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Simulation Today
The story
of Narcissus falling in love with his own image is perhaps the most critical
metaphor about human history. We are fascinated by ourselves; by the shared
humanity in others and us. We have placed ourselves at the center of our
universe by placing the questions of “Who am I? Where do I come from? Where
do I go?” at the center of philosophical inquiry. And we have usually
attempted answers in our favorite form: Anthropomorphic Story-telling.
Narcissism has consciously and sub-consciously, ruled human imagination and
driven artistic, intellectual, spiritual and technological developments
along its derived goal of immortality through duplication. The journey of
imagination, from the early cave paintings to the fabricated environments of
today, has been characterized by the desire to see ourselves as we are or as
we want to be and to achieve permanence for our own reflection, which a
mirror or even life does not afford. By virtue of its relative immortality,
the image becomes the thing it represents. Or semiotically speaking, the
sign becomes the signified.
This
phenomenon of the artificial representation becoming the represented real
has become an important study in the framework of Postmodernism. Modern
society is characterized by a newfound ability to control the world of
nature and worlds of illusion. People have the power to create their own
personal Utopias and thereby satisfy their innate narcissistic trait.
Imagine Narcissus with the power to make almost ‘real’ and live with the
image he fell in love with. In the ‘Age of Simulations’ power produces; it
produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth, which
people engage with and act out desires that are otherwise elusive to action
and experience.
Even
though the idea of Simulations is conceptually identified with Postmodern
theory, it has been one of the recurring and central motifs in the works of
many literary critics, cultural theorists and philosophers over time. This
is mainly because of its dubious character of being a falsehood that is true
to the truth. Philosophers have often deliberated upon the relationship
between emotions elicited by simulations and the responsibility of the mass
audience in reacting to these ‘false’ emotions: whether the audience gets
manipulated or is able to maintain the distinction between the real and the
artificial. Plato’s allegory of The Cave of Shadows and his grudge against
art being ‘thrice removed from The Real’ also stemmed from these concerns.
However, the concern today is compounded due to our situation in a
semiurgic economy of potent profit generating industrial complex, producing
simulations to contend with reality in the race for realism. Ultimately,
reality turns into a simulation making the difference indistinguishable.
Simulations depend on their quality of drawing in an audience into the
communicated content. There could be an immersion in the visual image
wherein the viewer gets absorbed into the projected imagery; physical
immersion in which we are actually inside the simulation; sensory immersion
in which we have the illusion we are inside the simulation (sometimes a
number of senses are played to at the same time); responsive simulations
which create a sense of interaction, participation or control. The most
important element is the psychological absorption in the story, the presence
of some kind of narrative or roughly coherent setting, which helps the
audience to find its place within the simulation and perhaps provide a
framework for cathartic closure. Today the complex interplay of these
different kinds of simulations in story-based representations like
role-playing games, amusement and fantasy parks and 4-d Cinema Houses
promise to dish out experiences ‘even better than the real thing’.
In
Role-playing games the participants assume the roles of characters and
collaboratively create stories. Children play many games where they create a
setup with props, rules and characters and perform within that setup. They
may be in a house or a dispensary or even a mock-business. This fascination
for vicariously living out characters remote to one’s own life and reality,
is also what makes role-playing video games work. They try and incorporate
more and more comprehensive storylines to engage players emotionally while
giving them the power to manipulate events and consequences. The
introduction to a popular video game starts like this:
“You are
Cloud Strife, a renegade with memories of a dark past. As a former member of
the military group Soldier you have turned to fight alongside a resistance
movement ...”
The
exciting story and the direct address immediately makes the player the
character. The latest trends in games are evolving to put the
‘player-character’ in the middle of life’s mundane routines. The Sims is a
‘strategic life simulation computer game’. It does not involve a time-bound
competitive goal but puts the player in control of ‘lives’ of virtual people
which includes sleeping, cooking, bathing, shopping, socializing and even
courting. Will Wright, the game's designer, likes to refer to it as a
"digital dollhouse." Thus making it a simulation of a simulation.
