The Most Popular Movie Column in the Entire World #6 – Notes on the Virtue of Cautious Satire

Posted on February 6, 2015 by Jog

Six miles away from my office is a theater that plays Bollywood movies simultaneously with their Indian release. This is one such film.

***

PK
Directed by Rajkumar Hirani, 2014

“I think it’s high time we creative people in the film industry stop and think what we teach our children, the audience, and the future generation through our films.” – Aamir Khan, Satyamev Jayate, Nov. 9, 2014

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The first thing you ought to know about PK is that it is the highest-grossing film in the history of Indian cinema; in fact, if you want to get boorishly local about it, liberal estimates mark it as the first Indian film to have breached the classic barricade by which to cordon pretenders off from the rarefied seats of Hollywood success: it has grossed in excess of $100 million. Indeed, at just over $10.5 million collected in the U.S. & Canada, PK is also the highest-grossing foreign-language film to have screened in English-speaking North America in 2014, and its global expansion is not quite done – a 3,500-screen wide release is now planned for China.

The second thing you ought to know about PK is that it’s a broad religious satire starring a Muslim celebrity, which has not exactly been the consensus image conjured by the international media from combining religion and satire in recent weeks – but then, Hindi film is so big a place that most in western arts reportage find it easy to just relegate the whole thing to specialist tastes, even when its successes burn historically bright.

And few are less unfamiliar with success then Aamir Khan.

As with many Bollywood stars, Khan is a scion. Both his uncle and his father produced and directed films, the former slotting him into his screen debut at the age of eight and subsequently producing his adult star breakthrough: Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak, a romance directed by one of Khan’s cousins in 1988. Soon, Khan became renowned as a lucrative ‘chocolate boy’ — very sweet, much-desired — even while he developed a reputation as a perfectionist, appearing in relatively few films per year. He first came before the eyes of international art house aficionados in 1998, when he appeared in Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta’s Earth; Roger Ebert gave it three stars, but this was nothing compared to what was to come.

In fact, if you’re like me — an English-speaking North American over the age of 30 — the first Bollywood film you ever heard a *lot* of critics discussing was surely 2001’s Lagaan, an unexpected global sensation big enough to catapult India toward a rare Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film; it was also Aamir Khan’s debut as a movie producer. He subsequently grew yet more remote, going completely inactive from the years 2002 through 2004 for personal reasons, only to return as frontman for a series of ambitious projects, the most notable-in-retrospect being 2006’s Rang De Basanti, a resolutely populist account of political awakening among a tidily diverse set of college chums.

Never mind that the noticeably 40-year old Khan was playing a character just under half his age, aided mainly by a floppy hairdo akin to Martin Freeman’s in the Hobbit trilogy; the film’s potent depiction of extremely close friendships transfigured through patriotic opposition to sociopolitical ills, up to and including political assassination, struck a chord with the filmgoing public. A 2008 thesis paper by one Meghana Dilip of the University of Massachusetts Amherst provides several examples of subsequent real-life protests fashioning themselves after events from the film, as well as some analysis of the film’s aggressive marketing: carefully tailored to enhance the work’s prestige as a venue for social messaging while also functioning as effective advertising for brand partners.

This was the path Khan would subsequently follow. In 2007 he would make his directorial debut with Taare Zameen Par (aka Like Stars on Earth), an ‘inspirational teacher’ drama concerning childhood dyslexia distributed in English environs by Disney. In 2008 came Ghajini, a vaguely arty revenge thriller reminiscent of Christopher Nolan’s Memento which became the highest-grossing Indian film ever, and remained so until it was dethroned by Khan’s next starring project: 2010’s 3 Idiots, an inspirational comedy about engineering students directed by Rajkumar Hirani, about whom more will be mentioned shortly. Other films would then vie for the heavyweight title, even temporarily gaining the lead, but all were swept away in 2013 by a tidal wave of kitsch – the riotously chintzy crime thriller-cum-global financial crisis parable Dhoom: 3, which marked the *third* time in half a decade that Aamir Khan had starred in the highest-grossing film in all the history of Indian cinema.

And hey – this isn’t to say that every film starring Khan was a popular bonanza. But even as the likes of Dhobi Ghat (2011, lyric ensemble drama about life ‘n shit) and Talaash (2012, very serious cop drama about regret ‘n shit) failed to set records, Khan was planning his next big move in social justice entertainment. It was not enough to be the Quality Superstar. He was going to be the Oprah of India.

Satyamev Jayate debuted on May 6, 2012, airing simultaneously on national and cable networks on late Sunday mornings to maximize family viewership. It has since run 25 episodes across three seasons, dubbed into numerous languages and streamed online with English subtitles. Each show adopts a discreet topic: domestic violence; alcoholism; dowry; road safety; LGBT acceptance; tuberculosis; caste; toxic masculinity. The aim, generally, is social hygiene via slick suites of emotional appeal, with creator/co-producer Khan seated before a studio audience, coaxing tales of trial and triumph out of guests from across India. The host weeps openly seemingly once per episode, but his tears are not shed for nothing; each broadcast also offers a poll by which viewers can SMS a vote and a small donation to one or more specially designated non-governmental organizations, thus ensuring a tangible result while the credits roll. It was all a huge enough success that season 3 added a subsequent hour-long live show after each episode, in which Khan would interact with viewers on the applicable issue.

And it was into this context — premiering, in fact, the very month after the final episode of season 3 — that PK arrived. By this time, Khan had made extremely explicit his feelings on Bollywood’s propagation of objectified women and aggressive, thoughtless men, and there was really no better filmmaker with whom he could have collaborated in opposition to that than Rajkumar Hirani, of the aforementioned 3 Idiots. Faultlessly dignified and widely successful, Hirani made his name on the Munna Bhai series of comedies, the second of which (Lage Raho Munna Bhai, 2006) had prompted an interest spike in Gandhism, not unlike the observable social impact of the roughly contemporaneous Rang De Basanti – was it fate that brought Khan and Hirani together?

Perhaps it was good business sense. Hindi film has enjoyed a long history of popular movies dedicated to educating the public on social issues; Hirani, for example, is an avowed fan of an earlier social film exemplar, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, though it is Hirani’s works with Khan which have found the most success with such films right now, in an era of grander financial scale and especially meticulous marketing. Hirani readily states that the film came specifically from “a desire to say something,” message-wise, rather than any specific storytelling goals, which perhaps added a special dose of calculation to the project’s timing. It follows an earlier religious satire, 2012’s OMG – Oh My God!, which director Umesh Shukla based on both an Indian play and a 2001 Australian comedy, The Man Who Sued God; undismayed by the similarities, Shukla would come to deem his and Hirani’s works dual entries in a genre, and perhaps we should think of it in terms of generic devices, as a means of best divining its message.

As PK opens, Aamir Khan is introduced as a humanoid space alien arriving nude on Earth; this is possibly inspired by another Australian film, 1995’s Epsilon (aka Alien Visitor), but Hirani and co-writer Abhijat Joshi draw from the wider global pool of fish-out-of-water entertainment: no sooner has Khan arrived on terra firma than his shimmering remote beacon is snatched by a thief, leaving him stranded in the midst of humanity with no pants on his ass and no way for his spacecraft to pick him back up.

MEANWHILE, IN EXOTIC, FARAWAY BRUGES, Anushka Sharma plays a young Indian woman who tumbles into a ruthlessly cute relationship with a Pakistani man; alas, no sooner has their obligatory romantic montage/song sequence ended than Sharma’s parents, beholden to a charismatic Hindu godman, voice their religiously-motivated doubts as to the endurance of any conceivable relationship with a *gasp* *choke* Muslim. The couple nevertheless plans to marry, but when the wedding day arrives Sharma finds herself alone, reading a Mysterious Note in which her love apparently severs their union and requests she never try to contact him again. Against all notions of common sense, she doesn’t, and returns heartbroken to Delhi to pursue work at the home of the emotionally destroyed: television journalism.

Sharma, as I’ve noted before, can be an entertaining presence; like a utility player from the bygone age of American studio films, she plays basically the same character in every movie, modifying her good-hearted effervescence from ‘extremely bright’ to ‘actually blinding’ as the role demands. She’s pretty subdued here, perhaps out of respect for Khan’s full-bodied schtick as the alien, PK – so named for his eccentric and questioning ways, as ‘peekay’ is a term suggesting drunkenness, which everyone assumes is this crazy guy’s problem. Staggering around with jug ears and ill-fitting stolen clothes, his eyes straining so as never to blink on camera (it’s alien!), his muscles bulging from the physical conditioning Khan presumably underwent to look good in nude scenes, his mouth lipstick-red from constantly chewing paan, PK may look like a professional wrestler lost between gimmicks, but he’s not tipsy; he just wants to find his damn beacon, which has regrettably fallen into the hands of a religious leader who’s passing it off as a divine object. Could this be the same godman who messed up Sharma’s romance? Might the alien and the journalist team up to expose religious shenanigans in India?! Have you ever seen a movie? Like ever??

The heart of PK is in the alien’s observations about life in this crazy mess called a country. Humans make love in private, but make war in public! You know. Midway through the first half, Khan relates to Sharma a long flashback about how he learned the ways of the human; aliens communicate telepathically, but they can also download another entity’s store of knowledge through prolonged physical contact, so many (many) jokes are devoted to PK attempting to hold the hands of random men and women, only to be aggressively rebuffed. Message-wise, this functions in two ways. PK *is* certainly behaving inappropriately, but he’s also an innocent, an adult child, so the audience simultaneously feels sorry about the men exploding in homophobic rage, though they might also sympathize with their gay panic, given that men holding hands is such an extraterrestrial abberation. Similarly, the audience may feel the women are right to fend off the unwanted advances of a strange man, though aren’t they overreacting just a little? PK the alien only wants to be nice, and so PK the movie has it both ways, playing into social norms as a means of sugaring the pill – perhaps with so much additive that the medicinal effect is nullified.

A similar trick occurs when Khan begins inquiring as to religion, having heard that God is in charge of India, and reasoning that He, of all people, must know where to find his beacon. But oh – all these religions are contradictory! The gods must be crazy! The Catholics drink wine at mass, but when PK tries to bring some booze to the mosque, he’s chased away by an angry mob… segueing into a montage of every major religion pursuing him in a similarly outraged manner. Balance is the key.

Balance might also be a necessity. Feature films screened in India must undergo censorship via the Central Board of Film Certification. Guidelines promulgated by the Central Government pursuant to the Cinematograph Act of 1952 provide that films must avoid “visuals or words contemptuous of racial, religious and other groups.” Indeed, the presence of censorship has occasionally been invoked to shield PK from religious and political argumen; check any well-populated comments section of an internet post relating to the film, and you’ll see plenty of accusations that Hirani is kissing Muslim ass, that Khan is concern trolling the Hindu majority, that the film’s treatment of various faiths are, in fact, wildly unbalanced, etc. But if a statutory body has already evaluated the damn thing for such offense, the argument goes, what legitimate grievance can you have?

Or let’s try another question: what is the PK philosophy of religion? Broadly, it cosigns the general theme of Shukla’s OMG – that religion should not turn so much on icons or intermediaries, but one’s personal relationship with the divine. Those of us in the U.S. (again: boorishly local) may find it not so dissimilar a take to that of evangelical Christianity, except the Indian films mean it to apply to all faiths, with none superior to another, distilled to their ‘essence’ so that the point where they are distinguishable is uncertain. OMG and PK, however, can be distinguished by the former’s insistence that there is, in fact, true divine power at work; Hirani & Joshi offer no such reassurance, pivoting instead toward a secularism where religions are but changes in costume; fashion. Very urbane, but cognizant of their audience. Only space aliens explicitly lack any religion in this film, which creeps right up to the precipice of agnosticism, but does not make the final leap, content to have its hero and his media enabler focus on exposing the chicanery of individual crummy religious representatives, thus inspiring a nationwide social media movement the filmmakers and star all but beg the audience to take into the real world. Hell, they did it before!

Now, I am not an alien, and I cannot read your mind, and you are not right here so that I can hold your hand, which I know you would let me, but I can nonetheless hear what you’re thinking. Of course this movie made $100 million, it’s a silly product! It’s safe! My god, a satire that makes every effort to avoid upsetting anyone! It’s a fucking sitcom!

Hirani, it must be said, is upfront about the cadence of his storytelling. “We are trying to make it simple so that it reaches as many people as possible, because in India you are talking about literacy levels which are from 0 to a 100.” It is similar to the careful packaging and broad distribution of Khan’s Satyamev Jayate – the intent is to be mass communication, with as wide a reach as possible.

Or, in other words, theirs is a cautious satire, wary of causing offense because the implication is that offense or aggression will cause the masses to turn away, and restrict the message, then, to like-minded souls (who don’t need it) or interested opponents spoiling for a fight. They will be the voice of reason, thus accessing the undecided, the busy, the unpracticed; from there spreads the vine. What does a Presidential candidate do in a U.S. general election? Move toward the center. Hirani, Joshi & Khan, then, if you’ll allow a pun, are truly political artists, operating on just as prominent a nationwide level, and raking in returns befitting a chief executive.

But maybe something else is happening too.

It is about half an hour from the end when the religiopolitical indistinctness of PK suddenly reaches a tension so acute that it becomes fascinating. Khan is preparing to debate his godman nemesis on live television, with the former’s beacon and the latter’s reputation on the line, when he is contacted by a good-hearted lowlife friend played by Sanjay Dutt, who also starred as the good-hearted lowlife protagonist of Hirani’s earlier Munna Bhai series – truly this film has dotted every i and crossed every t. Dutt has found the thief that stole Khan’s beacon, thus disproving the godman’s claim to the item’s ownership/divinity, but before this news can be disseminated a bomb blast rips through the train station, killing both the thief and Dutt.

The film never confirms who did it. However, when the cameras start rolling on the big television event — any similarities drawn between it and a certain actual show featuring Aamir Khan are yours to draw — the godman is hardly disinclined from pointing out that perhaps ol’ PK’s inquisition has proven counterproductive; I mean, he’s certainly not happy that people died, it’s an awful tragedy, of course, but maybe also a teachable moment, because, y’know, certain groups just can’t handle criticism like that. Eager to demonstrate the insights his close relationship with the beyond have brought, the godman also brings up the whole unfortunate incident of Anushka Sharma’s punctured romance, which finally moves Khan to action. He’s touched Sharma, you see. Heck, he’s in love with her! But in downloading her thoughts, he was also able to ascertain the truth behind her hidden sadness. That Muslim boy didn’t send Anushka Sharma a Mysterious Note breaking off their wedding at all! Anushka Sharma read the wrong note by accident! That boy was still crazy about her, AND IF YOU GET ON THE PHONE RIGHT NOW, ANUSHKA SHARMA, ON THE PHONE TO BELGIUM LIVE ON THE AIR, YOU’LL FIND OUT THAT YOUR MAN HAS BEEN CALLING THE EMBASSY OF PAKISTAN EVERY SINGLE DAY FOR MONTHS AT A TIME TO SEE IF YOU’LL EVER COME BACK!

Needless to say everybody pretty much shits themselves at this point, while the godman can only glower. He has been totally defeated – hoisted with his own petard. His own disciple, Sharma’s father, grabs the beacon from his hands. The charming thing about PK is that its stakes are pretty low; the godman isn’t a supervillain, he’s just a liar and a petty tyrant, managing his fiefdom through compelling narratives that exploit social fears to widen divisions, and thus reduce the risk of incursion onto the feifdom. Do not trust Muslim men with Hindu women; the man will leave. If the godman truly had divine access, he might have seen the cosmic game being played: this narrator, beaten by a better narrative. A ludicrous, goofy, contrived popular narrative, SO much more compelling than any of his recycled biases. Metaphorically, he has been destroyed by Bollywood. The prejudice of religion, ousted by movies. It is an aspirational vision for these filmmakers, this star. The assurance that they are doing more than making money.

The dream of art to save the world.

The Most Popular Movie Column in the Entire World #5 – Two Excerpts from the Life’s Work of a Dedicated Analyst and Top Earner

Posted on June 17, 2014 by Jog

Six miles away from my office is a theater that plays Bollywood movies simultaneously with their Indian release. This is one such film.

