I’ve been reading Jason Mittel’s book “Genre and Television” over Christmas break. In many ways, his take on genre is similar to John Rieder’s. That is, Mittell argues, like Rieder, that genres are constituted not by formal traits, but rather by social or cultural agreements or discourses. So (for example) it might make sense to call something a “comic” even if it were entirely text with no pictures, if the text was written by Dave Sim and came in a floppy format and was sold through a comics store and was part of an ongoing series that people thought of as a comic. Along those lines, a while back I defined comics as those things which are accepted as comics.
I still stand by that definition…but Mittell puts some interesting twists on it. Specifically, when I talk about what things are accepted as comics, I tend to think of the accepting as being done by folks in the comics world, who care about comics. That is, comics is defined by what comics folks (whoever they may be) think of as comics. That can be scholars, fans, readers, or whatever. But to participate in the process of definition, I was assuming, you need to want to be participating in the process of definition. People who don’t care about comics don’t care about comics — someone who has never read or seen a comic is not the person you want to go to for a definition.
Mittell isn’t so sure. For him, television genres are constructed socially, by everyone — even, and sometimes especially, by people who are not fans, or scholars, or even by people who have never watched or thought about the genre in question. Instead, genres are often shaped, or defined, by institutional forces or regulators…or even just by people who have heard something about a show and formed uninformed opinions about it. Thus, early television quiz shows were strongly shaped by federal regulations against lotteries. Even though the Supreme Court eventually determined that game show giveaways were not in fact lotteries, the federal scrutiny of the shows had a strong effect on which shows were made and how, and on public perceptions of the genre, which long had a whiff of scandal and illegitimacy associated with it — perhaps handed down to its progeny, the reality show. (The parallel here with the comics code is fairly obvious.)
As another example, Mittell argues that the genre of talk shows, and especially of daytime talk shows, was importantly shaped and understood through the opinions and ideas of people who did not watch those shows. That is, discussion of the genre — which is in many ways the genre itself — was based on an image of those shows as lowbrow, white trash fare for morons. That’s the vision of those shows that largely circulated as a genre marker in public perception.
Comics, then, is neither constituted by formal elements nor by fan or expert practices or discourses. Rather, it is constituted at least in part by those who do not necessarily read comics at all. And if that’s true, it’s possible that comics are, in fact, in many ways a genre — rather than a medium, which is what most fans and scholars and people who care about comics prefer to think of them as.
Certainly, in the world outside comics-centric blogs, I think there’s little doubt that comics tend to be treated as a genre. For instance, at Netgalley, where book critics can see previews of forthcoming books, comics is one option among many genres, listed as a search option alongside “mystery” or “nonfiction” or “science-fiction”, or what have you. On Amazon, too, there is no separate category for comics; they’re simply subsumed in books, rather than being broken out into their own larger block like movies or music.
Of course, the distinctions between genre and medium is fairly arbitrary anyway. There’s no real formal or ideological reason to think of television as its own medium, for example — it could just as easily be thought of as a genre of film, or both film and television could be thought of as subgenres of “screens,” or even of theater.
Still, the cultural subdivisions are what they are, and the fact is that film, and theater, and even television, are all much more firmly established — institutionally and culturally — as mediums than comics are — a fact which becomes especially clear if you start looking at places and people who maybe don’t care about comics that much to begin with.
So what does it matter if comics are a genre rather than a medium? To some degree, it probably doesn’t matter at all; a comic by any other name will smell as sweet, or as putrid, as the case may be. But, on the other hand, it seems like seeing comics as genre could in some cases shift the context in which comics are discussed, or point towards different questions.
For instance, Mittell talks about the Simpsons as a genre mash-up, in which the genre suppositions of sit-coms, and the genre suppositions of cartoons, are used to undermine or question each other. The formal potential and expectations of cartoons made it possible to create a sit-com with more characters and more venues; the genre expectations of sit-coms made it possible to see a cartoon as aimed at adults (and programmed outside of Saturday morning.)
Many comics could be talked about along similar lines. For example, Maus might be seen as a mash-up of memoir and comics, using tropes of each to create a crossover audience that appeals to a greater number of people than either memoir or comic might have been able to attain on its own. Bone could be seen as mixing comics genre and fantasy genre in a similar way — and/or to tweak the conventions of both. And/or, a television show like Heroes might be seen as combining comics genres with serial evening soap opera.
None of these ideas are necessarily innovative or undiscussed or anything. But I think they might be inflected differently, and perhaps more central, if there were less concern with comics’ medium specificity, and more willingness to think of comics as one genre among many. In particular, there might be less focus on comics’ definitional project, and more focus on how comics has functioned, or been thought of, or been used at specific moments or in specific situations.
Seeing comics as genre might also help to explain, or help in a discussion of, the way that comics often seems to function in popular discourse as a kind of novelty. The “Bang! Biff! Comics aren’t just for kids anymore!” meme might be seen not so much as an insult to the comics medium, but rather as what the comics genre is most often perceived as offering the mainstream. Just as the Simpsons cartoon form, with its connotations of flexibility and childish freshness, helped reinvigorate the sit-com, so comics’ associations with wild fantasy and childishness may be precisely why people are so interested in a comic book Holocaust memoir, or a comic book fantasy epic, or a comic book piece of journalism, or what have you. Instead of “how is the medium of comics defined?” the question might be, “what pleasures or interest does the comics genre offer?” Rather than trying to figure out how to separate comics from everything else, it might be more useful to look at the many ways in which comics shamelessly and continuously hybridizes.
