PROJECTING DESIRE

What caused the recent shift in India’s entertainment cultures.

There’s a lot going on in this latest book in New York University Press’ Critical Cultural Communication series by film and media scholar Chatterjee. At its core, it “offers an interdisciplinary conversation between media studies and architecture.” In the past 30 years, the heightened hyperreal architectonics of multiplex cinemas, rather than single screens in Indian malls, radically altered the politics of theatrical space, female consumption, and moviegoing. Chatterjee smartly explores how this moment “played out across media industries, architecture and design, popular cinema, and public culture,” especially in New Delhi. Media, gender, and architecture are woven together in the creation of this global media city in the “throes of a severe spatial, moral, and emotional crisis.” The author looks first at the prehistory of the multiplex, from the 1960s to the 1980s. In the 1980s, television and VHS tapes emerged as a favorite of the Indian middle classes, creating “heterogenous taste cultures.” Commodity and consumption culture “took over the Indian landscape” via the rise of shopping malls, public safety, and their multiplex spectators—not the only country, of course, where a similar pattern occurred. Chatterjee studies in detail three films that have thematically engaged with gender, especially women, a violent rape culture, liberalization, and space in Delhi: Pink, NH10, and Dev.D. She also discusses the nostalgia surrounding the death of the single screens, which could often turn spectators into joyful “performative fans,” and the conversion of older cinemas into multiplexes, as well as the addition of virtual reality lounges to them. Chatterjee soberly concludes by examining the impact of moviegoing in the midst of India’s right-wing Hindu nationalism, Hindutva, and how it negatively “infiltrates the regulated ‘safe’ microclimates of the mall-multiplex.”

An ambitious work whose dry, academic prose might put off some readers.