American and Arty

Saw the film Young Adult recently. Enjoyed it; though I was at a loss to understand why it is called a comedy. To my mind, a comedy makes you laugh in pleasure. Or the story has a happy ending. This film fails on both counts. It is not even a black comedy where there is a serious or a sorrowful undercurrent to the outwardly hilarious happenings. For example, Jagte Raho (a Hindi film), in which an innocent peasant enters an urban housing complex to quench his thirst and is hounded as a thief. Or Jane bhi Do Yaron (another Hindi film), in which two novices try to take on a whole corrupt system.

But then, are Chaplin’s films black comedies? They have happy endings all right; but is it a comedy when hunger drives him to cook and eat his shoe? Or when his friend takes him for a giant bird to be quartered, roasted and devoured? Now I am confused!

Coming back to Young Adult, it has a girl (or shall we call her a woman because she is quite grown up? All credit to Charlize Theron that such a question takes shape. And, it is admirable for a mainstream Hollywood actor to present herself as a plain Jane who takes the help of make-up while going for the kill. It could very well be interpreted as factual and could result in deglamourising her.) who wakes up next to a sleeping man, grimaces to reveal that she is far from happy with her last night’s association, downs big gulps of coke and leaves. Well, she leaves the life she is living and goes off to where she came from.

There is a transformation. She doesn’t change, the background changes and the relative valuation of her attributes changes. Back in her school days, she was a prom queen. Then she left for a bigger town and well, made it! She became a writer; no one in that place has been a writer. So, when she had left, it was in the halo of glamour and is now back with another halo. Never mind that she carries the baggage of a failed marriage and a failing career and has become an alcoholic to boot. The small people need not know that. She, in fact, has plans of reclaiming her old flame; which, in her opinion, should be a walkover; his small-town wife cannot be expected to offer any meaningful resistance. 

Of course things do not happen as wished. She is inexorably driven to accepting another old friend, who is now almost a cripple, as her alter ego and ultimately she goes back with a bad dent on her car’s bonnet.

I am a male on the wrong side of sixty and I never identified myself with the travails of Charlize Theron’s Mavis Gray even though her pathetic ordeal drew my sympathies; but the friend, a young female, who gave me the DVD called the ‘small people’ all sorts of names! I am a resident of Mumbai which is a sprawling metropolis where life generally is in the fast lane and success is defined as when you overtake others in your lane. Life laid back, does not count. Yet (or, may be because of that) I went with the small-towners who were more at peace with themselves and to me, that was important. For my friend, on the other hand, trying was far more important than failing. That Mavis tries and the others don’t, decided the race (which, to me, wasn’t there). That she becomes a psychiatric case (obsessively pulls out hair on her head) and they stay normal, did not matter. Rather, that was a great injustice.

The film reminded me of another film I saw during last year’s International Film Festival of India (IFFI) at Goa. The woman in that film (Yellow) is a teacher in a nursery school and she takes quick breaks to go and swallow pills which give her a high. She too goes to her home and meets her mother, her sisters, her ex-fiancé and all of them are abnormal. The film is supposed to be a harsh comment on the materialistic world. I found it obnoxious. The woman takes refuge in fantasies because reality bores her. Everyone is obsessed with their own problems and they are all unhappy in general.

Young Adult is a mainstream Hollywood film with the accompanying mainstream aesthetic sense and a straightforward narrative and smart editing. You could call Young Adult realistic; though I found tendencies to cut corners as in a fable. For example, Mavis goes and sits right next to Matt on her first evening in her hometown. Again, her outburst during the party at Buddy’s place is more theatrical than natural (she is drunk; that is a good excuse though). Both instances serve to speed up the passage of the movie’s message, without compromising on content or credibility. They make the movie crisper.

Yellow depicted a similar content but made out as if it was touching upon something profound; which, to put shortly, is irritating. The boredom of the sharp and the degeneration of the numb among the irresponsible and the callous is of no concern to me. Mavis Grey comes back bruised; but the first thing she does every morning upon waking up, is take huge gulps of Coca Cola! (Which is pretty damning, I should say.) Her idea of relationship is wanting something and expecting it to be delivered. She is arrogant without any basis for the arrogance. The Yellow heroine and her kin too want providence to deliver and they too are as hollow, as incompetent as Mavis; but their short stature is presented as a philosophical issue! Mavis remains an ordinary being.

Perhaps that is why Young Adult is a ‘comedy’ and Yellow is ‘arty’!

The pleasure of reading a good book

I have already said here that I am a science fiction fan. The Marathi literary world has traditionally looked down upon things scientific and just as it ridiculed its female characters in the name of humour, fondly contending that women have no sense of humour; it treated science as something strictly non-literary. Or something exotic. Shri Na Pendse, one of the foremost Marathi novelists, had a character who passed electric current into water in order to study the effect on the productivity of betel nut plantation. Another one who becomes a scientist, as a boy betrays his scientific bend by making a torch to see in the dark by collecting a bunch of fireflies. So, I hardly got to read good SF as a young, voracious reader of Marathi fiction. The eminent astrophysicist Jayant Narlikar did write SF; but it addressed the juvenile mind.

