Reading Journal [October 8, 2010]

An article that I found particularly interesting this week was an article on the blog IndiaRealTime published on The Wall Street Journal website questioning the casting of Max Minghella as the real life person Divya Narendra in The Social Network. With all the excellent press and Oscar predictions surrounding the film in all the blogs and papers, I thought it was kind of risky, but refreshing, to publish an article pointing something out that is potentially controversial about a practically universal critical success. I know from experience that whenever someone posts something like this online, there are always a bunch of naysayers commenting on how the writer needs to get over themselves and stop being so sensitive, so I always applaud anyone who actually has the guts to bring this up, and on The Wall Street Journal’s website no less.

The article starts off with a soft lede. What I think the writer did was give the reader a few details and then finally getting to the point of the article by presenting the widely contrasting descriptions of what Divya Narendra’s ethnicity is in comparison to Max Mingehella’s.

“The Social Network” opened last week to rave reviews, Oscar buzz and a big box office. This is the type of movie that actors give their right arms to star in.

Given the movie is at least loosely based on the Facebook story, there is an Indian character that plays an integral role in the narrative: Divya Narendra, a Harvard student who tussled with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg.

An Indian doesn’t play Mr. Narendra in the movie. Instead, he is played by Max Minghella, who has Italian, Scottish and Chinese ancestry.”

I thought it was a good way to get the problem across—I get the feeling the author was trying to go for a jarring effect. The story starts out sounding pretty average and conflict-less, making the reader wonder what the news is, but then hits the reader with the problem. To emphasize that, the author even makes it it’s own one sentence line. The comparison actually reminded me of how Allarie compared the images of two schools in her lede for her charter school story this week. I never really noticed it before, but it really is a pretty effective way to start a story and present the problem in an engaging manner.

Still, if the author was trying to go for jarring for the whole article, I think that after the lede, it could have been handled a bit better. While I did enjoy the quotes from casting directors and Sony Pictures, I had a slight problem with the portion of the blog entry discussing the part of the controversy in which Minghella appears darker in the film and promotional pictures, but is actually lighter in real life, posing the question: did he use makeup to darken himself for the movie? The Internet is a great thing and allows the author to use hyperlinks—which he does in order to link to pictures of Minghella’s skin tone in various pictures—but as I said, this is the Internet. To really get the point across, I wish the author embedded the pictures WITHIN the blog article, side by side, so that the reader can instantly be hit with the visual discrepancy of Minghella’s skin color. Sure, a reader can just open both hyperlinks and place the pictures side-by-side themselves, but honestly, who has time for that? The author DOES embed pictures of Minghella and Narendra in the article, but the pictures are not placed near each other and the picture of Narendra is so small that it doesn’t leave much of an impact. Pictures, I think, in this case would have spoken louder than words.

Basically, while I do like this article for pointing out the whitewashing of an Indian character, I think that the level of its presentation could have been upped so that the reader feels more of an emotional reaction to the news. As it stands now, I feel a person could walk away from this article feeling a bit “Meh” about it.