Dear Goomal:

I saw Slumdog Millionaire last night and it filled me such a feeling of self-disgust, I almost left several times before it was over. But, I stayed and wrapped up my understanding of it under these two words: vanity and voyeurism.

More than anything else, the film made me feel my own incredible vanity. It made me feel the baseness of my always being after the smartest and most beautiful woman, the best computer, the fastest car. It made me feel the absolute foolishness of what really amounts to my own petty and bourgeois desires. Even here (especially here) on Match, for instance: I am determined to make myself appear the smartest and most insightful man to the smartest and most educated woman I can possibly appeal to; you, in this instance, even as I diminish myself with calculated self-loathing; all of which naturally serves to speak, in the end, well of me as a person who is at least capable of some degree of self-awareness--and therefore, truly desirable.

But what does it really mean? I am basking in the luxury of my own pretentiousness, hunting online for a soulmate, a lover, a partner, a lifelong companion, because, on my Macintosh computer, seated in my antique Amish chair, in my cute little renovated house with shiny wood floors and fancy dimmer switches, I have the leisure time to do so--to while away my time, picking and choosing, writing to infinitely attractive women like you, most of whom will not even consider to drop me a note back (for which I do thank you for having done already); and those who do, and with whom I have had the good fortune to date once or twice, they are all richly educated and deeply intelligent like me, before, like the passing of a summer shower, the brevity of our knowing each other passes with little casualty and small eventual effect, not even so modest as a mild case of food poisoning.

In the face of the total and outright squalor depicted in Slumdog, I am only embarrassed. There I was, like you, with India's colorful slums as the backdrop, its teeming poor being shown for my movie-going entertainment and perhaps amusement. Or, even worse, to actually feel, for a brief two hours, the seething hardship of millions of others, to feel in my heart the pain of the sordid wretchedness of these castaway lives, before hopping in my silver stick-shift Saab to drive in unimpeachable comfort fast back home, feeling, perhaps, too, that something "real" had happened to me. Truly, to view the actual landscape of India's ruined poor is far more shameful than any bout or overdose of pornography; for the movie mistakenly makes, I think, its audience feel a sort of "moral truth," when, in fact, all that has occurred is a sort of moral prurience. At least pornography does not vaunt itself as being anything more than it is; it never claims, never pretends, and is never expected to be at the service of any purpose "higher" than itself.

Now, it is also possible that the moviemakers of Slumdog knew exactly what they were doing, and, quite conscious of who the viewing audience would largely be--the broad swath of middle class occidentals--they intended in their film to mock the likes of you and me. For, after all, if you put aside all the knee-jerk judeo-christian guilt that presupposed the above take on the movie, the movie was suffused with joyful people largely living joyfully; and if not joyfully, at least they were actually living their lives! They were not numbed and they had not succumbed to routine lives (forgive me this) of "work, gym. . .[and] hanging out"; they were not trying to find some "spark" to "ignite" the torpor of their otherwise, to all appearances, highly accomplished and successful lives--as both you and I are doing, it seems to me. No, it is only when the lives depicted in Slumdog began to resemble our own, with the rising pile of material accoutrements did the characters' lives correspondingly sink down into the morass of being quickly deadened. It seems, then, that it is only when you verily have insurance for your life, like the ripped off American couple with insurance for their stripped car, that it is suddenly bereft of meaning. That is the savage mockery and commentary Slumdog may have been making on it viewers in America who "loved" it, but alas, did not, sadly, for all their overweening intelligence and cross-cultural savvy, get. Not in the slightest. Not at all.

I'd love to hear your reply!

Egbert