Step Across This Line (42 page)

MARCH 2001: CROUCHING STRIKER, HIDDEN DANGER

Without Hollywood, they say, Los Angeles would just be Phoenix with a coastline. This year, as deadlines approach for strikes by actors and writers, L.A. is facing the possibility of becoming, for a time, exactly such a characterless, movie-less sprawl. Rumors are flying: the studios actually want the strikes, the actors don’t, though their representatives are talking tough, and the writers? Well, they’re only writers, after all. Talks keep breaking down an inch away from agreement. TV companies are preparing to flood the schedules with even more reality-TV programming—it’s cheap! it’s popular! it’s not unionized!—to fill the holes created by The Strike. There’s plenty of bad feeling in the air, and a growing sense of inevitability. The shutdown is “going to happen.” (Which means either it will or it won’t.)

And in the midst of this uncertainty, the movie community awaits its annual you-love-me-you-really-love-me festival of big business interests disguised as individual achievements. The lobbying season is over. The city is no longer being bombarded by “for your consideration” videotapes. Rock stars are no longer playing impromptu gigs in old folks’ homes in the hope of garnering a few votes for Best Song from elderly academicians resident therein. The votes are in. The Oscars are coming.

The movies are L.A.’s culture. At the weekend, big audiences go to the new pictures the way the opera-loving Milanese go to an opening at La Scala. L.A. is a city of passionate moviegoers. I haven’t seen such enthusiastically participatory audiences anywhere outside the Indian subcontinent. This can get irritating, for example when a big guy with his ass hanging out of his pants moans and groans loudly every time Penélope Cruz appears on screen in
All the Pretty Horses
—“my God, she’s so beautiful!—Oh, oh, he’s going to fall for her!—Uh-oh, here comes trouble!”—or when a five-year-old insistently asks her parents, during the interminable
Cast Away,
“Mommy, when is the volleyball going to talk?” (Footnote: Wilson the volleyball’s performance is the best thing in this leaden movie. Why wasn’t Wilson nominated for Best Supporting Actor? It’s a scandal.)

Angeleno enthusiasm can, however, also be thrilling. I can’t remember ever seeing a Western audience react to a new film the way a packed afternoon audience in a theater on La Brea responded to
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Even by L.A.’s standards, the whooping and cheering was astonishing. The audience knew it was sharing a very special experience—the arrival of a great, classic film—and was simply transported by its brilliance. Anyone who thinks DVDs will someday replace moviegoing should have been there.

Those PC killjoys who have denigrated
Crouching Tiger
as a piece of latter-day Orientalism, a Western appropriation of Eastern manner and material, would have seen an audience as diverse as America itself—Korean Americans, Chinese Americans, Hispanic Americans, African Americans easily outnumbered any WASP-y Orientalists who might have been there enjoying it for the wrong reasons. Akira Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray reached smaller audiences, in their native Japan and India, than the commercial movies of their contemporaries. That doesn’t make
Seven Samurai
inauthentic, or the trashy products of the mainstream Bombay cinema “more Indian” than Ray’s masterworks. So, yes, Jackie Chan sells a lot of tickets and, yes,
Crouching Tiger
draws on a long tradition of martial-arts movies. But Jackie Chan movies are cardboard fun, and Ang Lee’s beautiful, intimate epic is—one would have thought self-evidently—a luminous work of art.

In the context of the Academy Awards and the shadow of the strike, the success of
Crouching Tiger
is especially significant. It’s being talked about as the breakthrough movie that has taught Americans to accept subtitled foreign films into the giant cineplexes where the big money is made. And this is why the various players—but the studios above all—may be making a big mistake if they think they can ride out the strike without losing their stranglehold on the market. From the late 1950s to early 1970s, a flood of great non-American filmmakers prized Hollywood’s fingers off the cinema’s throat for a few years. The result was the golden age of the sound cinema, the time of the great films of Kurosawa and Ray, of the French New Wave, of Fellini, Antonioni, and Visconti, of Wajda, Jancso, and Bergman. Now, once again, world cinema is blossoming, in China, in Iran, in Britain. And it may just be that the mass audience is ready, at long last, to enjoy rather more diversity in its cultural diet. After all, there are plenty of dreadful American films we could all cheerfully do without.

The Oscars usually show us how Hollywood sees itself. Ridley Scott’s technically brilliant but woodenly scripted
Gladiator
is the big-studio candidate for honors, just as the latest sentimental Miramax confection,
Chocolat,
leads the charge of the smaller guys. Comedy comes off badly, as usual—the Coen brothers have to be content with screenplay and cinematography nominations for the wonderful
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
There’s no nomination for George Clooney’s delicious, hairnet-wearing performance in this movie, or, indeed, for Renée Zellweger’s moving, subtle work in the title role of
Nurse Betty.
But behind all this familiar maneuvering, the tiger is crouching, the dragon hides.

