The Wrath of Khan

On a somewhat lighter note …

I could hardly stop laughing last week at the news that Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan had been detained at Newark Airport and the resulting international stir, focusing on charges of ethnic-religious profiling and/or American ignorance of foreign movie stars. We’re now at the point where Arnold Schwarzenegger is inviting him to dinner, though it’s coming out that Khan himself may not have been the target of the detention and it may have had more to do with a legitimate investigation of the genuinely shady world of Bollywood financing than any kind of ethnic profiling.

But the circumstances under which the detention apparently happened is the stuff of high comedy. The Muslim star was in the US for, among other things, efforts to promote a film called MY NAME IS KHAN. About ethnic profiling of Muslims in the post 9/11 U.S. Inspired by a real-life incident.¹

As Jon Stewart said “ohmigawd, it’s a perpetual motion picture machine.”

(I can’t seem to get the embed to work … just click on “Shah Rukh Khan Detained at Newark,” and that takes you to the video on the Comedy Central site.)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Shah Rukh Khan Detained at Newark
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Healthcare Protests

Jon Stewart does not know how many inputs this perpetual motion-picture machine has, because he doesn’t know what I do.

The first time I ever saw Khan in person was at the Toronto Film Festival a few years ago, where he appeared with director Santosh Sivan for the screening of their film ASOKA. The reason for my interest was that Sivan had made a great Tamil film that had made my previous year’s Top 10 (and people should check it out). It’s called … ahem … THE TERRORIST. And it’s about … uh … a suicide-bombing mission.

Wait … there’s more. ASOKA was about the life of the king who conquered most of what is now South Asia in the 3rd century BC. King Asoka became a pacifist, rejected war and devoted his life to spreading Buddhism after seeing the mass carnage of the final battle of his war of conquest.² When introducing the film, Khan mentioned that theme. He said something like (and despite the quote marks, this is paraphrase from memory), “this film is about love and gentleness and rejecting violence — a message now more important than ever in the wake of the week’s horrible events. We always wanted to make a film that can bring people together in love and peace, and nothing is more important right now.”

This screening took place Sept. 15, 2001.

Yes, I saw Shah Rukh Khan in person for the first, and to-date only, time, just days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — a topic he directly brought up.³
————————–
¹ I should add that I would be surprised if there isn’t some name(s) on the terrorist watch list (and which should be on said list) that resembles Khan’s — something like S. R. Khan or Sheikh R. Khan or Shah Rokan or something else that would let me forgive someone making an honest initial mistake. What IS inexplicable is the hour-plus delay in letting him go, assuming that Khan was the target. I mean … how difficult can it be to establish that this guy is (arguably) the biggest star in (by some measures) the world’s biggest film industry. Do airports block Mr. Google or something? Are there any significant-sized employers in Newark (like, oh say, an international airport) with no Indians on staff?
² … rather conveniently, I cynically note. It’s the easiest thing in the world to do to reject war once you’ve won. Indeed, one of the things that unendeared me to ASOKA (which I graded a 5) was that if the movie was supposed to be about a religious conversion turning a king against war, it’s chickencrap to basically make the whole movie about his conquests, ending at the final climactic battle. There’s a few-minute coda showing Asoka’s tear-filled conversion as he roams over the battlefield and a couple of vague closing title cards about Asoka’s post-conversion rule — that’s it.
³ To be fair, most filmmakers and stars did bring up the terrorist attacks, even if to apologize by telegram for being unable to arrive in Canada (Takashi Miike did that). In one of their less important impacts, the attacks played havoc with the festival. Partly because of the cancellation of most Sept. 11 screenings, but mostly because the several-day shutdown of North American airspace meant many film prints (and less importantly stars and directors) could not arrive in Toronto or could do so only after their already-scheduled screenings. The festival had to extend itself one day to accommodate as many films as possible.

Soaked in tears about Dreyer

GERTRUD (Carl-Theodor Dreyer, Denmark, 1964) — 10

I’m sitting right now in a DC bar, unspeakably depressed, soaking wet with rain, face wet with tears, trying to make sense of perhaps the most discouraging filmgoing experience of my life.

Not because of the movie, which is and will remain one of my all-time favorites, the capstone to the career of one of my pantheon directors. There will be a time to write about the film proper, but not right now. To those of you who have read Pauline Kael’s legendary review of SHOESHINE, this may seem rather redundant. But here it is.

