4 Feminist Subversions: Comedy and the Carnivalesque

Beauty and Filipina Bodies

Miss Orient(ed) playfully but powerfully explores the construction of Filipina North American subjectivities. Filipina bodies in the diaspora are sites of contestation, used nostalgically as the embodiment of the lost motherland (see McClintock, Imperial Leather, 354) and, at the same time, used to personify the success of the American dream. The multiple and, at times, conflicting identities and ideologies in contemporary society “discipline” Filipina women (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 187ff), their bodies, and their desires, causing some women to collude with the colonizing gaze, the discourse of imperialism, and Hollywood’s ideals of beauty. Success in North America is sometimes achieved at the expense of the female body and often results in the commodification and commercialization of “native” culture. Miss Orient(ed) exhibits various ways in which young Filipina Canadians react to, collaborate with, and resist these confusing ideals and negotiate with both internal ethnic practices and the dominant culture’s assumptions about the “Oriental” girl. Through numerous short vignettes of three aspiring beauty queens and their mothers, it reveals the complex and sometimes confusing ideals and identities of the “modern Filipina” (scene 17). One reviewer notes, “If there’s an image of Filipinas that hasn’t made it into Miss Orient(ed)—from Imelda Marcos to babysitters to Mariah Carey–wannabes—it probably doesn’t exist” (Al-Solaylee, “Review of Miss Orient(ed)”). Through songs, exaggeration, camp, and monologues, the play pokes fun at, but at the same time poignantly depicts, the aspirations and, often, the misplaced hopes of two generations of Filipinas in America.

That the site of a beauty pageant is the setting of Miss Orient(ed) is significant for a number of reasons. Beauty pageants play a large role in the cultural and psychic landscape of people in the Philippines. The crowning of a “Miss Philippines” or the year’s “Miss Universe” is much anticipated and is a more publicized event there than it is in North America.2 One of the mothers of the play’s contestants, Conching, remembers winning “Miss Pearl Bicol” when she was young: “Winning the crown was a dream come true for us. Well you know, beauty pageants are so important to us Filipinos” (scene 11: Conching). As scholars of beauty pageants have shown, the beauty contest may appear frivolous and trivial, but it stages “complex struggles over power and representation” (Lieu, “Remembering ‘the Nation’ through Pageantry,” 127). It is situated in “multiple systems of culture, struggles for power and control, and discursive fields of practice” (127). As it plays out in other parts of the globe, the beauty pageant is a site where dominant discourses of nationalism are articulated. In the Philippines, in addition to expressing national pride, reinforcing “dominant constructions of gender and idealized forms of femininity” (127), the beauty pageant is also a version of the American dream. Contestants, their families, and spectators look to beauty pageants as an easy way to success, fame, wealth, and a passport abroad. Because beauty can supposedly break down barriers created by social class, education, and economic status, winning a pageant is like being spotted by Prince Charming at the ball.

Filipinos in cities such as Toronto, Vancouver, and San Francisco have recreated “Miss Philippines” or “Little Miss Philippines” beauty pageants in their communities (see Islanders BC, “Non-profit Society Launches ‘Little Miss Forever Young Philippines’ Beauty Pageant.”). As in the home country, these beauty pageants in the diaspora stimulate national pride and build a sense of community. But, more important, these pageants and, by association, the contestants become the embodiment of the now distant “Pilipinas,” the imagined beloved motherland. There is an added element of longing and nostalgia in these contests. Regarding this nostalgia, Susan Stewart says, “Hostile to history and its invisible origins, and yet longing for an impossibly pure context of lived experience at a place of origin, nostalgia wears a distinctly utopian face, a face that turns toward a future-past, a past which has only ideological reality” (On Longing, 23). This ideological reality presents challenges to Filipina women in the diaspora who have to measure up not only to their parents’ past experiences and memories of the Philippines but to what Salman Rushdie calls the “fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands” of their minds (Imaginary Homelands, 10). To become “Miss Philippines” in Toronto or Vancouver, or to have to measure up to them, is to have to embody the symbol of the impossibly pure utopian homeland. At the same time, these contestants are often dealing with the quotidian pressures of their transnational family, assimilation, and the trials of growing up.

These difficulties, as well as the issue of ethnic female subjectivity, are brought to the foreground by Miss Orient(ed). In the play, the character called the “beauty icon,” who acts as the master of ceremonies, says with some irony that the requirements for the “Miss Pearl of the Orient” contest are, “number one: you must be female, was born female and have always been female”; number two: “You must have a minimum height of 5′4″”; number three: “you must be free of any involvement in any act of moral turpitude”; and “the last and most important requirement, number four: You must be Filipino!” (scene 2). These requirements, seemingly simple, are not as straightforward and innocent as they seem. These requirements function to discipline Filipina bodies and to produce them, in the Foucauldian sense, as Victorian feminine subjects. Ideal femininity is associated with the sexually innocent, while the height requirement implicitly ensures that the winner will conform to Western standards of beauty—tall like a European, not small like Asians. Although not explicitly stated here, later in the play contestants are assigned ratings based on their appearance, their abilities, and their backgrounds. The beauty icon explains that “bonus points are given to candidates who [. . .] are tall, have a lighter shade of black hair, have a waist that measures twelve inches smaller than her bust and hips, can speak and write fluent Filipino, can speak the English language without a Filipino accent, have a Spanish last name, can sing karaoke, can dance the tinikling, live in Mississauga, and are still virgins” (scene 6). Bonus points are even given to contestants with white boyfriends. Playwrights Aquino and Villasin note, with tongue in cheek, that to be the perfect Filipina beauty queen, a young woman has to be able to speak fluent Filipino yet look as European or North American as possible and efface traces of her Filipinaness in her speech when required.

