For one, it’s the movies. If you can’t get your kicks on this make-believe Route 66, watching films can get downright onerous. For another, what is deemed gratuitous and what necessary in a medium whose prime job is to entertain – and ‘being entertained’ has many textures that includes ‘being moved’ – is as hard to separate as distinguishing the upstairs and the downstairs in a single flight of stairs. If you find it easy to identify ‘gratuitous’ bits – both in the sense of ‘done without good reason’ and of ‘gratis’ as in ‘free’ – then you’ve come pre-loaded with bias, and you’re simply raring to virtue-signal.
So, it’s kinda twee when the same lot that rolls their eyes almost out of their sockets each time some uncle-ji is outraged about the depiction of Bharat Mata, or some auntie-ji is appalled by the depiction of a navel blockade, are outraged by ‘regressive behaviour’ in a movie. Suddenly, things become ‘problematic’.
I haven’t seen Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Animal yet. But the conversation (sic) around its depiction of a misogynistic protagonist – among other signallings, he apparently tells his love interest that she has a ‘big pelvis’ much suited for baby-making, and the lady is suitably impressed by this comment – coupled with his doling out ‘gratuitous’ violence, has made me do my own kind of third eye-rolling.
The belief of movies being one-is-to-one correlated influencers – corrupting bits corrupt, uplifting bits uplift – is as old as cinema critic Mohandas Gandhi, who, in 1947 (the year Himmatwali, starring the whip-wielding Mary Ann Evans a.k.a. Fearless Nadia was a box-office hit even as India’s women did not turn overnight into desi Wonder Woman Hunterwalis), had said, ‘If I had my way, I would see to it that all the cinemas and theatres in India were converted into spinning halls and factories for handicrafts of all kinds.’ And you thought your grandma was strict.
For the liberal sort, depicting ‘immoral’ acts straying far from ‘decency’ and ‘tradition’ are fictive displays that should be consumed in the spirit of free expression. Things suddenly turn dicey when the same make-believe showcases behaviour deemed to be ‘toxic’. Why would beating up a cop in a movie be kosher (‘It’s not that people will leave the hall and bash up a policeman’), while a character treating a woman as a sex object become haraam (‘This gives out the worst toxic signals to an already patriarchal, misogynistic society’)? Long ago, when woke meant only the opposite of slept, film critic Pauline Kael wrote a scathing review of Don Siegel’s now-classic Clint Eastwood-starring vigilante movie, Dirty Harry, in the New Yorker. The trigger-happy, hyper-moral-compassed San Francisco Police Department detective Harry Callaghan remains a cultural icon in fictional extra-judicial justice delivery beyond Republican America. Kael wrote, ‘On the way out [of the cinema], a pink-cheeked little girl was saying, ‘That was a good picture’ to her father. Of course; the dragon had been slain. Dirty Harry is obviously just a genre movie, but this action genre has always had a fascist potential, and it has finally surfaced.’ Ah, the F word that is not ‘filmic’. Today’s Kaelists find movies depicting issues they abhor – hyper-nationalism, misogyny, hidebound orthodoxy, etc – as ‘glorifying’ them. While the rest become ‘free expression’. That’s double espresso standards.
Instead of getting into this single entendre of which ugliness is being ‘glorified’ and which merely ‘depicted’, this should be driven into the craniums of trolls, critics, culture warriors and audiences alike: ‘Boss, this is a movie. If you replicate or exalt something toxic or illegal you see in a movie outside in the real world, you’re going to be in big trouble.’
Upon the release of his 1965 crime drama, Pierrot le Fou, the interviewer from the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema tells Jean-Luc Godard with barely suppressed disapproval, ‘There is a good deal of blood in Pierrot.’ Godard replies, ‘Not blood, red.’
Whatever other qualitative faults the film may have, our overthoughtful commentators should realise that Animal isn’t glorifying misogyny, it is depicting it. Watching Gabbar lopping off Thakur’s limbs in Sholay is merely disarming.