I get that GERTRUD is not a film that will appeal to everybody. I would not myself recommend it to almost everybody I know in the flesh. A story of a 19th-century Danish aristocratic woman who succeedingly rejects every man around her in the name of her ideals about love, it’s a tragedy about a kind of pride and indifference to interest that practically doesn’t exist today. It’s also got a reputation (not without reason) as the slowest-paced, most boring movie ever made. It’s filmed and performed in the most aggressively stylized way of any orthodox-narrative film I can think of (it poses no difficulties with intelligibility). The actors pose for every line, generally pay no attention to each other and converse while looking in directions that make no naturalistic sense, and s t r e t c h   o u t   e v e r y   v o c a l i z a t i o n. Dreyer emphasizes the slow rhythm in every way imaginable — in camera movements, lack of cutting, real-time theatrical staging within scenes, etc. There’s also a couple of weirdly-lit flashbacks that use such a blindingly-diffused white light you would think they were shot in a room with walls made of soft-white fluorescent lights. And I know the history of its disastrous premiere and the critical derision heaped on it as a movie of sofas and pianos. All this to say — I know GERTRUD is not SINGIN IN THE RAIN. I get that. I really do. I’m not Jonathan Rosenbaum thinking GERTRUD would be popular, or could ever have been, if only Hollywood and the media didn’t conspire to limit what films we can see.

I was happy when the movie began, looking around seeing the huge National Gallery of Art screening room pretty full, though not packed to the gills. This is the best theater in DC … presentation is flawless, there are no bad seats (even the front row). And the print was in near brand-new shape.

I heard people leaving as early as the second scene, of Gertrud in the garden with young lover Erland, telling him she will leave her husband. And you know what … I can respect that. Not everybody will like everything (I have my own blind spots). And if you’re bored by a movie, leaving is a right thing to do.

There had been a few snickers … there always are. But at one scene, the laughter became a dominant reaction in the audience — the scene where Gertrud’s old lover Gabriel (we don’t then know why their affair ended) tells her that he was at a bohemian-artist “men’s party” the previous night and that Erland bragged about his latest conquest that afternoon — Gertrud.

And I snapped. I said audibly (though I don’t think anybody more than one seat away could’ve heard) “why is this funny?” I was already leaking from the eyes from the content of the scene — we’re seeing Gertrud’s heart break. And now I have to listen to (I’m sorry) a bunch of cretinous philistines laughing. Not for disliking the movie — that’s perfectly fair — but for imposing their derision on others. If you can’t adjust your expectations to accept a period piece and a stylized performance, why the frack are you at a museum for a 45-year-old Danish movie based on a hundred-year-old play? Why are you sticking around, if this is how you feel, you vulgarian? Do you think you score some points in the ledger of life for sitting through a film that you can’t respond to, but don’t have the confidence in your judgment to leave or fall asleep, so you just deride it as a nervous-panic reaction, you self-consciously “literate” yuppie bourgeois scum? Isn’t the point of museum film programs to gather a discerning audience? And I live in a city that prides itself on its intellectual sophistication.

I used to believe (I think I picked it up from Allan Bloom or some among the Straussians under whom I studied philosophy) that one good definition of an art masterpiece was “a work that didn’t make itself relevant to you, but made you relevant to it.” I guess I still believe that, but I’m really coming to question whether masterpieces, by this definition, are even possible any more, since we now laugh at and deride stuff that isn’t “relevant” (Richard Roeper’s derision of HOUSE OF MIRTH as “a hat movie” was his, and that version of the show’s, point of no return). And wonder whether the cultural barbarians have won with respect to the old masterpieces. If this is the reaction to GERTRUD in a national museum just a block from the US Capitol … where can it thrive?

For the rest of the movie, as Gertrud’s prideful isolation grows stronger, there was laughter widespread enough that I wrote it down in my notes six times. To nearly-quote Kael, I was no longer sure whether the tears I was shedding, and they never stopped entirely for long, were for the tragedy of Gertrud or the tragedy of GERTRUD. I left the theater trying to tune out all the “that was so slow” comments (fair point though that is; I wasn’t in the mood to be charitable). When I got outside, people were staying in the foyer or the outside breezeway, because it was raining. I didn’t care if I got soaked — headed for the nearest bar to drown my depression (though to be honest, Ive only finished half of my first beer while writing this post).

I’ve had audiences laugh at movies I love — TOKYO STORY, Dreyer’s own DAY OF WRATH. I dunno why this felt so uniquely discouraging. It’s almost enough to make you want to reject the mass of people and retreat into splendid lonely isolation with your own ideals unspoiled.

Oh … wait …