By S. Brent Plate

In the wake of the terrorist attacks on Mumbai, one of The New York Times most emailed articles last weekend was by NYU journalism professor, Suketa Mehta, entitled “What They Hate about Mumbai.” Professor Mehta waxed romantically and defiantly about his city: “My bleeding city,” a city of the “mass dream of the peoples of South Asia.” And while his antidote to terrorism–“to dream bigger, make even more money, and visit Mumbai more than ever”–was somewhat reminiscent of George W. Bush’s “go shopping” response to the 9/11/2001 US terrorist attacks, I was struck by Mehta’s constant reference to film in the midst of the current crisis, and the role of cinema in creating the dreams of the peoples of one of the world’s most populous cities.

Mehta’s piece reminded me of Salman Rushdie’s beautiful take on The Wizard of Oz (British Film Institute, 1992) a film that Rushdie considers his “very first literary influence.” Growing up in Mumbai (Bombay), Rushdie imagined the film as “the anthem of all the world’s migrants,” who might raise voices with the young Judy Garland and sing about a world over the rainbow, where troubles melt like lemondrops. Obviously, even the Land of Oz wasn’t without its troubles and terrors, and so indeed there is no place like home, emphasis on the “no place.”

I’ve never been to Mumbai, but spent a few weeks in Delhi, and elsewhere in northern India. I’ve had a taste of the sold-out Sunday afternoon cinema, of the throngs of people pleasantly spending an afternoon sitting and singing and crying their way through masala films. The cinema experience, in northern India and northern Indiana, invites viewers into a world over the rainbow.

In my recent book, Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World, I discuss how cinema operates as an analogy to religious myths and rituals through the ways it creates alternative worlds. At the altar and at the screen, participants in these aesthetic environments wonder about the way things in this world might be: whether apocalyptic fantasies about the end of the world, romantic fantasies about boy meets girls, or hero-adventure fantasies about how we must fight our way through the terror that confronts us. Films and myths give us insight, motivation, and sometimes even energy. The driving question is: “What if?” (“Toto, do you think there is such a place?”) And I think this is part of what drives Rushdie and Mehta in their quest for a cinema that is simultaneously escapist and motivational, allowing us to dream and act on those dreams.

The cinema is thus a “u-topia” (literally, a “no-place”), a place that actually doesn’t exist, even as it calls out to us to “dream bigger,” to transport us from the here and now into another world, a world of possibility. This is not escapism, but as with the Sabbath, a radical reinsertion into the real world. As Abraham Heschel puts it in his classic little book on the Sabbath, “It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world.”

If the Sabbath is the day we turn “to the mystery of creation” then film mimics this very process. Film makes us wonder about the world again, makes us say “wow!” offers images that allow us to see things in a new way. This is not to say all film accomplishes this, for there seems to be somewhat of an inverse relation between the spectacular images of film and the capacity for the viewer’s imagination–the more dazzling the image, the more depressed the imagination–, but then again, the challah bread, the candles, the recitation of prayers, are not fool-proof ways to stir our minds and bodies either. At its best, the Sabbath puts people in touch with their Creator, with their family, and with the created world. In the same way, anthropologist Bobby Alexander defines the aims of religious rituals in general, “Traditional religious rituals open up ordinary life to ultimate reality or some transcendent being or force in order to tap its transformative power.” At its best, film puts people in touch with the world again in new ways. In both of these, one is connected with their world only by experiencing another world.

Crucially, Rushdie suggests that The Wizard of Oz‘s “driving force is the inadequacy of adults, even of good adults, and how the weakness of grownups forces children to take control of their own destinies.” And it is here that Rushdie and Mehta dream collectively, becoming as children again. While there is no explicit mention of it, I suspect this is part of the reason Mehta’s article became one of the most emailed articles of the week, because the “no-place” is asserted as a backdrop to the burning buildings and death toll. There is a certain recoverable innocence possible in the alternate world of the cinema, a knowing innocence, a second naiveté. Even so, both Mehta and Rushdie understand that the two worlds, the u-topia and the here and now, continually collide and can’t be comprehended apart from each other. It would be foolhardy to remain in Oz, but utterly devastating to live in a world where there is nothing over the rainbow.

At least one questions remains: What will the Bollywood look like now? Will it wondrously, even apolitically, go on about its ways with song and dance and romantic drama? Or will it acknowledge the wound in its most prolific city and thereby bring the tragic more forcefully into the mixture that is the masala film?

S. Brent Plate is visiting associate professor of religious studies at Hamilton College. His most recent book is Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World.