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Holiday: A Soldier Is Never Off Duty
Directed by AR Murugadoss, 2014

***

I first learned of AR Murugadoss in the way most people in the United States learn of AR Murugadoss: he is the writer and director, we are told, of ‘the Bollywood version of Memento.’ Moreover — and this is the important bit, the part that raises eyebrows, because it is about money, and all notions of cultural superiority and/or prevailing taste can generally be cast aside in the U.S. on the proviso that one culture’s lucre is roughly as good as another’s — the Bollywood version of Memento did just as well as the real Memento in global theatrical grosses, and isn’t that something?

It’s true. Memento (2000) carries an estimated worldwide box office take of $39.7 million. Ghajini (2008), its multitudinous crore translated to USD, weighs in at roughly $38.3 million. This remains quite large for an Indian film, but in ’08 it was unprecedented. Know this: while Memento was a small, tricky crime movie made by a near-unknown British director, Ghajini was groomed to be a hit – a massy-classy vehicle for Aamir Khan, one of the most recognizable stars in Bollywood, struck from the proven success of an earlier, Tamil-language film of the same title, which Murugadoss had written and directed in 2005 to splendid response.

One year later, the Salman Khan vehicle Wanted would touch off a lucrative vogue for remakes of “south” films, but Ghajini sat aloof, only ceding its record to Aamir Khan’s next major endeavor, the inspirational comedy 3 Idiots. Its success seemed unique, and Murugadoss was not a straightforward masala man anyway.

Accounts vary as to how Murugadoss came to borrow from Memento, ranging from his having watched the film halfway through writing the script to Ghajini and plunking down its main character in a snap of inspiration, to Jodorowsky’s Dune-like tales of his having merely heard the premise of the English film described to him while concocting the story. Either way, Ghajini is best understood as less a singing, dancing Ballad of Leonard Shelby than a random episode of an imaginary television anthology consisting of nothing but crime stories about people with anterograde amnesia, Memento having served as the pilot.

Personally — as I am wont to do in most circumstances — I tried to ignore the existence of Christopher Nolan to focus on something more interesting. There is a profoundly odd dialectic at work in the Hindi Ghajini. Like the Nolan film, in detailing his story of a man on the hunt for revenge, Murugadoss includes both scenes of ‘present’ action and scenes from the ‘past.’ But there is no tension between b&w and color, and no tricks with the chronology. Instead, all of the ‘past’ footage is shot in a bright, sunny, eminently artifice-driven manner common of Hindi entertainers. A silly Bollywood romance, which ends with the heroine getting bludgeoned to death. It is a memory, horribly preserved; a film by which Aamir Khan’s protagonist might memorialize his happy former life.

The ‘present’ footage, in contrast, is noticeably drabber and dull, with whipping camera movements and ‘gritty’ editing which (to this American) calls to mind network police procedurals. Basically, it is a different kind of entertainment, coexisting in space with its fluffier sibling. At one point, Khan attends a gala function in pursuit of his nemesis, where a stage show is about to begin. He then seems to hallucinate a massive, impossible dance sequence, full of beauty and glamor and costume changes. Normal Bollywood pictures do this all the time, but they merely cut to the dancing, warping the cast into a music video and ignoring reality altogether. Murugadoss, however, implicates diegesis, which I found utterly fascinating – was the director attempting to comment on the psychological salve of candyfloss cinema? Gangs of Wasseypur, a much more self-evidently ‘serious’ project from a ‘serious’ filmmaker (Anurag Kashyap, 2013), would break off syrupy, sentimental songs from older movies and recontextualize them as motivating factors for a criminal antihero; was Ghajini really so different? Hell, would Murugadoss reveal that ‘dark’ stylization might be just as artificial as ‘light,’ pulling the rug out from under the whole vigilante concept? The possibility is delightfully teased!

But this is a tease without climax. Ghajini, in the end, is a pretty common revenge picture, one which entirely fails to answer any of the cinematic questions it raises – if, indeed, it was aware it was raising them.

Clues, perhaps, might be found in Murugadoss’ background. He’d been a writer and an actor during school, his artistic tendencies encouraged by his beloved father, a man of modest means who did not live to witness his son’s success. “AR” were the older man’s initials, folded by Murugadoss with numerological assistance into a lucky pseudonym. Purportedly, Murugadoss also toyed with radical politics in college, though it seems his Naxalite flirtations derived less from a doctrinally Maoist point of view than a generalized concern for social justice. His film school applications were rejected after graduation, so he instead worked as a novelist and story writer while pursuing on-the-job training as an AD, which finally led to his debut as auteur in 2001. He has written every one of his eight directorial ventures. His films have never failed to make money.

When asked once about his success, Murugadoss replied pragmatically: “I am focused; I analyze film trends and work extensively on scripts.” Elsewhere he adds that this is not to copy the latest theatrical successes so much as to understand the tastes of the audience, and hit them with something they haven’t realized they want. He also apparently keeps an eye on foreign concepts; his follow-up to the original, ’05 Ghajini was a Telugu-language picture which took its premise from the notorious sentimental drama Pay It Forward(!!), transformed into a socially conscious action-drama with the amazing title of Stalin. It was then remade in Bollywood under the title Jai Ho, where it grossed over Rs 100 crore, though Murugadoss did not direct; he was too busy with other projects, and no doubt analyzing further trends.

And as I became less ignorant, I wondered: is sophistication a mistake of culture? I saw Ghajini as unusually sensitive and inquisitive re: pop cinema properties, but couldn’t that also be a directness that evades my provincial expectations? In ‘normal’ American films, you expect a steadiness of cinematography, of color correction, so as not to disrupt the illusion of witnessing actual life occurring before you. But since Bollywood films frequently break out into music and dancing anyway, it could be that it makes perfect sense just to ‘code’ the happy scenes as happy, and the serious scenes as serious, in an intuitive visual manner that audiences wouldn’t need to be able to explain in order to know. This way, the maximum number of viewers could interface with a fairly complex plot, as there could be no mistake as to the film’s intent from moment to moment. This is also why Murugadoss, by his own admission, tends to set his films in cities: because they translate better to different languages across India, with little need to worry about anyone puzzling over local customs or obscure dialects.

Analytics. Logic. He’d seem almost a robot, this Murugadoss, if he weren’t so fucking perverse.

***

Holiday: A Soldier Is Never Off Duty, is the newest film written and directed by AR Murugadoss. It is an extremely close remake of his 2012 Tamil-language smash Thuppakki; if you have not been keeping count, know that one quarter of Murugadoss’ directorial oeuvre consists of remakes of films from elsewhere in his catalog, though the filmmaker appears to view “remaking” a film as an opportunity to isolate the flaws of an original and create a perfected version. Holiday, then, can be seen as the final form of Thuppakki. It is not based on any discernible Hollywood antecedent, so I am left to grasp at the trend its analytic creator must have identified.

The answer, I guess, is martial patriotism.

Toward the beginning of this year’s summer blockbuster season, I was advised away from director Gareth Edwards’ new version of Godzilla on the allegation that it engaged in Michael Bay-style military worship. I saw the film anyway, and disagreed. While it is true that the hero of the story is a Navy man, and that Our Armed Forces more-or-less save the day, the American military is nonetheless shown to make dangerous, critical mistakes. They must be saved — as men often are in Godzilla films — from their own hubris.

There is no such vacillation in Holiday; its closest English-language equivalent is 2012’s Act of Valor, a film starring real Navy SEALs and live Navy firepower. Akshay Kumar, about whom I’ve written before, stars as Virat Bakshi of the Indian Army, who is secretly a nigh-unkillable specialist with the Defence Intelligence Agency. He has returned home to Mumbai on leave, where his family plots his arranged marriage with a nice girl, by which I mean a grown adult, but do keep in mind that heroine Sonakshi Sinha *is* young enough to be Kumar’s daughter, and, like a child, is not given a single goddamned thing of substance to do at any point whatsoever.

Even some admirers of this film have suggested it could be even better with the romantic track excised. I suspect, however, that Murugadoss is hedging his bets; the widest audience, after all, may not want to stare at a sausage party, and those with a stake in the promotion of romantic songs will be even less pleased. With Ghajini, a crowd-pleasing romance was built right in to the plot; no such luck here, so best to keep it painless with a familiar jodi – of Sinha’s thirteen film appearances, six have been in Akshay Kumar vehicles, and the two share an easy, convincing chemistry, ideal for mass placation.

And yet!

As with Ghajini, Murugadoss plays the romance and thriller elements of Holiday directly off of one another, this time as deliberate interruptions. In fact, the first 35 or so minutes of the film betray no suggestion that there’s even going to *be* any action – it’s a completely straightforward mismatched couple scenario, complete with a big, ditzy song number where Kumar hilariously and romantically pisses Sinha off by imposing himself on all of her extracurricular interests. This, the film says, is the [h]oliday a soldier can enjoy, but alas, it is short-lived – soon a satchel bomb explodes in a crowded bus, the camera leering at an elderly couple trapped in an adjoining car as they’re enveloped, luxuriously, by flames.

This time, Murugadoss allows no variation in visual approach; everything is shot in a distinctly bright, it’s-gonna-be-okay-the-hero’s-gonna-win type of manner, even as Kumar, having spotted the terrorist behind the bombing escaping with ease from his hospital confines, abducts the man and whisks him away to a bedroom torture chamber, where the hero slices a joint from one of that bastard’s fingers and immediately elicits wholly accurate information. Stow your murmurs, American liberals: not only is torture necessary, it is SO FUCKING COOL.

Before long, Kumar has discovered a pestilence coursing through the blood of India: “sleeper cells,” always pronounced in English, with the frequency and intonation of “LSD” in a ’60s drug film. A talking head on a television fills us in on the details, praising U.S. domestic security policies in the wake of 9/11. This is hardcore shit, quickly lapsing into feverish, ecstatic fantasy. Gathering a group of Army buddies at a wedding reception, Kumar suggests a jolly game for the well-dressed bunch to play. Having kept the original, tortured terrorist dosed on ketamine and locked in a closet for days, Kumar now allows his escape; as would any of us in the same situation, the man immediately and accurately goes about facilitating the complicated, dozen-man bombing mission planned for that date. Men break off from Kumar’s party to follow each new sleeper agent, until it is 12 heroes following 12 villains.

Reach into your bags, Kumar says, and you’ll find I’ve given you a gun! The man you are following is a terrorist! On my signal, you must draw your weapon and shoot him dead in public! Each player agrees without hesitation, and on Kumar’s signal Murugadoss cuts rapidly across one dozen gory headshots, crack crack crack: a coordinated strike on terrorism, just like the coordinated attacks they launch on innocents! Twelve handsome, well-dressed cosmopolitan men — the livelihood of a strapping nation — flee the scene, and the news media immediately and unanimously identifies each and every victim of this ritual as dirty terrorists, causing the leader of the terrorists, played by model-turned-actor Freddy Daruwala, to glower in his well-furnished estate… and summon further terror, via mobile!

It is too much: a quality that seems to have been discerned by the poster designers, at least (see above). If the writer/director is aware, however, he does not overplay his hand, and lord knows he could. Akshay Kumar is more than capable of playing things five-alarm broad, but here he’s subdued and emphatic. He’s a big improvement over “Vijay,” the preternaturally collegiate star of Thuppakki, sneering his way through every scene like the cockiest freshman in general science and requiring some combination of wirework and intrusively rapid editing to accomplish anything in the way of fighting. Kumar, though 46, is still fit enough to draw from his background in martial arts performance and pull off some genuine stunts, so Murugadoss gladly extends the duration of certain major confrontations to flatter his hero’s proclivities. It makes for rightly perfected action.

There is also an interesting deletion from the Thuppakki version of the story. As I’ve mentioned, both films begin as a sort of feigned romantic comedy, only to abruptly transform into an action-thriller. The romance, however, keeps bumping its way back in to both versions, complete with a ludicrous subplot about Virat’s superior officer becoming engaged to the heroine. In the midst of all this — and so self-evident is the intrusion that Murugadoss at one point has the heroine interrupt a conversation between Virat and a friend about the thriller plot to drag him into the romance track, only for the friend to call Virat on his cell phone near the end of the romance scene to beg him to continue explaining the thriller plot — Thuppakki sees the superior officer try and set Virat up with a sexy lady, only for comedy to ensue when Virat finds out she’s a call girl, with whom no respectable man would ever associate with on a personal or professional level. That’s basically the joke. She’s a nice lady, but she’s trash.

This bit is absent from Holiday. Possibly, Murugadoss felt it detracted from the pacing, but then again – he does plan to work with Sinha further, this time as solo star on a Hindi-original project, an untitled 2015 action movie “based on a story which is close to my heart and has a very personal and powerful message for all Indian women.” Might he now sense the trends shifting?

Holiday otherwise remains comprehensively patriarchal, both in terms of how it approaches women, and how it approaches military protection. Kumar gets quite a lot of people killed due to retributive violence over the course of this film, but it’s all collateral damage. At one point he even manipulates his own sister to be kidnapped and nearly murdered by terrorists, just so he can track ’em down, shoot ’em up, and lock the lone survivor in the boot of a commandeered vehicle. The girl castigates her brother’s lack of compassion on the ride back, only for Kumar to shut her down in borderline Marine Todd fashion by declaring that if terrorists are willing to die in their mission to kill thousands, civilians ought to be ready to pay the same price as the soldiers and police who gladly face death to protect them. BOOM.

The girl then informs her brother that he’s not yet killed all of the terrorists, which does not so much challenge the statements made as segue into another round of enhanced interrogation (SO COOL), only for the romantic track as personified by Sonakshi Sinha to scale a ladder a la Clarissa Explains It All and surprise her man inside his bedroom/torture chamber. Kumar manages to hide the prisoner in a closet, only for someone else to approach the bedroom door; thinking it’s his mother, Kumar then shoves Sinha in another closet, only for the second intruder to reveal himself as a policeman friend. A relieved Kumar opens up all the closets. “Don’t you keep any clothes in there?” asks the friend.

Then there is a romantic song sequence, and immediately after we see that Kumar has tortured his prisoner to death and dumped his corpse in public. Perhaps he did it in the ‘real’ world, while the romantic daydream played. The news identifies the dead man as a terrorist; there is no dissent.

At this point, you’re probably wondering what the sleeper cells are hoping to accomplish. I’ve watched two extremely similar versions of this movie in two languages, and I’m still not 100% sure on that myself, but from what I can gather there’s a bit of a twist involved. The terrorists, it seems, are at the beck and call not of religious zealots or foreign nations, but certain factions of the Indian government itself, hoping to extract prestige and wealth from scaring the population into trusting them, then playing the hero as the pre-planned attacks stop. Only the Indian Army is pure of sleeper cell contamination.

I like this scheme. It brings us right back to Murugadoss the would-be Naxalite – “empowered with arms,” he said, “to fight for the masses.” Think like an analyst: who is more *acceptably* armed than the Indian Army? And it isn’t a novelty to have them cleaning up the government at large; there, Murugadoss is drawing from the library of his great role model, Tamil pop cinema icon Shanmugam Shankar, who — before whipping up a frenzy of computer graphics at the helm of mega-blockbuster Enthiran — created popular vigilante films in which men who can’t take it anymore enact lurid expressions of popular disenchantment with widespread corruption. In Bollywood, this sort of thing arguably goes back to the ‘angry young man’ persona of superstar Amitabh Bachchan in the 1970s. Massy hits are lousy with crooked cops, dirty politicians, avaricious bureaucrats – positioning those scumbags as the power behind the sleeper cells isn’t radical, it’s logical.

And as we’ve already established, AR Murugadoss is a very logical man, both in terms of popular calculation and the raw nerve appeal of vulgar poetic vengeance.

There’s a scene leading into the climax of Holiday where Freddy Daruwala, model-hot terrorist kingpin, phones Akshay Kumar with a nasty surprise. A bomb has been hidden in a mall, where one of the 12 assassins has taken his whole family, and it will explode in ten seconds! Frantic, Kumar phones his buddy, and urges him to take his wife and kids and flee the premises, but the man becomes paralyzed considering all the people he’d want to save. He and the camera, and therefore we, stare into the eyes of happy children, one after another… until a blast rips down the walls!

