Maybe it's just "us" i.e the folks I know and yours truly- our conversations often involve TV shows we love or movies we watched. If everyone involved in the conversation has the same opinion it usually evolves into a scene-by-scene fanfest. If not, I've noticed that it somehow explodes into a commentary about life and the way things and/or we "should" be.
I've found myself involved in conversations of the latter kind over a Bollywood movie "Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna" (Never Say Goodbye) or KANK as it's come to be known. If you'd like to know more about the film, follow its link on this website: http://www3.dharma-production.com/
The interest and hype in this movie was not only generated by the fact that it has been made by one of Hindi cinema's top directors and that the actors were played by the crème de la crème of the Bollywood film fraternity but also because of the subject: marital infidelity. Apparently we in the "East" or "South Asia" just can't have our marriages falling apart because that's sacred. Hence bad marriages = taboo; films about it = you gotta be kidding, that's sacrilege and then some! Doesn't matter that the gossip circulating the local grapevine has hefty doses of "who is cheating on who?" and "who is getting divorced (again)?"....guess it becomes "real" and triggers the vocal chords of the moral police only when it's on celluloid?
Back to the film though...my own (unscientific) survey (ok not quite) reveals that some people loved KANK, more were outraged; the important thing, IMHO, is that so many watched it and continued to talk about it afterwards.
In the midst of all this talk about KANK some thoughts about the place of films (and other popular culture forms) in our talk about life fell into my head so here goes:
1. If the subject of a film makes you uncomfortable, don't go in expecting to find something else that, in your opinion, will redeem it. When you come out of the film don't crib about the heinousness of the subject either - you knew what it was going to be about.
2. Related to #1, I can't for the life of me fathom why we expect films to have a socially-responsible message that is in cognizance with the norms and values we hold or think we ought to. For some reason, we aren't outraged in quite the same way about newspaper editorials that we allow into our homes everyday -- even when we disagree vehemently with the content most of us either ignore/dismiss it or vent a little steam and then go on about our daily lives. But films seem to be imbued with a multitude of notions that render them as "sacred space" for the most part. If it isn't mindless entertainment (by which I mean ridiculous comedies with bawdy humor), it should have some kind of message - explicit or otherwise - about the way life ought to be lived. Why can't films be taken simply as a perspective on some aspect of life? Can't we digest them as texts that represent rather than preach? What I'm trying to say is that it's not the strong reactions that bewilder me as much as the fact that we can't forgive films for presenting an opinion with which we disagree or can't support. I certainly don't approve of infidelity, marital or otherwise, but should that make me go into a livid rant over a film like KANK that simply represents what happens to relationships when someone is unfaithful? I doubt it....again films, besides being entertaining, are simply a specific take, a specific perspective, a specific representation. Does it mean the director condones cheating on one's spouse? Not necessarily - as he's also clarified repeatedly in TV and magazine interviews. But even if he did, does it take away from the movie-watching experience? Does it make a less well-made movie because the director's moral register is different from ours? Does a movie's morality govern whether or not one should watch it? Perhaps...it's a personal choice but I personally think that's expecting too much of a film. What never ceases to amaze me is that when we read an editorial on the rampant corruption of our governments we let them get away but let's hang the 30-something director from a noose for depicting something that we ought not to be engaged in. [Relevant aside: civil society in Pakistan might not be dead, it's just numb to the things we romanticize it as being engaged in.]
3. Of course that just means that there is something powerful about the medium itself...at least in the Indian and Pakistani contexts (something I've learned not only through experience but through my dissertation research over the last 3-4 years) in a very specific way. Personally, there's something about sitting in a dark movie theater with surround sound that makes movie-watching larger than life and strangely life-like...I feel the music, the ambience and it moves me.
4. More specific to the movie, if we are going to judge the actions of the characters, the actors who played them, and the film-maker then some thoughts:
a) Dev, the character played by Shahrukh Khan, is not the lovable guy this actor is used to playing. You might detest the character with every fibre of your being but isn't that really proof of the fact that he's a good actor in that he can make you believe in the emotions that he's depicting.
b) Yup the character played by Abhishek seems to quite a few like the perfect husband (I beg to differ though which doesn't mean it wasn't enacted well - because he did a great job playing that character- but I guess I just don't envision spending my life with someone whose personality seems a bit unidimensional at times, especially in the earlier half) so that fact that the character of Maya (his wife in this film) leaves him and cheats on him isn't believable. Umm go back to the first 10 minutes of the film - she's having (more than) second thoughts right before they get married. Should she have not married him in the first place if that was the case? Yes. Does she have to pretend to be happy when she feels they aren't compatible? No. But that sounds fairly judgmental as well. The character cheated on her husband because she just didn't feel it was right with him or just because it was more right with someone else. I'm inclined to let it go at that. Why? You can't rationalize emotions ....sometimes things are the way they are because they are the way they are...period.
c) The charges, grounded in various ridiculous sounding reasons that are just too narrow-minded for me to even write down, that Karan Johar (the director) doesn't understand human emotions and relationships. Umm, maybe he didn't make a film about your emotions and relationships but that doesn't mean he represented these inaccurately. I'm not so sure we ever really represent things accurately whether these are understanding our loved ones' thoughts or recollecting a conversation and sharing it with someone else...but that's a transcendental path I won't walk down on, at least not in this post :-).
5. Consider this if you will; if not, humor me for just a little longer. In talking about the cultural politics of everyday life, Shotter proposes a new kind of knowing which is a "knowing from within". To summarize the idea, which will inevitably result in butchering from oversimplication so I hope you'll pardon that, the ways in which we act and make sense of our world are shaped by our interpretations of how people have acted in similar situations in the past and what we want the future to look like. It is in this process that the world(s) we inhabit are created/recreated. To me, that includes what we describe hurriedly as culture, values, morals, norms, traditions etc. It is through this process that we know who we are. In layman's terms, knowing from within is kind of like saying and/or acting on the basis of "this is how we do it". In those actions that we perform thinking this, we solidify certain ways of being i.e. the "we" and social phenomena i.e. the "this". Where does the future come in? Well by acting that way we've oriented ourselves towards the future in that we're seeing to preserve certain identities, certain ways of being. Where do films come in in all of this? Simple....I think when we watch a film we rely on this "knowing from within" to make sense of this text...that effectively defines the contours of how we react to the stories, the plots, the actors, and the film-maker. So yes I can see how the reactions have formed. But the point I'm trying to get to is this. Do we really have to be so close-minded that we can't even respect the fact that someone else might be coming from a different place? This is not the same as accepting it necessarily; I think you can still detest this film or anything else for that matter. But when I think about Shotter and when I look around myself it's upsetting to see that people just don't make an effort to give people room to think differently, behave differently, act differently to the extent that they pronounce it as wrong and reprehensible. Couldn't it just be that the circumstances of their "knowing from within" led them down a different path? Hate it, sure; but give it room enough to consider it "logical/sensical (yes I know that isn't a word but it goes with what I'm trying to say) embedded within or nested in a particular perspective". Some might call this giving someone else the "benefit of doubt" - I'd call it the "benefit of alternative interpretation/sense-making".
Okay tirade over. And if you still haven't seen the film, it's official DVD release is scheduled for this month. And if you haven't heard the music as yet, you're missing out on some of the best film song compilations ever. I'm pretty sure A.R. Rehman will sweep the awards this year for Rang De Basanti but if you ask me Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy have come up with a soundtrack that's much more listenable and really does enhance the tone of the film.
[PS: Yes I'm aware that the title of the post is quite a mouthful....let's not point out the obvious ;-)!]
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment