It was interesting to watch the evolution of the Slumdog Millionaire story from film to music video, to westernized music video and then the subsequent home videos which people produced thereafter. Each evolution of the original was such a departure from the last, and yet still retained some semblance from the original in a few dance moves along the Indian Bollywood continuum. In, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin discusses the value which art takes on once it has been reproduced. Benjamin claims that the original piece of art loses its value as it gets reproduced, in this case, repeatedly. The Slumdog Millionaire film is condensed and fitted with a dance sequence in its first reproduction in the soundtrack music video. The video depicts scenes from the film and illustrates some scenes which are to represent social and cultural aspects of India as well as the film’s plot. In the reproduction of Slumdog Millionaire, I find that the story line of the original is lost in the proceeding reproduction by the Pussycat Dolls. The Pussycat Doll version is notably vacant in terms of plot or substance. The production is reduced to costumes and erotic women gyrating their hips to an Indian backbeat. This Westernized version isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it does appeal to a more western audience for marketing purposes. It is however, vastly different from the original music video with only a few congruencies in dance moves carried forward and the appearance of singer A. R. Rahman. The next two reproductions which we viewed on YouTube, people create their own interpretation of dance for the song which illustrates the influence of the media on them and their influence on the media as they direct the movement coordinated to the song. The first video which has an English speaking man and a woman from a western country dancing to Jai Ho with a hybrid of Indian dance movements from the original Jai Ho soundtrack video, mixed with what appears to be a bit of HipHop dance styling. The context of the film may be lost but the cultural Indian Bollywood style dance is here, being learned by Western people on the other side of the globe and mixed with the African-American originated dance style.
In the other youtube video, we view some young teenagers performing a dance on stage to Jai Ho while incorporating partner style, formal dance movement popularized in Western countries but originating from Latin America. They infuse this partner style dancing with Indian Bollywood style dancing, again from the film.
In both YouTube cases, the precise original piece of art may have been lost or reduced along the way however, the spread of culture through media connects people and gives way to cultural fusion. Therefore the reproduction of art has a social and cultural on the audiences who view them. The positive aspect of globalization lies in that cultural fusion facilitates greater common ground between different cultural groups. This translates into less xenophobia and increased tolerance and understanding for other walks of life. So the reproduction of art facilitates the creativity of its reproducer and its additional perspective lends to a broader audience who, having viewed a derivative of the original, have been influenced by the original in its, albeit diluted, form. As Arjun Appadurai dictates in his book, Modernity at Large, these influences are important social and cultural phenomena which now need to be integrated into the field of anthropology so that we might better understand our ever-evolving contemporary culture. Appadurai writes that our “lives are inextricably linked with representations and thus we need to incorporate the complexities of expressive representation (film, novels, travel accounts) into our ethnographies” (64). The evolution of these representations in media influence us which then in turn influences the evolution of global cultures at large and this is worth being examined. In perspective, the ever-gyrating Pussycat Dolls may have not lent much authenticity to Indian culture or the original film itself however, their exploitation of these gave exposure to a much greater audience.sources:
Appadurai, Arjun
1996 Modernity at Large. Public Worlds 1(2): 48-65.
1996 Modernity at Large. Public Worlds 1(2): 48-65.
Benjamin, Walter
1936 The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. UCLA School of Theatre, Film and Television.
YouTube.com
YouTube.com
Official YouTube version of Jai Ho from the end of the movie “Slumdog Millionaire”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRC4QrUwo9o
Pussycat Dolls Jai Ho,
Slumdog Millionaire Dance Jai Ho
Karan Khokar and Divya Ikara- Jai Ho Dance - Tamil Sneham - Tampa, Florida,
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