Watch This, Not That: Eat Pray Love

by Jillian Butler, Ampersandology

Apologies for the drought in posting lately; I've been planning and then executing a cross-country move, and such things tend to eat up free time. The blog should be back to normal now that I'm settled! 

I'll just preface this entry with a confession: I have a huge problem with the upcoming adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love (opening today). It's not that I think the result will be an atrocious film; no, I think that, like most entires into 'Travel, Sad Woman, and Find Thyself" genre, will make you feel good about life and make you want to flag down a taxi to the airport (see also, Under the Tuscan Sun; A Good Year).

I think what bothers me most is the outrageous amount of privilege on display here, and the implication that all your average well-to-do but woefully unaware North American woman needs to find herself is to throw money, carbs, and traveler's cheques at the problem. Not every newly divorced singleton can decide to take off for a year and travel to exotic lands; in fact, who in the world, single or not, can really afford such a feat? Gilbert paid for her costly jaunt to Italy, Bali and with an advance she received on her book proposal. In other words, she hadn't yet written about epiphanies she hadn't yet had. Basically, as Maureen Callahan of the New York Post described it, the book stands as a rather egregious example of the "Western fetishization of Eastern thought and culture." 


As Bitch magazine coined just this year, this is priv-lit: the literature of Western privilege. 

Gilbert isn't the first to tap into the desire to travel and find yourself; hell, Henry Miller built an entire career on his rather exaggerated status as an American expatriate. What I disagree with most, then, is the dangerous seed that this notion plants: if only you could travel to foreign places, and learn the humble ways of strange cultures, then perhaps YOU TOO could stand to live your incredibly privileged Western life. It's presented as monetary only as an afterthought, when really, money (or lack thereof) is the entire barrier to the accessibility of her purchased revelations. I don't mean to demean any of the many problems our Western society faces, but really: just being born into it, with its freedom of speech and excess of food, puts you in a different league than the rest of most of the world.

Travel does have the side effect of forcing you to grow and change, yes. But I think that there's an honesty missing from the crux of Gilbert's narrative. The truths about yourself appear when you're stranded at an airport with no way to civilization; when you're the only person who speaks your language in a mob of people; when you find yourself making new friends from the strangest bonds. It's the hardship and challenges of travel that teach you about yourself, not eating gelato on a Italian bench or making kissy faces at Javiar Bardem.

For this first installation of Watch This, Not That, I present three movies that grapple with the real meat of being a stranger in a strange land, for better or (more likely) for worse.

Cairo Time (2009)
Probably the flip side to the Gilbert coin, Cairo Time is how a Westerner's love affair with foreign would most likely play out, and with a sweet, aching romance. Directed by Canadian Ruba Nadda, the film is the story of Juliet (played by the undeniably appealing Patricia Clarkson), who is waiting in Cairo for her husband, who has been delayed. She finds herself confined to her hotel room, unable to venture outside because of the effect of her unicorn-blondeness has on the local males. Tareq, an associate of her husband's and Cairo native, offers to escort her around the city, and the film is basically Juliet's slow introduction to an ordinary Cairo existence. It's a quiet, understated film that denies you the ending you think you expect, and its revelations don't arrive in well-timed voice-overs, but in soft waves. What I love most is its utter lack of fetish: no matter how far you go at the end of the day, as any traveler can tell you, people are just trying to live.

The Beach (2000)
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, The Beach is basically a Lord of the Flies for over-privileged expats, set in an isolated commune on an exotic, faraway island. This film didn't get a whole lot of love upon release, but to me, it manages to both revere and mock those young, naive kids who consider themselves 'travellers' not 'tourists.' The period of Edenic commune living, followed by the swift entrace of reality, is what makes the first two thirds of this forgotten film an interesting study of the sneaking, demanding nature of civilization.

The Darjeeling Limited (2007)
Three brothers quest to find their estranged mother after the sudden death of their father. Notable for how little their physical journey seems to change the brothers, contrary to most road trip movie standards, suggesting that travel is not the only ingredient in self-discovery: the brothers cling to their habits and proclivities even in the depth of Indian culture, so desperately they may as well be staying in a four-star on Main Street. But contrary to certain parties, self-discovery isn't included in your travel costs, but needs an open mind and a healthy dose of self-awareness.






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