Of damaged angry men.

5 Bollywood movies in 20 hours. I finally watched five movies I put off for several months. Love, Sex Aur Dhokha, Manorama Six Feet Under, Khosla Ka Ghosla, Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! and Dev D.
Firstly they are all fantastic movies, LSD in my opinion was one of the most innovative movies I have seen. Not having read anything about it before watching it, I was the perfect passenger and Dibakar Bannerjee knows how to stitch a ride together for sure. I fell for the funny bits, only to find I had been baited into a very real, very visceral kick in the gut. And my kidneys loved it!
Khosla Ka Ghosla and that 'Lucky' movie were also directed by him and were very impressive also.

The Manorama movie, directed by Navdeep Singh was great as well; set in the small town of Lakhot Rajasthan, it is a re-hash of Roman Polanski's Chinatown. The movie oozes with the same lovable torpor that infects everyone in the movie. I was drunk on noir and the thickness of desert summer air by the end of the movie, needing a hot sticky nap and random jolly bystander to be snarky to.
But while each movie was different, one thing emerged as a common property: Modern Bollywood loves emotionally damaged angry men, emotionally damaged angry men with the stress tolerance of myotonic goats.  Angry men themselves make great muses; they frequently have just been punched in the nuts,  or have had a devious scheme ruined by some meddling kids. Such timeless edifices are angry men that they have been all-time favourite subjects for artists attempting to capture the human form, as elucidated by this archetypal example of upper-paleolithic rock-art from Kakadu, Australia. Followed by an in-praesenti example of ... (pop-art?).

The emotionally stunted angry man is a particular impotent variety of angry man. DevD, for example, is a story of guy who returns to his home town, courting a woman there called Paro. The movie is a document of the colourful and chaotic tapestry that emerges from shit hitting the fan as Dev expertly splits the seam connecting nuanced Indian ethos, sexual attraction and personal conflict - with a wildly swinging chain-saw. The result is a beautifully rendered haze of drug addled dementia, swearing, sickly moping and the self destructive urge to hurt the things he loves.

I find it interesting that this is a somewhat recurring theme with movies and that male characters with retarded emotional maturity are colored with a touch of romance.  I am willing to buy a male character with an impulsive rage and temporary loss of judgement. I suspect that most men can empathize with acts of indiscretion triggered by a hormonal head rush. An uncontrolled impulse, after all, must be something of a vestigial fragment of a reflex existence, where stressful situations needed to be dealt with, in greater measure immediacy than tact. Think, saving your occipital bun from a rampaging woolly mammoth! I find it hard to believe, however, that there was ever anything but a severe anthropological disadvantage for men who attempted to reach lucidity through transcendental binge drinking.  True, the D in Dev D probably stands for Degenerate but there is no doubting that men willing to freestyle dive into self-propitiating chaos are unfairly perceived as remissible juvenile delinquents.

More often than not the role of mending or at least valiantly trying to mend these men, at great personal cost and sacrifice, falls on the lead female character. And honestly, these female characters are quite awesome, balancing a figure relatable to viewers as a "real woman" while dealing with events of cartoon proportion. I hear from individuals broadly identified as female movie goers that there is a lovable aspect to damaged men, the myth that women love men who are projects. At the very least, the claim is that women find inarticulate men with troubled emotions more approachable and human.

In contrast, I believe there is nothing human about Dev, him and his cohorts in films alike are caricatures of disarray. An anthropomorphic representation not unlike Homer Simpson. They are the contrast you need to be able to see all the other humans in the movie; so dull in their similarity to you, me and the people we know that we wouldn't notice them unless you set them against the absurd.  So then DevD is not a movie about the complexity of Dev's glaring dementia, but a movie about the intersection of a fantasy with regular lives.  The regular lives of Paro, the guy who sells Dev drugs and the random stranger who jumps out of the way in time to not get stabbed by Dev in a murderous rage. A collection of characters that just as well could have been us.

Even the vamp character in the movie, Chandramukhi, is not illogically fucked up and without the ability see choices ahead of her. Her fuckeduppedness has back-story, purpose and beguiling charm. Vamps in general are far from the vapid seductresses they are advertised to be, being instead highly put together gold diggers with guile and wit.

Truth is, it is not our frailty, ineptitude and weakness that writes the human narrative. Wooly Mammoths had frailties, weakness and consequently are extinct. Devs from history have all shared the Wooly Mammoth's inadequacy at articulating a growing sense of incompatibility with their surroundings and have shared too their fate. The human story is that we survived, we survived past the ice age to talk about the the time we were in an abusive relationship with a drunken asshole or the day we almost got stabbed in the chest. It is our ability to make choices and plan for a future with less assholes and fewer opportunities to get stabbed. Oh by the way here is an approximate rendering of that lunatic who tried to stab me, his legs and arms were like that of a mantis, a snarling mouth as big as his head with hair flying in all directions, never have I seen a scarier sight in all of upper-paleolithic Australia. Now hand me that rock I am going to draw him for you,... and did I mention he was like 10 feet tall and was holding this gigantic bottle of Red Label!?


Rock faces stand everywhere, marked with the blood of human cruelty, headstones to inexplicable hatred. But gleams amongst them, the monolith of human existence, coloured with grit and volition, shaped by the men and women who survived, lived and contemplated.