Chapter 12 - Slumdog Millionaire and the New Middlebrow

Summary

Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire is the film of the moment for the “new middlebrow” — the audience able to perceive momentous changes in the world and culture when they're reported in, say, the New York Times, but that wouldn't have the slightest clue that the most thrilling new rushes of creative filmmaking since the nouvelle vague originate in the apartments and editing rooms of Manila, Kuala Lumpur, Barcelona and Buenos Aires. This new middlebrow has a fresh object of adoration in Boyle's entertainment, since it quite conveniently summarizes and expresses so many wishes, hopes and romantic yearnings of the West toward what is perceived as the troubled East, with today's West resembling nothing so much as the West of the Sixties and its taste for turning Indian style into various forms of Hippie Chic. Slumdog is paisley cinema, pure and simple. Boyle's feverish, woozy, drunken and thoroughly contrived picaresque also conveniently packages misperceptions about India (and the East) that continue to support the dominant Western view of the Subcontinent. This makes the film a potent object to examine not only what is cockeyed about an outsider's view (particularly, an Englishman's view) of India, but even more, what is misperceived by a middlebrow critical establishment and audience about what comprises world cinema.