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.
I remember reading something about Dinesh D’Souza that talked about he was married to a ‘taut, perky blonde.’ It actually used those adjectives. It made me go ‘ewww.’ How much more obvious can D’Souza get about having a (white) trophy wife?
‘S okay, Nala. I think I fell asleep during “Rushmore” myself but as I’ve gotten old and crusty, I find my attention span is a little more protracted.
Sigh…I just wish there were more kooky, irreverent South Asian filmmakers who don’t take Bollywood in earnest…
I hasten to add that there’s nothing wrong with having a taut, perky, blonde as a wife… it’s just that this thing that I was reading was talking about him in a professional context, and I felt that it was inappropriate.
you also got that no doubt dude and gwen stafani. vikram chatwal also
snorted withdated kate moss. not that those dudes are bad looking, but the women are hotter, like they’ve made the world’s hottest women lists.I don’t know. I see this all the time in two worlds I have inhabited. Wall street and Academia. Tons of nerdy Indian hedge fund / trader / investment banker types with their Wall Street stepford wives. Similar in academia, though its a different type of attractiveness.
Dude, Manju – those ‘world’s hottest’ lists lie. You need to trust yourself on this. Gwen Stefani is so, so, SO overrated.
I’m with Nala. I think Gwen’s ex was waaaaaay better looking than her. I thought Gwen was prettier in her “Trapped in a Box” era. And I honestly don’t want to sound catty, but Kate Moss looks like a crack whore. Heroin chic is so 1994.
she’s smart too. they were both analysts in the reagan white house, where they met, i think. i’m sure every conservative dude was crying out “O, I wish I was in Dixie!” …but it was my man dinesh who conquered dixie
unfortunately the only results that come up from a google image serch of Dixie D’Souza are pics of ann coulter and laura ingram, both former gf’s of big DD (he was engaged to laura).
so it looks like our man dinesh definitely has a type 😉
agree with HMF that DD is not a good model to hold up. I come from a very similar background and if he ever showed up at a family reunion in Mumbai or Goa and started saying things like: “The American slave was treated like property, which is to say, pretty well.†(from his book the end of racism) he wouldn’t hear the end of it from the uncles and aunties in the group. Goans tend to be less tolerant of ridiculous statements especially after we’ve had a few glasses of feni.
Sorry the thread got derailed … back to the regular scheduled “Unbearable whiteness of being Wes Anderson”
An interesting Atlantic monthly blog post about Wes Anderson that is a sort of rebuttal to Cicatrix’s central points. Read the comments, too.
agree with HMF that DD is not a good model to hold up.
Right, he’s not a good model for two reasons:
don’t forget liz hurley and her husband. he’s notbad looking but she’s liz hurley.
This perfectly explicates what I am getting at–giving back in coin. Your experience sounds hellish and I don’t want to sound presumptuously arrogant or make light of it, but why allow this scorn to cloud your judgment? This collective behavior you describe is not just an “especially unattractive feature of their culture” but a feature of any homogeneous culture, particularly pronounced in isolated ones in my experience. I’m sure you know that and I feel sententious to lay it out as such but I can’t help myself I suppose.
on the other hand, desi arnaz ws efinitely better looking than lucille ball
An interesting Atlantic monthly blog post about Wes Anderson that is a sort of rebuttal to Cicatrix’s central points. Read the comments, too.
Yet another instance where I disagree with just about everything Reihan Salam says, starting with his interpretation of Pagoda and ending with Gwen Stefani’s offensive “Harajuku Girls” phase.
(I also strongly disagreed with Reihan on Ramachandra Guha)
Yeah, I disagreed with it as well and found the tone pretty off-putting. I always read these posts more for the comments/discussion. The argument that we live in a “post-racial” world is pretty asinine. Reihan is sloppy and slapdash, and his assertions regarding being a militant ethnic activist or whatever reek of disingenuousness. All the same, the argument that art transcends societal judgment is one I’ve seen bandied about quite a bit of late…
Torpedo on October 19, 2007 01:12 PM · Direct link
Drei on October 19, 2007 07:01 PM · Direct link
Torpedo, you are spot on about the lot of the foreign wife/girl friend! I have an American friend who was fried by Greeks, as was Jackie Onassis, and Marie Antoinette in their day, but here’s the difference– your Bengali relatives changed their tone while talking to your GF; they gave you a hard time within your earshot, and you fixed it. The Swedes I speak of did not change their tone when talking to me, in fact they made a point of being bloody when they knew I understood and did not do this where my husband could hear– much more sly. It’s over now, but it was some several degrees more slippery than what you describe — Drei, you are not sententious and my judgment is not clouded– I can see very clearly, thanks, and I’m here to tell you that in the case of Swedes, racism is exceptional and extreme and prevalent in their smallest dealings with others including Italians. This is well known, viz., back in 2003, Anderson Cooper expressed doubts about sending Hans Blix to Iraq, though Mr.Blix may himself have actually been one of the Best Kind of Swede, who knows. And what are we talking about here but Wes Anderson’s movie, which in some respects displays a new take on the subtlest and most slippery type of racism? And the movie is not total trash either, IMO, which makes it harder to point a finger– tricky-tricky!