John Christopher’s novel, The Possessors, is (among other things) a metaphor of imperial reversal, in which Westerners have the tables turned on them and become colonial victims of space invaders. Christopher’s fantastic Tripods Trilogy also flips colonialism, this time more specifically focused on Christopher’s native England.
Christopher’s “The Long Winter” from 1962, though, seemed like it would be different. I’d heard that it was an apocalyptic tale of a new ice age. No invading aliens; no imperial metaphor.
Shows what I know. The Long Winter is indeed about a new ice age; due to some typically vague scientific gobbledygook, the sun’s rays start to weaken, temperatures plummet, and the British isles, not to mention a large portion of the rest of the world, becomes so cold as to be virtually uninhabitable. Fuel stocks are used up, food becomes scarce, and civilization quickly and efficiently collapses into savagery.
But all of that is really just a set-up for the heart of the novel — which is an elaborate, gleefully mean-spirited excuse to shuffle the English center and the colonized periphery. As Britain disintegrates, all those who can flee desperately to warmer climes — especially Africa. The influx of wealth in that continent creates a new, flush black upper-class. The white immigrants, meanwhile, have, in most cases, lost everything, and become a despised, racial underclass — living in filth and poverty, eking out menial jobs as maids or laborers or prostitutes.
Christopher’s detailing of this reversal is both remorseless and brilliant. In one sequence, the protagonist Andy and his lover, Maddy, having just discovered that their currency is worthless, spend a night on a Nigerian beach rather than pay for lodging they can’t afford — only to be almost arrested under a newly passed white vagrancy law. In another passage, Christopher describes several white boarding school boys talking among themselves with a “fencing unsureness…[a] glib pretense of acceptance into a society which, they knew at heart, would always deny them.” Andy, overhearing them, connects their attitude instantly to that of some Jews he had himself known at boarding school in England.
What’s best about the book, however, is that Christopher is smart enough about the workings of empire to know that it can’t simply be inverted. Oftentimes, narratives which flip power relations simply assume that those on the bottom will behave like those on the top if given the chance. The “moral” ends up being that everyone would misuse power if given the chance — which may be true, but is certainly banal.
Christopher, though, knows that empire can’t be separated from history. Africa in his world is on top…but it wasn’t always so, and that fact matters a lot. Whites may be discriminated against just as blacks used to be, but the exact inflections of that discrimination are slightly different. Sometimes, this difference makes the whites’ situation even worse. Many of the Nigerians that Andy meets clearly relish the Europeans’ come-uppance — they remember suffering under the English boot, and they are eager for payback.
In other ways, though, the legacy of colonialism is a boon for the fallen Europeans — or at least gives them more options in some situations. Andy’s ex-wife, for example, is able to attach herself as a mistress to a wealthy Nigerian in part, Christopher implies, because European beauty standards remain in force. Similarly, many white men who served in European colonial armies are wanted as trainers by the Nigerian military, which is perpetually preparing for war against the white regime in South Africa.
Perhaps Christopher’s smartest reversal, though, is saved for the end of the book, when a Nigerian expedition travels north to colonize England. Andy goes along on the expedition, which is (after some power struggles) led by his Nigerian friend and benefactor, Abonitu. Abonitu repeatedly says that Andy serves as a kind of totem; a sort of living good luck charm. In some ways, this mirrors the manner in which European narratives often rely on a magic Negro — a black marker of authenticity, who provides the hero with spiritual, earthy wisdom. Andy, however, serves a slightly different purpose; he is not a marker of authenticity, but rather an icon of empire. He represents the shining white city of civilization, the position Abonitu, and Nigeria, is trying to occupy. Abonitu dehumanizes Andy, but the dehumanization functions differently than the way that, say, Tonto is dehumanized. Power is inflected by history; for the Nigerians the magic of conquest is not a seductive, humid heart of darkness, but a seductive, cold heart of white. Thus Abonitu describes his desire to take over London:
“I am excited by the idea,” Abonitu said. “And disgusted with myself, a little. When the princesses and queens of ancient Egypt died, they used to keep the bodies until putrefaction set in before handing them over to the embalmers. That was because they found that otherwise the embalmers used them for their lust. London is a dead queen.”
But London isn’t quite as defenseless as a dead queen. Again, history matters; the English — who, after all, still have modern technology, including guns — are able to fend off the Nigerian invasion. On the one hand, I enjoyed the way that Christopher made Abonitu so much more appealing than the English, so that you (or at least I) end up essentially rooting for the colonizer. But still, it is hard to avoid noticing that, in his imperial set pieces, Christopher pretty much always finishes up with a happy ending in which the plucky English throw off their oppressors. However clever his reversals, and however clearly he sees their hypocrisy and their faults, Christopher’s English background is determinative — his people still, somehow, always have to be the good guy. Even if you know how history works, I guess, it’s extremely hard to keep it from working on you.
We’re headed into the holidays, obviously. Posting will be lighter than usual, though something or t’other will probably go up most days. In any case, have a happy season of happiness!
On HU
Featured Archive Post: me on Jack Cole’s pin-up art.
Vom Marlowe on the Inspector Lewis television cozies.
I talk about how Bart Beaty’s ideas are my ideas, and comics scholars vs. comics bloggers. Beaty freaks out in comments, more or less confirming my thesis.
Alex Buchet on how the King drew Mickey, and other Kirby oddities.
