It is Written

In his review of the Adam Sandler Mossad-hairdressing comedy You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, David Denby declared “mutual acceptance is now the hip mode of humor” and called the film, like the Harold and Kumar movies, “un texte obamiste”: an Obamaist text. It’s unclear what, besides multicultural awareness, Obama and Sandler share. The textes are comic and meandering while the muse is anything but. This was in June 2008, the same month Barack Obama’s primary campaign ended; premature to be declaring an Obama era, let alone the art that would define it. After Obama’s triumph over Hillary Clinton, before the subterranean threats embodied by Sarah Palin’s rhetoric and the knee-jerk mobilization of enraged liberal voters against her ticket, perhaps it seemed to Denby that this raucous subgenre—“profane, sloppily made, ethnically knowing, but good-hearted movies”—would become the new American cinema.

Denby wrote before it was clear what then-Senator Obama would mean for politics or for art. The President has remained consistent, but his unforeseeably rapturous popular reception has changed the sorts of stories Hollywood will tell. Denby’s examples do a worse job of depicting what 2008—the Year of Obama per Time’s year-end issue and popular acclamation—was like than do films as well-produced and successful as Obama’s campaign. Before the election and the Oscars, it might have been possible to claim a friendly unity as the national mood, rather than aggressive, deifying parochialism. Among the films successful with the Academy’s industry professionals and with moviegoers, though, idle idolatry dressed up vaguely in hope won out.

Cinema is an effective lens through which to analyze political change. Films have always reflected their times, and Obama was the media celebrity throughout 2008 and into 2009. The annual Vanity Fair and Entertainment Weekly Oscar-season issues put Obama on the cover this year (Entertainment Weekly’s headline: “Superstar! Barack Obama is Changing Pop Culture Forever”; Vanity Fair’s, the relatively demure “The Obama Era Begins!”). A year prior, the Vanity Fair cover featured, among others, Anne Hathaway and Jessica Biel. This is not an incredibly logical shift, until one considers that Obama and the changes he has engendered play more like a movie than like historical events of consequence.

Oscar-ratified films like Slumdog Millionaire reflect that dissolution of political reality even further, surrounding their characters with meaningful tableaux but refusing to complicate either character or tableau with ideas. Slumdog, which won eight Oscars—including Best Picture, Director, and Adapted Screenplay—represents not a Denbian triumph in the depiction of ethnicity on film, but a failure to even recognize political complexity. (This is not new for the Oscars, but even Crash faced off against four sophisticated films.) Slumdog’s lead character, the blank Jamal (played by Dev Patel), wins the grand prize on the Indian Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? not by knowledge but unique elements of his personal history. Each question on the game show dovetails with an event in his life. The only worthwhile thing about him is the tide of history that carries him. In this way he is, nationality aside, the ideal obamiste protagonist.

Slumdog Millionaire depicts modern India but was produced by a British crew and is reinterpreted by American moviegoers as a reflection of national myth. Those stories taking place in America were all either too intellectually strenuous (Milk) or too obtuse (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) to represent the American dream quite as well as did Jamal from Mumbai. The Wrestler, a brilliant allegory for America’s fading place in the world, was largely lost amid the Oscar-season shuffle. The fact that the best-loved iteration of the traditional American dream onscreen in 2008 took place overseas either went unnoticed by moviegoers or allowed them to congratulate themselves on their new, facile understanding of India.

It is easy to get carried away by the romantic notion of a poor individual overcoming cinematic travails. However, this movie relies on a suspension of disbelief greater than that required to buy Adam Sandler as a wacky Mossad agent. In its presumption that personal history is a substitute for ability, Slumdog Millionaire is too cute by half: one is reminded of incantatory paeans such as “son of a Kenyan and a Kansan,” recited by supporters to dispel the relative brevity of Obama’s legislative career, as though accidents of birth were the same as accomplishments.

Jamal does next to nothing in Slumdog Millionaire—bad things are done to him, and good things done for him. He is taken in by a band of orphans and this is fine; his brother alerts him to their caretaker’s evil plan and helps him escape, and that is fine too. Eventually, he finds himself, by an almost Dickensian accident, on the Millionaire contestant hotline—of course, he didn’t himself place the call. At the film’s outset, a title card asks how Jamal ended up succeeding. The answer the film provides, “It is written,” denies the notion that individuals have any agency, or grants the character’s success as his birthright rather than his goal.