In a similar way, the requirement of being “Filipino” is more complex than it looks. For example, contestants in the “Miss Philippines” contest that is part of Mississauga’s Carassauga festival compete with other contestants from seventeen pavilions representing other countries such as Egypt, Greece, India, the Caribbean, Latin America, China, and Portugal (see CPO News, “March 22, 2003”). But because one can no longer simply use citizenship to demarcate the boundaries between the contestants from the seventeen pavilions, one has to create new rules. Identities cannot be taken for granted. Whereas in the Philippines all the contestants are Filipino citizens and presumably speak Tagalog or another of the many dialects of the Philippines, in Canada the identities of Filipinas have to be defined. Because citizenship, place of birth, and knowledge of a “native” language cannot be counted on as the markers of a real Filipina, what indicates that a contestant is a real Filipina? What makes “Miss Philippines” in Mississauga different from other girls in Mississauga? Is it the simple fact that, as most contests’ rules specify, “at least one of the parents must be of Filipino descent”?

These are some of the issues facing the protagonists of Miss Orient(ed). Faced with the question, “What does being a Filipina mean to you,” one of the contestants, Jennifer, says to herself:

Being a Filipina means [ . . . ] that I am from the Philippines . . . means that I am a woman . . . who is Filipino . . . means that I am a good daughter to my mother [ . . . ] means that I am an obedient daughter who enters beauty pageants so that her mother can be happy for once in her life [ . . . ] (catches herself). I don’t know, I don’t know. I mean, how am I supposed to answer that question? I’ve never even been to the Philippines. (scene 5)

This passage raises important questions that confront many Asian North Americans, particularly those second-generation youths whose parents engage in transnational practices. Can one who does not speak Tagalog and who has never been to the Philippines be a “Filipina”? Is the Filipina part of one’s identity the residue that remains in one’s blood, in one’s physical appearance, or does it reside in cultural practice? Here Jennifer’s definition of “Filipina” slips from place of birth and origin to fulfilling one’s familial responsibility. Part of her definition of Filipina includes not only morally good behavior but filial obedience. She experiences what sociologist Diane L. Wolf terms “emotional transnationalism,” which is common to children of Filipino immigrants (“Family Secrets,” 459). Wolf suggests that second-generation Filipino youths are situated “between different generational and vocational points of reference—their parents’, sometimes also their grandparents’, and their own—both the real and the imagined” (459). Strong familial ties create pressures on these youths, who struggle to negotiate between their parents’ ideals and their own “hyphenated and hybrid identity” (475). Significantly, unlike the motives of the other contestants, Jennifer’s motive for entering the contests is not vanity or her desire for the prize money but a desire to please her mother.

Following this passage, Jennifer gives an interesting if somewhat sardonic description of the typical life of a young Filipina in the North American diaspora. She says that her upbringing has not followed the predictable patterns of a “modern” Filipino girl in Toronto. She muses:

I played tennis and went skiing instead of hanging out at the mall and going to debuts like other Filipino girls. I went to private French immersion instead of Catholic school, I lived in the city not the suburbs, I listened to Pink Floyd instead of Mariah Carey, I did ’shrooms instead of getting pregnant, I took marketing instead of nursing, and no, I have never been interested in becoming the world’s next big pop star. (scene 5)

This catalogue of the usual habits of Filipina girls in Toronto verges on the comic stereotype, yet it does reveal much about the dreams of Filipino youths and their families. Filipino Canadians’ dream of a good life means sending children off to Catholic schools, living in the suburbs, and choosing a safe career traditionally occupied by Filipina women, nursing. At the same time, this catalogue mocks such aspirations and behaviors as wanting to be a pop superstar and attending debut parties. The comedy of Miss Orient(ed) comes from this blend of self-deprecating humor and observations of daily ethnic life.

Aquino and Villasin employed a device that, as scholars of the genre point out, is central to comedy, the mocking of norms and stereotypes (Finney, “Introduction” to Look Who’s Laughing, 7). What is notable about their humor is their use of what Bakhtin calls the “double-voice discourse” (The Dialogic Imagination, 324). Judy Little argues that “doublevoiced discourse” is “especially prevalent in comic writing by women, which often interweaves elements of a subversive discourse into the language of the status quo—the discourse of power and control—using the former to ridicule, subvert, or deconstruct the latter” (as paraphrased by Finney in “Introduction” to Look Who’s Laughing, 7). Although Bakhtin was analyzing novels in his Dialogic Imagination, his observations about the way language and voices function are applicable to the way discourse is deployed in comedy. For Bakhtin, “Every utterance participates in the ‘unitary language’ [ . . . ] and at the same time partakes of social and historical heteroglossia” (272). Heteroglossia, in low genres such as “street songs, folksayings, anecdotes,” was “parodic, and aimed sharply and polemically against the official languages of its given time” (273).

In Miss Orient(ed) there are several scenes in which Aquino and Villasin created humor from the juxtaposition of serious and parodic discourses, thereby critiquing official discourse or practices. For instance, Angie, the mother of one of the contestants, comes out at one point to talk about her experiences of being Filipina in Canada with a deliberately exaggerated Filipino accent:

But let me be frank in saying—Filipinows don’t know how to integrate in Canadian society! And let me tell you why. Well, first of all, they don’t improve their English pro-nun-ci-a-shan! They don’t improve their ed-u-ca-shan, for goodness sakes. Because they stick to each other and don’t have a chance to practice speaking correct English with a Canadian accent, eh. I have been here long enough to know that the only way to get ahead in this country is to be better than other Filipinos. That’s why I studied hard to become a registered nurse. That’s why I worked very hard in the hospital and didn’t complain when I always got the graveyard shift. That’s why my husband and I really saved and saved our money so that we could move out of St. James Town as soon as we could. And this is a secret, but I’ll tell you. That’s why I had my nose fixed. My nose job changed my life! My nose before was not so bad. But it’s a Filipino nose, you know. It was a little flat and a little thick. I was starting to be really unhappy with it, because it was the only thing that was keeping me from being a true Canadian. I was tired of being constantly asked where I am from—originally! Now look at my nose. It is taller and smaller, right. Look . . . am I right? Yes, indeed I get better treatment from more people now. At the Intercontinental Hotel the other day, the doorman opened the door for me and was very polite and said “Good morning, ma’am.” (scene 9)

Here Angie echoes right-wing conservative sentiment in her complaint about Filipinos’ not knowing how to “integrate in Canadian society,” but this discourse is tinged with irony. Although she professes to be critical of Filipinos who are not assimilating well into Canadian society, through double-voiced discourse her speech actually points out some of the ways Filipinos have been discriminated against and what they have had to do in order to be perceived as good citizens. As Angie notes, immigrants are not viewed as proper Canadians as long as they still speak with foreign accents. They have to work harder than others in order to be successful. This work ethic means competing against people in their own ethnic community, taking the shifts no one wants, seeing themselves as imperfect imitations of European Canadians. Angie has even had to undergo surgery in order to make it as a Canadian. Regarding herself through the gaze of the dominant white culture, she sees herself as inadequate. What she describes is the process of psychic disavowal and mimicry. Her nose job reveals her desire to be an “authentic” Canadian through the process of what Homi Bhabha calls “colonial mimicry.” Bhabha notes that mimicry produces a subject that is “almost the same but not quite” the same as the white subject (The Location of Culture, 88–89).

In addition, Angie reveals the degree to which she has abjected her own community in her effort to become integrated into society. She tells us that her family saved money in order to move away from Toronto’s Filipino town, as if it is only through ethnic disavowal that one is able to move up in the world. David Eng notes of this phenomenon,

The untenable predicament of wanting to join a mainstream society that one knows clearly and systematically excludes oneself delineates the painful problem of becoming the instrument of one’s own self-exclusion [. . .]. In other words, the minority subject must, in the vein of the fetishist, simultaneously recognize and not recognize the material contradictions of institutionalized racism that claim his inclusion even as he is systemically excluded. (Racial Castration, 22)

This partly unconscious desire to dissociate oneself from one’s ethnic community, to be part of the dominant culture, to no longer be asked where one comes from, is echoed by Angie’s daughter, Caridad, a vain teen who calls herself Carrie.

Carrie, like her mother, has internalized a degree of self-hatred and, in the course of the play, reveals many of her insecurities about her ethnic and gendered subjectivity. In the Factory Studio production Carrie was played by a young woman who had dyed blond hair. Of the three contestants, she is the one who is the most slavish to Western ideals and Western images of beauty. She has tried to make a career of beauty contests, placing eighth in Miss Canada, fifth in Miss Ontario, third in Miss GTA, and second runner-up in Miss Scarborough (scene 7: Backstage). For her, winning a beauty contest is the way to self-fulfilment. Through exaggeration and parody, Aquino and Villasin highlight the way girls and women are made to embrace global (American) ideologies of “beauty” and femininity. Carrie’s discourse echoes the views of fashion magazines and advertisements targeted at women. Proud of the way she puts on her makeup, she tells the other girls with a keen sense of her own superiority that Bobby Brown, “a makeup artist to the stars and owner of one of the most hottest makeup lines” says that “90% of putting together a flawless face comes from knowing how to use the right tools: brushes, sponges” (scene 7: Backstage). She transforms herself into what current fashion deems beautiful with the help of padding in her bras, Vaseline on her “eyelids, cleavage and teeth” (scene 7: Backstage), and brand-name items—clothes and shoes from The Gap, Prada, and Sketchers. Feminist critic Sandra Lee Bartky points out that “in the language of fashion magazines and cosmetic ads, making-up is typically portrayed as an aesthetic activity in which a woman can express her individuality. In reality, [ . . . ] making-up the face is, in fact, a highly stylized activity that gives little rein to self-expression” (“Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” 70). She argues that such disciplinary practices “are part of the process by which the ideal body of femininity—and hence the feminine body-subject—is constructed; in doing this, they produce a ‘practiced and subjected’ body, that is, a body on which an inferior status has been inscribed” (71).

What becomes problematic for the Filipina woman is that this inferior status is doubly inscribed. Not only does Carrie have to contend with the ideals of feminine beauty; she also has to grapple with her non-Western features, which are deemed inferior by Western standards. With an attitude of mock seriousness, Carrie says that on August 13, 1993, she decided to “become a true Canadian. Inside a 24-hour Shopper’s Drugmart” (scene 14: L’Oreal). Her becoming Canadian costs her “twenty-two dollars and eighty five cents, six hundred Shopper’s Drug-mart Optimum points,” and it is through L’Oreal’s “Feria Champagne Cocktail, Number 91” (scene 14: L’Oreal). Although it is humorous to think that the simple act of coloring one’s hair can turn one into a Canadian, this passage does illustrate how much our notions of the Canadian are still predicated on the European, white subject. To at least have this subject’s hair color is one step closer to being a white Canadian. However, Carrie is told by the sales clerk that it is not enough to simply purchase the hair coloring; she has to “strip the black out” of her hair first in order to look like the perfect blond white woman pictured on the box (scene 14: L’Oreal). Symbolically, what is being required of the non-European subject is a stripping off of her ethnic and physical difference before she can be recognized and accepted as a Canadian subject.