Anything is justified in the face of this. Never mind that Kumar arguably sort of provoked this response – anything is justified in the face of this. We might even imagine a quiet respect, underneath the agony, for the screenwriting utility of this grandest of gestures. From this sacrifice — small, really, when you consider the safety of a nation’s people! — the hero is beaming and uncomplicated again, like pressed linen or a polished gun. Murugadoss knows.

In seconds, the hero will be addressing an audience of army officers – all of them confined to wheelchairs. They will be reactivated for one last mission: to mold plastic explosives with their own hands, so wizened with sacrifice. Imagine: a suicide bombing on the terrorist leader! A taste of their own medicine at last! The audience of crippled veterans applauds with passion. Murugadoss knows. Audiences in cinemas across the globe are cheering too.

Every one of us knows.

You needn’t conduct a survey to get the consensus on that.

Nicolas Winding Refn: “White Movie Nerds Must Die” (An Imaginary Story)

Posted on July 23, 2013 by Jog

The first we see of Ryan Gosling, he is shown flexing his hands and squinting with terrific meaning before a statute of a strapping, shirtless boxer, and this, one suspects, is pertinent to why every critic in the world hated Only God Forgives.

I exaggerate, of course. A glance at any popular review aggregator will reveal a modest selection of minds sympathetic to this latest picture from popular Dane Nicolas Winding Refn, whose previous feature, 2011’s Drive, was met with a lingering rapture so disproportionate to its derivative pleasures — seriously, just sit down with Richard Rush’s The Stunt Man for two hours and you’ll get basically all of Refn’s deeper thematics, plus a stellar turn by Peter O’Toole — the observant reader can’t help but catch a whiff of guilty score-settling, or at least the unmistakable grimace of an indulgent teacher left embarrassed by a prize pupil’s misbehavior.

These are good concerns, because this new film is all about authority, and behavior, and guilt.

But before we get to that, I must make a personal confession. Absolutely critical to my experience with Only God Forgives was the realization that it is deliberately mistitled. There is, in fact, no English-language title displayed on screen during the opening credits; instead, the title is a Thai phrase, written in Thai script, which merely translates to “Only God Forgives” via subtitles at the bottom of the frame.

Moreover, it soon turns out that quintessential Hollywood hunk Gosling is not, in fact, the film’s hero, but an arguable co-protagonist with Thai actor Vithaya Pansringarm, whom not a few viewers of the original red band trailer mistook for the story’s villain – as perfect a coincidence as those (over-)sensitive to western exceptionalism could possibly dream!

Or did writer/director Refn plan it all that way? It seems unlikely – and not just because I have no idea who cut that trailer. Supposedly, pre-production on Only God Forgives began in 2009 with a much more traditional action movie scenario, but Refn — having subsequently overseen the mutation of Drive from a purportedly more ‘normal’ crime thriller to its languid final form — re-thought the picture as a moody, ‘foreign’ thing, eventually rolling with production crises to further that impulse: a lack of English-capable local actors resulted in a *lot* of subtitled Thai-language dialogue, and the absence of money for a soundtrack of American tunes inspired a recurring device of Thai characters performing domestic songs via karaoke.

That’s right. There’s three song sequences in Only God Forgives; three less than the average Telugu film, yes, but divvied out at similarly well-spaced junctures, as are the surprisingly modest action scenes. Did you know Refn once authorized a no-budget Hindi-language remake of his debut film Pusher, by a British filmmaker with an eye toward appealing to Indian audiences? This too got me thinking.

Having watched anime from a young age, I am accustomed to feelings of embarrassment. All around you in that peculiar fandom, at all times, is a strange fetish for marginal aspects of a foreign culture, or snatches of culture marginalized by their use: honorifics (mis)applied as a signifier of ‘understanding,’ weird debates over the accessibility of translation, and — since I knew mostly men — desperation-laden desire for an exoticised notion of female perfection, apparently native to Japan. This is not to say that some fans didn’t eventually develop a sophisticated understanding of language, culture and dubiously popular entertainment, but many more remained ignorant of their tourism, convinced instead that the meager abridgement of cultural engagement that is buying (or stealing) shit elevated them above the rabble, away from the debasement of American things and toward a verily rising sun.

I feel much the same way watching Indian movies today, though I am cognizant, of course, that a movie does not care who is watching. Like any single-screen front-bencher settling in for an evening of straightforward masala, I am invited to cheer the swaggering cop heroes and delight in the beautiful women, though I know that, fundamentally, part of my interest will always be the novel character of entertainment not exactly tailored toward a thirty-something heterosexual white American middle-class male, as is a good deal of the U.S. product which more and more seeks to dominate the filmgoing experience of international audiences as a valuable supplement to its already considerable returns.

Guilt, guilt, guilt. Need I mentioned I was raised stolidly Catholic? I do so wonder about Nicolas Winding Refn.

The plot of Only God Forgives concerns a murder of frustration, and the waves of incrimination that radiate outward in the manner of a stone dropped into a lake. The stone, in this case, is played by English actor Tom Burke, who is first spotted seething in a Bangkok kickboxing gym run by Gosling, his younger brother, as a front for the family’s lucrative narcotics smuggling trade. This is not deliberately a foreign expansion – Gosling had to be moved far away from America to escape a certain crime, and Burke, we might guess (though, like much in the film, we are not told), is supposed to be supervising him. Later, Burke skulks around the streets of the city, growling at a local pimp “I wanna fuck a fourteen-year old,” before offering the man an exorbitant sum for his young daughter. It is probably less a serious offer than a sneering display of the economic superiority that will always keep the locals polite, no matter how much it pains them.

Eventually, Burke secures the services of a prostitute, whom he then murders, for reasons which are never revealed, and perhaps unimportant.

Enter: Pansringarm, as a severe police lieutenant who observes only black and white moral distinctions. Instead of arresting Burke, he locks the white man in a room with the prostitute’s bereaved father, who pummels the killer’s skull into hamburger. Yet justice cannot end there, for the father too was a party to his daughter’s exploitation. The man pleads that economic and cultural circumstances led him to this place — he has no sons, which is financially disadvantageous — but because A is A, one of his hands is ceremonially cut off by Pansringarm’s righteous machete.

All of this Ditkovian melodrama is interspersed with images of Gosling staring at his own twisting hands, occasionally suffering precognitions of a confrontation with Pansringarm while wandering long, red-lined halls. He also fancies a local prostitute, though he seems disinterested in paying her to sleep with him – fantasies are crucial to Gosling’s life experience, and so he envisions his hands slipping up between her long legs, those instruments of violence depicted as, essentially, his primary sexual characteristic.

Alas, soon his wicked, wicked mother arrives from America, and Gosling — appalled at his brother’s actions and hoping things will remain settled — finds himself tempted into pursuing unenthusiastic vengeance against Pansringarm, turning those hands again… toward killing!

Pulpy material indeed, presented with a minimum of subtlety and maximal art direction, with a seemingly bottomless appetite for hoary visual metaphors. Flexing your hands in front of a statue of a boxer, washing your hands of illusory blood – by the time Kristin Scott Thomas’ malevolent mommy wraps herself around Gosling’s waist with her face pressed toward his crotch in commemoration of the Oedipal subtext at play, you can understand why connoisseurs across the globe dismissed this picture as the very definition of pretentious trash.

Still, I was utterly engrossed by the cultural dynamics central to the film. Put simply, all of the white characters are consumers, tourists, and their consumption is what causes much of the trouble for Bangkok’s luckless citizenry. Thomas contracts with an Australian fixer to assassinate the people who killed her son, an assignment then subcontracted to local thugs who shoot up the clientele of an entire cafe to get to Pansringarm, who himself then battles frightfully up the racial/class ladder until he has the white fixer pinned to his seat in a prostitution bar with needles plucked from ladies’ formal hairdos and flower arrangements, gouging out his eyes and gashing open his eardrums to relieve him of the senses he has misused.

The director is plainly thrilled by this old-school manliness, having once described his scenario as a ‘take’ on the great American cowboy films (though Bollywood movies too are full of heroic police who abuse due process to bring about Good); interestingly, though, the locus of manliness appears to have shifted from Gosling to Pansringarm during the film’s sequential shoot. You can easily picture him in a tall white hat, dispatching baddies without any angst. During the Australian’s torture, a theatrical police assistant urges all of the women in the club to close their eyes, while all the men are bidden to look closely, so they might appreciate the wages of sin. What showmanship!

Meanwhile, Gosling takes the prostitute with whom he is besotted to a fancy dinner attended by his mother, who proceeds to berate and humiliate the two of them in a fantastically vulgar manner, pausing only to turn to an off-screen waiter and order the table food. There is a certain ambiguity to exactly how much of Thomas’ absurd ugliness is occurring in Gosling’s imagination — and Thomas growls her dialogue with such lusty camp that she provides the film its sole source of comedy relief by virtue of performance alone — though plenty of external confirmation establishes her as a racist, grasping, misanthropic terror on her own terms, the kind of woman who perhaps sees a problem with what her older, departed son has done, in the abstract, maybe, but will inevitably choose the bonds of family over any exercise of empathy toward the funny local people who delay her activities through their broken English.

Outside, the prostitute expresses disbelief that Gosling would put up with such shit. Angered, the white man demands the girl remove the lovely dress he bought for her. She complies, standing proudly in her underwear and holding the fabric out toward Gosling, who is so ashamed he can scarcely reply.

Never have I seen an action-thriller so intimate with shame.

The ‘evil mother’ is a favorite character type of Alejandro Jodorowsky, to whom Only God Forgives is dedicated. And by this point in the plot, it is clear that Refn is sending Gosling out on a quest of spiritual and psychological evolution, as does Jodorowsky with so many lost souls. Santa Sangre — in which a man is maneuvered into violence by the specter of his mother guiding his *hands* — is a good reference point. Of course, to Refn, the idea of ‘evolution’ is to understand one’s true nature, like Gosling’s Driver in their prior collaboration, who is stunned to discover that he really is the super-cool expert killer he’d been playacting for so long.

But here, evolution terminates in annihilation.

Only God Forgives, you see, is also reminiscent of Eli Roth’s Hostel series, in which tourists are ushered onto the next level of humans-as-commodities by their own bad behavior. But Refn does not characterize Pansringarm’s working class machete cop as himself an uncontrolled evil of capitalism; instead, he is unambiguously righteous, like a slasher movie’s killer cast as the hero, or a comic book avenger given a religious twist. Pansringarm himself has suggested a polytheistic reading of the character, positioning him as a literally magical “superhero” character, if but only one god among many Thai deities; Gosling’s situation, however, is specifically applicable to his domain, leading viewers of a certain religious disposition to inevitably conjure visions of a looming, Old Testament-style fire ‘n brimstone Gawd.

Politically, this is arguably problematic. Thailand’s recent history is marked by periods of military crackdowns on democratic activity, yet Refn places all of his enthusiasm in a brutal representative of Authority, one whose tolerance of prostitution/intolerance of individual prostitutes can easily be taken as advocacy for retrograde gender assumptions. No questions are asked by Refn – this is all necessary, one assumes, to combat the hellacious rudeness of capitalistic white condescension, of which Gosling, try as he might, cannot wriggle free.

Yet Refn knows he himself cannot do it either.

***SPOILERS FOLLOW***

In my addled little head, the act of Refn’s filming a movie in an exotic foreign location, for occidental delectation, became a metaphor for consuming foreign entertainment. Gosling is the ‘good’ consumer, looking to forge real relationships with women, respecting local performers/athletes, not murdering anyone, etc. But he learns, gradually, that he is still implicitly in the position of abuser, unable to escape the dread orbit of his mother; he cannot really accomplish terrific feats with his hands, and he is impotent as a lover – it is exactly the reverse of Drive, the bloody fantasies of which were so loved.

Inevitably, it comes to pass that Gosling asks Pansringarm for a fight. The powerful cop absolutely destroys Gosling, who doesn’t land so much as one punch, leaving the room with his pretty Hollywood face rearranged into a monster makeup mosaic of bruises reminiscent of Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tokyo Fist. The climax of the movie quickly follows. Pansringarm confronts Thomas, who reveals that Gosling murdered his own father, and suspected her and older brother Burke of having an incestuous affair. Not one to abuse his emotions, Pansringarm cuts her down.

Intercut throughout is Gosling’s own attempt to track and kill Pansringarm at his home. Too late, Gosling realizes that his backup thug has orders from Thomas to murder not only Pansringarm, but his wife and young daughter. The white man stands still as the woman is shot dead, but he acts in time to prevent harm from coming to the little girl, who in an earlier scene expressed to her daddy an interest in people solving their problems by talking them out. In a Christian sense, she is the peaceable [Son] to Pansringarm’s wrathful Father, and she stares silently at Gosling while he departs, as proud and stoic as the prostitute he shouted at, perhaps having already forgiven him.

Doubtlessly, many viewers will expect the film to conclude with a final battle between crook & cop; they will have to content themselves with memories of Albert Brooks’ stabbing. Gosling discovers his mother, slices open her womb, and fiddles around inside, perhaps eager to return; this could be the ultimate goal of his incestuous urge, to be like a child again, and not care about anything. This is futile, so he goes again to pay and watch his favorite prostitute, who can’t entirely get rid of him so long as he has money.

Pansringarm meets him there.

Gosling imagines they are in a field.

The white man offers both his hands in penance for his and his family’s sins.

Only God Forgives.

And then we are back in the karaoke bar, where Pansringarm takes the stage to sing the song from that original red band trailer. There are no white people in the theater. The lyrics are not translated; it is a communication Western audiences will not understand. The dream of obliteration is realized. Closing credits are displayed over the performance, again in Thai script, but with English translations now provided just below each name, instead of out of the frame. Hope remains, at least, for the future.

Summer Blockbusters: The Quest for Peace

Posted on June 17, 2013 by Jog

I am a rational and even-tempered man by nature. Nonetheless, I can be driven to anger in certain extreme circumstances, such as the screening of films.

Even now, I can vividly recall my last episode: it was at an early afternoon show of 2009’s Watchmen, adapted from the original Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons comics by David Hayter (a contributing writer to various X-Men– and The Mummy-related projects) & Alex Tse (his sole theatrical film credit), and directed by Zack Snyder, a specialist in bombastic medium-budgeted geek-friendly franchise work, semi-revered at the time for his kinetic opening reel to 2004’s remake of Dawn of the Dead, in which Romero’s buckshot satire ably transitioned into a gory round of Crazy Taxi.

Watchmen ’09 was a horrible piece of shit, the absolute nadir of Snyder’s career, attributable mainly, I think, to dispassionate studio maths: Geek-Friendly Director + Superhero-Experienced Writer = Superhero Movie. The possibility that Snyder’s bodies-in-motion/all-sensation aesthetic might prove incompatible with a comic book series renowned for its slow, precision control likely did not enter into the mind of anyone capable of making a decision on the matter, because superhero movies, fundamentally, are specialty-branded extensions of action movie formulae – which is to say, the ‘superhero’ aspect is a means of allowing advancements in special effects and facilitating expansive franchising opportunities. Deviations in tone are at the indulgence of the individual director — provided they are not working for Disney/Marvel — with little discernible need to consult the source material. A superhero comic is a superhero comic is a superhero comic.

Or, perhaps we might say an fx blockbuster is an fx blockbuster is an fx blockbuster.

My hands shook in rage at the climax to Watchmen ’09; it was the part where they annihilate the city, and I had no refills left on my popcorn. I couldn’t have cared less about the fucking squid — and even now, close to half a decade later, where the befuddling fandom acceptance of that misbegotten project has faded into a sheepish Oh Well, you are still guaranteed to have any objection to the climax of the film met with ‘get over the fucking squid’ — because all I could see in front of me was sparkling-clean CGI decimation: New York vaporized into a bloodless field of stone rubble. Heresy! Travesty! People say the problem with the film is its hidebound adherence to the comic, but this is only half the problem: it is notionally ‘faithful,’ but lacks many of the specific visceral cues of the original work. The Moore/Gibbons Watchmen was as subdued in its violence as it was in its page layouts, until that awful moment where the blood POURS and the grids EXPLODE into booming splashes, forcing us to feel the transgression to which its superheroes are party, shaking the very foundations of their comic book universe.

