Blinded by the Light (Gurinder Chadha, 2019)
Before I begin slicing and dicing, let me confess that I did get choked up at the end of Blinded by the Light when director Gurinder Chadha (Bend it Like Beckham) shows photographs of Sarfraz Manzoor, the real Bruce Springsteen fan whose 2007 memoir Greetings from Bury Park: Race, Religion and Rock N’ Roll inspired the film. Chadha includes several snaps of Manzoor with his best friend, his parents, and several with The Boss himself, all figures with whom we've spent the previous running time. Manzoor was able to make something of his intense fandom (he's seen Springsteen live more than 150 times). Good for him. Now on to this terrible movie.
Even Springsteen's most rabid fans must admit that the man traffics in corn. His high-fructose post-teen symphonies to America (is there something grander than capital-A?) have certainly inspired a corresponding cottage industry of corny criticism. Take Greil Marcus on the Springsteen show at the Sports Arena, Los Angeles, August 27, 1981: "I was there because I wanted to hear him sing one line: 'Take a knife and cut this pain from my heart.' He didn’t just sing it, he did it." (rolls damn eyes) Manzoor and Chadha love that line too (and I wouldn't be shocked to discover they know Marcus' blurb as well). They use it many times in the film because it derives from "The Promised Land," evoking the Pakistani diaspora and Manzoor's struggles with assimilation in 1987 England.
And therein lies the problem with corn and this movie. Like the fungible foodstuff of its namesake, corn in art repeats on you. It abjures specifics and recycles low-nutrition homilies in their stead. And right about now, I should admit that Springsteen has transcended these shortcomings in most of his oeuvre with not just lyrical specifics but musical ones as well, especially his 1980s oeuvre which comes off as conversant with a wider swath of popular music than the monochromatic Rock of the 1970s albums - punk on The River (1980), Suicide on Nebraska (1982), pop on Born in the U.S.A. (1984) and Latin freestyle on Tunnel of Love (1987) (although I'm open to the suggestion that he was wrestling with boogaloo on 1973's The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle).
Specifics would just get in the way of Blinded by the Light's goal of creating a feel-good movie. Never does it suggest that anything about the music of Bruce Springsteen has fired up Javed Khan (Viveik Kalra, adorable), a Pakistani teen based on Manzoor. Chadha merely shows lyrics whirling around Javed, a desperate conceit that is supposed to convey Springsteen's genius to the audience as automatically as it does for Javed. Worse, the apparently self-evident brilliance of the music is constantly counterposed against all other musics. The ebullient "Born to Run" number comes at the expense of Tiffany and the Pet Shop Boys, that inauthentic pop and new wave junk played by the DJ at the high school radio station. Javed and his friend Roops (Aaron Phagura) put on "Born to Run" and then lock the door to the station, preventing anyone from changing the song. Roops and Javed and his girlfriend Eliza (Nell Williams) then proceed to run through the halls and eventually the city streets, singing along to Springsteen's song while ignoring how Tiffany and the Pet Shop Boys have provided succor and escape for their listeners. Javed does come around to appreciating other music, especially as he dances (suddenly, without much reason) to the bhangra group Heera at a daytimer. But it's far too little, too late.
It gets even worse. In a scene soon after, Javed's father Malik (Kulvinder Ghir, in the "I hef no son" role) must pawn his wife Noor's (Meera Ganatra) jewelry to pay the bills after he's been laid off by Vauxhall Motors. "O Duniya Ke Rakhwale" from the film Baiju Bawra (Vijay Bhatt, 1952) plays non-diegetically over the scene and the effect is two-fold: 1. It associates Hindi film music with suffering in explicit contrast to the freedom (however provisional) of "Born to Run." 2. It cannot be commented on so we learn nothing about the song. Why aren't the lyrics to this song swirling around his parents' heads? Why do we hear no mention of the name Mohammed Rafi (or Lata Mangeshkar, heard in another scene), who sings this song and is one of the greatest playback singers in Indian cinema history? What does this music mean to Malik and Noor? In 117 minutes, one would think the subject could have been broached at some point.
Most curiously of all, there's a deeper, emptier nostalgia to this already emptily nostalgic movie. Bruce Springsteen's new album at the time, Tunnel of Love, is almost never mentioned. We see a picture of the album cover when Javed learns that Springsteen is going on tour...for that album. But we hear no songs from it. Not even the title is uttered. There's no rush to buy it at the record store, no taping it off the radio, no playing the CD to death. The most current Bruce tracks played in the film come from Born in the U.S.A. three years prior. So the Bruce Springsteen of Blinded by the Light is one that's already past. Tunnel of Love happens to be my favorite Springsteen album, a perversely revisionist gesture, I've been told, although it landed at #2 on that year's Pazz & Jop list. But even if it were the worst, this oversight cheapens Springsteen's legacy. It casts him as perpetual backward-looking journeyman rather than an artist actively engaging with the present. And it gives the audience a license to ignore the music that's happening around them today.
