Jukeboxes on the Moon by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi
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www.canopycanopycanopy.com/8/jukeboxes_on_the_moon Jukeboxes on the Moon By Rafil Kroll-Zaidi Stardom is martyrdom: India arrives in the American imagination He represents in petto India in transition—the obsession it inspired in the press, the way monstrous hybridism of East and West. it served as an occasion for all manner of —Rudyard Kipling, Kim sociological commentary—in these there was something incredible. The kind of life I have chosen is ultimately not for Breaking stories of Slumdog’s latest plaudit personal gain. received or offense caused perpetually —Osama bin Laden supplanted one another. The two slum children cast in big roles became, as they gamboled amid diverse filth and were beaten TWO WINTERS AGO, making their way for insolence in their see-through hovels, through Bombay’s Victoria Terminus, two young subjects of paparazzi surveillance. Freida Pinto, Muslim men became famous. One was Jamal a previously undistinguished Indian fashion Malik, a fictional orphan in a movie. The other model who played the film’s love interest, tied was Ajmal Amir Kasab, said to be from a clan for No. 5 in Vanity Fair’s Most Beautiful Woman of butchers in small-town Pakistani Punjab. in the World rankings; Details, with less film- The former, in the closing scenes of the film, industry cachet but wielding the imprimatur of is weedy, gawky; lets his mouth hang open in disinterested gay good taste, put her at No. a pantomime of nervous exhilaration; is newly 4. The reigning No. 1, Angelina Jolie, let slip rich from winning a game show; kisses the that she and her consort were planning to girl and then dances with the rest of the cast. adopt a slumdog of their very own. Newsweek The latter, in the most widely seen photo, is discovered it had a genuine slumdog working in stout, steroidful; wears too-short cargo pants, its Delhi bureau and persuaded him to produce a knockoff VERSACE T-shirt, two backpacks filled an op-ed. The Washington Post’s third annual with ammunition and snacks; carries a double- Eastertide Peeps diorama contest received banana-clipped AK-47 that blurs as it swings several Slumdog-themed submissions; slumdog through the depopulated space before him. On itself entered the language as an all-purpose May 6, 200, he was sentenced to be hanged. attributive for any story of unlikely success or thing Indian. A “slumdog effect” was credited I FIRST SAW SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE about with optimism among independent filmmakers, twelve hours into November 2008’s languorous, with a craze for bhangra-based fitness classes meandrated attacks in Bombay, and the film’s and an increase in donations to international visual style fittingly evoked the city as it was at children’s charities. Republican National that moment and as it is always: an unseemly Committee chairman Michael Steele sent collocation of bodies, buildings, land, and sea. out “slum love” to “slumdog governor” Bobby On the whole the film was slight and slipshod, Jindal. Slumdog Millionaire was proclaimed its world-pop-scored hullabaloo admitting “the movie Generation O can call its own.” a complaisant charm. But its reception and The big O himself said it reminded him of his coverage, the quality and extent of the doting in Indonesian boyhood. the four months between its theatrical release Even in the late stages of its overexposure, and its apotheosis at the Academy Awards, and Slumdog continued to metastasize: its plot into well into the months beyond; the numbersome a Broadway musical; its monies, a scholarship awards it acquired, the churning regurgitant fund; its concluding dance number, a Pussycat www.canopycanopycanopy.com/8/jukeboxes_on_the_moon Dolls cover. The film’s success, said the do it?), whose answer is revealed at the end Boston Globe, derived from its “multi-tasking (D. It is written). Throughout the film, this writ as romantic drama, exotic postcard, Eastern of destiny governs far beyond the game-show cultural study, pop-cultural riff, fractured triumph that is its jurisdiction. As vignettes of narrative exercise, and Bollywood boogie- operatic megapolitan pauperdom give way down sampler.” But Slumdog’s seductive power to a life of peripatetic high jinks, exuberant had little to do with chemistry-free romance or petit larceny, and agreeable if menial jobs, visual flamboyance, with “photogenic squalor” Jamal’s progress comes to feel oddly without or “polyglot verve”—and little ultimately to do impediment. Slumdog was often called a with the story the film told. Far more powerful fairy tale, which served as a defense of the was the story told about the film, and the film’s nonsensicality and occasionally as an consolations it offered, mostly by accident, acknowledgement of its plentiful folkloric motifs to a culture