Slumdog Millionaire at the Oscars

The day after Slumdog Millionaire's eight wins at the Academy Awards is a great time to revisit Bollyviewer's hilarious imaginary dialogue between Danny Boyle and 1970s masala-master Manmohan Desai.

And am I correct in noticing that in his acceptance speech for Best Director, Danny Boyle did not thank his cast? And that in his acceptance speech for Best Picture, producer Christian Colson said "This was a film with no stars," while Anil Kapoor and Irrfan Khan were standing behind him onstage?

Still, it was great to see music director A. R. Rahman, sound mixer Resul Pookutty, and the enthusiastic cast enlivening the proceedings (image © Amy Sancetta/Associated Press).

U Me aur Hum

The late David Foster Wallace wrote a hilarious essay about taking a luxury cruise on a ship he rechristened the Nadir. You can still read it in the online Harper's Magazine under its original title "Shipping Out"; it was later published as the title essay of his nonfiction collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (Little, Brown, 1997). Here's a representative sample:

"The promise [of cruise-ship advertising] is not that you can experience great pleasure but that you will. They'll make certain of it. They'll micromanage every iota of every pleasure-option so that not even the dreadful corrosive action of your adult consciousness and agency and dread can fuck up your fun. Your troublesome capacities for choice, error, regret, dissatisfaction, and despair will be removed from the equation. You will be able--finally, for once--to relax, the ads promise, because you will have no choice."

So a release from everyday reality and an escape from the burden of memory could be said to be the very purpose of a cruise. Or, as Wallace quotes from the cruise line's "positively Prozacian" brochure, "Just standing at the ship's rail looking out to sea has a profoundly soothing effect. As you drift along like a cloud on water, the weight of everyday life is magically lifted away, and you seem to be floating on a sea of smiles."

How fitting, then, that large chunks of U Me aur Hum (You, Me and Us, 2008), including its framing story, take place on a cruise ship. The movie recounts the saga of Ajay (Ajay Devgan) and his love for Piya (Kajol), a cruise-ship waitress who becomes a victim of (spoiler alert!) a Tragic Disease: early-onset Alzheimer's. Really early--Piya seems to be in her mid-20s in the flashback scenes (Alzheimer's symptoms are rarely detectable before age 60).

But this isn't the only stretch of the imagination the film requires. (More spoilers follow.) For one thing, Piya's symptoms come and go--she's capable of executing a seductive song and dance ("Saiyaan") for husband Ajay one minute, and then forgetting she's put the baby in the bathtub the next. (What is it with drowning-baby scenes? Heyy babyy (2007) also had a highly disturbing one.) In fact, when we first see Piya--in the present day, more than two decades into this inexorably degenerative disease--she's reading a thick paperback novel, and she listens attentively to Ajay's lengthy narration as he recounts how they met and fell in love on a cruise 25 years previously. She has no trouble remembering the plot and characters of a 700-page novel or following Ajay's story, but she can't recognize her husband of more than two decades? This movie needed to hire Oliver Sacks as a consultant.

The flashbacks are no more grounded in any sort of recognizable reality than the present-day scenes. Ajay is supposed to be a high-powered psychiatrist, but somehow he can't diagnose the dementia symptoms in his wife. And apart from some unconvincing aging by makeup in the present-day scenes, no effort has been made to suggest the passage of time: in the flashback scenes, none of the clothes, hairstyles, or music seems to date from the early 1980s. (Were cruise ships filled with blonde Russian pole dancers back then? Just asking.)

Wallace reported: "I don't think it's an accident that 7 N[ight] C[aribbean] Luxury Cruises appeal mostly to older people. I don't mean decrepitly old, but like fiftyish people for whom their own mortality is something more than an abstraction. Most of the exposed bodies to be seen all over the daytime Nadir were in various stages of disintegration." But--surprise!--most of the bodies on display in U Me aur Hum belong to an army of lithe young actor-dancers, who of course just happen to be taking a cruise together.

