Shock & Awe
Author: DABBA (New York, NY)
EMAIL: withheld
Shock & Awe
Dubya was right. “We will awe them with our might and shock them into submission…”; Famous last words, only problem was they weren’t last words as we have seen 5 years later. I think Bush was on to something though in terms of strategy. A man of all the right answers to the wrong questions. Instead of being the most powerful man in the world with a trigger-happy finger on the red button, he should have been a filmmaker or a studio head. In Shock & Awe, we have the clearest understanding of what cinema is or purports to be.
Bare with me for a few more words. Since this is flog-the-dead-horse week, I figured I should beat the other PFC authors to another post on the current topic on fire at PFC. May our passions keep the eternal embers burning. A few weeks back it was about new wave or lack of it etc., and now the double headed snake has moulted, swallowed itself whole and resurfaced. I am not Rikki Tikki Tavi, but may be Pied Piper if I play the right tune with my bhansuri. Snake dance, snake dance!
Let’s get back to W. The essence of any storytelling and cinema in particular, is to awe with spectacle and shock with truth. Yes my dear friends, the yin and the yang. Night and day. Male and female (please insert your favorite duality analogy here). However, is there anything more beautiful than a sunset or a sunrise? Even the gods had to combine the qualities of male and female to destroy invincible raakshasas. This is also Stretch-the-metaphor week. So we have the space-time continuum argument applied to cinema.
This is not some new fangled 21st century epiphany, but one that storytellers have known through the ages. When in doubt, look to the comic books. Well, I call the Mahabharata and Ramayana the best comic books ever written. Dussehra is the celebration of good over evil, and in some parts of the country it is done by burning the 10 heads of Ravana. In this spectacular action and celebration lies the simple truth of good over evil.
Now let’s come to a 20th century invention – cinema. Just another medium for telling stories. Spoken word costs breath, written word costs ink and the painted word costs money, shit loads of it. Cinema will always and should always remain a business because human ingenuity finds patronage when people get rich off it; In a free and democratic society at least. It may be a very artistic business but anything that requires money to be created is and should be treated as a business.
People talk about good and bad cinema, independent, parallel, commercial, blockbuster, tentpole, platform, footpath, arthouse, NRI and every other way to define cinema. I am going to throw my hat in the ring and venture a definition. One based entirely on money. So we have low budget, medium budget and I-Sure-Hope-This-Thing-Turns-Into-A-Franchise-And-I-Can-Sell-Toys budget. I would say that in India the figures would be under 5 crore, 5-20 crores and Khuda-nay chappar-faad-kar-dey-dee crores respectively. In Hollywood, I would put those numbers at I-am-a-$10MM-Trust-Fund-Baby, 10-40 and 50+ MM. Feel free to argue over the specifics. It’s in the details that God and the Devil come together and laugh at us.
The truth of the human condition apparently is never changing. There are variations but our eternal quest for it and what we seek seems to remain the same or else we would not be able to appreciate religion or scientific hypotheses. What else is The Big Bang Theory but a wonderful story about our origins with some truth (it has not been proven beyond doubt, once you go less than Planck time 10^-43 secs, all our exisiting Laws of Physics cease to apply and we are not in a position to scientifically verify what happened at Time Zero of the Bang and what if anything existed before) and a whole lot of spectacle. Same goes with the Resurrection of Christ or Vishnu’s reincarnations.
Truth is not fact. Facts are mundane. I am not a good son is a fact. But when I tell you a story about someone that is not a good son that in some way connects to you and makes you think what does it take to be a good son, perhaps that is truth. At least in my eyes. If I had all the answers, I wouldn’t be posting anonymously on a blog now would I? Humans seem to have evolved to not seek the truth too much, why else would we use only 10% of our intellect/brain power and why do we have such few wise sages? Even if they knew the truth, we are not in a position to fathom it. “You can’t handle the truth!”
People will differ on spectacle as well. It could be a cool explosion, an alien chase sequence on saturn’s rings or a beautiful Indian woman draped in chiffon in a rain song. Perhaps we can agree on the fact that truth costs no money or very little I should say. Only ingenuity and insight but spectacle does not come cheap.
Some want more truth (good story well told) and others prefer spectacle. To each their own. Empty spectacle alone is like cotton candy. Great when you are eight, not so much after you have developed any real taste. So a good movie is one that perhaps balances the two. This is where prudent filmmaking and the responsibility of the filmmaker comes into play. If you are going to spend a lot of money on spectacle with a poorly told story, you better have a kickass targetted marketing campaign to make those pre-teens part with their money over and over again. If you have a great and very personal story that is a trenchant observation of the human condition, make it accordingly because no one under 20 other than your kid brother/sister that looks up to you is going to want to watch that movie. Last I checked, the median age of India is like 26 or something which is incredibly young.
It is pointless to complain that the 15 year old gentile who was trying to score with his girlfriend didn’t watch Schindler’s List. If there are people out there that want to watch a good story without the razzle dazzle, there will be a Producer to make money off of it. Unless the cost of entry has been raised so high that it has turned into a monopoly, and we need some anti-trust laws. But we know that not to be the case.
As for a website dedicated to passionate movie goers, it’s just words init? Sticks and stones may break my bones, but ur words will haunt me forever. Ephermeral to some but trapped in the eternity of mindspace for others.
No peace for the ticking mind. Serenity now…
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Great line of thought, and even better clarity and choice of words. Good piece Dabba.
@ Dabba – ‘Words be nimble, words be quick, words resemble walking sticks…’ Jim Morrison
‘I dont know what’s going to happen man..I just wanna get my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames..’ – JM
Most communication seems futile on the surface of things but it’s simply a manifestation of the primeval human urge to evolve, to comprehend, to socialize and to perpetuate the gene pool…the creative force in each of us is simply a manifestation of our sexual drive…they have the same root, which our Sages in their eternal wisdom revealed to us a long time ago….
classic clean and crisp dabba!!
“Spoken word costs breath, written word costs ink and the painted word costs money, shit loads of it”
Wow. Good stuff.
wow man. elusive, eclectic & erratic as usual(aint’ it stretch-the-mataphor week!)
metaphor*
folks,
thanks for the comments. I apologize for the criminal negligence in punctuation and typos. Hit send accidentally before I could proof read.
@qwerty,
when the shithouse is burned to the ground, some thirsty soul has got to walk out, hungry for a tale; and I’ll be waiting, ready to ply my trade.
Thanks for the comments. I apologize for the criminal negligence in punctuation and typos. Hit send accidentally before I could proof read.
@qwerty,
when the shithouse is burned to the ground,
some thirsty soul will linger about, hungry for a tale;
and I’ll be waiting, ready to ply my trade.