How does India, assertively taking its place on film?s pop culture world map, deal with outsiders? portrayals of its social woes? ? What global box-office stories would you like to see in After Hollywood? Let us know in the comments below A few weeks ago, Joss Whedon scored all the smart cultural points by taking us on an abridged world tour of horror in The Cabin in the Woods . But he seemed to trip up after putting superherodom on long-haul in Avengers Assemble ? the Kolkata slum scenes (where Black Widow finds Bruce Banner on an indefinite gap year) were criticised by Indian actors for dealing in stereotypes and fixating on poverty in the country. ?There are two scenes about India, and they only show slums,? the Bengali star Rituparna Sengupta told the Hindustan Times. ?It could have been done in better taste.? The Brits love carping about the Big-Ben-and-double-decker-bus shorthand that used to get rolled out in Hollywood films, so India can be (sort of) flattered that it now has its own equivalent. Avengers Assemble also had scenes in Stuttgart and New York City, subject to the same laws of cheesy popcorn-precis: like the history-ventriloquising Jewish pensioner who won?t bow down to Loki in Germany. That?s just the way pop culture works, in moron-proof nuggets ? and India is firmly on its map now. Slumdog Millionaire has set the mould for portrayals of the country and its people in the global mainstream, for good or for ill. The audience I was with during a screening of last year?s comedy 30 Minutes or Less collectively gasped when Danny McBride?s villain addressed an Indian-American character as ?slumdog?. But the slum-portrayal issue is something separate to that of pop culture?s need for stereotypes, and it?s interesting that it has arisen again. The first time, for Slumdog Millionaire, the accusations seemed more serious: slum life was the subject of the entire film, and it was partly the slum-dwellers themselves who objected ? to the use of ?dog? in the title, which didn?t seem to have any plucky associations at all in Hindi. Amitabh Bachchan, the actor for whose autograph the young Jamal will go to any lengths in the film, also wrote an ambivalent blogpost that was widely picked up around the world: ?If SM projects India as Third World dirty underbelly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations.? That?s too true. But films such as Slumdog Millionaire and Avengers Assemble seem to have touched an exposed nerve in India like nowhere else. Perhaps it?s because pride is running high in a newly assertive country, and these are films made by outsiders; there have been Bollywood films set in shantytowns before, such as 1981?s Chakra , 1988?s Salaam Bombay! , and 1991?s Dharavi , and they didn?t attract the same controversy.
Original Source Slumdog?s dissenters: poverty on film in India
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