Once upon a time, in a land called “college”, I dated a wealthy white boy from Arizona. He was a nice boy, with nice parents who rushed to embrace and accept me. I was young and eager to be embraced. Trouble was, his mom had an odd way of tacking on an explanation (sometimes sotto voce, sometimes not) to anything “cultural” whenever she addressed me. Implicit in every conversation was the assumption that they would refine me, expose me to the better things in life, elevate me somehow. I shrugged it off time and again until the weight of all that well-intentioned condescension finally felt too crushing: for god’s sake, high art to this family meant Monet’s fucking Water Lillies!! They spent gobs of money on interior designer who made them buy a pool table swathed in beige felt!
I would stand there in my thrift or Army-Navy surplus wear and thrill at the fact that I was secretly turning up my unrefined nose at them, a giant thought-balloon screaming “TACKY!!” rising above my head. I didn’t say anything because it was all so deliciously meta. Also? I was a chicken-shit people-pleaser.
So, anyway, it’s been a great many years since I dumped the guy, but seeing Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited brought on some strange flashbacks.
I’m a sucker for cinematography. Great art direction and visual flair can supplant character development, direction, or even plot, as far as I’m concerned. So naturally, I’ve been a rather ardent Wes Anderson fan. His stilted little diorama-like movies were fine by me. I accepted his narcissistic, self-involved characters because I was watching Anderson’s carefully constructed little world, and if the darker/foreign people were always a little goofy, and not really treated all that well by the main characters, well, that’s alright, right? His world, his prerogative, and all that. Besides, the soundtracks were so great! Until The Darjeeling Limited. The story, in a nutshell, involves three brothers (Owen Wilson, Adrian Brody, Jason Schwartzman) who have lost touch with each other since their father’s death a year ago, and meet up on the Darjeeling Limited train in India. The oldest, Francis Whitman (Wilson) summoned his younger brothers for a “spiritual journey” with the hope of bonding again, as well as another, hidden, agenda. More reviews here.
WARNING: SPOILERS!
Anderson takes the bold (for him) step of pushing his characters (literally) out of his little constructed world (the train) and into the real world (India). But the “real world” is still not even slightly fucking real! It’s Anderson’s cutesy, nostalgia-for-the-colonies, anglophilic, imaginary take on India. It’s like he ran out of colors to paint his scenes with, so he set them India, cause it’s already, you know, “colorful”. It’s like he took criticisms of his previous films to heart, so he set out to make something meaningful, in India, cause it’s so, you know, “spiritual.”
This movie is to India what The Life Aquatic was to oceanography.
A controversial recent article in Slate magazine (memorably subtitled, “That Queasy Feeling You Get When Watching a Wes Anderson Movie”) accused the director of being racist.
Much like that well-intentioned Arizona family I once knew, I don’t think Anderson means to be, at all. And I’m still eager to be embraced: I get that the brothers’ behavior and comments as they travel are supposed to cast them in a bad light, as clueless, careless, egocentric, shallow American asswipes. But the director is far too fond of them for this condemnation to really stick. They get a chance at redemption when, thrown off the train (for bringing aboard a poisonous snake and promptly losing it) in the Indian countryside, they try to save three drowning boys. Two are rescued, but despite much thrashing around in the water, a bloodied Adrian Brody admits, “I couldn’t save mine.” Mine. The word got caught in my ear canal and kept pinging against my ear drum. Mine.
Here’s the Slate writer’s take on it:
They’re invited to the child’s rural village for his funeral (which Anderson cannot resist presenting in slow motion and setting to a Kinks song), where the Whitman clan realize that they need to stick together and see out the rest of their journey. Turns out that a dead Indian boy was all the brothers were missing.
This isn’t just heavy-handed, it’s offensive. In a grisly little bit of developing-world outsourcing, the child does the bothersome work of dying so that the American heroes won’t have to die spiritually.
I want to say that Anderson isn’t this callow, that the writer is over-reacting, that humor or quirkiness or something leavens the scene from such harsh judgment. But I can’t. Adrian Brody and Owen Wilson are captivating actors, and deliver performances that almost transcend the material. Brody’s shocked face and wet eyes almost won me over as he delivered that line. But still. Mine.
