When I am writing a review, I often branch off into Deep Thoughts inspired by the topic of the film. They are related to the film and belong in the review, but they are also above and beyond the film. Since my last two reviews have gotten soooooooooooo few views (Uyare and Nenu Naa Rakshisi), and I put a lot of work into those big thinky parts of them, I decided to do something a little different and pull out those sections from the reviews and give a new post to discuss just them. Oh, and also the section of my Rockstar review which was similarly abstract.

The Suffering Great Male Artist Narrative and Its Flaws

Male artists always think stories about suffering Great Male Artists are fascinating, and I almost never do. Why should I care about your artistic pain? Everyone has pain!

You may be the most sensitive dying inside artistic soul in the world, but there are rape survivors out there, people with clinical depression, people with injuries that cause massive constant physical suffering. If we make this into a game of “who hurts worst”, the answer is not artistically unfulfilled healthy wealthy young men. And anyway, that isn’t a very good movie. Watching someone endure terrible suffering is either unendurable, or eventually just kind of boring. Or else you start to giggle.

No, the way to make a story of a hurting protagonist interesting, whether it is about a bad break up or artistic misery or anything else, is to make us care about the person outside of the hurt. They can be funny, or kind, or brave, or anything else, but we need a reason to like them, to want to spend time with them as an audience.

And this brings me back to the male artist problem. If you are a male scriptwriter, or director, or film reviewer, you will automatically connect with the story of a struggling unfulfilled middle-class over-educated young man. And because you connect to it, you will assume it is universal. And because you connect to it sooooooooooooooo much, you will not be terribly open to suggestions that it is not universal. If you are a sensitive artistic type of young man, this sort of story and character resonates with you so much that it is hard to hear honest criticism of the story, the character, or even the actor playing him without taking it personally.

These stories often come with the addition that Great Artists suffer more than regular people. Let’s take this theory to the inevitable conclusion. It means that, on the one hand, those who suffer the most will make the greatest art. If that is the case, than all great art would come from survivors of genocide, of torture, of other horrors. And on the other hand, it means that if you have not suffered than your art is not true.

What I would say instead is that an understanding of the highs and lows of life can add depth to your art. That doesn’t mean you have to seek out suffering, suffering is around us all the time, every where. It simply means you need to open your eyes and see it. If you want to find suffering in order to deepen you art, there is no need to seek out a girl to break your heart, just walk outside and open your eyes. But, unfortunately, the Great Male Artist character never seems to be able to connect to anyone’s pain but his own.

Brechtian Art Theory

“playing in such a way that the audience was hindered from simply identifying itself with the characters in the play. Acceptance or rejection of their actions and utterances was meant to take place on a conscious plane, instead of, as hitherto, in the audience’s subconscious

There is a concept in art criticism called “Brechtian”. It is sort of similar to “breaking the fourth wall”, but not quite. The idea is that your art work is at such a heightened level of reality that you are telling the audience “you know and I know this is fake”. An example might be Douglas Sirk choosing to make Sandra Dee’s bedroom entirely shockingly pink in Imitation of Life. The message of “this is an innocent young girl” crossed the line from a subtle subconscious visual sign, to “you know and I know that this is just a set in order to convey a message about this imaginary person”. Indian films, especially Telugu action films, are often Brechtian, in their own way. The action sequences, the character backstories, even the dialogue, crosses the line from “this is something slightly heightened to evoke emotion in the viewers while still feeling real” to “this is something so over the top that the intended message must be an awareness of the artificiality of what is happening”.

This all sounds very high falutin’. You don’t have to be high falutin’ to use the theory. You don’t have to sit down in a grad school class and discuss semiotics and Brechtian theories for a semester to be able to put them to use. All it really means is, “do I want my audience to be swept into the movie and forget it is fake, or do I want them to be pulled out of the movie so they appreciate my artistry in making something so fake and interesting?” If the maker wants you to stand back from his films and go “oh wow, that was a great fight scene! This song is so sexy! That one liner was so great!”, he doesn’t want you to come out of the film thinking about the story and the characters, just the craftsmanship, than that is Brechtian. Keeping the audience at an appreciative distance instead of drawing them in.

I just said “he doesn’t want you to think about the story”, and now I am going to contradict myself by pointing out that the story IS part of the craftsmanship. If you come out of the film sobbing over the sad ending, that’s not Brechtian. But if you come out of the film marveling at how perfectly the ending fit with the rest of the story, that is Brechtian. In the Indian context, if you come out of the film marveling at how it played with familiar tropes, with star personas, and even consciously referred to and entered a conversation with previous films, that is Brechtian. Farah Khan is Brechtian, Aditya Chopra is not.

Acid Attacks

Acid attacks are almost always on the face. Have you noticed that? We don’t even think about it, we just accept that of course the acid is thrown on the face. But why? It burns and causes horrible damage no matter where it lands. Why isn’t it usually thrown on hands, making a woman unable to care for herself as her skin fuses together? Or on feet, so she cannot run? Or on her back, where it will have the largest target and be simplest to hit?

More than that, the “sad story” of the acid attack usually focuses on the damage to the face. It’s not about the incredible pain, the disabilities that can result, or even the psychological pain of being hated to such a degree. It’s “look at her face! Look at what it was before and what it is now!”

A woman’s sexual power is seen as being held in two locations, her vagina and her face. An acid attack comes from the same anger and carries the same message as a rape. “You have hurt me, you have made me feel bad, I resent your power over me, and so I am going to attack what I see as your source of power and take it away.” As with rape, there is a second message in the way the survivor is treated. If a woman is told that, after an acid attack destroys her face or a rape destroys her “purity”, that she truly is destroyed, it confirms that this was her only value. She is nothing but a face and a vagina. She must be hidden away to bemoan her fate (along with her weeping family) for the rest of her life.

An acid attack or a rape is, of course, a truly terrible thing from which a woman will never fully heal. But that message must be tempered with the lesson that life goes on, there is more to her than the parts that were broken, she herself is not broken, her innate inner spirit is more than any physical pain.

The kind of targeted violence of an acid attack often hits the strongest women, and that is not a coincidence. It is because of their strength that men want to tear them down. Beautiful, sure, they might be extra beautiful. But also outspoken, confident, in some way seen as an offense to men because of their very existence. It is the same reason male trolls attack women online, or (sometimes) the reason why men will harass a female co-worker in the office. She is special, she is better than them, and it makes them uncomfortable, challenges their world view, so they must tear her down. The acid attack is a badge of honor, it means you did something so brave, so remarkable, that it made a man scared enough to try to destroy you in response.