What do Hollywood and Bollywood regard as Shameful?

Sunny Rai, Khushang Jilesh Zaveri , Shreya Havaldar, Soumna Nema, Lyle Ungar, and Sharath Chandra Guntuku have a fabulous new paper on movies! Using web scraping, natural language processing (LIWC), and ChatGPT4, they reveal that Bollywood often focuses on shame, especially concerning female sexuality.

In Paapi Farishte, for example, the rapist tells a teenager: 

Ab main jo tujhe nishaan dunga woh nishaan tujhe zindagi bhar yaad rahega

(Now whatever mark I give you, you will remember it for your entire life)

How did they do it?

Rai and colleagues collected over 5000 movie subtitles (using a web crawler), then identified common themes with natural language processing techniques. The Linguistic Inquiry of Word Count (LIWC) was used to ascertain how various psycho-social categories correlate with shame and pride. ChatGPT4 was then given prompts, about who is shamed and why.

LLMs are imperfect

Rai and colleagues recognise the limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs). Manually coding a random sample of 200 dialogues, they find that gender was incorrect for 13 samples. Rai and colleagues suggest that

‘the prediction error for gender lies between 8-23% for Bollywood and 5- 15% for Hollywood’.

This is an important caution. Kudos!

Shame, in Bollywood, is associated with women and sexuality.

In Bollywood films, shame is often associated with women, families, and sexuality. Shame also triggers triggers aggressive reactions: conflict, swearing, and angry emotions. This pattern is unique to Bollywood.

Bollywood films tend to associate shame with gender roles, disrespect, family, sexual harassment and deviance with shame (as shown below in Figure 2).

Hollywood, by contrast, tends to scorn poverty. U.S. film culture thus appears much more materialistic; India is more sexually puritanical.

Bollywood films celebrate national and family pride

In Bollywood, glory is often collective; protagonists take pride in the nation, family honour and their son’s success. Think of Telegu epics like RRR and Bahubaali!

Whereas Hollywood actors tend to take pride in their individual achievements.

Bollywood movies show proud families

ChatGPT was asked to specify common triggers of shame and pride. Rai and colleagues find that Bollywood tends to celebrate people’s ability to please and provide for their parents, i.e. fulfilling their father’s dreams.

The two industries vary significantly on gender. Bollywood movies sometimes depict the birth of daughters as shameful, whereas Hollywood movies cheer queers and condemn sexism.

In Bollywood, shame is more often associated with women

Bollywood plots overwhelmingly centre on shame. In Figure 4 below, a greater negative value for women (relative to men) indicates a higher share of dialogue concerning women is about shame relative to pride.

Whereas in Hollywood, there is a greater emphasis on pride.

Men are shamed for incompetence; women are shamed for promiscuity

Rai and colleagues analyze a set of shameful activities and track their respective associations with men and women. They find that shameful promiscuity is more often associated with female characters, while shameful poverty is more typically linked to male characters. Poverty, incompetence, alcoholism, and cowardice are typically portrayed as failings of men. In these respects, the two industries are almost identical.

Neither industry shames men for promiscuity. Quelle surprise!

Indian men’s honour depends on female chastity

What a fantastic paper, using Big Data and LLMs to explore cross-cultural variation! Bravo to Sunny Rai, Khushang Jilesh Zaveri, Shreya Havaldar, Soumna Nema, Lyle Ungar, and Sharath Chandra Guntuku!

I doubt any readers will be surprised; these results track nationally representative attitudinal surveys regarding pre-marital sex, casual sex, and homosexuality. While it’s difficult to know whether movies shape or respond to cultural preferences, the two clearly correlate.

World Values Survey 2017-2022

Hollywood’s particular dislike of poverty is also consistent with data published by Pew and the Wall Street Journal: some societies are much more materialistic. As I have previously written, there is huge cross-cultural variation in desire for economic prosperity.

All this is consistent with my theory of “Honour-Income Trade-Off”. In societies where men’s honour is tied to female chastity, women may forgo economic opportunities. Compared to countries with similar economic development, female employment remains low.

World Bank 2024

What about change over time?

Rai et al’s dataset begins in 1990. Back in the 1980s and early ‘90s, Bollywood plots often featured a young man avenging his sister’s brutal rape. But my small n sample would suggest that Indian films have diversified.

By programming their web crawler to supplement movie scripts with corresponding release dates, Rai and colleagues could explore change over time. Timestamps would also enable them to compare rates of cultural liberalisation: which industry has seen more rapid change? Sex and the City was first shown in 1998, and revelled women’s sexual pleasure. It was a game-changer.

What about other countries and cultures? Personally, I’d be extremely curious to this method replicated for all languages and locations. How does China compare? It would be a good test of my theory that East Asian tend to idealise upward mobility and economic prosperity!

Next up, I’m looking forward to software engineers using computer vision to analyse movies!

Related Essays

• The Power of TV

• Ideals of Upward Mobility

• How did East Asia Overtake South Asia on Gender?

Also check out Smrutisnat Jena’s excellent essay, “I Can’t Believe The Kind Of Trash Our Parents Were Watching When They Were My Age”.