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

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

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Special 26
Directed by Neeraj Pandey, 2013

SpecialPoster_zps329b7617

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*SPOILERS THROUGHOUT*

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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!

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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.

AkshayWelcome

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.

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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.”

AkshayTees

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.

AkshayOMG

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.

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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.

SpecialSpeech

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.

SpecialKher

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.

SpecialDance

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.

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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.

SpecialManoj

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.

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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.

A Few Words Of Intent Concerning A Different Website Entirely, But Also This One, And, Perhaps, All Of Them In The Current Situation

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The following expulsion relates to a Twitter conversation into which I rudely inserted myself earlier this week, concerning the mission of certain websites in publishing writing on comics, and the character of certain tendencies in comics criticism. I was then offered one million dollars to expand on those tweets here. I’ll be checking the usual address for payment, Noah!

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Years ago, when I was younger, I started a blog about comics because I wanted to be part of a conversation, and I found the message boards to be slanted toward rock star frequent posters, all of whom should have been me. It takes some measure of self-regard to presume that anybody would want to read your words on a topic in the absence of solicitation, and I found it rightly cheering and worthwhile to control my little island of dictation and catch the occasional seagull-bound dispatch from neighboring personal nation-states. At that time, you could identify most of the writers-on-comics-online from a generous sidebar listing, and — if you were oversensitive, which is to say you were blogging — you felt the need to respond to basically everything of probable interest that was ever said, or occasionally just implied.

Gradually, the scene became large enough that it was less a consortium of islands than a small city, and in a city you lack the psychological compulsion to acknowledge every dress outlet and cheese shop simply because they are there. I became no less self-interested, but the primacy of conversation became subsumed into the fascinations of communication: argumentative craft, writerly noodling. Of course, I had to be careful in some ways, as I was aware that I had a small audience, and also that the parity of linkage afforded by the meme-prone internet kept a momentary larger audience perpetually on the horizon. I became aware, silently, of how much I could write before I’d safely assume I was boring people. Today, I think I was too generous in that estimation, but I am not the same person, and neither are you.

Always I knew I would be my editor. That I would self-censor for the good of the communication. I had editors at The Comics Journal too, which I expected, of course, from a print publication. With apologies, I confess that the editors I encountered through online group sites were thought of as gatekeepers, yes — as homeowners and hosts, as sounding boards and error-catchers — but not as forces behind the craftwork of identity online. I would be me, on any site that would have me.

Eventually, though, there came a time when individual blogging faced the same perils of noise as message boards. This was inevitable, given the volume of free, equidistant writing online – given the choice of two types of apples, the consumer will exercise some informed judgment, but given the choice of two hundred they will stick to what they know. The illusion of permanence and the glamor of size became crucial. I don’t know anybody who reads Ain’t it Cool News anymore, but by god it’s still around.

This was the age of aggregation, and I went willingly. A certain publication I’d contributed to twice invited me to write for their online edition. In the future, some would place Comics Comics toward the front of a small movement to construct counter-histories of comics evolution; whether the chicken of this departed forum preceded or followed the egg of Dan Nadel’s Art Out of Time and other publications is a matter for future and no doubt highly exciting controversies. At the time, I did become aware of a reputation existing for the “Comics Comics gang,” which I never felt encompassed the attitudes of everyone on the site, but fuck it – I’d always appreciated history, and history’s manufacture, and comics’ tendency to forget all but the most victorious of popular winners. It was once said that the readership comic books departed every five years to make way for new, young readers devoid of expectations; that’s not true of comics, but it seems right for histories thereof.

But Manny Farber convinced me, in my arrogance, that I ought to be a termite, and burrow my way into the neglected crevices of the culture. That wasn’t what Farber meant by his essay, admittedly, but I was too busy reading comic books. Lots and lots of comic books, more than I could ever possibly write about, particularly after I graduated school and found a day job and stopped posting seven days a week, as I had done for years. I loved many of the ‘established’ classics. I still dearly love Chris Ware. But even in the diminished state of comics criticism — the truest and most damning thing about which I’d ever heard was from the critic Ng Suat Tong, who told me that prose books, as periphery as they are to the popular culture, could always count on several and varied reviews of the bigger releases, while comics cannot — certain vaunted works do attract a goodly amount of continuous reaction, while too many others join the congress of orphans shivering in dank and yellowed longboxes in Donnie’s Dojo and Sports Collectables, thirteen miles from the state line.

When I could not find things about a comic online, the compulsion rose. What I could not read, I would want to write. I would abandon 6,000 words on Building Stories without much regret, seeing the writing that was out, but a stray back issue of Métal Hurlant would have me rising at 2:00 on a work morning to delineate the gaps in the common understanding of what that magazine represented.

Alas, I understood then that I am as much a character as an author.

The aggregation of voices online inevitably subsumes the individual into the common understanding of the forum’s inclination. This was made plain as scalding water when Comics Comics fused itself onto The Comics Journal and became its online edition. Many Journal writers were retained, as was the Journal‘s name and reputation, and Comics Comics verily ceased as a going concern, both ‘physically’ and rhetorically. The editors were thrust into dialogue with the expectations of the one comics magazine that would span the whole of the history of the comic book direct market.

Personally, I formulated a whoppingly pretentious concept for the new releases checklist column I’d carry over from Comics Comics: half would be a reflection on something I’d read very recently, while the other half would make brisk assumptions about things imminently due. THIS WEEK IN COMICS!, in both the retrospective (THIS past WEEK) and prospective (THIS coming WEEK). Additionally, it would allow me to retain a certain seat-of-the-pants, blog-like character I’d come to prefer in composing frequent writing.

But there was a difference. This was not a blog.

And I found myself grateful to be able to exercise such stylistic discretion without the burden of editorship.

It is said, occasionally, that the criticism dedicated to new, young, experimental comics is meager; I don’t disagree. Nor do I disagree that some critics seek the obliteration of the prior canon, and the ripping down of the old heroes. Sometimes I rip a few scraps myself, but my mission, oh god, is individual engagement with works. I realize, though, that I’m on the internet, and that I cannot be exactly an individual anymore; we are all part of sites, of movement, of Ideas. To post on the Hooded Utilitarian is, in part, to be seen through the prism of things Noah Berlatsky wrote in the mid-’00s, often about Art Spiegelman. To write about Heavy Metal is to participate, in part, in a devaluation of the prominence of accepted ‘good’ works, because they are just that less prominent. If Heavy Metal is seen as a misogynistic enterprise, you are part of that misogyny. If the Hooded Utilitarian is seen as a negative force in comics criticism, you are a party to negativity.

This too is history’s manufacture.

Yet if I don’t write about these things… who the fuck will, he screamed, sweating at a mirror, fists clenched, the hero, trying to watch his own back. The function of a critic, he knows, can be to establish or demolish canon, or to theorize on the form, synthesizing the thinking of past experts, applying rigor and distinction as to worth, as to societal narrative, as to moral concern. He thinks, sometimes, that he needs a critic to explain to him exactly what the fuck he is doing, but still –

I am disinterested in formulating mortal [k]ombat between comics canons. That I tend to write about dodgy French gloss porn is not a deliberate statement on the superiority of (say) Heavy Metal to (say) RAW. Rather, it is a (knowing) effort to explore areas of interest to me that otherwise will receive little sustained attention. If I want to say that a work or a tradition is garbage, I will say exactly that, by name, individually. The resultant state of any online venues ‘advocating’ one tradition over another by dint of published writing is an editorial concern. I am not an editor. I’m grateful for editors! It is a bias of my own to focus on works of little demonstrated critical value. Perhaps I’m a narcissist. Nonetheless, I am convinced of the value of this pursuit.

I used to be a libertarian, but then I got old.

[BARTENDER CARDS ME GETTING A BEER]

Fin.
 

JimboHorse

The dead horse from the final page of
Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise,
the greatest work published under the auspices of RAW.

 
 

The Most Popular Movie Column in the Entire World #2 – Every Man For Himself and God Against All

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

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Jab Tak Hai Jaan
Directed by Yash Chopra, 2012

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

Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan (or, “SRK”) plays an incomparably stubbled member of the Indian Armed Forces whose motorcycle trip is interrupted by thoughts of girls. His is an artist’s soul, revealed through fleeting images of guitar-wielding promenades in foreign environments and vigorous dancing before hooting crowds of Anglo-Saxons, as well as a poetical voice-over narration. Alas, it is all a wistful flashback, as memories of — non-exclusively — (1) girls smiling, (2) girls leaning in a winsome manner, (3) girls twirling in the snow and (4) girls otherwise gesticulating prettily are interrupted by a barrage of b&w color-corrected images accompanied by an ambulance’s siren: bad news. Clearly we are in for a film of love, loss and potentially decorative wartime. His thirst for aesthetics duly slaked, SRK then concludes his journey to the Exploding Desert.