Kim Thompson in comments on the rationale behind Fanta’s recent Kurtzman reissues.
For a review I finished the first 50 Shades of Grey; only two more to go, god help me. Finished Alasdair MacIntyre’s “Whose Justice? Which Rationality?” by skipping over most of the incredibly detailed discussions of historical philosophical traditions and going straight to the ranting about how liberalism abstracts ideas from their philosophical traditions. Read John Christopher’s excellent “The Long Winter”. Started for review “The River of No Return,” by Bee Ridgway, aka Bethany Schneider, a dear friend I went to Oberlin with many, many moons ago.
Six miles away from my office is a theater that plays Bollywood movies simultaneously with their Indian release. This is one of them.
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Jab Tak Hai Jaan
Directed by Yash Chopra, 2012
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WHAT CAN WE GUESS THE FILM IS ABOUT FROM THE UNSUBTITLED TRAILER?
Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan (or, “SRK”) plays an incomparably stubbled member of the Indian Armed Forces whose motorcycle trip is interrupted by thoughts of girls. His is an artist’s soul, revealed through fleeting images of guitar-wielding promenades in foreign environments and vigorous dancing before hooting crowds of Anglo-Saxons, as well as a poetical voice-over narration. Alas, it is all a wistful flashback, as memories of — non-exclusively — (1) girls smiling, (2) girls leaning in a winsome manner, (3) girls twirling in the snow and (4) girls otherwise gesticulating prettily are interrupted by a barrage of b&w color-corrected images accompanied by an ambulance’s siren: bad news. Clearly we are in for a film of love, loss and potentially decorative wartime. His thirst for aesthetics duly slaked, SRK then concludes his journey to the Exploding Desert.
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WHAT IS THE HISTORY BEHIND THIS PICTURE?
It would be a mistake to call Yash Chopra — founder of Yash Raj Films — an exclusive romantic, although that would probably be the impression his corporate body would prefer you have. It has been good business in Bollywood to set love stories down as the foundation of your art, yet the young Chopra, born in Lahore prior to the partition, began his filmmaking career with the social dramas Dhool Ka Phool (1959) and Dharmputra (1961), films that built him a reputation for dealing earnestly with issues of Muslim/Hindu conflict fostered by the establishment of India and Pakistan along religious lines. Later, in the ’70s, Chopra became one of the architects of the ‘angry young man’ persona for megastar actor Amitabh Bachchan; by this point the director had already become famous for the hot-blooded boy-girl melodrama (and Yash Raj foundational picture) Daag: A Poem of Love (1973), but ask a connoisseur and they’re more likely to cite Big B raging against god and society in Deewar (1975) as a decade’s highlight over anything more outwardly lovey.
But then, it is very possible to bask in the heated emotions of these films, this aesthetic of gut feeling, of human connection trumping religious or national or caste division on the basis of what seems, intuitively, to be the ‘right’ way to behave, and declare Yash Chopra a Romantic in the macro sense, irregardless of the presence of any picturesque Swiss lake presiding over the action of a tender little song.
Still, there’s no denying that the rough ‘n ready ’80s were tough on Chopra, or that his revival as a film director of popular relevance came by way of Chandni (1989), an exceedingly backlit vehicle for the always-great Sridevi Kapoor that ensured Chopra-as-director would never venture far from romance-as-genre ever again; perhaps his biggest departure since would be Darr (1993), and only then because nominal hero Sunny Deol is all but blown off the screen by the picture’s obsessive villain, played by a 28-year old Shah Rukh Khan in one of his most indelible early roles.
Darr, in fact, represented both a beginning and an end for Chopra and Yash Raj – two years later, Chopra’s son, Aditya, would pair with SRK for the enormously lucrative Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (see our last episode for more). Neither man would ever direct a film without Khan again, and Yash Raj — which, until the 21st century, in movie production terms, had served mainly (if not exclusively) as a vehicle for the Chopras to release their own directorial ventures — would build its own shooting studio and enter a period of promoting new, young directors through in-house productions, albeit with A. Chopra often providing story synopses in what I tend to imagine is a rather Stan Lee manner.
Yash Chopra died on October 21, 2012, having completed shooting on all but one song sequence for his newest directorial outing, Jab Tak Hai Jaan. It had already been rumored that Aditya Chopra — officially the producer and writer (with screenplay aid by Devika Bhagat) — had directed portions of the film in his father’s name, but the younger man declined to shoot any posthumous scenes. Perhaps he was distracted by the contemporaneous and unwelcome characterization of Yash Raj as a Marvel-like evil empire; the company had secured agreements from theaters requiring their exhibition of Jab Tak Hai Jaan for a certain period as a prerequisite for receiving an earlier, much-anticipated Salman Khan vehicle, Ek Tha Tiger, and Ajay Devgn, a producer and actor, had subsequently filed a claim with the Competition Commission of India against Yash Raj, alleging “abuse of dominant position,” insofar as his own production, Son of Sardaar — the latest among multitudinous neo-masala remakes of Telugu-language pictures — could not manage adequate bookings as a result.
The claim was dismissed, but Yash Raj couldn’t entirely shake its verdict from the court of public opinion, whereby not a few observers deemed Jab Tak Hai Jaan and its eventual Rs 100+ crore domestic gross the beneficiary of protectionism and cunning. Worse yet, Devgn’s film company is supervised by the former Kajol Mukherjee, Devgn’s wife and SRK’s co-star from A. Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, giving the whole affair a smack of familial betrayal. Nonetheless, it also became a notable hit overseas, standing as only the third-ever Bollywood film to land inside the U.S. Top 10 grossers for the week of its release. Clearly some romantic perceptions endure at a remove.
