Slumdipus Millionairex

The Times columnist Alice Miles’ assessment of Danny Boyle’s much-touted Oscar-winning film "Slumdog Millionaire" as brilliant but unethical has struck an Aristotelian nerve in me, if you will. It brings to mind "Poetics".

In this celebrated treatise on the moral function of art, the Greek philosopher said that if a creative work (a play, a recitation) represented human misery in a manner that induced chortles in the bosom of the audience—instead of pity, fear and sadness—then such a piece of art should be dubbed immoral.

It’s hard to tell what Aristotle would have thought of pornography, but as a student of Greek tragedies, I do know that he detested farce. The idea of laughter at the spectacle of a man slipping on a banana peel and crash-landing on his bottom was repugnant to him. Classical Greek thought would have shuddered with horror at the aesthetic portrayal of pain in say, "The Rape of Lucretia" by Titian.

The best of Greek tragedies typically centered on the twin themes of carnage and the suffering of the body and soul. But Aristotle asked playwrights to refrain from representing them overtly. I imagine him instructing them to represent violence through words, and not theatrical acts.

Little wonder then that the audience in an Attic drama seldom saw the maiming, the raping, the burning, and the looting on the stage. Instead, he or she heard an announcement of the act by a character called the "messenger" or "the chorus."

Take for instance, Oedipus’ blinding of himself by thrusting the sharp end of his mother’s brooches into his eyes. As an audience, seated under a large tent in Athens in 300 B.C., one wouldn’t have witnessed this sight in its gory details, but rather, seen a Corinthian messenger make his appearance and announce Oedipus’ blinding. Next, one would have seen the blind hero stumbling onto the stage.

In "Slumdog Millionaire," by contrast, a whole scene is dedicated to the display of the blinding of a child’s eyes with molten wax. It’s captured on camera with the ardor of one filming an orgiastic scene.

Maybe that’s why it’s been denounced as “poverty porn” by critics, though its content isn’t pornographic in the strictest use of the term. Set in the slums of Dharavi, in the outskirts of Mumbai, the film celebrates lives brutalized by unmitigated poverty and violence. The razzle-dazzle of groovy soundtrack and high-technology lighting titillates the viewer, rather than move him or her.

Aristotle, I believe, would have called "Slumdog Millionaire" not “poverty porn” but a farce—an ignoble piece of entertainment that harnesses human misery for entertainment purposes. So how would Aristotle have directed the film?