== Is it OK to have your royalty-bearing music intensify a rape scene? ==What _was_ "The Bandit Queen" really about?
Check out Roy's review, it's right on!
http://www.sawnet.org/books/writing/roy_bq1.html
I saw the movie shortly after it came out. I had no idea that it bore no resemblance to reality. I certainly wanted to cheer for a low-caste woman taking up arms and fighting back.
But what left me very uneasy about the movie was the architecture of Phoolan's rape-based success -- there have been many movies made in the last thirty years based on the same brew. It's hard for me to describe it because it's the serpent eating its tail. I think Derrida came closest in "White Mythologies"...but it goes something like this:
1. Oppression is wrong. 2. The victim of oppression has the moral right to seek revenge or to escape oppression 3. By becoming successful within the order that promoted that oppression in the first place 4. This success is the visible proof of their rightness 5. (Oppression goes on, but somehow that's OK. No oppression; no success. It's a dynamic.)
This is the sauce ladeled on all the "genius" movies of the last generation -- "Good Will Hunting" for example, which proves that if you're really, really smart you have the right to betray the working class....with their blessing; or "Shawshank Redemption," which proves that if you are an investment banker, you get to steal all the money of your equally oppressed inmates and escape to a desert island with a magic negro, provided you have been sufficiently sodomized.
It's the one element of "Bandit Queen" that Roy missed in her review -- it's a success movie disguised as a feel good women's liberation movie. On one level the movie styles itself as a radical movie by identifying itself with a violated low caste woman and championing her right to revenge for her pain and humiliation. On another level what the movie really justifies is its own right to make a huge profit by staging a public rape and treating a woman as nothing other than a sexual object (wronged or revenged) for an entire two hours.
It's interesting that this "success" story has become THE 21st century myth; it goes like this, depending on your class perspective: if you're willing let yourself get violated, you too can become a success...if you're willing to let other people get raped for you, than you have a right to become a success....the only way to become successful is to rape others. To oppose oppression is to undermine this profit giving dynamic thus pulling disaster and confusion down upon us.
.....the self-making of Robinson Crusoe has reached its logical end, which actually bears a strong resemblance to its beginning: if you reinvent yourself on a solitary I-land then you have the right to retire on the income produced on your slave colonies which you magically discover when you manage to get off the I-land. The difference is that Defoe may possibly have been ironic whereas today's filmmakers have become true believers.
Joanna