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WHAT HAPPENS BEFORE THE INTERVAL?
Shah Rukh Khan! Grimly stubbled! Martially attired! He rides through a blazing desert, reciting poetry by A. Chopra! Violins arranged by ACADEMY AWARD(TM) WINNER A. R. Rahman leap on the soundtrack, while the middle-aged gentleman in the row ahead of me bobs his head! Then: a beautiful woman strips out of her workout gear to a teeny-tiny swimsuit! Yash Chopra: still randy at 80! She leaps into a mighty stream but oh – she cannot handle the water! Grimly, SRK deigns to save her life, then zooms away stoically on his manly motorcycle! But he left his fucking diary! Perhaps the secrets of his grim and manly stoicism are hidden somewhere… somewhere… in the past!
Jab Tak Hai Jaan is best described as pleasantly unspecific bullshit, or — more tactfully — a high-end entertainment. It’s basically an ‘epic’ romance, spanning the course of a decade and coyly implicating the occasional social issue; the intent, perhaps, is to prove more aesthetically nutritious than something like Son of Sardaar, though it’s basically still an unreal, sensuous fantasy steeped in an awful lot of Bollywood tradition. Indeed, the London setting of the flashback that takes up almost the entirety of the film’s first half — a 2002 that makes no effort to approximate period fashions or even attempt to hide the occasional Coke Zero advert — seems poised specifically to evoke memories of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, with SRK playing a similarly cocky goof of a twentysomething, on the prowl for honest, true love.
It must be said now that Shah Rukh Khan is 47 years old, and looks it. I will further suggest that his age doesn’t matter; part of the artifice of mainstream Bollywood films is that dependable male stars, heroes all, can presume to be as young as they please. Those corners of the audience prone to hemming and hawing will do just that, but in the end the public will buy it.
For women, the heroines, it’s very different.
I’m not about to make a bunch of ridiculous claims for mainstream Bollywood as a uniquely awful place for women — not in an American situation where as longstanding a directorial presence as Kathryn Bigelow hears prominent voices idly speculating that her success is attributable to her looks — but for an industry so interested in appealing to female ticket buyers, it’s a bit startling to see how lean the roles for women have become in Hindi pop film. The neo-masala wave has had an aggravating effect, with its emphasis on macho protagonists smashing their way to victory, but even romance-as-genre tends to slot women away for pining and pouting.
Into this scene comes the female lead of Jab Tak Hai Jaan, Katrina Kaif: the quintessential modern heroine.
Kaif is probably terrific with anecdotes. She was born in Hong Kong in 1984, and spent over a decade and a half shuttling with her English mother and numerous siblings to seemingly half the nations on earth — France! Japan! Poland! Belgium! — eventually settling into a modeling career in London. There, she was spotted by filmmaker Kaizad Gustad, and cast in a film titled Boom (2003), an experience that prompted the teenaged aspirant to relocate to Mumbai, despite knowing hardly any Hindi. Likely, she knew the language barrier wouldn’t prove goal-stopping – there is a long tradition in Bollywood of forgoing sync sound, after all, and virtually every performer ‘sings’ with an alternate voice anyway. What Katrina Kaif could offer, uniquely, was that touch of exotica useful in the ranks of models-turned-actresses, a mighty corps in the Mumbai ’00s. Filmmakers were perfectly willing to have her lines dubbed over by some native performer.
A funny thing happened, though – Kaif, having eventually paid her dues, developed a knack for appearing in blockbuster movies. Not starring, no – but appearing, in the way heroines today are generally made to ‘appear’ rather than ‘star.’ The only mainstream Bollywood actress under the age of 40 that I can even think of who regularly ‘stars’ in movies is Vidya Balan, with everyone else relegated to one-offs or ensembles, or the myriad pair-offs of boy-girl romantic comedies. Or appearances beside popular heroes in vehicles built around them.
Of the ten highest grossing Bollywood films of 2012, Katrina Kaif has been present for three (including #1, the aforementioned Ek Tha Tiger); aside from a cameo in a children’s animation thingy, that accounts for her entire year’s output. One of those appearances was even an item number: a gratuitous song sequence cameo by a performer otherwise uninvolved with the film, manufactured strictly for added value of some sort, be it star wattage or sex appeal. Some have claimed this sort of thing ought to be Kaif’s natural habitat; others say she’s not even very good at that.
Nose around the internet — or hell, read YouTube comments — and you’ll hear that Katrina Kaif cannot act. That she’s nothing but eye candy. That she’s stale eye candy – Kaif is 28 years old now, which places her perilously close to the Logan’s Run limit of a heroine’s viability as sufficiently fresh visual stimulus. Every so often you’ll get a Madhuri Dixit or an Aishwarya Rai Bachchan who remains viable in mainstream supporting roles into their 30s, but they are rare.
As such, in the spirit of contrarian joie de vivre for which this website has become enthusiastically footnoted, I will now suggest a new paradigm for the evaluation of Katrina Kaif performances: “Does Katrina Show Up?” Which is to say, she always appears, but – does she show up?