Like I keep saying– here’s the very best part of the movie– Did you know this guy is genuine Anglo-Indian, born in Delhi, brought up in Kurseong and Calcutta? See for yourself. You knew Freddy Mercury was a nice Parsi boy from Bombay, you knew Engelbert Humperdinck was an ex-rocker from Madras, but did you know Peter Sarstedt came from Calcutta? — okay, Chennai, Mumbai, Kolkata.
Amrita,
I’m not sure I follow here–sorry–is the point that Anderson Cooper was correct in his “view” that Swedes are “bad”–I really doubt that he thinks that–I know him.
Swedish racism is so well known that yes, AC did say, “Why are they sending him?” on one show — of course I caught that. ASk AC– he may remember. As I said, Hans Blix may well be more like Hans Rosling than, say, certain peeps I had to cope with. An American friend’s mother pointed out this reputation to my mother before I got married — my mother of course brushed it off.
Anyhow, why aren’t you listening to Peter Sarstedt?
OK–if you’re right, I will have learned something.
Sorry mate I ll have to disagree. You have had negative experiences with Americans of Swedish descent. My experience has been with Swedes in Sweden and I daresay that they are certainly less racist than the French / Germans. For their own sanity I do hope that they close their borders and focus on assimiliation. It would be a sad day if the Swedish way were to be destroyed.
rob, what’s this? –“view”, “bad” — your words, not mine. Racism is what it is, very “good” as far as people who practice it are concerned. My father-in-law would say Bobby Kennedy ruined this country (by changing immigration quotas), but he also brought my younger daughter a lovely folk art rattle from Kenya when she was a baby with pure delight and clearly no racist intent. He was very proud that she had his feet. Same FIL explained to me once that people thought I was ignorant, not stupid. After he left for the great party in the sky, my goose was cooked.
cicatrix was talking about a patronizing attitude and I wholeheartedly concur.
Melbourne desi, my Swedes were totally salt of the Swedish earth. My Ex and I lived transatlantically. Swedish-born people of every socio-political stripe are present on both shores, as well as second and thiord and four and lord knows how many generation Swedish Americans. There is a pretty old, pre-Revolutionary Swedish town just south of Baltimore. At a memorable dinner party in Sodermansland, I was seated between a man on my left who said he had never left Sweden and never wished to, and one on my right who lived in Paris in the 16th and had Desi neighbors, and couldn’t wait to get out of Stockholm. This may or may have not been literally true, but my friend on the right was being gallant.
nahh–see, e.g., gary becker, “The Economics of Discrimination”
Thanks Rob, hope you enjoy Peter Sarstedt.
I unapologetically don’t know who that is, but I will look him up tomorrow!
I put in links to Peter Sarstedt singing his song above, at 70. It’s the best thing Wes Anderson did in this movie.
Amrita, as I said, I empathize with you. But I wouldn’t say my relatives did not talk behind my back– I just don’t know (my gf did not speak Bengali and was quite overwhelmed by the different environment, so she wasn’t too perceptive).
As for them not being rude to her directly, true, but I suspect it would have different if she were foreign but nonwhite. I recall a cousin saying (talking about how the other relatives felt), “Ah, everyone was happy it wasn’t a kallu.” A different cousin had once expressed revulsion at the fact that I had “fucked a nigger”.
This is not to say that Bengalis/Indians are any more evil than Swedes in this respect. every culture has racism to varying extents just they don’t. I would be careful about overgeneralizing.
it gives me hope in the human race that we can find common ground in our mutual contempt, nay, hatred of each other. bigotry, not music, might be the true universal language.