And if by some chance the one genuinely great movie to have been nominated this year runs away with the big prizes, it may just be the wake-up call that Hollywood needs. When the world’s finest filmmakers are coming after your audience, it may not be such a smart idea to shut your industry down.

APRIL 2001: IT WASN’T ME

The current hit single “It Wasn’t Me” by Shaggy (featuring Rikrok) celebrates, with wickedly infectious glee, the uses of shamelessness. A man caught red-handed cheating on his girl—a man watched by said girl making love to someone else on the sofa, in the shower, on the bathroom floor—must, or so the song tells us, at all costs, and in the face of all the evidence, deny, deny, deny. Now, who does this remind us of?

There have been some great champions of brazen denial in recent years: Diego Maradona ignoring the video evidence of his notorious hand-balled goal against England and ascribing it to the “hand of God”; O. J. Simpson swearing to dedicate his life to finding his wife’s “real” killer (any hot leads, O.J.?); the British Conservative politicians Neil Hamilton and Jonathan Aitken denying their proven corruption to the point of their economic ruination; and of course the great denier himself, Bill Clinton, passim, from “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” to the rejection of any improprieties in his last-gasp “Pardongate.”

The barefaced denial, the giving of the lie direct, has become, in this age of saturation media coverage, an increasingly prominent feature of public life. It is now routine for even the age’s greatest monsters—the war criminals of ex-Yugoslavia or Cambodia—to deny their atrocities, knowing that their power of access to the world’s airwaves is almost certainly greater than any journalist’s power of access to the truth. When great crimes are openly admitted—Timothy McVeigh boasting about the Oklahoma bombing, the Taliban taking pride in the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas—it’s so unusual that you find yourself fighting the urge to praise the criminals for their plain speaking.

I once sat in a courtroom in Alice Springs, Australia, listening to the testimony of a truck driver accused of murder—of having deliberately crashed his vehicle into a bar he’d been thrown out of, killing and maiming many people. The man had clearly been carefully coached in the important contemporary art of saying the thing that is not. His dress was sober, his eyes downcast, his manner shocked and decent; and for a long time, he persuasively denied his guilt. But in the end the coaching couldn’t save him. After he’d repeatedly denied that he could do such a thing, he made the mistake, under cross-examination, of saying why. “For me to half-destroy my truck,” he explained reasonably, “is completely against my personality.” The jury quickly found him guilty and threw away the key. What did him in was that flash of unpalatable truth. A more skillful liar—or rather, denier—would have known better.

“It wasn’t me.” Many such consummate exponents of the arts of brazen obfuscation are presently in the news. In Britain, successive governments have colluded with the British agricultural lobby to unleash not one but two plagues upon the world. The first, BSE [Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy], was the result of (1) turning cows into cannibals and then (2) allowing farmers to save energy costs by giving their cattle food that hadn’t been boiled long enough or at high enough temperatures to kill the deadly germs. But of course the Tory government of the day did not admit its complicity; nor did the farm lobby own up to its part. Instead, both parties pretended, for a long time, that the links between BSE and its crossover human variant, CJD [Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease], were “unproven.” And now here comes foot-and-mouth, and we discover that three years ago the present Labour government declined to outlaw the use of pigswill as feed (even though many of our European partners had done so) and failed, once again, to ensure that the swill was boiled long enough or at high enough temperatures to be safe. Once again, the decision was cash-driven: the farm lobby wanted to cut corners and save money, and the farm lobby got its way. Do we hear the government or the lobbyists admitting they were wrong? Of course not. “It wasn’t us, it was this Chinese restaurant that imported illegal meat.” So that’s all right then. We can just blame the Chinese. We all know the kinds of things
they
eat.

Meanwhile, in India, the BJP-led government has contracted an acute case of snout-in-trough disease. The sting operation carried out by the excellent website tehelka.com—what a difference the Internet has made to press freedoms in India!—showed many of the country’s leaders accepting bribes on videotape. There have been some resignations, but no admissions of guilt, and much talk, by the shamed leaders and other governing party figures, of a sinister “conspiracy” against the ruling coalition. The new BJP president has spoken of creating a new code of conduct for people in public life, but at the same time has refused to expel his corruption-tainted predecessor. Apparently, and in spite of the video evidence, it wasn’t necessarily him.

And now, as the United States, the world’s greatest contributor to global warming, repudiates the Kyoto treaty designed to reduce environmentally harmful emissions, President George W. Bush goes so far as to claim that the link between greenhouse gases and global warming has not been proven. (“It wasn’t us.”) This is what the cigarette companies used to say about cancer, and it’s about as persuasive. But the president has a big megaphone, and if he goes on repeating his claims, he may even make them stick for a long, damaging time.

