Back when I was growing up in the US, there was a saying: “Everybody loves a winner” a phrase derived possibly from the 1967 song. Nowadays, from social media to the movies, and through everything in between, we’ve come to love the “losers” much much more. In her personal documentary, award winning filmmaker Karla Murthy talks about one such person. Someone very very close to her — her dad.
It’s sometimes hard to watch Karla Murthy’s doc The Gas Station Attendant. I felt urges of anger, then pity, then true angst while listening to Murthy’s own voiceover and viewing her dad, H. N. Shantha Murthy, wade through the obstacles that both life, and himself, put in his way. Anyone who has had a less than perfect relationship with a parent, or two, can identify with this story and therein lies the brilliance of The Gas Station Attendant, which world premiered this week at the Sheffield Doc Fest.
The film starts out with Murthy, the filmmaker, on camera and on voiceover. Mom and dad had a gift and jewelry shop in Texas, which hasn’t been doing so well, she tells us. So mom has had to pull double duty as a nurse, while dad is a nighttime gas station attendant. “I was worried,” Karla says about her dad’s predicament, “and I wish I didn’t have to worry.” Yes, we’ve been there with some of our parents, haven’t we? She continues, “I don’t want to see him as the butt of a joke,” meaning he’s South Asian, with an accent and working in a gas station… Apu from The Simpsons anyone! Stereotypes in today’s hyper-boxed in world, where everyone is told to belong to an ever shrinking category of labels, are rampant. If you didn’t think of Apu when you first started reading that sentence, good for you. You’re either incredibly open minded or have been living under a rock.
Life started out OK for little H. N. Shantha. Born in a village near Bangalore, he remembers trips to Mysore as a child, in a pre-partition India. Then things started to fall apart, and when he was around seven years old, young Murthy witnessed two tragedies — Gandhi’s assassination and his dad falling into a coma, as a result of an accident. From then on, he struggled to get his head above water, let alone swim forward into a successful life.
But then, something happened with changed the course of his existence forever — I won’t give a spoiler here but let’s just say that he considers the Ashoka Hotel in Delhi “lucky” — followed by a move to the US, Texas in fact, which many dream of. It’s the immigrant’s version of a Cinderella story, to be swept off your feet and brought to a land of opportunity, and yet, for Murthy, it hasn’t necessarily turned into a fairy tale.
As a personal aside, I remember as a young teenager on the eve of our move to the US, a friend of my parents, writer Oriana Fallaci, telling me that in order to survive in America one had to behave like John Wayne. Now, mind you, I moved to Los Angeles as a teenager with my mom and dad, and dad held a US passport from his own father’s days of escaping Nazi Germany. I know it could not have happened like this, but I remember stepping off the plane at LAX and immigration handing my mom and me a green card. Anyway, I never forgot Fallaci’s words, and always remember the film she showed me to make her point. “See how he walks? How he talks to people? That’s how you have to behave in the States,” she said, meaning walk tall and carry a big stick. To this day, I can’t watch a John Wayne film without feeling a bit of incomprehensible sentimentality, like he’s my distant uncle, teaching me the ways of life in America.
For Murthy, I imagine, alone and without Fallaci’s prompt, it must have been incredibly scary to land in the US, and in Texas at that, a land of cowboys and, well, everyone else — all those who don’t belong there, in the white Americans’ eyes. He did his best, he struggled, he continued to try to keep his head above water, and made it as a father — clearly made it better than alright at that, to have his filmmaker daughter create a whole film about him! — but never perhaps as a worker bee. His values, his charm, the things that made it successful in India, don’t count for much in the US, unless you also have money to show off. That’s the hard truth, even our president would not be there if he hadn’t shown his voters “the money!!” Remember the scene in Jerry Maguire?
We often think of South Asian immigrants these days as skilled labor who come to our shores to be doctors, nurses and the likes. Or, at the other end of the spectrum, from the Americas gardeners, housekeepers and babysitters. Yet, just like in life, migration exists in all shades of grey, not just the black and white of blue collar vs. white collar job seekers. It is a human condition which has become more and more everyone’s condition, as we all move to other lands, seeking a happiness that is more and more fleeting and more and more impossible to find. As we also reinvent the modern version of a perfect beauty or a masterpiece, through today’s points of view, then we should be rethinking the idea of “winner” and “loser” and what those labels mean in a society where money is becoming the only factor in deciding who gets assigned which tag.
Karla Murthy’s haunting, touching film gives a name to one immigrant’s story and makes us ponder it all. In the process, The Gas Station Attendant defines this human condition — the constant struggle to find what is perfect, or perfectly ours — that is our own fate, our collective karma if you will. For that, The Gas Station Attendant is a must-watch film, one which although difficult at times, should be on everyone’s list. Even if just to understand our parents, and the struggles they have gone through to get us here, a little bit more.
Image courtesy of Greene Fort Productions LLC, used with permission.