Namesake

Happy new year to everyone. May 2008 bring better times for us all.

Spoiler alert!

I just saw the movie Namesake. It helped me and another friend round out 2007 and welcome in 2008 in one of the most mellow ways possible. I enjoyed the movie and felt that I could relate to it quite a bit--my family following a somewhat similar storyline in coming to the USA. Anyway, the movie stirred up some thoughts in my mind about culture, diversity, and the U.S. immigrant experience that I wanted to get out.

I enjoyed the movie for its recognition of complexities. Instead of resorting to the binaries of "us versus them," the immigrants versus "Americans" (as if those terms even have meaningful monolithic explanations), the movie offered a more nuanced perspective. A child born in a land foreign to his parents and ancestors, and given a name neither American nor Indian. Both signify a state of being neither this nor that, living in the grey, the area of fusion and redefinition. The movie continued to defy a simple and predictable storyline in its treatment of Gogol's relationships. Gogol, the immigrants' son, ultimately does not fall in love with the pretty American girl. Moreover, his failed married to a Bengali daughter of immigrants proves that sexual attraction and a common ethnic bond in a foreign land (foreign being the USA in this case!) are not enough to sustain love and a meaningful relationship.

Another gratifying aspect of the movie is that it subverts the image of courtship and the "typical American life" that U.S. media has worked so hard over decades to create. Gogol's parents do not court each other and fall in love. The marriage is practically arranged between these two strangers, and Gogol's mother soon follows her stranger-husband to a new life in a foreign country (USA). Yet, very little is made of the new couple's relationship--Do they fight? Do they love? Do the like each other? Are they happy? Few scenes attempt to provide direct answers to these questions. Thus, the movie reveals a different model of love and marriage--one in which strangers decide to make a commitment to one another, to care and look after each other, to raise a family together, and through the struggle of making this joint project work, perhaps even fall in love. In this case, though, love is secondary; nor is it the kind of western-American love that borders on lust. In one affectionate scene Gogol's mother asks her husband if he wants her to tell him that she loves him... "like the Americans do," she adds with a a dismissive chuckle. Nevertheless, the commitment between Gogol's parents appears as real and powerful as the "true love" that we westerners/Americans have come to hold in such high regard. When Gogol's father dies, his mother's grief is just as real as someone who lost their "true love," just in this case she lost a lifelong partner to whom she committed and over time learned to love.

The movie further decentralizes the white, upper-middle class U.S.American norms. This mostly becomes apparent from the way Gogol's girlfriend Max and her family are portrayed in the movie. The way in which Max's relative approaches Gogol and spews out stereotypes about India in an attempt to make friendly conversation, "Oh she returned from India rail thin!" Max's family tradition of vacationing (with their two dogs) in an expensive lakeside second home/cabin-mansion in the countryside. Max's attitude about life and her career, "I don't want to think about it right now, I just want to be free/happy/have fun!!!" And Max's failure to understand Gogol's grief--encouraging Gogol to go on vacation with her to escape the familial grief when at this time he actually wanted to be with the family, and alternatively wanting to join Gogol in the scattering of his father's ashes--inserting herself into the cultural and ethnic grieving customs where she did not necessarily belong as a mere girlfriend.

At the same time, the movie contained less satisfying elements, ones that suggest that the serious attempt at complexifying and defamiliarizing was dropped halfway. For one, Gogol's parents' move to New York City, and later the NYC suburbs is certainly highly plausible, but for a film, perhaps not the most interesting choice to make. Not to diminish the immigrant experience in NYC in any way, it's nevertheless worth noting that the NYC area is known for its diversity and large immigrant communities that can support and integrate newcomers. A much more challenging and interesting story my have consisted of following a newlywed immigrant couple into a rural american community, or to a city in some place like Alabama or South Dakota. In those places, the struggles to fit in, coexist, and get by crystallizes even more in the context of severe cultural and ethnoracial isolation. Interestingly, too, despite the movie's focus on an immigrant couple from India and their U.S.-born children, the movie was notable for the lack of interaction with/portrayal of the wide diversity of other U.S. ethnoracial groups besides the one epitomized by Gogol's "blond-American" girlfriend. For a movie set in the hyper-diverse NYC area, I would expect a little more. Furthermore, I would also expect that perhaps Gogol and his sister would, at some point, find a sense of solidarity with, or empathy for, the struggles of other minority ethnoracial groups in the USA.

The movie also reinforced some stereotypes, that it would have done well, perhaps, to defy. The depiction of Gogol's wife serves as the most glaring and disappointing example. A daughter of Bengali immigrants, we first meet her as a super-nerdy high school student who proclaims, "I detest American television!" She then disappears from the script, only to re-emerge years later as a hyper-sexy seductress. How did this transformation occur? Duh, she moved to France and started having affairs to liberate herself from the confines she saw in her mother's life, and somehow that process also made her really hot. Please. This treatment does a disservice to the French people and the way Americans view them. To reinforce such stereotypes of sexually permissive, and seductively good-looking French people is dishonest, and does not do justice to the diversity of looks and attitudes that exists in French society, as in any other. In another nod to simplicity, the movie also choses to raise Gogol and his sister as all-American U.S. kids, who talk the same way and hold the same values as any other American kid. While some immigrant children do indeed grow up to become American princesses and dudes, this overshadows the other portion of immigrant children who feel deeply torn between two worlds, cultures, value sets, and do not conform to the stereotypical norms of American teens.

Finally, the conclusion of the film left me a bit confused and only half-satisfied. The death of Gogol's father, the failure of his first marriage, and the scattering of his family enables Gogol to find meaning in the story of his name--the son of Indian immigrants, born in the USA, named after a Russian author whose book his father was reading in a train in India when a fellow passenger implored him to travel the world. The conclusion, though, conflates complexity with a form of simplistic cosmopolitanism. As the substrate in which Gogol's life was grounded deteriorates, Gogol declares that he finally feels free and the quote about traveling the world is restated in narration. Of course, any individual experience can vary widely, but the movie's conclusion completely brushes aside the opposite possibility--that someone in this position would find himself completely lost and alone in this world, raised in and accustomed to a world where he no longer has the same support system that existed when he grew up. This would acknowledge the sense of world-weariness and a dispossession that so many immigrants and ethnoracial minorities do indeed experience in a country where the mainstream does not sufficiently attempt to create a respectful space that acknowledges that they do, legitimately, have a right to belong. Such an ending, however, would contradict the long running American narrative of rags to riches, of melting-pot integration, and of rootless cosmopolitanism--and contradicting these would not appeal as much to the mainstream and thus to the box office bottom-line. Nevertheless, acknowledging such alternative realities--the American Nightmare that coexists in the same universe as the American Dream--would be a good first step in building a world that makes the latter cosmopolitan, integrationist ideals more possible and less problematic.