Wednesday, November 26, 2003 :::
jetlagged
it occurred to me this afternoon somewhere amidst the teeming masses at ohare airport, that i'd avoided being in an airport on the "busiest travel day of the year" for quite a few years now. in fact i can't even remember the last time i flew somewhere during this ferocious day. maybe its because i have a tendency to work late into the night - before a long flying day and consequently sleep through my alarm only to have my taxi company wake me because a driver is outside getting antsy. consequently i make it to the airport with the minimum necessary time and am assigned the middle-middle seat next to armrest hoarders and behind a "recliner" who takes away every inch of room my knees deserve. a story i had heard last week about knee defenders came to mind during the few minutes i was conscious. there should just be rules- unspoken or otherwise that assure that everyone gets atleast one armrest, whether it be at the movies or in the airplane.
since whining is worthless- i do have a policy suggestion which i hope spreads around the world. i think people should assume authority over the armrest on either side of their chair which is nearer to the wall. so if you were sitting exactly dead center - facing the front of the aircraft or stage, the people to the right of you would be entitled to their right armrest, people on the left would be entitled to the armrest on their left. since u have the unfortnate luck of being in the absolute center of the aisle (lending your life for the good of the collective if there needed be a hasty evacuation) you get the benefit of both. think of it like a small collective subsidy program for the stuck-in-the-middle set.
travelling on holidays reminded me that there are very few times that i'm ever in contact with soldiers. holiday travellers at major hubs will frequently see young cadets from academies and soldiers from just about every force - all on leave fromt the branch they serve in - heading home to see and feel some love. i guess its not that odd that we don't see soldiers that often living in large metro areas but its continually sobering to realize that our collective policy decisions have human faces behind them. a few times today i thought about this fabulous nightline piece i saw from veterans day- called shattered lives it was about young wounded national guard reservists and what they're facing now- after coming home injured. one was a lawn care guy with shrapnel in his brain, and now essentially suffers the effects of a serious stroke, another was a mechanic with shrapnel in his knee and post traumatic stress disorder.
there are very few times that we fly now w/o thinking about the T word. i was starting to get a bit whatevuh- about the extra frisk etc. and then i saw this 60 minutes piece by steve kroft a few weeks go on the lack of security at chemical plants around the country. it was really chilling how long a 60 minutes crew spent inside a restricted area, and apparently an investigative reporter named Carl Prine from a pittsburgh paper has done this 60 times around the country. who needs to import WMD when we've got them right around us? who needs to do crazy things at airports where all the focus is? it doesn't give you a half-full feeling.
so on that note- i'll leave you to a WTF flash animation- thats one of the funniest little ditties i've come across as of late.
peace be with you.
enjoy the football.
::: posted by h at 10:25 PM
Monday, November 03, 2003 :::
What passes for the art of film today
I bore witness to one of the most disturbing pieces of video/art/film I’ve seen this past year, if not in my life. A film called A World Without Women. (as you know I’m a big fan of hyperlinking but as will hopefully be justified with the rest of my rant, I don’t even believe this film deserves that much). The film is an effort to address the issue of female infanticide- a deplorable practice in several parts of the developing world, including but not limited to India.
To inoculate some reservations, let me be very clear that in no way am I denying that the practice occurs in India, or am I writing a bad review for a film under the influence of some pseudo-nationalist pride. The most recent numbers quoted on the issue come from a brand new brochure published by the United Nations Population Fund. It’s a somewhat cumbersome pdf file so for those on a narrowband internet connection- let me briefly summarize their info. Their numbers compare 1991 and 2001 census statistics and in a nutshell the problem is worse.
The national average for India of women to men has decreased from 945 women per thousand men to 927 women per thousand men.
The following numbers are between 1991 and 2001. Tamil Nadu went from 948 to 939. Himachal Pradesh went from 951 to 897. Maharashtra went from 946 to 917. The districts surrounding the capital Delhi went from 915 to 865. Gujarat went from 928 to 878. Haryana went from 879 to 820. Punjab went from 875 women per 1000 men in 1991 to 793 women per 1000 men in 2001.
To put this in context, according to the Indian census the country’s overall population grew by 21% in the same period while the population of girls born and surviving shrank as dramatically in some of these areas.
The issue had made a brief splash in the press in 2001 when articles like one from the Hindu and another from Rediff provided special coverage, and the issue seems back in the press now due perhaps to the new brochure.
From the get-go I knew it wasn’t going to be a happy-go-lucky Bollywood number but I had no idea that I’d be in store for such depravity as fantastic as Voltaire’s Candide and violence surpassed only by the first few pages of a Michel Foucault book called Discipline and Punish. As a south asian male who consumes a dash of progressive cinema, I’ve become accustomed to the diabolical and detestable characterizations of Indian men. I think its probably a bit less comfortable than white men watching movies about the southern United States in the 1940s or 50s, where segregation was the norm. For at least they have the cushion of time, and some semblance of comfort knowing that this is a historical depiction. I wince each time because I know that essentially, a far flung brother of mine is in fact currently behaving in some of these ways and wielding advantages handed him through entrenched patriarchies, and honed through systematic oppressions of women, the lower castes and the poor. This movie however reached a new low. Even in Bandit Queen, (the tale of a woman who survived a series of rapes and abuses to eventually become an outlaw, folk hero and subsequent member of parliament in India) it seems that not literally every man in the movie was a rapist. In this excuse for a film, short of two servants, a gay priest, the father of the bride and the youngest brother of the male clan, it seems the entire cast in the film participated in raping one woman.