That said — because I am vulgar, but not so much an auteurist — I cannot blame Zack Snyder as a purely affirmative actor. He had $130 million studio dollars under his oversight, and having an “R” rating withheld for depicting a holocaust as a holocaust would be tantamount to chucking bushels of cash money into the furnace of an engine careening toward a sheer cliff. Of poverty. The irony, of course, is that ‘important’ topics are frequently given a societal nourishment’s leeway in ratings considerations, but a superhero movie? Forgive me for repeating myself, but again: there is no substantial difference between Watchmen and Green Lantern in the fx movie calculus, they are superhero movies, and it is already a goddamned miracle that one of them snuck away without a PG-13 restriction, which *only* happened because a pair of half-billion-dollar-grossing Frank Miller adaptations could be processed as ultra-stylized Crime and War pictures. Suddenly, the ferocious opposition authors gave to the notion of a comic book ratings system around the time of the Moore/Gibbons original makes a lot of sense.

That’s the kind of shit you have to deal with when you’re Zack Snyder. Half the thirteen-year olds in the United States of America imbibe exquisitely gory martial violence every single day whilst calling each other faggots during marathon gaming sessions, and that’s because dorky, costly video games — unlike movies and comics — initially faced sluggish acceptance as a valid avenue for mass culture, allowing it to bypass much of the heavy breathing over its societal impact until it was already established as a gigantic capitalistic force. As such, if you’re chasing an audience which now equates ‘thrills’ with ‘nonstop violence’ — and if a movie studio gives you $130 million dollars, guess what, you’re chasing it — you need to make things as sensational as possible while also bypassing those niggling concerns over beloved cinema as a pollutant of mental hygiene.

And there’s an old, easy solution to that: make the violence clean. That’s why nobody uses squibs anymore to simulate gunshot wounds – if you use CGI, you can scrub away the nasty effects of shootings when necessary so that they register as murders in a white hat/black hat western. It’s just that there’s more of them. Lots more. An absence of blood in extraordinary quantities! As an accomplished, successful director of films of the type, Snyder has doubtlessly internalized these techniques, and imparted such wisdom to his crew, in the unlikely event they — professionals all — were not already hip.

This is why arguments were made as to whether Watchmen should even have *been* a movie, but I suppose that’s not so much asked about superhero comics anymore.

***

Anyway, now everyone hates Zack Snyder, largely due to the next live-action film he directed: 2011’s Sucker Punch, which he also co-produced and co-wrote. It was the obligatory passion project you get to make after serving xx number of successful years as a good soldier: his Inception, in more ways than one. Tracking the queasy travails of young, exploited girls through numerous cross-pollinating levels of masculine dreamtime fantasy, the film married intense images of geek culture sexualization to furious denunciations of the male gaze in a profoundly bizarre manner. Watching it was like seeing a filmmaker struggling nakedly with his indulgences, and at best fighting them to a draw – idealizing women in a Chaplinesque manner which, by their profound suffering, strips them of agency. Names as diverse as Lucile Hadžihalilovic and Lars von Trier spring to mind in comparison, with all their clashing ideological baggage crammed into the trunk of a speedy genre vehicle.

There was little nuance to the film’s reception, though. Sucker Punch is one of the most widely-loathed films in recent memory, overtly *hated* to the extent that Snyder’s prior films became tainted by association. Duly empowered, dissenters to the sexual violence of 300 and the general cluelessness of Watchmen broadened and intensified the scope of their criticisms to the point where “Zack Snyder” became synonymous with “trash.” I can understand why it happened: Sucker Punch is indeed a broken, fucked attempt at a feminist statement. Yet it worries me that the film’s attempts to be a feminist statement carry no apparent rhetorical value, and, moreover, are commonly misidentified as a brazen, belching effort at the ultimate in deliberate objectification, with little reference to the ‘text’ of the film beyond Just Look At It. I did look at it! I swear! And what I saw was an opportunity for a detailed analysis of what did and didn’t work — a ‘teachable moment,’ to be condescending as hell — falling by the wayside in favor of wholesale denunciation on the basis of received wisdom. I tried, nobody bit.

The message to Snyder, and the people in any position to fund his efforts, must have been very clear: do not try this shit again. Play it safe next time. Go back to what you were doing before.

So we can blame you more when you do.

***

I’m not in any place to defend Snyder’s Man of Steel; I haven’t seen it. From what I’ve been reading, both inside and outside of the nerd conversation bubble, there’s a big debate brewing now over depictions of sanitized violence and the ethics of lethality in popular cinema. I welcome this, although I do find it funny that it was necessary to have a man dressed as the American flag whooshing around disaster areas to prompt such widening concern; so much for the argument that superhero movies are unnecessarily blunt!

Also, I can’t help but wonder why similar concerns didn’t crop up for such critically-acclaimed action bonanzas as director J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek, which opened the same year as Snyder’s Watchmen, and featured as a particularly zippy set piece the destruction of the planet Vulcan and the obliteration of billions of humanoid alien-persons. That’s a Star Wars trick, granted — and look what Abrams is directing next! — but it sat heavily with me as I realized the film’s screenwriters had absolutely no substantive emotional fallout planned: it was merely the signal of pathos necessary to allow some mild identification with fan-favorite corporate holding Mr. Spock. A box was checked, and then onward – to greater adventure!

It is a systemic problem. Perhaps it is only visible now because Superman carries a particularly weird set of viewer expectations, and Snyder is a very easy, zero-cost target for criticism at the moment; no death threats for fucking with him.

As luck would have it, though, there *was* a blockbuster-style fx movie in play this summer that offered a real alternative. A genuine response to all that plague us.

It was derided by critics to a spectacular degree.

I will be blunt. After Earth — an M. Night Shyamalan film, written by one-time video games journalist and occasional comics writer Gary Whitta, with Shyamalan himself (among various uncredited helping hands), from an original story by co-producer/star Will Smith — is not a particularly good movie. This, I admit, is reason enough for critics to reject it, though the conversation surrounding the film has not fit the mold typically set down for a summer flop. There is palpable glee to the denunciations, doubtless owing to some combination of: (1) the film’s relationship to Scientology; (2) the general air of circus ridicule that follows M. Night Shyamalan, who’s mocked in only the way a weird dude who got praised too much too early ever is; and (3) Will Smith’s own efforts at breaking his son Jaden into movie stardom by sheer force of indulgence, an acceptable practice in Bollywood, maybe, but not in these here United States, where everyone succeeds by the sweat of their brow and effort always correlates to reward, save for with those few bad apples who perpetually demand plucking.

Regrettably, After Earth is also the only would-be tentpole this year directed by and starring non-whites, which adds an extra drizzle of WELCOME TO EARF and “Shamalamadingdong” jokes to the comments section mix. Worse, it is arguably a non-Judeo-Christian work (by non-whites) that insists on operating as a serious religious allegory; much attention was paid to a recent Shyamalan interview in which he claimed to have ghostwritten the 1999 Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicle She’s All That, but the real juicy tidbit was the director’s profession of admiration for Terrence Malick’s brazenly churchy The Tree of Life. That’s fitting, given Shyamalan’s disposition as an artist; reared Hindu, he is nonetheless fascinated by the emotive and mystic capabilities of the Catholic and Episcopal faiths that surrounded him growing up in Pennsylvania. Thus, he would make the perfect collaborator for Smith, who is not officially a Scientologist but obviously sympathizes with the gathering in an intense, here’s-my-money fashion.

There are some who deny that After Earth is Scientology-based. Indeed, the Church of Scientology International’s own director of public affairs pooh-poohed such readings, claiming that the film contains themes “common to many of the world’s philosophies.” Which… of course! Why wouldn’t M. Night Shyamalan, good student that he is, suggest (say) Scientology’s focus on clearing the analytical mind of wicked engrams from prior days and prior lives to ascertain the state of the present as parallel to the karma yoga of the Bhagavad Gita, promoting perfection in action through disassociation with Earthly qualms and attachments? Fear is an illusion, after all.

So let’s play a game right now. Let’s set aside, for a moment, our concerns about Scientology, and divine from the resultant Smithian text a solution to the blockbuster problem.

Fundamentally, After Earth rejects the idea of ‘raised stakes’ as a necessary component to the fx extravaganza. What is at risk in the story of the film — seeing Jaden Smith’s anxiety-ridden, anime-like lonely child protagonist, complete with Neon Genesis Evangelion plug suit, stranded on the wild, overgrown, anti-humane landscape of a far future Earth, racing against time to raise a beacon to save himself and his similarly-stranded military hero dad (Will Smith), all the while stalked by an alien beast that tracks its prey by sensing its fear — is nothing more than the lives of two people. There is no galactic threat, no planetary devastation, no mission to eradicate the monster alien race, or reclaim the Earth, or win a war. There *was* a war with the aliens in the past, and it claimed the life of Jaden’s sister, and he is haunted. He does not want to lose his father, or his own life.

In other words, every life is sacred. It is a *terrible* thing when people die. ALWAYS. Candidly, the film could have done better to emphasize this message. There is a considerable amount of time spent near the beginning of the film with the crew taking the Smiths across space, and none of them are particularly memorable; there is little emotional punch to their deaths when the ship inevitably crashes. A cynic might accuse the film of only really valuing the lives of the famous movie star Smiths, so intense is the focus on them. Yet it is nonetheless extremely clear that the deaths of the crew — the absence of lives — has a ready and palpable effect on the mission Jaden is forced to undergo. And we do see some bodies, strung up by the alien monster. PG-13, yes, but not invisible.

Not emotionally sanitized either. Jaden Smith has been lambasted for bad acting, but this is mostly a problem of hesitant and uncertain vocal delivery. In terms of bodily acting, facial expressions, reactions – the kid is pretty good at playing a nervous wreck. He is absolutely terrified for four-fifths of the runtime, hyperventilating in a sickeningly realistic manner, and at one point writhing and grimacing under the sway of toxins, his face swelling into a grotesque CGI mask that ably magnifies his natural expressions of agony until he throws himself onto a syringe of antidote. Warfare, battle, survival: After Earth posits these scenarios as FUCKING SCARY, and, moreover, situations in which one must rely on others to survive. Jaden of course has his dad’s stranded voice to inspire him, but he also encounters a more immediate ally in the form of a large, intelligent bird, who repays his small kindness with a selfless moment of aid.

It is almost a parody of the far more consumptive flying thingy/humanoid relationships in James Cameron’s Avatar, for Whitta & Shyamalan are prepared to extend the capacity for empathy to all smart things.

Ah, but what about the alien? The antagonist Other? Obviously the monster is intended to represent the limitations on human transcendence, but can’t it also be a handy means of demonizing all manner of corporeal foes? Is this not just a softer hymn to battle, to conquest?

(Hang on while I jump off the high horse and crack an M. Night Shyamalan joke like it’s 2002.)

TWIST: I’m not actually opposed to violence in movies! I’m not even opposed to sanitized violence! They pulled that shit all the time in old issues of 2000 AD, and those comics are like my personal Silver Age! Fuck Superman! As originating editor Pat Mills (specially thanked in the collected Watchmen) once wrote of his killing machine hero robot Hammerstein, I am “programmed to enjoy action and destruction.” But just as Alan Moore grew wary of popular films when he saw how the budgets of undemanding entertainments swelled to rival the GDP of small nations, so did the anonymous killings of summer and summery movies begin to wear me down. At least when Django Unchained leers at its dead you can see their faces.

Religious texts are generally not opposed to depictions of battle either, which is one capacity by which they can become instruments of oppression. Yet the climactic struggle of After Earth, perched on the trembling precipice of a mighty volcano — potent symbolism in Scientology, as that is where Xenu detonated nuclear bombs to release the thetans of his prisoners for indoctrination into bad religion — is marked by a distinct ambivalence. Yes, Jaden does clear himself of material concern and slay the beast, and it is the film’s great failing as entertainment that this development in his character seems utterly abrupt, divorced from any satisfying sense of dramatic build or character development.

But then, as he and his father are soaring away, Jaden tells Will that he does not want to be a warrior anymore. He does not want to fight things. He would rather divorce himself from violence. It is allowed, because there is no need for a sequel, a franchise. It’s not how you keep conversation buzzing, to let controversy feed the anticipation for your next move, but if critics are serious about their stated qualms, if they are not themselves tackling an outrage du jour to rustle momentary hits as justification for their declining wages, but interested in addressing underlying questions of motivation and depiction, the steaming husk of this capsule fallen to Earth is worth a closer look.

Baseball as a Metaphor for Certain Industrial Necessities: A Speculative Comment

Posted on May 20, 2013 by Jog

An earlier version of this essay was posted on May 26, 2011, at The Panelists, a now-defunct group website, at the invitation of Derik Badman. It was conceived as part of a multi-site commentary project, the “Manga Moveable Feast,” devoted at that time to the baseball series Cross Game, created by Mitsuru Adachi.

A million thanks to Andrew White for his invaluable technical assistance.

***

Say there was a manga studio.

Writer-on-manga Ryan Holmberg recently identified Shinji Nagashima — albeit by the artist’s own assertion — as the first mangaka to utilize the Production (“Pro”) moniker to denote the operation of a studio: Musashino Manga Production, founded in the late ’50s. Nagashima had previously served as an assistant to postwar comics godhead Osamu Tezuka, and would subsequently work for Golgo 13 creator Takao Saito at his Saito Production, the early years of which Holmberg depicts as a transition from the on-page interaction of several artists retaining some individuality of line to the smoothed-out servitude of multitudinous studio hands pursuing a uniform visual goal. Comparisons to modern corporate function were present and pertinent, though Saito was also wont to invoke the filmmaking process, with himself as director – indeed, Holmberg cites Tezuka’s own fascination with American film as influential on a tendency to initially just pretend that he operated a studio, even while drawing many of his early works essentially by himself.

Of course, anyone who’s seen the excellent 1985 television documentary included with Helen McCarthy’s The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga knows that Tezuka did eventually command a studio of very tired manga assistants, despite retaining a great aptitude for drawing pages, even while in transit, say, from his small hotel workroom to an airport. He would be dead in four years, at the age of 60.

Also a sexagenarian at the moment is Mitsuru Adachi, creator of Cross Game — serialized in Big Three manga publisher Shogakukan’s Weekly Shonen Sunday, 2005-10 — and namesake of the above-cited Adachi Pro. Diligent reader that you are, I needn’t tell you that Cross Game is both a baseball-themed sports manga and a humorous character drama set among young people. The ‘baseball’ parts make for better images.

Likewise, though, you’re aware that the speed-lined sports action pictured above is not the essence of Adachi’s comics, though he is nonetheless adept at the stuff; I like how the tense, intent figure to the right dominates the page so as to actually upset the act of reading, his limbs barging into adjoining panels so that they function less as sequence than collage, balls and rays and all manner of expressive fury exploding from his form while the rest of the space depicts time-displaced moments of accordant havoc.

That’s all pretty great, but this is a bit more Adachi’s style:

A young girl has drowned unexpectedly. The top tier depicts her immediate family, supporting characters all, their personae summarized deftly through expression and body language. Below, series protagonist Ko, at this point only in fifth grade, searches through a forest of proper adult attire to understand what’s going on: that his dear close friend is gone for good.

One chapter later:

For much of the series up until this point (note the pg. 183), Ko has been depicted as a traditionally callow shonen, undisciplined but unarguably full of guts and determination and raw sporting talent. Now, faced with a serious tragedy, Adachi suddenly and effectively shows how he is also a child, only very slowly comprehending the permanence of death. With expert subtlety, Adachi reprises a visual motif from the previous chapter’s memorial service, again catching Ko peering through adult bodies, mistaking a nearby girl for his friend. It is made plain that she is not coming back, and by this I mean it’s made plain to us; it takes a few more pages for Ko himself to understand what he must do, but narratively, subconsciously, Adachi reveals the hard cosmic facts, through pure cartooning.

