For one, it comes a little too close to the voyeurism of “slum tours” to me. Of course, I myself am a bit torn about this since photojournalism and documentary photography, crudely put, often partake in this kind of dynamic. most photographers and filmmakers try to justify, at least to themselves, their actions with some principle of moral concern, whereas the slum tours are more experientially akin to the one night stand.
You could argue that this film isn’t like that, and is above that, and again, this is not meant to be a full condemnation—but I think it appropriate to discuss the relation of the film to the sociological backdrop of which it partakes.
People in the film industry are quite utilitarian: they are investing what for most people is an astronomical sum of money, and they hope to make as much as possible on it. Someone like Danny Boyle, an established filmmaker, operates within these parameters as much as anyone else. So they pick these exotic backgrounds and make these feelgood stories so that middle classes of the developed world will fork over their money. Of course, most movies are like that. That’s what they are—mass entertainment. A chance to forget the world for two hours.
So they go there and scout locations, and learn about their characters by staying there. Again, this is standard operating procedure, and its no doubt educational for someone.
But that’s at the microlevel, and what bothers me is that at the macro-level, nothing changes. They come in and shoot their movie and go out. The slums don’t change. Poverty is not eliminated. They couldn’t find a suitable boy in the slums for this role—because as we know, the main actor is everything and has to be vetted by the suits before the movie is a go. So they get an English Indian kid to play the lead. So they exploit the area and the social reality for the backdrop, but when push comes to shove and there’s money on the line, they go with something a bit more safe. Dev Patel isn’t a bad person, but honestly, he does, no matter what, look a lot more London than Mumbai.
And now, Danny Boyle, Dev Patel, et al. get their statues, and DVD sales go through the roof.
They make f*ckloads of money and get more gigs, sustaining or in Patel’s case, launching a career. He was just a somewhat well-known TV actor in England before all of this. And now, in some sense, he belongs in a rarefied elite of actors who played leads in Best Picture films. So his life, no doubt, has been changed, and drastically so.
And yet the slums remain. Of course, the slums aren’t all misery—there is real human community there, and, at least according to Dev Patel on the Jon Stewart show, there is a real joie de vivre there as well. Which is a nice and uplifting thing to say, and which no doubt assuages the conscience of the popcorn munchers around the world. All I know is that the amount of money that Dev Patel and Danny Boyle and them are worth is more than most of those slumdogs will make in their entire lives. I bet Danny Boyle himself is worth more than the aggregate wealth of at least 100 slumdogs.
Of course, I am not better: the whole reason why my conscience is troubled is because I belong to that same global middle class of popcorn munching voyeurs. But I stand by the point that the meta-discussion of the relation of the movie business to the social realities they depict—be it war-torn Iraq, Israeli vets, Japanese orphans, what have you—is something we ought to continue, or, in the case of many people, begin. Movies—what are they? No one is naive enough to dream that they could ever be vehicles of human liberation. How about make them mildly educational, give us isolated, navel-gazers a glimpse of a world we might not ever see. Saturated and vibrant images, great camera work is much appreciated, thanks. We can do that. Yes we can. But of course, I hope for more. I hope for art to somehow trump business, and I hope that egalitarian distributions of income, around the world, will become normative, will become something that human civilization aspires to, because of the basic dignity it could afford us.
So, then, what about the relation of global capitalism to the global South then? That’s a huge can of worms, and one that I, ill-educated in economics of any sort, am not able to answer. I can say that capitalism can create jobs and thus alleviate poverty. But I can also say that this should never be used as a means of justifying the status quo, that is, actually existing capitalism. There can be a better capitalism, I believe. A more humane one. Right now, capitalism seems to do more for the greedy CEOs and elites of the developing countries than it does for the bottom fifth dwelling in the slums of the South. Sometimes we middle-class people get some tax breaks. Sometimes Republicans and Democrats pretend to care about people in the US working minimum wage, even while their overriding goal is to keep the system runnign smoothly and not rock the boat.
The movie business is no different, and no number of George Clooneys or movie star UN ambassadors is going to change the fact that it is still a huge for-profit machine, one that generates huge sums of money for its stars and one that, for the most part, doesn’t mind its role as an opiate for the masses. Art brings liberation. Revolution can bring liberation. Is it naive to believe in these? Of course it is, and I know better—but in my heart of hearts, I will go on believing these, maybe just to spite those who are better adjusted to reality than I am. Or maybe because not only am I an idealist, but also because I believe there are too few of those out there, especially among that demographic that can afford a bit of extra idealism here and there. But they refuse, for the most part, and keep reading their business and financial news and keep caring about companies and people who do things that neither illuminate nor change something about the human condition, in the most fulsome sense of that phrase—but where’s the surprise there? These traits are rampant. But let’s not that call them traits. They are, ahem, the discreet charms of the global bourgeoisie.
