Gunga Din

Gunga Din is a relic now, something that could never be made without completely reversing its underlying messages.  Here you’ve got three British officers, having a good time in the exotic parts of the British empire, yucking it up and turning themselves into heroes at the same time.  And then you have your Thug worshippers of the lovegoddess Kali, who yell “Kill, kill, kill!!!!” so that you know they aren’t headed off to Sunday School.  The Thugs are political rebels as well as idol worshippers, so the whole point of the movie is how the three British officers tame the thugs and steal their gold, all while having a grand old time in the spirit of a 1930s swashbuckling adventure movie.  This kind of thing was remade by Spielberg as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but the difference is that Jones is an American individualist, while Gunga Din reinforces the joys and jollies of rule by the British empire.

Now that we’re on this side of WWII and colonialism, they can’t make this movie.  Consider the difference between it and The Man Who Would Be King, another movie based on something written by Rudyard Kipling.  In that movie, two guys go into Afghanistan for gold and military glory.  This is no different than some of the basics of Gunga Din‘s plot.  But whereas Gunga Din is about how you could whoop it up while dominating the colonials (just look at the movie poster to the right), The Man Who Would Be King is about how those exotic colonials will get you killed.  In other words, empire can work grandly on that side of WWII.  It’s a total failure on this side of WWII.  This latter point is used and reinforced, of course, by that still-dominant movie vision of empire, Star Wars.

The Bible has a lot to say about empire, but always the chosen people are on the side that the Thugs are in Gunga Din.  Either the smallish Israel, or the church in the New Testament, finds itself squeezed or persecuted by a dominate, idolatrous military and cultural powerhouse.  Two of the major points of Bible stories about empire is that God saves a remnant of the chosen and that those powerhouses aren’t powerhouses for long — they go kaputt, with a bang or a whimper.

Does that mean, at its core, that The Man Who Would Be King is more Biblical than Gunga Din?  Maybe, maybe not.  Politically speaking, maybe.  Religiously speaking, probably not.  In the first movie, it’s the native religious superstition that undoes the phony rule by the two British officers.  That religious superstition, then, triumphs in the end.  Not so in Gunga Din, in which the main point is the British destruction of the bloodthirsty worshippers of the goddess Kali.  Like many Old Testament stories, Gunga Din is a morality play about the destruction of wicked idolatry.  In other words, it seems to us that you’ve got your goods and your bads with both the pro-empire movies and the anti-empire movies.  Watch them with a careful eye.

It’s up to you whether you have a taste for Gunga Din.  People who’ve consumed blockbusters for the last thirty years are apt to be put off by 1930s special effects and overacting.  They probably won’t get the movie language of Gunga Din‘s long battle sequence followed right away by a long, semi-comedic dinner scene.  You wouldn’t ever get those two scenes separated but juxtaposed these days.  This is all to say, know your preferences and take the entertainment rating as you need to.

Entertainment:8

Intelligence: 4

Morality: 6