newly conscious of its waning (Predestined Treasure, Princess in the Tower, preeminence. That story had everything to do Quest for Stolen Princess, Princess Rescued with the coincidence of Jamal Malik’s and Ajmal from the Lower World), but never as an Kasab’s debuts. assessment of its actual fabulous coherence. For at the heart of Jamal’s destiny are neither JAMAL, A NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD PEON who the haywire contrivances that endow him works in a call center and is on the verge of with the necessary factoids nor the flaccid winning Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, is arc of his star-crossed love, but an innate interrogated by policemen who suspect him of aptitude, an assurance of success, an identity cheating. He relates, in flashbacks to childhood that precedes experience. His is an ancient (six-ish), adolescence (fourteen-ish), and the story, that of high birth and low upbringing, near past, how he came to know the answers; the prince raised as a pauper, the crownling these flashbacks tell the story of his life. He sent abroad for safekeeping, the boy who, on and his older brother, Salim, live in a Bombay reaching adolescence, manifests wondrous slum until they are orphaned by their mother’s abilities that betoken the patrimony to which he death. They meet a girl named Latika, and all will eventually accede (e.g., Theseus, Jesus, three are impressed into a begging syndicate. Harry Potter). Jamal’s birthright, his secret The brothers escape, but Latika doesn’t. After superpower, is simply this: He is not Indian. traveling around India for several years, they Our princely weanie’s arrival is signaled return to Bombay at the insistence of lovelorn by one of the film’s sporadic burps of lesser Jamal and rescue Latika from a brothel, but magic. After a brief montage of their wanderings fall out when Salim claims her for his own. Five outside Bombay, Jamal and Salim tumble from years later, Jamal is a tea-boy in a call center a moving train, roll down an embankment, and and Salim is muscle for the mob. They reunite, have doubled in age when they sit up; in front and Jamal again sleuths his way back to Latika, of them is the Taj Mahal; Jamal asks, “Is this whom Salim has delivered to his boss as a kept heaven?” Until this point, Jamal spoke only woman. She and Jamal try to run away together, Hindi, but now he commands perfect convent but Salim recaptures her. Jamal goes on the school English, acquired not after he and Salim game show so that Latika can locate him; Salim, reinvent themselves as Taj Mahal tourist guides in a change of heart, sacrifices himself to secure but, miraculously, before. Jamal’s English is not her freedom. Jamal successfully answers the a late-blooming native speaker’s facility; it is ninth and final question. actually a new mother tongue. Hindi he reserves At the beginning of Slumdog, the audience thereafter for lowly sorts (rickshaw drivers, a blind is presented with their own multiple-choice beggar from his syndicate days); English is the question (Jamal Malik is one question away language he turns to in amusement, shock, and from winning 20 million rupees. How did he anger, the language in which he professes (and, 2 www.canopycanopycanopy.com/8/jukeboxes_on_the_moon we might imagine, but for his boyish chastity, attend the ceremony with the rest of the cast. makes) love. On its own this transformation is not Their parents had been holding out for more the shibboleth of Jamal’s election (it occurs as money, but apparently they had relented. In well with Latika and Salim), but for him alone it Los Angeles, the two appeared alongside the resonates with other exceptional developments. seven (much wealthier) children and teenagers A few critics groped at Jamal’s incongruity, his who had played Jamal or Salim or Latika (as essential Westernness, and flailed to explain it. “youngest” or “middle” or “older”). The group “He’s got more affinities with his twentysomething went to Disneyland; they were photographed counterparts here and worldwide,” suggested with Mickey and rode on “it’s a small world.” one—of this (impecunious, Indian, Muslim) young When Rubina and Azharuddin made their man—“than any of them do with their elders.” wee-hours return to Bombay, the airport was thronged with well-wishers. “America was IN JANUARY OF LAST YEAR, just after Oscar amazing,” said Rubina. “I loved the pizza there. nominations, the British and American media People are so beautiful.” picked up on the story of Slumdog’s child With the pair returned to Garib Nagar, actors, poor children from the Bombay slums journalists reported that they had themselves who had been cast as poor children from the become a nuisance: “Reporters were Bombay slums. Three months into the release everywhere where any details of the children of the film that their street-kid cred had already and their families could be taken down.