On Jun 9, 2006, at 1:37 PM, joanna wrote:
> I eat at a neighborhood Indian restaurant as often as I can and they have
> their TV permanently tuned to some bollywood-type station. And on that
> station I see something which, I don't know, seems a silly imitation of
> Western pop and dance
Actually this isn't at all true. Bollywood isn't an imitation of Western forms. It is the creation of a new form that is completely unlike anything that's ever existed in American film. The closest analog to it in the Western tradition is opera -- but not opera as is now, but as it was when it was alive, from 1600 to the 1920s (at the end of which it was eclipsed as a Gesamtkunstwerk in the west by movies).
Truly great Bollywood movies, like _Lagaan_ and _The Ballad of Mangal Pandey_, are IMHO more successful than Wagner in their synthesis of politics, myth and musical drama. They have less harmonic chromaticism, but they are better on almost every other count. They have a better beat, better sets, better dancing and a wider field of human expression. But most importantly, they are more emotionally effective for a greater range of people, and they still work as popular art in the age of movies, which opera no longer does. Wagner was one of its last gasps.
One thing that Hollywood genre movies, opera and Bollywood all have in common is that they all work their emotional magic by means of a logic of archetypes. They all use a very small set of stock roles and stock plots. (I think this is also true for the kung fu ballets of Hong Kong -- which I suspect ultimately derive from the similarly archetypal conventions of Peking opera -- but I'll let Michael Hoover weigh in on that one).
In the history of opera, this is obvious. It comes out of Commedia dell'arte, where the stock roles were so stylized they all had names (Columbina, Pantalone, Pagliacci), and each performance was an improvisation, showing that literally any plot would do so long as it obeyed the laws of their archetypal interaction.
Opera simply takes those roles and makes them into a musical drama. (This is also true of the secular cantata tradition, which are really one act operas. Bach's Coffee Cantata is a classic confrontation between an Isabella character and her Pantalone.) It vastly developed the musical complexity and the special effects while removing the dancing and almost all of the acting (as well as the juggling and acrobatics, but I think those qualify as poor man's special effects).
But while nowadays we tend to rate opera almost purely in terms of how good their music is, when opera was vital the music was merely a means to an end, a means of getting this play of archetypes to resonate in a person's soul (which action movies now do with special effects and soundtracks). Music in opera was the means of dramatization, and largely the only one. Most of the libretti weren't poetry, so it wasn't that that was moving people. It was the music that dramatized those words, that brought out all their hidden back-themes, their hesitations and gushings forward, and that trumpeted those feelings until they echoed from the ceiling. And that's what made people feel like they were in those archetypal plots, living those moments, identifying with those characters.
And here's where we get to the part that is so similar to Bollywood. When you have an archetypal plot, and you have a musical way of dramatizing it, the plot per se is really largely irrelevant -- as you can see in the absurdities of the plots of both. What really matters in the play of archetypes is the archetypal scenes, the face to face big moments, where emotions that everybody knows from childhood are made as enormous as they sometimes feel within.
When you have an archetypal mechanics that can do that, and a dramatic form that can get it to resonate, all you need to make it work is charismatic principals. And conversely, this mechanics of archetypal scenes is the perfect setting, and the perfect amplifier, for charisma. It creates the sort of demi-gods that make it work.
So if you are a Bollywood fan who responds to this kind of drama the way Europeans responded to opera in the 1700s, all you need to be fully satisfied is stars you love and a movie made according to the rules. Even if nothing in it is inspired, you will still be energized and feel you've gotten your money's worth -- which is precisely how people felt about opera during its heyday. Most of those operas have perished today because musically they were so formulaic and jejune. But in their time they got people emotionally involved and exhausted. And they carried their heroes through the streets.
I realized this for myself a couple days ago when I snuck out and saw Fanaa. This movie isn't a work of genius like Lagaan or The Ballad of Mangal Pandey. Rather it is the perfect example of run of the mill. Virtually every aspect of it is unspired: the dialog, the dancing, the lyrics, the action sequences. And the only parts of the plot that aren't formulaic are ones that are absurd and contrived even by Bollywood standards.
And yet I still heartily enjoyed it. A three hour movie and I not only sat through the whole thing -- me, who usually leaves in five minutes when anything is 2nd rate in any other art form -- but I felt downright energized for hours afterwords, like I'd been at something brilliant or at a sports event.
And in fact, being a Bollywood fan really is closer to being a sports fan. I've never gone to a Knicks game I wasn't emotionally involved in no matter how bad it was. I guess what sports have in common with archetypal mechanics is that in both cases it's more about identification than anything else. And big scenes. And amplifying the emotional involvement through physicality -- which in Bollywood movies comes from the beat, which is always reliably stirring no mater how rote the music, just like any formulaic dance music.
And Fana was thus a perfect example of how a movie that lacked everything except archetypal mechanics and charismatic principals could be totally satisfying to a fan -- and thus an affirmation just how alive this form is. Because genius, heck -- that can make any form worthwhile. But when the run of the mill really moves you, this tradition is alive.
Fanaa is also an example of one of the many things Bollywood can accomplish that Hollywood cannot, which show part of how they are different in essence. It's a standard Romeo and Juliet plot. But what makes it mind boggling to think about is that the obstacle keeping the girl and boy apart is that she is Miss India and he is an anti-India terrorist. And he's not only the film's romantic hero, he's also an action hero-type superman mastermind. You see him kill Indian soldiers face to face while smiling and bragging. You hear about him blowing up iconic Indian buildings and killing hundreds. And yet he's the hero of the film, the guy you identify with, and who the girl falls in love with, and who is clearly the manly superior of anyone in the film.
An American equivalent would be like recasting Matt Damon's Bourne character as a Zarqawi character and having Jennifer Lopez fall in love with him after we've just seen him blowing up buildings across America and killing our best agents with his bare hands while laughing. It's impossible to imagine anyone in America even conceiving that film, never mind producing it or being allowed to show it. And yet in India, which is more traumatized by terrorism than America (because there it's not only scary but stuck like scab to nationalist wounds), it not only got shown but was a success.
And if you see it (which I don't really recommend unless you're a Bollywood fan -- beginners should start with the works of genius), you'll see the secret is not that it accomplishes some new political synthesis. (Its politics and sociology are just as rote as everything else.) And it's not that it allows us to identify with the other side. Because that part doesn't really work and by the end induces a kind of vertigo. But *that's* what works -- the vertigo!
Which brings us back to Bollywood. There is something about this love conquers all arche-plot that really does conquer all. There is seemingly nothing you can't dissolve in it. And that's where it's thrill comes from -- from doing the impossible. This setting would seem for sure like the one thing you couldn't possibly digest into a Romeo and Juliet plot. But it turns out you can. The laws of Bollywood really are more powerful than reality.
Last point. IMHO, we should always be suspicious of every judgment we have about genres in which we like nothing. Because if in a given tradition there isn't a single piece you love it's pretty much proof that you don't understand it. If you can't tell good from bad, then you lack even the most elementary understanding of a tradition. And it's only when you love something in it that you know you have an unconscious understanding of its principles.
And when you don't, you don't. Which is no big failing. None of us has a soul so big that everything can resonate, and no one's got the time or motivation to learn to appreciate everything that doesn't come naturally. But I think each of us should have the humbleness to realize that when we don't know anything about what makes a genre tick -- which we can deduce from the fact that don't like anything in it -- we shouldn't take our judgments about it seriously.
Michael