One of my fave movies of all time is Padosan; a movie that is as replete with stereotypes as it is funny. Sunil Dutt’s Bhola is the strong and loyal but not terribly bright North Indian. Mehmood is the South Indian so of course he is the dance master with the over the top accent. Kishore Kumar is the paan-chewing stage artiste who calls everyone ‘bangdu’, because he is a Bengali. Stereotypes and movies seem to go hand in hand - in Hollywood and Bollywood as the tweeple pointed out.
This tweet about a typical movie professor struck a chord. We’ve all seen the scene where the professor ends his lecture by making the main point and then telling students to do their homework.
If Bollywood has some very specific portrayals of Gujaratis, South Indians (with no distinction made between people from Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka or Andhra-Telengana of course), Punjabis etc., so does Hollywood. The French are mercurial, with an accent thick as brick, the Germans are cold and precise, and Italians are emotional people with mafia connections, the Russians are all spies and so on.
If you’ve ever followed a TV series about a law firm/famous lawyer, you know that they have corner offices with a drinks cabinet, that they drink a lot and have a hectic sex life. Also they never seem to be doing any of the boring stuff such as drafting, case law research, making notes and pleadings etc. but seem to have a lot of time to contemplate life with a faraway look in their eyes.
The gun never manages to find its mark until the very end if it’s the main villain or the hero. All the others will fall like ninepins. And in the Hindi film, each of the baddies will approach the hero one by one only… with great decorum, never all together.
When the token black woman is not being all arch and candid, she is making sassy comebacks. She is also overweight, with very distinctive diction and body language.
Be it Hollywood or Bollywood, if they portray a computer geek or a hacker of some sort, this person will be shown as having some type of magical power. With this power they can easily and quickly break into any system simply by banging on random keys of the keyboard.
There was a time when being a cross-dresser was the same as being transsexual and being a homosexual in a Hindi film… it was all ha-ha funny. Now the gay man is presented as a distinct species with peculiar characteristics: an effeminate, fastidious dresser who will constantly hit on straight men. It is all still ha-ha funny.
The teenager in a Hindi movie is always trying to find a way to balance parental and societal expectations with personal dreams and aspirations.
This is the theme of countless films Hindi and English: the well-meaning but misguided dad who has a revelation or encounter of some sort that awakens him to what is really important in life.
That nice young soldier who has a girl waiting for him somewhere… he is always the first to get shot, isn’t he.
The aliens always, always, always invade only the United States. It is always, always, always up to the Americans to save the planet… repeatedly.
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