The Art and Artistry of Depravity
iView Author: Raghu (Huntsville, Alabama, U.S.A.)
Email: r.s.godavarthi [at] gmail.com
The Art and Artistry of Depravity
What is common to Dev D, Slumdog Millionaire, Watchmen, Wrestler and Delhi-6? Before you start combing film magazines to see if some unknown person worked on all these films, let me tell you. Read the title of this post. Depravity’s the answer. What is Depravity? The literal definition is moral degradation. So, what is moral? Is it just the last line of all those fables we read as kids? Is it something about wise old men sagely nodding their heads and agreeing or disagreeing to actions? Is it about God? Or is it about man? Ooofff… Too many questions… let’s see if there are answers. Abhishek Bachchan in Delhi-6 waxes about mirrors, Kala Bandar, and Uska Noor, and promptly gets beaten up. Hey, so did Jesus! Dev in Dev D drinks, chases skirts, nearly gets run over and finally gets a life and a (maybe) wife. Randy in Wrestler also drinks, chases skirts but gets nothing, except getting thrashed, loud applause and funny looks from Marisa Tomei. Jamal in Slumdog also gets thrashed and trashed all his life, but eventually gets rokda and chhokri. So is the point all about getting either money or love or the love/fear of God? Who is God? Doc Manhattan? The Driver of the car that nearly hit Dev? Irrfan? Marisa Tomei? Abhishek Bachchan? Amitabh Bachchan?
The answer is, obviously, it doesn’t matter. The not-so-obvious answer is – you choose your own god(s). It’s also ok if you don’t choose or care. There is always depravity in the human being, and consequently in human society and the ball of life rolls on. It’s a circus. You just are a spectator, maybe a bear or a lion. We are just blessed to have people like Kashyap, Arronofsky, Mehra, Boyle or Moore/Snyder to tell us, in so many scenes, that we live in Dystopia. And if there’s any location for Utopia it’s in the oases of this desert. There definitely are gods even within this dystopia, but they don’t come in the standard forms. We’re being introduced to the templates of the new gods by our friendly neighborhood movie makers. Now this isn’t to say that there haven’t been such templates before. Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, Radha in Mother India, Shakuntala in Water, Oskar Schindler in Schindler’s List, Mr. Davis in 12 Angry Men – the list is long and incredible. But the troublesome fact for me, is that of late we seem to be looking for god way too often by looking at the easiest reflection– depravity. By showing the protagonists to be depraved and deprived morally, economically or otherwise, our story-tellers are becoming Vishnu Sharmans of the 21st century. As Gurudutt asked us in Pyasa, and Kashyap reiterates in Gulaal, what indeed would you get if you conquered the whole world? Would you find god? You’d find the same depravity that drove the poet away in Pyaasa and the na'¯ve Dilip mad in Gulaal.
As in the Panchatantra, when four of your friends decide to use their powers to revive a dead lion from its ashes, you better go climb a tree and just watch the madness unfold. This, in a modern, magnified way, is the Middle-Class mentality. Should we really get off the comfortable, safe branch and step into the melee? No matter how angered we are by the injustice in the real and reel worlds, what ultimately defines us is our ability to find safety in chaos. As Mishraji writes and sings in Gulaal, it is the will of Krishna, the essence of the Gita that he alone who fights is great. But we who live in a country born of Gandhi’s Charkha rather than Krishna’s Chakra, will we ever fight? O ri duniya…..
Tags: Abhishek Bachchan, Amitabh Bachchan, Anurag Kashyap, Delhi 6, Dev D, Gulaal, Mother india, Schindler's list, Slumdog Millionaire, Watchmen, Wrestler
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
a very well written article.after a long time such a pleasant n satisfying reading. i agree with points u made.
Very fine pov-based film-writing, waiting for more(loved the new gods funda)
O ri duniya indeed.
More power to Depravity!
I don’t really get the connection with ‘depravity’
Depravity: badness of character, wickedness of mind or heart, absence of principles.
All the protagonists you have mentioned may not be perfect, but they are typically shown to be good people, at least deep down or when they lower their egos.
It is almost impossible to write a depraved lead character – without a principle worth fighting for there is no conflict and then no story.
I would consider Salo to be about depravity, and i wouldn’t compare that to any of the films listed here….
@ aman, tushar – glad u liked it.. promise to write more.
@ chris – i wasn’t driving the point that the protagonists are imperfect. I was driving at the growing acceptance that we live in Dystopia. The classical notion of Godhood entails seeking the higher, but by seeking the lowest, we are lowering the bar on what can be defined as Godhood.
Agreed on highlighted points, but isn’t the over-indulgence of depravity reflective of a fiercer desire to transcend the world of norms, god/godlessness, and an active search for an alternate principle (even as it is posited as futile)? The idea may not be as existential as waiting for godot in dystopia but rather directed at seeking cohesion of the self and the world through the active energy, albeit through the apparatus of despair, degeneracy and depravity.