You see, my extensive Bollywood research has led me to conclude that the much-maligned Kaif is actually a pretty charismatic performer, but at the same time she’s realized that the nothing roles available to her require little to no particular effort on her part; indeed, Kaif herself has stated that she didn’t feel particularly free or confident to contribute actively to a film until 2009, over half a decade into her professional career. Other times, she really needs only be there to be photographed, and so that, I theorize, is all she does. Ek Tha Tiger is the perfect example of a Katrina Kaif role in which she seems entirely disengaged from the movie surrounding her, because – as logical observation dictates, what the fuck will she have to do in a goddamned Salman Khan movie anyway? But compare that with the 2011 Yash Raj romantic comedy production Mere Brother Ki Dulhan, where her role affords her ample opportunity to point guns and play drunk and engage in many forms of wholesome rebellion, and suddenly – she clicks.
Kaif’s role in Jab Tak Hai Jaan seems engineered to flatter all of her strengths. She is SRK’s London-based love interest (autobiography!), initially connecting with him to brush up on the Punjabi singing (language barriers!) that will surely please the rigid father who’s set her up to marry some monied dude she doesn’t particularly love (tropes!). She’s also a withdrawn, internal woman and a devout Catholic, prone to cutting little quid pro quo deals with Jesus to get (or perhaps justify) what she wants; this is the most important aspect of Kaif’s character, as it allows rakish SRK — at one point taking her on a role-play date in which he goes by the same name as his character from Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, in case you didn’t get it — to release her inner wild child, which is fortunate, as what Katrina Kaif is best at doing is playing at a lack of inhibitions.
In this way, Jab Tak Hai Jaan becomes a metaphor for Kaif’s career as an actress; it’s the most apropos role she’s ever had. “Does Katrina Show Up?” YES.
There are other small rebellions in the first half of the film. After kneeling down with SRK to pray she won’t do anything untoward with him (Catholic girls!), Kaif takes him along to meet her estranged mother — ’70s star Neetu Singh, demonstrating that nostalgia cameos are an additional avenue of exposure after a comfortable hiatus — who readily admits that leaving her husband improved her life, as it allowed her to marry for love. Before long, the song Saans is playing, boasting Rahman’s most intense violins of the show and an impressive bait ‘n switch on visual expectations – where prior Yash Chopra films would present “dance sex” to approximate the lovemaking of the ecstatic couple, near-miss kisses and all, Jab Tak Hai Jaan has the dancing segue into an actual sex scene, thereafter blooming outward into a Bollywood tribute to public displays of affection. Enjoy this PG promotional abridgement:
This is a huge departure for SRK, who’d vowed to never so much as kiss a woman onscreen again after performing a sex scene in a 1992 art movie, Maya Memsaab, reportage on which had alleged the married actor had actually ‘done the deed’ with co-star Deepa Sahi. In the most colorful variant on ensuing events, Khan then threatened to sodomize and castrate one of the offending magazine’s reporters in front of his (the journalist’s) parents – SRK was subsequently arrested, and then used his phone call to further threaten the luckless hack, who it turned out hadn’t even authored the offending dispatch.
The sex in Jab Tak Hai Jaan, in contrast, has prompted little real-life upheaval, though perhaps the eventual upheaval among the film’s characters boast some real-life anchor. So delightful is the erotic frenzy of the film’s Khan and Kaif, that the latter neglects to actually call things off with her arranged marriage, and verily suffers an acute religio-emotional episode when SRK gets whacked by an oncoming vehicle. Another deal is struck with Sir Jesus: her lover’s life, in exchange for her agreement never to sin with the man again. Khan is irate at this turn of events, and vows in church — before God and London, his non-belief notwithstanding — that his vengeance on the Almighty will be total, that he will place himself into such a dangerous, awful line of work that his inevitable death will destroy Katrina Kaif’s relationship with Christianity.
And then, metaphorically, we see the older Khan, ten years later, striding through the Exploding Desert without a care, because Jesus Christ has made him invincible.
Critical to the Shah Rukh Khan creation myth is an incident of 1990, where the young Khan, a Sunni Muslim, rebuffed by Gauri Chibba, the Hindu girl he’d been seeing, pursued his lover from Delhi to Bombay, searching up and down for seven days and seven nights, and on the eighth day he found her, and he married her the next year, Gauri Khan, whom he would zealously defend from the slights and innuendos of entertainment journalism and leering theology as they raised children, two children, of two religions.
***
WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE INTERVAL?
Oh, right! Remember the girl who found the diary?
Anushka Sharma can perhaps be called a mirror held up to Katrina Kaif. She too began as a model, albeit in India, and made her film debut by the intercession of an interested director. That director, however, was Aditya Chopra, who cast Sharma opposite SRK in Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi, a 2008 feature and (at the moment) A. Chopra’s most recent solo directorial work. And of the five films in which Sharma has subsequently appeared, four have been Yash Raj productions; like in old-time Hollywood, she was signed to a multi-picture studio deal upon discovery, and some — having seen the moody-cute role given her in Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi — wondered if she had much of a future outside the studio.
For me, Anushka Sharma does not begin in that film. She begins in her third Yash Raj movie, Band Baaja Baaraat (2010), in which she debuts a survival instinct 180 degrees away from that which I’ve attributed to Katrina Kaif – while Kaif seems to sleepwalk through roles she knows don’t have a lot to interest her, Sharma guns it into overdrive, 101%, every single time.
For the purposes of illustration, behold an abridgement of Jiya Re, Sharma’s showcase number in Jab Tak Hai Jaan, seeing her charm the living shit out of SRK, the Indian Armed Forces and gaggles of children and horses, even if it kills them all:
I genuinely have no idea if Sharma is a ‘good’ actress, but I won’t tolerate a single negative word. Did you count how many times she fucking winked? Four times in two minutes: levels unseen Stateside since the close of the Jazz Era.
