RACE IN CINEMA MONTH: MY NAME IS KHAN AND THE PROVERBIAL LIBERAL MESSAGE MOVIE

Shahrukh Khan as Rizwan Khan in My Name Is Khan. Don't be a wiseass and ask what his name is.

Continuing on the theme of the last post, I want to talk about a peculiar variant on unintentional racism: the Hollywood liberal message movie. This is a very specific thing, as there are plenty of movies with progressive political themes, and they can be great, but a Liberal Message Movie (or, as they should probably be called, LIBERAL MESSAGE MOVIES because the all-caps is proportionate to their subtlety) is frequently really fucking embarrassing. This is because of the “awwwww, wookit the cute widdue culture that we don't weally undastand, SO CUUUUUUTE” tone that these pictures tend to take. Even in LMMs that manage to keep their levels of condescension down, there's a tendency to grossly oversimplify shit. Irony of ironies, the liberal tendency to not want to offend anyone ends up being the most offensive thing in the movie.

Weirdly, when I was trying to think of the most annoying example I could of this tradition, the one I came up with wasn't a Hollywood movie. It wasn't even from America. But much like one sees one's one flaws most clearly in others, it took a foreign picture trying its damnedest to be a Hollywood liberal message movie to really shine a light on how staggering the fuckups can be therein. The picture is called My Name Is Khan, directed by Karan Johar, and starring Shahrukh Khan.

It's not a total disaster, and its heart—as with all LMMs—is in the right place. Shahrukh Khan stars as Rizwan Khan, a Muslim from India who has Asperger's Syndrome (thus making it a near-stereotypical “PLEASE I'M DESPERATE FOR AN OSCAR PLEASE GIVE ME ONE I'LL SUCK YOUR DICK” role, though it's one that SRK does a creditable and sympathetic job with; he's never quite as annoying as he could be, even though the accuracy of his portrayal of someone with Asperger's is slight at best). The story is told through heavy use of flashbacks, but what's eventually revealed is the following: In typical LMM fashion, Rizwan has a savant-like ability to repair just about any mechanical object, and a tendency to utter Great Truths. He encounters, first in India and then when he emigrates to the United States, a good deal of anti-Muslim prejudice that basically takes the form of people marching up to him and going “I AM PREJUDICED AGAINST YOU BECAUSE YOU ARE A MUSLIM. HAVE YOU ANYTHING TO DO OR SAY THAT SHALL REVEAL ME TO BE FOOLISH IN MY PREJUDICE, MR. KHAN?” And when it's expedient for the plot, he does.

In San Francisco, Rizwan falls in love with a pretty Indian hairdresser, Mandira (Kajol). It's love at first sight, at least for Rizwan. (The first picture Shahrukh and Kajol made together, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, in 1995 is an all-time classic in Bollywood, and is so largely because Shahrukh and Kajol blaze when they're on screen together. Anyone who's ever cried at the movies and hasn't seen it is advised to stop reading this immediately and rent DDLJ.) So a bit of mildly (but not terribly) embarrassing cutesy “I'm autistic and awkward but I love you” business out of Shahrukh—not the world's subtlest actor at the best of times—and Kajol triumphs over the fact that there's no way Mandira should plausibly fall in love with yutz Rizwan and falls in love with Shahrukh. (Or, more simply, real movie stars don't let dumb scripts get in their way. They know what people are there watching the movie for.) They get married, and Rizwan's brother manages to get past the fact that Mandira is Hindu, and everyone's good and happy and it's the American dream, and Rizwan adopts Mandira's son Sameer and yay!

Then 9/11. One thing I do have to give MNIK credit for is a straightforward anger at how fucking stupid Americans got about Muslims after 9/11 (which has eased slightly in the decade since, but not anywhere near enough). This comes to a head when Sameer's white American BFF, having snubbed him out of post 9/11 racism, and a group of bullies set upon Sameer (who, being brown, was clearly responsible for the attacks) and call him “terrorist” and rough him up a bit. Sameer makes the mistake of fighting back, and they really stomp the piss out of him. I mean, they fuck him up good. But (and this is where MNIK did an irreversible plausibility swandive and faceplanted straight into an unforgiving concrete floor of “get the fuck out of here”) the way the bullies kill him is when Sameer gets back up and is talking shit, the alpha bully kicks a soccer ball into his chest. And that puts him out. Yes, that happens, you hear about kids getting hit with baseballs and just dropping dead, but come on.

Mandira goes into deep shock, and in her anger blames Rizwan for Sameer dying, by being Muslim. Rizwan, having no other sense of the world than the absolutely literal, says, “but I am not a terrorist,” to which Mandira, rhetorically, says “Go tell the president 'My name is Khan and I am not a terrorist'” in a “get the fuck out of here you Forrest Gump motherfucker” kind of tone. So Rizwan packs a bag and sets out to go find the president to tell him “My name is Khan, and I am not a terrorist,” his refrain for the whole movie, introduced in the first scene.

