Characteristic vacation day. Comatose summer afternoon. Even the animate imitates the inanimate. Lying prostrate, you start the television, desultory gliding through the news channels, music programmes and reality shows, showing utter disregard. Life seems to have lost meaning. Then all of a sudden you stop at a channel, pupils dilate. This is it! NIRVANA! Magic happens to the moribund entourage. Throwing the remote with apathy, you rise, eyes glued, confident that you have finally escaped the vicious cycle of channel hobbling. This vitalizing force is the sight of a man, well a superman, beating the hell out of an army of ghastly looking men, armed with glistening daggers and all (and you thought that the man was ‘BUDDHA’, the Enlightened one!). These are the mainstream South Indian masala dubbed flicks. THE MEN ARE BACK!
So popular have they become that in the last year or so that every movie channel telecasts them. Their Bollywood remakes have set the cash counters ringing. What is it in them that catches the eye, encompasses our imagination? The actors? Actresses? Or the locations? Certainly not. The lyrics of songs come across as having been distastefully squeezed into the music beats. Bollywood beats them on all these counts. The secret is the unadulterated, high voltage action. Storyline is simple and mostly runs along chartered territory. The good, innocent hero is harassed by the goon until it is his turn to seek revenge. You can actually tell when the movie meanders from a purely hilarious scene to an emotional one and then to action. It reminds me of the South Indian plate served in restaurants. Sambhar, chutney, rasam, Idli and vada neatly confined to their compartments on a platter, opposed to the ‘Khichdi’ we often eat.
The psychological aspect which attracts us to these movies is worth inspecting. Even seeing the hero mercilessly butchering men, breaking every law in the book, we sympathize with him. Does it tickle our beastly instincts; we long abandoned to settle down as a society but which still spills out sometimes? Will we still like to have an eye for an eye if given a chance? Doesn’t the evolution of our laws reflect what we are in reality? I don’t think so. For me, the reason for this attraction is a creation of society itself. We see injustices occurring all around us. Many a times we are a party too. Seeing no way to stop these, we become insensitive. We protect our minds by an elaborate system of abstractions, ambiguities, metaphors and similes from the reality we do not wish to know too clearly; we lie to ourselves, in order that we may still have the excuse of ignorance, alibi of stupidity and incomprehension, possessing which we can continue with a good conscience to commit and tolerate the most monstrous crimes. But somewhere deep down, in the darkest caverns of our heart, we still nurse the desire to spring forth and bring a change. When we see these over the top films in which the good stands up against injustice, our moribund desires are incentivized. We feel related. Our pent up frustration oozes out. This relaxes us. For once, we end up on the winning side.
The evil is polarized in the villain and the good in the hero, much unlike in real life where it is impossible to classify good and bad. This adds to the vigour. We know it is surreal but so be it.
Watching the climax of these films one cannot help but compare it to the height of the ‘Anna Hazare agitation’. We felt we had gheroed ‘CORRUPTION’ .It seemed we won. But reality is different. Change happens when we act. We act when we are filled to the brim with the desire for change.Buying these over-simplistic and impossible solutions to very complicated problems, our angst and our potential for change all flow down the drain. Our ability to craft a revolution is consumed. Far better are movies which expose the underbelly of the ill without becoming prescriptive. They force us to think and increase our uneasiness, our desire to unleash a change.
But no matter how much I criticize these films, I am abruptly ending this piece because it is 2:00 p.m.(one of THOSE AFTERNOONS I mentioned in the beginning) and I am sure I haven’t missed much of the latest ‘Nagarjun’ starrer flick, slated to be broadcast today.
So popular have they become that in the last year or so that every movie channel telecasts them. Their Bollywood remakes have set the cash counters ringing. What is it in them that catches the eye, encompasses our imagination? The actors? Actresses? Or the locations? Certainly not. The lyrics of songs come across as having been distastefully squeezed into the music beats. Bollywood beats them on all these counts. The secret is the unadulterated, high voltage action. Storyline is simple and mostly runs along chartered territory. The good, innocent hero is harassed by the goon until it is his turn to seek revenge. You can actually tell when the movie meanders from a purely hilarious scene to an emotional one and then to action. It reminds me of the South Indian plate served in restaurants. Sambhar, chutney, rasam, Idli and vada neatly confined to their compartments on a platter, opposed to the ‘Khichdi’ we often eat.
The psychological aspect which attracts us to these movies is worth inspecting. Even seeing the hero mercilessly butchering men, breaking every law in the book, we sympathize with him. Does it tickle our beastly instincts; we long abandoned to settle down as a society but which still spills out sometimes? Will we still like to have an eye for an eye if given a chance? Doesn’t the evolution of our laws reflect what we are in reality? I don’t think so. For me, the reason for this attraction is a creation of society itself. We see injustices occurring all around us. Many a times we are a party too. Seeing no way to stop these, we become insensitive. We protect our minds by an elaborate system of abstractions, ambiguities, metaphors and similes from the reality we do not wish to know too clearly; we lie to ourselves, in order that we may still have the excuse of ignorance, alibi of stupidity and incomprehension, possessing which we can continue with a good conscience to commit and tolerate the most monstrous crimes. But somewhere deep down, in the darkest caverns of our heart, we still nurse the desire to spring forth and bring a change. When we see these over the top films in which the good stands up against injustice, our moribund desires are incentivized. We feel related. Our pent up frustration oozes out. This relaxes us. For once, we end up on the winning side.
The evil is polarized in the villain and the good in the hero, much unlike in real life where it is impossible to classify good and bad. This adds to the vigour. We know it is surreal but so be it.
Watching the climax of these films one cannot help but compare it to the height of the ‘Anna Hazare agitation’. We felt we had gheroed ‘CORRUPTION’ .It seemed we won. But reality is different. Change happens when we act. We act when we are filled to the brim with the desire for change.Buying these over-simplistic and impossible solutions to very complicated problems, our angst and our potential for change all flow down the drain. Our ability to craft a revolution is consumed. Far better are movies which expose the underbelly of the ill without becoming prescriptive. They force us to think and increase our uneasiness, our desire to unleash a change.
But no matter how much I criticize these films, I am abruptly ending this piece because it is 2:00 p.m.(one of THOSE AFTERNOONS I mentioned in the beginning) and I am sure I haven’t missed much of the latest ‘Nagarjun’ starrer flick, slated to be broadcast today.
over-simplistic and impossible solutions,rightly said. Meri Jung will always rule over Inception. (though majority will sing about inception but we know "classical is the the book that everyone praise but no one really read").
ReplyDeletesahi baat...South is hit bcoz it has huge viewership...
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