Slumdog is About America, not India

Protests in India over Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire have puzzled some in America. At the same time that we are inspired to visit India, and maybe even take one of those “slum tours,” some in India, including major Bollywood actors and some politicians, have decried the film as “Poverty Porn.” We in America see the movie as optimistic, even great, and hail it with Golden Globe after SAG Award after Oscar.

This dissonance can be explained by the fact that Slumdog Millionaire is really about America. Danny Boyle creates a fantasy land, and like all fantasy lands there are great dangers that await the heroes of Slumdog. Instead of goblins and trolls, we have religious conflicts and slavers. We in America are familiar with both. However, unlike the Revolutionary War, Slumdog’s religious conflict does not involve Christians, and unlike Jamaica, the slavers are not “white” as we understand the word “white” to be used. The problem is not that this fantasy world is pornographic. All fantasy worlds are pornographic in the way that they allow us to act on our greatest and most secret desires. Danny Boyle’s own Trainspotting, Millions, and 28 Days Later all present us with worlds filled with these same kinds of gratification fantasies. The problem with Slumdog is the fact that progressives in America have given such importance to it. Our friends call us to tell us that it is “eye opening” and reviewers (writing for no less than the New York Times) call it a lesson in “cross cultural understanding.”

For an America that is suddenly in the control of the Democrats, this movie is important because it is progressive and distinctly American. In Slumdog, the entire fantasy world is endangered, not by the Great Eye of Mordor, but by the kind of poverty that progressives rail against. And the hero in the film is the Game Show. What could be more American and hopeful than a Game Show. It’s as if Ronald McDonald himself came down in his Coca-Cola shaped rocket ship and gave everybody Wal-Mart gift certificates. And it is not just the hero that is saved by this doppelganger for American culture. The entire Indian nation seems to be caught up in the moment. India's cross cultural lesson is the Great American Myth that no matter how poor you are, if you keep trying and working hard, some day you will succeed. The myth rings hollow to an India currently hurtling up the list of the worlds largest economies while leaving behind the poorest and the most needy, but we in America are much more easily convinced.

The newly progressive leaning America loves this film because it is the satisfaction of three of our most secret and powerful desires. The first is that our economy will fix itself. We don’t need to make sacrifices, like those of us who have jobs paying higher taxes, and making deep cuts into our largest and most wasteful spending (military spending and laissez faire health care). If we give our economy a nudge and a little time, we too will soon be millionaires. Every game show and lottery in history is essentially this kind of solvency porn. The second progressive desire is that we will no longer be seen throughout the world as the malevolent and violent imperial power. In Slumdog, it is Hollywood and not the Pentagon that represents America. The American influence in Slumdog is the game show, and a couple of American tourists who wise crack “This is the real America” while giving a desperately poor orphan a $100 bill. While both of these symbols spread a powerful myth, they are doing so with money and wit instead of with bullets and body armor. This is benevolent imperialism, where we can spread the myth with kindness the way that the Catholic preachers struck out with their missions into the Heart of Darkness or the Georgian Cherokee tribes. Progressive Americans see this form of imperialism as a stark contrast to the preemptive attacks of the last eight years. But our greatest and most secret desire that is satisfied with this progressive porn romp is that everything is going to be okay for all those orphan children living in extreme poverty throughout the world. Those are the children that we had drilled into our brain every time that we didn’t finish our vegetables who were “starving in China.” This movie reassures us by showing us that the child will not starve even if we do not finish our vegetables. It shows us that the children that make our coffee in slavery conditions in Ghana will eventually grow up to own the plantation. It allows us to say that the children begging for change in the markets in Cairo are better off than those who were blinded or mutilated for the same purpose. With this knowledge, we can go out and buy the blouse made in Bangladesh with Turkmen cotton, because in the end, everything is going to turn up Bollywood.