Monsoon Wedding: 'There's a temple right in the middle of the driveway'

The good folks at the Criterion Collection have set a new standard for themselves with their edition of Mira Nair's 2001 'Monsoon Wedding', out today, and, if it wasn't for the fact that they're giving us 'Wings of Desire' in a couple of weeks, it would be my choice for simply the best DVD release of the year.

I remember being exhilirated by the film when I saw it in Belfast - a mostly handheld family soap opera centering on the microcosm of all human life that takes place around a Delhi wedding, that also manages to take in the impact of globalisation, the economic transformation of India, sexual identity, the re-interpretation of religious traditions to accommodate modernity, but most of all the question of how love on earth is possible.  For four days it feels like the whole world has arrived in India to dance, to fight, to eat, to complain, to stress out, to wear extraordinary colors and carry out the tensest of rituals: a family gathering.

And so we get Old and New India scattered in our direction, English and Hindi in the same sentence, remixed Bollywood dance tunes underscoring ancient rituals (flowers arranged as if their lives depended on it, mothers-in-law hiding the fact that they smoke, motivations mixed).  It's utterly exuberant, but far deeper than that: this is about what India is really like.  It's kinetic enough to feel like a rehearsal for 'Slumdog Millionaire', its scope wide enough to invoke the spirit of Robert Altman, its high drama mingled with a smidgen of magic is undeniably sourced from Fellini.  (While it's become fashionable to detract from 'Slumdog', I'm still a fan (with reservations); but there's a scene of a boy with an eyepatch carrying coconut halves through the rain in 'Monsoon Wedding' that's as evocative than anything I saw in this year's Best Picture winner.) Nair knows when to up the emotional ante (to 'milk it', as she says on the erudite and illuminating commentary track); her cinematographer Declan Quinn arrives at a representation of these people and this place that makes you feel like you're there (and was to repeat this technique for 'Rachel Getting Married' last year, a film that could be considered a sister to 'Monsoon Wedding'); the music and editing dovetail perfectly.

Nair's early work was in the theatre, and she says that with the wedding scene she wanted to create 'an enormous drama in one night'.  It's obvious that in making this film she organised things so that something approximating real life would happen on screen.  And you're into it from the opening frames; totally compelled by these people who remind you of yourself, even if you feel that you have nothing in common with their rituals or culture.  What's most compelling is how there are so many well-rounded characters - Naseeruddin Shah's patriarch chief among them, granting his role dignity, soulfulness, authority, and - the hardest thing - a moment of change that feels completely convincing.

Now, I just got married, so I may be allowing the residue of sentimentality that derives from that day to prejudice me in favor of this movie; I'd counter that by saying I liked it when I was single too...It's a genre-defying film patched together from Bollywood/Hollywood romance, musicals, a bit of psychological thriller here, a family soap opera there.  It will make you cry and laugh, and think about your own family while it teaches a gentle lesson about how the world is changing, and the place of India in the world (it shouldn't be a surprise that Steven Spielberg sees the future of Dreamworks as intimately bound with the country).  Most of all, though, 'Monsoon Wedding' portrays the mad courage that it takes to enter into love with other people; it's liberating to imagine that life could be like this.

Criterion's edition includes several short documentaries and fiction films from Nair, and a crop of thoughtful interviews, alongside the requisite essay; there's almost nothing you could imagine being left out of the supplements.  It's a fantastic edition of a wonderful film that repays repeat viewings.

*Images courtesy Criterion Collection.

Why I Think He (Maybe) Deserves the Nobel Peace Prize

I know it's been a week and a bit, which in the contemporary mode suggests that ancient history has already passed under the bridge since the Nobel Committee announced its decision, but I wanted to comment about Obama's Prize.  I think it's telling that half the country is outraged that their President is well thought of by the outside world; and there's a lot of obvious projection going on, both from those who miss their fallen emperor - you, know, the guy who invited people who wanted to kill us to 'bring it on' - and from those who think his successor is their ideal version of what a man should be. Now, for me, President Obama is a pretty representative approximation of what kind of good man could possibly be elected to the Presidency; he seems to have made it there with his soul intact, and you have to empathise with him when he is targeted at the hands of the astonishing double-mindedness of his opponents, whose complaints seem to be as follows: He hasn't saved the world in his first ten months in office, he hasn't ended the wrong-headed war his predecessor started eight years ago, he hasn't disavowed his blackness (which some people appear to want him to do), he's too smart, etc.

