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this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
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chapotraphouse
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Thinking back on it I can’t even concretely say what the messaging was. Organized crime bad? Love good? Maybe some vague allusion to tech being the future of India. Whole thing was a fancy package on not much substance, probably why it disappeared from the popular consciousness rather fast.
So I had a discussion about an old game with someone here on Hexbear. They had a completely different take on one of the main characters than I did and, ultimately, it was a reflection on how I had first played the game prior to radicalising while they clearly first played the game post-radicalisation and it showed.
I think we're going to have one of these moments right now.
The message of Slumdog Millionaire is this:
The people who live in slums are cruel, selfish, vicious, and essentially they deserve their lot in life. But if there is a virtuous slum-dweller then fate will intervene and ultimately they will be rewarded with the station in life that they truly deserve.
I can see that argument, if one looks at the characters as representing the Indian underclasses as a whole. Which is probably an underling problem with any “rags to riches” story: if they wander into riches by chance, it’s not entertaining, so they have to have some sort of virtue that sets them apart from their peers that gets them the riches.
Interestingly, there was a scene that ended up on the cutting room floor that would have completely flips the script on that. He’d still get the girl, but the show’s producers would have dumped him on the street and told him he wasn’t getting a single rupee. Then it would’ve been, even if the underclasses play by the rules and beat the system’s game, the game still leaves them impoverished. Wonder if that was the director’s decision to drop that scene, or if it was the studio’s.
Eh. There's absolutely zero reason why they couldn't have had sympathetic underclass characters in the story even if they were morally grey or flawed characters somehow.
Look at the orphanage scene and the narrative it creates around disabled beggar children, for goodness sake.
I don't think that the story in the film would have been somehow diminished if there were other slum-dwellers who were virtuous. Shit, the protagonist could have even paid back those other virtuous characters by helping them out after his win and it would have contributed to the moral justification for his character being in a rags to riches situation. But no.
I mean, wasn't the movie representing basically every Indian underclass and every trope about the Indian underclasses throughout the story though?
If we transposed this argument to a film that represented queer people or people living in the projects in the same sort of way, for example, I'm not convinced that you'd be arguing against the fact that it's acceptable to have essentially no virtuous characters who were queer or from the projects.
I get what you’re saying, it’s problematic that there’s not more virtuous underclass characters in the film. The higher classes aren’t presented any better, though, constant exploitation of anyone lower on the rung than them. Like, the timing of the movie felt very opportune, right when Western audiences were starting to catch wind of Indian cinema, which gives the whole thing a “look, the third world is finally learning modernity” vibe.