***

WHAT IS THE HISTORY BEHIND THIS PICTURE?

It would be a mistake to call Yash Chopra — founder of Yash Raj Films — an exclusive romantic, although that would probably be the impression his corporate body would prefer you have. It has been good business in Bollywood to set love stories down as the foundation of your art, yet the young Chopra, born in Lahore prior to the partition, began his filmmaking career with the social dramas Dhool Ka Phool (1959) and Dharmputra (1961), films that built him a reputation for dealing earnestly with issues of Muslim/Hindu conflict fostered by the establishment of India and Pakistan along religious lines. Later, in the ’70s, Chopra became one of the architects of the ‘angry young man’ persona for megastar actor Amitabh Bachchan; by this point the director had already become famous for the hot-blooded boy-girl melodrama (and Yash Raj foundational picture) Daag: A Poem of Love (1973), but ask a connoisseur and they’re more likely to cite Big B raging against god and society in Deewar (1975) as a decade’s highlight over anything more outwardly lovey.

But then, it is very possible to bask in the heated emotions of these films, this aesthetic of gut feeling, of human connection trumping religious or national or caste division on the basis of what seems, intuitively, to be the ‘right’ way to behave, and declare Yash Chopra a Romantic in the macro sense, irregardless of the presence of any picturesque Swiss lake presiding over the action of a tender little song.

Still, there’s no denying that the rough ‘n ready ’80s were tough on Chopra, or that his revival as a film director of popular relevance came by way of Chandni (1989), an exceedingly backlit vehicle for the always-great Sridevi Kapoor that ensured Chopra-as-director would never venture far from romance-as-genre ever again; perhaps his biggest departure since would be Darr (1993), and only then because nominal hero Sunny Deol is all but blown off the screen by the picture’s obsessive villain, played by a 28-year old Shah Rukh Khan in one of his most indelible early roles.

Darr, in fact, represented both a beginning and an end for Chopra and Yash Raj – two years later, Chopra’s son, Aditya, would pair with SRK for the enormously lucrative Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (see our last episode for more). Neither man would ever direct a film without Khan again, and Yash Raj — which, until the 21st century, in movie production terms, had served mainly (if not exclusively) as a vehicle for the Chopras to release their own directorial ventures — would build its own shooting studio and enter a period of promoting new, young directors through in-house productions, albeit with A. Chopra often providing story synopses in what I tend to imagine is a rather Stan Lee manner.

Yash Chopra died on October 21, 2012, having completed shooting on all but one song sequence for his newest directorial outing, Jab Tak Hai Jaan. It had already been rumored that Aditya Chopra — officially the producer and writer (with screenplay aid by Devika Bhagat) — had directed portions of the film in his father’s name, but the younger man declined to shoot any posthumous scenes. Perhaps he was distracted by the contemporaneous and unwelcome characterization of Yash Raj as a Marvel-like evil empire; the company had secured agreements from theaters requiring their exhibition of Jab Tak Hai Jaan for a certain period as a prerequisite for receiving an earlier, much-anticipated Salman Khan vehicle, Ek Tha Tiger, and Ajay Devgn, a producer and actor, had subsequently filed a claim with the Competition Commission of India against Yash Raj, alleging “abuse of dominant position,” insofar as his own production, Son of Sardaar — the latest among multitudinous neo-masala remakes of Telugu-language pictures — could not manage adequate bookings as a result.

The claim was dismissed, but Yash Raj couldn’t entirely shake its verdict from the court of public opinion, whereby not a few observers deemed Jab Tak Hai Jaan and its eventual Rs 100+ crore domestic gross the beneficiary of protectionism and cunning. Worse yet, Devgn’s film company is supervised by the former Kajol Mukherjee, Devgn’s wife and SRK’s co-star from A. Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, giving the whole affair a smack of familial betrayal. Nonetheless, it also became a notable hit overseas, standing as only the third-ever Bollywood film to land inside the U.S. Top 10 grossers for the week of its release. Clearly some romantic perceptions endure at a remove.

***

WHAT HAPPENS BEFORE THE INTERVAL?

Shah Rukh Khan! Grimly stubbled! Martially attired! He rides through a blazing desert, reciting poetry by A. Chopra! Violins arranged by ACADEMY AWARD(TM) WINNER A. R. Rahman leap on the soundtrack, while the middle-aged gentleman in the row ahead of me bobs his head! Then: a beautiful woman strips out of her workout gear to a teeny-tiny swimsuit! Yash Chopra: still randy at 80! She leaps into a mighty stream but oh – she cannot handle the water! Grimly, SRK deigns to save her life, then zooms away stoically on his manly motorcycle! But he left his fucking diary! Perhaps the secrets of his grim and manly stoicism are hidden somewhere… somewhere… in the past!

Jab Tak Hai Jaan is best described as pleasantly unspecific bullshit, or — more tactfully — a high-end entertainment. It’s basically an ‘epic’ romance, spanning the course of a decade and coyly implicating the occasional social issue; the intent, perhaps, is to prove more aesthetically nutritious than something like Son of Sardaar, though it’s basically still an unreal, sensuous fantasy steeped in an awful lot of Bollywood tradition. Indeed, the London setting of the flashback that takes up almost the entirety of the film’s first half — a 2002 that makes no effort to approximate period fashions or even attempt to hide the occasional Coke Zero advert — seems poised specifically to evoke memories of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, with SRK playing a similarly cocky goof of a twentysomething, on the prowl for honest, true love.

It must be said now that Shah Rukh Khan is 47 years old, and looks it. I will further suggest that his age doesn’t matter; part of the artifice of mainstream Bollywood films is that dependable male stars, heroes all, can presume to be as young as they please. Those corners of the audience prone to hemming and hawing will do just that, but in the end the public will buy it.

For women, the heroines, it’s very different.

I’m not about to make a bunch of ridiculous claims for mainstream Bollywood as a uniquely awful place for women — not in an American situation where as longstanding a directorial presence as Kathryn Bigelow hears prominent voices idly speculating that her success is attributable to her looks — but for an industry so interested in appealing to female ticket buyers, it’s a bit startling to see how lean the roles for women have become in Hindi pop film. The neo-masala wave has had an aggravating effect, with its emphasis on macho protagonists smashing their way to victory, but even romance-as-genre tends to slot women away for pining and pouting.

Into this scene comes the female lead of Jab Tak Hai Jaan, Katrina Kaif: the quintessential modern heroine.

Kaif is probably terrific with anecdotes. She was born in Hong Kong in 1984, and spent over a decade and a half shuttling with her English mother and numerous siblings to seemingly half the nations on earth — France! Japan! Poland! Belgium! — eventually settling into a modeling career in London. There, she was spotted by filmmaker Kaizad Gustad, and cast in a film titled Boom (2003), an experience that prompted the teenaged aspirant to relocate to Mumbai, despite knowing hardly any Hindi. Likely, she knew the language barrier wouldn’t prove goal-stopping – there is a long tradition in Bollywood of forgoing sync sound, after all, and virtually every performer ‘sings’ with an alternate voice anyway. What Katrina Kaif could offer, uniquely, was that touch of exotica useful in the ranks of models-turned-actresses, a mighty corps in the Mumbai ’00s. Filmmakers were perfectly willing to have her lines dubbed over by some native performer.

A funny thing happened, though – Kaif, having eventually paid her dues, developed a knack for appearing in blockbuster movies. Not starring, no – but appearing, in the way heroines today are generally made to ‘appear’ rather than ‘star.’ The only mainstream Bollywood actress under the age of 40 that I can even think of who regularly ‘stars’ in movies is Vidya Balan, with everyone else relegated to one-offs or ensembles, or the myriad pair-offs of boy-girl romantic comedies. Or appearances beside popular heroes in vehicles built around them.

