Bollywood For Beginners: Part 9

Note: This series was originally posted to my Bollywood blogspot blog and represents the cumulation of the wisdom of a decade or so spent in the Bollywood trenches. It would have last been edited in about 2014.

Bollywood For Beginners 9

SONGS AND MUSIC:

What’s the deal with all those songs in Bollywood?

From Bollywood “parodies” on television shows like The Simpsons to so-called viral video hits like the “Benny Lava” video (which puts silly “misheard” lyrics over a fairly standard Prabhudeva song), the Western idea of Bollywood music is nonsensical, exoticized, and far removed from any film song I’ve ever seen. Westerners seem to find the lip-synced Bollywood film song an almost insurmountable obstacle to accepting the Bollywood style of filmmaking as enjoyable, let alone accepting it as good filmmaking. Music has always been an essential part of Western film but the problem that American viewers (in particular) have with lip-synced songs seems to stem from the American stereotypes about the genre of films that we call “musicals.” 

Even though successful writer-directors like Joss Whedon (The Avengers) and the pair of Trey Parker and Matt Stone (South Park) have dabbled in “musicals” (Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along Blog and South Park: The Movie, respectively), the genre is still seen something created exclusively for women and gay men. And despite many societal advances made by those two groups, most discussion about films still takes place in a in a straight male context. And with the big cultural taboo that remains against straight men liking anything that could be considered even remotely effeminate, Bollywood has, for the most part, been ignored by the Western film community, even as mass entertainment from places like China (kung fu and wuxia films) and Japan (anime) has been embraced. 

The complicating factor is that there is a good deal of truth to the idea that American movie musicals are all non-serious fluff. Most movie musicals were (and remain) adapted from Broadways shows. While Broadway today is mostly a dumping ground of film adaptations and revivals of Rodgers & Hart shows, in the early part of the 20th century, popular theater was an important part of the cultural conversation: dangerous, political, and wildly entertaining. For example, in 1927 Mae West wrote and starred in a play called Sex, with a plot that presaged Pretty Woman by about 50 years. But these plays never made it to Hollywood because the heyday of the movie musical happened to corresponded with the heyday of the Hays Code and all of the adult content--not just sex but anything considered unwholesome, like social commentary--was expunged, leaving little to these film adaptations but sugar and wonderful production numbers.

This is not true of Bollywood. While films do have to pass through a Censor Board--which, despite the name, is more like an officially sanctioned version of the MPAA Ratings Board than something out of George Orwell--and explicit depictions of sex are going to be snipped if a film is to have an all-ages certificate--again, much like they would be in a film that would be receiving a G-rating from the MPAA--films can and do discuss a wide variety of serious issues using lip-synced songs. The classic film Roti Kapada aur Makaan (“Food, Clothing, and Shelter,” 1974) for example, is a tough look at how the drive to stay out of poverty can lead a person to an immoral life. It’s an adult film dealing with adult issues, including a very disturbing rape scene, and it uses lip sync songs to tell the story. 

Even for those film critics who might consider liking something “gay,” they still have to overcome the misconception that film songs make Bollywood films “faker” or “more unrealistic” than their Hollywood counterparts. But if you think about it objectively, the use of music in Hollywood films is just as contrived as in Bollywood films. Bollywood “musicals” only seem fantastical to the non-Bollywood viewer because they’re not used to that style of filmmaking. Actually, it’s no more or less ‘realistic’ for two characters to sing a romantic song together to convey love than it is for a soaring John Williams score to bubble up while those two character stare soulfully into each others eyes. Is the orchestra hiding in behind the couch? Are they just following the couple around playing appropriate music? Isn’t that kind of expensive? And why doesn’t the couple hear the music, too? And who just stares at their romantic partner for five minutes? Isn’t it kind of creepy? Hollywood viewers don’t ask these questions because we instinctively read the visual-audio shorthand of soaring orchestra plus soulful staring as love. But questions like “Why are they singing?” and “shouldn’t they just be staring at each other soulfully instead?” would seem equally as ridiculous to a Bollywood filmmaker. (It may seem incredible to a viewer steeped in Hollywood film tradition but the John Williams-style orchestral score can feel really suffocating and false to those who are not used to hearing it; “no background scores” was point number two on the Dogme 95 chastity list for a reason. )

The reason we Americans have the filmmaking conventions around music that we have now is because in the 1930s, Hollywood studio heads were concerned that film audiences would be too stupid to understand the idea of characters expressing their inner monologues through song and they made the decision to avoid that trope as much as possible. (In fact, this is still a matter of concern for Hollywood filmmakers, which is why some film adaptations of Shakespeare plays will have monologues performed via voice-over and why the Oscar winning musical Chicago went out of its way to show that the songs were explicit fantasy sequences.) This meant that most of those adapted Broadway shows weren’t just reworked to avoid political and sexual content, they were also reworked to put the songs into settings where they were being explicitly performed, directly leading to the Let’s Put on a Show genre (e.g. High School Musical.) Unfortunately this also meant that when a character did express themselves through song in a movie musical, that character was actually singing in the reality of the film. Anyone with a passing familiarity with movie musicals can think of scenes where a character stands alone in an empty theater and sings his or her heart out only to be startled when somebody overhears the song. 

While some Bollywood songs do take place at festivals or weddings or stage shows that show the characters really singing in the reality of the film, other songs function more like a soliloquy in a Shakespearean play. In other words, the characters aren’t actually singing in the reality of the film but expressing their characters’ inner feelings in a metaphorical, breaking the fourth wall way. Where a Hollywood film might show a couple falling in love using a montage of different scenes set to a classic rock song, in Bollywood, that same experience could be shown with the couple singing a duet in a lush meadow in Europe. Indian audiences implicitly understand that the couple has not actually been teleported to Switzerland just like Hollywood audiences understand that the montage is meant to show the passage of time. The fantasy location and the song are designed to show what that first blush of love feels like to the people involved, rather than showing what that couple might look like if snippets of their life were set to “Walking on Sunshine.” 

Editing, background scores, special effects… and falling-in-love montages do not happen in real life but we have learned to look beyond the artifice of the tools to appreciate the stories being told. The only difference between those things and Bollywood songs is that is that Western viewers understand how a montage works but have no experience with the Bollywood song form. Songs are an integral part of the Indian film language and one can’t properly watch a mainstream Bollywood film without understanding that.

(And for more information on Broadway shows being hacked to pieces for Hollywood adaptations, please consult the amazing book Through The Screen Door by Thomas Hischak.)