Rajpal's Column

16th January 2000

Politics shipwrecks and that sinking feeling

By Rajpal Abeynayake

The fact that it is "Titanic as a cultural phenomenon'' is apparent to anyone who has had at least a brush with the commercial imperatives that have prevailed in Colombo in the recent past. But, it's been a vicarious swooning.

In New York or Tokyo, two cities which are culturally apart, the spectacle of the sinking of the Titanic and the love story that goes along with it has no doubt created a cultural phenomenon that has not been dissimilar. But, in both cities, the young swooners and the generally impressionable had all at least seen the movie.

In Colombo, the movie may have been seen via the restrictive medium of the video, which is the confirmation of the fact that Titanic was a cultural phenomenon that excited Colombo's aesthetically jaded.

The late A J. Jayawardena was the authority on cinema in the absence of any other in Colombo's know-it-all cultural ethos, used to say emphatically that watching Gandhi on video for instance is something he would not do, even if it meant he never saw the movie in his entire life. (Dead men don't tell tales it is correct, but the reference to Gunawardene here is at least posthumously meant to be complimentary though it might sound a tad posthumously patronizing too in the process)

There is no insult meant to Richard Attenborough here because his movie Gandhi cannot be compared to Cameron's hi-tech conspiracy, the Titanic, which was a designer movie made for audiences which had been brainwashed into believing that special effects represented good art.

The thrill value of Titanic notwithstanding, it generated a cultural stampede here in these parts with Colombo's cultural parvenu going for Titanic beer mugs, Titanic CD's and worst of all Titanic coffee table books. It is this sort of vicarious Americanization that had the importers of Titanic the movie in a thrall.

This vicarious Americanization has spewed all kinds of reactions some of which a movie such as the Titanic can do without. For example, those who are cultural dilettante, do not want to have anything to do with the Titanic as they feel it is about mush and cheesecake - - -to lapse into the quasi-Hollywood idiom here .

But, now that the movie Titanic is here, a separate movie is being planned about the shipwrecked Sri Lankan movie industry on the lines of the Cameron epic.

It is a bittersweet tale, but probably not as poignant as the tale of the torpedoed sense of aesthetic appreciation in Colombo.

Dwelling on a shipwrecked culture is depressing, but talking of lifestyles, the movie that is playing in the political theatre is infinitely more interesting and therefore it is advisable to cut to that scene.

The President for instance has a more keen sense of drama than James Cameron for instance, or the moguls who imported the Titanic who after all took so long to do it —when Titanic fever was almost extinguished and at a moribund fag - end.

There is more movement here in the political arena than in the cricket stadia or any of the cinema's in which Titanic is playing, for instance. Ronnie de Mel's visage for starters should say it all about the expedient nature of the politics that goes on. It says that all is resilient in the Sri Lankan political system which revels in existing in splendid disdain of the demands and the imperatives of the time.

At the time of going to press, the government was continuing its hard knock on the press — even though the shape and the form the attack will finally take is still not very clear.

The opposition in Sri Lanka is to be subsumed by expedient and opportunistic politics, which is another way of saying that we are going to have a "national government'' of sorts in which all the politicians who have an interest in hoodwinking the masses are going to get together and do just it. (Only just a little nod at theatrical evocation of cynicism here.) It's fitting, this two pronged activism of the government, considering that the opposition is to be taken over by a big Tsunami wave of expedient politics in which one monolithic government is poised to dwarf the emasculated opposition, after the crossovers. One prong of the government's attack is to see that the crossovers are a fait accompli.

The other prong is to see that in the absence of the opposition, that the only opposition which is in the form of the press, is bound, gagged, trussed up and thrown into the Beira, (which is the brackish water that surrounds the Pulitzer prize winning effort that goes on at Lake House.)

This politics is therefore seen to be frenzied; it is seen to be done in a cavalier and roundly irreverent way. The politics today is irreverent of convention, but mostly it is irreverent of public opinion which is not a new tendency of course. But this kind of frenzy to be irreverent is a first. It's in the manner of saying : we were here first, we conquered this terrain. We alone gagged the press for all time, and ruled this land therefore by overwhelming consensus. It's epic.

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