I've met a few Nobel Laureates over the years - being on the fringes of the northern Ireland peace process meant that you tended to bump into them from time to time.  Between my alma mater and home city, we produced four of them in just over two decades - Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Betty Williams, David Trimble and John Hume.  Very few people would dispute that each of them deserved to be so rewarded.  Mairead and Betty co-founded the Peace People with the journalist Ciaran McKeown, a truly grass roots mass movement that transformed the streets of Belfast in the mid-1970s into space for non-violent public protest against the use of violence.  People mobilised in tens of thousands to make their voices heard, gathered in a movement sparked off by the killing of three of Mairead's sister's children.  When they were awarded the Nobel, they had not brought peace to the streets of my home town.  But they had served as a focal point for people's hope.  Precedents had been set.  And although the Peace People movement came under enormous pressure, and was not helped by either local political parties or the British state, it still works in a grass roots way today.

Two decades later, political negotiators drew up a treaty that offered a structure for relationships in northern Ireland that could be used instead of violence.  Hume and Trimble, the two avatars of northern Irish Protestant unionism and Catholic nationalism, were recognised by the Nobel committee; their political opponents used this as an opportunity to rant then as well.  That was eleven years ago.  Both Hume and Trimble have left the northern Irish political stage, and people who hated either or both of them are now in charge of the government built on the agreement they championed.

But - and this really is the heart of why I think the Nobel Committee got it (mostly) right - the totem for the northern Ireland peace process is not the fact that we now have a broadly stable government, that violence has all but disappeared (with awful, but thankfully rare exceptions), that all the major paramilitary organisations have decommissioned their weapons, or begun the process of doing so, that the police are more accountable than ever and have an enviable (albeit imperfect) record on human rights, and that the opportunity to deal with the past without vengeance exists, even though all these things are true.  No, the totem for the northern Ireland peace process is that, after decades of using violence or belligerence as a political first resort, people decided that negotiation was not a sign of weakness.  Four years of talking got us an agreement.  Nine years of still talking got the agreement implemented.  In the past, there were years when people were killed for political reasons in northern Ireland every single day.  Since 1994, when we started talking, the death toll has reduced to a tragic handful each year.  It is undeniable: a vast number of people are alive today because sworn violent enemies talked to each other.

And this is why President Obama may deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.  Because he is willing to talk first.  Now, he has been saddled with a legacy of war and presides over a nation which has grown too fond of a 'shoot first' attitude.  He cannot easily extricate himself from business as usual.  But I agree that the Nobel Committee gave him the award because they want to help him.  Complaining that he doesn't deserve it is both sour grapes, and a misunderstanding of why the Prize is given - sometimes you get it because you've done something amazing (Mandela, Mother Teresa, Wangari Maathai, Jose Ramos-Horta), sometimes you get it because you maybe did something that could have been amazing and might have covered a multitude of sins (Henry Kissinger), and sometimes you get it because the Norwegians think you might be something some day.   I think President Obama already is something - just take today, for instance.  His representatives are talking to Iranian diplomats about diverting their uranium to another country for processing.  His predecessor appeared more willing to drop bombs on Iranians than to talk to them; it may only have been the US election cycle that prevented another insane war in the Middle East.  Obama's presidency, on the other hand, is offering a teachable moment to us all; we might learn that scapegoating our leaders ends up delivering only more violence.  Alternatively, we might give them a chance to take the high road, and to avoid the mistakes of history by doing what we deeply know, but often deny, to be true: talking is better than fighting.  Doing that might mean that we deserve a peace prize one day too.

*Caveat: Because I know some folk might want to take issue with me, let me say this:

1: I don't think Obama is perfect.  He is not the Messiah.  He is not the Antichrist either.  Neither is George W Bush.

2: There are plenty of areas where I think he is either moving too slowly, or has given no indication that he is going to change some of the wrong directions set by the Bush administration.

3: Obama is not responsible for my choices or behaviour.  I hope we can agree to disagree about whether or not he deserves the Peace Prize.  But I hope we will not disagree that we both have a responsibility to reduce violence wherever we are, including when we're having a conversation on a blog.

Proof that Evolution is Real (With all respect to the King)

I think this settles it:

Images from the Independent and the mighty Larry K's Twitter.