The play relates this personal debasement of having to erase one’s ethnicity or culture in North America to the way the Philippines as a nation has also been stripped of its heritage or traditions by its colonizers. In one scene of the play, the beauty icon takes a moment to “acknowledge and applaud those pioneering Filipinas who paved the way for modern Filipino women everywhere” (scene 8: History). What we see is a series of slides of “Pearls through the Ages” featuring a combination of important historical female figures with popular icons. The first Filipinas, the “Babaylans” or indigenous priestesses, were “women who governed pre-Spanish, pre-civilized, pre-enlightened, communal society.” They engaged in trade and industry and enjoyed the “right to own and inherit land” (scene 8: History). However, the Babaylans were erased by three hundred years of Spanish colonial rule and by the “power and influence of the Catholic Church,” which replaced the figure of the Babaylan with the model of “Maria Clara,” who was as pure “as the Virgin Mary” and was expected “to be shy and modest, with fine manners and delicate expressions” (scene 8: History). Then, in the twentieth century, America brought other images of women to the Philippines. These included heroines of romances, the bakers of Betty Crocker cakes, electrical appliance owners, and beauty queens. The humor of this catalogue comes from the comic inflation and deflation of Filipina women who climb “to the summit,” including those of Miss Universe of 1969, Gloria Diaz; Imelda Marcos, who taught women how to “put their best foot forward”; Miss World; Miss Universe; Lea Salonga as Miss Saigon; and finally, Filipina domestic workers and caregivers (scene 8: History). Of these various images, only that of the Babaylan was indigenous to the Philippines. The others are all corrupt versions of Spanish and American ideals or else they arose as a result of Western capitalism and the recent globalization of labor.

To include Filipina domestic workers in this catalogue of heroines at first seems ironic; yet, as many scholars have shown, Filipina domestic workers constitute a large proportion of the Filipino migrant workers who help support the Philippine economy through their remittances (see Parreñas, Servants of Globalization, 51). The beauty icon notes that the Filipina domestic worker is the “dirty little secret” or the “dark side to the modern Filipina” (scene 8: History). These “servants of globalization,” as Rhacel Parreñas calls them, are our silent heroines: “the domestic Filipina climbs a mound of dirty dishes, diapers and depraved employers as she takes care of the young and elderly, and saves the Philippine economy with her dollar remittances” (scene 8: History). More often than not, these women have to strip off or leave behind their identities as mothers, wives, and daughters in order to become a foreign family’s nanny or caregiver to the elderly. Pauline Barber notes other contradictions in this type of transnational work. She writes:

In the Philippine economy the significant influx of migrant remittances contributes to the national balance sheet and enables new forms of consumption and migration-related industries to flourish. However, the benefits of such changes are precariously tied to volatile labour market conditions beyond the control of Philippine policy. And, [ . . . ] for migrants themselves [ . . . ], migration enables new forms of consumption, economic subjectivity and class agency—but in problematic ways given the nature of their typically de-skilled employment, and the transnational location of their work and political expressions. (“Agency in Philippine Women’s Labour Migration and Provisional Diaspora”)

Like the play’s contestants, who have been “misoriented” and interpellated by Western ideals of beauty, they, too, have been misoriented into an acceptance of themselves as docile transmigrant workers, allowing their bodies to become commodities for export.

Beauty contests, which have become so integral to Filipino life at home and abroad, were not originally part of Filipino culture but are part of the colonial heritage. Nanay, the mother of one of the contestants, who resides in the Philippines, objects to her daughter Twinkle’s participation in the competition. Significantly, the mother still exerts a strong influence on her daughter even though they are separated geographically. She tells her daughter on the telephone that beauty pageants are simply stupid: “Mga ulol lang ang naniniwala diyan” (Only fools believe in them) (scene 16). For Nanay, beauty pageants, with their bathing suit parades, go against the values Filipinos cherish, such as respect, honor, humility, and modesty: “respeto, dangal, pagkamababang-loob, kabanihan” (scene 16). This dialogue, the only extended one in Tagalog, is delivered over the long-distance telephone, and in the stage production is deliberately muffled. The mother’s lecture about standing by one’s values is interrupted by static, and she is disconnected abruptly. The scene, one of the few that is not funny, reenacts in a poignant way the disappearance of Filipino values and traditions. The mother reminds Twinkle of the important qualities she was brought up with—dignity and pride in herself and the sense that she is already a “winner” in the game of life. She does not need such a pretentious event as a beauty pageant to make her happy.

In the final scene of the play, Twinkle, who has just been given the lecture by her mother over the telephone from the Philippines, sees the pageant for what it is and cries out: “This is a sham! A joke! Can’t you all see this! Everybody! It’s all fake!” (scene 17: Finale). What she recognizes is that although the pageant purports to search for the “ideal modern Filipina,” what the judges are looking for is an Americanized version of beauty: someone tall, with bleached hair, a “Western nose. And above all, fair, fair skin” (scene 17: Finale). Intelligent, confident, short, and stocky, with jet-black hair, Twinkle realizes that in fact she is the “ideal modern Filipina” but will never be crowned as such. Her moment of insight, though briefly staged, nevertheless mars the superficial buoyancy of the pageant. Her outburst provokes a moment of uncertainty and self-awareness in one of the other contestants. Jennifer also decides that she cannot be the “modern Filipina” that her mother wants. She says, “I don’t know how to speak Tagalog [ . . . ] and I can’t sing the Philippine National Anthem or dance the tinikling [ . . . ] and I can’t cook adobo” (scene 17: Finale). Modern Filipinas in the diaspora will have to carve out different identities for themselves, ones that are not necessarily based on the traditions their parents brought with them when they immigrated. Although the play does not outline what this identity will be, it definitely shows what it will not be. The “ideal modern Filipina” will not be the demure Oriental woman, a symbol of femininity and exoticism, nor will she have to be a pale imitation of the white European Canadian in order to succeed. She will be, as Twinkle is, a “spunky little fighter” (scene 16: Nanay), and she will not make a career out of dancing the “tinikling” or “cooking adobo.”

