Aesthetic of Escapism

    Popular cinema requires themes and content that can resonate with a wide audience. In Hollywood today, major studios are challenged with making films that can sell to both American and international audiences (usually focusing on China). This raises the question: how do you appeal to the widest audience possible? What style and themes transcend cultural differences? While there is some variance to the answer, the commonality in popular cinema is spectacle.
    Genre and spectacle are often used for the purpose of escapism. For example, in Star Wars, visual and sound effects place the film in a world outside of Earth. This other world shares many elements of the real world, but it feels different enough from our perception of reality to reduce the events of the film to mere allegory. There are aliens, but most of them take recognizable forms. Although it is set in the past, the world of Star Wars likely parallels much of its audience's vision of Earth's future. There are laser guns and lightsabers; futuristic updates to the swords and guns we use for warfare today.
    Kuch Kuch Hota Hai employs a far more subtle method of world-building to establish escapism. First of all, the film is color-coded and brightly lit. It looks incredible; certain frames are almost excessively candy-colored like a Gregg Araki film. It is not quite surrealism, but we would likely never see locations that look quite like this in reality. Because everyone in the movie is an actor, most everyone in the film is more good-looking than the average person. Additionally, there are musical numbers that are performed with spontaneity that could never be achieved in real life. The fact that these performances are carefully rehearsed beforehand is obvious, but while watching these scenes we forget this and get lost in the performance.
    The characters and narrative also contribute to the film's escapist quality. The narrative threads together too perfectly for it to be a true story; it is clearly scripted in order to create the most romantic drama. Although the film is very long, the plot is unraveled piece by piece at a pace that demands attention. It is not a difficult film to digest, which is a compliment for a popular film. The filmmakers intended for Kuch Kuch Hota Hai to be viewed by millions of people, so they made the themes as universal as possible.
     

Comments

  1. AmyNovember 30, 2020 at 9:11 AM

    It seems like a simple thing to make a narrative that can appeal across boundaries of race and culture. In fact, I think it actual takes a simplicity that is quite complex as this reading and the David Bordwell reading suggest. I think embodied forms such as actions films and musicals make the easiest transitions across borders because they speak a language that is as culturally bound. While this film makes obvious attempts to speak to a globalized world in relation to the inclusion of Islam and Sikh characters, its most obvious cosmopolitan gestures are in the things that you have indicated in a structural investment in spectacle.

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