Blinded by the Light

Ah, fathers and sons. Is there a more universally present theme in storytelling across the world? By its “back of the box” description, Blinded by the Light is about a young man from the Indian subcontinent, Pakistan to be specific, who discovers that the music of Bruce Springsteen speaks to his experiences as the son of immigrant parents in Britain in the late 1980s. Gurinder Chadha’s deftly told coming of age story is not just about the transformative nature of music or how teenagers often turn to a musical subgenre to forge an identity for themselves, but also about that age-old tension between the wants of the parents and the desires of the child.

In Blinded by the Light, this tension is expressed specifically through the lens of the intensely patriarchal and rigid structure of a Muslim Pakistani family of the time. The father is paramount in every sense; he makes the decisions for the family, pools all the family’s earnings and manages them personally, decides who his sons and daughters will date and marry, and so on. As is often the case with second generation kids who are raised with influences outside that rigid cultural expectation, the youth of the central family rebel to varying degrees, although none as pronounced as our protagonist: Javed.

Javed feels trapped and out of place, with desires and pursuits that he keeps intensely private, in no small part because they don’t fit within any framework his family or greater ethno-religious community will understand. He begins keeping a diary at a young age and eventually begins writing both prose and poetry as a form of self expression. It isn’t until both a teacher and a neighbor discover his work and compliment his talents that he begins to see writing as something more, something that can give his life purpose.

Blinded by the Light shares a lot of characteristics with Chadha’s most famous movie, Bend it Like Beckham. The Indian subcontinent family, a protagonist with an interest that is outside of cultural norms, the peculiarities of being the child of immigrant parents, and even dating in an environment where your old world culture and your new world reality represent completely different expectations. However, Blinded by the Light still tells its own story. Blinded by the Light is about a young man, rather than a young woman, so the pressures of arranged marriage and feminine conformity are replaced with Javed’s struggles creating mutual respect between himself and his father: issues of expectation and reality, dreams of a future and pragmatism about the present, and so on. But gender issues aren’t the only way the film is different.

The story of Blinded by the Light is about many other significant ideas, related to the time in which it was set, such as Thatcher era politics and the emergent white nationalism of the time, the economic struggles of a United Kingdom whose manufacturing jobs were drying up, and how all those things influence the life of a 16 or 17 year old Pakistani kid living in Luton. It isn’t just that Javed’s dad is traditionalist, although he very much is, but that he has genuine concerns about the practicality of a writing career as the total workforce in the UK is shrinking, something he knows all too well after losing his job at a midlands automobile factory. It isn’t just that Javed doesn’t fit in because he’s different, he is targeted for his race and his home and the homes of his family friends are vandalized by white nationalists. That being said, these things don’t end up being as important to the story as you might expect, but instead frequently act as part of the rich background tapestry that informs the action of said story.

For me, the film has two major flaws that prevent me from really loving it. The first one, which is a pretty big one, is that Javed is often hard to like. There are times where his character is made almost one note with his love of Springsteen and that creates situations in which he comes across as either shallow, a bit insensitive and immature, or both. He centers so much of his life around the music that he lets it affect the way he talks to the girl he likes, his work, and his friendships. You can like music. You can like music so much you make it a core part of your identity. But it is downright weird to essentially replace your identity with the lyrical poetry of your favorite artist. One scene in particular, where he is on a kind of first date with the girl he has a crush on, is particularly alienating as he can’t seem to stop and just have a human moment where he connects on a personal level; he still must filter everything through Springsteen.

Speaking of the music, the second major flaw is that for a movie about music, the soundtrack ends up feeling very repetitive. Though the soundtrack of the film lists as many as twelve different Springsteen songs, the actual featured music ends up feeling more like the same few hit songs over and over and over again, which is a bit of a disappointment. There is a limit to the number of times you can reuse Born to Run in a film’s soundtrack and this movie far exceeds it.

Ultimately, however, the movie delivers a relatively safe and similar message to that of Bend it Like Beckham. It is an enjoyable film about the complications of growing up, the desire of young people to buck against their restrictive elders and carve their own path, and the power that music can have in shaping one’s identity and worldview. It is, in every sense, a big crowd pleaser. However, what keeps it from being truly great is a so-so main character who, either through script or performance, never quite clicks, some feeling of repetition in the musical choices, and, frankly, being an only slightly different but slightly worse movie than the director’s other big hit.

Would Recommend: If you absolutely love the music of Bruce Springsteen.

Would Not Recommend: If the idea of a soundtrack that is 80% Springsteen is an immediate turn off.