The film starts off by depicting an infanticide, and then asks for the audience to either suspend their disbelief for a day in the future or attempts to paint the picture of some corner of rural India where literally not a woman is to be found. There are simply no female characters in the film except in the very beginning when there are midwives delivering a child. The male characters are developed with intelligence that seems slightly higher than that of the village idiot, all in search of what seems the Holy Grail – a bride. Within the first five or ten minutes we’re already given images of drag queens serving as surrogates, men being so sexually frustrated that either they are teary eyed at pornography or they find a nearby barn and available cow to engage in some bestiality.
Upon spying a siren who has been carefully hidden by her father in the wilderness, the constipated and flatulent village priest (who happily and unsuspectingly consumes a sherbet diluted with the servant’s urine throughout the film), introduces the two fathers. Up till now we’re almost along for a ride on a comic strip with caricatures of Indian men that simply draw chuckles and a few guffaws but the audience is in for a shock when we realize that the father of the bride (a simple man corrupted by capitalism) sells her off as a wife for all five sons for five times the agreed upon dowry. The audience of course shouldn’t be shocked when on the wedding night as the new grooms are rationing out their nights with her, the father accuses them of being ungrateful sons and demands his access.
In cliché form, the youngest brother, who takes a quiet and shy approach to her, the one who doesn’t’ mount his bride on his allotted nights, is the one that she grows emotions for. While the youngest brother helps his wife with chores, teaches her how to read and they both giggle about, the other brothers get jealous and kill him. We don’t know whether it was the cross dressing brother who paints a fake moustache on his wife before enjoying his portions, or the brother for whom a cow will suffice every now and then, but we’re led to believe that they were all in it together.
At this point, most people in the audience think- aah it can’t get any worse, but it does. At the news that the only husband who makes her nightly visits by all the others bearable is gone, the “wife” makes a run for it with the servant boy. The servant boy is summarily shot and hacked to bits by the pursuing brothers. The wife is then bound by a chain around the ankle and left in the barn with the cattle for an indefinite period of time.
The lower caste villagers, of which the servant boy was one, are enraged. When two of them skulk around the house where this ridiculous family lives in an effort to exact revenge, they stumble through the barn and find this woman. Instead of having pity or sympathy, they see her as the cause for their young friend’s death and duly rape her. Oh but there is certainly more.
The angry villagers decide that it is almost the duty of every lower caste man to sneak in at night and rape the nearly unconscious and lifeless body of this woman chained to the ground in a barn. She seems to be kept alive from the new servant boy who slips her bread and milk on his breaks.
As seasons change, there she lies, raped on and on. Eventually the father and brothers who wanted to punish this girl for running away and wanted to teach her a lesson, still unaware of the fact that every lower caste man in the village has avenged into her, become in time desperate enough to resume their usual, yet more clandestine schedule of raping this woman even after she is visibly pregnant. This is all happening while the audience is treated to shots of an emaciating body with a swollen belly, discolored teeth and skin, still lying shackled on the dung covered floor of a barn.
The climax of this movie is a ridiculous mob scene where the villagers and the family have it out, and as the malicious father of the groom prepares to immolate our heroin, he is of course stabbed by the servant boy and as her husbands are executed by a mob, she delivers a daughter.
What a wonderful way to talk about female infanticide right?
After the film I stayed for part of a discussion of dazed and confused people. Some patrons chose to walk out of the theater during the film, but two dozen or so sought answers for what had just happened to them in the last 93 minutes. The group conversation’s first interlocutor made her criticisms from a filmmaker’s viewpoint stating that this dangerous film was almost anti-feminist in that it gave the female character absolutely no agency. A woman in the back of the theater with an accent appropriate of a metropolitan Indian prep school upbringing retorted that such criticism was unfounded; that the film we had all witnessed actually represented the “reality” in India. Then began a series of individuals who started throwing numbers around about what the child ratios in India were and so forth, and that’s primarily the reason I cited my “googlings” above. One individual stepped up to the microphone and justified the film’s existence simply on the basis that people would “go home thinking about it” and it would raise awareness. I suppose we also go home and talk about the horrible car accident we had just passed, or perhaps what the shock jock on some conservative talk radio was spewing. In those scenarios, aren't we continuing to contribute to the rubberneck traffic slowdown, or one more listener and perhaps consequent consumer to an advertiser that might not deserve us? This viewer in the theater was applauding the festival organizers (many of whom had not seen the film) for taking such a bold risk, echoing the pre-movie congratulations delivered by a local paper’s entertainment editor. My concern was that lost in all this vitriol for non-judgemental ,secular/ political correctness was the fact that the entire audience was a bit desenstitized to rape and violence against women. its a fact, no one that stayed through the flick could possibly have done it w/o putting some shields up inside themselves.
If we want to talk about the movie on its merits, I'd be happy to. I thought most elements of the movie were overshadowed by the gratuitous violence. While there were a few "moments" cinematographically - those kudos belong to the director of photography, certainly not to a 26 year old director from Mumbai who made this. Lets not attribute to this horrendous excuse for watching violence against women the power of being an awareness raising banner against female infanticide. If you'd like to do something about it, there are several non-profits that could use your two hours worth of energy or money better.
I’m conscious of the fact that if this movie had not made me so nauseous I might not be spending as much time railing against it, but there are a lot of horrible pieces of expression in the world, and while I agree in their right to exist, I certainly don’t feel like my friends or I need to see all of them.
::: posted by h at 9:00 PM
