Hollywood and the Lamas

...They are in tears performing the segment in which the 1951 Seventeen-Point Agreement with China is signed, despite its not being historically correct Even those who have spent most of their lives in India tell him again and again that they feel as though they are at home when they walk onto the set of the Barhor, the market street that encircles Tibet's chief temple...

...It is a lazy way of achieving enlightenment...

...provides the traveler with "an indigenous cuisine made up of things most Westerners have found virtually inedible...

...One can sympathize, however, with his view that the beleaguered country itself would benefit from a more accurate depiction...

...than we perhaps care to know," without pursuing this further...

...If Tibetans cannot tell the difference between the real and the Hollywood Tibet, Schell reasons, the confusion of American audiences will be far worse...

...He points out that where the missionaries tended to see dirty pagans, George Bogle, four centuries later, saw noble savages...

...Schell offers an excellent sequential précis of subsequent books, working his way from Odorico de Pordenone in the 14th century, through various other Catholic missionaries both Capuchin and Jesuit, to the first British intruders in the 18th century...

...At least we have not been snared by the Hollywood version— although we may be entrapped by other Tibets of our own making...

...and is populated by a people "who engage in only the most modest kinds of personal hygiene...

...This occurred in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when the surroundings an earlier generation had perceived as ugly and cruel came to be viewed as majestic and awe-inspiring...

...The author flew uninvited to the Argentine site of the filming of Seven Years...

...If Tibetans have profited to some slight degree from better roads, the purpose of those roads is to facilitate the transport of troops...

...Accessibility and involvement have done the Tibetan cause nothing but good...

...If there are new schools, the classes are taught in Mandarin...

...Most intriguing are several issues Schell raises that he treats only superficially...

...Schell does an excellent job of tracing the complex historical events that have entwined the indigenous population with the Mongols and the Chinese, and have resulted in its being overpowered by Beijing...

...Alexandra David-Neel is taken to task for her reporting that monastery messengers moved almost as if in flight, and Lama Govinda is characterized as a charlatan in fancy dress...

...Most of Virtual Tibet concentrates on a more abstract matter: the Shangri-la invented by Westerners...

...Pondering Tibet's attraction...

...The wingless messengers have disappeared from books on Tibet...

...The revelation that Harrer was a Nazi and member of the SS, made just before the release of Seven Years, may or may not have contributed to the film's failure...

...The Chinese immediately made use of those facts to try to discredit the Dalai Lama...

...Nonetheless, there are problems...

...Schell is worried about the effects movie stars and Hollywood itself may have on the Tibetans' cause and the image of the Dalai Lama...

...When the young Tibetan woman who plays the love interest in Seven Years puts down her fork and prays over her half finished salad, then explains to him how her spiritual vision requires that she treat even those she does not like with kindness, his recoiling is palpable...

...He does not seem to recognize this has not gone to the Tibetan community but to the Chinese military and the Han Chinese colonists...

...Schell tracks the Indian spies sent by the British to literally figure out the lay of the land—at great risk to their lives—and the British invasion during the winter of 1903-04 under Francis Younghusband...

...He finishes his reading list with James Hilton's Lost Horizon, published in 1933, and Out of This World, the 1950 book by Lowell Thomas and his son about their trip to the land of lamas...

...For example, Steven Seagal, the martial arts expert, actor, director, and producer has been proclaimed a tulku, a reincarnation of a high lama...

...He is not an enthroned tulku, Schell explains...

...What he fails to point out is that at bottom their fear may have more to do with the Tibetans' loyalty to a religion that rivals Communism...

...Chiefly interested in showing Hollywood's impact on our perceptions of the country, he begins by recounting a trip he made there as a result of childhood fantasies inspired by National Geographic and adventure books like Heinrich Harrer's Seven Years in Tibet...

...Instead, he dismisses them by quoting Joan Chen, director of Xixiu: The Sent Down Girl, who declares that "people in Hollywood like the idea of Tibetan mysticism because they don't really understand it and so can interpret it any way they want...

...But the practice of controlling one's body temperature, thumo reskiang, that David-Neel claimed to have practiced has been documented in the West...

...Her notion that the spiritual life is something one has to labor at also stands in stark contrast to director JeanJacques Annaud's glib description of Tibet as "a brand name" for the spiritual, and Schell's telling us the Dalai Lama must be careful not to "debase his moral and spiritual currency...

...More interesting is his recording of the Tibetans' reactions to the set and the scenes they participate in...

