Slumdog Millionaire, gah.

So I've been wondering why I've felt so much unease about "Slumdog Millionaire" these past few months and the awards-orgy here is keeping it in front of my mind so I will forthwith address it, so that people can know my completely irrelevant opinion about "Slumdog Millionaire." Let us begin!

So as it sits on Oscar-watch there's all kindsa chatter about it, what with its unlikely breakout success in the West and its amibivalent reception in the East.

My conclusion is this: I agree about the Western poverty fetish (I just was introduced to a gross term known as "poverty porn." Ugh. Sometimes words damage.) But anyhow, I agree that the awards-hype is more about that fetish than about the intrinsic story of the movie. Because the movie is, to me, a plainly Charles Dickens feelgood story. Almost escapist.

So the remarkable part is this: the awards-orgy-fetishizing has enabled the craziest heights of dissonance. It's meta-meta. It's meta-squared. It's meta at a geometric rate. I mean, it's being celebrated in the gleaming hallways and spiffy carpets of Hollywood and -- of all the most perverse juxtapositions-- in the fenced-in tiled Mumbai getaways that sit next to the very slums it portrays, next to the the millions that aspire to $millions. And the conversations about slumdwellers that take place during these gatherings are what make it so painful. The way people are making this movie something more than it is - as if it is something more than an escapist fantasy.

Which brings me to what prompted this too-wordy post: Katherine Boo's amazing, fiction-like article about Mumbai in this week's New Yorker magazine, called "Opening Night: The scene from the airport slum." The woman writes like nobody's business. Like she knows history before it happens.

Here, she talks about the large fences, including concertina wire that separate lavish hotels from slum dwellers:

"The fences insured against a time when a scavenger in Gautam Nagar might learn that a shot of rare Scotch consumed in ten minutes at the Sheraton's ITC Maratha cost exactly as much as he earned in seven hundred fourteen-hour days picking up aluminum cans and used tampon applicators, and find that information too much to bear."

"...This was the marvel of many great twenty-first-century cities, including New York and Washington, whose levels of inequality now match those of Abidjan and Nairobi. Maybe they should have looked like [violent video game] Metal Slug 3. Instead, ingenious social constructions--democracy, charity, subtle and blatant articulations of caste, hope, electrified fences--were keeping things more or less in order."

Hope: a social construction. Man.