But I can deal with lapses in logic and a certain degree of unreality: this is Bollywood, after all. The flaws in this movie are deeper (or perhaps I should say shallower). Basically everything about U Me aur Hum and the dilemmas of its characters rings false, and so the big emotional moments are flat and uninvolving. This was a project conceived, produced, and directed by Ajay Devgan, and so there's not a lot of ambiguity about who to blame for its failures.

The main redeeming feature of the movie is Kajol, who seemingly can't give a bad performance, even of a character whose Tragic Disease has been rendered completely unbelievable by the scriptwriters. Not only that, she's looking great. In some of the cruise ship scenes, when she's out in the bright sunshine, you can see that she's now developing tiny, endearing, sexy laugh lines at the corners of her extraordinary eyes. Kajol is one of those fortunate mortals who just looks better than ever as she gets older. And since she's onscreen for most of the film, she keeps it from being a total loss--there are certainly worse ways to spend a couple of hours. But in the end watching U Me aur Hum was all too much like Wallace's cruise: it was only supposedly enjoyable, and I'm not tempted do it again.

Manny Farber's film criticism

Negative Space is a collection of Manny Farber's legendary film criticism, originally published in magazines like The Nation and Artforum from the mid-1940s to the late 1960s. (My paperback copy, given to me by my brother, is simply titled Movies (Hillstone, 1971).) Farber was a champion of what he called "termite art": creative products made by highly skilled craftsmen without pretensions or ulterior motives. He saw termite art as being exemplified by what he called "underground film"--meaning, mainly, the action or crime pictures churned out by the Hollywood studios to fill the B slot on a double bill. Typically made without expensive stars, shot on recycled sets or on location, these films display an inventiveness and a directness inspired by their modest budgets.

Farber contrasted termite art with what he called "white elephant art": bloated, big-budget spectaculars designed to showcase star performances or directorial technique or Important Issues and (not coincidentally) rake in awards and box office receipts. For Farber, watching a white elephant film usually became a battle between boredom and irritation.

However, his aesthetic judgments weren't always consistent. In an aside in an essay about The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1965), he praises Vertigo (1958) as Hitchcock's best film. I agree with him wholeheartedly, but Vertigo features major stars (James Stewart and Kim Novak) and foregrounds Hitchcock's directorial technique: the track-out zoom-in "vertigo" shot; the swirling, 360-degree pan around the kissing lovers; even an animated sequence. Shouldn't that make it (in Farber's estimation, anyway) a white elephant? Perhaps its box-office failure and the searingly personal nature of its themes blinded Farber to his own typology.

But you don't turn to Farber to find someone who is perfectly in sympathy with your own aesthetic judgments. For one thing, he's too spiky. Not many films get his full approval; praise for a film is almost always accompanied by an enumeration of the failures, bad faith, or misjudgments of its creative team.

And while his general tone--skepticism and disappointment--is usually clear, it can be hard to figure out exactly what he's saying in any given sentence. Farber wrote like a jazz musician plays, making associations (often to painting), using puns and neologisms, mashing incongruous words together into a phrase to try to express something important but elusive (in a description of an actor's performance, for example, what might "gelatinous frigidity" or "gloved fluidity" mean?). His hipster prose can sometimes be frustratingly opaque.

What can't be denied, though, is the sheer energy of his writing and the passion of his engagement with movies. When he writes that Michelangelo Antonioni's "aspiration is to pin the viewer to the wall and slug him with wet towels of artiness and significance" (in "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art"), or that Preston Sturges' characters' "semicomic suffering arises from the disparity between the wild lusts generated by American society and the severity of its repressions" (in his essay on Sturges) he cuts straight to the heart of his subject.

So read him for that energy and passion, and because he appreciated particular producers (Val Lewton), directors (Howard Hawks) and genres (the crime movie style we now call film noir) long before it was fashionable to do so.

