Sita Sings The Blues Video Notes, Week 4 Reading Notes Part A

Sita Sings The Blues Trailer, via YouTube

This week, I watched Sita Sings the Blues by Nina Paley. A modern twist on the retelling of the Ramayana, it presented the story as "The Greatest Break Up of All Time." And, it certainly was. In the end: Sita, in her own demure way, gets her revenge.

Most intriguing in this movie were the narrators that popped in and out of the movie to help move the story along. I found it really interesting that instead of just one narrator, as we are usually accustomed to booming over the movie with no physical form, these narrators were three, creating an interesting dynamic in discussion when events were questioned. They were also given simple, black forms stylized to that of an Indian god. I enjoyed hearing their memory of the story as the learned it when they were presumably younger, and how they argued over different aspects of the story, including discussion of modern moralistic values applied to a historical tale:

Ravana giving Sita 2 months to decide to be his wife, from Wikimedia Commons

(paraphrasing) "Why don't we applaud Ravana more for not forcing himself sexually upon Sita? At any point he could have just had his way with her, but no, if she wouldn't come to him willingly, then he wouldn't force her to. As much as we shouldn't have to applaud people for not raping other people, there is something missing from not noticing that he didn't just rape her."

This really helped spark the thought of how to re-interpret ancient tales in a modern way, using a single question applied to one of the characters to create a whole new framework where a story could be born.

I was incredibly pleased to have seen this movie, as Nina Paley's modernization to the Ramayana sparked ideas for my own story crafting, ten-fold. She hearkened Singing Sita to Betty Boop, she likened Rama to Johnny Bravo, she included her own modern day struggles, the narrators were simply having a conversation with each other, and Sita became the star instead of Rama and Lakshmanan. It certainly was a worthy watch for the reminder of how many different ways a story can be told if we allow ourselves to explore our creativity.