on Movies

With every passing time that I visit India I get to see some of its character in more detail, especially when compared against the US. We went to see a new movie in the theater which is about a young Pakistani girl who happens to find herself lost in India. The story is about the protagonist's quest to take her back to her family in Pakistan. One would think that would simply be a matter of getting a visa, boarding a train, and job done. But in true Bollywood fashion there are twists and turns enough for the simple premise to stretch over 2 hours. The movie is fun in a very Bollywood kind of way. In a certain sense it is also very characteristic of the society here, but then as they say, art does imitate life.

There is an undercurrent of activism here and I have noticed it in several other Bollywood movies. The central premise is the following: those who wield the institutions of power are corrupt and it takes for people to come together to get things done and to improve the general lot. The institutions of power include, but are not limited to, police, government, even religion. The response to the unfair powers is, in typical Bollywood fashion, idealistic where, in the end, not only are the primary objectives achieved (the common man prevails) but these objectives are achieved in most moral of fashions. The entire suite of virtue is upheld in this fictionalized rebellion of sorts and this idealism, in essence, is the idealism of Ramayana (as opposed to Mahabharata) where there is much suffering emanating from the requirement that to an ideal person suffering is preferable to immorality, pain preferable to short cuts. This idealism unfortunately has no place in the real world where heinous injustices are often inevitable by-products of the pursuit of high minded goals.

Compare this to the typical American narrative where the powers that be are incompetent (and not corrupt) and, therefore, there is hardly any case to be made for rage and rebellion on a social level. This is why the typical American movies and the typical American obsessions are isolationary and individual with little regard for issues larger than one's own. To Americans, the war is being fought somewhere in Asia whose carnage is continuously being cleaned up and packaged in neat little statistics so as not to offend anybody. The kind of poverty which is seen in India is largely not an experience in the US and, therefore, its stories are not about overcoming it and general unfairness. However, it doesn't mean everything is great in the US. There exists a kind of existential meaningless there which is absolutely debilitating and that is why, I think, the American stories are so escapist. Escapism in comic books and their movie adaptations, escapism in the kinds of movies typified by need for speed, escapism in a general extended adolescence which stretches all the way into the 40s and 50s, and escapism in fairy tail stories such as Harry Potter and LOTR. Movies there are symptomatic of a general cultural trait: there are no real issues, at least, none of the same caliber as those found in a third world country like India, however, there's a terrible issue within oneself which nobody knows how to solve so let's just run away from it.