'I'm up to my Neck in being an American, whether I like it or not'

Wallace Shawn - you know, Wallace Shawn, man of wit and letters, agreeable suppers with theatre directors,  and potentially poisoned cups of mead, has some things to say about life.  Haymarket Books have gathered his elegant essays in a book which turns out to be one of the wisest and most pleasurable I've read in a while.  He riffs on topics as varied and inextricably connected as the relationship between artists and the corporations who fund so many of us, the dependability of sex and our inability to talk about it, and what he considers the detachment from morality that occurs when you stop noticing the connection between imperialism and you.  You can hear his inimitable voice as you read, and, for myself at least, might rather wish you were discussing this with him in a cafe, just like he does with Michael Moore in 'Capitalism: A Love Story'.

The most striking thing about Shawn's writing is how seriously he takes the artist's vocation to re-humanise the world.  He knows that he is complicit in oppression, simply because the global structure deems it so; and he knows that by art and kindness he can up-end the scales of history.  It's a rich and challenging experience to read him, because he goes beyond the typical blame-everybody else-my-view-of-the-world-is-just-fine-thank-you-very-much rhetoric that tends to dominate these days.  He wants to write about life in a way that allows for the possibility of change on his own part, not just those he's angry with.  I'm still reading this super little book, but for now, here's some wisdom from Wallace, that I'd like to let speak for itself:

From the Introduction: 'My congenital inability to take the concept of inviolable 'self' seriously - my lack of certainty about who I am, where I am, and what my 'characteristics' are - has led me to a certain skepticism, a certain detachment, when people in my vicinity are reviling the evil and alien Other, because I feel that very easily I could become that Other, and so could the reviler.'

On Patriotism:'For people who are already in love with themselves, who worship themselves, who consider themselves more important than others, more self-esteem is not needed.  Self-knowledge would be considerably more helpful.'

On Morality:  'Everyone knows that ... goodness exists, that it can grow, or it can die, and there's something particularly disingenuous about extricating oneself from the human struggle with the whispered excuse that it's already over.'

More from Mr Shawn here:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yv0fduTDDAY&hl=en&fs=1&]

*Image above from Cinema Strikes Back

What I Learned from the Devil at the Movies

Yesterday I spent a monumentally pleasurable afternoon in the presence of Satan; in the form of the ridiculous and wonderful performance that Walter Huston (above) gives in 'The Devil and Daniel Webster', a film about American history and the mythopoetics of the Yankee soul that deserves to be compared with 'Citizen Kane' (and not just because they were both edited by Robert Wise and released by RKO within a month of each other).  It's an astonishing movie, of the kind that evokes an utterly romanticised vision of pastoral, political and religious life but manages to appear even more realistic for it.  (Story hook?  Poor farmer sells soul to the Devil in exchange for money and crops.  Doesn't make him happy.)

There's a hell of a lot more to it than the soul-selling plot point, and I'm writing something more extensive about the whole film, but for now I thought I'd post about what the movie devil looks like.  (I'm also honored to be currently involved in a project with Walter Wink, a theologian and writer who has done more than anyone I can think of to develop an understanding of the concept of Satan as a projection of human evil that is both psychologically healthy and intellectually rigorous, and avoids not only the neurosis that some religious practices can reinforce but also the societal resignation that results when people don't think clearly about evil.  The fruits of that project should be published in the next year or so; I'll post details then.  In the meantime, some of you may be interested in Wink's incredible book 'Engaging the Powers', which describes the way in which story/myth is manifested in real-world violence, and how ending the cycle of oppression depends partly on finding a new way to tell stories, and meeting violence with its opposite, rather than pouring gasoline on a fire; this book will, I believe, be read, and its themes practised, for generations to come.)

Walter might enjoy his namesake, Mr Huston's performance in 'The Devil and Daniel Webster', partly because it's played for dark laughs, and partly because it reveals the structure of all human temptation to selfishness: looking up from a sense of scarcity to find an easily-imitated set of behavior played out by someone who seems to offer jealous reward.  You have it, so I want it.  Given that 'Daniel Webster' is a myth, it has a moralistic climax - in which the victim is defended on the grounds of national pride; but the film has the maturity to end not on a note of triumph, but a warning: it could happen to you too.  Movie Satan is usually a source of fear; but while fear can teach you something,  for now, I thought I'd write about some of what I have learned from Satan in the movies.  Lessons 5-8 may present the most valuable psychological idea I've ever heard; although watching Film Number 8 may make you feel like you're in Hell.

1: Beware men with long fingernails who hire private detectives.

2: Use a reputable adoption agency.

3: Always bring a Swedish guy with you.

4: Be careful how you judge little things.

5: You'll be paying those law school debts forever.

6: The Devil only has the power you give him.

7: He really only has the power you give him.

8: Honest.