There is good utility to all this – every millisecond of an Anushka Sharma performance serves primarily to draw your undivided attention to Anushka Sharma, to the exclusion of virtually everything else. This is a way to stand out, to convert a romantic pairing into a star vehicle, which is exactly what Sharma did in Band Baaja Baaraat and Ladies vs Ricky Bahl (2011), both opposite nondescript leading hunk Ranveer Singh (which, admittedly, is probably like interacting with a particularly advanced special effect). Moreover, it’s a style of acting perfectly applicable to Indian pop cinema – and maybe no other cinema in the world, save for that of Guy Maddin, but Sharma no doubt knows exactly where she’s at.
Shah Rukh Khan, however, is not one to be out-hammed.
Sharma eventually tracks down SRK — who is working with a bomb disposal unit in Ladakh — in hopes of jump-starting her media career with a megahit Discovery Channel documentary (on right after Amish Mafia, one hopes). No information is ever given as to the origins of the IEDs Khan is defusing; we’re basically made to accept the presence of such threats as challenges dropped from Heaven. Or perhaps we can presume that A. Chopra has seen The Hurt Locker, just as he presumably read Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair (or saw a movie version) for the whole bargaining-with-God-for-a-lover’s-life thing; surely he meant for the title “Jab Tak Hai Jaan” to evoke Haa Jab Tak Hai Jaan, a song from Sholay, the Jaws of ’70s Bollywood – he’s a packrat and a perpetual student, this younger Chopra, often guilty of exactly the sort of hybridization for hybridization’s sake everyone kept laying at the feet of Quentin Tarantino in the ’90s.
Tarantino, though, is more of an intellectual writer, to the point where his films adopt an essayistic quality; A. Chopra prefers the broad, sensual flourishes of the filmi world in which he was raised, where a romantic comedy variation on The Hurt Locker can see invincible SRK hanging below a bridge, with no protection, de-wiring a bomb while Anushka Sharma projects flirtations somewhere into western Baltistan. Workin’ it like Clara Bow has its brute force effect, and soon rough ‘n nasty post-Jesus SRK is manfully preparing to head back to London for fact-checking on footage shot by Sharma, who functions metaphorically as a genre superfan of sorts – a girl with a tendency to quote old movies in regular conversation (if the folks in my audience finishing her dialogue for her are any indication).
Really, what Sharma wants to know is if this old, crazy love story she read in the diary, this ersatz Yash Chopra movie of the first half, this self-referential thing – she wants to know if any of it’s real. The Chopras are kind to her; she’s forward, spunky, and sexually active, and never punished for any of her behavior, even when her shojo manga heroine-like clumsiness causes a building to explode. But still, she longs to know if movies are true, if people fall in love like that, if she could fall in love like that. It’s a writer’s justification for his craft – maybe his father’s work too.
And then SRK shows up at the Discovery Channel’s London bureau and is immediately hit by another goddamned car, revealing the true message of Jab Tak Hai Jaan: England has the worst drivers on the entire bloody planet.
Stripped of his Jesus powers, a bedridden SRK develops an awesome case of movie amnesia, believing he’s in fact woken up from the first time he got mowed down UK-style. Obviously, Sharma must then track down Katrina Kaif — who, in the interests of not having to deal with anything else in a 175-minute motion picture, has not managed to marry herself off to anyone — in the hopes of easing Khan back into the world. And then, as medical science inevitably demands, Kaif pretends that her and SRK have been married the whole time and are living in a fine home, leading to several great moments of interior decoration porn, and probably the best joke of the whole movie, wherein Kaif meets Khan at the front door with a Hindu greeting, and he grins widely at her now apparently less-exclusive take on organized religion.
Although, now that I think of it, we never do hear of Khan’s personal beliefs (if any) in the film. The real joke might be that she guessed the wrong faith. Catholics!
At this point, the Chopras cruelly tease that Sharma might go full-on Bad Maria and become the antagonist of the picture, but against most generic expectations she winds up acting in a basically logical and sensitive manner, admitting that she really loved the gruff SRK who’d passed through a (conveniently distant) flame, thus excusing herself from the climax, and — if Wikipedia is any indication — the entirety of mainline Hindi film, as her list of forthcoming projects looks like a who’s who of ‘mainstream-alternative’ auteurs.
This allows the camera to dwell fully on Kaif, who, in advancing ten years down the timeline, is finally given the opportunity to play a character close to her actual age. Maybe the last chance she’ll have in a while, still on the treadmill.
But it’d be unfair to label this a purely surface-appeal picture notable mainly for the circumstances of its female leads’ careers and the magpie antics of its head writer. As he did back in Dhool Ka Phool, in Dharmputra — back when the partition was still a recent memory to some — Yash Chopra seeks to dramatize the emotional toll of religious separation.
SRK regains his memory, of course; in the midst of a bomb threat on a local train, the London police — just a shade more competent than London drivers — allow Our Hero to play with the wiring of the explosive device upon the recitation of lots of exciting bomb facts (this is also how I became a movie critic). Now aware of the whole situation, Khan confronts Kaif in church — in front of the tabernacle! — and declares that she ultimately loves him more than she loves Jesus. Then he returns to Ladakh, because, like Jeremy Renner, he just can’t get enough.