Of the ten highest grossing Bollywood films of 2012, Katrina Kaif has been present for three (including #1, the aforementioned Ek Tha Tiger); aside from a cameo in a children’s animation thingy, that accounts for her entire year’s output. One of those appearances was even an item number: a gratuitous song sequence cameo by a performer otherwise uninvolved with the film, manufactured strictly for added value of some sort, be it star wattage or sex appeal. Some have claimed this sort of thing ought to be Kaif’s natural habitat; others say she’s not even very good at that.

Nose around the internet — or hell, read YouTube comments — and you’ll hear that Katrina Kaif cannot act. That she’s nothing but eye candy. That she’s stale eye candy – Kaif is 28 years old now, which places her perilously close to the Logan’s Run limit of a heroine’s viability as sufficiently fresh visual stimulus. Every so often you’ll get a Madhuri Dixit or an Aishwarya Rai Bachchan who remains viable in mainstream supporting roles into their 30s, but they are rare.

As such, in the spirit of contrarian joie de vivre for which this website has become enthusiastically footnoted, I will now suggest a new paradigm for the evaluation of Katrina Kaif performances: “Does Katrina Show Up?” Which is to say, she always appears, but – does she show up?

You see, my extensive Bollywood research has led me to conclude that the much-maligned Kaif is actually a pretty charismatic performer, but at the same time she’s realized that the nothing roles available to her require little to no particular effort on her part; indeed, Kaif herself has stated that she didn’t feel particularly free or confident to contribute actively to a film until 2009, over half a decade into her professional career. Other times, she really needs only be there to be photographed, and so that, I theorize, is all she does. Ek Tha Tiger is the perfect example of a Katrina Kaif role in which she seems entirely disengaged from the movie surrounding her, because – as logical observation dictates, what the fuck will she have to do in a goddamned Salman Khan movie anyway? But compare that with the 2011 Yash Raj romantic comedy production Mere Brother Ki Dulhan, where her role affords her ample opportunity to point guns and play drunk and engage in many forms of wholesome rebellion, and suddenly – she clicks.

Kaif’s role in Jab Tak Hai Jaan seems engineered to flatter all of her strengths. She is SRK’s London-based love interest (autobiography!), initially connecting with him to brush up on the Punjabi singing (language barriers!) that will surely please the rigid father who’s set her up to marry some monied dude she doesn’t particularly love (tropes!). She’s also a withdrawn, internal woman and a devout Catholic, prone to cutting little quid pro quo deals with Jesus to get (or perhaps justify) what she wants; this is the most important aspect of Kaif’s character, as it allows rakish SRK — at one point taking her on a role-play date in which he goes by the same name as his character from Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, in case you didn’t get it — to release her inner wild child, which is fortunate, as what Katrina Kaif is best at doing is playing at a lack of inhibitions.

In this way, Jab Tak Hai Jaan becomes a metaphor for Kaif’s career as an actress; it’s the most apropos role she’s ever had. “Does Katrina Show Up?” YES.

There are other small rebellions in the first half of the film. After kneeling down with SRK to pray she won’t do anything untoward with him (Catholic girls!), Kaif takes him along to meet her estranged mother — ’70s star Neetu Singh, demonstrating that nostalgia cameos are an additional avenue of exposure after a comfortable hiatus — who readily admits that leaving her husband improved her life, as it allowed her to marry for love. Before long, the song Saans is playing, boasting Rahman’s most intense violins of the show and an impressive bait ‘n switch on visual expectations – where prior Yash Chopra films would present “dance sex” to approximate the lovemaking of the ecstatic couple, near-miss kisses and all, Jab Tak Hai Jaan has the dancing segue into an actual sex scene, thereafter blooming outward into a Bollywood tribute to public displays of affection. Enjoy this PG promotional abridgement:

This is a huge departure for SRK, who’d vowed to never so much as kiss a woman onscreen again after performing a sex scene in a 1992 art movie, Maya Memsaab, reportage on which had alleged the married actor had actually ‘done the deed’ with co-star Deepa Sahi. In the most colorful variant on ensuing events, Khan then threatened to sodomize and castrate one of the offending magazine’s reporters in front of his (the journalist’s) parents – SRK was subsequently arrested, and then used his phone call to further threaten the luckless hack, who it turned out hadn’t even authored the offending dispatch.

The sex in Jab Tak Hai Jaan, in contrast, has prompted little real-life upheaval, though perhaps the eventual upheaval among the film’s characters boast some real-life anchor. So delightful is the erotic frenzy of the film’s Khan and Kaif, that the latter neglects to actually call things off with her arranged marriage, and verily suffers an acute religio-emotional episode when SRK gets whacked by an oncoming vehicle. Another deal is struck with Sir Jesus: her lover’s life, in exchange for her agreement never to sin with the man again. Khan is irate at this turn of events, and vows in church — before God and London, his non-belief notwithstanding — that his vengeance on the Almighty will be total, that he will place himself into such a dangerous, awful line of work that his inevitable death will destroy Katrina Kaif’s relationship with Christianity.

And then, metaphorically, we see the older Khan, ten years later, striding through the Exploding Desert without a care, because Jesus Christ has made him invincible.

Critical to the Shah Rukh Khan creation myth is an incident of 1990, where the young Khan, a Sunni Muslim, rebuffed by Gauri Chibba, the Hindu girl he’d been seeing, pursued his lover from Delhi to Bombay, searching up and down for seven days and seven nights, and on the eighth day he found her, and he married her the next year, Gauri Khan, whom he would zealously defend from the slights and innuendos of entertainment journalism and leering theology as they raised children, two children, of two religions.

***

WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE INTERVAL?

Oh, right! Remember the girl who found the diary?

YashAnu

Anushka Sharma can perhaps be called a mirror held up to Katrina Kaif. She too began as a model, albeit in India, and made her film debut by the intercession of an interested director. That director, however, was Aditya Chopra, who cast Sharma opposite SRK in Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi, a 2008 feature and (at the moment) A. Chopra’s most recent solo directorial work. And of the five films in which Sharma has subsequently appeared, four have been Yash Raj productions; like in old-time Hollywood, she was signed to a multi-picture studio deal upon discovery, and some — having seen the moody-cute role given her in Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi — wondered if she had much of a future outside the studio.

For me, Anushka Sharma does not begin in that film. She begins in her third Yash Raj movie, Band Baaja Baaraat (2010), in which she debuts a survival instinct 180 degrees away from that which I’ve attributed to Katrina Kaif – while Kaif seems to sleepwalk through roles she knows don’t have a lot to interest her, Sharma guns it into overdrive, 101%, every single time.

For the purposes of illustration, behold an abridgement of Jiya Re, Sharma’s showcase number in Jab Tak Hai Jaan, seeing her charm the living shit out of SRK, the Indian Armed Forces and gaggles of children and horses, even if it kills them all:

I genuinely have no idea if Sharma is a ‘good’ actress, but I won’t tolerate a single negative word. Did you count how many times she fucking winked? Four times in two minutes: levels unseen Stateside since the close of the Jazz Era.

There is good utility to all this – every millisecond of an Anushka Sharma performance serves primarily to draw your undivided attention to Anushka Sharma, to the exclusion of virtually everything else. This is a way to stand out, to convert a romantic pairing into a star vehicle, which is exactly what Sharma did in Band Baaja Baaraat and Ladies vs Ricky Bahl (2011), both opposite nondescript leading hunk Ranveer Singh (which, admittedly, is probably like interacting with a particularly advanced special effect). Moreover, it’s a style of acting perfectly applicable to Indian pop cinema – and maybe no other cinema in the world, save for that of Guy Maddin, but Sharma no doubt knows exactly where she’s at.

Shah Rukh Khan, however, is not one to be out-hammed.

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Sharma eventually tracks down SRK — who is working with a bomb disposal unit in Ladakh — in hopes of jump-starting her media career with a megahit Discovery Channel documentary (on right after Amish Mafia, one hopes). No information is ever given as to the origins of the IEDs Khan is defusing; we’re basically made to accept the presence of such threats as challenges dropped from Heaven. Or perhaps we can presume that A. Chopra has seen The Hurt Locker, just as he presumably read Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair (or saw a movie version) for the whole bargaining-with-God-for-a-lover’s-life thing; surely he meant for the title “Jab Tak Hai Jaan” to evoke Haa Jab Tak Hai Jaan, a song from Sholay, the Jaws of ’70s Bollywood – he’s a packrat and a perpetual student, this younger Chopra, often guilty of exactly the sort of hybridization for hybridization’s sake everyone kept laying at the feet of Quentin Tarantino in the ’90s.

