A frenzy has
been created by the media around Shah Rukh Khan and his 'Jawan.' Much before
the release of the film in the theatre-- eyes hazy, heart satisfied, choked,
and distrustful a new thought was stitched--to podcast the mind to show the
nation is comfortable with these ugly films. This new brand of hero worship has
slaughtered the cinema as an art. There is nothing new, disjointed, burly,
artefact in this that is now being perfumed. These movies are made on incoherence,
spicy, declared as relics which are glorified themes in movies.
'Jawan',
'Pathan', 'Chennai Express', 'Dabang', 'Three Idiots', 'PK', 'Raees',
'Ghajini', etc are sculpted as
art-dominating camps inhabiting the false spirit of Robin Hood vigilante
pickpocketing the viewers' money. They
are just like weapon manufacturers who kill millions of people and pollute the
environment but donate some money to NGOs to build hospitals. Female characters
are completely sidelined. No film has been able to shun the testosterone trap. This
is a very dark period for actresses in Bollywood just like dark ages of
invaders.
Like Atlee's
earlier movie 'Bigil' the gauchely dressed hero is surrounded by an army of
scantily dressed women, the women deliver the traumatic flavour, and the hero
thrashes it into catharsis and suddenly comes to terms with his past. The same
hot dish is served cold in 'Jawan.'
Viewers walk
out of the theatre with heavy heads and the feeling of seeing many old films
stuffed into one. Scenes do not travel so much, as to jump into a different
realm, a new sub-plot, another public topic, another bit of trauma alchemized
as new feed. The flashback, a regularly copied tool in the films, dispensed
toolkit, used one after another, presents the past as a mishmash. 'Pathan'
failed to give secular credentials to the mess of Bollywood or a new boost to
life.
Now, heroism
is roaring in Bollywood with the Khan group. One of the many features is a
celebration of their presence and over-acting. The action highlights endless
quarks of punches and pulls. The setting dips into hideous, sour and
over-drenched shades of insipidness. The joy is artificially created to charm
the film hero, resisted and depicted.
However, the
elements that pushed that heroism, like the unstable gallows of the storyline
between the super-display of their muscle and velour. To travel through 'Jawan'
or 'Pathan' is to bang about, the smoothness of the highway, slashed by the
occurrence of car-sick speed breakers for a sick man. There is now a name for
such films. It has become a type -- 'hero-worship'.
This
hero-worship, mass cinema is a tasteless distillation of old 'masala cinema' an
important variety of Indian cinema. According to famous film critic Rangan Bharadwaj,
"these big highlights that would be built up have now become the
highlights of the movie" -- 'the mass movie.'
Unresponsive
to tale link, and character chain, the plot jumps the one listed vista to the
next as if on a trampoline. The mass movie is exclusive to please the
irrational fan's fidelity, devoid of any wise and tasteful pretence of being a
thought-provoking film. A "mass
movie" cannot be considered a genre. Genre consists of the proper
disposition of a film, its quality, and its tropes while these elements have
been developed over time, through sublimity of a performer's inherent merit
tricked as the taste of the audience, popcorn and cafeteria in hand,
disregarding that is supposed to be very object being looked at.
The
semantics do not express anything about the movie but only the collection and
audience in mind--the mass, all recall. It is called by critics
"post-modern" that is to deliver every postulation unlikely to
disembowel the conviction we held about what a "movie is." It takes
the proper design of cinemas and strikes it to a position where nobody can
understand it. It is almost impossible
to accept 'Jawan' or 'Pathan' or "PK' a film because they have more
foolhardy ideas--to demolish the very concept of cinema, raising themselves as
a "mass movie" movie those are not movies. They are just assembling
incongruous ideas.
This is an
archetypal move in denigration. To view something in the theatre, the very idea
of "art" -- in these cases, distorting the mass movie --- and to turn
that thread into a genre, folds it into cinema because one can criticize a film
and not a genre. Particularly if the genre is derivative from psychology of the
drama, the aspirations, and desires of the 'common man', the "mass
movie."
To cut the
criticism of a film, the failure of the viewers to welcome it is now postured
as your failure to take pleasure in a very exact genre. The onus is not on the
producers but on the viewers. The big question is, can the makers handle the
mass film? Nobody dares to say "yes."
Fake and phony
titles are given to shallow acting like King, Shanshah, Dabang, Mr. Perfect,
Khiladi Kumar, Chote Nawab etc. Most of such labels are bizarre and the viewers
simply laugh. In the words of noted critic Hal Fostel, "an awkward term
for a common move in criticism, the inflating of a characteristic into a
criterion... adjectives becomes nouns and attributes becomes values," There is no film anymore, there is only fake
stardom.
