Time to Pretend

One of the greatest pre-Christmas activities has to be walking along railroad tracks in between shopping excursions. Last Tuesday, I stumbled across this nondescript old warehouse along the Monongahela River on Pittsburgh's South Side, a neighborhood so rich in industrial history that it's literally like biting into a chocolate truffle to go exploring there.


Can't see it? Ok, Mr. Demille he's ready for his closeup.


For whatever reason, the scene just grabbed me. I thought of my September post on Bollywood Escapism. Would one consider this act of obviously planned graffiti an act of American Escapism?

Then my mind drifted to the subject of the artwork - that beautiful sunny country. I thought of being on the Costa del Sol at age 15. The sight of the blistering sun still floods my memory whenever I think of that trip. Was this what the artist intended to convey? Regardless, this was the effect - most people think of Spain (even if they have never been there) as a sunny place, far removed from the often bleak landscape of America's Rustbelt, England's Midlands Region, or Germany's Ruhr Valley. Yet, here it was spelled out before me - why?

We Americans love to escape so much, perhaps even more than Indians or Europeans. We have overdeveloped a peninsular swamp (Florida), created whole government agencies (NASA), and even built a desert emerald city (Las Vegas) for this purpose. Perhaps it was this strain of Americana that brought us Spain along the Mon Valley.

Looking east beyond the warehouse, I snapped the tracks continuing under the Tenth Street Bridge. This bridge has always given me the ultimate yellow brick road feeling, and I thought if these tracks stretched in a perfect trajectory across the Atlantic, they would take me back to Malaga and those warm sands of ten years ago.

Bollywood Escapism

Since coming to India, I have become quite the Bollywood fan.

The other day I saw one of the most recent celluloid products out of Mumbai, Bachna ae Haseeno (Beware Pretty Women). The story is rather simple - boy leaves girl, boy leaves girl, boy falls in love with girl, girl leaves boy, boy apologizes to girls, boy and girl live happily ever after.

Okay, perhaps not as simple a story, but how simple could it be with over three hours to fill up. The cinematography was absolutely spectacular with musical numbers that I haven’t seen in any American film since West Side Story.

We watched two other older Bollywood films on DVD as well, and the combination of all of them made me think deeply about their popularity and what this popularity says about India and indeed all of Asia where they are more popular than their Hollywood counterparts.

Most Bollywood films have a few common traits. All are full of colorful and expertly choreographed musical numbers, seemingly coming out of nowhere in the story line. Despite a great deal of sexual suggestiveness, sex scenes are forbidden, and screen kisses are usually quick and passionless. Violence is also rare, and even in a thriller about an international thief with multiple gun fights, Dhoom 2, the gratuitous blood loss and explosions that define most American films in this category, simply don’t factor in.

For a film connoisseur like me, who usually trend towards the serious, the deeply analytical. I found my booming enthusiasm and foot tapping extraordinary, yet most welcome. I suddenly didn’t care about deep meanings and movies that taught me something -- and best of all it felt great!!

My first two weeks in India had been challenging. The country is growing so fast and the rapid increase in the number of cars is overwhelming to any newcomer. New infrastructure projects abound in any city, but many are not keeping up with their project deadlines causing muddy messes along major roadways in most cities. Though I haven’t been to China, Vietnam, the UAE, or other Asian economic hot spots, I can imagine many of the same growing pains must exist in those countries as well.

This goes a long way in explaining Bollywood’s popularity. This escapism is not new, it was a huge factor in the original popularity of the Hollywood musical in the United States in the 1930s as the U.S. and most of the industrialized world was in the grips of the Great Depression. Check out this clip from the 1930s musical, Gold Diggers of 1933. Could Hollywood have been any more blatantly escapist?

Perhaps Hollywood could learn from Bollywood and adopt some of its lighter, non-violent, and excitable tendencies. As I sat watching the latest news out of my country (McCain/Palin Surging, More Home Foreclosures, 33K Jobs Lost in August), I felt like stringing up my arm and getting yet another Bollywood fix.