Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 11:36:25 -0400
Subject: Re: East is east: dissent



Although I largely agree with Salil, East is East fails, it seems to me, because
we know what will happen at the outset: culture clash; the contradictions the
father is caught in, and so on.

The result is that we (okay, me, in this case) quickly "work through the issues"
(reprehension at wife abuse; our own "guilt" in wondering why the father doesn't
"get" Western values, while cheering on the kids, and the like).  The result is
a rather paradoxical and residual sympathy for the father simply because he is
really the only conflicted one in the picture.

This is difficult, because his behaviour, through Eastern or Western lens, is
still reprehensible.  This is furthermore compounded--if one is going to press
all issues into service--by the use of "ugly fat girls" as foils for comedy (the
vanities of the girls' mother; an outlet for avoiding the issues behind arranged
marriages, etc).  The film, as Salil points out, attempts "tragedy" but ends up
a rather sorry mess; there is simply no insight (at least for someone like me).

A more mainstream analogy might be found in the recent American film _American
History X_.  The glorification of Edward Norton's body (what indeed the film
should have been called) results in a kind of aesthetic displacement: we forgive
him *from the outset* because (1) we know he is the protagonist who "learns";
but moreover (2) because his incredibly beautiful body swamps us, and the film.
While one might take Norton's buff body to be a symbol of aesthetic facism (not
unlike Aryan Nazi facism) and therefore not to be admired, the reverse happens.
Again, there is no tragedy in _AMX_; it's just a mess that fails miserably in
its attempts to explore racism.

Andrew Lesk



On Fri, 14 Jul 2000, Salil Tripathi wrote:

> 
> East is East is written by a Bangladeshi-British playwright, Ayub Khan Din. 
> He was born in the UK, and is in his 30s. And no, he is not white. The play 
> was produced first; the film followed. So how th Spivakism, of white men and 
> brown men and women apply here, is a mystery to me. But then I am not an 
> academic.
> 
> I suppose everyone's viewing/reading of the film is, by definition 
> subjective; I felt Om Puri, who plays the father, brought the internal 
> contradictions of being an Asian in the UK of 1970s rather well, of trying 
> to build his own little laager around his family, to protect it from the 
> city around him, when Enoch Powell was warning about blood on the streets 
> (or was it the Thames)? And I think the film humanized, rather than 
> caricaturized the Pakistani caught between two cultures; and in the end, the 
> intent was to show the pathos, the tragedy, of being caught in those two 
> cultures *and* the hypocrisy it entailed. I say this was an intent because, 
> clearly, some of the comments on the list suggest that the intent did not 
> come through. Of course, I say this without justifying the behaviour of the 
> Pakistani husband. Nor do I buy the hype surrounding the film, which 
> pretends that it is somehow a path-breaking film.
> 
> Salil
> 
> 
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