What's the connection between the two? The audience. No, not that the same audience went to both, but that, largely, the same audience didn't.

When I walked into the cinema showing Beefcake, it was impossible not to notice that well over 90% of the people there were men. The New Paper's reporter noticed the same thing, though poor fellow, he was puzzled by it. Reporter Ernest Luis seemed to be a good ol' macho heterosexual, objectifying women as "babes", and expecting nude men to attract women, the way nude women attract men (in other words, expecting women to be mere mirror-images of men). This was what he wrote:

"This movie is 100 per cent pure beef. But guys, be warned, there are no babes in this movie, at all. Only lots of sculpted men in the buff here…. Which made my observation of the cinema audience somewhat puzzling: On that weekday afternoon, there were far more men than women watching it." [The New Paper, 24 Oct 1999]

We know of course, that Beefcake had a gay following. We weren't puzzled, were we?

Earth had a strong Indian following. The evening I went -- and I don't think it was untypical -- some 90% of the audience were Indian. Where were the Chinese, the majority race in Singapore?

One could be critical about both films; they had their flaws. The narrative in Beefcake could have been, well, beefed up, without losing historical accuracy. The dialogue and editing in Earth left quite a bit to be desired. But they were both worthy films, because they explored historical periods that have largely been ignored or forgotten, and in so doing, addressed issues that still confront us today.

The main story in Earth was that of two men, IceCandyMan and Hassan the masseur, both Muslims, pursuing the hand of a Parsee family's Hindu maid. The setting was Lahore in 1947, with violence breaking out between Hindus and Sikhs on the one hand, and Muslims on the other. This even as some among them couldn't understand why. "We speak the same language, we eat the same food." With the rising animosity, old friendships were torn apart because of religious differences, and many found their political and personal loyalties at odds. Hassan sheltered his Sikh friends from the violence, but IceCandyMan went berserk after his sisters were murdered by a Hindu mob. Throughout, the Parsee family tried to remain neutral, but that did not mean they were spared the horror of the civil conflict either.

It was a good film that made one think about the tragedy of inter-communal fighting, especially in communities where various groups live inter-mingled with each other. Surely this is not a moot point. Kosovo, Rwanda, Bosnia, Northern Ireland and Lebanon are places, which, even if you're under 30, you might have read about in your daily newspapers.

The message from Beefcake, on the other hand, was not about the ugliness of conflict, but our denial of beauty. Our modern heterosexist attitudes include a phobia of the male nude. Men who have absorbed a sense of male superiority find it threatening to be cast as sexual objects for the casual use of women (not that women care that much about the male nude, in which case, wouldn't it be worse to be revealed that men are redundant?). Other men, who can barely keep their own homosexual potential under wraps, find it even more threatening to have their sexuality confronted by such tempting images.

Beefcake challenged such denial, by repeatedly presenting the male nude one after another almost as if to wear down one's defences. The film compelled one to react to the issue, and to the related questions of male prostitution, pornography and freedom of expression. These are still burning questions in all societies.

Yet, these two thought-provoking films were mainly seen by narrow audiences. Non-Indians gave Earth a miss -- what has an Indian film got to do with me? -- even as the issues it raised would have benefitted everyone. Straights wouldn't be caught dead in Beefcake, even as they were the ones who most needed to reexamine their own insecurities.

The average consumer of media selects the offerings that are comfortable to him. He sticks to the news, the entertainment, the opinion columns, that accord with his own outlook on life. Very few choose films or TV programs, or even news, which challenge their cosy assumptions. Mr Average would much rather listen to a preacher preaching what he already believes in, than someone asking difficult questions. The average person is parochial, and his parochialism is not only that of geography, but also of interests. How do we have liberated minds, and a slightly better shot at world peace, if so many people will not venture out of their ghettos?

This will be an increasingly pressing problem in the 'information age'. In the 'industrial age' -- and I use such simplistic terms with great reluctance -- the producer was king. Whether it was the Model T Ford ("you can have any colour you want so long as it's black") or choice of newspapers (is there any real difference among any of the papers published by Singapore Press Holdings?), most people had little choice but to consume a fairly standardised product. Even so, we still ended up with misunderstanding and conflict. There was little meeting of minds, and even less opening of them. People stuck by their biases and petty loyalties. Indians watched Earth and gay men watched Beefcake.

Far from making a uniform, seamless world, I fear the coming 'information age' may make things worse. There will be so much product out there, it will be a consumers' market. Instead of all reading the same news, we will each personalise our portals to see only the things we want to see. The explosion and fragmentation of all information offerings, not just the internet -- books, movies, news, editorial opinion, too -- will mean we can fill all our time consuming exactly the things that meet our preconceived ideas, and yet be beguiled into thinking we are indulging in variety. This illusion of breadth and richness, when the reality is numbing narrowness, will reinforce the ghettoisation of the mind.

The response to this challenge is not to write more brilliant books or make more enriching movies. Those we will have -- there will always be dedicated geniuses out there. The response has to be to educate consumers to be more open-minded, and this is best done before consumers are enfranchised to choose. In other words, catch them young, when we can still insist that the reading list includes the massacre at Wounded Knee, the development of banking in Tokugawa Japan, the inquisition of Galileo, desertification of the Sahel and the trial of Oscar Wilde. We need to demonstrate to them the joys of intellectual discovery, of seeing new worlds, and looking at old ones afresh. We need to teach people to be receptive to challenging ideas. The whole point is to get people to want to look beyond their ghetto, unsquintingly, at the wider world.

Then again, maybe we worry too much. Every generation has feared for the worst: the decline of civilisation, the dictatorship of duds, that kind of thing, for throughout history, people have been parochial, short-sighted and bigotted. Only a fraction of a percent of each generation have ventured out from their mental hovels. In the main, only Indians have been interested in India, only gay men in the male nude. So what's new?

© Yawning Bread