That’s nice, huh? I liked that. Here’s another protagonist, the dead girl’s sister:

Ha ha, yes, it’s shonen manga: time to focus on the eighth grade panties. And, I know, I know – this is one page, out of context. Adachi has, in fact, set up an entire ongoing theme of curious sexuality for his now-teenaged cast, introducing Older Ko’s less childlike disposition by having him gaze wide-eyed upon schoolgirl thighs from a few escalator steps down. Later there’s a scene where tomboyish Aoba whips a dirty shirt off right in front of him, and, weeell, that’s kind of the issue here, because that would be an entirely separate laundry scene, just one chapter away from the one pictured above, presented with no especial character insight behind it. Then *another* chapter’s title page shows the girl posing in cutoffs and a sports bra, joined two chapters later by a critical panty flash. Again, it’s all basically apropos for the overheated atmosphere of boy-girl interactions at a certain age, but after a while it gets to feel like restatement to the point of inadvertently revealing something else.

My guess? Industry. Adachi is an entertainer, having worked skillfully for a variety of ‘mainstream’ manga publications — generally from Shogakukan — since 1970. He’s worked in shonen, shojo and seinen forums, with Cross Game specifically positioned in a magazine meant to appeal (though not exclusively cater) to male readers around Ko’s age. In this context, underdressed images of a likewise-aged female peer make some economic sense; notorious lolicon progenitor Hideo Azuma, in his autobiographical Disappearance Diary, depicts himself ordered by a Shogakukan editor to insert fan service nudity into his own Weekly Shonen Sunday work circa 1969, roughly around the time Adachi was honing his skills as a studio assistant.

But we don’t need history to sense the finger of industry upon the aesthetic pulse. After all, this is a speculative comment.

I like this page a lot. The curling stairs bordered by small hits of first-person sensation — crosshatching as the insides of your eyelids — ably convey the disorienting sensation of running unto exhaustion. It reminds me a bit of an establishing image of looming, intimidating competition architecture from Adachi’s Rough, a 1987-89 swimming saga:

That is a damn scary stadium. And yet, I don’t think I’m alone in looking at pages like these and thinking “well, they’re good, but are they the creator’s pages?” Which is to say, aren’t essentially photographic backgrounds like these generally the province of a studio assistant? Is that even an important distinction to make?

A few years ago, Derik Badman observed that Adachi’s series tend to share common traits, including similar-looking characters. I’d go a bit further and term Adachi’s entire style as remarkably consistent over the past three decades. Here’s a page from Nine, serialized 1978-80, the baseball manga by which the artist made his solo longform debut:

All of the Japanese-language images I’m posting come from a 2010 Shogakukan sampler released in honor of Adachi’s 40th anniversary as a professional mangaka. Admittedly, I think some effort was made to have the art appear more consistent, in that his first eight professional years are omitted entirely and the sample from Nine lacks the ’70s brushiness of some other pages from the series. Still, you can see how the character designs are only slightly thinner and sprightlier.

Now let’s try another baseball series, Adachi’s 1981-86 megahit Touch:

And hell, we might as well throw in the mighty H2, 1992-99:

Again, there is some variation in the character drawings, which are typically the sole province of the series’ creator, even on deadline-tight, assistant-stuffed weekly series like these three, all of them Shonen Sunday. But the crucial difference to me — and I readily admit this isn’t entirely discernible from the small samples I’ve provided, in that the true Adachi experience, to my mind, demands heroic consumption — is how both of the latter pages draw considerably on either blankets of empty space sitting behind the character art or (in H2) photographic-style images lacking any character art whatsoever. This approach is absolutely essential to Adachi’s art.

Getting back to Cross Game, let’s take a series of pages, in sequence.

Typically paced windup action, concluding with a startling snap from the distorted speedball in panel #4 to eerie stillness in panel #5, like a bullet paused ripping through an apple. It doesn’t appear to be a photo-drawn image, but it stands in stark contrast to the cartoon stylization just above. It is the point of impact drafted into service as a wholesale shift in tone.

We hear nothing, but the character up top can see it happen. Considerable speed is conveyed by the panel directly below, showing the ball very far away, while the character from panel #1 has hardly moved. Indeed, his arm has yet to relax from the pitch. There is meaning to everything. At the far left, characters look around, actively, bringing us back to mobile action.

Then, halfway through the third page, the image of the sky repeats to again suggest tremendous speed, this time in a joking manner, as Ko and his not-long-for-this-world sweetheart escape the celebration.

Truth be told, though, I see that big sky as representative of a second kind of speed.

They never do scan well, those minute patterns of screentone. Probably digital. The last time I wrote about Adachi, Andrew White, cartoonist and Adachi expert, suggested that the artist’s ‘extraneous’ panels — the sky, nature, laundry, etc. — are “at least in part motivated by practical concerns,” which is to say that space on every page can thus be easily delegated to studio assistants, who would need only training at mechanical tasks to complete their work. This certainly fits in with my understanding of the mechanics of weekly manga production; logically, a man over the age of 50 simply does not produce 17 thick volumes of comics in under five years without considerable backup.

Let’s return to Adachi Pro. I won’t make you scroll up.

What are we really looking at?

Panel #1 is all letters; I don’t have an untranslated edition handy, but I presume the original was nothing but Japanese characters. Panel #2 is urban scenery, very likely copied from photo reference. Panel #3 is the same, perhaps taken from a shot of the handsome Adachi Pro studio door. Panel #4 is the only area of the page to depict a character, helpfully shown from behind, so as to require nothing but a basic outline of a human form. Panel #5 is a classic: ultra-tight cross-hatching, or maybe a digital pattern or tone, upon which sound effects are plastered. The rest of the page is narrative captions and dialogue bubbles.

In other words, this page — depicting the mad rush of weekly manga serialization — is set up in a way that it could potentially be composed entirely by studio hands, insofar as every piece of it represents some mechanical task that can potentially be delegated so as to allow the artist’s attentions to focus elsewhere. I’m not privy to Adachi’s intent, of course, but it seems in keeping with his sense of humor to keep his own hands largely off the page while complaining about how little time he has to finish his pages. ‘Readers have no idea’ indeed!

This leads the thoughtful (or obsessive-compulsive) critic into a bog of attribution. Why, then, should a page ever be deemed the work of ‘Mitsuru Adachi’ and not ‘miscellaneous Adachi Pro employees,’ when it is realistically more the labor of the latter than the former? I understand, of course, Takao Saito’s analogy of the industrial comics artist-as-movie director, but I think something more fundamental is at work in my American mindset.

Here is a page from Green Horror, a 1954 horror comic about an axe-throwing cactus that’s in love with its owner. Needless to say, it’s been beloved by generations, panel #3 is probably the apex of the comics medium (“It hates me! AIIIEEEE!”) and the cactus would definitely make for a great baseball pitcher. The story has most recently been presented in lovingly restored form in the Fantagraphics collection Four Color Fear: Forgotten Horror Comics of the 1950s. The editor, Greg Sadowski, has made sure to properly credit the tale to the “Iger studio,” a comics packager of the day, although he and Editorial Consultant John Benson do at least attribute the plot direction (and potentially the script entire) to Ruth Roche, the studio’s script editor.

It’s important to do this, to clarify the roles involved, because the history of North American comics is one of exploitation, of publishers refusing artists benefits, among them sometimes the credit for their labor, and holding perpetual ownership over their creations – indeed, per the work for hire concept, annihilating them as the legal author. As a result, the abuses of the past weigh heavily on the minds of practitioners and critics. The notion of “creator’s rights,” then, became inseparable from the idea for credit. Pencillers are credited, inkers and credited, colorists are credited – arguments rage over credits in billion-dollar superhero movies. Only the most inexperienced of studio hands go without credit, as do friends helping an artist out on a deadline. Moreover, artist substitutions in long-running work-for-hire American comic books do not involve anybody hewing to a foundational visual approach; it is a wholesale substitution of one style for another, because every hand on the page deserves its own spotlight. Pity the historical standing of the damned editor who had Jack Kirby’s Superman heads replaced!

Adachi is more enduringly popular than the biggest of the pop comics artists from North America, though there’s probably been many dozens of hands on his pages. But also, his development for what’s now approaching half a century has been free of the particular abuses that mark the development of American comic books. An editor can’t hire somebody to replace all of his character heads, because he is fundamentally in control. An editor can only reject him and his project. We might suggest a comparison to a popular singer, surrounded with producers, session musicians, stylists, backup singers and other entities orbiting him.

Or, you know – movie directors, corporate heads. Baseball players.

I will now expand on a suggestion made by Sean Michael Robinson at this very website: that baseball analogizes to making comics.

It’s hard to escape the idea that when Adachi is writing about baseball, he’s also writing about making comics – about the thrill of watching one’s self improve, of pushing, of hitting a barrier only to break through to the challenge previously unseen. Aiming for the top. The sweet satisfaction of an aptitude well-developed, of a lifetime of skill coming to bear on a single moment.

A team, though, eight around a star, a draw: the protagonist. Skill and drive and guts and control and rock-ribbed American-style individualism can take you far, but in some games you need a potentially motley assortment of teammates to cover the field. If Adachi’s comic is stocked with self-reference, then it’s fitting that baseball itself matches up with the process by which the comic is made.

More importantly, though, this deployment of assistance on a breakneck weekly comics schedule has formed the very heart of Adachi’s work on Cross Game, and maybe his art entire. Chapters are typically more like vignettes, tracking a certain incident or revealing some character trait seemingly without concern for suspenseful plotting. It’s a very straightforward story, yes, sentimental and at times distractingly silly, and never especially far away from the genre tropes that inevitably guide the eye of the die-hard populist, if only to know from where to veer away at the right moment. That doesn’t really matter, not to my reading, because Adachi’s art moves so well, pulling the reader gracefully through waves of dialogue and ‘silence,’ interaction and environment, drawings and photographs, intimacy and enormity.

David Welsh is right: the mono no aware all but wafts up from any given spread in a fine mist. The interplay of self-evidently handmade character drawings are so often juxtaposed against realist, photographic, miscellaneous certainty, that it becomes by accident a procedural self-reference: a showcase for the delicacy of humanness before greater and older things. From this, the early chapters of Cross Game, when the characters are little, becomes a striking thing indeed on a second reading, because Adachi so blatantly foreshadows the death of his tiny heroine from the constant interjection of looming skies and big bodies of water – time becoming threatening, the world something that swallows you up exquisitely, horrible and lovely. Summer hits like a mushroom cloud.

In this way, Adachi has fused pragmatism and aesthetics into something unique, a comics art that seems to belong in the hazardous environment of weekly serialization. Is this the key to his longevity? Eh, that’s probably got something to do with characters, plot, romance, sports – you know.

But to me it’s the unity that attracts. Not the Adachi talking on the page, but communicating through it. Yes! In spite of all the transparencies I’ve so dubiously divined, I do hear Adachi himself in Cross Game, a singular presence speaking from the work of many like an MVP hoisting himself up to the podium. He says Osamu Tezuka is dead, and one day I’ll be the same. If my baseball players look alike, it’s only from being young to grow old. This art will outlive us all, and this architecture is bigger than me, but I know its ins and outs. He’s a pro, Adachi. He’s not doing this for his health.

The Most Popular Movie Column in the Entire World #4 – A Field Guide to Southern Sci-Fi Spectaculars

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Jog

Two hours away from my apartment is a merchant that sells Tamil & Telugu-language movies on dvd. Here are a few of them.

***

WHAT CAN WE GUESS THE FILM IS… JOG?

Yes?

WHY IS IT WE’RE ALWAYS TALKING ABOUT BOLLYWOOD MOVIES IN COMPARISON TO “SOUTH” FILM?

Well, you see–

I MEAN, WHAT THE FUCK DOES “SOUTH” EVEN MEAN? ISN’T MUMBAI, LIKE, GEOGRAPHICALLY SOUTH OF PARTS OF ANDHRA PRADESH? I CHECKED WIKIPEDIA.

True, yes, but Hyderabad, which is the center of Telugu-language–

AND ISN’T A WHITE AMERICAN’S CONTINUED FOCUS ON HINDI-LANGUAGE POPULAR CINEMA AS UNIQUELY (AND, GIVEN YOUR SNIDE “NEO-MASALA” LABEL, I DARESAY DELETERIOUSLY) ALTERED BY THE FINANCIAL SUCCESSES OF THE TAMIL AND TELUGU-LANGUAGE INDUSTRIES A DECONTEXTUALIZED AFFECTATION OF INDIAN-DOMESTIC ‘COSMOPOLITAN’ BIASES IN — AT BEST — THE CACK-HANDED SPIRIT OF CULTURAL TOURISM, IF NOT OVERTLY A COLONIALIST INCURSION INTO ZONES OF RESISTANCE TO GLOBALIZED SPECTACLE?

Oh no, you’ve been visiting that anarchist bookstore again. Did you steal my credit card?

YES.

Okay, listen: I agree with the words up above that happened to make sense, but –

What you see here is not the extent of the “South” industries’ popular vigor. “Neo-masala,” as I have dubbed it — which is to say, Hindi-language (Bollywood) films either remade from or heavily inspired by Tamil or Telugu-language (South) movies, in pursuit of an old-fashioned populist blend of multi-genred entertainment fronted by macho, swaggering superstar Heroes, albeit via a halfway self-aware narrative apparatus — is arguably on the wane. Or, such is the fear of Mumbai in this early May of a cashed-strapped 2013, which has seen precisely one Rs. 100 crore worldwide grosser (January’s Race 2, the latest contraption from action-suspense specialists Abbas & Mustan Burmawalla) and, more pertinently, the first bona fide fiasco of the neo-masala wave: Sajid Khan’s Himmatwala.

In retrospect, it was embarrassingly easy to root for this to happen. Khan is the brother of delightfully prickly A-list director/choreographer/actress/gadfly Farah Khan (mentioned last time), but generally lacks his sibling’s beguiling approach to oddball throwback cine-pop. Rather, he is a professional vulgarian in the Brett Ratner mold, so dismissive of the pretension inherent to ‘art’ in motion pictures that certain promotions for his latest refused to even refer to the product as a ‘movie.’ It was an “entertainer”: four syllables and two beckoning palms raised toward the critics and aesthetes who’d derided his prior trio of shrill, wildly derivative comedy blockbusters. And they were all blockbusters, successful to the point that Khan boasted Himmatwala would cross Rs. 100 crore in one week flat.

It did not make half of that in its entire theatrical run. Indeed, it just barely recouped its Rs. 40 crore production costs, which is shockingly bad for a high-profile film dropped without competition into a cherry Easter holiday weekend. Ironically, it’s not really *that* poor a film; a remake of a 1983 Hindi remake of a 1981 Telugu blockbuster, the project rather cleverly nods toward “South” influence as a cyclical thing, while swapping out some of the original’s mercy-for-the-poor thematics for a surprisingly hard-stated feminism, commenting explicitly on December’s notorious Delhi rape case, while couching issues of dowry and spousal abuse in a period context that underlines how such issues linger in contemporary India.

The problem, however, is that Khan is ultimately the sort of populist who, in denouncing the lie of ‘art,’ has neglected the value of craft; this is no longer a pure comedy, it is masala, and you do actually need a practitioner’s respect for basic cinematic values to put together engaging action scenes. So much of Himmatwala, though, is goofy and half-assed – almost defiant in its negligence toward the development of dramatic stakes on the macro and in-scene levels. No wonder the public shrugged.

***

SO, ARE YOU SAYING THE NEO-MASALA TREND IS FINISHED?