Tarantino, though, is more of an intellectual writer, to the point where his films adopt an essayistic quality; A. Chopra prefers the broad, sensual flourishes of the filmi world in which he was raised, where a romantic comedy variation on The Hurt Locker can see invincible SRK hanging below a bridge, with no protection, de-wiring a bomb while Anushka Sharma projects flirtations somewhere into western Baltistan. Workin’ it like Clara Bow has its brute force effect, and soon rough ‘n nasty post-Jesus SRK is manfully preparing to head back to London for fact-checking on footage shot by Sharma, who functions metaphorically as a genre superfan of sorts – a girl with a tendency to quote old movies in regular conversation (if the folks in my audience finishing her dialogue for her are any indication).

Really, what Sharma wants to know is if this old, crazy love story she read in the diary, this ersatz Yash Chopra movie of the first half, this self-referential thing – she wants to know if any of it’s real. The Chopras are kind to her; she’s forward, spunky, and sexually active, and never punished for any of her behavior, even when her shojo manga heroine-like clumsiness causes a building to explode. But still, she longs to know if movies are true, if people fall in love like that, if she could fall in love like that. It’s a writer’s justification for his craft – maybe his father’s work too.

And then SRK shows up at the Discovery Channel’s London bureau and is immediately hit by another goddamned car, revealing the true message of Jab Tak Hai Jaan: England has the worst drivers on the entire bloody planet.

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Stripped of his Jesus powers, a bedridden SRK develops an awesome case of movie amnesia, believing he’s in fact woken up from the first time he got mowed down UK-style. Obviously, Sharma must then track down Katrina Kaif — who, in the interests of not having to deal with anything else in a 175-minute motion picture, has not managed to marry herself off to anyone — in the hopes of easing Khan back into the world. And then, as medical science inevitably demands, Kaif pretends that her and SRK have been married the whole time and are living in a fine home, leading to several great moments of interior decoration porn, and probably the best joke of the whole movie, wherein Kaif meets Khan at the front door with a Hindu greeting, and he grins widely at her now apparently less-exclusive take on organized religion.

Although, now that I think of it, we never do hear of Khan’s personal beliefs (if any) in the film. The real joke might be that she guessed the wrong faith. Catholics!

At this point, the Chopras cruelly tease that Sharma might go full-on Bad Maria and become the antagonist of the picture, but against most generic expectations she winds up acting in a basically logical and sensitive manner, admitting that she really loved the gruff SRK who’d passed through a (conveniently distant) flame, thus excusing herself from the climax, and — if Wikipedia is any indication — the entirety of mainline Hindi film, as her list of forthcoming projects looks like a who’s who of ‘mainstream-alternative’ auteurs.

This allows the camera to dwell fully on Kaif, who, in advancing ten years down the timeline, is finally given the opportunity to play a character close to her actual age. Maybe the last chance she’ll have in a while, still on the treadmill.

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But it’d be unfair to label this a purely surface-appeal picture notable mainly for the circumstances of its female leads’ careers and the magpie antics of its head writer. As he did back in Dhool Ka Phool, in Dharmputra — back when the partition was still a recent memory to some — Yash Chopra seeks to dramatize the emotional toll of religious separation.

SRK regains his memory, of course; in the midst of a bomb threat on a local train, the London police — just a shade more competent than London drivers — allow Our Hero to play with the wiring of the explosive device upon the recitation of lots of exciting bomb facts (this is also how I became a movie critic). Now aware of the whole situation, Khan confronts Kaif in church — in front of the tabernacle! — and declares that she ultimately loves him more than she loves Jesus. Then he returns to Ladakh, because, like Jeremy Renner, he just can’t get enough.

The message is simple, and obvious: excessive religiosity (or any sort of grand, declaratory societal apparatus) leads only to repression and unhappiness, while human connections are of paramount importance. This is the enduring message of the late Chopra, the Hindu Punjab born in the current Pakistan, his favorite leading man a Muslim with a father from Peshawar and a mother from Hyderabad, married to a Hindu woman. Anushka Sharma delivers a speech for her documentary debut. Shah Rukh Khan is defusing the final bomb of his career. Katrina Kaif appears, having pursued him all the way up to the disputed territories. Suddenly – there’s a second bomb! SRK leaps into action!

Sharma declares that SRK’s defusing his last bomb. “It’s his last not because he’s suddenly scared of dying. It’s his last because it’s his time to live.”

The wire is cut. He rises to his feet and asks Kaif to marry him.

“It’s just a simple story of love,” Sharma remarks, and the picture fades into a behind the scenes montage of the late director Yash Chopra, who couldn’t stand to go out on anything less than affirmation.

The Most Popular Movie Column in the Entire World #1 – Nobody Likes Bollywood

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

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Student of the Year
Directed by Karan Johar, 2012

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

[]

Through the intercession of those occasional bursts of English common to Hindi-language films, the monoglot can discern that St. Teresa’s High School is India’s premiere academic institution. Thus grounded, the ensuing barrage of flailing bodies and flashing lights reveals two suspiciously adult-looking male students who are clearly in love, though the rigors of the recently-opened Student of the Year Competition (also in English) will cruelly rip them apart. Obviously this is all a metaphor for the sociopathy engendered by globalized capitalism in an emerging market, thereby revealing Karan Johar as a stealth Marxist – perhaps the stealthiest in history, judging from all those brand names. Also, there’s a girl and a burning tree.

***

WHAT IS THE HISTORY BEHIND THIS PICTURE?

In the beginning, i.e 1989, there was an auteur by the name of Sooraj R. Barjatya who, at the age of 24, with the might of a production company established by his grandfather behind him, directed a film titled Maine Pyar Kiya. Tracking the rich boy/poor girl romance of its protagonists through multiple societal and familial tribulations, the film was hardly the first of its kind — a similarly goopy (if more mechanical) hit titled Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak had debuted just one year prior — but it nonetheless struck a chord with a public tired of the generic excess that marked the Bollywood of the ’80s. Barjatya was young, and driven by a religious-minded zeal for wholesome entertainment steeped in traditional family values; his art was stylized and idealized, but intently focused on interpersonal dynamics.

He returned in 1994 with his magnum opus, Hum Aapke Hain Koun..!, a 200-minute, 14-song gargantuan sprawl of earthy romantic devotion that sparked a veritable revolution in Indian theatergoing – buffeted by the advent of home video, the movie house found unexpected salvation as a public venue for family togetherness. Box office receipts were fucking ridiculous.

Among the scores of industry personnel whose lids were flipped was Aditya Chopra, scion of Yash Raj Films, a production company that had left an indelible mark on Bollywood through the pastel romances of founder Yash Chopra. Emboldened by Barjatya’s success, the young Chopra, also aged 24, released his directorial debut in 1995: Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, a savory bowl of cosmopolitan mush so popular that one particular Mumbai theater continued to run daily showings well into the 21st century. Yet while Barjatya’s films remained devoutly focused on Indian concerns, Chopra’s twist was to incorporate the non-resident Indian (“NRI”) experience into the action, positioning the Yash Raj brand as a global platform for homemade entertainment, aimed at monied Indian nostalgists and curious fellow travelers worldwide.

Most critical to our narrative, however, is DDLJ’s neophyte co-writer, assistant director, bit part actor and associate costume designer: Karan Johar, a Chopra friend and yet another heir to a movie studio, Yash Johar’s Dharma Productions. Johar had also became close with the film’s lead performer, Shahrukh Khan (“SRK”), a Delhi-based theater and television actor who rocketed to Mumbai movie mega-stardom over the course of the early ‘90s. Leapfrogging off of Chopra’s success, Johar teamed with SRK for his own directorial debut in 1998, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, which dressed the NRI-minded focus of Chopra’s film in every designer label its comparatively wizened 26-year old director could yank free from the London racks. It was a supreme work of dissolvable ultra-kitsch, foregrounding the artifice of its love story so severely it bordered on auto-critique, though it did command some real drama too: that of Karan Johar, who in his youth turned up his nose at the tackiness of Bollywood, and — to strike an ill-fitting protestant note — was born again on the set of DDLJ. Through a conglomeration of costume, he would isolate the ridiculousness of what he was doing, and then love it anyway.