Suggested reading

"Suggested reading" will be an occasional series where I offer links to some of my favorite recent articles, blog posts, reviews, and the like:

1. Hester Santlow was one of the most famous dancers and actresses in Handel's London. She was painted in costume as Harlequin by John Ellys, had affairs with members of the aristocracy, had a duel fought for her honor in Hyde Park, and her descendants include Diana Spencer and Sarah Ferguson. Amazingly, some of her dances were notated at the time and are now being recreated. In a review of Moira Goff's The Incomparable Hester Santlow: A Dancer-Actress on the Georgian Stage (Ashgate, 2007), New York Times dance critic Alastair Macaulay writes about her amazing life both onstage and off:

"Her enduring appeal comes across in a 1725 letter by James Thomson, whose response to her is distinctly erotic: 'Mrs. Booth acts some things very well and particularly Ophelia’s madness in "Hamlet" inimitably, but then she dances so deliciously, has such melting lascivious motions, airs and postures as indeed according to what you suspect almost throw the material part of me into action too.'"

2. Zadie Smith in the New Yorker on comedy and mourning her father's death, "Dead Man Laughing":

"Maybe it was the fortuitous meeting of my mournful mood and his morbid material, but I thought [Edward Aczel's] show, 'Do I Really Have to Communicate with You?,' was one of the strangest, and finest, hours of live comedy I’d ever seen....'I think you’ll all recall,' he muttered, barely audible, 'the words of Wittgenstein, the great twentieth-century philosopher, who said, "If indeed mankind came to earth for a specific reason, it certainly wasn’t to enjoy ourselves."' A long, almost unbearable pause. 'If you could bear that in mind while I’m on, I'd certainly appreciate it.'"

3. John Lanchester in the London Review of Books on the multibillion-dollar video game industry (game and console sales in 2007 were greater than those for movies, video, or books), "Is it art?":

"A common criticism of video games made by non-gamers is that they are pointless and escapist, but a more valid observation might be that the bulk of games are nowhere near escapist enough. A persuasive recent essay by the games theorist Steven Poole made the strong argument that the majority of games offer a model of play which is oppressively close to work."

Poole's essay, a critical examination of the standard video game paradigm, smartly invokes historian Johann Huizinga (author of Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture) and the Frankfurt School philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Poole writes, "What would videogaming look like if it rejected the machine as a model for play, if more games incorporated gratuitous moments of relaxation from their constant, accelerated striving? Or if more games did not treat us as employees but as autonomous co-creators?" Such games might appeal to those of us ignored by most current game designs, which seem to focus on violence and/or accumulation.

4. Marcia Angell, former Editor in Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, writes in the New York Review of Books on the financial ties between drug companies and the doctors who are testing and prescribing their drugs, "Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption":

"No one knows the total amount provided by drug companies to physicians, but I estimate from the annual reports of the top nine US drug companies that it comes to tens of billions of dollars a year. By such means, the pharmaceutical industry has gained enormous control over how doctors evaluate and use its own products. Its extensive ties to physicians, particularly senior faculty at prestigious medical schools, affect the results of research, the way medicine is practiced, and even the definition of what constitutes a disease."

Update 20 June 2016: A new study by UCSF shows what it takes for pharmaceutical companies to influence physicians to prescribe more expensive brand-name drugs instead of an equally effective and far less expensive generic versions: a free lunch costing between $12 and $18. See "Drug Company Lunches Have Big Payoffs," New York Times, 20 June 2016.

John Adams: Hallelujah Junction

The composer John Adams has recently published an autobiography, Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008). The title is taken from one of Adams' piano pieces, which was named after a truck stop on the border of Nevada and California (curiously, the piece doesn't appear in Hallelujah Junction's index).

The title seems to allude to a moment of epiphany Adams experienced while driving in the Sierra Nevada mountains (near Hallelujah Junction?) and listening to the final opera in Wagner's Ring Cycle, Götterdämmerung. He perceived that Wagner's music can have such tremendous emotional impact because of its ravishing melodies, shifting harmonies, and exploration of the tonal colors of the orchestra (and of human voices). He realized in that moment that atonality, strict serialism, and Cageian experiments with random processes are limited in their expressivity, and represented (for him, in any case) a creative dead end.