The message is simple, and obvious: excessive religiosity (or any sort of grand, declaratory societal apparatus) leads only to repression and unhappiness, while human connections are of paramount importance. This is the enduring message of the late Chopra, the Hindu Punjab born in the current Pakistan, his favorite leading man a Muslim with a father from Peshawar and a mother from Hyderabad, married to a Hindu woman. Anushka Sharma delivers a speech for her documentary debut. Shah Rukh Khan is defusing the final bomb of his career. Katrina Kaif appears, having pursued him all the way up to the disputed territories. Suddenly – there’s a second bomb! SRK leaps into action!
Sharma declares that SRK’s defusing his last bomb. “It’s his last not because he’s suddenly scared of dying. It’s his last because it’s his time to live.”
The wire is cut. He rises to his feet and asks Kaif to marry him.
“It’s just a simple story of love,” Sharma remarks, and the picture fades into a behind the scenes montage of the late director Yash Chopra, who couldn’t stand to go out on anything less than affirmation.
In July 2007 David Enright was at a Borders bookshop in the UK with his wife and two children when he stumbled upon a copy of Tintin in the Congo by Belgian comics artistGeorge Remi (aka Hergé). The couple couldn’t believe their eyes: was this filth at children’s reach? Worst: was it addressed to them? Here’s what he said:
“So you are married to a monkey and have two little yard apes. Good job. Got bananas?” This is one of the letters and emails that my Ghanaian wife and I received, when we asked that the Hergé book Tintin in the Congo be removed from the children’s sections of bookshops back in 2007.
According to The Telegraph (July 12, 2007), after being contacted by Enright a spokesman for the CRE (Commission for Racial Equality), said:
This book contains imagery and words of hideous racial prejudice, where the ‘savage natives’ look like monkeys and talk like imbeciles.
It beggars belief that in this day and age Borders would think it acceptable to sell and display Tintin In The Congo. High street shops, and indeed any shops, ought to think very carefully about whether they ought to be selling and displaying it.
That same month, on July 27, 2007, a Congolese citizen living in Belgium (see above), Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo, read an Enright related article in a newspaper and decided to act filing suit in a Belgian court against Tintin’s copyright holder, Moulinsart Foundation. After patiently waiting for three years Mondondo, now supported by a French anti-racist organization (CRAN: Conseil représentatif des associations noires – representative council of black associations), extended his suit against Tintin in the Congo‘s publisher, Casterman. The suit was also filed in France.
Mondondo and the CRAN wanted Moulinsart and Casterman to ban the book or, as an alternative, if the first plaint failed, they wanted a warning to be put on the cover of future editions as well as a foreword inside explaining the colonial context in which the book was created (basically they wanted the French-Belgian editions to follow the British Egmont edition). On February 10, 2012, the Brussels Court of First Instance rejected the applicants’ claims. The same thing happened at the Brussels Appellate Court last December 5.
Here are some of the court’s allegations, according to this site:
If we were to follow the appellants, for whom it would suffice to take into account the simple intent of publishing a book, that would require banning today, for instance, the publication of some of the works of Voltaire, whose racism, notably toward Blacks and Jews, was inherent to his thought, as well as whole segments of literature, which cannot be accepted [as] the passage of time must be taken into account. Hergé limited himself to producing a work of fiction with the sole objective of entertaining his readers. He carries out therein candid and gentle humor.
It is above all a testament to the common history of Belgium and the Congo at a given epoch[.]
The Telegraph, again (February 13, 2012) also translated the following court statement:
It is clear that neither the story, nor the fact that it has been put on sale, has a goal to… create an intimidating, hostile, degrading or humiliating environment[.]
I’m not a lawyer or, more specifically, I’m not a Belgian lawyer, but come on! “candid and gentle humor”? How can a book that dehumanizes the Congolese people depicting them as childish and lazy and in need of white peoples’ guidance contain “candid and gentle humor”? Are racist jokes “candid and gentle humor”? And how does the entertainment purpose excuse anything? Plus: how can the environment depicted in this blatantly racist book not be “hostile, degrading [and] humiliating”? The known argument that the book reflects its times’ prejudice doesn’t hold water either as I’ve shown, here. Hergé could not invoke an insanity defense. He was responsible for creating racist imagery and racist writing. Others, like Alan Dunn, for instance, at roughly the same time, didn’t do so.
There’s another reason why Hergé couldn’t invoke the insanity defence mentioned above: he’s dead since 1983. Again, I’m no lawyer, but how can a court judge a dead man (guessing his intentions!) is completely beyond me. I know that the “goal” part above is what matters to the court, but in the dubious case that they are psychic isn’t there something called criminal negligence in the Belgian law? What they should be judging is how can today’s copyright owners ignore the racism in one of their books refusing to do anything about it. I can understand why did the Brussels court mention the banning of a book by Voltaire, but Mondondo and the CRAN didn’t want to ban Tintin in the Congo in their secondary plaint, they just wanted to add some heads up and some informative paratext? Here’s what the court had to say about that:
As for the subsidiary inclusion of a warning it is not only an interference with the exercise of the freedom of expression it also hampers the moral right to the integrity of the work which can’t be contested because the defendants don’t own it [Fanny Rodwell owns the moral rights to Hergé’s oeuvre, not Moulinsart and Casterman].
