1/4/2005 » Film

I saw The Life Aquatic last night, a hilarious, laid-back Jacques Cousteau parody. Bill Murray pulls his world-weary schtick, the same as in Lost in Translation. Murray and Owen Wilson are so lackadaisical, they match the Wes Anderson aesthetic perfectly. Willem Dafoe was marvelously comic, played against type as an insecure, slightly-built German deckhand. Jeff Goldblum and his army of white-suited eugenics experiments Village People’d across the screen. Seu Jorge transmogrified David Bowie songs into Portuguese guitar serenades. Anderson pays tremendous attention to small, throwaway comic texture, like a Crayola-colored seahorse trapped in a champagne glass, or a frumpy insurance company stooge who happens to speak Tagalog.

The director was very respectful of the handsome, turbaned actor / fashionista Waris Singh Ahluwalia: it was not a token role, the Sikh was a bona fide character. He had an American accent. He had a real name, Vikram Ray (though Ray is a Bengali name, perhaps a play on Satyajit). He was addressed by name several times, he had plenty of lines, he was an integral part of the crew. He even had three glamor shots in the submarine scene at the end, close-ups with light reflecting off his eyes. There was an Asian-American on the crew as well, and assorted Europeans; the casting was like the Star Trek bridge minus the aliens, with no particular attention drawn to their ethnicity. It’s the same way real-life technical teams are built.

Along with Naseeruddin Shah’s turbaned Captain Nemo in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, we’ve now got two turbaned desis on Hollywood screens as seafarers, perhaps because ocean voyages are linked with adventure and otherness.

Anderson does seems to slide people into fixed casting slots sometimes: Cate Blanchett looked a whole lot like Gwyneth Paltrow in this film, and Ahluwalia fit into the Kumar Pallana slot from The Royal Tenenbaums. Ahluwalia was also the videographer for the voyage, which, if you’ve been to a desi wedding, is arguably culturally accurate ;)

On the flip side, the marketing campaign cropped Ahluwalia out. It’s a shot of the submarine scene, where Ahluwalia was seated at far left. On the U.S. poster, the guy in the turban and the black guy are missing.

In this particular case, it’s probably because Ahluwalia and Jorge aren’t recognizable stars. However, in many movies (e.g. Sandra Oh in Sideways), minorities don’t figure in the marketing campaigns, even if they have substantial roles.

The business reasoning here is clear: minorities don’t move product in the heartland. Post-9/11, of course, there’s widespread anti-turban prejudice in the U.S. If the movie were to sink, the producer would want to know he’d done everything within his power to make it successful. And it’s one thing to take a stand against prejudice, quite another when a focus group can quantify its cost (‘the turban on the poster cost you $x million in box office’).

But this argument is weak in the end. It’s the same argument venture capitalists use to assure themselves they’re doing the right thing by knifing the founding team and bringing in a silver-haired hired gun. Regardless of financial impact, putting major characters on the poster would have been the right thing to do, popular minorities or not.

The kinds of people you’ll see doing so are producers at the top and the bottom: those who are either already successful enough to take the risk, such as Wes Anderson and his cult of fans, or so indie that they don’t care. And, of course, minorities themselves.