I'm not actually the hugest fan of Adams' music. But even so I found the book to be very engaging, especially, perhaps, in Adams' discussion of his New England upbringing and his struggles to find his own compositional voice after moving to California in the 1970s. He goes on to discuss the gestation and development of many of his best-known pieces, including Shaker Loops (1978), Harmonium (1981), and the operas Nixon in China (1987), The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), and Doctor Atomic (2005).

Here's a taste of Adams' mature style, Short Ride In A Fast Machine (1986), performed by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by Sir Mark Elder:

To my ears, this sounds a bit too much like a mix of Steve Reich (the pulse and cross-rhythms), Philip Glass (the arpeggios) and Aaron Copland (the brass fanfare that kicks in at about the 3:10 mark).

Adams clearly intends his book to be read by a general audience--there's little abstruse music terminology--and his narrative voice is very appealing: down-to-earth, plainspoken, and generous to most of his colleagues and collaborators (though the director Robert Wilson and the late poet and activist June Jordan come in for some fairly sharp criticism, as do post-Schoenberg serial and atonal composers). Adams is also amusingly blunt in assessing the failures of some of his own pieces.

However, something odd intrudes towards the end of the book during the discussion of the creation of Doctor Atomic. Librettist Alice Goodman (who had written the words for Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer) withdrew from the project; Adams writes that she stopped participating because she was "newly ordained as an Anglican minister with her own parish in the English midlands and overwhelmed with her church responsibilities" (p. 276).

Alice Goodman herself has given an account of her withdrawal, though, that is very different. In a profile piece on Doctor Atomic by Tom Service that was published in the Guardian UK (29 September 2005), she was quoted as saying, "I found that the structure John and Peter had got together with me was really anti-semitic, with Oppenheimer as the good blue-eyed Jew and Edward Teller as the bad limping one with the greasy hair, and a host of virtuous native Americans pitted against the refugee physicists out in the New Mexico desert. I couldn't see how it could be anything but deeply offensive." Adams was clearly aware of her accusation, because he's quoted by Service as responding that "her preposterous reason for not being able to deliver a libretto strikes me as speaking more about her own private preoccupations than about the reality of the Oppenheimer story." Of course, her objection wasn't to "the reality of the Oppenheimer story," but to its representation in the opera.

Although I haven't seen the opera, Goodman's accusation sounds pretty far-fetched and hyper-politically-correct to me. Teller was a pretty despicable person: we basically have him to thank for the arms race, he claimed sole credit for work to which other scientists made major contributions, and he betrayed his colleague Oppenheimer in Congressional hearings by agreeing with the absurd proposition that he was a security risk (perhaps not coincidentally, leaving the way clear for Teller to assume the leading role in creating nuclear policy). It seems justifiable to portray a reprehensible character as, well, reprehensible--otherwise, you risk sanitizing a complex and messy history.

But leaving aside the question of whether her objection had any basis or was simply "more about her private preoccupations," not a hint of this heated exchange makes it into Hallelujah Junction. Even if Goodman later thought better of her claim and patched things up with Adams, it's strange that Adams makes no mention of the controversy, and substitutes instead an entirely different, neutral explanation of her withdrawal.

Unfortunately, Adams' treatment of this incident calls into question his credibility in the rest of the book. Of course, an autobiography necessarily represents the perspective of its author. However, this strikes me as something more--a deliberate evasion of what was likely a painful moment of conflict. It's especially puzzling because Adams treats the accusations of anti-semitism hurled at The Death of Klinghoffer fully and openly.

Daniel Mendelsohn has written a review of the recent re-mounting of Doctor Atomic in New York for the New York Review of Books. Curiously, although Mendelsohn discusses Hallelujah Junction and mentions the "well-known tensions between composer and librettist (hardly the first on record), which resulted in an eventual break," he doesn't say anything about Adams' elision of Goodman's "anti-semitic" remarks. Neither, to my knowledge, has any other reviewer.

Adams' resorting to partial truths in his discussion of Goodman's withdrawal shouldn't deter you from reading this highly entertaining and reflective account of his life and works. However, it should put you on your guard that perhaps Hallelujah Junction is less frank than it pretends to be.