Irfan Khan plays the dead boy’s humble-peasant father, and in fewer than five lines, is supposed to convey the sort of parental love that the Whitman boys (who am I kidding. These are men. They should have pulled up their big-boy pants long ago) are so desperately seeking. He manages to pull it off, too. A horrible waste of an amazing actor.
Oh, and I almost forgot about Amara Karan, the Sri Lankan Brit who plays a hot-to-trot “Sweet Lime” stewardess on the train. (Yes, I know. Stewardess on a train. Like I said, his world). The youngest brother has an on-board affair with her, if “affair” means humping in train toilets. I mean, I’m all for liberated South Asian women and all, but NONE of the women I know would consider such a thing for a second. In an Indian train bathroom, no less. She is supposed to be “searching” or something too. I guess. Who knows, since she barges into their cabin to sneak cigarettes, makes cryptic comments about maybe having a boyfriend, and doesn’t seem to mind when Owen Wilson calls her “Sweet Lime” all th time. Mostly she’s there to flash her enormous eyes and sprinkle some sassy-sexy mystique.
Sidenote: A friend attended the casting call for this character two years ago. She gigglingly reported back to me that in the script the stewardess is first seen through a partially open bathroom door, “zipping up her sari”. Thankfully they changed this to a salwar kameez/ kurta pajama like thing in the finished movie.
On top of all this, Anderson’s usual quirks and tics are starting to get stale. Darjeeling uses the same blue and yellow color scheme as The Life Aquatic, includes a bandage unwrapping scene that looks (and functions) exactly like the head-shaving scene in The Royal Tennenbaums, recycles the same Kinks-heavy soundtrack as Rushmore, the Indian stewardess is like the maid from Paraguay in Bottle Rocket, the list goes on. A flashback to the Whitman father’s funeral (actually, the journey to the funeral. They never actually get there, either) plays like it was meant to be slapstick with undercurrents of poignancy, but the actors just look lost.
Waris Ahluwalia plays the train conductor/manager. He’s magnificently stern and imposing. I’d like to think that he provides a foil for the brothers, as someone their age who’s a proper adult. But maybe that’s just me still eager to spin this so I can convince myself that Anderson’s movies are worth watching. A great interview with Ahluwalia here. Moments of awesomeness abound, as when he tackles confronts a turban’n’beard question head on:
When did people start noticing you on street and saying, “Hey, you’re that dude from…”
It started happening after Inside Man. It’s interesting how different people come up to you depending on where you are. In the weirdest places–security guards, delivery guys–it started happening. People on the street being really excited. They’re very sweet about it.
It’s interesting how that happened in your case. People who gawk at movie stars on the street often notice how they differ from their onscreen personas. Physically, at least, you don’t look different from the characters you’ve played.
Tell me what you mean by that.
Just that you wear a turban and have a beard–like in the movies that you’ve appeared in.
Oh yeah.
He also takes on the Slate.com article:
Since you bring it up, can you address the recent Slate magazine article accusing Wes of “fetishizing” India in Darjeeling? He cites several examples, such as the scene when Francis (Owen Wilson) gets his shoes stolen by an Indian boy and remarks, “I love these people.”
[laughs] Really. I didn’t even know about that. Good old Slate. I think that’s the writer projecting his own feelings. We knew that was racist. It’s the character. It’s done to agitate Owen’s character. When you go into a foreign country, you run that risk. Wes treated the country beautifully, in terms of how he shot it. It’s earnest and honest. The films of Satyajit Ray are something that he loves. He got really into it. So why is it fetishistic in a bad way? We all fetishize things. Maybe he did.
It’s good to hear that from you. Obviously, Wes wouldn’t help his case if he tried to defend the charges.
Yeah, he’d be like, “I’m not racist. I have an Indian friend.” It’s like saying, “My friend’s black.” But, you know, I know him. He’s curious about cultures and experiences, and he was drawn in by those films he saw—the magic of them. Everyone has a tendency–not just this writer from Slate, god bless him—we look at everything through our own eyes. Sure, it could be construed as racist. I won’t argue with you there. You can look at anything out of context, and it’s going to be racist. I think there might be racist things in Spike’s movie, but I’m not sure. [laughs] Someone needed a good angle for their story. And that’s a good angle! I commend him on his story. These are good things to explore. That’s fine. It’s an opinion. But he’s talking about someone who I know and have spent a great deal of time with over five years—I know that’s not him.
