White Ramayana

I get a little wiggy about cultural appropriation. A couple years ago, I wrote this post about being asked to write a short story from the perspective of a little black girl from Ohio. Never have I been black or lived in Ohio, so I did not feel remotely qualified to lend my incredibly dubious fiction-writing talents to that project. Nor was I ethically comfortable with the assignment. Fortunately for both me and the kids who would ultimately have been my audience, I wriggled my way out of it.

Here's the thing: my culture--let's call it White America--has a nasty habit of glomming onto the cool stuff other folks think up, consuming said cool stuff and then defecating it out as something a whole lot less cool. I do what I can to avoid falling into this particular White American trap when I can, but to avoid it completely would be to refrain from participating in my own culture. And I can't exactly do that, either.

I have a found poem in my manuscript from grad school. By "found poem," I mean the words themselves are wholly quoted, but I cut them and re-lined them so to punctuate the ideas therein to imply something very other than what the original author intended. I pulled the text directly from one of my favorite yoga books, Power Yoga, by Beryl Bender Birch. In her introductory chapter, she talks about going to India, looking for enlightenment. In the anecdote she relates, she enters into a lively debate with two young Indian men, who deride Americans (clearly to get her goat) in a coffee shop. And then she discovers within a few minutes that they'd drugged her. In my version, I cut off the drugging part and just excerpted her rapturous language as she describes her experience of cultural tourism that launched her yoga career.

I excerpted Birch's lines because I think they spoke to a very peculiar aspect of the American relationship with the yogic practice. Yoga means a lot to me. I've been practicing for over 12 years and I've come to find several spiritual touchstones in yogic philosophy and in my practice itself to be personally necessary. But nonetheless, I've never been fully comfortable with the fact that most American yoga isn't terribly close to its source material-- and that it is, by and large, an appropriation of a spiritual philosophy that is far cry from my white, Western heritage. And all the little ponytailed girls, like me, who came to their practices out of a desire to be hip while getting skinnier? Oy! What to do with us! So, including that poem in my manuscript, which is largely composed of poems about what it means to be a white girl from the south, was one part me calling Birch, from whose book I've learned much, out for her own touristic myopia and one part calling myself out for my collusion in American comsumerism as it pertains to an Eastern tradition.

So, today, in my Twitterly adventures, I retweeted a link from The Film Talk blog containing their discussion of Sita Sings the Blues, which, as I mentioned, I saw a few days ago at the Nashville Film Festival. Gareth Higgins, one half of The Film Talk duo, writes a glowing send-up of the film-- and, for the most part, I don't disagree. It's collage-style animation is both varied and beautiful. The score is inspired. The narration is funny and lively. Despite several long, draggy, under-edited musical numbers and two full minutes of an intermission that stopped being funny about 15 seconds in, it's a totally enjoyable film. And you can watch it for free here.

But it shouldn't escape us that Sita tells the story of The Ramayana, as re-envisioned from the perspective of a white American woman, Nina Paley (the director/animator/writer). And frankly, that changes the story not a little bit. I first became acquainted with this story in high school, when I worked in the costume shop of the Nashville Children's Theater during their production of The Ramayana. In that version, Rama and Sita ended up together with a quaint little Disneyesque ending. It was a play for 8-year-olds that had a demon king in it. You can hardly blame NCT for attempting to smack a smiley face on it. But Paley bills her version as "The Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told." In Sita, the jilted wife, rather than Rama, the great Hindu hero and incarnation of Vishnu, becomes the protagonist and in doing so, Paley has greatly shifted the onus of the Ramayana epic. Add to that that Paley inserts several scenes of a largely irrelevant and highly solipsistic autobiographical break-up tale into this film and, well, Paley begins to feel a lot like an Oprah Book Club reader to me-- one who can only understand the world's literature as it relates to her, and has trouble contextualizing the narrative's larger social resonance.

Yesterday, upon my return to DC, I had lunch with a close friend who just happens to be of Indian heritage. This film came up in our discussion and she told me that, though The Ramayana had been a prominent story in her upbringing, she has always had trouble finding a personal connection to it. She explained something to me at which the film hinted, but did not go into detail describing: in more traditional tellings, Rama doesn't abandon Sita because he's a distrustful dick, as Paley's story implies. Rama, despite deeply loving Sita, must shun her as a show of solidarity with his people, thus making him a great, self-sacrificing, humanist hero--the epitome of idea of the people's king. Now, it's understandable why that notion wouldn't sit too well with an American audience, coming out of a Romantic tradition, in which limerent love always reigns supreme. Or with an American audience from a post-feminist age, for that matter, for whom Rama's public display of distrust for his wife is tantamount to his admission of his complicity in her commodification. Because, again, White America has one bitch of a time trying to be anything other than repletely culturally relativistic.

