Slumdog Millionaire audience positioning and responses

Slumdog Millionaire uses many different way to make the audience identify with characters, sympathise with them and also convince the audience to take the preferred reading to the text. The audience are forced to sympathise with Jamal as he is the victim in every situation, he is a vulnerable teen who is transitioning into adulthood and struggling to stand on his own two feet due to his innocence and introverted personality, this encourages the audience to want him to succeed as we can see his troubled past and how he has had to fight through it, it is common for the audience to want the underdog to win and have success. In addition to this the audience identify with him as no one succeeds all through life everyone has flaws and dips in their life exactly as Jamal does. As an audience we are also manipulated emotionally as many of the things that happen to Jamal have happened in many people’s lives, for example we see Jamal lose his mother which is a very relatable things as many people will have lost a love one so therefore audience members are able to feel the emotion they felt when they lost their loved one so can empathise with Jamal and understand what he is going through, however to lose a mother at such a young age may be rare which would make the audience even more emotionally connected as a child needs a parent to care for them making the audience want to take that role on for young Jamal. The audience’s emotions are also manipulated by Salim as we see him as a child who had to grow up extremely fast and be a parent to Jamal, however Salim can be seen as a parent to Jamal but also a villain as he constantly pulls Jamal and Latika apart making the audience hate him, but at the end sacrifices his life so Jamal and Latika can finally be together. “It’s a widely engrossing movie that takes us from innocence to salvation” – Clint O’Connor, Rotten Tomatoes. This quote shows the film engaged an audience through its character development and how the audience were able to personally identify with the characters. Another quote to show how the film was successful and attracted a large audience is “Many films tell stories of underdogs, unrequited love and such, yet Slumdog Millionaire feels breathtakingly fresh, at times inexplicably so” – Steve Parsall, Rotten Tomatoes, this shows he has taken the preferred reading as although the narrative is generic and conventional it is different and that is what the audience loved about the film. Slumdog Millionaire became something to talk about and if you hadn’t seen it you couldn’t engage in conversation about it which meant more people watched it as they wanted to be socially involved in the latest thing.

On the other hand not all audience members took the preferred reading some took an oppositional and or negotiated reading to the film, “Slumdog is a good film and an appealing film with some lovely performances but it’s not a great film: it’s too sentimental and predictable for that” – Deborah Ross, Rotten Tomatoes. Here the preferred reading hasn’t been taken as although they have understood the intensions of the film they felt it was common and nothing to be excited about. In addition to this audience members felt that the film was not convincing and more of a cliché showing that the preferred reading was not taken and in fact rejected. Other reasons audience memebers may have not taken the preferred reading is that Boyle wanted to show a real India and avoid stereotypical ideas of India (not wanting a cow in the film) however there is a shot with a cow in the film which meant he could not avoid all stereotypical views as they were shooting on location, however people believed the representation of India was extremely generic and not realistic at all.

Overall Slumdog Millionaire was a very successful film and shows that a lot of the audience did take the preferred reading, however like every media text there are audience members who take the negotiated or oppositional reading and dislike the text due to other factors.