One is reminded of the website Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle, which lists off the ways in which the President “helped” the reader (e.g., “Barack Obama folded your laundry”). The site is facetious, but elucidates the American mindset as well as does Slumdog Millionaire’s success: American citizens intend Obama to be their million-dollar ticket. By being in the right place at the right time—that is, “Obama-era” America—they will triumph effortlessly. Slumdog evokes the archetypal nineteenth-century Horatio Alger stories, which encouraged young boys to make the most of luck and rise out of poverty, but those stories encouraged the cultivation of personal qualities. The 2008 equivalent said that all one needs is to be oneself. It’s okay if that self doesn’t have thoughts other than hope in a deus ex machina solution. After Jamal wins, his countrymen celebrate in the streets—he represents something to them, but there is no nuance in our understanding of why. Will his victory make a difference for them? Obama’s election was a victory for demographic groups as specific as second-generation immigrants and as broad as the American population, but the electoral win alone was taken as the million-dollar grand prize. There is a harsh reckoning—the decisions Obama will have to make, the realization that Jamal’s win changed no one’s life but Jamal’s—in individualistic, cinematic narratives.

No matter. Director Danny Boyle cannily cuts away from a dark moment—the death of Jamal’s one family member—to Slumdog’s closing dance number. The death’s dramatic impact is deleted; after all, winning, even in the most compromised and unbelievable circumstances, is cause for celebration! Scary things—from the death of a brother onscreen to war and recession on the news—aren’t worth considering. As he dances, Jamal grins vacantly at the camera—it’s as though the horrors in his past never happened. The wide-eyed stare holding not intelligence but a ceaseless, puppy-like wait for good news is the new American ideal. Voters in a country on the brink of economic collapse wait to hear what kind of dog Sasha and Malia Obama are getting.

An opportunity to tell a complicated story of modern-day India is forsaken in service of an amiable shell onto whom the audience projects its hopes. The New York Times’ “Room to Debate” blog reported that the film was protested in India, for its title—seen as offensive to actual slumdwellers—and for its narrative and shot setup (the screenplay and cinematography that the Oscars named the year’s best). “[T]he rags-to-riches romance has been called ‘poverty porn’ for the way it casts a glowing light on a very poor section of Mumbai society and promotes ‘slum tourism.’”

Writing on the same Times post, Sadia Shepard noted that screenwriter Simon Beaufoy’s “use of the word ‘dog’ was a problematic choice he made arbitrarily, and clearly without doing enough research.” She reports that Boyle’s film has been integrated into debates over whether or not to demolish the Dharavi slum, an effort to “put India’s best foot forward” in the wake of the movie’s success. It is easy to allow cinema to color our perceptions, which is why a film so heavy on referents (Shepard notes the totemic use of the Taj Majal and Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan) but so light on information is dangerous. Americans cooed at the sight of the Slumdog child actors on the Oscar red carpet. MSNBC quoted one young actress: “My friends are saying, ‘your fate is so good’”; those same child actors were back in the Mumbai slums by midweek, and one was reportedly beaten by his father after the Oscars. But popular attention had moved on.

It would be easy to call Jamal an Obama figure, but the politician himself has broad personal ambition (that he has sought to downplay) and a keen, remarkable intellect. Rather, the Slumdog Millionaire protagonist is a representation of how Obama exists in the popular imagination: an inertly flawless savior, bringing his novel personal experience to bear on every issue before the group dance sequence that we all know is coming in the end, whatever horrors happen in the interim. Slumdog Millionaire is un vrai texte obamiste. Its vision is less in line with Denby’s “good-heartedness” and more in line with Obama’s pre-election trip to Europe: a new setting for generic boilerplate, which condescends both to the foreign land used as window dressing and to the American citizens wooed by exotica.

If Slumdog Millionaire’s Best Picture Oscar—the same prize won by such non-classics as Gladiator, Driving Miss Daisy, and Dances With Wolves—seems insignificant, consider that a film which was nearly released direct-to-video has instead grossed over $115 million and counting, with high DVD sales assured. (Of course, the box office has been by and large booming in this escapist year.) The Oscar win not only declares Slumdog’s underpinning philosophy the order of the day in Hollywood; it also broadly disseminates that philosophy.

In recent years, Oscar Best Pictures had presented individualistic protagonists: American Beauty, A Beautiful Mind, and Million Dollar Baby, for instance, had characters who made decisions and challenged their circumstances in order to obtain self-defined success. Swank’s Maggie Fitzgerald, for instance, becomes a celebrated boxer through her commitment to training. She has to overcome rather than exploit humble circumstances. These somewhat artless films express a reliance on the individual’s abilities and mental toughness rather than the inborn hauteur of “destiny.” Million Dollar Baby, if you change boxing for the political sphere, plays like a biography of Hillary Clinton; both Hil[l]aries even get euthanized in the end.

