Book Review: Nitin Govil,Orienting Hollywood: A Century of Film Culture between Los Angeles and Bombay

Nitin Govil’s new book continues his earlier interest in restating Hollywood on global platforms (see Miller, Govil, McMurria, & Wang, 2001, 2005) by engaging with perhaps Hollywood’s most intractable antagonist: Bombay. The Indian or, more precisely, Bombay-based film industry has been viewed down the twentieth century a little like the Gaul village in Asterix: an economically tiny industry that is nevertheless Hollywood’s strange Other, at once terminally dependent for its texts on its big imperial overseas rival, even as it stays fiercely independent of it financially, stubbornly presenting cultural and economic challenges greater than its economic worth could ever justify.

Govil’s previous books significantly transformed our understanding of how a California-based film industry grew to become a global entity, relying on complex circuits of labor and capital. With Orienting Hollywood, he extends several of the arguments made there to overcome standard histories of Bombay’s obsession and hatred for Hollywood, and tells instead a much more complex story of the mutual role both industries have played in the growth of each other’s creative film-driven economies.

Govil does this by inquiring into several phenomena, chosen both for their historical as well as metaphorical significance. He begins with the idea of the “copy” which, in his view, extends across questions of intellectual property through to an imagination of a Bollywood industry that could itself be seen as a gigantic illegitimate copy of an American original. He then turns to another register of financial exchange, using as his trigger the attempt by a major Mumbai finance conglomerate, Anil Ambani’s Reliance MediaWorks, to invest in Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks. In Govil’s hands, this extraordinary investment is framed by 50 years of failure in sorting out the problems between the two industries, moving from the “blocked funds” history of the 1950s/1960s to unsuccessful attempts to put together crossover productions like Sony’s investment in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Saawariya (2007) and Warner’s in Nikhil Advani’s From Chandni Chowk to China (2009). The third chapter addresses the 1990s’ multiplex phenomenon, and is once again staged upon a century-wide platform, going back to Universal’s early twentieth century effort to take over Madan Theatres. The fourth chapter revisits the question of cultural labor—a key category of inquiry in the earlier Global Hollywood project—here extended into a complex mix of religious tourism, fan adulation, and stereotyping.

Govil begins with an assertion. Hollywood’s hegemony is an “insufficient account” of interindustrial relations between the USA and India (p. 5), but figuring out the problem will need a fair bit of “disciplinary and methodological license” (p. 9). The problem, roughly, is this. Hollywood’s share of the Indian exhibition sector has historically been in the single digits. This, however, is an elusive fact, for it fails to account for the diverse levels of cultural investment that cannot be captured by box office figures alone. However, when he inquires about these levels, what he finds is a curious instability that defines both economies. In Hollywood’s case, it involves “runaway” productions and investment, paralleling the adoption of the Hollywood Mode by emerging national media industries. In India, he finds Hollywood playing the unexpected role of a catalyzing agent within India’s domestic cultural industries even as these transform and re-differentiate themselves. Establishing and maintaining any kind of control over such a diverse economy needs a complex of strategies, from IP to textual domination and from diplomatic lobbying to retain control over existing markets to awareness of new emerging markets. Developing a theoretical framework that would take all of this into consideration needs, among other things, a staggering, even vertiginous, textuality that can move seamlessly—as Govil does—from a publicity photograph of Anil Kapoor and Tom Cruise shaking hands in front of the Taj Mahal to an AT&T phone card and from Mehboob’s planned Taj Mahal as an unrealized Hollywood coproduction to Mission Impossible 4, all within a couple of pages.