Ultimately, though the ambitious Carrie is declared the “winner of the 2003 Miss Pearl of the Orient” contest, it is an empty and Pyrrhic victory. Carrie has had to “whiten” herself as much as possible to resemble a Barbie doll, with her lightened hair, blue contact lenses, fake breasts, and excessive makeup, in order to fulfill the beauty contest’s ideals. But the fact that she has won the contest is also a rather sad and ironic commentary on some members of the Filipino community. Many Filipinos in Canada, in their struggle for acceptance, assimilation, and upward mobility, have internalized their own inferiority, accepting many of the fantasies and ideals of the dominant culture. What Miss Orient(ed) depicts is the comic effects of such institutionalized racism and cultural abjection on Filipinos in North America. But it also sends a strong message about the dangers of “misorientation.”

Empowering the Local

Indian Canadian Deepa Mehta’s Bollywood/Hollywood is also about the assimilationist and upward mobility desires of South Asians in Canada. Following serious social dramas such as Fire (1996) and Earth (1998), Mehta’s Bollywood/Hollywood (2002) was not as well received critically as her first films.3 Toronto Globe and Mail film reviewer Rick Groen says that “there are enticing glimmers, there are worthy moments but, in the end, the result is disappointing” (“Fusion Fare”). Others note that it is “trivial, and trite” (Hornaday, “Bollywood”) and that “any viewer who has seen Fire or Earth will refuse to believe that this is a Deepa Mehta film” (Planet Bollywood, “Bollywood/Hollywood”). Mehta produced the movie when she could not complete the filming of the third part of her trilogy, Water, because of waves of protests in India. In an interview she said, “There was no other way. It was great therapy. I got to play. I got to realize that there is more to life than just pain. And, if it wasn’t for the catharsis of Bollywood/Hollywood, I would be in agony right now because I was really down” (Kirkland, “Filmmaker Mehta Has a Love for Canada”).4 However, following the Bakhtin-inspired work of Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, I want to argue that Mehta’s film, with its Bollywood and Hollywood musical style of dancing and singing and its colorful sets, creates a carnivalesque atmosphere in which a politics of transgression becomes possible within a popular genre. Instead of viewing it as a failed Bollywood or Hollywood imitation, as some critics do, I see the film as a product of Asian Canadian transnational subjectivity in which hybridity, borrowings, and transcultural exchanges generate energy, self-examination, and new identity formations. Bollywood/Hollywood successfully works through localized community settings and sensibilities and yet is able to venture forth and resonate with global spectators.

Mehta employed the traditional Cinderella rags-to-riches plot of a beautiful but poor girl who is swept off her feet by a rich prince, but uses it in a self-conscious and parodic way. At the same time, as some critics have noted, the movie “has a Pretty Woman twist to it, but done with much humility, charisma and class” (Gawle, “Bollywood Film with Hollywood Humour”). In her study of twentieth-century art forms, Linda Hutcheon points out that parody “is a form of imitation, but imitation characterized by ironic inversion, not always at the expense of the parodied text” (A Poetics of Postmodernism, 6). Mehta, I argue, is using what Hutcheon calls “repetition with critical distance, which marks difference rather than similarity” (6) to explore, albeit with humor, the vicissitudes and the pleasures of diasporic South Asians in Canada. Her deliberate echoing of the Hollywood romantic blockbuster featuring Richard Gere and Julia Roberts shows her familiarity with, her tribute to, and her mockery of the conventions of romantic comedy as well as offering the stories of diasporic South Asians as a legitimate subject of mainstream North American spectatorship. That is, Indians in the diaspora are no longer marginalized as the subjects of “ethnic” art house films or in Indian national cinema but are placed at the cinematic threshold of global audiences. Significantly, in this film, set in Toronto, diasporic South Asians are represented as economically successful citizens who belong to an upper-middle-class affluent community with large houses in the suburbs. Although scholars such as Vijay Mishra and others have noted the “massive size of Indian cinema,”5 for many people in North America, Bollywood/Hollywood and films such as Moulin Rouge were their first exposures to Indian cinema (Bollywood Cinema, 1). Like Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham, which came out the same year, Bollywood/Hollywood participates in the work of what Ella Shohat and Robert Stam call “unthinking Eurocentrism” in their book of that name, because it places the everyday stories of diasporic Indians on center stage in a commercial film marketed for Western audiences.

The choice of locales featured in the film is another way of rejecting U.S. global hegemony. The film is set in Toronto, and indeed, one irascible critic says, Toronto herself is the “most memorable character” in the film, because she has received “quite the cinematic face-lift” (Groen, “Fusion Fare”). Rick Groen writes, “Mehta does for the city what Woody Allen did for Manhattan, and what she can’t do for the comedy—glamorize her and stylize her and make the old gal sparkle.” Although Toronto has been the location of a number of Hollywood films, in most of these films the location is not highlighted. The city is usually being passed off as another North American city.6 In Mehta’s film, however, the city, with the views of the Skydome, Gardiner Expressway, and skyscrapers on the horizon, takes center stage. The particular storefronts and settings chosen are also important, for they are part of Mehta’s repudiation of large capitalist corporations and enterprises and her celebration of Toronto’s cosmopolitan cultures. Though Toronto, like other North American cities, has been invaded by U.S. chain stores, hotels, and fast food outlets such as McDonald’s, Sheraton, Wal-mart, Chapters Book stores, and others, these do not make an appearance in the film. Instead, Mehta has close-up shots of independent South Asian stores and eating establishments. For example, when Sue and Rahul negotiate their contract, they sit in a small eating place, “Motionmahal,” located in Little India, where Sue amazes Rahul by eating a plateful of chilis.

