A Wizard

Historically, the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, has been interpreted to be a coming-of-age story about realizing the value of home. Dorothy’s “There’s no place like home” line is both famous and – seemingly – definitive. However, in his 2002 book “The Wizard of Oz”, Rushdie challenges this, saying the tale is one of exile, realizing the inadequacy of adults, and that the ending is a betrayal/Hollywood cop-out. In viewing this video of Indian children singing “In the Merry Old Land of Oz”, Rushdie might have interpreted the clip to be a continued parallel between Bollywood and The Wizard of Oz’s style, the children’s longing to escape home, and a projection of the children eventually realizing the inadequacy of their situation.

According to Rushdie, the Wizard of Oz “fit[s] into what was…and remains today, one of the mainstreams of ‘Bollywood’ film production”, but with tighter production values. This explains why children in India today would still be engrossed in perpetuating a film created 70 years ago. It fits better into Indian culture.

Rushdie says the Wizard of Oz “shows that imagination can become reality, that there is no such place as home or rather that the only home is one we make ourselves.” Given that the children singing the song all – like Rushdie – originate from overcrowded India. In view of the large numbers of Indian immigration to the US, and Indian success in the US, the desire of the children to come to a land where “they [can] laugh the day away” (such as the US) seems to mirror the desire to go to Oz.

The children in the youtube video are being made to sing the song by adults, because of their belief that adults are powerful and frightening figures. This mirrors Rushdie fear of his father, and Dorothy’s of the wizard. Like them, “when the curtain fell away and …offspring discover the truth about adult humbug it was easy to think, as she did, that wizard [parents] are very bad indeed”. These children forced to sing a song will eventually realize the ridiculousness of adult authority.

Rushdie rejects the end of the “Wizard of Oz” as Hollywood drivel. The children in the video sing with vague feelings that the reason they do so is their own desire to escape, the film’s link to Bollywood, and the one day they must reveal their instructors as frauds.

Smile

One of the most famous paintings in the world, the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, has undergone much scrutiny, mimicry, etc in the centuries since it was originally created. In 1919, the famous DADAist Marcel Duchamp painted his own version, added a cheap mustache, and titled it “Elle a chaud au cul”, or, “she has a hot ass”. Since then, Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, and what seems like half-the-internet have reinterpreted the mysterious lady. In the picture of the Mona Lisa as a character on the Simpsons, we see post-modernism as Frederic Jameson christens “post modernism”, that is it depicts “the effacement… of the older (essentially high-modernist) frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture, and the emergence of new kinds of texts infused with the forms, categories, and contents of that very culture industry so passionately denounced by all the ideologues of the modern”.

The Simpsons ‘Mona Lisa’ does not make the artful, modernist point found in either Duchamp’s or Dali’s Dadaism/Surrealism. According to Jameson, “postmodernism…[is] fascinated precisely by this whole “degraded” landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV series”, and this interpretation is clearly revealing in the popular culture of the Simpsons art style. Even the name “Mona Lisa”, parallels the name of the Lisa Simpson, the show’s main female lead. No point is being made; the reference is created only for the mild, kitsch amusement of connecting one thing that contemporary viewers will appreciate with an absurd – thus amusing – subject.

According to Jameson, the Simpsons Mona Lisa is postmodern because it fills the capitalist need that post modernism thrives in. Jameson claims that postmodernism occurs from the fact that in today’s world , “aesthetic production … has become integrated into commodity production”: therefore, this Mona Lisa exists to fill the need for the short-term clever/pretty idea that can consumed and forgotten. It was quick, easy, and cheap to produce. So easy, in fact, that anyone could do it. On the Simpson’s website, browsers are given the option to create a character that looks like them. This Mona Lisa was formed out of a need to produce cheaply a maximum reward towards capitalist gains.

The value of the Simpson’s Mona Lisa is that it creates wealth. Jameson argues that the “truth of postmodernism, …is multinational capitalism.” With 449 episodes that have broadcast world-wide, the Simpsons stands for as an internationally franchise. There is a movie, merchandize, fans, etc. The creation of this new Mona Lisa merely glorifies the capitalist power of the original show.

Though its facination with pop culture, integration of aesthetics and production, and capitalist ends, the Simpson’s depiction of the Mona Lisa places the famous painting in its rightful place amidst post modern culture; as something to gain shallow enjoyment from before moving on to the next, money-making thing.