You probably would’ve realized it by now.
Either that, or I’m just lying to myself.
So they had more than two years to think about this flick? I wouldn’t have guessed from the previews…
I hear that! After three years of living in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, I’ve had the pleasure and pain of meeting a number of study abroad students, and that particular word and its variant came up a lot. The most glaring example was a religion student who, accompanied by a field assistant quite familiar with the area, “discovered” an amman koyil (goddess temple, if you will) in one of the villages near Madurai and henceforth referred to it as “my Temple.” Charming.
On a warm summers evening, on a train bound for nowhere I met up with a gambler, we were both too tired to sleep…
I just finished reading Paul Theroux’s Elephanta Suite. I came away sensing the same condescention from its characters too. All the Indians in the book were almost caricatures – nothing more than a hodgepodge of mannerisms, accents and vocabulary. India is almost always described at its dirtiest, smelliest, most chaotic. It’s almost as if Theroux set out to write an anti-mango-saree-idyllic-india book.
I actually look forward to seeing Darjeeling Express, with a bogeyful of reservations.
phoo-weee!! this is a rather angry review. my hair’s still standing on end. um.. it wasnt me 🙂
tx for review. very interesting.
Okay, so if somebody feels this way 80% of the time when watching fillimz, would you still recommend that they go see it? (and take a few hours away from studying for onerous, work-related exams)
Wes Anderson has forced me to press “eject” on more than one occasion, so I’m trying to make the best bet here.
I am not sure I got the racist vibe, in the Brody character saying “mine” when he couldn’t save the kid…? In the movie, he’s going thru tough times in his marriage while his wife is pregnant with their child. Couldn’t that be the allegorical device Anderson was, maybe, driving at?
I thought Anderson handled the Orientalism issue with aplomb in this flick. Brody didn’t save ‘his’ because it’s a parallel to the child he’s not sure he wants with the wife he’s not sure he should stay with.
I too dated a white, wealthy Midwesterner, whose family was intrigued by me and at the same time trying to integrate me into their privileged “American” world out of enthusiasm and ignorance. They were wonderfully sweet people, they just weren’t exposed to a lot and were ignorant. I came from Long Island for pete’s sake. Once you’ve seen one Katayone Adeli pantsuit and Waterman rollerball pen, you’ve seen them all. It was the first time I really also understood why it was icky to be called ‘exotic’.
I read the Slate piece and I really do think it was a writer overwriting something and oversensitizing something. In my opinion, I felt the actions of these brothers were in character with people who have a disjointed, disconnected relationship with everything and everyone in their lives. Of course, they saw the world through stereotypes. They had selfish, egotistical delusions in which they searched for spirituality and the ‘answers’ in their idea of a fabled India. Of course it’s one big cliche for them, they dont ‘know any better. I think that being said, the racist tones in their characters were really ignorant Western ideas correctly portrayed. I enjoyed the fact that they overexoticized India from the ‘Sweet Lime’ stewardess to the bazaar shopping experience, complete with the killer cobra. I think through the funeral scene we vividly can see that the poor, rural villagers are actually portrayed with intelligence and certainty in their actions and traditions, whereas the overprivileged, educated foreigners are shown as unassured and disoriented.
I think Adrian Brody’s character refers to the dead Indian boy as “mine” because he doesn’t even have the emotional depth to humanize and connect with the boy, much like he cannot connect with his pregnant wife or unborn son.
I also think Wes Anderson did a great job of putting these overprivileged yet underloved and disconnected brothers in such a connected, peaceful, shared community where they are literally fish out of water, just like they are everywhere else. You can’t help laugh at them as they try to pray to Hindu gods, make ‘wishes’ on peacock feathers and find peace in temples. It’s like watching a five-year-old at church at the first time; completely in awe but utterly confused. I know a lot of Westerners that go to India doing the exact same thing. They are not being racist, they just dont’ know any better. It’s just as terrible as people that go to Italy for good pasta. It’s sad to say that tourists go to India to find some sort of cookie-cutter, yoga posed prayer beaded enlightenment.