Ah, Cicatrix, I feel your pain!
I’m a fellow Wes Anderson junkie right down from the colour schemes to the soundtracks to the socially stunted narcissistic male protagonists…
But I guess we should have seen this coming with characters like Pagoda et al…
I might still be in the chicken-shit-people-pleaser phase you were in (I am in the land of college) but I still think the film sounds cool and wanna see it when it comes to NZ.
Honestly, I’d rather see India exoticised in a Wes Anderson film where aesthetics are deliberately absurd, surrealist and artificial than in the upcoming ‘Shantaram’ which has a really bad ‘naughty white boy makes good in the wild, untamed exotic edge of civilisation’ whiff about it.
Or, who could forget the crap contributions to exoticism that have already passed our way from desi directors, the unbearable Bride and Prejudice and the so-bad-it-was-like-watching-a-train-wreck ‘Bollywood/Hollywood’ by Deepa Mehta?
I’d rather listen to the Kinks than ‘My name is Chin Chin Choo’ any day. And I don’t think I’m the only one.
YES! Glad I’m not the only one…ugh I know a certain person called ‘Raj’ who this entire group of blonde private school Barbies think is the hottest brown guy ever and he has somehow deluded them into thinking so…and he just shares himself around with all of them.
I sort of wanted to tell one of them that he as far as brown guys go is so unhot but then it’s kinda funny watching him have his Wilmer Valderamma-wannabe moment in the sun.
Ugh. You would think that wouldn’t you Manju.
Not to threadjack or anything, but this statement:
by Satya in #32 resurrected the shudder that went through me during that scene. Has any of you seen the inside of a lavatory on an Indian train (this includes the lav of the 1st-class AC compartment) ? Even if I had spent the last couple of years not screwing, and the “encounter” happened to be a houri who looked like Veruschka von Lehndorff; I would not do it if it had to be in a lavatory of an Indian train!
Torpedo, are you saying it was my fault for being at the dark end of the Swedish spectrum? Empathy aside (thanks all the same), perhaps it’s not so much to the point for you and me to babble about the travails of being a foreign wife, so much for me as to say, the racially based disdain that Swedes engage in is completely unselfconscious and utterly unbridled, and is apparent in many matters, not just my own experience– after all, Hans Rosling is responding to something.
Anderson is a Danish name, and while I don’t know how Danish Wes Anderson is, I can say that Danes are a bit more accepting of other peoples than Swedes, being on the mainland, but only just a bit. I can see why the movie would remind cicatrix of that long ago relationahip with a Midwestern boy.
Saw this movie today. I go to movies to have fun, with my brains switched off and I think I enjoyed it. I didn’t find anything racist and didn’t have any issue with any character of the movie. I loved the colors and visuals of India shown in the movie. And I think some of the real scenes of India were beautifully real and not some fantasy land like Bollywood movies. Rural India was well portrayed and I think is very much like that.
amrita thanks for the clarification.
Bigotry is a force precisely because its messengers see “very clearly,” in my experience. Extreme and exceptional racism? Compared to whom, to what saintly nation? You were married to a Swede. There are plenty of places where such a union would not have even been possible. I can’t do much with your Blix or Cooper reference, for instance, but I know a little of Iraq or at least the peninsula just south, as I have one ancestral foot dangling therein, and I can tell you that as a Desi, or as any foreigner really, you might find that extreme and exceptional racism is alive and kicking the world over. Or at least in Sweden and the Gulf. It might just be that snide remarks about ones gloves can happen just about anywhere.
man oh man, you put into words what my thoughts couldn’t form. i love the “diorama-like” description – perfect! I’ve felt the same way about and even half-agree with Weiner’s racist White man theory. I also consider myself a big fan of Wes Anderson’s movies, but I’ve noticed his movies do tend to be very “white” and his characters of non-whiteness tend to be amusing little plot points or characters. And yeah because I love his color palettes, his selfish actors, and stylish direction, I always try to justify watching his movies with my love for filmmaking.
I loved the colors, the meandering story of “Darjeeling”, but you’re right, he might get a little stale. One of my thoughts was that he doesn’t ever venture into too much self-parody or self-reference with his style, but at the same time, he might be doing worse with his similar plot and character elements or “auras”. Okay I think I’m losing my train of thought.
Anyway, cool thoughts and cool site! I’m glad I stumbled on to it 🙂
:: efrain