So, then, the question becomes, is Paley taking all appropriate artistic license to make the story her own or is she ripping it out of its relevant cultural context so as to make a cute little cartoon to which her own heartbroken self can relate? Now, far be it from me to criticize anyone for using extant cultural information as a point of artistic departure. It's just that doing so without fully acknowledging that, if you're a white American woman, to do so is to do so as an outsider -- much like I am in relation to my yoga practice -- strikes me as remiss.

Paley ends her film with her animated avatar of herself reading The Ramayana in bed. This scene, I suppose, is intended to exculpate her from the fact that she picked up the story as though it were some street-market trinket on a trip to India. However, the scene reads as entirely too self-congratulatory with regard to Paley's own worldliness for my taste. The film then becomes less of an homage to a culture Paley finds inspiring and more a tearing apart of a religious text, so as to make it palatable for a Western audience. And I can't help it -- that feels icky to me.

Really, I'm not entirely sure how Paley could have fixed her story so that it felt less like theft and more like tribute. I return to that gorgeous moment in Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter when he interrupts his narrative to apologize to Buddy Bolden, his historical subject matter, for taking Bolden's story and making it his own. I'm paraphrasing here, as I don't have the book in front of me, but Ondaatje says something about how the story spoke to him and, though he knows he can never do it justice, he felt the story should reach a wider audience. I come back and back and back to that moment in that book because I find Ondaatje's authorial humility to be so deeply moving. And really, I think that it's Paley's lack of humility with regard to her own appropriated tale that detracts so troublingly from what is truly a technically virtuosic animated film. I mean, not only does she never really defer to her source in the way that Ondaatje does, but she actually inserts herself into a Hindu religious text? Imagine if a Muslim tried to make a cartoon of the Gospel According to Mark and stuck himself in there as a modern-day analogy to Jesus. Yeah, it wouldn't go over so well, would it?

But this is what White America does. We see shit we like. We steal it. We reap it of its soul. We paint it bright colors. We sell it back to ourselves. One can hardly fault Paley for doing all that so very well. She is, after all, merely participating in her own culture. And there is no denying that her artistic vision is more expertly accomplished than many. It's just that Paley seems to be trying to peer into this story with a post-feminist lens. And, like many religious texts, it just doesn't hold up all that well under that particular lens. The story becomes marooned without the context that makes it a meaningful religious text in the first place. So, Sita somehow managed to acquire a subtle, yet rather judgey undertone than made me question just how well Paley understood her subject.

Meh. White folk. We're a disaster.

A new metaphor for the love that eludes

Monster movies pretty much tend to serve similar purposes. They show us a negative human trait, distilled. The one trope that holds true to virtually every vampire movie is that the bloodsuckers themselves are embodiments of self-interest. They lack compassion, generosity, empathy -- every action they take is devoid of altruism and in service to the satisfying an appetite. They are fantastical versions of a sociopaths, but with bumpy foreheads. And this is true of throughout the history of the vampire legend-- even when they had a whole lot more in common with other incarnations of the idea of "the undead," namely, zombies than, say, Eli from Let the Right One In.

Most of the origins of vampire legends can be traced back to Eastern Europe. Not long ago, Joan Acocella published this handy summative report on the evolution of the vampire legend, from yesteryear through today. To me, it's impossible to conceptualize the vampire without acknowledging its heritage, from risen, shambling, rotting corpse all the way on up through Spike, the undead's answer to Billy Idol, from Buffy. The best I could find about the equally rich zombie legend heritage was this Wikipedia page. As with vampires, I can't really talk about zombies without pointing out what I know of the heritage of the legends. While vampires are a distinctly European monster, zombies hail from Africa. Or more specifically, they stowed away on slave ships and arrived on American shores as avatars of empowerment for the leaders of the amalgamated patois-religions throughout the Caribbean and the American South. Powerful Vodou priests would raise the dead and have these mindless laborers do their bidding. Let it not escape us that by "powerful Vodou priest," I mean "slave." And so, by extension, I also mean to point out that inherent in this origin of the zombie legends is the notion that the primary purpose of the zombie was to scare the everlivin' shit out of the white folks. They are slaves of slaves, but they are also vehicles of retribution against the smug, pale-faced captors. That they are the bogeyman of the Confederacy is as important now as it ever was.

Since these early days of The New World's restless corpses, the zombie legends have been appropriated a million times over. No longer do we understand zombies as the slaves of powerful magicians--they've come to serve as metaphors for all kinds of things. So many analyses of zombies in film have bitten written that I need not do more than hit the highlights here: they represent anxiety over biochemical warfare or the AIDS epidemic, depending on the analysis in question, in 28 Days Later. They're the rapid soul-death of modern middle class life in Shaun of the Dead. They cast allegorical shadows of Iraq War military occupations in 28 Weeks Later. And it's no coincidence that Romero's Night of the Living Dead apocalyptic zombie vision preceded the Cold War detente which began in 1969. Night of the Living Dead was released in 1968, when tensions were still relatively high. In other words, zombies are one of Hollywood's favorite candy shells in which they coat the bitter pills of social unrest, so as to make such niggling worries more consumable for a general audience.

