"Roller Reel" - THE PEACOCK: The Prof (21 November 2019)

Martin Scorsese rubbed fans of the Marvel franchise the wrong way when he said of the superhero films that he saw them less as cinema and more like “theme parks.” Speaking in an October 2019 interview, the famed director explained that he didn’t feel Marvel films were the usual stuff of human experience traditionally seen on screen. But Marty seems to have forgotten that one of his own films has been incorporated into an amusement park. 

Cinecittá World, opened in 2014, is built on the site of Dino De Laurentiis’ former studio, Dinocitta. Situated just outside Rome, the theme park is a tribute to the involvement of Italians in cinema. An Italian American, Scorsese’s nineteenth century-set Gangs of New York (2002) provided the inspiration for the look of Cinecittá. Both the film and the park hark back to Hollywood’s Spaghetti Western era of the mid-1960s, so called for the involvement of Italians, such as Sergio Leone, in the making of the sub-genre. Ennio Morricone who composed the soundtrack for films of that time also did the music one hears at Cinecittá.

Yet, isn’t it intriguing that it is the Western, a film genre so emblematic of America, that informs Cinecittá’s attempts to pay homage to Italian cinematic heritage? 

Sure, the genre of the Western suitably provides the backdrop of adventurism that amusement park-goers crave, replete as it is with fantasies of taming the wild and encountering savages (never mind that these are natives defending their homeland against marauders). But there’s more to be gleaned of how the Western sets the stage for a roller coaster ride of conflation between national sentiment and the movies at theme parks.

Let’s depart Italy’s Cinecittá and enter Bollywood Parks Dubai (BPD). Established in 2016, BPD is the only theme park in the world to pay tribute to India’s film industry. But just like Cinecittá relocates the American Western to Europe, BPD brings Bollywood to the Emirates. And if America had its Spaghetti Westerns, then 1970s’ India cooked up the Curry Western – films that use the ethos and look of the Wild West as the setting for desi drama. 

The most famous of these was the Amitabh Bachchan-starrer Sholay (1975). One of the rides at BPD recreates the film’s tale of two petty crooks conscripted by a retired policeman to protect his village against dacoits. As part of the ride, guests shoot at bandits on a screen which mirrors the look of the film’s frontier aesthetic that could be mistaken for a scene from a Spaghetti Western. Considering, though, that the lawless west of Sholay is actually the east, how does one tell the Indians from the cowboys? 

What’s more, on my visit to BPD, nearly every one of the park-visitors involved in the pretend shootout on the ride was Arab or South Asian, the latter making up the largest demographic in Dubai. As much as amusement parks may seem separated from the “real world,” I had to wonder if the simulated violence I was witnessing might somehow reflect a bit of the tensions of the outside world, especially with South Asians outnumbering Arabs in the Emirates. Further, the curious spectacle of South Asians shooting people who looked like themselves on the video game-like ride itself made me muse if there was a caste/class angle to ponder. 

Inadvertently, the Curry Western, as it is employed at BPD serves as a metaphor for the westward frontier crossing of South Asians into the Middle East, possibly along with multicultural frictions. At Cinecittá, the Spaghetti Western is reminiscent of the immersion of Italians into American culture, presaged indirectly by the journey of Columbus. That original Italian thrill-seeker, who erroneously “discovered” the region, much to the detriment of indigenous peoples, had gotten lost on his way to the Wild East. Even as history and the tensions of the outside world are never fully excluded, theme parks immerse participants into cinematic realms, the vicariousness of film-watching translated into a physical experience of fantasy.

As for the Marvel movies being “theme parks,” Scorsese may not be far off the mark. Aren’t superheroes after all just cowboys in capes?

From The Peacock.

"Golden Men, Tigers, and Jewels" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (Goa - 2 March 2013)

In Oscar-winning Ang Lee’s Life of Pi (2012), based on Yann Martell’s novel of the same name, an Indian boy reverses Christopher Columbus’ fifteenth century oceanic journey by travelling to the west from the “Indies,” but finds himself in the middle of nowhere, instead. That nowhereness is signified by the strange island that Pi arrives at in the course of his perilous voyage with Richard Parker - the Bengal tiger he is saddled with and tames while lost at sea. The island, populated by meerkats, sustains by day and kills by night – its inlet waters turning toxic. Pi is to discover later that the unpeopled island features on no known map.

Columbus’ own unmapped wanderings “about the Caribbean in search of India” are referred to in Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather (1995) as having caused the explorer to “[write] home to say that the ancient mariners had erred in thinking the earth was round. Rather, he said, it was shaped like a woman’s breast...” In likening Columbus to a lost infant seeking “a cosmic breast,” McClintock identifies “the female body ... as marking ... the limits of the known world...” She adroitly analyzes the European encounter with the “New World” as one replete with a coeval anxiety of the loss of and desire for “the female body,” which is at once maternal and erotic. 

Women’s bodies were as much the metaphor of exploratory longing as the theme that caused this year’s Oscars to hit an all time low. The 85th Academy Awards opened with the song “We Saw Your Boobs” - vexing for many reasons, not least the undermining of professional women by a still largely white boys’ club. That the song was sung by the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles, only further proves how the pursuit for mainstream acceptance can devolve into a minstrel show of insensitivity to other minorities. Breasts, it would seem, continue to denote the confusion men have with shifting boundaries, both in the landscape of the film industry and in commerce generally. Note Oscar host Seth MacFarlane’s conflation of xenophobia and misogyny in a joke that simultaneously acknowledges and belittles gender and ethnic diversity when he said of Salma Hayek that it mattered little if she could be understood or not, because “she’s hot.”

The incestuousness inherent within Columbus’ hunt for the elusive feminized unknown was intensified by “dreams of pepper and pearls,” McClintock adds, combining the allure of rare foreign goods with domestic necessity. It is reminiscent of the quest for spices and converts by Columbus’ contemporary Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese explorer who did find the sea route to India in 1498, leading to Goa’s later conquest by Afonso de Albuquerque. And while the Prime Minister of a certain island refused to return that famous crown jewel to the former jewel in the crown, David Cameron’s visit last month made it quite clear that the desire for the erstwhile Indies has not tarnished. No doubt, globalization has added sparkle to India’s brand as its economic fortunes experience a sea-change. The island Pi “discovers” is like this rediscovered India - it could never be unknown. Its existence is already prefigured, first by the colonial past and, then, globalization. Life of Pi is quintessentially emblematic of the latter, what with its having been written by a French Canadian, directed by a Taiwanese American, centred on a French-named Indian boy and a Bengal tiger with a British moniker, who are lost at sea upon the sinking of their ship – a Japanese vessel headed for North America. The course is set and new jewels are up for grabs.

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