Like that VW ad, NYC sometimes has moments of spooky synchronicity. Like the time two weeks ago when I hailed a cab to SoHo. The fellow who picked me up was an uncle crooning along to Hindi ghazals in the direction of his steering wheel. After crossing the Williamsburg Bridge, we passed a Sikh guy with a black pug and a cute Punjaban walking toward chic bar Mecca. A block later, a group of desi high school kids sounded their barbaric yawps over the sidewalks of the world. The louche lounge turned out all Arabic and Hindi tunes, Turkish lanterns and Bombay tones; ‘twas hookahs and wine, you know the kind.
Similarly, both major movies released last weekend, Madagascar and The Longest Yard, had desi influences. In the animated film Madagascar, a major character speaks in a comical desi accent mouthed by Ali G. His Julian the lemur king is pompous and faintly ridiculous, though aside from the accent he’s funny in his own right. The sound isn’t exactly Sellers, but this movie confirms the cycle of immigrant visibility: first ignored, then laughed at, then accepted. (And finally The Man? Only in spelling bees.)
The hilarious thing is, American movie reviewers couldn’t place the accent. It was clearly a desi parody, though rounded off via the West Indies or just the fertile mind of Sacha Baron Cohen. Reviewers guessed all over the map: Eurotrash, Middle Eastern, Caribbean. Here’s what the director said:
We had this two-line character, Julian, and we got a tape of the show “Ali G” with Sacha Baron Cohen. He came in and he invented this Indian accent. We gave him a couple of lines and he turned them into eight minutes of dialogue. We were just in tears on the floor and thought, “This guy has to be the king.” So that was just a two-line part that he invented and it turned into that role.
‘Still buffoons, freaks, troublemakers, idiots and virgins are we.’ Except for Kal Penn, desis only get on Hollywood screens as dwarves and giants, cabbies and pizza guys. So I subjected myself to another movie by Adam Sandler (motto: the finest in passive-aggressive mediocrity) to see Turley, a.k.a. Dalip ‘Giant’ Singh. In The Longest Yard, he’s cast as a lobotomized monster who bangs his head against prison walls, ignores a head wound and plays ping-pong alone: the hunchback of Apni Ma. He speaks a couple of lines in perfectly understandable English, but he’s the only character to get obnoxious, thick, yellow subtitling because of his Jalandhar accent.
This stereotypical crap is too denatured to be offensive, but it’s consistent enough to be tiresome. Leave Hank Azaria and Ali G to make money off the Peter Sellers gravy train. I’d love to see a weekend when two mainstream releases have desi romantic leads. Then the rest would be a lot more palatable.