...He dips into everything from the Lazarist priests Abbe Evariste-Regis Hue and Joseph Gabet's rather Baron Munchausen narrative of their adventures in Tibet to Elizabeth Sarah Mazuchelli's reaction on being the first Western woman to stand at the base of Everest...

...In the end, however, one can hardly disagree with Schell that we should give up our blurry-eyed view of Tibet as the capital of mysticism...

...Chen also underscores the exchange of fantasies between East and West: "Westerners crave a place in the East where everything is pure and spiritual, while those who grew up in China crave the West because they see it as the land of materialism...

...Today Tibet is in a continuous state of tension, plagued by commercialism, oppressive surveillance, urban sprawl, and pollution...

...Some of the authors mentioned are denigrated...

...In fairness to the Chinese, he suggests that their vision of Tibetan Buddhism is not colored by the rosy glasses of Westerners but by the firm Marxist belief that religion is the opiate of the people...

...Schell offers an interesting insight of his own: "I wonder if Seagal and many other Tibet supporters here as well, having had to triumph over adversity themselves, don't identify with the Dalai Lama and Tibetans as underdogs—the little guy against the big bully...

...The failure of Seven Years at the box office makes moot Schell's conviction that the American public has been taken in by a virtual Tibet...

...As acute as herremarks are, they do not explain the young Chinese who travel to Tibet to try to find the lost roots of the Buddhism destroyed by Mao, let alone the recent upsurge of religion in China...

...Yet the facts are that Tibet fell to China because of inaccessibility and aloofness...

...He notes that with "little money and fewer resources, bereft of diplomatic recognition," the Tibetans were delighted by Hollywood's interest in them, but they lacked a "full understanding of how Hollywood worked or of its legendary appetite for consuming subjects and stories only to move on....' The Dalai Lama's exchange of "inaccessibility for accessibility and aloofness for involvement" is risky, Schell believes, as though the spiritual might be sullied by fingerprints...

...The fascination started with Marco Polo's passing mention of Tibet being populated by wizards...

...Reviewed by Karen Swenson Author, "The Latitude of a Daughter: New and Selected Poems" Orville Schell separates Tibet into the land victimized by China and the Shangri-la of Western imagination...

...Part of Schell's difficulty in understanding the situation is that religious and spiritual feelings are incomprehensible to him...

...There, among ceramic yak dung, he mused over the similarity between the old Dalai Lamas in the Potala and actor Brad Pitt in his walled villa...

...Lama Govinda's photographs of the great artistic sites of Tholing and Tsaparang have allowed us to know what those places looked like before the depredations of the Red Guards...

...He refers frequently to our yearning for the mystical, for a spiritually intact belief, but does not explore the source of those yearnings...

...He relates, too, the pressures China put on India to prevent the filming of Seven Years in Ladakh, and Disney's strategy in hiring Henry Kissinger to placate the Chinese when it did Kundun, a far better movie...

...His attempts to draw parallels do not yield much...

...Schell never tells us whether he found the place of his imagination...

...If industrial plants have been built, those who work in them are Han...

...Schell writes well about the bizarre interest that prompted the Nazis to adopt the swastika emblem—a symbol of spiritual strength in Tibetan Buddhism and not, as he states, of good fortune...

...Schell tries to enlist our sympathy for the Chinese by noting they have invested over $4 billion in Tibet...

...The author pokes fun at our blind adoration for a place that has "one of the most inhospitable climates on earth...

...The Chinese who live in Lhasa openly express their feeling of superiority to what they consider to be the semifeudal Tibetans...

...Experts like Robert Thurman disagree, stating emphatically that Buddhism, properly understood, is an ethical system...

...Another altered Western attitude, described by Peter Bishop in The Myth of Shangri-la, concerned the landscape...

...To have become one he would have had to commit to years of study and practice, and to Tibetans, the title is meaningless without the practice...

...He ends up by visiting the Argentine set of a 1997 movie made from Harrer's tale, and reflecting on its implications...

...The fact that they are acting in the film at all is to Schell "something like having real Holocaust victims play the roles of concentration camp prisoners...

...Becky Johnston, the scriptwriter for the 1997 production of Harrer's Seven Years in Tibet, is quoted as saying Buddhism's appeal to Hollywood is that it is thought to be "guilt free...

...Nor is he able to demonstrate that the romantic view of Tibet has had much effect on American culture, let alone a negative one...

...Rather, we should work for its freedom, since as "citizens of the wealthiest and strongest nation in world history" we have much to offer the oppressed mountain land...

...Schell concludes that Seagal probably received it in exchange for a large contribution...

...Early on, for instance, he notes that "our fantasies of places on or off this earth generally reflect far more about ourselves...