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2. The Optical Field
- University of Minnesota Press
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39 2 The Optical Field Vantage In a crucial scene in the film Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2008), Salim and Jamal, two brothers who had grown up in the slums of Juhu in Mumbai, are looking across the city from the top of a high-rise under construction. They have met after years of separation. The camera catches the haze of the low-lying roofscape of the slums in Jamal’s background, then pans across the surrounding high-rises. Salim, who works for a slumlord-gangster, wishing to reestablish himself in his brother’s eyes, notes his newfound sense of self in the city:“That used to be our slum. Can you believe that now? We used to live right there, man.” Salim’s face is in close-up, and the skyline of tall buildings is reflected in his dark glasses: “Now it’s all business. India is at the center of the world now, bhai, and I am at the center of the center.” The distance between the slum of the past and the locus of business in the present is marked by nothing less than the recentering of the global economy, as if India’s emergence as an economic power has opened up an entirely new horizon of expectation, affording Salim and those like him the possibility of a novel metropolitan fashioning of the self. With the two brothers, the viewer takes in the bird’s-eye view of the city, far removed from the trammels of life on the streets. This brotherly encounter on an unfinished edifice that concludes in a precarious truce, rather than being a moment of absolution, turns out to be a deception that the brothers have to work out on the streets below in the 40 The Optical Field remaining part of the narrative. This is the only moment when the brothers are allowed this premise and vantage of power, a momentary abstraction from the life on the street, perhaps to highlight the fragility of the fiction of power produced by this elevated point of view.1 The rawness of the exposed concrete structure that proposes a different future based on global economic reorientation is strangely alien to the visual fullness of the street scenes that comprise much of the movie. It is, however, not the only panoramic shot in the film. The audience has been given this privilege at the very beginning of the narrative with a flashback of the two brothers’ childhood. In an engaging chase through the slums of Juhu, the filmmaker plays off the visual–spatial complexity of the slums while introducing the viewer to the protagonists. We see a ragged cricket match in progress : one of the small boys drops a catch right at the moment that an airplane swoops up from behind; two security guards come chasing the boys off the outlying areas of the airport tarmac that is their playground. The chase continues past the airfield, across a garbage dump, along the sewer lines that delineate the slum, past fetid pools and tin roofs along narrow lanes that insinuate their way through homes and courtyards, the dash of color on the clothesline, everyday business of the storefronts, until in a clarifying move, the boys scatter , and charting the narrative thread, the two brothers are chased into their mother’s arms. This scene hands the viewer the cinematic playing cards: the contrast between the jet-set (and rarely shown in the film) lives of the upper classes versus the slum children who, having no field of their own, encroach on an unlikely cricketing green, thus exposing a jarring contrast between the generous open space of air traffic and the narrow congested afterthoughts of lanes and alleys in the slum; the exasperated security guards who find their limits in the slums of Juhu; the physical structure of the slum that conceals a realm of knowledge from which the security guards and police are alienated, despite their routine encounter with it; the anxious and soon-to-be-lost figure of the nurturing mother who pleads with the policemen and dumps the two boys in a cramped schoolroom, hoping they might receive some education—a small opening on the path of upward mobility—where the teacher is reciting The Three Musketeers . Between cricket and canonical European literature we have a repertoire of imperfectly received metropolitan culture being played out and transformed in the milieu of the slum, obliquely mediated by the police. During the latter part of this sequence, the...