Audiences familiar with Pretty Woman will recall that when Edward (Richard Gere) hires Vivian (Julia Roberts) for the week, he makes her over. He takes her shopping on LA’s fashionable and snobbish Rodeo Drive. There designer shops like those of Armani, Gucci, Christian Dior, Coco Chanel, Ralph Lauren, Valentino, Cartier, and Tiffany are located and featured. It is one of the most expensive streets in the world, reputed to be “where the stars shop.” In Mehta’s film, Sunita is transformed into an elegant and respectable woman with the help of clothes and jewelry bought not from well-known French or Italian designers but from a local transnational, diasporic Indian store. In her establishing shots Mehta pans a number of other South Asian store-fronts—Pooja, a clothing store on Gerrard Street, and Shubi’s jewelry—suggesting the vitality of South Asian diasporic communities in Toronto as well as promoting these small, independently owned stores in the global medium of a full-length feature film. In another scene, at the engagement party of Twinky and her fiance, the festivities take place in a rented hall. When Sunita and Rahul go for a walk, we find out that the party has taken place not in a fancy hotel but at the Scarborough Towne Centre, a shopping mall located in the east-end suburban, immigrant, middle-class area of the city.

The sites featured in the film are important locales in the daily lives of diasporic South Asians in the metropolitan area. They represent places where they shop, eat, rent videos, meet, and interact with other diasporic South Asians. They show Mehta’s effort to frame “the local as creative, resistant, and transgressive” (Desai, Beyond Bollywood, 14). By featuring them Mehta was resisting what Stuart Hall has described as the “new kind of globalization” that comes to people in the form of American mass culture (“The Local and the Global,” 178). Yet, at the same time we can see the film participating in the reformulation of global mass culture, which, Hall points out, is centered in the West but “does not speak the Queen’s English any longer. It speaks English as an international language, which is quite a different thing” (179). Hall links this reformulation to a number of recent processes, including “the return to the local as a response of globalization,” as well as the “struggle of the margins to come into representation” (183). In this film, which depicts, albeit through comedy and occasional irony, the social and familial concerns of diasporic Indians, I argue that Mehta is attempting to return to the local as well as to represent and empower the margins. Her film makes Westernized audiences aware of a number of issues that face diasporic subjects, and it places them on center stage rather than using them as extras or secondary characters, as in most filmic productions from the Western world.

Aside from showcasing local shops and eateries, Mehta also pays tribute to a “local” Torontonian, internationally known filmmaker Atom Egoyan. There are at least three instances in the film in which Mehta repudiates Hollywood films in favor of independent ones. Initially, in the comic interviews with potential wives for Rahul set up by the matriarchs of the household, one of the women states that she cannot stand those independent films about incest, which often crop up in the work of Canadian independent filmmakers. Of course, she is rejected by Rahul. In contrast, when Rahul and Sunita are getting to know each other, they talk about their preferences in terms of cuisine and films. Although Rahul likes Hollywood blockbusters with stars like Al Pacino, Sunita tells him she prefers the films of Atom Egoyan. She has a poster of the film Exotica in her bedroom. And the nightclub where she is insulted by a former client is also called Exotica.7 These allusions are playful and cursory, to be sure, but their presence in the film signals Mehta’s admiration of a fellow Canadian diasporic director, as well as her awareness of the liminal space of what Hamid Naficy calls “accented cinema.” According to Naficy:

Accented films are interstitial because they are created astride and in the interstices of social formations and cinematic practices. Consequently, they are simultaneously local and global, and they resonate against the prevailing cinematic production practices, at the same time that they benefit from them [. . .]. They signify and signify upon exile and diaspora by expressing, allegorizing, commenting upon, and critiquing the home and host societies and cultures and the deterritorialized conditions of the filmmakers. They signify and signify upon cinematic traditions by means of their artisanal and collective production modes, their aesthetics and politics of smallness and imperfection, and their narrative strategies that cross generic boundaries and undermine cinematic realism. (An Accented Cinema, 4–5)

I quote this passage at length because much of what Naficy describes is what Mehta, and of course Egoyan, attempt to do in their films.

Like Egoyan’s films, Mehta’s Bollywood/Hollywood straddles that space between home and host societies, examining and critiquing both. Through its self-conscious metafilmic narrative structure and its pointed surtitles an ironic distance from both cultures is established. This attitude of irony and self-mockery was not present in Mehta’s two films about India, Fire and Earth. But from the start of Bollywood/Hollywood, with the opening scene of the father dying on a dark, stormy night, we become aware that this is not a typical “ethnic” film that arouses nostalgia for the homeland. Rahul’s Daddy-ji exhorts him to be a good son, but his dying speech includes humorous references to being the “team captain,” and he asks his son to “remember the Blue Jays.”8 That the whole family lives in a cosmopolitan, transcultural space is further emphasized when Granny-ji and Mummy-ji invite Rahul’s white pop star girlfriend to the house. Even though Granny speaks English perfectly and often quotes from Shakespeare’s plays, she asks her daughter-in-law to act as a translator. Her questions to the European Canadian pop star include “What caste are you?” which renders rather absurd the way some diasporic people persist in clinging to traditional categories of difference in their host countries. At the same time, it is the very need to preserve categories and traditions that impels the plot of the film and demarcates one’s ethnic identity. The younger brother of Rahul videotapes the whole interview with Rahul’s girlfriend, and when she (Jessica Pare) is insulted and leaves, he says, “This is way better than any Bollywood movie,” calling attention to the genre the movie is indebted to and, at the same time, is parodying.