Grade: C+
Even Springsteen's most rabid fans must admit that the man traffics in corn. His high-fructose post-teen symphonies to America (is there something grander than capital-A?) have certainly inspired a corresponding cottage industry of corny criticism. Take Greil Marcus on the Springsteen show at the Sports Arena, Los Angeles, August 27, 1981: "I was there because I wanted to hear him sing one line: 'Take a knife and cut this pain from my heart.' He didn’t just sing it, he did it." (rolls damn eyes) Manzoor and Chadha love that line too (and I wouldn't be shocked to discover they know Marcus' blurb as well). They use it many times in the film because it derives from "The Promised Land," evoking the Pakistani diaspora and Manzoor's struggles with assimilation in 1987 England.
And therein lies the problem with corn and this movie. Like the fungible foodstuff of its namesake, corn in art repeats on you. It abjures specifics and recycles low-nutrition homilies in their stead. And right about now, I should admit that Springsteen has transcended these shortcomings in most of his oeuvre with not just lyrical specifics but musical ones as well, especially his 1980s oeuvre which comes off as conversant with a wider swath of popular music than the monochromatic Rock of the 1970s albums - punk on The River (1980), Suicide on Nebraska (1982), pop on Born in the U.S.A. (1984) and Latin freestyle on Tunnel of Love (1987) (although I'm open to the suggestion that he was wrestling with boogaloo on 1973's The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle).
Specifics would just get in the way of Blinded by the Light's goal of creating a feel-good movie. Never does it suggest that anything about the music of Bruce Springsteen has fired up Javed Khan (Viveik Kalra, adorable), a Pakistani teen based on Manzoor. Chadha merely shows lyrics whirling around Javed, a desperate conceit that is supposed to convey Springsteen's genius to the audience as automatically as it does for Javed. Worse, the apparently self-evident brilliance of the music is constantly counterposed against all other musics. The ebullient "Born to Run" number comes at the expense of Tiffany and the Pet Shop Boys, that inauthentic pop and new wave junk played by the DJ at the high school radio station. Javed and his friend Roops (Aaron Phagura) put on "Born to Run" and then lock the door to the station, preventing anyone from changing the song. Roops and Javed and his girlfriend Eliza (Nell Williams) then proceed to run through the halls and eventually the city streets, singing along to Springsteen's song while ignoring how Tiffany and the Pet Shop Boys have provided succor and escape for their listeners. Javed does come around to appreciating other music, especially as he dances (suddenly, without much reason) to the bhangra group Heera at a daytimer. But it's far too little, too late.
It gets even worse. In a scene soon after, Javed's father Malik (Kulvinder Ghir, in the "I hef no son" role) must pawn his wife Noor's (Meera Ganatra) jewelry to pay the bills after he's been laid off by Vauxhall Motors. "O Duniya Ke Rakhwale" from the film Baiju Bawra (Vijay Bhatt, 1952) plays non-diegetically over the scene and the effect is two-fold: 1. It associates Hindi film music with suffering in explicit contrast to the freedom (however provisional) of "Born to Run." 2. It cannot be commented on so we learn nothing about the song. Why aren't the lyrics to this song swirling around his parents' heads? Why do we hear no mention of the name Mohammed Rafi (or Lata Mangeshkar, heard in another scene), who sings this song and is one of the greatest playback singers in Indian cinema history? What does this music mean to Malik and Noor? In 117 minutes, one would think the subject could have been broached at some point.
Most curiously of all, there's a deeper, emptier nostalgia to this already emptily nostalgic movie. Bruce Springsteen's new album at the time, Tunnel of Love, is almost never mentioned. We see a picture of the album cover when Javed learns that Springsteen is going on tour...for that album. But we hear no songs from it. Not even the title is uttered. There's no rush to buy it at the record store, no taping it off the radio, no playing the CD to death. The most current Bruce tracks played in the film come from Born in the U.S.A. three years prior. So the Bruce Springsteen of Blinded by the Light is one that's already past. Tunnel of Love happens to be my favorite Springsteen album, a perversely revisionist gesture, I've been told, although it landed at #2 on that year's Pazz & Jop list. But even if it were the worst, this oversight cheapens Springsteen's legacy. It casts him as perpetual backward-looking journeyman rather than an artist actively engaging with the present. And it gives the audience a license to ignore the music that's happening around them today.
Grade: C+
Labels: 2019, bad movies, Bruce Springsteen, crappy musicals, I hef no son, musicals
posted by Kevin John at 2:51 PM
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