Oh god no, not as long as Salman Khan‘s around to kick the corpse. But even setting him aside, there’s signs that the trend may be developing a more trans-Indian outlook. Witness the latest from Bollywood director Apoorva Lakhia: Zanjeer/Thoofan, which has been shot once in Hindi (“Zanjeer”) and once in Telugu (“Thoofan”), with slight changes to the supporting cast in each. The Hindi title evokes one of Amitabh Bachchan’s most beloved ’70s vehicles, but the style is purely today’s:

In summary, that’s Telugu semi-star Ram Charan Teja as a hero cop who beats the shit out of the Oil Mafia when not lighting desks on fire and outrunning floods. He is joined by perpetually overcompensating Hindi glamorpuss/former Miss World Priyanka Chopra drawing an outline around her boobs, doubtlessly in formulation of an allegory for the tasks given to heroines in these types of films. Plus: Prakash Raj, rolling in like a total asshole with a SOUL PATCH and a WHITE FEDORA. When the fuck is Quentin Tarantino or Nicolas Winding Refn gonna discover this guy? Not that he needs western approval – he’s been in over 9,000 movies, cycling through the same three or four roles every time, and he’s *always* great. I’m also told the Hindi version will boast the presence of Sanjay Dutt — basically a living Frank Miller protagonist who happens to be a movie star — captured in the sweaty weeks prior to resuming a prison sentence for possession of illegal arms, so, all and all, I’d call this an “entertainer.”

***

WAIT, ARE TELUGU AUDIENCES ACTUALLY GOING TO WATCH THIS?

Eh, maybe not. Hybrid projects rarely see a lot of success; there’s some pretty sharp divisions in what audiences from different regions of India prefer to see.

I mean, what I call “neo-masala” movies in Bollywood parlance are basically just ‘really popular movies’ among Telugu audiences. And don’t think for a second that said audiences aren’t aware of the cabinets into which their films are willingly placed; sometimes, tongue-in-cheek viewer discretion warnings are issued for A-listers stepping outside their comfort zones:

Obviously there’s *some* variety among all the films that see release — just under 100 feature-length Telugu-language originals appeared in 2012 alone! — but the big-ticket items tend to hew to such a rigid action-comedy-romance-dancing formula you can watch them without subtitles and basically grasp what’s going on. It’s like attending opera. Just the other week my local Indian movie-friendly multiplex was among the 108 screens in the territorial United States to screen the spanking-new Baadshah, allegedly the most expensive Telugu production in history: Rs. 55 crore, or just over 10 million USD.

(I dunno how it got that expensive. Perhaps it was the on-location schedules in Milan and Bangkok. Or maybe it was star player N.T. Rama Rao Jr.’s lavish introductory title card, which sees his face reflected in glittering diamonds which are then fired, with some virility, out of a gleaming chrome pistol.)

Anyway, the movie was completely untranslated, and I didn’t care. You can set your watch by how routinely the songs and fights and laughs appear, with even the very mise-en-scène of director Srinu Vaitla shifting from Tony Scott by way of the CSI opening titles to a blazing front-lit ultra-color sitcom sheen to signal the switchover from one tonal track to another. I personally found myself looking forward to the musical bits, since NTR is a damn fine dancer, and — stereotypes aside — there aren’t actually very many of those in Indian pop film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgIj7V4v90w

The film is looking to be a gigantic hit, supposedly making a run at the U.S. box office top ten on its opening night, which is a first for a Telugu picture, and… hell, possibly a first for a movie that’s straight-up not in English.

***

OKAY, THAT’S ALL VERY NICE, BUT IS SOMETHING SO SEVERELY FORMULAIC REALLY THE BEST THE “SOUTH” INDUSTRIES HAVE TO OFFER?

Oh, no no no, disembodied all-caps narrative device. Clearly, some education is necessary as to my personal favorite species of South cinema: the Batshit Insane Sci-Fi Spectacular!

Anyone will tell you that huge-budgeted Hollywood fantasy/sci-fi releases make back a good deal of their costs these days in overseas markets. It’s natural, then, to expect that bustling international film industries would produce their own like-minded pictures in response. Bollywood, however, has proven remarkably ineffective in this particular area of film production.

The first 21st century attempt to tap into this market was actually a throwback: 2003’s Koi… Mil Gaya, which recalled nothing so much as the 1980s wave of international E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial rip–offs (though, to be fair, E.T. itself drew much alleged influence from a script by Indian master Satyajit Ray). The film was a big success, though, and spawned a fantastically cheesy 2006 sequel in Krrish, a full-blown superhero(!) movie crafted in seeming homage to Mort Weisinger-era Superman stories in which the titular dickhead plays sadistic games with Lois to preserve his secret identity. This was also a big hit, and a new entry in the series is now scheduled for later this year.

Still, successful as they were, for every Krrish there were money pit losers like Drona (a calamitous attempt at a Bruckheimeresque family SFX blockbuster) and Love Story 2050 (sort of like the android bits of Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 crossed with the teddy bear parts of A.I. Artificial Intelligence, if everything was unbelievably fucking stupid). And the king of the chasm — rhetorically speaking, at least — can only be Shah Rukh Khan’s 2011 gaming culture kids’ movie-cum-vanity project gone haywire Ra.One, a 3-D bonanza I saw on an especially packed opening night, due to every first-day afternoon show having been cancelled because the 3-D post-conversion hadn’t been finished in time. By the interval, people were shouting catcalls at the screen, and every would-be dramatic moment in the second half was met with scattered laughter and disbelieving whispers.

Ra.One is nonetheless among the highest-grossing films in Bollywood history. It had to be; the ad campaign was truly excellent. It is the quintessential Blockbuster that Nobody Liked, lacking the lasting kick of renown that marks a true popular classic – to say nothing of any prayer for cultural penetration outside of India. No, for that, we must turn our attentions southward, geographically South, to Tamil Nadu: the home of a true Superstar.

***

Enthiran
Directed by Shanmugam Shankar, 2010

I trust you’ve seen this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yBnl_krN_U

If viral recognition is the last surviving measure of success decoupled from the roaring engine of global capital, then Shivaji Rao Gaikwad, aka “Rajinikanth”… no, Superstar Rajinikanth, has brought down the thunder twice. BEHOLD:

That’s right. On the boombox: same guy.

I don’t know if it says something about Indian popular cinema’s embrace of artifice and theatricality (and the modular construction of the popular cinema itself) that the biggest worldwide video memes struck from the stuff tend to come from super-popular entertainers working their craft straightforwardly — “Benny Lava” (Prabhu Deva) is also a crazy-successful dancer, choreographer and filmmaker — but we’re definitely far enough along now online that the ‘internet popularity’ of certain Indian films can trickle into the more sealed corridors of media discussion. Enthiran, from which the crazy highway robot action two videos up was derived, for example, has been reviewed on miscellaneous pop culture sites like the AV Club, and has gradually wormed its way into the loose canon of non-English sci-fi movies you probably ought to see. For better or worse, it *is* Indian sci-fi to the outside world.

You can’t say they didn’t work for it. Weighing in with a production budget estimated at Rs. 132-150 crore (approx. 24-27.5 million USD), Enthiran is among the costliest of recent Indian films, and while official box office records are not kept for Tamil pictures, it’s generally agreed that its final grosses place it somewhere among the nation’s all-time highest earners, if not right at the top. And while all that expensive sheen doubtlessly carried its own appeal, it simply would not have have had the opportunity to exist if not for the leading man. Even more so than in Bollywood, stars matter to the South cinema, and Rajinikanth, a former itinerant laborer and bus driver, born into poverty, who clawed his way into the public eye over the course of four decades, best embodies a stouthearted set of traditional values – humble, good-humored and idealistic, he never forgets the suffering of the less fortunate.

Today he is old, bald and paunchy, and none of that matters, because the public adores him so much that any hurdle in the path of cinema illusion merely reinforces the humanity at the core of the Superstar.

Pragmatically, you could just stand Rajinikanth up and have him do his funny/brash/decent thing and build a series of mildly self-referential set pieces around him and call it a movie — that and a sprinkle of social commentary was basically the formula of director Shanmugam Shankar’s prior film, 2007’s Sivaji — but Enthiran actually does have some ambition to it. Written by Shankar with longtime collaborator Sujatha Rangarajan and lyricist-turned-dialogue-man Madhan Karky, the plot aspires to epic status, tracking the evolution of an artificial man, Chitti, from unthinking military instrument to lovesick emotional wreck to cackling weapon of mass destruction to tragic martyr, all due to the avarice of humankind. Rajinikanth plays both the robot and its creator, and while Chitti is obviously more of a show-off role, I rather preferred Rajini sir’s Dr. Vaseekaran, a somewhat morally ambiguous character who’s not entirely redeemed at the end – maybe not a *bold* character choice, but still a little out there given the reverence surrounding the Superstar.

Yet the further I get from Enthiran, the more I wonder how “out there” the writers went in composing their script. I mean – sensitive robot bred for combat? Humanity as warmongering villains? Wholesale property damage married to soggy woe-is-the-robot bathos? A narrative point of view perched somewhere amidst childish naivete, giggling self-awareness and broody philosophizing? Tone-smashing moments of slapstick humor? A weird fascination with insects, for god’s sake? Maybe my mind has been ruined by too many comic books, but it really does seem to me that Shankar & co. have drawn an awful lot of unofficial influence from another prominent force in Asian popular sci-fi: the mangaka Osamu Tezuka.

In fact, I would go so far as to declare Enthiran the single most faithful live-action depiction of Tezuka’s manga ever committed to film, despite the fact that none of Tezuka’s specific works are directly referenced. Asimov is explicitly cited, however, and the design of some of the musical interludes suggest Fritz Lang’s Metropolis by way of Daft Punk, so this could all be a rare case of different artists arriving at much the same result by way of shared inspirations. It’s beguiling nonetheless.

Still, Rajinikanth, I suspect — as with Tezuka! — carries a unique burden in embodying total popular appeal. If we are to read Enthiran as a political work, it is both sweepingly humane in the macro and socially conciliatory in the micro. It needn’t be. Sivaji, for all its routine silliness, did have one really unique and striking vignette: a spoof on India’s enthusiasm for skin lighteners, in which Rajinikanth attempts to impress a girl with multiple absurd schemes to erase his brownness, culminating in a song performed in the character of a parodic white man (with touches of, ulp, blackface):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvgI6pxzbSQ

Perhaps it was just too expensive for such jokes, but Enthiran reinforces the common wisdom at every turn. Go through the film slowly, and note the skin color of the random thugs Chitti is made to fight; the darker their skin, generally, the more obviously crude and violent they are. Heaven forbid anyone is caught wearing hip-hop gear – they might as well be clad in placards reading “MENACE.” That the songs of Enthiran are so American rap-influenced only places this strange tension into sharper relief.

And then, of course, there is poor Aishwarya Rai, another former Miss World and a Hindi movie superstar, roped into the heroine’s role presumably to guarantee the widest possible trans-Indian collections. I sound like a broken record discussing women in these movies, but Rai really is stuck with a flagrantly awful part; her love interest character is the sort of schoolgirl naif who’s clearly supposed to be a paragon of traditional virtue enrobed in a ‘naughty’ modern shell, but actually comes across as a genuine idiot, roping in an eager Chitti to help her cheat on her exams and tee-heeing herself into a hideous living caricature of every popular girl who ever friendzoned a wishy-washy Nice Guy, i.e. Chitti, the audience identification figure. She is also threatened with rape, twice, to bolster the masculine hero bona fides of each of Rajini sir’s roles individually. The more potent of the two scenarios pits the modern, cosmopolitan, intellectual Dr. Vaseekaran against a much-darker, traditionally-dressed local thug, brewing up a uniquely toxic mix of color, gender and class stereotypes served straight for public delectation.

To this, we are expected to nod and say “of course.” At a critical juncture in the film, Chitti rescues a woman from her bath in a burning building. In doing so, she is seen naked by the gathered crowd and news cameras. So great is her shame, she flees into traffic and is struck and killed by an oncoming vehicle. This is presented only as proof of Chitti’s tragic inability to grasp social nuance. No questions should be raised about the position of women in such a society. No questions about Aishwarya Rai – still playing a bubbly schoolgirl in her mid-thirties, yet very, very lucky to even be landing lead female roles at such an advanced age. She hasn’t made a film since she had a kid, and put on a bunch of weight. That is the end. Lose that shit, be Miss World, or wait until you’re old enough to play mummies and aunties. That. Is. The. End.

Of course. Of course!

***

Eega
Directed by S.S. Rajamouli, 2012

Don’t get me wrong, I *liked* Enthiran, but it’s the product of fundamentally conservative artists with one eye on the price tag; mass expectations can allow for crazy experiments in straightforward action — and storytelling deviations too, so long as they ultimately facilitate said action — but if you don’t want to piss people off you’ll still have your Superstar dancing and romancing as much as possible, without upsetting too many preconceptions. Rare is the filmmaker that can chase his bliss on his own terms, on such a scale, without the backing of a major celebrity.

Yet even in the formula-bound world of Telugu popular cinema, due just north of Tamil Nadu in supple Andhra Pradesh, there is just such an auteur: S.S. Rajamouli, director of nine feature films, every single one of which has been an enormous popular success. If money talks, it has said “trust this man” of Rajamouli, who in recent years has eschewed the star system entirely, preferring to focus his audience on the stories he tells. Remember when I mentioned above that movies like Enthiran need big stars to even exist? Rajamouli’s movies always have a star: S.S. Rajamouli. Never lacking for eager financiers, he can theoretically do anything. If he wanted, he could replace his leading man at the half-hour mark with a computer-animated insect.

And in 2012, that is exactly what he wanted.

You are correct, that is a fly dodging a bullet in Matrix-style slow motion.

Eega is startling; unforgettably so. Not because there is anything particularly outré about its storytelling — this is the kind of movie where singers on the soundtrack explicate characters’ inner emotions, so that absolutely no potential for confusion could possibly threaten the audience’s most immediate engagement with the film, a veritable zero-subtext zone — but because it is so willing to push its crowd-pleasing techniques so goddamned far over the top that, upon reflection, it emerges as less an ‘entertainer’ than a work of unbridled sadism and perversity. Starring a CG fly that dances at the end of the movie, just like in Shreck.

The first thirty minutes of the film follow the heartwarming journey of a bright, energetic young man as he ruthlessly stalks the girl of his dreams. This is *movie* stalking, though, so we’re meant to chuckle and sigh, wistfully, at his puppy-like hounding of pretty Samantha Ruth Prabhu, who, in the interest of fairness, has been alternately leading him on and rebuffing him for literally years. Nonetheless, she surely does not deserve the knotty sickness that inevitably comes from this dork showing up at her workplace and engaging in howlingly misogynistic banter with her friends:

HIM: You’d look better if you’d tie your hair up instead of letting it down.

HER: I prefer it loose.

HIM: I know you’re loose, so at least keep your hair tight!

Lol! Anyway, I lied about the knottiness, this is actually super-endearing and awesome, and useful too, since Prabhu is apt to use her would-be paramour’s omnipresence as a defensive shield against another shady dude who’s after her: a filthy-rich industrialist who’ll stop at nothing to fuck any women he fancies, and kill any man who opposes his desires. “LAVA LAVA LAVAAAA” the soundtrack purrs as he eyes Prabhu with lechery, the main differentiation between him and the virginal Hero being that the latter would presumably not act on the opportunity to sully his conquest with Filthy, Actual Sex.

Still, after just one romantic song it seems inevitable these kids will totally admit they like-like one another, until the boy is abruptly kidnapped and straight-up murdered by his zillionaire rival, the coup de grâce delivered via a bare foot slowly crushing the Hero’s windpipe. Proving that karma is always effective, however, the boy is immediately reincarnated in a nearby cluster of eggs as the soundtrack cheers “He’s back! He’s back! Life is back!”

Tethered to human memories by sheer force of devotion to his Sita, unmolested in the demon realm of Ravana, the fly sets out to do justice. Street justice.

The remaining hour and a half of Eega functions as an unofficial adaptation of the music video to Alice in Chains’ I Stay Away, with the fly doing his absolute damnedest to irritate the impulsive villain into fatally harming himself. The fly keeps him awake, tortuously, for hours on end. The fly bugs him during a shave so that his throat is cut. The fly causes the man such embarrassment that he blows a major business deal, and then the fly maneuvers him into losing all of his savings (which is to say he keeps all of his savings in a big iron safe, and the money is then lit on fire). Always, we are encouraged to cheer at each new humiliation. In the most bombastic of the film’s vignettes, the fly slides across the gelatinous surface of the man’s eyeball while he is driving, causing a fantastic highway wreck, and then the fly throws his tiny body against the dirt that has poured atop the villain’s ruined windshield, spelling out, in English, “I WILL KILL YOU.”

