Review: Virtual Tibet

Schell, O. (2000). Virtual Tibet : seaching for Shangri-la from the Himalayas to Hollywood (1st ed.). New York: Metropolitan books.

As a sympathizer of the Tibetan cause, Schell seems perfectly place to dissect the somewhat problematic relation between Tibet, the Dalai Lama, and Western Romanticism as embodied in the 1997 film Seven Years in Tibet starring Hollywood icon Brad Pitt. In his travels during the production and eventual premiere of the movie, he visits Heinrich Harrer, the spellbinding mountaineer and storyteller who mythologized his account of his escape from a British POW camp in Dehradun in 1944, to his two year journey to Lhasa, and his five years with the Dalai Lama as a "special advisor". The ineffectual nature of Hollywood's intervention is found most wanting when it fails to bring about substantial qualitative change in the policies of important countries like the US and EU. Eventually, what Schell speculates and fears is that the Tibetan cause seems destined to remain a cause celebre, popular precisely because it requires little in the way of sacrifice by supporters. [amazon link]