Hello Dali

Some years ago Shirley MacLaine (currently an admirer of Tibet and what it stands for) had found “serenity” in Mao’s China where “women had little need or even desire for such superficial things as frilly clothes and makeup. . . . Relationships seemed free of jealousy and infidelity.” Every day during her visit she felt “powerful vibrations because of the massive . . . healthy group of human beings called the Chinese people.” She also “began enjoying sunsets and trees and food instead of rushing through each day because time meant money.” Last but not least, during her visit she stopped smoking, picking her fingers and biting her nails.

It must have become clear to her in the intervening years that these were peculiar responses to communist China--fantasies and projections which nonetheless were revealing of her needs and those of many Western visitors in the same period. It is tempting to ask, could her present day affection for Tibet and Buddhism have the same qualities and roots as those earlier raptures for communist China? MacLaine was only one of many celebrities (and intellectuals) who grotesquely misread the nature of communist China (as well as that of Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua, et cetera), perceiving it as a font of social justice, serenity and progress. By the 1990s, for MacLaine and many other Hollywood celebrities, Tibet became the new source of serenity and meaning.

Is it possible that the recent wave of infatuation with Tibet (and what it stands for) is yet another substitute gratification for those uneasy with their wealth, fame, freedom and comforts in an all-too-open society in which “anything goes” and there are no guideposts to purpose and meaning in life? As Orville Schell explains in “Virtual Tibet,” Buddhism in particular appeals to celebrities “who have gained wealth, are living the good Southern California life and have acquired certain confirmed habits of self-indulgence” because it is “nonjudgmental” and “guilt free.” Moreover, “In Hollywood, where everyone is out hustling something there is nothing more beguiling . . . than someone in the limelight who restrains him or herself,” such as the Dalai Lama.

The rapidly growing interest in Buddhism and Tibet during the last decade has been among the most interesting cultural phenomena in the United States in recent times. Its manifestations include the mushrooming of study and meditation centers, popular movies, bumper stickers, a huge number of publications and TV programs (even commercials featuring Buddhist monks) and the celebrity status of the Dalai Lama. Hollywood, in particular, and many of its leading celebrities have been in the forefront of this preoccupation. Any book that sheds light on the phenomenon also helps to understand our recent cultural-intellectual history, and especially one written by “an old China hand,” Orville Schell.

There is a good deal of irony in the fact that Tibet victimized by China has replaced socialist-Maoist China as destination and symbol for Westerners looking for an alternative to ways of life in their own society or, as Schell puts it, for a “sanctuary--a place where all civilized yearnings are satisfied.” During the 1960s and ‘70s many Westerners, like MacLaine, visited China and returned as enthusiasts. I called them political pilgrims in my book because their manifestly political quest had distinctly spiritual undertones and they were reminiscent of religious pilgrims seeking redemption and rejuvenation at the holy sites of their religion. These travelers believed that communist China was in almost every respect superior to Western societies and in the process of creating not merely a just and egalitarian social system but one animated by a widely embraced sense of purpose and community, a new society which not merely solved all serious social problems but did away with alienation and meaninglessness and nurtured the best human qualities.

These visitors were not interested in Tibet or Buddhism (and in any event were not allowed to visit Tibet) and knew little about the horrific repression imposed on it by the government they revered. To be sure, their ignorance was not limited to conditions in Tibet: They were equally uninformed of communist China as a whole and especially its totalitarian characteristics, economic mismanagement and the bizarre official worship of its lecherous, megalomaniac ruler. They viewed the so-called Cultural Revolution as a further expression of the rejuvenation of Chinese society, an outburst of popular will and energy demolishing the last alienating vestiges of the past.

The recent enthusiasm about Tibet is, of course, different in many ways from the wishful, uninformed effusions of the political pilgrims. Their beliefs and attitudes were shaped and stimulated by both self-deception and organized deception (the latter provided by the Chinese authorities), whereas the sentiments of the present-day supporters of Tibet are spontaneous and have also given rise to laudable opposition to the Chinese repression of Tibet. Although this is a notable difference, the two groups and generations and especially the celebrities among them share similar spiritual hungers. The political pilgrimages of the past and the recent preoccupation with Tibet are both revealing reflections of the durable problems of American society and culture.

“Virtual Tibet” is an examination of Western and especially American perceptions and conceptions of Tibet and their recent reflections in American mass culture. I started reading it with high expectations and great interest because of its topic and my respect for the author, who was among the few who had the courage and integrity to disavow in print his early misguided notions about Mao’s China. I expected a probing and thorough analysis of an important social-cultural phenomenon. These expectations were not fully met.