I loved when they finally let go of the fancy-schmancy LV luggage. It’s like they were on their way to growing the hell up and letting go of all their familial hangups. I just kept thinking of how much money the workers at that station could make in profit from all that luggage:)
well thats more adrian brody than i ever wanted to see
also, cicatrix’s review and slate’s article makes me feel guilty for loving the royal tenenbaums…but are we being oversensitive?
I thought it was visually interesting – pleasing even, but I kept wishing I could hit “mute” to make Jason Schwartzman shut up. I liked the characters of the “natives,” even the ones that were only around for a few moments, much better: the stewardess, and Waris Ahluwalia, Irfan Khan, etc.
Haven’t seen the film yet, but LOVED the review- a fun read. We saw Life Aquatic- well, let’s just say we say about 10 minutes before friend decided to can it. It was annoying us both for reasons we could not quite articulate. Saw the Royal Tannenbaums and tried, really I did try, to like it. Did not, apparently, succeed. May find I feel about Darjeeling like I feel about Hideous Kinky- which was simply hideous, and sadly, not kinky enough to overcome its hideous stereotypes.
that my friend, is the perfect physique, of a runner. and i’m not even of the gay – more an aspirational statement.
– grabs love handle between the thumb and the fore finger and lets out deep sigh –
Bet ya can’t say that really fast three times.
Splendid review; you handled the Slate piece well. I can divorce myself from my dual upbringing and understand the reactions I heard outside the theater (“Oh, what a quaint country!“) but damn, more than a few times during the movie I thought to myself that Wes, not the characters, is an asshole and I’m thinking that’s not the gut reaction the director is aiming for.
I still enjoyed it but I knew I would going in because I too am a sucker for visuals and the inside of a train compartment affords an abundance of intimacy. ‘Twas my first Wes Anderson flick by the way.
I always felt anderson to be a pretentious rich boy fuck (the duck hunting boots) but his films are AMAZINGLY…. GOOD. Not deep, not wise, not smart, just good. I know of what he films. I went to private school and grew up with pasty faced white kids like anderson. That wasn’t an insult it was nostalgia. I played football and was an art nerd so I fit no stereotype. I took (and take) delight in destroying any perceived notions whitey had about what brown kids could and couldn’t do.
Guys, The Royal Tennenbaums could have been about any number of dysfunctional middle class Indian families in America or England, with over-achieving children drooping through adulthood in sullen silence towards their parents, an overbearing, funny, social climbing father, and lots of confusion, rejection, sibling rivalry and fear of the world outside the family in the real world. Anderson understands us.
The relationship between Amara Karan’s character and Schwartzman. This is (white) male fantasy. You can read exoticisation / eroticisation into it, sure you can. But as unreal and projected as this is, does it down the movie? For me, no, it does not. But I can see how some people might feel uncomfortable about it.
Thanks, cictrix. I found it pretty pissy really– the Darjeelng Limited apparently passing through Rajasthan– satire of Palace om Wheels, maybe?– Owen Wilson asking “Did you just f that Indian girl?”– It is such a replay of the white pipples in a strange land thing — almost like Zoolry in the Krown. But I did like Amara Karan’s delivery of “You’re Welcome.” I did like Waris Ahluwalia busting them for taking prescription drugs without prescriptions, but I have to say, Anjelica Houston was not anywhere near Darjeeling….the one good thing was the Peter Sarstedt song- I never knew he was Indian until this movie.
cicatrix. I was married to a Swede from Sweden– I know whereof you speak. Midwesterners are often transmuted Swedes.
Amrita, how is it that a presumably educated person can so readily typecast an entire people while implicitly decrying this very treatment? I understand that you’re trying to commiserate or be witty, but that’s just what seems wrong to me. I often wonder why we don’t see that these seemingly innocent or humorous jibes (“______ are often transmuted ______”) are in the same vein of other more explicitly prejudiced ways of grouping other people. Or maybe we just don’t care, or maybe I’m too sensitive.
