湘藍日光海岸

版权声明：转载时请以超链接形式标明文章原始出处和作者信息及本声明
http://sea-z.blogbus.com/logs/36958776.html

Between Dark and Light

——Impressions on Salim & Slumdog Millionaire

I have to admit that until tasting back on Slumdog Millionaire once again did I had deep touched feeling on the “bad guy”, Salim.

Salim is shaped as a typical character that is the inverse of the hero, Jamel. Compared to his biological brother, Salim didn’t trust in “love” at all (maybe that’s the only characteristic that a hero has to have). He told Jamel to forget Latika 3 times. In my opinion, Latika means love, hope and naiveté in that movie. What he told to Jamel was what indeed he wanted to tell himself. In Indian slum, such a cruel jungle, those 2 tiny kids were not able to live on the persistence of love. Giving Latika away, staining her, separating her from his brother, which Salim did was trying to destroy all the pure things in their life, then he would have no Achilles’ heel.

But even in such a cruel world, Salim still believed in the cruel god, not loves. Though he did a lot of “dirty things”, paradoxically Salim was a fatalist. It’s a loveless world, and Salim was not the one beloved. According to the Caste system and the belief in karma of previous life in India, those slumdogs are the humblest and can never get rid of the awful life. The noble are noble, and the humble are destined to be humble forever and ever. Isn’t it like that common people’s attitude to those good or bad guys? So Salim, a fatalist, just did what people thought he was bound to do. That’s all his life.

“In our world there is the light and the dark, and the thing between them.” At the end of that movie, Salim died in a bathtub that was fully filled with banknotes, holding tightly the gun that just killed the big boss. Salim was a “bad guy” but did the last but one good thing. Between dark and light, he was grey.