Yet if Kuch Kuch Hota Hai was flagrantly trendy, it was also unwaveringly conservative; for SRK to truly understand his love for tomboy heroine Kajol Mukherjee — herself returning from the earlier Chopra film — she must renounce her taste in sherbert-hued overalls and dress like a proper goddamned lady. In this way, the audience is soothed – assured that the global tastes of the young will not trammel the value of tradition. Such is the key to mass appeal.

Popular as they were, these films were not always well-received by aesthetes, or devotees of more action-oriented fighting/dancing/joking/romancing Bollywood masala. “Candyfloss” became the slur of choice for Johar’s cinema, connoting banality for those who wished for a more sophisticated Bollywood, and effeminacy for those content with a more strapping brand of fantasy. Having been teased over his effete mannerisms since childhood, the latter criticisms appear to have washed off Johar, though he did seem to respond to the former, as his later films tackled notions of familial estrangement (Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham…, 2001) and sexual infidelity (Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna, 2006), if always in a distinctly soapy idiom. This evolution reached its peak with the 2010 release of My Name Is Khan, a glossy tragicomedy of well-to-do Muslim angst in post-9/11 America; by this time SRK was co-producing via his own company, Red Chillies Entertainment, always with an eye toward expanding his global brand. The film wound up making most of its money outside a domestic Indian market which treated it coolly.

Indeed, if you study the Indian box office of today’s Bollywood, we have rather come back to the old days of macho masala, with hulking superstars like Salman Khan — ironically, also the male lead in those Sooraj R. Barjatya pictures from years ago — winking and flexing their way through remakes of formula product out of the Telugu-language industry down south. Johar knows this, as one of his most successful recent productions was a 2012 remake of Agneepath, originally a 1990 potboiler his father took a bath on in the wake of the very wave of ‘family’ cinema that would revive Dharma Productions.

In this way, Student of the Year, so flashy and simplistic, can be seen as both a throwback to the glory days of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, as well as its director’s throwing down of the gauntlet at the feet of the neo-masala wave – a new spin of candyfloss for a history that seems determined to repeat itself.

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WHAT HAPPENS BEFORE THE INTERVAL?

WAIT, WAIT – WHAT’S AN INTERVAL?

Good question! An “interval” is what is typically called an “intermission” in the North American parlance. Most Indian popular films have an interval, at which time the movie stops and snack vendors roam the aisles like at a sporting event (or, if you happen to be watching these things digitally beamed into a North American megaplex, you immediately visit Twitter). Ideally, some sort of thrilling cliffhanger or punchy bit of dialogue will occur just before the interval, so as to maintain the audience’s energy – in the South industry (i.e. Telugu, Tamil-language productions) this is called the Interval Bang. Critics therefore cannot resist gauging the efficacy of the film both pre- and post-interval.

Mind you, this description is premised on the operating procedures of your classic Indian single-screen theater, of which there are more than 10,000 nationwide. There are also a smaller number of multiplexes, which may or may not function in the same manner. Nor will all single-screen theaters play the same releases – an additional stereotype brands the local single-screen as a haven for “mass” films, i.e. movies that appeal to the general working public. The urban multiplex, in contrast, allegedly supports “class” films, which seek to appeal to a more superficially sophisticated, young, wealthy-ish clientele.

To combine “mass” and “class” is to know the highest success in Hindi pop cinema, and Karan Johar — himself a nearly perfect-bred “class” viewer — has done just that at times, although the comparatively weak domestic returns on My Name Is Khan have been attributed to a remote subject matter with little applicability to the immediate desires of the filmgoing public.

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OKAY, THANKS. SO, WHAT HAPPENS BEFORE THE INTERVAL?

Why, several immediate desires are duly met.

I should probably mention at this point that Bollywood — which, by the popular Western understanding, encompasses basically the whole of Indian cinema, though I will only use it to designate products of the Hindi-language industry based in the former Bombay — is probably the least reputable of the major world cinemas among English-reliant cinephiles. Talk to a film buff in my neck of the internet, and nine out of ten will instantly dismiss the stuff as garbage, fluff and nonsense, commercial imbecilities farted to life by career hacks who wouldn’t last a minute in the big show of Real Movies. Frequently, reactions become emotional. Bollywood is ’embarrassing.’ Just look at those clowns hopping around – why can’t you watch South Korean crime movies? Hell, even a Korean television drama would be preferable; this shit’s as cringe-worthy as anime, and at least anime has decent violence sometimes.

I’ve watched anime since I was 14, so I’d heard it all before. I’d heard the newer complaints about manga too: that it’s comics for little girls, or gay men. Some of that connotation seeps into the omnibus complaints about Bollywood. That’s not to say there isn’t a lot of crap in Hindi film — or that it doesn’t have devotees who swear everything was better in the ’70s — but I do suspect the sheer enormity of the scene, Japanese comics and Indian movies alike, supports a tendency to speak broadly and intimidates even open-minded commentators from delving deeper.

It is true, however, that contemporary Bollywood films have a way of idealizing the male body to an extent that’s unique to world cinema. But then, the notion of masala, a term borrowed from blends of spices used in cooking, after all, demands that something for everyone be included. Songs in crime dramas! Slapstick in tragedies! Dudes leaping twenty feet into the air in social satire! Unlike Japanese comics, which arrived at its women-friendly reputation by sharply dividing itself into semi-discreet zones of demographic appeal, Indian popular cinema of the Hindi/Tamil/Telugu variety often just tries to be as audience-inclusive as possible in any given situation, which results in both a novel ‘exotic’ surface (songs in crime dramas) as well as the occasional crossing of cultural taboos, i.e. thou-shalt-not-linger-on-a-guy’s-abs-in-a-movie-that’s-not-specifically-for-girls.

Thus, Student of the Year introduces one of its male leads with a shimmering close-up of his glistening six-pack as he strums a guitar. This is Varun Dhawan, one of the film’s three debutante stars; SRK’s Red Chillies may still be co-producing, but now Johar is focused on breaking new talent. All of them are first presented to us by revealing close-ups of body parts; heroine Alia Bhatt‘s teeny feet totter in a tall pair of designer shoes, rich yet vulnerable, while the other male lead, Sidharth Malhotra, is first seen from behind, his broad back stretching out a fine leather jacket. Importantly, he is the only one of the stars not affiliated with one of Bollywood’s dynastic film families; Dhawan and Bhatt are both children of prolific directors. He’s a rebel, you see.

Moreover, in-story, Malhotra is attending St. Teresa’s on scholarship, while the other two — characterized immediately as the sort of longtime couple that can’t recall what they like in each other anymore — are simply rich as fuck. Both Dhawan and Malhotra served as assistant directors on My Name Is Khan, so it’s not difficult to imagine story writer Johar — assisted by screenwriter Rensil D’Silva and dialogue writer Niranjan Iyengar — concocting his scenario from the ‘school’ of filmmaking that is a set full of young people, one of them maybe connected, another maybe not. There’s even a ‘director’ of sorts presiding over St. Teresa’s scrum: Rishi Kapoor, old-time star of the massive ’73 inter-class teen romance landmark Bobby, playing a tremendously camp dean of students prone to stroking hidden magazine covers of perennial Bollywood hunk John Abraham and sexually harassing a handsome Coach, who himself is the catalyst for Malhotra & Dhawan to stop hating each other and fall in loBECOME GOOD FRIENDS.

All of this is depicted in long flashbacks as various supporting characters mill about in a hospital where the Dean lays dying, alone and unloved – regretful of the relationships he smashed for his fondness of conflict! This mild criticism of competitive education is ripped straight out of the highest grossing film in Bollywood history, 2009’s 3 Idiots — an ‘inspirational comedy’ most notable for a scene where the film’s cast of engineering students revives a dead baby by chanting the movie’s catchphrase — and can easily be disregarded. The meat is in the evolving relationship of the male leads, and, to a *much* lesser extent, their relationship with poor Bhatt, who seems doomed on a conceptual level – the main guys are proper Bollywood hunks in their mid-’20s, while Bhatt is a young 19. In other words, she actually looks like a high school girl, which doesn’t at all fit Johar’s artifice, glamming her up to an absurd degree so that she seems frequently ill at ease in front of the camera.