But all these subsequent iterations of the greater zombie collective body do not erase their slave culture narrative history. Or at least, they shouldn't-- not for an informed audience. Zombies carry a very specific genetic code of meaning that incorporates all of the versions of the story I've listed above as well as many others. That's an important thing to remember if you're going to take it upon yourself to grow a new branch to the zombie family tree. And a paucity of historical references may well be the only real bone I have to pick with Make-Out With Violence.

MOWV is a locally-made production, filmed on location in Hendersonville, a little suburb to the northeast of Nashville. In all honesty, it's remarkably accomplished. It's low-budget, for sure. But its soundtrack, written and performed by The Non-Commissioned Officers (to which I'm listening as I write (for mood), and which, I might add, I bought just a few hours ago directly from Leah High, who steals the show as Addy, the zombie's best friend) covers a wide tonal range, from sad to spooky to atmospheric to giddy/youthful. In wholly apropos fashion, its recurrent melodic schema occasionally even goes so far as to broach something like a Lynchian, Twin-Peaks-ish sound reference now and again.

Also, I found myself marveling at the dialogue throughout. For such young and relatively inexperienced filmmakers, the collaborative writing talents of The Deagol brothers, Cody DeVos and Eric Lehning display a not unimpressive sense of restraint. The script is pointedly understated and it keeps the exposition to a minimum-- for which I was deeply grateful. Moreover, it manages to capture the spirit of the teenage clique-- complete with idiosyncratic inside jokes (one character, for instance, is always called by both her first and last names: Anne Haran -- which rhymes and is therefore funnier.) -- without dumbing down the characters because of their youth. Or making them speak in some kind of Dawson's Creek-esque elevated shrink-speak diction.

But the story is a curious one in the lineage of the zombie movie. As it goes, one girl, Wendy, from a tight-knit group of friends goes missing in the summer after their high school graduation. The town searches for her. She is not found. They presume her death and have a funeral-like service. And then we cut to a shot of her body washed up on the edge of a river. She twitches. She stands. And then a couple scenes later, a couple of the kids find her strung up between two trees. They take her home and proceed to care for her all summer long, in the house of a friend who is out of town. She rots. She eats a rat. She breaks a toilet and a few champagne glasses. She lunges after one of the living kids a couple of times in an effort to eat him, too. But most of the time, she is relatively docile, as zombies go. And the usual social drama of teenagers continues around her.

Wendy does not trigger an epidemic, nor does she reflect any greater political anxieties of our culture. Instead, she is a whole new brand of zombie. She is the eternally unavailable girl, made only moreso by her death. Patrick, one of our band of compatriots, had long nursed a crush on the girl, when she was still pre-undead. Wendy, of course, had a boyfriend and showed no real romantic interest in poor Patrick. But Patrick quickly becomes the primary caretaker of our zombie invalid, as she lies in her bathtub bed. Despite his devotion, she remains aloof, if a little hungry, in her deadness. Though the physicality of their relationship becomes a reality, as he bathes her, puts make-up on her, tests the limits of her deathly numbness, Wendy remains utterly unmoved by Patrick's dedication. It is only through the titular make-out session, in which Wendy eats Patrick (weirdly reminiscent of the scene in Drawing Restraing 9 in which Bjork and Matthew Barney flay each other underwater, and then eat each others' skin, by the way), that his love for her reaches any sort of perverse fulfillment.

This story, in and of itself, is duly compelling. For a bunch of non-professional actors, these kids do a bang-up job. As I previously mentioned, I could watch Leah High all day long. However, I really do wonder how this film fits into the zombie tradition. While I quite enjoy this new spin on the trope, its failure to tie it back to its literary, cultural and filmic heritages raises a few questions. And, well, it's also likely that the script's admirable restraint left a hole or two in the narrative fabric. What I'm wondering is this: why is Wendy a zombie? How did she get that way? Is someone controlling her and the clues that would relay the identity of her puppeteer went over my head? Or is she more of the zombiehood-as-a-disease school? If so, why doesn't she try harder to pass her funk along? What, exactly, is it about her that makes her have more in common with the zombies of folklore and legend than, say, Bernie (as in the Weekend-at Bernie, I mean)? And who the hell tied her up to that tree, anyway?

So, OK, it's not perfect. But it's still, by far, the best conceived, best executed local film I've seen at the Nashville Film Festival. And well, it's just so hard not to love a zombie movie.

UPDATE: I forgot to include this gem in my abridgement of the zombie lineage. Clearly, it is a much needed step in the ladder.