In particular, the film crosses east-west divides by locating itself at the boundary between the extravagant, sentimental productions of Bollywood musicals and the predictable, feel-good plots of Hollywood romantic comedies. At Twinky’s engagement party, one of the guests says, “Films made in India are better,” as if anticipating the criticism Bollywood/Hollywood would be given by critics who find it not authentic or not as elaborate as Bollywood films from India. This self-conscious metafilmic trait of the film creates a constant distancing effect for the audience, so we are never quite fully in the realm of the Hollywood comedy or the Bollywood musical but always somewhere in between. But the point is that the film is not strictly a Bollywood film, and even Bollywood films themselves are increasingly becoming transcultural, influenced by American, European, and other cinematic traditions.9 Mehta’s version, as Bruce Kirkland points out, is a “mock-Bollywood picture, the melodramatic bits are heightened to farce” (“Bollywood High”). Rahul’s mother acts as if she were the heroine of a Bollywood movie, forever breaking into loud sobs and wailing at her misfortunes. Yet her complaints, “Why am I so unlucky?” are not taken seriously by anybody in her family or in the audience. Rahul’s pop star girlfriend, Kimberly, is killed in a freak accident while she is learning to meditate. Through this scene Mehta not only pokes fun at New Age practices but humorously relates them and the rather contrived device of killing off the undesirable other woman to Hollywood by having Jessica Pare fall right in front of the renowned Hollywood sign in the Hollywood Hills.

At the same time, Bollywood movies’ practice of conveying the emotions of the characters through sentimental love songs is also used and parodied. When Rahul loses his girlfriend, the surtitles compare him to “Devdas: very tragic Bollywood hero.” Yet at this point we feel no emotional empathy for him, so, rather than conveying sadness and loss, Rahul’s song reminds us of a flashy MTV video rather than a serious Bollywood segment. In addition, the constant presence of Bollywood movies in the background, on TV screens everywhere in Rahul’s mansion from the bedroom to the kitchen, remind us of the highly mediated world of diasporic South Asians. Because they are geographically distant from their originary culture, they rely increasingly on memory, fantasy, technology, and media culture to reaffirm their Indian identity. Yet what is authentic Hindu tradition versus what is performance is questioned. For example, at one point the grandmother is saying her prayers, presumably in a highly spiritual mood. At the same time, she interrupts her prayers and gives Sunita orders for the maid to get her food, specifying a mango lassi “with lots of sugar,” in a tone very unholy, earthly, and commanding. The disjunction between the grandmother’s supposedly spiritual state and her bodily needs is comic but reminds us of the performative aspects of religious and ethnic cultural traditions. A number of scenes in the film demonstrate what Judith Butler has called the “performative” aspects of identity. In Bodies That Matter, Butler explains her theory of the performativity of the subject in relation to gender identity. Butler argues that sex and sexuality are neither “constructed nor determined” (94), but rather are assumed in complex ways. Her points about the importance of “the forced reiteration of norms,” which “enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject,” can be applied to the way ethnic or racial identity is also assumed in our society. Just as sex and sexuality are not biologically determined or simply constructed, ethnic identity is also “a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo” (95). Similarly, Gayatri Spivak has observed, “What we call experience is a staging of experience, sometimes on the small screen. In this sense, an earlier experience is being staged in this new, displaced imperialist scene: the horror of an absolute act of intercultural performance. One of the many tasks of the activist intellectual is to offer scrupulous and plausible accounts of the mechanics of staging” (A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 781). In the film, the character who repeatedly forces us to think about what or who constitutes a diasporic Indian is Sunita, or Sue. Through Sunita’s role-playing and changeable identity, Mehta critiques conventional assumptions about South Asian subjects, about Hindu girls, and suggests a more fluid and malleable version of acceptable codes of behavior for Indian women.

Sunita’s role-playing highlights the performativity of racial and gender identity as they are played out in North America. During Rahul’s first encounter with Sunita, he believes that she cannot be Indian because she is working at a bar as some kind of hostess or prostitute. He tells her that “Indian girls don’t do this.” She, however, has a much more flexible notion of what it means to belong to a certain racial or national group. She playfully tells him, “I can be anything you want me to be,” which echoes a line of Vivian’s in Pretty Woman. When asked about her name, Vivian (Julia Roberts) responds repeatedly, “What do you want it to be?” Her identity, like that of Sunita’s, is malleable and can be changed to suit her clients. Similarly, Mehta wants to confound stereotypes of Indian girls as uniformly passive and obedient, and she makes Sunita perform a number of different identities. She proves that Indian girls can be “anything” they want to be, especially when they are exotic looking and racially ambiguous.10 Sunita lets Rahul believe that she is a poetry-loving Spanish girl, a philosopher, and an experienced prostitute at the same time that she leads Rahul’s family to believe that she is a good Indian girl simply by “performing” these identities. Just as in a Bakhtinian carnival the world is allowed to turn upside down, during the week when Sunita performs her role as Rahul’s girlfriend she indulges in unlimited luxury, treats, fine clothes, and the semblance of a rich, happy extended family.

This plot of misidentification is a device commonly used in romances from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to today’s Harlequin romances and is one that is picked up in Bollywood movies. The hero or heroine, or sometimes both, has been misinformed and believes erroneously that the other possesses undesirable qualities that make him or her unsuitable as a partner. This misinformation presents an artificial obstacle to the romance between them, but in most comedies, the truth turns out to be much more positive and pleasing than what the protagonist had assumed. Mehta uses this device, but with a critical difference. In Bollywood/Hollywood the female character is fully in control of the plot, possessing knowledge about her identity that is withheld from the male character and the audience. It is as if Sunita, like Mehta, is in charge of the development of the narrative. This is the difference between Mehta’s film and Pretty Woman. Although the endings of both films are the same—that is, there is the anticipation of a wedding—the middles are worked out differently in terms of gender relations. In Mehta’s film, unlike Pretty Woman or most Bollywood movies, the woman takes an active part in the control of crucial information, in role-playing, and helps to engineer the happily-ever-after ending.