Another issue: Dhawan is the only one of the three that can actually dance. Normally this isn’t too much a problem, as you can ‘fake’ Bollywood dancing through clever editing — and, obviously, nobody is really singing, there’s professionals for that (and albums to release with those professionals’ bankable names — but if one member of the main cast actually is better at dancing than everyone else, he or she inevitably begins to hog the song sequences. Distracting as this is, though, it still sort of fits the plot, since Dhawan’s rich boy character, alas, only wishes his Cruel Businessman Father would respect his love for music, though the wicked man secretly prefers foe-turned-friend Malhotra, who’s got an eye for finance. EVEN WORSE, Bhatt and Malhotra start to pretend they *like-like* each other as a scheme to get Dhawan to pay more attention to the comprehensively neglected lass, but OMG, then Malhotra starts to really fall in love with her!!!!

All of this climaxes in (the controversial) Radha, a supremely goofy wedding dance and probably the peppiest of music duo Vishal–Shekhar’s compositions for a soundtrack so overstuffed there’s sub-songs that bridge longer songs together.

Still, watch that video above, and see how Johar (and one or more of the film’s four choreographers) communicates the entire drama between Dhawan (in gold), Malhotra & Bhatt, even on mute, largely through motion and exaggerated, silent cinema-worthy body language. Johar then depicts the ceremony itself — the lead cast are guests — as a wordless flourish of images accompanied by a tinkling piano score, until an agonized Malhotra joins hands with Bhatt, only for her to slowly pull herself away, and then – the orchestra swells.

***

WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE INTERVAL?

Shit gets real.

Seriously though, much of the second half of the film is concerned with the Student of the Year Competition, divided into four parts: (1) standardized test; (2) treasure hunt; (3) dance competition; (4) triathlon. Malhotra is keen to win, having pinned his financial future on the access to a top college the prize will net. Dhawan, meanwhile, wants to prove his worth to his Bad Dad — relations deteriorate to the point where he’s booted out of the house and must fend for himself economically — while also taking down Malhotra, whom he caught smooching the increasingly irrelevant Bhatt, to booming percussion on the soundtrack. Nobody steals his lover, goddamn it Alia.

But wait.

I’m making an awful lot of gay jokes here, surely more than is welcome on an enlightened web portal such as this. The thing is, Johar is making the same jokes, and honestly… I’m not sure either of us are really joking. More than once, Malhotra quips that it seems the emotionally needier Dhawan is about to kiss him. All the while, Dhawan neglects his ostensible girlfriend, Bhatt, only reacting when she flirts with Malhotra. As the film wore on, I began to wonder if Johar was playing a quiet game, subtly contrasting the shrill, quintessentially filmi gay stereotype of the Dean against something of greater emotional verisimilitude.

It’s difficult to talk about homosexuality in Bollywood. Part of the traditional, cliche appeal of foreign cinema to English-dominant North Americans is its departure from domestic morality, but mainline Indian movies share the NA movie dichotomy — violence is okay for display, while sex is best hidden — at a much lower intensity. Top of the line Bollywood movies often won’t progress beyond lip-kissing onscreen, and dramatic depictions of gay relationships are rare.

Redolent of this uncertainty is a movie Johar produced in 2008: Dostana, starring Abhishek Bachchan and the aforementioned John Abraham as a pair of men who pretend to be gay to secure a nice living arrangement in proximity to a woman they both pursue. Neither gets the girl in the end, and it’s hinted that a genuine attraction has developed between the two. The truth, however, remains as private as Johar’s own personal life, though rumors always, always swirl: about him and SRK, about him and Sidharth Malhotra. How does one score a leading man role in this town without connections, after all?

In Student of the Year, Johar is more willing to let go of things. Toward the end of the film, the Dean — the Director — is castigated by a fat, nerdy student for the ten million or so obvious logical shortcomings of the Student of the Year scheme; as in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Johar underlines the artificiality of his construct, but now the older director shows the Dean become sad and withdrawn. He never maintains a real relationship with a man. As he dies, his movie’s cast around him, he stares into the eyes of the Coach, the object of his lust, uncomprehending of his true desires, and all he can whisper is “that’s life,” as if he’d thrown a party as a cry for help.

By this time we’ve found out who won the competition: it was Dhawan, but only because Malhotra held back at the last minute, to disgust Dhawan’s father and thereby prove himself the more calculating player. Then he marries Bhatt and becomes a zillionaire tycoon, while Dhawan apparently throws the prestige of his prize away and becomes a famous (presumably shirtless) rock star. Like 3 Idiots, the message boils down to ‘follow your dreams, but try and select dreams that will get you a middle-class life, because being poor is pretty loathsome.’

Yet some things are not filled in for Dhawan. He is not apparently married, nor does he have any girlfriend. He claims to have bedded 100 women, although this is immediately shown to be a lie. He and Malhotra confront one another immediately, but quickly resume friendly relations. It’s a happy Bollywood ending, competition fermented into a woozy nostalgia, but also tinged with mystery, unspoken secrets hovering as the two grown men return to St. Teresa’s, and loosen their clothes as they prepare to revisit their final race for real, gazing into each other’s eyes, alone, as the frame freezes, and the color fades, and the director’s name appears onscreen before a final fade to black.

The idea could be that the future remains in the hands of “Our New Generation” – but know, dear audience, that we are not there yet.

Il Dolce Libro

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A brief satire on Appuntamento fatale (Ballata in si bemolle) (Rendezvous in B-Flat, aka Fatal Rendezvous), a 1997 album by Milo Manara, as most recently translated in Manara Erotica Volume One (Dark Horse, 2012), one segment of a prospective ten-volume endeavor compiling 2,000+ pages of Manara’s comics under various titles.

***

Brother, what I write to you now will reveal more about myself than the book I describe. But still, you have asked for the apex of degradation, and what better venue than this?

Il maestro is summarized most adequately by the woman on the left. Yes, ha ha – it must be a woman! She must be aloof, of course; inscrutable! Unknowable! Nearly an alien race are the females of this species, litters of pups sired from a closely-kept line, all related, no doubt, from the similarities of their faces, their expressions; sisters who blossomed together in that kennel of warm latex flesh. You can’t turn me on with your Japanese PVC dolls, dear friend, for I have women readily sculpted right here on the page. See how she bristles at the thought of “love,” arms thrown up in defense, cringing at the touch of a man!

This, fundamentally, is the feminine disposition under Manara’s pen and brush. He is a great lover of the female form, it is said, but his devotions are such that even the most Roman of Catholics comes to understand some nauseous puritan appetite for denunciation of idolatry. His women can be chipped into particular shapes for the purposes of dramaturgy, yes, but you cannot imagine them as itchy beings any more than you might expect the Pietà to fart.

They are, in a word, perfect, and therefore a most fitting vehicle for the perfection of rape, as you have urged me to detail.

Valeria is a materialist and something of a bitch, which allows the shallow reader to presume she deserves it. We can disregard these lower minds, brother, but a fundament is always necessary to il maestro. Recall how he establishes the book’s relationship dynamics in its opening panel, its subtleties are only discernible in retrospect:

Valeria is not a speaking character. Instead, at the far left, we see the words of the Senator, the reader’s surrogate, to whom the story is ostensibly being narrated, though the fact of narration is not apparent until later; in this way, the confident, virile, powerful man — a happy flattery! — can command the opening of the drama. His arm is locked around Valeria, directly to his right; she touches him gladly, her head bowing toward him, the finger on her rightmost hand pointing toward him, her posture set entirely away from Silvio, her ineffectual husband, whose eyes are either trained on her or the Senator. Such ambiguity is necessary.

As the plot will eventually reveal, Silvio, the eunuch, whose wife withdraws from his touch, whose torpid marital relations are consigned to off-panel oblivion after an abridged bit of early foreplay — cock-blocked, one might say, by authorial fiat — is the “bagman” for the Senator’s dirty kickbacks, though in some ill-advised gesture toward agency he has begun skimming the take. This cannot do. The Senator is aware of this transgression, and seeks to punish the man through emasculation; he will arrange Valeria’s rape, and, moreover, arrange so that Silvio consents to and encourages such. It is a cocksure bit of comeuppance between men, a sexual fantasy of the lusty Senator, put into being and then, ingeniously, detailed back to him by trusting, narrating Valeria.

See again how only the Senator’s eyes follow the eyesight of the reader: toward the right, brother! See how every other character pushes against the flow, staring left, gazing upon the Man, the reader, yes, and the author! The creator of the story, assessing his cast, all the way back to his nameless date at far right, her face identical to Valeria’s – neither the first, nor the last is she.