Informative chapters on historical background and the perceptions of travelers of bygone centuries alternate, without a coherent organization, with lengthy descriptions of visits to movie sets and interviews with celebrities like actor Richard Gere and mountain climber-turned-tutor Heinrich Harrer. The reader is plunged into a hodgepodge of Hollywood insider gossip, loosely linked anecdotes, human interest stories of celebrities (enchanted with Tibet) and historical flashbacks. Far too much of the book deals with the making and the makers of the two famous movies, “Seven Years in Tibet” (about Harrer’s adventures) and “Kundun.” Schell seems to have been anxious to write an entertaining book crammed with trivia, and he sometimes strains for superficial parallels. For example:

“If Tibet was once a highly stratified feudal society . . . replete with forms of exotic pageantry and flamboyant dress to fill Tibetans with awe, then Hollywood kultur is in certain ways not so dissimilar to [sic] that of old Lhasa. Indeed, with its own nobility of stars and celebrities, bizarre rites, costumes . . . award ceremonies . . . potent mythologies, studio complexes so vast as monasteries, and a reigning pantheon of semi-divine deities worshiped around the world, Hollywood might well appear as alien and mysterious to outsiders as the forbidden city of Lhasa once did to . . . Westerners. . . .”

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Old Lhasa resembles contemporary Hollywood as much as the Nobel prize does the Oscar or a nightclub a monastery. I suspect the point of the comparison is to make the distant and unknown familiar and digestible to readers presumed to get as easily bored as Hollywood celebrities.

The flavor of the book is further illustrated in this remark: “Where the explorers of old . . . made their first way station a bazaar in an Indian border town like Darjeeling to engage the caravansary of yaks, I started my pilgrimage at the Sony TriStar studio in Culver City, California, where a production office for ‘Seven Years in Tibet’ had just opened.” Schell also claims that gaining access to a movie set that he calls “Hollywood’s ersatz Tibetan Kingdom,” made him as exhilarated as his first actual trip to Lhasa. If so, it is a reflection of an impaired ability to distinguish between what Daniel Boorstin called (a long time ago) a “pseudo-event” and the real thing.

Does it really help to understand the complex phenomenon addressed in the book to learn that when “action-pic superstar” Steven Segal (another Tibet aficionado) sits down in “his director’s chair inscribed with his name, almost immediately a young female retainer appears with a stool marked ‘S.S. Boot Rest,’ onto which Segal hoists his feet. A cell phone is proffered like a scepter by another retainer . . . a third assistant . . . uses a makeup sponge to daub his beefy brow, already glistening with perspiration . . .”?

The author cannot seem to be able to make up his mind about his own attitude toward Hollywood and its celebrities. Often he seems to take the creators and creations of “virtual Tibet” far more seriously than they deserve to be. For example he confesses:

“All I know is that I feel overwhelmed by a yearning for a place like the one I see being set in motion before me [that is, the set of the movie being made]--a fantastic island of escape from the prosaic, the rapacious, the speed and falseness of modern life. The irony does not escape me that I am actually looking at one of the most false of all modern conjuries. But then, as I drink in the wonder of the scene unfolding . . . it occurs to me that at last I really reached the true goal of my quest: the ultimate Hollywood illusion of Tibet. . . .”

Toward the end of the book he writes: “With the help of Hollywood might not Tibet be redeemed? With its global economic reach and ability to animate popular sentiment around the world, was not Hollywood more omnipresent and mighty than even the American military?” Elsewhere he describes somewhat breathlessly his numerous star-struck efforts to meet Brad Pitt (“I have yet to glimpse . . . Brad Pitt. Everywhere . . . I run into evidence of both his immanence and his eminence . . . despite my scepticism about stardom I am nonetheless filled with a thrill of expectation at the thought of actually seeing Pitt. . . . “ Again, later on he found himself “unable to abandon the idea of meeting Brad Pitt. For reasons I didn’t bother to analyze, I continued to call Pitt’s personal public relations agent. . . .” Perhaps the book would have benefited from bothering to analyze this urge and from better understanding his attitude toward Hollywood, its culture and celebrities.

It is a relief that in the end the writer’s sense of reality and intelligence finally overcome the lurking star-struck approach. He does reach the conclusion that movies, however lavishly striving for authenticity with native extras and impressive settings, cannot substitute for the real thing, nor can they make much difference to the lives of Tibetans who are not movie extras. The last chapter thus largely redeems the book, suggesting that Schell after all understands much of the prevailing shallowness and faddishness toward Tibet spearheaded by Hollywood. He writes: “That the real Lhasa so often disappointed those who finally managed to reach the elusive goal suggests that no borrowed land can satisfy yearnings that were never meant to be projected onto geography. . . .”

On balance this is a flawed but informative and intermittently insightful volume that illuminates the old paradox of material riches and spiritual poverty that continues to haunt our society and especially some of its most privileged members.