"Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge"

One of the biggest Indian movies of all time has finally reached America -- and deserves to translate into a big success here, too.

By Charles Taylor

June 17, 2004 | In Zhang Yimou's 1999 film "The Road Home" a poster for the movie "Titanic" hangs on the wall of an elderly widow's modest home in a rural Chinese village. Even given the worldwide pervasiveness of American pop culture, the passing detail of that poster is startling. You wonder, has the old lady seen the movie? Where? Does one of her neighbors have a VCR? Do movies play in some communal hall in her village? And where did the posters (there are two, actually) come from?

Zhang isn't using the detail to lament the popularity of American culture (though the success of a stinker like "Titanic" is depressing), and I'm not much interested in doing that either. Froth all you want about cultural hegemony, but proposals like the French one of a few years back to limit the number of American movies imported into that country have obvious flaws. Apart from the ugly prospect of censorship (what else do you call a government deciding to withhold certain films from distribution?), the people behind those proposals always conveniently ignore the millions of others who want to see American movies. I'd much prefer it if more people in France (and in America) saw Philippe de Broca's "On Guard!" than "Troy." I just don't think the decision should be made for them.

But I do wish things worked in reverse as well. American culture is unavoidable worldwide, but in the U.S., the pop culture of other countries is almost totally avoidable. Every forgotten Broadway performer who once had a second lead in "Hello, Dolly!" merits an obit in the New York Times, but it took the paper a week and a half to acknowledge the death of Hong Kong pop star and actress Anita Mui. Try to imagine the Hong Kong press waiting that long to acknowledge the passing of Madonna -- because that's the equivalent.

It would be easy to blame that resistance to foreign culture completely on American provincialism. But most people, no matter where they're from, respond more instinctively to their own culture. There's no language barrier, for one thing, and there's a shared pool of references and tradition and convention.

Foreign influences have the damnedest way of working their way into American culture. "The Matrix," for example, is unthinkable without Hong Kong movies (or the New Testament, for that matter). And Middle Eastern rhythms have steadily been making themselves felt in hip-hop.

Still, in the U.S., foreign pop remains a specialized acquisition. Americans who get caught up in some aspect of another country's pop culture are often looking for something they feel is lacking in their native pop. Action-movie aficionados become connoisseurs of Hong Kong movies. Comic book fans may find themselves captivated by manga. (I fell for French pop after I saw Françoise Hardy singing in a 1960s promotional clip on MTV.)

A natural feeling of protectiveness may come over us when we discover a singer or a writer or a movie that only a few other people know about, whether in our own culture or another. The impulse to keep it our cherished secret is understandable, but it goes against the expansiveness of pop culture and the very idea of being a fan: the impulse to spread the word about your discovered passions.

Next page: A piece of Indian pop culture that easily traverses borders