This is before Prabhu realizes that her non-boyfriend has been reincarnated as a fly. He spells out his identity in her fallen tears. “What should I do now?” she asks. The fly dips itself in paint and draws a straight red line on a photograph of the villain, right across his neck. “How do we kill him?” she asks.

Later, she builds the fly a tiny gas mask and wee iron claws, with which he can tear into the flesh of his adversary.

The lion’s share of credit for the non-animated success of Eega can only go to the surnameless “Sudeep,” a Karnatakan actor and filmmaker, virtually unknown to Telugu viewers, who plays the villain with a comic brio that keeps the film from registering as intolerably cruel on first impression – which, to director Rajamouli, we must remember, is the only impression that matters. Savoring every mouthful of scenery, Sudeep throws himself into madder and madder complications, at one point hiring a wizard to vanquish the fly with magic, though all the cut-rate sorcerer can manage is to bedazzle a pair of birds into a prolonged dogfight. For his troubles, the conjurer winds up gorily skewered by jagged piece of debris, while Sudeep begins to suffocate in a locked room rapidly filling with smoke, only to survive, grudgingly, to suffer again. Did I mention the computer-generated cartoon fly dances to songs at the end?

Ah, but I’m gilding the lily here. In his own way, Rajamouli is just as conservative as Shankar & Rajinikanth; instead of giving a shit about societal behaviors, he flatters his audience’s basest emotional reactions. Revenge narratives are popular all over the world, and India is no exception, with the Telugu industry particularly eager to justify images of Heroes smashing ten, fifteen, twenty men at once with the undeniable motivation of the grudge. Himmatwala had much the same plot, in fact, as did Bollywood films of the period dealing specifically with vengeful reincarnation (the groovy Karz, for instance). Rajamouli thus approaches sadism with a craftsman’s attention to detail: if the Hero is not reincarnated as a human, then how can he take revenge? How can he fight another man? Such destruction would need to be cumulative, slow. It is murder as maths.

And I should say, without hesitation, that it is proper bad-for-you fun, its set pieces well-mounted and its 134-minute run time ideal for novice sampling. It looks very nice. I was shocked to discover the picture was made for less than 5 million USD – it may not be Iron Man 3, but its blend of animation and live-action is really quite good, with any lingering cartooniness to the lead fly folded back into his anthropomorphized ‘acting.’ By its own terms, Eega is not supposed to seem entirely real or logical anyway; Rajamouli even frames his plot as a bedtime story told to a little boy, like in The Princess Bride, but with all the violence a Call of Duty kid demands in this new decade.

Obviously, the lad is too young to think about girls, or to consider the implications of a healthy young woman choosing to devote herself to a sexless relationship with an insect. Or is this Prabhu’s punishment for toying with that poor lovesick stooge? Is her karma instant? Does her film’s director identify with the hero, or the villain? Is there really much difference?

Is the jiva always desirous, in Rajamouli’s cosmos?

***

Dasavathaaram
Directed by K.S. Ravikumar, 2008

But let’s get back to Tamil Nadu. I don’t think I talk enough about those movies. Really, I don’t think I talk a lot about *most* South Asian movies — it’s not like you’d know anything about the Malayalam, Kannada, Bangla (Kolkata and Dhaka) or Punjabi film industries from this column, True Believer — but the sum total of Tamil cine-chat I’ve dished out so far consists of Rajinikanth riffs and the occasional cite to Oscar-anointed composer A.R. Rahman, and there really is quite a lot more going on than that.

Like, how could I possibly respect myself tomorrow morning without a single mention of Kamal Haasan? Oops, I mean:

That’s right, fuck you, Superstar, this is man for *all* people. Which, in South terms, means that this is purportedly a Hero for Mass and Class alike: an avowed atheist in a religious nation, a ‘method’-type actor among a congress of hams, and an egomaniac, I’d wager, disinterested in even the mild self-deprecation of a Rajinikanth baldness joke. That title card up there? It winks. Because? Of course.

Haasan’s film career dates back to the ’50s, when he was only a child, and extends to just four months ago, with Vishwaroopam, a controversial and hugely odd anti-terrorism thriller he directed and co-wrote to limited regional banning and enormous box office collections. If Rajinikanth is a Superstar, and S.S. Rajamouli a celebrity filmmaker, then Haasan is the rare personality to combine the two. He is eccentric, and whatever small visibility he enjoys in the West has been a product of eccentricity; it is said that Quentin Tarantino saw his 2001 vehicle Aalavandhan under its Hindi title of Abhay, and that one particular sequence — in which the action suddenly transforms from live-action into ’80s He-Man-caliber animation to depict a crazed murder — wound up inspiring a vastly longer and gorier stretch of the American filmmaker’s Kill Bill.

But Haasan too had a magnum opus in him, and he did not prove shy about drawing outside influence. Dasavathaaram was released in 2008, following nearly two years of production work. The director, K.S. Ravikumar, was a frequent collaborator of Haasan, though it was the leading man who devised the story and put the project into motion. Perhaps it could only have come from the pen of an actor, one madly confident enough to essay ten different roles.

Specifically: six Indian men, a Japanese guy, one Indian woman, and two American men, one of whom is United States President George W. Bush.

You can see already why this is my favorite of the Southern Sci-Fi Spectaculars detailed today, even though it is just barely ‘SF’ in the liberal sense. With a scenario prone in its first few reels to leaping across the centuries, and a leading man intent on violating racial and gender boundaries in the name of Universal Heroism, Dasavathaaram initially registers as a predecessor to Cloud Atlas as directed by Neveldine/Taylor on a Syfy original’s budget, introducing Haasan as a super-strong devotee of Vishnu who runs afoul of 12th century Hindu sectarian strife, delivering the film’s first song while elevated bloodily on hooks a la A Man Called Horse while his wife urges him to reject the specifics of his faith.

Both are subsequently reborn in the 21st century, with much irony: she is now devoutly religious, and he is an agnostic NRI scientist working on a secret American bacteriological weapons program, who suffers an acute crisis of conscience when a beloved lab monkey gets into the experimental goods and fatally erupts with the sort of garish CG effects that are just good enough to freak you out underneath your laughter. Knowing that the super-virus is too strong entrust to any governmental entity, Haasan makes a break for it, pursued by himself as the film’s primary antagonist and other main white guy: Christian Fletcher, an ex-CIA operative whom Haasan indulges with an amazing quasi-Jimmy Stewart ‘heartland’ accent, and who the makeup team may have decided to model after famous video game character Duke Nukem.

Before long, though, the film reveals itself as not so much influenced by David Mitchell as another popular art sector: the ‘everything-is-connected’ movie, stretching back to Robert Altman’s Short Cuts and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, but typified in the 21st century by Paul Haggis’ Crash and the oeuvre of Alejandro González Iñárritu, particularly 2006’s Babel, which seems to have influenced Haasan & Ravikumar in its depiction of international miscommunication. Dasavathaaram even throws in a storyline concerning a Japanese family, although instead of brooding and sexually frustrated, they are now masters of Aikido, and prone to throwing down with any motherfuckers unwise enough to get in their way.

So, it’s sort of the Carnosaur to Iñárritu’s Jurassic Park, except with Brad Pitt as the Mexican nanny and/or Sam Neill as two or three of the dinosaurs. I can’t say that Haasan’s nonstop makeup antics aren’t distracting, but such distractions are clearly supposed to be part of the entertainment, if only to surmise whether the investigatory Japanese dude is an intentional or unintentional homage to Charlie Chan —

Or whether the Old Lady makeup was specifically meant to recall the golden age of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop.

Irregardless, Haasan does have more on his mind than latex. Two of the three extravagant hours of Dasavathaaram are set in Tamil Nadu itself, where the hapless scientist meets up with centuries-gone beloved — Asin Thottumkal, at full-throttle endearment — and finds himself stranded amidst four of Haasan’s additional personae, each of them representing a different aspect of India’s conflict-prone diversity of religion: the Old Lady, a devout Hindu and the love interest’s grandmother(!!); a cancer-ridden Sikh music star; a gigantic, childlike fair-skinned Muslim; and a dark-skinned, rabble-rousing ‘untouchable’ Dalit Christian. A fifth resident national provides comedy relief in the form of a Clouseau-like police official parodying residents of Andhra Pradesh in a manner I absolutely fucking dare anyone not living in southeastern India to even attempt to comprehend.

No, this is not a globally-minded motion picture, despite its copious English and numerous jabs at American dirty work. More so than any of the films I’ve mentioned here, it is an Indian movie intent on addressing *Indian* concerns, through mechanisms seized from the popular foreign films that play in many Indian theaters. This brand of cultural adaptation is often stereotyped as a Japanese tendency, but globalization perhaps demands it everywhere, now, in the entertainment sphere. Thus, it’s metaphorically appropriate that the most straight-on impressive bit of movie magic director Rajamouli can conjure is a climactic three-man martial arts showdown in which every participant is played by Kamal Haasan, the most fantastical of his avatars finally left so coated with karo goo on his white putty face he seems less a person than a Ray Harryhausen monster, a Superpower’s boogeyman fit only for slaying.

None of this is to say that Dasavathaaram goes down silky smooth. There’s quite a lot of tedious semi-romantic business around the two-hour mark, and Haasan’s enthusiasm for playing multiple roles doesn’t always translate to plot utility – the Muslim characters mostly seem present to declare that all Muslims are not terrorists, and the Sikh singer’s storyline seems plopped in solely to facilitate a musical number, as well as the by-far battiest denouement of the film, in which a stray bullet shoots the cancer out of the guy’s throat. We’re all connected.

But then there is a scene following a budget-busting CG depiction of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, killer of 18,000 Indians, which Haasan — his balls too big for even ten roles to hold — suggests was Butterfly Effected into existence by India’s ancient religious strife, providing a faux-scientific sort of rain of frogs (or a rightly Altmanesque earthquake) to temporarily obliterate the distinctions between faiths. The Old Woman, played by Haasan, embraces the dead Christian, played by Haasan, screaming at her community to stow their bigotry and leave her with the man she has come, in her senility and her sincerity, to consider her son.

It’s a grandiose, cheesy flourish, uninhibitedly sentimental and self-absorbed, but also, for a moment, earned. As Americans settle in for a long summer of mega-monied sci-fi extravaganzas, the least of them more costly than all three of these films combined, each eying as much in the way of worldwide return as possible, it is good to know that aesthetic prudence need not mark each iteration of the genre, fabulous as it nonetheless can remain.

The Most Popular Movie Column in the Entire World #3 – Scenes from the Life of an Accidental Progressive

Posted on March 15, 2013 by Jog

Six miles away from my office is a theater that plays Bollywood movies simultaneously with their Indian release. This is one of them.

***

Special 26
Directed by Neeraj Pandey, 2013

***

*SPOILERS THROUGHOUT*

***

WHAT CAN WE GUESS THE FILM IS ABOUT FROM THE UNSUBTITLED TRAILER?

One initially expects the picture is about a revolution in chroma key backdrops overtaking India’s newsreaders, but this is quickly proven superficial. Some variation on “TRUE INCIDENTS” awaits, dear children, with the authoritative voice of Akshay Kumar barking “raid dalni” while clacking fonts assure us that shit will imminently get at least as real as Zero Dark Thirty. At least. Look at Anupam Kher slap that guy. I swear to god, I walk out of every Bollywood movie wanting to slap as many people as conceivably possible; no other world cinema tradition has so *totally sold* the virile crack of flesh on cheek. Mmm! Anyway, it looks like the Central Bureau of Investigation is raiding the hell out of major dudes, except REAL IS FAKE and vice versa, leading to at least one broadly satirical(?) speech on the value of patriotism delivered by a top-ish Hindi movie star in a crisp professional shirt. Action! And a little dancing!

***

WHAT IS THE HISTORY BEHIND THIS PICTURE?

Once upon a time, there was a boy from Punjab who grew up in the markets of Chandni Chowk and went to school in Delhi and Bombay, and then, apropos of apparently nothing beyond personal desire, relocated in his late teens to Bangkok to study martial arts, at which time he supported himself as a waiter and a chef. Upon returning to India as a martial arts instructor, he unexpectedly broke into modeling, and then, by chance, the cinema. “I’ve been linked with every heroine I’ve acted with,” he would later say, but this was only fitting: a gadabout reputation for a Bollywood outsider, a strapping naïf who would take what he wanted, when he wanted it, and saunter away whistling to the next big thing.

Most Bollywood heroes have legends, and this is the legend of Akshay Kumar, born Rajiv Hari Om Bhatia, active since 1991, and limited only — so the stereotype went — by his own whimsical ambitions. He would score lead roles, sometimes, and big hits, sometimes, but in the ’90s he was mainly associated with the B-grade arena of action pictures just a little ways past the vogue for those. He even had his own signature series of films: Khiladi, or “Player,” which did not hew strictly to action or suspense over the course of its eight feature-length installments, but that was where it always returned. Where Kumar, who did a little of everything, always returned. He was a ‘classic’ Bollywood workhorse, at one point appearing in a dozen feature films in one year, which by that time was very much not the behavior of a ‘major’ star.

Still, there are occasional benefits to prolificacy. In 2007, sixteen years into his career — having spent much of the decade oscillating between dubious action and romantic comedy with dips into outright drama — Kumar unexpectedly saw each and every one of his four releases hit hard, with three of them grossing over Rs 100 crore.

Suddenly, he could no longer be ignored as a periphery leading man, and gradually — be it through artistic desire or a sense that he could branch out into different areas of potential income — his risks became higher-profile.

In 2008, Kumar and his wife founded Hari Om Entertainment, a production company. Their first project, Singh is Kinng, betrayed a global outlook, with footage mostly shot in Australia, a plot remade from an ’80s Jackie Chan vehicle, and a closing credits cameo appearance by American rapper Snoop Dog. It was a financial success. The next year, Kumar seemed to double down with Chandni Chowk to China, an ambitious India/U.S. co-production with an autobiographical slant to its script. You’ve probably not heard of it, despite Warner Brothers ensuring distribution in North America; like all Bollywood/Hollywood team-ups, it seemed fated as marginalia on both sides of the globe. Interestingly, despite the seemingly personal nature of the project, Kumar managed to keep Hari Om out of the mess, though his brand nonetheless suffered; by the end of 2009 he had also co-starred in Blue, the most expensive film in Bollywood history (as of then), which also under-performed.

This prompted a particular type of conversation about Kumar, one which continues to this day: is he really a movie star? He *is* to some degree, of course — he’s the lead actor in an awful lot of movies — but his reliability as a ‘draw’ is more comparable to a Matt Damon or a George Clooney (the reduced ‘stars’ of high-concept, branding-mad America) than the Hero is Everything ethos still in strong effect in Hindi pop cinema.

The temptation, then, is to hypothesize Kumar as the potential herald of a less star-focused Bollywood, though a connoisseur might simply dub him a minor presence in the constellations. My own first encounter with his work came similarly troubled, through 2010’s wretched Action Replayy, an utterly risible fusion of Back to the Future and The Taming of the Shrew that nonetheless startled me by how completely fucking serious Kumar seemed to be taking the Crispin Glover role of a nerdy, put-upon dad, waves of shame and resentment all but jumping from his face for the first two reels of the picture. “What the hell is this guy doing?” I thought. “He’s not a terrific actor or anything, but he’s taking this dumb shit so… seriously.”

By the end of that year, my feelings had evolved in a typically perverse manner. Ask anyone — anyone — what they made of Kumar’s Christmas 2010 co-production, the notorious Tees Maar Khan, and they will instantly claim a career low for its leading man, and potentially the whole of 21st century Hindi film. It was moronic, it was insulting, it was ugly, and, worst of all, it was quite lucrative, due to intense hype, incessant advertising and a massively front-loaded opening weekend, nimbly avoiding the word of mouth that would eventually win the film a 2.5 rating on the IMDB, one of the lowest from Bollywood-acclimated users.