All desirable women are the same, in the mind’s eye. They are all perfect.

I will not waste time with any detailed synopsis. Suffice to say, the Senator has arranged for Silvio’s financial ruin, which has thrust him into the clutches of a lecherous, corpulent loan shark, who determines that payment of interest will best be taken from Valeria’s body. Silvio is the one who persuades his wife into this peril, thinking, perhaps, that the fat man wants only some quid pro quo. But it’s instant gratification the usurer demands.

When we see then — here, above — is the genius of Milo Manara. His draftsmanship is beyond reproach, but to only study figuration is to value illustration over sequence, diminishing the function of comics art. Similarly, to only appreciate images of sexual acts is to insult the character of Erotica, which rightly encompasses the psychological textures of the sex act: the anticipation; the anxiety; the flight from one’s senses; afterglow.

By this tradition, il maestro luxuriates in the effect of rape. See how the above diptych appears on first glance to depict one continuous image, though on closer examination it instead shows, in panel one, Valeria gazing in abject horror at the weeping face of the man who betrayed her trust, worthless and weak, unable to meet her gaze, his hand laughable in hers, as panel two closes in, at dead center of the image, on the debutante instance of unwanted penetration, Valeria’s hindquarters enlarged and raised, beckoning to the accorded silent moment of a ritualized insertion.

In panel one she is not raped, and in panel two she has been raped, and will always thereafter have been raped. It is consummate comics.

Lest you suspect I am projecting, on the page thereafter the narration starts. Yes, it is only after the first legitimate exploit that the story can truly begin to be told! “I couldn’t fall asleep that night…” Valeria recounts — again, I remind you, to the Senator, who has set these antics in motion — “I felt humiliated… sullied… I’d been defiled… I had suffered a wound that would never heal…”

Here, the journeyman might either stop the tale entirely or embark on some risibly generic revenge scenario. But Manara realizes that Erotica is both peaks and valleys, and best enjoyed through the glaze of verisimilitude. So Valeria seeks to return to her old life.

She is raped again at the salon. Not immediately – for a while, il maestro delicately applies some genuine psychology of the rape victim: “Everything seemed somehow far away… as if I were now in another world! The world of the defeated, the losers…” Such dissociation and self-loathing is typical, and adds fine coloration to the rising action.

After she is raped in the salon, Valeria retreats into her own bedroom, locking Silvio out while he attempts to explain that he can’t go to the police because they too are corrupt. The gang then invades the woman’s last bastion of retreat and rapes her on her own bed, though only after she learns that Silvio had apparently struck a deal with the usurer that his debts would be excused — and his political career preserved — day by day, with his wife being raped every single day: the Appuntamento of the work’s title.

This concept, I confess, borders on silly. It is not unlike Johnny Ryan’s Sherlock McRape, who exchanges his crime-solving prowess for, say, 50 rapes, half up front. The gradual build of the sites of Valeria’s assaults from (1) an unknown location to (2) a beloved merchant to (3) her own home offers some lively and gradual build of excitement, but something more would have to be introduced to keep the comic from becoming monotonous.

Ah, brother! But I have forgotten the story’s hero!

You see, specifically, Valeria is not gang-raped. She is only ever raped by one member of the gang: a silent, hulking man named Ursus, which is Latin for bear. As always, Manara’s symbolgy is deliciously complex – by his ancient designation, Ursus evokes the same Roman milieu as the ‘Senator,’ positioning them both as figures from antiquity, divorced from the weak and the fat of modernity. Yet they are opposites, the Senator all calculation and stratagem, while Ursus is inarticulate and passionate: a real brute!

Mercilessly, invisibly — almost supernaturally — he pursues her, even after she packs her bags and hits the road in the dead of night. Yet as the clock strikes six, the appointed hour, Ursus’ car zooms out of the roadside woodwork to block Valeria’s retreat. Withstanding the woman’s blows, he chases her on foot to “a battered old van” manned by proletarian type in overalls. Ursus beats the man furiously, then bends the woman over. She claws at the worker’s leg, but her rescuer does nothing. She maneuvers upward as she is sodomized, her face pressing up toward the impotent man’s crotch, his head lowered in utter shame, in total defeat, he watches the entire process, this woman’s public rape, unwitting vehicles zooming by in the background, her head pressed against his body as she screams and screams.

At this point, you are no doubt detecting a political subtext to the action. In fact, il maestro previously added an element of social critique to the encounter in the salon, as an ignorant woman clucks over how handicapped people would do better to stay at home than expect accommodation from a hotel. Such insensitivity from those unaccustomed to pain! Yet because this is not a bathetic work, a representative of the loan shark’s gang offers his own declaration upon entering the scene: “If you want to enjoy the good life, my dear signora, the piper must be paid!” If you’ll recall once more the work’s first panel, and what immediately followed, you’ll know that bourgeois Valeria herself was very much interested in joining the Senator, the reader, “in Barbados,” nudging her lover further toward the pit of misery into which she now herself is cast.

Turnabout, truly, is fair play. In this way, Manara evokes an earlier Italian parable of class warfare, Lina Wertmüller’s 1974 film Swept Away, though his intensity better matches what I’ve read of an inaccessible pinku eiga by the great Japanese subversive Masao Adachi, 1969’s Sex Play (Seiyûgi), in which leftist students reject the timidity of ‘non-consensual’ role-play with girlfriends to commit actual rape: a metaphoric embrace of direct action politics, and a challenge to the moralistic paradigm necessary to accomplish the revolutionary project.

Manara thus begins to intercut Valeria’s continuing dalliances with images from her narration aboard the Senator’s yacht in the Caribbees. “It is simply unacceptable for the rabble to rape our women!” the powerful man muses, arms folded, assuring the woman that Darwinism accords the elite a natural right to command the public. But Ursus too is a worker, and the peerless accomplishment of his set task, day after day, begins to impress the woman:

There! There it is, brother! The face! The Manara face, in the final panel! Ooh, the lady doth protest too much! Another one:

This moment marks a major turning point in the story; prior to this, we are told, Ursus had only ever entered Valeria through the anus. As we will eventually learn, the bandage on his head is due to his covert efforts at paying off ridiculous Silvio’s debts through his own industry. The symbolism is powerful – anal sex is immoral and unnatural, per the Catholic outlook of Manara’s work, so vaginal intercourse can thus mark a sea change in Ursus’ affections: bringing the woman food, tending to her shell-shocked state all holed up in a boarding house. He continues to fuck her at six, of course — a working man has his duties — but unlike the limp grotesques previously seen as challenges to the prevailing social order, Ursus is physically inspired. The last romantic hero.

But forgive my sentimentality. These comics are about women.

Il maestro knows. In all of these beautiful images, there is not a hint of the ugly male anatomy: the leering prick; the dangling, imbecilic pouch. I am not the sort of man who is so insecure that he cannot stand the sight of a woman being goodly fucked, brother, but need I be perpetually confronted with the wan issue of coughing rods at the conclusion of every episode on the erotic midlist? Goddamn it, this is better. There is no emanation from Valeria. She does not drool or sweat. Her eyes do not water. We are spared the potential of her scent. She is the quintessence of the Manara woman. She is perfect, perfect, flaxen glow perfect, tawny sunbake perfect, ceramic milk white perfect, every color of perfect, perfect, perfect.

Until! Until!

The second panel above depicts the only instance of fluid definitively seen to escape Valeria’s body over the course of the story. It is a single tear. Ursus has somehow made his way to the coast of Barbados, again in pursuit of his departed love. He has blown his deadline, and is in a bad state. Sneering, the Senator/reader/author spells out what’s happened to Valeria, but she will hear none of it. The rapist must be punished. From this, most readers conclude that Appuntamento fatale (Ballata in si bemolle) is a sad story of perverted, frustrated love, ruined by circumstance.

Pity their lack of vision, brother. A masterpiece must have more.

The great manga artist Toshio Maeda once remarked, “[m]es titres s’adressent aux hommes, adolescents et adultes. Ils veulent y voir des filles violées ou des scènes lesbiennes.” What is crucial is that des scènes lesbiennes are in parity with des filles violées. They are fantasies, yes, but also safe spaces for male desire, for the admiration of women.

Yet non-consensual scenarios are not a purely male space, alas. You need only look to kink.com, or yaoi manga, or any number of places to know that the certainty presumed of these ideas are increasingly, viscerally feminized, beyond the old romance novel and soap opera tropes. God, it is confusing. Can’t anything be exclusive? What, pray tell, is the gossamer boundary between a fantasy of male domination and a fantasy of female submission?