Like Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett and Vivian in Pretty Woman, Sunita is an intelligent and educated woman who stands apart from the many other women who are potential wives for an eligible, rich, young, and good-looking bachelor. Though she comes from an immigrant Sikh family, she works as a hostess not out of necessity but in order to spite her father. She is a modern woman who, though still stunningly beautiful in a traditional sari, drives fast cars and is capable of acting tough when the situation calls for it. Her education is transcultural: not only does she recite poetry; she has studied anthropology and knows some Spanish, as well as Hindi. Sometime before her meeting with Rahul, she has rejected her parents’ effort to arrange a suitable marriage for her. She has refused to marry the world wrestling champ, Killer Khalsa, even though this marriage would have brought the family some economic security. Like the heroines in romances, she has integrity and a sense of self-worth that, despite some earlier evidence to the contrary, capture the hero’s heart in the end. Mehta thus conforms to the sentimental plots of social comedy, the comedy romances of Hollywood, and what Vijay Mishra calls the “order of marriage” that is mandatory in Bollywood movies (Bollywood Cinema, 27).

However, though the plot structure and movement of Bollywood/Hollywood largely conform to Hollywood comedy romances and Bollywood movies, which have the form of a “sentimental melodramatic romance,” as Mishra notes (13), I suggest that Mehta’s film inserts subtle, small changes into typical scenarios found in traditional romances. One striking example is the penultimate courtship scene, in which Rahul goes to Sunita’s house to ask for her hand in marriage. He receives permission from Sunita’s father to court her, climbs up her balcony with roses, and, like Edward in Pretty Woman, makes a plea for Sunita’s hand. However, she does not accept him at that moment, which is playfully reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet, but rather, to his disappointment, appears to refuse him. In the next scene, though, Rahul and the viewers are surprised to find that Sunita, not the regular chauffeur, is driving the limousine that takes him home. Though this scene can be read as yet another one of Sunita’s various attempts at role-playing, it is important in various ways. Wearing the chauffeur’s cap, Sunita crosses gender, not racial, boundaries this time. Though she agrees to marry Rahul, the scene suggests that this marriage will be based on her terms—she is at the wheel and Rahul is in the back seat. She will not be cowed by his millionaire status into playing the role of a submissive wife but will continue to negotiate, as she has, her place as a diasporic Indian woman in his life.

In the film there are many other moments at which questions of Indo-Canadian identity and gender issues are raised, albeit playfully. Indian diasporic identity is shown to be hybridized, with Indian customs and beliefs intertwined not just with Westernized culture but with globalized Canadian multiculture. In one of the early scenes in the film, Rahul’s sister swears and says, “Jesus Christ.” Chastised by her grandmother to not take the name of the lord in vain, she says, “But he isn’t even our God.” This remark reveals the ways in which the discourses and worldview of the dominant culture, English and Christian, have permeated the lives of diasporic Indians. In a later scene, when Sunita threatens to leave home and move to London—Ontario, not England—her mother tries to calm her by looking into the future. However, the answer to the future is not in Hindu spiritualism but in Chinese fortune cookies, which are commercially produced locally in the factory where the mother works. In another scene, Rahul’s younger brother, Govin, is being teased by bullies at school. Mehta does not play off whites against ethnic minorities in the schoolyard scenes but shows the multicultural mix of Toronto city life by having the student group composed of whites, East Asians, and youths of other ethnicities. The bully, Brian, is Chinese Canadian. A similar confusion of ethnicities occurs in the closing scene, in which Rockini (the chauffeur in drag) sings a song in English and Hindi but is dressed in a traditional Chinese dress.

For Mehta Rockini, the chauffeur, functions as a way to queer or to critique the “normative, particularly the heteronormative,” which may be “embodied in citizenship and nationalism, circulated through capitalism, and mobilized in the terrain of postcoloniality” (Desai, Beyond Bollywood, 30). This figure of the cross-dresser, or transvestite, comes from the tradition of the hijra, a “highly visible intersex persona often called a ‘eunuch’ in English,” which has recently become a Bollywood stock character, according to Thomas Waugh (“Queer Bollywood,” 283). For Waugh the marginalization of this figure is problematic, because the hijra remains as “background figure or low comic diversion” (286). Although I agree that Rockini is mainly a comic figure in Bollywood/Hollywood, it is nevertheless difficult to condemn Mehta’s depiction of homosocial relationships, given what we know of her previous experience with Fire, which depicts a relationship between two unhappily married women in India. If anything, I found that the Rockini character reminded me of the ways in which mainstream culture forces filmmakers to capitulate to nationalistic, generic, and capitalistic pressures.

These examples may seem trivial, but cumulatively they serve to exemplify the hybridized culture and global identities that are now typical of Canada. Mehta’s film situates itself at the cusp of two or more cultures—Hollywood and Bollywood, white and brown, local and global, Canadian and American. The film does not fully belong to one world or the other but belongs to both. It reveals the deterritorialized characteristic of the filmmaker as well as the characters she depicts. However, instead of signifying conditions of exile and loss as do other diasporic productions, the film suggests the vibrancy of being between worlds—the humor, self-mockery, and self-awareness of being exotic and other to both the West and the East. As the film’s subtitle proclaims, “Nothing is what it appears to be,” and the surprises in the film are some of the ways in which new identities and new formations are being enacted in playful, powerful, and creative ways.