As though this itself was not enough as a theoretical challenge, there is the further fact that even as Govil seeks to straddle the often intractably opposed methodologies of textual work and economics, he is writing at a time when the kaleidoscope is changing yet again, this time drastically and perhaps for good. It is as though contemporary events had almost “conspired to force me to write precisely that book about transnational economic victory” (p. 6). In theory, had Govil been able to transport his academic apparatus back in time, it appears that he might have well been able to write this very book in the 1920s with the Madan network, in the 1950s with the government of India’s clampdown on Hollywood’s Indian incomes or the 1970s when Jack Valenti declared a boycott of the Indian market. Is it simply his misfortune, or good fortune perhaps, that he is writing this story at the very moment when it is fundamentally changing, as Hollywood, now a very large transnational coproduction of American and Indian capital, at last establishes it’s long-delayed grip on India’s markets, or is the 2000s story merely another twist in a very long tale? And how might film studies find the wherewithal to tell a story as slippery and shifting as this one?

The problem is one that many film studies scholars across Asia will share, especially those from Japan, and I am thinking mainly of Mitsuhito Yoshimoto’s work (see Yoshimoto, 1991, 2000), Koichi Iwabuchi’s (2002) classic Recentering Globalization, and Shunya Yoshimi’s (2003) work on Americanization in Japan. I am also thinking of Tom O’Regan’s wonderful Australian National Cinema (1996). The consequences of Hollywood’s refractions through the prism of national cultures—especially its adoption for further acts of both extending and fighting imperial domination within Asia—have been a topic of considerable interest to many, and Govil certainly talks to that interest. In both, the story first begins somewhat benevolently when the Hollywood mode is adopted in Asian battles that appear to be far from American shores, but takes a much more aggressively virulent turn when used to fight off American domination itself.

Govil keeps open the question of whether recent developments are a game changer or just another episode in an ongoing saga. This is an important decision on his part, in a book that might have taken the safer option of historicizing the issue, rather than rendering it so mesmerizingly contemporary. It does, however, run the risk of making his object of inquiry far more elusive than merely answering the question of whether the era of Hollywood domination has finally dawned in India or not. Govil’s shadow copy—emerging from pirate economies that, along with other spectral presences that haunt the global modern, turns into a full-scale industry with the arrival of Bollywood and culminates in the grudging admission by Quentin Tarantino (himself no exemplar of cinematic originality) that Sanjay Gupta’s Kaante (2002), the unacknowledged remake of his own Reservoir Dogs (1992)—is far closer to his original inspiration in its use of background stories of characters than he had been himself able to achieve in his film. Rachel Dwyer has recorded an equally bizarre reverse instance when Yash Chopra apparently edited down and dubbed a “Hollywood” version of his Sridevi–Anil Kapoor film Lamhe (1991), titled Indian Summer, and removed all the songs. This was presumably just before the onset of Bollywood.

Paralleling oddities like these, and reflected in films such as Shona Urvashi’s Saas Bahu Aur Sensex (2008), is the curious financial ocean of subterranean money sloshing around the world in search of investments—an ocean that once bankrolled Bombay’s film industry and may now be at the doorstep of Los Angeles. In Govil’s telling, the story begins a while ago with blocked funds being used for diplomatic parties, building movie theatres and even bankrolling films by the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) through interest-free loans, and culminates in Ambani’s deal to acquire Dreamworks. At the same time, there is a shadowy and equally subterranean “new international division of labor”, as labor extraction occurs at a global scale even as national–cultural forms do a “spatial performance” by instituting social practices extending from informal codes of etiquette to regularizations of identity and domicile, eventually facilitating outsourcing. And there is the multiplex, which may well have been India’s first major cleanup of its exhibition circuits in its history, clearly giving Hollywood new opportunities for investment.

Perhaps, the main question I am left with at the end of what is a very racy read is precisely the elusive nature of the topic of inquiry itself: the place where Govil finally locates his Hollywood. As with all elusive forms, there is something both attractive and frustrating about this book—you are perennially in wait for the bite-sized offering. Is Hollywood, seen thus, at once all around us, defining the everyday even as it exists as a fugitive economy that, as Govil quotes Shravan Shroff of Shringar Films, is simply a “certain type of sex appeal” where “you have to walk their walk, talk their talk”, not “worth it” in the end? Finally, at once, about everything and nothing?