After The Mourning

Carmen's heart may be a black, withered, shriveled raisin in his sunken cavity of a chest, but still, how people found Slumdog Millionaire uplifting, or inspiring, or poignant, or good in any sense of the word doesn't even register on his inner seismograph.  If anything the movie stands to trivialize every emotion, every personage, every movie-making convention and overarching message it depicts.  The sole attribute Carmen can drag from the spiritual landfill is that the millions of missteps throughout the film are carefully masked by a flurry of brightly colored and philistine-pleasuring images, the bottomless vapidity is draped with a shawl of greater meaning.  Is the state of movies to blame?  Or Hollywood's demented agenda?  Or India?  Or philistines?  Or the faulty Oscar voting system?  Or God?  Is it some sick joke, possibly perpetrated by Ashton Kutcher?  Is Ashton Kutcher God?  Is God Kutcher responsible?  Would God Kutcher do that to the simple masses?  No.  

Slumdog Millionaire's Oscar domination is a result of a complex and rarely acknowledged zeitgeist within Hollywood.  This silent killer is known as: Shakespeare in Love Syndrome (SiLS).  Over time, idiocy and sadness and need for mindless satiation begins to tumefy in the hearts of man.  Around once a decade this psychological accumulation reaches it's breaking point, i.e. people are so tired of being tired, close-minded, and generally empty inside that they latch onto something that SEEMS to provide a cure to these ailments.  In 1998, Twas' Shakespeare in Love.  This year it was Slumdog Millionaire.  Both films rest on a beyond preposterous narrative crux, both look really pretty, both have a mass appeal, both are complete and utter filth, but Slumdog Millionaire has committed a far greater sin.  While SiL is a joke from the onset, SM asserts itself as something more, a comment on destiny and love and escaping the limitations of our world.  It is none of these things.  The film hinges on such an improbable premise, executed by one-dimensional character whose aging and random insertion into lush, impoverished backgrounds supplants characterization, that destiny can't even factor into the film's equation beyond a narrative device.  The film asserts itself as a commentary on poverty in India, but the characters and situation are so entirely unreal and Hollywooded it amounts to a pretty guilt trip if anything, the characters don't play as people but lifeless figurines playing against the backdrop of poverty, pantomiming and sucking the soul out of love and spiritual triumph, running the river of a call to action dry.  After SiLS works its slow magic, people are willing to accept even substance-lacking representations of what's important as important, to sit back and absorb and then to come to a resounding agreement about this very fake and in actuality divisive monster, then to celebrate their agreement, not the film itself.  Certain times in the course of human history people must simply agree.  They must label something as one thing when it is in fact something completely different, and cast a rheumy eye over the thing and silently nod in complete unison.  This is what happened.  Things like this happen.  Don't get yourself down about it.  

P.S.  Sean Penn's win was not a product of SiLS, but of Hollywood awarding an Oscar not on the merit of the performance but on subject of the performance.  His speech was pretty good though.  Carmen still hates him.