I rather like Tees Maar Khan. It’s the bitterest movie in the entire world, and damn fascinating as a moment capture. Directed by Farah Khan — an acclaimed dance choreographer, media personality and probably the only woman in India who could realistically call herself a superstar filmmaker — and written & edited by her husband, industry gadfly Shirish Kunder, the film is uniquely positioned as a peek into a private world of politics, resentments, and general beefs.

Adapted from Vittorio De Sica’s 1966 Peter Sellers outing After the Fox, the plot finds Kumar as a legendary con man, who, cognizant of the bottomless hunger Indian cinema types have for Western approval, poses as M. Night Shyamalan’s lighter-skinned brother and hooks up with a pretentious film hero driven Oscar-crazy in the wake of Slumdog Millionaire. An absolutely vicious parody of megastar social crusader and ‘quality’ Bollywood icon Aamir Khan (with more than a dollop of Shah Rukh Khan plopped on top), the delusional actor is more than willing to participate in BIG-TIME HOLLYWOOD PROJECT — amusingly pitched as a paean to Indian suffering, i.e. the only way to get Americans to acknowledge anybody outside of the first world — which is actually just an excuse for ‘director’ Kumar to rob a train right under the noses of ignorant, starry-eyed village folk.

The true objective, of course, is to broadcast Khan’s & Kunder’s unflagging sneer at everything in show business that irritates them, including but not limited to Hollywood influence, cultural tourism, bucolic ‘patriotism’ and the current crop of heroines — poor Katrina Kaif seems to have been cast as the female lead specifically so Khan can make fun of her; despite being a romantic interest, Kumar never shows her the slightest affection outside of the obligatory song sequences, which is a bit of parody all its own — not to mention critics, audiences, and indeed, the very notion of cinema ‘art.’ To Khan, through her onscreen avatar, film direction is revealed as a con game, useful primarily for facilitating a properly modern Indian lifestyle — rightly separated from the laughable grotesquery of dirt-eating village life but proudly self-reliant and anti-American in its urbanity — with the happy accident of people sometimes finding themselves entertained in the process of being used, the stupid fuckers.

Taken in this way, Tees Maar Khan is a genuinely radical (if gigantically obnoxious) work of thematics, totally unafraid of seeming shrill or hysterical or any of the other gendered insults you can throw at a woman behind the camera. Employing an ultra-high camp mise-en-scène recalling late ’90s Old Navy commercials, its soundtrack prone to screeching “TEEES MAAR KHAAAN” at every instance of on-camera mugging, the film all but dares you to hate it, to get up and walk away from its brazen irritations; such provocation is a very rare thing in eager-to-please Bollywood, especially coming from as otherwise easygoing and cosmopolitan a guy as Akshay Kumar, who must have felt weird as hell seeing the results. He nonetheless teamed with Khan & Kunder again for a 2012 directorial project by the latter, an eccentric children’s film titled Joker that proved so unpleasant a process Kumar abandoned promotions for his own co-production and left it to die a dog’s death in theaters.

Yet given the latitude of perspective, it’s easy to see why Kumar would click with the surface attributes of such filmmaking. His style of delivery hews toward the very broad and loud, to the point where anything resembling a subdued performance inspires a Jim Carrey-like overcompensating toast to fresh-blazed subtleties. He is also that special kind of macho male whose classical masculinity is so little in doubt he’s become fond and unafraid of strutting around in pink and incorporating effeminate, almost coquettish overtures into his presentation.

You can see why a Farah Khan would find him camp as fuck, though Kumar’s tiny resistance to heteronormative standards may betray a deeper sympathy; while Tees Maar Khan adopted the I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry approach of cracking gay jokes as a means of normalizing homosexual relationships, one of the songs in Kumar’s 2011 Canada-set co-production Thank You matter-of-factly depicts one man slinging his arm over another, flowers in hand, while the star producer gazes on in approval. Similarly, the skin color jokes of Tees Maar Khan are refracted in Kumar’s 2012 neo-masala romp Khiladi 786, which posits Kumar’s hero cop and a brown(er)-face doppelganger brother as scions of a wildly mixed-race family, the earthy harmony of which is stereotypically but earnestly emphasized.

Perhaps most startlingly, Kumar has recently set up a second production house, Grazing Goat Pictures, for the purposes of exploring ‘quality’ films. Its virgin feature effort was 2012’s OMG – Oh My God!, an adaptation of a popular stage play Kumar credited with inspiring a profound change in his religious practice. A riff of sorts on the 1977 George Burns starrer Oh, God!, the film maintains the pose of a light comedy, but also directly tackles the industry of diverse religion in India in an unusually thorough manner. More than anything else, it’s been the critical and popular success of this film that has threatened to completely revise Kumar’s reputation – suddenly, he is “mass” and “class” alike, and uniquely equipped to push Hindi pop movies into less-comfortable places. Or so is the wish.

***

WHAT HAPPENS BEFORE THE INTERVAL?

Immediately, we are confronted with a most patriotic illusion, as a serious young woman delivers a speech detailing the idealistic motive behind her applying for a job with India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (“CBI”). Visible on the margins are her interviewers — Akshay Kumar and veteran character actor Anupam Kher — who, if you have done any research whatsoever prior to seeing the film, are evidently not real CBI officers, though they maintain classically straight faces throughout the process. Soon, we are seeing footage of an authentic 1980s Republic Day parade; this is both to establish the time period of the film, as well as writer/director Neeraj Pandey’s satiric theme. Unique from India’s Independence Day (which celebrates liberation from British rule), Republic Day commemorates the adoption of India’s first Constitution, thus placing its focus on the stability of a federal apparatus that still employs the CBI as its primary criminal investigation body.

Naturally, it’s all bullshit. Particularly since the 1970s — a great era of social entertainments pitting angry young men like Amitabh Bachchan up against an uncaring society toxic with corrupt administration, self-serving capitalism and ruined idealism — ‘adult’-oriented Bollywood films have been massively skeptical of the efficacy of business and law enforcement powers; rare is the public works official not hungry for kickbacks, or the titan of industry not sleeping on black money, or the policeman not toadying for regional dictators. If there’s elections that aren’t rigged, I haven’t seen ’em. Even the brazenly reactionary neo-masala wave, escapist as it is, typically frames its swaggering, mustached hero cops as aberrations: forces that defy the will of the majority and the laughable ruse that is the ‘rule of law’ to bring immediate, popular justice to the displaced and needy.

Pandey is working loosely from a true story in Special 26 — a 1987 incident in which fake CBI officers robbed a Bombay jeweler under the auspices of an official raid — but his deployment of a ‘period’ setting also (inexactly) evokes an older era of Hindi film for its gloss of righteous criticism. Indeed, for the first fifteen or so minutes of his film, Pandey strings the less studied viewer along by presenting Kumar & Kher and their gang of loveable cronies as *actual* CBI officers, prepping for and carrying out a tax raid on a local politician. Basically — in movie terms! — that means CBI officials get to burst in on somebody’s home or place of business on suspicion of tax evasion, literally tearing apart the walls searching for money the suspect has inevitably stashed in huge clumps somewhere on their property. “You will be cursed!” shouts a woman as the men move a religious icon from its place of rest, complacent as everything else in a shit society.

It’s all quite exciting; Pandey hails from the world of television commercials and documentary film, having only made his theatrical feature debut in 2008 with A Wednesday!, a Hollywood-sleek hour-and-forty-minute tour of a day in the life of a police commissioner (Kher again) who must negotiate a mysterious terrorist threat. Special 26 is his sophomore feature, likewise effective at caffinating legal procedure – witness Akshay Kumar, clad in a crisp, Rick Santorum-worthy sweater vest ensemble, wriggling his ‘stache while knocking on walls, cracking the dirty politician’s private property like it’s a bank safe! And what a slap Anupam Kher delivers when the suspect hazards a bribe!

Perhaps the seasoned viewer can’t possibly believe such upstanding civil servants could really exist; when Kher delivers a snappy catch phrase to a goggle-eyed young policeman about the importance of Heart, it’s a self-evidently filmi moment, dreamed up on the fly by a man who has doubtlessly crafted his con man persona from long hours in the theater, all the better to fool higher-paying rubes. Perhaps this charade of idealism is merely Pandey’s shaggy dog way of setting up a joke, the punchline arriving when Akshay Kumar — handsome here like a old American matinee idol — tears off his facial hair as the team makes its getaway.

But Special 26 is also cognizant of audience expectations on a less confrontational level. At two hours and twenty-three minutes, this is a far longer film than A Wednesday!, and Pandey spends much of the first half detailing the circumstances that have led Kumar & Kher into their situation. The latter is not a stern authority figure at all, but a comical neurotic — such an ability to convincingly switch between ‘funny’ and ‘serious’ personae has made Kher one of the very few Bollywood lifers to occasionally pop up in English-language films, such as David O. Russell’s The Silver Linings Playbook — who needs a lot of extra money to support his gigantic family, while Kumar is just a roguish romantic who hopes to earn enough scratch to spirit his girlfriend away from her unhappily looming arranged marriage.

As we eventually discover, Kumar was once a CBI prospect who was rejected for service due to his lack of skill with English (a neutral, ‘universal’ language); as a result, his obsessive knowledge of federal procedure empowers him to throw India’s would-be national outlook back in its rotten, corrupt face… anyone prominent can be targeted for a fake raid, after all, because everyone is corrupt. If director Pandey notices that such all-devouring cynicism is just as much a movie device as goody platitudes, he doesn’t let on, perhaps embracing this cooler brand of artifice in the same manner a masala director might crank out the fights and dances.

There are dances in here, though. Ha ha.

You’ll notice I didn’t identify the girlfriend just above. Sadly, that’s because actress Kajal Aggarwal (mostly of Telugu and Tamil ‘south’ film) is saddled with one of the most thankless, do-nothing roles in recent memory, stranded amidst a romantic subplot that eats up an extraordinary amount of screen time without accomplishing anything beyond the most banal platitudes. Obviously, such problems are not unique to Bollywood. Were this a Hollywood film, I’d theorize that some studio executive had delivered a note reading “MAKE AKSHAY SYMPATHETIC, XOXO” but it seems likely here that the romance takes up so much space to facilitate adequate song tie-in monies for somebody’s corporate partner somewhere. I don’t mind when a Hindi action movie breaks into song and dance — you just buy into that possibility coming in — but the music of Special 23, set to ‘missing you‘ montages and the like, works at direct cross-purposes with the suspenseful, relentless, immersive pace Pandey obviously seeks to build. A ‘traditional’ Bollywood movie is so often a work of vignettes – a modular evening of courses. This is like eating a piece of a steak, and then waiting a while for the second piece to be brought out, and then the next, and the next.

But then, that is the balance when you seek to go big. Akshay Kumar may be a modest progressive, but knowing that he *can* pull off such things carries with it the burden of popular expectations that facilitate that very freedom, particularly when he’s not in control of the production. The public expects a sympathetic, heroic figure, and Special 26 is altogether eager to play up Kumar’s movie star reputation as much as his offbeat tendencies. The result is really a hybrid film, but not something that benefits from hybridization: so eager to provide a slick, straightforward work of suspense and critique, Pandey winds up seeming less sure with the songs or the romance than any of the ’70s and ’80s social picture forebears he plays at emulating. Like Kumar, he is man slightly astride his transitional age.

***

WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE INTERVAL?

The second half of the film primarily concerns the climatic jewelry heist, as well as a cat-and-mouse game played between Kumar/Kher and and actual CBI investigator played by the always-excellent Manoj Bajpai, whom nobody will call a traditional movie star, though he embodies a more intense tradition than Akshay Kumar.

A television actor who made his film debut in 1994 via future (and temporary) Oscar semi-darling Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen, Bajpai rose to prominence in 1998’s Satya, one of the landmark works of contemporary alternative Hindi pop cinema – not exactly the ‘parallel cinema’ of art film, but a distinctly vérité, rough-hewed, criminally-focused brand of urban fiction. The director of the film was Ram Gopal Varma, a prickly, erratic, sometimes rather goofy figure deserving of more attention than I can afford right now, though it’s sufficient for these purposes to note that he’s often sought new and potentially unpleasant ways to produce ostensibly popular films, including recent forays into (unwatchable) microbudget filming and (slightly underrated) consumer-grade digital photography, recently given way to large-format tragic docudrama.

Even more pertinent, though, is the co-writer of Satya, one Anurag Kashyap – more than anyone else, Kashyap embodies the present counter-mainstream in Bollywood, perhaps because his films often strike an explicitly critical stance against the Hindi film norm. His 2007 feature directorial debut, Black Friday, despite its stance as (another) tragic docudrama, was both a sensitive investigation of the heroic/villainous police dichotomy and an avowed cinematographic influence on Slumdog Millionare, while his 2009 Dev.D mined intriguing veins of misogyny and self-abuse from the beloved, oft-filmed Bengali novel Devdas.

Bajpai reunited with Kashyap for his most recent directorial pursuit, 2012’s weird, beguiling, tiring, indulgent, and undeniably 5 1/2 hour-long Gangs of Wasseypur. Eventually split into two films for ease of release, the project was a shoot-for-the-moon attempt at a century-spanning, multi-generational crime saga comparable to The Godfather and its sequels; while the results frankly suggest less of a novelistic immersion than a filmmaker simply unwilling to edit much of anything, Gangs of Wasseypur nonetheless boasts a commanding, impulsive performance by Bajpai (and an equally good Nawazuddin Siddiqui), and an all-time high for the agony of influence active in Kashyap’s cinema, climaxing in an agonizingly long, unbroken shot of a wounded man crawling through a house in flight from assassins, the soundtrack humming his very favorite cheesy Bollywood romance song to give him strength, to fortify his misguided character, to affirm his misspent life.

Where Kashyap is agonized, Pandey is content. He establishes Bajpai a bit prior to the interval, in an extended chase scene that serves mainly to give him something ‘active’ to do in a screenplay that might otherwise leave the audience unstimulated for a millisecond. Egged on by the aforementioned goggle-eyed (now seemingly humiliated) young policeman from the prior raid, Bajpai muscles his way into the jewelry plot, which centers around Kumar & Kher recruiting a cadre of underemployed dumbass civilians to serve as an unwitting backing army in the raid. They are not quite the “Special 26” of the title, however, as Kumar & Kher are (of course!) playing a long con, and (of course!) the goggle-eyed cop was a deep-cover plant, in on the scheme the whole while, and (of course!) our anti-heroes have prepared for every eventually, ultimately using the real CBI as an inadvertent decoy while the real raid goes down with triumphant slow motion punctuation at a different locale.

Yet where does this leave us? One might assume that Pandey is making a point about capitalism — there’s a classically cheesy humanizing moment near the end where Kumar mails Bajpai back some money he snatched from him earlier, ’cause he don’t steal shit from honest working men — but the only real success his heroes enjoy is their entry into a more relaxed social strata. Indeed, they mostly take advantage of their fellow proles in the process, without a lot of regret, if never exactly to their material detriment. Maybe Kumar hasn’t wandered so far from Tees Maar Khan after all. Maybe this is all nothing more than a writer/director applying all sorts of domestic mainstream gloss to his foreign mainstream influences, and happily cashing in – Special 26 is already the second-highest grosser of 2013, standing at about Rs. 65 crore, having done enormously well for an ‘small’ film.

Still, there is a weird ambiguity at the end of the picture, as the frustrated Bajpai suddenly receives a new lead on the whereabouts of the thieves, just before the end credits. Did censorship concerns prompt a crime (sorta) doesn’t pay (maybe) denouement? Or did Pandey mean to suggest that, having become rich in place where rich equals corrupt, his heroes will inevitably become corrupt as well, and require toppling? Endless conflicts like that can power endless, profitable, probably banal fictions, though the success of this one again inspires hope for another small line of credit extended to Akshay Kumar, another possibility for another small step for this Bollywood outsider, wormed goodly inward and now slowly navigating his way out.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Author Archives: Jog