Just sometimes a song stumbles on a truth about the spirit of the age. The Shaggy-Rikrok hit is cheerfully unrepentant about its amoral little discovery. Deny your wrongs and you will right them. As Nancy Reagan might have put it, “Just say no.” It’s plainly an irresistible proposition. You hear it everywhere right now, hanging in the air like a mantra. All together now: “It wasn’t me . . .”

MAY 2001: ABORTION IN INDIA

I have always believed myself fortunate to have come from a sprawling Indian family dominated by women. I have no brothers but plenty of sisters (three: believe me, that’s plenty). My mother’s sisters are a pair of aunts as formidable and irresistible as Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia and Aunt Agatha. In my generation of cousins, girls outnumber boys by two to one. While I was growing up, the family’s houses, in India and Pakistan, were full of the instructions, quarrels, laughter, and ambitions of these women, few of whom resemble the stereotype of the demure, self-effacing Indian woman. These are opinionated, voluble, smart, funny, arm-waving persons—lawyers, educators, radicals, movers, shakers, matriarchs—and to be heard in their company you must not only raise your voice but also have something interesting to say. If you aren’t worth listening to, you will most certainly not be heard.

As a result, I feel, to this day, most at home in the company of women. Among my close friends the girls far outnumber the boys. In my writing, I have repeatedly sought to create female characters as rich and powerful as those I have known. The men in my books are rarely as flamboyant as the women. This is as it should be: or at least, in my experience, how it has been, more often than not.

It is therefore worrying, to say the least, that these women, or rather their potential successors in the Indian generation presently being conceived, are rapidly becoming an endangered species. In spite of the illegality of the practice—and under cover of spurious health checks—ultrasound tests to determine the gender of unborn children are increasingly being used all over India to identify, and then abort, obscene quantities of healthy female fetuses. The population is rapidly becoming lopsided, skewed toward male numerical dominance to a genuinely alarming degree.

Here’s a tough nut for the pro-choice lobby on abortion, of which I’ve always been a fully paid-up member. What should be done when a woman uses her power over her own body to discriminate against female fetuses? Many Indian commentators say that if these sex-discriminatory abortions are to end, the refusals must come from Indian women. But Indian women want male children as much as their husbands do. In part this is because of the myriad pressures of a male-centered society, including the expenses of the dowry system. But fundamentally it’s the result of modern technology being placed at the service of medieval social attitudes. Clearly not all Indian women are as emancipated as those among whom I was lucky enough to be raised. Traditional India still exists, and its values are still powerful. Women beware women: an old story, given a chilling new gynecological twist.

Ever since Indira and Sanjay Gandhi’s attempt to introduce birth control by diktat during the forced-vasectomy excesses of the mid-seventies, it has been very hard to get the Indian masses to accept the idea of family planning. Mother Teresa’s hard-line attack on contraception didn’t help. Lately, Hindu nationalists have made things even harder by suggesting that the country’s Muslims are breeding faster than Hindus, thus placing Hinduism “under threat.” (This, even though the Hindu majority makes up a whopping 85 percent of the population.)

Abortion, along with contraception, has up to now been anathematized by Indian religious leaders. As a result India’s population has soared past the one billion mark, and is projected to overtake China’s within a decade or so. But now, suddenly, terminations of pregnancies have become acceptable to many Indians, for the most reprehensible of reasons; and the argument over the urgent issues of population control gets even murkier. There are those who claim that the new wave of abortions is actually beneficial, because the bias toward boys means that Indian couples who have girl children will tend to go on having daughters until they have a son, thus contributing to overpopulation. Allowing them to make the choice, the argument continues, will not result in a scarcity of girl children but rather make sure there isn’t a glut of them. The trouble with this theory is that the statistical evidence suggests that in a generation’s time there will indeed be a girl shortage. Then what? Will girls become more valued than they are today, or will the masculinism of Indian society, reinforced by the weight of numbers, simply create more and more macho men, and increasingly downtrodden women?

Not all problems are capable of instant solution. Even though the nation imagines itself as a woman—Bharat-Mata, Mother India—and even though, in Hinduism, the dynamic principle of the godhead—shakti—is female, the scandal of the missing girls of India will end only when and if modern India succeeds in overturning centuries of prejudice against girl children.

This doesn’t mean that nothing can be done. The government can and should crack down hard on the ultrasound clinics that are allowing people to defy the law. It should provide state benefits for families with girl children and perhaps even, for a time, impose tax penalties on families with boys. Politicians, educators, activist groups, even newspaper columnists can and should batter away at the ingrained prejudices that are at the heart of the trouble. In the end it all boils down to this: is today’s India prepared to be seen as the country that gets rid of its daughters because it believes them inferior to men? The parents who are doing this may one day face questions from the children they allowed to live. “Where are my sisters?” What will they answer then?