This week I struck cultural gold. Twice.
First was when I finally found a shop in town that sells DVD’s and better yet, one that has a decent collection of Hollywood movies. Finally, something to fill some of the more boring nights that I have here. I’m not complaining but sometimes I just want to watch a movie. I’m a big movie fan back home, yet I don’t have much opportunity to watching anything good here. Almost none. You can imagine how happy I was when the guy at the shop pulled a big stack of American DVD’s from under the counter. It was like an express tunnel to America had opened up for me to visit it from my computer at my convenience. Yay, McDonalds and Coke!
You can also imagine how happy I was to see that they were all movie collections, 5-6 on one disk, for 50 rupees each. 5 movies for about a 1USD? And new releases too? Score! You may wonder how the guy at the shop was able to find movies like Legion, The Book of Eli and Sherlock Holmes (with one of my favorite actors ever, Robert Downey Jr.). Let’s just say that somewhere in this particular retail chain, somebody ignored the warnings at the beginning of the film that threaten criminal prosecution resulting from the sale or distribution of unauthorized copies. The MPAA might not be too happy with me were I to give away any more details than that.
One of the movies that I purchased was James Cameron’s new cinematographic masterpiece, Avatar, which also happens to be the most expensive movie ever made. Allow me a few sentences to release some frustrations about this film, which I had seen in theatres in the states before I left for India. This movie is visually stunning and the most beautiful thing I have ever seen on screen. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the awesome images and cinematography that littered every single microsecond of the film. That was fortunate, because the story is an anthropologist’s worst nightmare. Were it not for its beauty, I would have walked out of the theatre at the first sign of giant blue humans from another planet. Seriously, James Cameron? In your half-billion dollar budget, did you ever consider shelling out a couple of bucks to hire an actual anthropologist? It’s like he didn’t even try to make it realistic or original. The notion that every major life form that evolved on a completely different planet would still be analogous to major species on earth is ridiculous. We’ve got humans, except they’re blue, 10-feet tall and with four fingers instead of five. We’ve got horses, except they have six legs and breath through their necks. We’ve got something that’s a cross between a rhino and a hammerhead shark. Oh, and don’t forget the dragons, because you have to have scary flying creatures in an alien flick.
Don’t even get me started on the culture of the giant blue monkeys in the film. Too late, I already started. There is no way that humans would have been able to communicate and relate so easily with a different sentient species from another planet. Who’s to say that aliens even have to have tongues, mouths and vocal cords that can fluently express our language? Who’s to say that their mouths aren’t on the top of their heads? Who’s to say that they even speak at all? And of course, it’s so convenient that their alien language can so easily be learned and expressed by our speech capacity. Now, let’s say that lighting does strike a billion times in the same place to give way to a species that looks and talks like us. Why the hell would they have evolved to have the same culture as us? Duh, of course there are differences, but they have bow and arrows and mate monogamously. WTF? Cameron, you have to be a little more creative with your next alien movie and not make it a remake of Pocahontas. There’s a reason that the only little golden figures your pet project won were in visual effects and technical categories.
Ok, I’m done. I think.
Anyway, Avatar is the first great example that I have found of subtle globalization that isn’t Western influence bearing down on everybody else. Well, not the movie, but the word. “Avatar,” I learned, is a Hindi word for reincarnation, but this word has been in the English language for at least a couple of decades. That means somewhere along the line, Western culture was sufficiently influenced enough by Indian culture that a bit of it got transferred over. Principal Ramdev even tells me that there are a lot of Hindi words in an English dictionary, but he can’t think of any besides “avatar.” I found this fascinating, because so much English is sprinkled into everyday Hindi, and I always take it as a sign of the arrogance of Western globalization. It’s always good to see that it’s not true. Not entirely, anyway.
Summary: Avatar is a beautiful movie with a horribly uncreative story, and Hindi is surreptitiously taking over English. Just wait, your great-grandkids are going to grow up speaking Hindi and English. And James Cameron’s grandkids will spend a few trillion dollars to make a holographic movie focusing on a re-imagining of the afterlife that’s populated by people with wings. But they wear green jumpsuits, not flowing white robes, so clearly they’re not angels and are completely original. Right?
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