Disclaimer: Not a Swede nor a Midwesterner, though I am in Chicago right now 🙂
to put Irfan Khan into a non-speaking, non-part for this tupid movie is so insulting. But one would argue Bill Murray was also just not in the movie.
talar du svenska? Sverige rocks 🙂 My first love and I am still blushing.
I loved Wes Anderson’s prior movies, especially his first three. I think the Slate guy is overreacting a bit. Maybe part of white guilt. Who knows. However, it does annoy me when filmmakers use nonsensical names like Pagoda to name Indian characters. How tough would it be to use a real Indian name that sounds funny? I have seen this happen too often with Indian characters in movies.
I even liked Life Aquatic though in this case, I understand why some people cna get annoyed by it. It is too precious for its own good and is an empty movie with great style.
Sorry, Drei, but I guess I’m giving back in coin– I found myself talked about in Swedish in third person right under my nose — Are those her gloves? She understands everything –very dangerous. What does she cook for dinner? etc. It didn’t matter so much for the first ten or even fifteen years, because I was into my marriage, and I had friends and fun, like Melbourne Desi (ja vist, ja tala lite), but my divorce was a bitter one, fueled by that attitude, so I don’t say any of this lightly. It’s an especially unattractive feature of their culture and that unattractive feature came to America with Swedish (Scandinavian) immigrants, who are a cultural force in the Midwest. Not that I don’t love Garrison Keillor…
Great post, some really interesting issues. Can we get more meaningful articles from cicatrix and less pretentious, poorly written navel gazing on this site?
Plucky perfection!
Amrita, I empathize with your experience, but I must say I have been on the opposite side of the issue. The first (and so far last) time I visited Calcutta with my (Upstate ny, white) gf, a few of my relatives would talk in Bengali in the 3rd person about her, RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME. Some of it was quite catty and hurtful, even though the tone changed completely when they were talking to her directly. So I started translating everything to English right in front of them, and also said she understands bengali (at that time she didn’t). Things changed after that. 🙂
you meant fewer. but hey, what’s a little irony between friends?
Darjeering Limited was already covered in an earlier SM Post.
I know whereof you speak. Midwesterners are often transmuted Swedes.
Especially Minnesota, like where Fargo was set. Brainerd. The guy who played “Grimsrud” is a Swede.
I don’t think Irfan Khan really needed to SAY anything. His body language, the expression in his eyes, and his entire demeanor were powerful enough. When I saw The Darjeeling Limited, I was afraid the village scene would completely degenerate into caricature, but it comprised some of the most tender, beautiful moments of the film. To convey dignity and grief in few words is truly a feat for any actor, and I think that giving Khan a speaking role would have been just wrong, as the scene is supposed to convey that communication can occur despite lack of a shared language. The image of Khan burying his face in his hands is still fresh in my mind.
I do have to say that the unpalatable toilet sex scene between Jason Schwartzman and Amara Karan left a bad taste in my craw. But maybe that’s just because I find him icky. I feel that her character was too underdeveloped, like Anderson was hinting at her complexities but hadn’t fleshed her out enough to offer us a satisfying story about her. And Natalie Portman’s presence as the obtrusive ex-girlfriend also felt kind of forced; I thought it detracted from the Rita/what’s-his-face storyline significantly, which was irritating.
Heh heh, dl, don’t mean to be a grammar nazi, but you’re actually wrong. if the poster had said “stories” after “navel-gazing,” you would have been right, as “fewer” should be affixed to quantifiable nouns. But since “navel-gazing” is the noun in the sentence, “less” is an appropriate modifier.
Back to work now.
Heh heh, dl, don’t mean to be a grammar nazi, but you’re actually wrong.
Reminds me of the scene from Finding Forrester. Further vs. farther.
I don’t understand how this is a white male fantasy. You just don’t see that many white men with or chasing after Indian women.
yeah, i realized that i misread.
You just don’t see that many white men with or chasing after Indian women.
Thats why it’s a fantasy.
I was thinking of fantasy in the sense of something desirable but hard to attain.
I dunno I’ve heard many white people say to me “I think your country’s women are beautiful” and just by reading a brief sample of the female contributions here show that many desi women get (and want) caucasio-attention. Hell, the longest thread was dedicated to that very topic.