Then, on a chance I attended an all-night session of star watching. I went there with my school-going daughter, with a vague idea that she could pick up something interesting. It was late evening when we reached the place and one of the organisers said, “Take a look at Mercury, which is about to set. Soon it will be dark and we shall see the satellites launched by man. Then Jupiter will rise and …”

I was there only to accompany my daughter and was wondering how I was going to keep awake for a stretch of time. ‘One look at the sky and you have seen the stars. What do you do for the rest of the night?’ I thought. His words shook me awake. The stars too rise and set! Just as the sun and the moon do! It had never occurred to me that the night sky presented you with a slowly but continuously changing scenario. Then staying awake was no problem as I took in this constellation and that and there was Andromeda, the neighbouring galaxy 22 lac light years away which you can see with bare eyes without a telescope and Saturn had rings and Betelgeuse was red and all celestial bodies described a circle around the pole star and all planets strictly passed under the heavenly arc made by … Castor and Polux I believe.

That hooked me to Khagol Mandal, the organisation devoted to promoting awareness of Astronomy. I attended a number of star watching sessions thereafter and took friends and their children to share the fascination. I discovered that the organisation had a good library devoted to books on Astronomy. I read them all. I do not pretend to have understood the relativity of Time and of Gravitation but the theories of Black Hole and the Beginning of the Universe and the SF stories fascinated me.

In the days that followed I mainly talked about my new interest and a friend responded by lending me four books. All fiction, all by Asimov; the Foundation trilogy and the fourth book was named ‘The End of Eternity’. That did me in and I have read more than a hundred SF novels and short story collections thereafter. I tried Marathi SF too but found most of it either simplistic or non-science. Pseudo-science if you want to be charitable. The complexity and the consistency one finds in the normal English (which includes books translated into English too) science fiction is missing.

When I say ‘science fiction’, I do mean any fiction based on fictionalising any aspect of science; but what I enjoy most, is the Astronomy genre. Going to distant stars and planets and finding exotic environment and matching species. Asimov completely steers clear of this possibility and describes a galaxy colonised exclusively by humans. But his genius has created a mythology out of the various tales he has spun! He went on to add more books in the Foundation series and ultimately logically linked even the Bailey books and Susan Calvin stories into it. His last (in the chronological order of what happens, not the order in which he wrote; he added prequels too.) book ends with an emphatic hint that the saga is to continue; but physical mortality caught up with him. Unfortunately no SF can overpower that.

The End of Eternity intrigued me. It reads like a suspense drama where you always remain unsure if the author has disclosed his (or her) ultimate destination. The characters’ actions are consistent to what they perceive as the ‘normal’ (SF normal please, whatever that is); but the protagonist has other designs. And the reader wonders if the author has yet other designs as to what ultimately is going to happen. It caught me by the neck right on the first page and did not let go till the very end. I totally submitted to it and stifling all my doubts and reservations, never went back to seek some clarification.

 But they remained as minor irritants. For example, why is a class of men called ‘Computers’ when we, in the real world, have given that name to machines? All right, this is fiction and the author has every right to deviate from reality. But why? It cannot be simply explained away as ‘his fancy’. Again, the idea of an ‘Eternity’ outside Time seemed too far fetched. Then there is a loop in the story and a character has to be hauled out from normal time again and again. The hero, Harlan does ask Twissell, his Computer and Twissell exclaims, ‘Of course! You think two is a magic number?’ (Or something to this effect; I don’t have the book before me at this moment.) This too taxed my credulity. ‘The whole superstructure is so unstable; how can it survive for any period of time,’ I wondered, ‘And that means the idea shouldn’t stand since this is a time-travel story!’

In the end, when Asimov did answer all my queries (though the answer to the problem of meeting oneself is fiction!), I felt like a child sitting in his lap listening to an absorbing tale told seductively. It was a sumptuous meal and I remained satiated for quite some time and kept postponing the repeat read in order to savour the sublime pleasure. The subsequent reads were as pleasurable and I read and reread the novel till I was sort of on first name terms with Harlan and Twissell, as also with Noys and Cooper and Computers, Technicians and others.

I still like the novel, though now I find the end unconvincing. I think this is one of the more emotional novels of Asimov. He is not averse to using emotion to push his story (Susan Calvin falls in love, Fastolfe’s daughter has a permanent grudge against him for refusing to have sex with her; why, the Mule is a master of emotion!) and here too Harlan in a fit of anger, sends Cooper down into primitive centuries; Noys plants ideas in his mind at a moment when he is emotionally vulnerable and so on. But all this goes to demonstrate that emotion is an unstable state of mind. That it can be induced from outside. That it can be changed and manipulated. So, it is hard to accept that Noys' argument convinces Harlan so that he decides to abandon his task and his decision is so irrevocable that the ‘undo’ option vanishes for good!

I am sure Asimov was no fan of Cameron or, like Terminator, he would have revived Eternity and continued to present equally intriguing tales involving eternals and Minimum Necessary Change!