It is, I argue, the subtle presence of the feminine perspective. The suggestion of exchange – of secret, implied consent. Of knowing.

And a Milo Manara woman can never know you. And you can never know her. It is the metaphysics of his line. The locked sameness of his luscious designs. The alien poise of his beauty, god. Always, there is potential with him, and here, with Ursus standing on the beach, castrated, summarizing the plot to a disbelieving Valeria, we finally, totally know praxis, so that the rape of a woman can inevitably be no less than the furied trauma of an ultimate man.

Beauty without tears.

__________
Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

Classroom Minus Children

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This is part of a roundtable on The Drifting Classroom, and also part of the October 2011 Horror Manga Movable Feast.
________________

Seeing as how there’s absolutely no way I can top the  other fine and informative posts submitted this week in terms of information, humor, passion or — let’s face it —  logical sentence construction, I will instead embrace the transformative aspect of the Halloween season to address a mutated form of the series under examination. An abridged form – a hacked-up form, an act of horror movie violence as brutal as the alterations I’m currently making to my Sexy Comics Academic costume for the weekend.

In short, I’d like to talk about The Drifting Classroom, sans kids.

That right – I’m just going to delete all that crazy survival horror stuff with those screaming children in the howling future hellscape. Who needs it? Not me. Not while I’ve got the most wonderful character in the entire series slotted into her proper role as full-fledged protagonist.

It must be said up front that in some ways Emiko Takamatsu (i.e. “Sho’s Mom”) is typical of artist Kazuo Umezu’s depictions of mature women: “pretty on the outside, but ferocious within,” as Jason Thompson put it earlier in this series. Certainly I’m loath to forget such fine specimens of devouring womanhood as the murderous substitute mother of Umezu’s Insects, the best of his shojo horror works available in English (as Scary Book vol. 2, published by Dark Horse) – that’s the one with the little girl who’s afraid of butterflies, eventually becoming plagued with Lepidopteran precognitions when disaster is about to strike, such as an earthquake rattling her classroom and most of her schoolmates subsequently being run over by a truck. As you might expect, all of this dates back to her mother’s murder at the hands of a romantic rival — the very woman now intruding upon Dad’s personal space — whose nourishing characteristics are marred by a giveaway disfigurement.

What’s important then to realize about Mrs. Takamatsu, heroine of our mental edit, is that she’s both the adult and the child. She’s the wall of fury and the helpless pup, seized by irrational forebodings due to an intense personal trauma: the death of her child.

Yes, the first thing that becomes clear when you drift the classroom out of Umezu’s series is that Sho really did die; the school exploded, hundreds of children perished, and poor Emiko is robbed of even the catharsis of anyone finding so much as a human cinder. In a different series — say, something eleven books long — this might be evidence of the kids being whisked away to a hazardous land of crawly things, but for our purposes it’s a manifestation of her inability to put her terse final interactions with her son in the past. The toy “future car” of chapter one thus carries additional ironic weight, as Sho isn’t blasted to a very non-aerodynamic future; his future is instead blasted to bits, and Emiko is left holding all that wasted potential.

And so, as with the little girl in Insects, Sho’s Mom begins to receive messages from the future, but not in the form of butterflies – instead, her status as Sho’s Mom is reinforced by sounds of her boy calling for help, a condition suspiciously brought on after having unspecified Medicine poured down her throat by her well-meaning but largely useless husband. She starts screaming into the telephone when neighbors call, because she can’t hear them – it’s only her son. She picks up a fellow traveler, a boy sidekick of sorts, in the form of Shinichi: a classmate of Sho’s who didn’t arrive at school in time and could have saved his life. Only he can fathom the strange compulsions driving her to invade a hapless foreign couple’s hotel room and eventually plant a knife in the wall for use by her child in god knows how many years.

Gradually, the antics become satirical. Frantic to find the cure to a future plague, Emiko and Shinichi invade a baseball game on the theory that a uniquely-scarred star player will inevitably become a mummy, and thereby a helpful means of transporting necessary drugs. One might also say the shonen manga formula of today is mummified into obligatory burps of friendship, perseverance and victory, traits borrowed (as some say) from the great sports manga of boys’ comics with intent to deliver refined hits of sleek entertainment.

The Drifting Classroom was serialized in wilder days, in Weekly Shonen Sunday from 1972 to 1974, at the same time hit baseball series by the likes of Shinji Mizushima ran in rival magazines. Umezu’s vision of baseball departs – it is sheer barbarism, with fans leaping onto the field screaming for Emiko’s head as she interrupts the game. It all but goes without saying the great player is a bit of a fraud, seeking to injure himself out of the contest for fear of disappointing his many child fans. Yet Umezu is writing a comic for boys, and just as perhaps his entirely hypothetical children zapped away to the future might embrace sacred shonen values out of sheer desire to survive, so will the baseball player truly serve a young child by dying to save him from kidnapping.

Something else was happening too. Even as work continued on Umezu’s series, the landscape of his former specialization in shojo manga began to change. The Year 24 Group began shifting the focus of girls’ comics into something driven by inspired female artists, as opposed to the men who drew the shojo manga of Umezu’s earlier years. Moto Hagio’s The Heart of Thomas began around the time The Drifting Classroom started wrapping up, and its evocation of affectionate lads couldn’t seem further from the invariably KYAAAing kids of Umezu’s earlier horrors.

But the beauty of excerpting a work like this is that we can draw out potentials often left hidden by the bustle of a busier plot. If Emiko believes she can sense the future like the little girl in Insects, it’s not because of a secret, personal calamity, but an inexplicable disaster that has taken away her child. It’s a wide-ranging thing, evidenced by the mourning crowds of mothers she denounces as quitters, and especially her doppelgänger, the mother of wee three-year old Yuichi, with whom Sho played on the night before that fateful event. If anything, Yuichi’s mom is even worse off that Emiko, in that she doesn’t even get the satisfaction of having her too-young-for-school child recognized as anything other than commonly missing.

Yet this will bring an odd sort of hope. I don’t want to do anything extravagant here, like credit Umezu with the accidental creation of josei horror, but there’s something in the way of real forward momentum to this characteristically high-volume confrontation between mourning women. Time is passing them by. The site of the exploded building is transformed into a garbage dump. Emiko prophesies a desert in place of the already lifeless concrete of the city. Finally, she invades a television variety show with a message for all of Japan: to wish as hard as she has, to will the children back to life, to believe once again in kids’ comics mechanics.

For our purposes, it cannot happen.

But something else can.

First comes Yuichi’s tricycle, and then the boy himself. Heaven only knows where he’s been, or how he got a copy of Sho’s journal, or what the hell is going on with that guy in the hospital with parts of his body missing. In the interests of salvaging my hypothetical, I’ll sheepishly note that the missing body parts aren’t revealed until we switch away from the household television’s point of view, and nobody other than Emiko ever actually reads the journal. Maybe little Yuichi was inspired to run off by the disaster; certainly Emiko’s husband has demonstrated a capacity to support her mania with love.

Regardless, what it all represents is hope – one mother is getting her child back, for real. And for Emiko, it sparks a realization that all her visions of the future cannot make her reactionary – she has to think bigger, better. It’s a sentimental ending of sorts, but as Mizuho Hirayama observed in his essay on the collision of comedy and horror in Umezu’s work (in the back of Viz’s edition of Cat Eyed Boy vol. 2), the glee with which repulsion turns to delight evidences a zest for childlike naivete on the artist’s part. Perhaps this vivid burlesque of a mother’s grieving which I have drilled out today is still childlike, still shonen or whatever you want to call it, in proffering a final, quiet epiphany that children have to live in the future, and we have to leave a future there to imagine.

We don’t see her face in the end, though, and we withdraw as if through a keyhole, as if peeping, as if some things are too complex for a child’s comic to show.

The Grammar Lesson

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A portion of the following essay was originally posted to this site, in modified form, as part of its Muck-Encrusted Mockery of a Roundtable, on April 15, 2010. Particular thanks go to Robert Stanley Martin for his valuable comments on that prior incarnation.

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“If I have any real talent at all in comic writing, that talent is probably the talent for collaboration.”

– Alan Moore to George Khoury, The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore

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I blame this post on Jesus.

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