In Rizwan's travels, he meets a bunch of people, some good, some bad, but all are overshadowed when he finds himself in Georgia, and a young black urchin wipes out on his bicycle and asks Rizwan for help. Rizwan takes him home and . . . well . . . there's no way to accurately convey how unfuckingbelievable this is if you haven't seen the movie, but anyone who has can tell you, I'm not exaggerating at all when I say the kid with the bicycle lives in a village that's like the fucking Shire in Middle Earth but instead of Hobbits it's Gone With The Wind-esque black people. Again, that's not an exaggeration at all. The bike kid's mom is literally named Mama Jenny. And Rizwan calls the kid, Joel, “Funny-hair Joel” for the whole rest of the movie because he's got a 'fro. Yeah.

Like, okay. American movies fuck stuff up all the time. I'm sure at some point some American movie set in another country and committed fuckups of this or similar caliber. I'm sure thirty of you could name the worst example and come up with thirty different answers. It's just . . . until someone comes and does it to your country you don't really realize how bad it is (and I know it sounds like I'm whining about people being mean to America, that's not it at all, it's that I'm like oh fuck this is how it feels to everyone else when we make shitty movies. . . ) And to compound things, in the mutual agape for all things Hollywood middlebrow shared to varying degrees by Karan Johar and Shahrukh Khan, they do it in a really earnest Hollywood middlebrow kind of way, which means not only does it suck, it's so melodramatically treacly that it's just like . . . fuck.

So, Rizwan stays in the Shire for a little while before moving on and getting into trouble for trying to barge up to the president while saying something about the word “terrorist.” Eventually, everything gets cleared up, but then a fictional version of Hurricane Katrina hits, and Rizwan has to race back to the Shire and singlehandedly try and save everyone. This makes national news, and finally gets Rizwan his audience with the president (the guy they got to play Barack doesn't look much like him but does a fair vocal impression, though they cover for this by not naming him, he's just “the president”) and finally gets to tell him “my name is Khan and I am not a terrorist.” And Barack is like, “I know.” Because Barack is awesome. (Well, also, Barack kills the fuck out of terrorists. You know what I'm saying? Like, he doesn't just kill them he kills the motherfucking fuck out of them. The Seal Team Six raid that ended up with Osama bin Laden getting murked was so fucking awesome they needed to get Kathryn fucking Bigelow to direct the movie of it. So, if Rizwan had been a terrorist, Barack probably would have crushed his nuts with his fucking mind. Anyway, sorry, that's me not being a terribly good progressive, but hey, them's the bricks.)

The thing to remember, is that like all good Liberal Message Movies, My Name Is Khan doesn't mean any harm. It doesn't have a mean bone in its body. Even the little shitheads who kill Sameer are immediately remorseful. It's just . . . dude, that bit with Mama Jenny in the Shire is just flabbergasting. My Name Is Khan is an atypical Bollywood movie in a lot of ways (paramount among which is that it's distressingly light on songs) but one way in which it holds true is in the sense that when Bollywood movies go there, they Go There. When they're good they're damn near the best thing there is. When they're bad, holy shit do they suck. I'll take the bad if it means we also get the good, but fuck a duck when you mix the way Bollywood swings for the fences with the kind of guileless schmaltz of Hollywood Liberal Message Movies the result is a serious cautionary tale. Because My Name Is Khan came out in 2010. It shouldn't leave its audience floundering for a cultural frame of reference more recent than Gone With The Wind.

And the great shame of that bit is that it undermines a lot of the things K-Jo and SRK got right. There's a subplot about how Rizwan's in a mosque praying and overhears a bunch of guys who have fucking Had It and are about to resort to terrorism. Shahrukh plays Rizwan's freakout really well. He just flat out tells the guys, you're wrong and you shouldn't do this, in a way that would have been horribly on the nose and basically the filmmakers getting a bullhorn and shouting “TERRORISM IS BAD YOU GUYS” at the audience, if Shahrukh didn't get it just right. Which makes up for the seven or eight scenes when you just want to strangle the fucker for overplaying the Asperger's.

I guess the point of all this is, Liberal Message Movies are annoying, but there's a limit to how pissed off at them one can get, because they are trying to do the right thing. (Speaking of Do The Right Thing, a celebration of the cinema of Spike Lee is coming in a couple/few days, so Race In Cinema Month won't all be scolding and complaining.) But there's nothing worse than seeing a movie try to be good and fuck up. And it's especially unfortunate when it comes at the expense of the things the movie does well. Oh well.

As a counterexample of this kind of bullshit, I caught In The Heat of the Night on TCM the other day. That was the same year Sidney Poitier was also in Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?, which spends its entire running time shrieking about how important it is (and poor Spencer Tracy looks so horribly uncomfortable the whole movie, I felt bad), but In The Heat of the Night takes a different tactic, which is basically, “Sidney Poitier is fucking awesome.” It's shot by Haskell Wexler, it's cut by Hal Ashby, people like Rod Steiger and Warren Oates are in it and rule, and most importantly holy shit Sidney Poitier. He's waiting for a train in a small town in The South when he gets arrested for existing while black after a guy gets killed, and because he's smarter and more badass than everyone in three states Sidney Poitier solves the murder. Not only that, but he manages to do it without the benefit of any modern advances in forensic science. In The Heat of the Night is pure ownage, great filmmaking and holy shit Sidney Poitier. See? That's how you do a movie about how racism is stupid. All you need is a good script, talented filmmakers, and really good actors. But most importantly, know who the people are who are in your movie. Caring isn't enough.