From now on we’re informed that a foreword constitutes a violation of a “work’s integrity.” I can understand the reasoning behind the idea that such a foreword would be a violation of Moulinsart’s and Casterman’s freedom of expression (as well as Fanny Rodwell’s moral rights) though. Said foreword would be forced on them by the court. You’re wrong if you think that I’m on Mondondo’s side on this. I agree with him only when he says that the court suit was a means to force Moulinsart to seat at the conversation table. I understand the strategy, but it was doomed from the beginning: big corporations don’t deal with the little guy. When I repeatedly say on this post that I’m not a lawyer what I really mean is that I don’t want to discuss matters I know little about. (What I do know, however, is that they are lousy comics critics at the Brussels court.) What’s unfortunate is that the publishers themselves don’t comply with Mondondo’s wish for a foreword of their own free will as they should. It shows that Continental Europe is still way behind America and the UK when these matters surface in the public sphere.
Another quote in the court’s decision (written by De Theux de Meylandt, according to this site), states:
We see in particular that Tintin in the Congo does not put Tintin in a situation where there is competition or confrontation between the young reporter and any black or group of blacks, but puts Tintin against a group of gangsters… who are white[.]
I’ll let a Portuguese anthropologist living in Maputo, Mozambique, José Flávio Teixeira, answer to the above for me (in a review of Deogratias, a book about the Rwandan Genocide by Belgian comics artist Jean-Phillipe Stassen):
Beyond a self-centered gaze (ethnocentric: what interests him, above all, is how “his people” behave themselves elsewhere and how they get astray from the recommended “good behavior”) what the book states (distractedly) are two fundamental points: the perennial (the need for?) European leadership; the inferior malevolent capability of the Rwandan people (the African people). Thus crystallizing the racism, affirming white superiority: “people” (race, because, in the end, the book is about race) who are more in the lead, who are more corrupt, meaner. More human, right?
Going back to the UK, Ann Widdecombe, a Conservative politician, criticized the CRE (see above) for their support of Enright’s views (she said that their claim was ludicrous):
It brings the CRE into disrepute – there are many more serious things for them to worry about.
I don’t know if this is an apocryphal story or not (it probably is), but this reminds me of that officer of justice, after Belgium’s liberation, who refused to accuse Hergé of collaboration with the Nazis under the excuse that he didn’t want to cover himself in ridicule. It’s a well known fact: comics are less powerful, less corrupt, less mean. Less of an art form, right?
The post has generated a long comment thread. I posted several comments myself here and there…and I figured I’d highlight a couple of my longer ones here since I don’t know that anyone will read them otherwise. They’ll be a bit disjointed…but what the hey, it’s a blog.
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I think there’s a lot of truth to this. But Tolkien could also see racial antagonism (as between Elves and Dwarves, for example) as evil and hurtful. And the Hobbits (especially Sam) are kind of supposed to be working class too, in some ways.
As with the violence, I tend to see race as an issue that Tolkien struggles with, sometimes successfully, sometimes less so.
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I don’t think sentience in and of itself predicates against the logic of genocide. In fact, I know it doesn’t. On the contrary, genocide really only makes sense in terms of sentience — you don’t use genocide to refer to the mass killing of the dodo, for example. The fact that the Goblin wants to find out what they’re doing first before killing them also seems beside the point. The issue isn’t whether they always fight each other in every circumstance; the issue is whether Tolkien presents goblins, orcs, etc., as people who can be good or evil or in between, and who it is a sin to kill if you don’t have to, or whether he presents them as vermin who should, ideally, be exterminated. I think he tends very much to present them as the second.
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No…it’s quite different. Twain was a committed anti-racist; Huck Finn is explicitly committed to racial equality in a way that was very courageous for its time…and for our time, for that matter.
Tolkien’s stance towards race is a lot more ambiguous. And…for those who say it was just of its time, it’s worth noting that Huck Finn was written a fair bit before LOTR. There were people at that time (Langston Hughes, for instance) who were anti-racist. Tolkien’s stance certainly could have been a lot worse — but comparing him to Mark Twain definitely shows up his limitations in this area.
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I think you can see the enjoyment of violence in, for example, Beorn’s attitude towards killing goblins, and the book’s satisfaction in the dead goblin and warg he displays in front of his door. Or in Legolas and Gimli’s contest to see who can kill more orcs. Or even perhaps in the Ent’s spectacular destruction of Isengard.
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Saying evil is real, and embodying that evil in a particular race or group of people — that’s the logic of genocidal violence. The claim that you need to kill every one of the enemies because they are genocidal — that’s how genocide is justified too. To say that it’s a fantasy sort of misses the point as well — genocidal fantasies are also fantasies. That other tribe, over there, isn’t *really* unhuman — it’s a story you tell. But stories can have real results. Fantasies can kill.
Like I said, this is a tension in Tokien’s work, not an absolute. He very eloquently argues for peace and mercy in many way. But he also finds genocide appealing. That’s the case for most of us (it is for me — I like lots of bloody body count films.) I think Tokien actually makes us think about that, sometimes quite deliberately. How do you fight Sauron without being Sauron? How do you pick up that ring without becoming the ring’s servant? Those are pretty important questions, not less so because Tokien sometimes (not always, but sometimes) seems swayed by Sauron’s logic of murder and force.
Many comics could be talked about along similar lines. For example, Maus might be seen as a mash-up of memoir and comics, using tropes of each to create a crossover audience that appeals to a greater number of people than either memoir or comic might have been able to attain on its own. Bone could be seen as mixing comics genre and fantasy genre in a similar way — and/or to tweak the conventions of both. And/or, a television show like Heroes might be seen as combining comics genres with serial evening soap opera.
