Film trailers are notorious for telling too much plot, giving the wrong impression of the film, or emphasizing marketable stars over important characters. But more serious dangers arise when selling Asian American cinema to American audiences. APA does a close reading of Fox Searchlight's trailers for The Namesake.
It's comforting to read that I'm not alone in finding the U.S. trailer for Mira Nair's The Namesake badly misrepresentative of the actual film. On Kal Penn's blog for instance, the film's lead actor writes that, based on the trailer, people "thought the film [would be] about an Indian kid who has to choose between his white girlfriend or his Indian one." Penn then adds that what makes the misinterpretation unfortunate is that "people are viewing these characters in terms of race." Penn's insistence that the film is not about racial identity (reiterated in APA's interview with him) has become an important point of debate among Indian American fans of the film, and while I fall on the side of those who think the film is indeed about racial identity (among other things), I agree with him that the trailer's positing of American-ness versus Indian-ness (articulated misogynistically as a decision over picking a white or South Asian girl) is not at all what the film is about.
Trailer #1
First, let's take a closer look at the U.S. trailer:
The first words we hear are Gogol (Penn's character) describing a woman's "luscious lips" while we see images of a South Asian American beauty seductively looking at the camera. The editing is done in the classical Hollywood shot-reverse-shot style, with Gogol's desiring gaze followed by the female object of his sexual craving.
This is followed by a short set of scenes where Gogol's mother complains that her son "is willing to go on vacation with someone else's parents, but not to see his own." We see a montage of Gogol with his arms around his white girlfriend, relaxing with her upper-class family.
Then we see the white girlfriend commit faux pas after faux pas when she visits his parents, ignoring the ground rules Gogol has set for her ("no kissing, no holding hands"), suggesting the incompatibility of white and Indian cultures. This is followed by Gogol's proclaiming his American-ness, his desire to change his name, and his choice of the white girl over an Indian one. ("Your parents want you to marry a nice Indian girl," she says, as images of the seductive South Asian come on the screen. "I don't care what they want, this is what I want," he replies.)
The trailer's tone shifts as the emphasis is placed on Gogol's father, who tells his son that the name "Gogol" has to do with one fateful night in India.
"Do I remind you of that night?" Gogol asks his father. "You remind me of everything that followed," is his response.
The music swells. India! We see images of Gogol at the Taj Mahal, jogging in the streets of his forefathers. "The greatest journeys are the ones that bring you home," reads the trailer's text. The editing gains momentum and cuts back and forth between Gogol, his parents, his white girlfriend, and the South Asian girl. The Namesake.
Trailer #2
As a point of contrast, let's also take a look at the international trailer.
The first image we see: India. The first words we hear: "Two strangers, brought together by tradition, begin a journey that would take them half-way around the world." The emphasis is immediately placed on the parents as immigrants from a traditional land, who arrive in America, described in the trailer as "the land of opportunity," where "you can become whatever you want." We then see images of their young son Gogol growing from kid to teenager.
"Their eyes were opened," says the trailer voice. A teenage Gogol rocks out on an air guitar.
"Their differences were exposed." Gogol wants to change his foreign-sounding name.
"Their loyalties were tested." Gogol goes out with a white girl.
The trailer's tone shifts as the emphasis is placed on Gogol's father, who tells his son that the name "Gogol" has to do with one fateful night in India.
"Do I remind you of that night?" Gogol asks his father. "You remind me of everything that followed," is his response.
Musical montage of life in India, tears in the United States, and the discovery of love, American style. The Namesake.
So, what's being sold...
Both trailers use the father's speech about "that night" as a tonal turning point, but for very different reasons. In the U.S. trailer, knowing "everything that followed" that night forces Gogol to retrace his cultural history, to take the journey "that brings him home," to choose between the white and the Indian girl. In the international trailer, "everything that followed" is the journey of the parents, who cross borders and confront cultural change.
In my opinion, both trailers get it wrong, although the U.S. trailer's misleading representation of the story is especially sneaky. The international trailer simply leaves the cultural conflict ambiguous because it doesn't want to give anything away (or because ambiguity sells better to a heterogeneous international audience). On the other hand, the U.S. trailer plays on the American audience's insistence on romantic couplings by reducing Indian American identity to the masculinist choice between female objects. To make matters worse, that "home" is defined by India only contributes to the stereotype that Asian Americans are, in their purest state, Asian.
To me, that's the opposite of what the film argues so eloquently. [minor spoilers in this paragraph] The "journey home" forces Gogol to confront the meaning of his name, but ironically, it doesn't lead him to India, but to Russian literature. "Gogol" comes from the Russian novelist Nikolai Gogol, whose The Overcoat is the book Gogol's father is reading when he is motivated to move to the United States. Finding out about the meaning of "that night" isn't a search for one's Indian roots; rather, it's learning about the development of his father's cosmopolitan identity and his decision to move to America. "Home" isn't defined by the cultural purity of the Taj Mahal, but by the ethos of being at the intersections of multiple cultures -- Indian, American, New York, white, Bengali, Russian. It's significant too that the film inverts quite matter-of-factly the stereotypical formula of Asian American intergenerational conflict: the son at first thinks that "home" is India, but it's his parents who prove to be most open to hybrid identities and cultural mixing. The younger generation obsesses about being good Indian kids while the older generation grew up reading Russian literature and falling for "Made in America" labels.
But you miss all of that playful subtly in the U.S. trailer, which focuses on selling the mystique of Asia and the clichés of Asian American family conflict. I can't say I'm surprised, given that the ideal audience for The Namesake is the predominantly upper-middle class, Caucasian, Asia-loving Miramax crowd that made Deepa Mehta's Water, Wayne Wang's The Joy Luck Club, and Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet art house hits. But what about Asian Americans? Why must Asian American cinema necessarily be filtered as Asian entertainment for whites? Must the Asian American audience only be a secondary demographic when they are the primary subject matter? Must the choice of categories always be white or Asian?
APA review of The Namesake
APA interview with Kal Penn
APA interview with Mira Nair