Boyhood and the alien: E.T. and Koi Mil Gaya

Given the perduring distance between Bollywood and Hollywood, two of the largest and most prolific film industries in the world, the recent release of the Bollywood film Koi Mil Gaya, loosely based on Steven Spielberg's science fiction classic, E.T. the Extraterrestrial, provides an excellent opportunity to compare this most current of Bollywood products to the original, a classic of contemporary American cinema, re-edited and re-released on its 20th anniversary last year.  What is striking about the comparison is how different the films manage to be, despite sharing all essential plot elements. Placing these two versions of one story side by side thus helps elucidate the different tropes through which Hollywood and Bollywood succeed in capturing popular desire (and making a buck off it) and in particular, the heroes they construct to do so. The bittersweet paths we see boys take to become men in both E.T. and Koi Mil Gaya  express more than anything the anxieties which underlie the norms of adult manhood in both contexts. It is these anxieties which the films work to release, by resurrecting the ancient hope of the hero who can overcome the dreadful binds we all fear to be caught in.

It is indeed a testament to the imagination of Koi Mil Gaya's film makers that they could take such highly atypical material – a science fiction tale of an abandoned alien and the lonely boy who helps him make contact with his home world – and Bollywoodize it.  And Bollywoodize they did! Adding a romantic story line, six songs, an hour to the plot-line, and an ending that thankfully did not involve flying bicycles, motorbikes, or pedal scooters (as it easily might have), but did involve a certain volume of tears shed, a space ship landing and taking off, and the reassurance from our alien friend that "he would be there, watching over" our hero forever, Koi Mil Gaya is nonetheless a profoundly different film from the original. While both movies tell a story about childhood, families, and bridging these, about the struggle to be a man, they reveal very different children, families and men. Both are designed as family entertainment, which distinguishes them from other blockbusters of male adventure.  Not only do they include women in major roles, but they show us heroism at its sweetest, i.e., when performed by boys, who we are supposed to love for their innocence and vulnerability as much as for their power.  The sweetness of the boy is what excuses the violence of the man he becomes; it is what marks out our heroes as heroes in the first place. The emotional requirements of the central figures is what motivates their friendships with the aliens in both films, and it is this relationship which then forces them to act within a world which opposes and threatens it.