Had 2008 been the year of Hillary Clinton rather than Barack Obama, perhaps a film about a striver owing his or her rise to a tireless work ethic—like Milk, which depicts ceaseless losing campaigns before Harvey Milk’s mid-film political triumph—might have won out at the Oscars. Milk never had a shot, though; Slumdog Millionaire was forecast to win from early on, just as the persona of Hillary Clinton couldn’t hold up against the more appealing one of Barack Obama. The Oscars, after all, are something of a crystal ball into national mood: Gandhi and Out of Africa in the operatic, symbolist Reagan 1980s; Forrest Gump in the previous great wave of “hope” that was Bill Clinton’s first term and American Beauty in the deflated irony of his second, A Beautiful Mind and Million Dollar Baby in the Randian “compassionate conservatism” of Bush’s first term; The Departed and No Country for Old Men in Hollywood’s dark night of the soul that was Bush’s second term. 2007 was especially dark, and not just due to Juno—the dark insights into American society of the anti-Western No Country for Old Men and the capitalism-vs.-religion saga There Will Be Blood were absent in 2008. What a difference a year makes! With the election of a President whose public image, despite his worthiness, seems pinned to the notion of luck and timing rather than the traditional Million Dollar Clinton narrative, it’s easy to imagine that we’ll see many more films whose protagonists are acted upon, films with easy happy endings.

Other Best Picture nominees were hardly less simplistic than Slumdog: Frost/Nixon congratulates its audience on being smart enough to know that Richard Nixon was bad. The message is not that far off from the penumbra emitted from but not necessarily by Obama (see his pre-Inauguration concert, at which Hollywood stars sang his praises while he sat smiling blithely): that the audience, or voter, is intelligent for having voted for the right candidate or seen the right film, and that he or she is clearly beyond manipulation. Then the silly, simplistic story—“it is written,” Barack Obama is your new bicycle—continues.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button earned the most money and greatest number of nominations of the five films, and it certainly has a good hook. As played by the fortysomething tabula rasa Brad Pitt, Benjamin Button is a man of interesting health: he is doomed to age backwards, being born as an old man and dying a fresh-faced youth. The fatal flaw of Benjamin Button is that literally nothing else about its protagonist is interesting. “You never know what’s coming for you,” Benjamin’s mother instructs him—a “life’s like a box of chocolates” obamiste, perhaps, though even Forrest Gump wanted to engage with others and his nation.

Long stretches of Benjamin’s life—and the viewer’s—pass without incident or meaning. If there is anything worth knowing from an American life lived backwards over the course of the twentieth century, Benjamin avoids learning it; “what’s coming” for him as he grows younger is a series of period outfits and a mind as untroubled by thought as his face is newly unwrinkled. His regression into youth signals little more than the notion that an externally-determined life spent avoiding contact with ideas is not a life wasted—in fact, is perhaps the American ideal. The film begins at the end of World War I and ends during Hurricane Katrina, but neither event has scope—one a bunch of celebrating citizens, the other a few rattling windows. Benjamin lives in the same nice universe as Jamal; he may never know what’s coming for him, but, freed from the constraints of responsibility and context, he’ll always land on his feet.

Between Button’s Benjamin, Slumdog’s Jamal, and Kate Winslet’s Hanna—The Reader’s S.S. guard whom the audience is expected to absolve once she becomes, you know, a reader—characters gliding above the political import surrounding them dominated this year’s Oscar ceremony. Viewers gave the Oscar show good ratings, now that the partisan Jon Stewart has been replaced as host by song-and-dance-y Hugh Jackman, and they turned out to see Benjamin Button and Slumdog Millionaire in droves. (The Reader, too, has found unexpected momentum in Winslet’s Best Actress trophy.) Perhaps they see themselves, framed by picturesque political change that makes a good plot twist but that they hope cannot affect them, as Benjamins and Jamals.

Popular cinema got in on the game too. Wall-E and The Dark Knight, two summer blockbusters more widely attended even than Slumdog Millionaire, were even considered front-runners for a Best Picture nomination, and won major prizes. They even overshadowed You Don’t Mess With the Zohan. In Wall-E, humanity has shipped itself to the outer reaches of space after destroying Earth—they have evolved into entertainment-obsessed slobs, controlled by an omniscient computer system about which they neither know nor care. They merely trust it.

In The Dark Knight, Batman and the Joker battle over the fate of Gotham City, but the Gothamites themselves are believed to be complicit in their own destruction. The director, Christopher Nolan, sets two Nietzchean figures at play to take charge of the lives of those who cannot or will not aid themselves—the very people who allowed Gotham City to slide into ruin. The Gothamites need a protector because they are lazy, shiftless, weak. I looked around my theater to see if anyone else was offended at the film’s close, but everyone else was rapt, in communion with the screen. The Dark Knight became America’s second-highest-grossing film of all time.

These films are not “good-hearted,” nor are they heartening. But judging from the slate of films at the first Obama-era Oscars, and the discourse—restricted primarily to who loves Obama most—on this campus and throughout America, they represent a cultural shift. One wonders if, as Presidencies tend to fade in popularity over time, disillusionment with Obama will produce an Obamaist There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men. One hardly hopes for the American situation to worsen, but perhaps more critical thinking on the part of audiences, filmmakers, and Oscar voters is called for. Euphoria over Barack Obama’s election has not only conditioned us to wait for a happy ending that may long be deferred, but has elevated to the American pantheon truly bad art.