Maybe the poster meant it was a white male fantasy not necessarily because she was Indian but because of the whole exotic/forbidden/taboo aspect of the relationship. This isn’t really related, but I remember watching an episode of The Real World: Hawaii where the gang goes to India, and one of the guys is like, “Dude, I want to hook up with one of those dot-headed girls.” Never mind the offensive implications of such a statement–his dumbass roomie goes on to say, “Oh, don’t even think about it. Americans get killed if they try to have sex with the women there.” But I guess that’s what made the pursuit so appealing to begin with…Harumph.
It also reminds me of something this white guy once told me. The guy was very clear that he only dated East Asian women, NOT Asian American women. He wasn’t a looker himself, but he said something to the effect of, “All these women love white guys because we’re strong, powerful, have money, are good-looking, etcetera etcetera, blah blah blah.” So maybe the fact that Jason’s character was obviously several notches below Amara’s in the looks department contributes to that “white male” fantasy, in which said male is able to score with good-looking non-white chicks even if he isn’t attractive, solely on the basis of being white and therefore superior.
While I haven’t done any scientific studies a cursory glance around the bay area… this tends to hold true. Good looking Asian/desi woman with mediocre looking Caucasian. The reverse is never true, hot Caucasian woman with mediocre looking Asian/desi guy. I’m just saying 🙂
I’ve actually seen a lot of hot white girls with not so hot guys of color. Personally, I think it’s just because women place a smaller premium on looks than men do (and perhaps care more about other stuff like career, values, how much money he makes–yeeeah, I said it), though that’s a totally empirical conclusion.
, solely on the basis of being white and therefore superior
Whats that you say? white privilege? Be mindful to only whisper that.
The reverse is never true, hot Caucasian woman with mediocre looking Asian/desi guy. I’m just saying 🙂
The reverse isn’t true, but the converse is. That is, mediocre looking white women with attractive Asian/desi men.
dinesh d’souza’s wife is hot. i’ve met her (many, many years ago so not sure how she aged). her name’s dixie. really.
i think this is a universal.
not saying dinesh is mediocre. actually, he’s definetely not mediocre
That trend isn’t as pronounced for South Asians as it is for East Asians… actually there’s not much of a sex imbalance with regards to marrying white people at all. More desi guys might marry East Asian women, but more desi women also marry black men, which has more to do with those respective populations’ outmarrying rates than anything else.
Wes Anderson’s movies sound boring as hell. Hipster-trying-to-pretend-he-has-a-soul boring. His first name is probably short for ‘Wesley’ or ‘Weslifer’ or ‘Weslington’ or something.
i meant this:
ie, hot woman w/ beat dude…is a universal for all races.
I’ve actually seen a lot of hot white girls with not so hot guys of color. Personally, I think it’s just because women place a smaller premium on looks than men do
I disagree here, especially if you’re talking south-asian/east-asian men, latinos don’t count, a one legged latino with an eye-patch can score a hot white girl by salsa 101.
Also, I’m not sure that women don’t place a smaller premium on looks than men do. I think it’s about the same, women just place a higher premium on everything else you mentione, where as men don’t. It’s a subtle difference to what your claim is.
Nala, you say Wes Anderson’s films sound boring, but I wonder if you might like them if you saw them? He’s not my favorite filmmaker and his quirkiness has become pretty formulaic, but I do find some of his work heartfelt and deeply endearing. And he seems quite self-aware of the hipsteriness, which I think redeems him from soullessness. I’d like to think that behind some of the more self-masturbatory stuff, there’s a genuine curiosity about other people and the way the world works.
Satya- I think I tried to watch Rushmore once, and fell asleep (I also fell asleep during Pulp Fiction, THREE TIMES)… maybe I’ll give his films another chance someday, heh. Probably starting with The Royal Tenenbaums.
dinesh d’souza’s wife is hot. i’ve met her (many, many years ago so not sure how she aged). her name’s dixie. really.
Did you ask her how many crosses she’s burnt?
DD is not a valid counterpoint. Speaking against the benefit of your community, an being a white apologist can be very attractive to a white woman.