The western gaze & poverty porn
Colonialism has left many wounds on multiple cultures, leaving generational turmoil, systemically seeping into our lifestyles. When discussing colonisation in the age of media, it’s hard to leave out the Western gaze. A gaze that is often normalised has diluted many cultures lost in translation, ignorance, and bias.
Here are some examples:
Slumdog Millionaire (2008), dir. Danny Boyle: One of the most famous depictions of India in mainstream Western cinema, garnering infamy for its post-colonial gaze and sensationalisation of poverty, crime, and the Dharavi slum.
The Help (2011), dir. Tate Taylor: Depictions of the white protagonist playing the role of a ‘saviour’ to the minor African-American characters (spoiler: their (the help) lifestyles remain the same or worsen)
The Best Marigold Hotel (2011), dir. John Madden: The exotification of Indian culture provides a distinct class difference, with the British retirees being from a superior Occident in contrast to the Orient – barbaric and morally inferior.
A more recent example would be British actor Dev Patel’s debut film, ‘Monkey Man’ (2024), which mimics the style of Indian action films with a not-so-foreign narrative of an underdog avenging his family/community. This is done with a backdrop of a political commentary with elements of mysticism.
While done with the right intentions, there is a disconnect within the treatment of Indian representation in the film. Whether it is an overflowing toilet or a cocaine-crazed gentleman’s strip club, these visually provoke a sense of disgust rather than something gritty and dark. For a direct comparison, Anurag Kashyap’s “Gangs of Wasseypur” (2012) successfully uses a landscape of lack of morals, poverty, and violence by documenting a reality without glorifying or judging it.
While art is always up for interpretation, a film director usually dictates the treatment of the piece and can also dictate, to an extent, the audience’s perception. And in Patel’s film, the feeling of disgust echoes a westernised gaze, almost like the fictional streets that resemble the city of Mumbai are peered into by a judging, foreign eye. And for an Indian audience, this experience can be quite unsettling. Siddhant Adlakha writes about the subtle cultural hypocrisies that cause the overall intention of the political film to fall flat.
“Cinema isn’t a science, but a number of political films are distinctly Newtonian: they contain equal and opposite forces, resulting in inertia.
Adam McKay’s 2021 climate change satire Don’t Look Up blames the public’s disinterest in politics on its obsession with fame, all while flaunting a celebrity ensemble; this isn’t the gravest offense, but it calls the movie’s message and self-awareness into question. Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi’s 1971 Italian mockumentary Addio Zio Tom (Goodbye Uncle Tom), which seeks to lampoon American slavery, but does so by dehumanizing hundreds of poor Haitian extras on camera; a horrific hypocrisy. The list goes on.
Monkey Man—the action-packed, politically-volatile directorial debut of actor Dev Patel—is plagued with a similar problem, but it’s neither as fluffy as McKay’s faux pas, nor as materially harmful as Jacopetti and Prosperi’s exploitation. Patel’s revenge film exists between these two extremes, with contradictory optics stemming from images whose creation is well-intended, but whose meaning grows more incongruous and disconcerting as the current events of India’s thorny political climate fades into view. “ (Adhlakha, 2024)
While this is just the tip of the iceberg, it opens up the murky layers of systemic bias inculcated within all of us that sometimes perpetuate self-inflicted bias and confused cultural identities that can be reflected in the media we create and consume.
In a more extreme reality, this has been a catalyst for the phenomenon of ‘poverty porn’ where the “struggling” are objectified to garner sympathy from an audience, often for commercial purposes, blurring the line between altruism and voyeurism. There is a subconscious satisfaction in dipping your toes into situations of distress under a blanket of privilege, hence why village/slum/ghetto tourism has garnered its niche market.
A great example would be Dharavi, the slum featured in Slumdog Millionaire, which now has a surge of people worldwide coming to tour the slum, almost making it into a human zoo.
References:
Adlakha, S. (2024) ’Monkey Man’s political critique misses the point, Time. Available at: https://time.com/6963482/monkey-man-political-critique/ (Accessed: 23 July 2024).
Kevin McCloud: Slumming it (2010) - EP1 (2012) YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Im0tHRs9Bng (Accessed: 23 July 2024).
Gonzaga , E. (no date) The gamification and domestication of slum voyeurism: From poverty porn to aesthetics of precarity, Mediapolis. Available at: https://www.mediapolisjournal.com/2019/10/the-gamification-and-domestication-of-slum-voyeurism/ (Accessed: 23 July 2024).
Hew, L. (no date) Poverty porn: Post-colonialist attitudes in White Entertainment, Poverty Porn: Post Colonialist Attitudes in White Entertainment. Available at: https://gal-dem.com/poverty-porn-and-the-post-colonial-gaze/ (Accessed: 23 July 2024).
Writing and Curation by Sabrina Joseph
Animations by Anjali Swarstad