Online
games like SecondLife.com have taken this concept a step further by
providing different players (usually from different parts of the world) with
virtual space and personas to come together and interact:
“There is
a world of busy cities, beautiful tropical islands, dense forests and
mysterious deserts. You can lead an Earth-like existence there. Only, it
resides on the Internet”
SecondLife.com is exactly that: an alternative existence where you can
choose to have a bull’s head instead of a ‘humanoid’ one, exhibit your art,
choose a virtual career, marry other users while being involved in a real
world relationship. You can also hire a virtual detective to spy on your
virtual spouse and check if they are cheating on you. There is also a
confinement cell for transgressors of general decorum. The difference
between ‘The Sims’ and these online games is that while in the former you
are interacting with preset character modules, the latter involves other
player-characters compounding the game dynamics with heightened
life-likeness
The
spatial challenge involved in transcending the barrier between the screen
and character-players disappears when all the senses are treated with false
stimuli in fabricated environments. Amusement and Fantasy parks are pioneers
in creating these multiple microcosms that promise realization of some of
our fantastic parallel existences, an Instant-Mix for far-off intangible
existence and landscapes brought to the doorstep of the busy consumer.
A
representative example is the ‘Honey, I shrunk the Audience’ ride. It takes
off from the movie ‘Honey I shrunk the kids’ where Professor Wayne Szalinski
has shrunk the audience in an experiment gone wrong. What follows are
enlarged 3-D images of a dog, python and duck which make the audience feel
‘shrunk’. But it is a 4-D ride which means coordinating other sensory
effects along with the visuals to ‘make you feel what you are watching’. So
it has movable seats, mist sprays, air jets and rubber tubing to simulate
effects such as shrinking, air, rain, crawling mice etc. This ride not only
dissolves the physical distance between the player and the simulation but
also creates another physical illusion of ones own reduced size. Another
ride at the Universal Studio that mutates the limits of time is ‘Back to the
Future’. Even far-off places don’t seem to be far off in realistic
recreations of natural environments.
An
example is the Lied Jungle
“The Lied
Jungle was the Omaha Zoo's first total immersion exhibit. Guests see, touch,
smell, hear and become part of the natural rainforest environment … All
man-made amenities are blended with live plants and animals to almost make
the difference unidentifiable… Mechanical devices not native to a jungle,
such as air ducts, filters and light fixtures, are hidden in the walls and
rocks.”
This
description from the Zoo’s official website reinforces and checks the
reality quotient at the same time. While the makers take pride in the level
of naturalistic accuracy, they continue to maintain that it is after-all a
simulation, a ‘Lied’ landscape. This is quite the playing out of the
Descartesian premise that the world perceived through our senses cannot be
trusted and only our faculty of thinking provides evidential reliability.
The audience continues to remain aware of their suspension of disbelief.
However as one starts getting into the realm of the Hyperreal this awareness
also starts to blur.
Hyperrealist paintings are an example of highly deceptive simulations. They
try to achieve acute likeness to photographic images. So much so, that they
incorporate photography glitches like blurs, flashes, distortions etc. This
painting is called “after Klein”, acrylic on canvas by Frank Egloff:
Hyperrealists consider photographs to be a simulacrum, a representation of a
captured instance. They use it to build a representation of a representation
of reality.
The
serial art of artistes like Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol involves
increasingly continuous simulations. They revisit their own works not in an
attempt of improvement, but simply as a self-reflexive gesture of the
illimitability and scope for perpetual reproduction. The Warhol prints of
Last Supper and Mona Lisa, for example, are self-referent in their notions
of repetition and reproduction. Gerhard Richter ‘serialized’ a picture by
passing it through four techniques of reproduction respectively –
photography, oil painting, photography and offset print.
The
iconization of one simulation through the medium of another, reproducible ad
infinitum, is an exercise in the destruction of the ‘Aura of the Original’.
It suggests that there are always more images beyond the frame.
Hyperrealist fiction is similarly misleading in its appearance. The
pseudo-essays of Borges used the non-fiction form of essay to communicate
its fiction. The film ‘Blairwitch Project’ employed the documentary look
which is generally associated with objective documentation of reality. The
result was that many people came out thinking ‘it really happened’. This
identifying of reality with a simulacrum is also seen when contemporary
films like ‘Catch me if you can’ evoke the depicted era by trying to achieve
the same Eastman tinge and look seen in films of that era, supplemented
similarly by music and fashion. The reason for this phenomenon can again be
attributed to the fact that we have access only to images of the past and
not the past itself.
Hyperrealist art could become a model for the way reality can be manipulated
to seem what its not. The awareness of a simulation being a false reality
starts dissipating gradually with unrelenting pervasiveness of images: when
you see something for long enough you end up believing that it’s been around
forever. What was true about Fascist Propaganda before World War II has
ironically manifested itself in the way Corporations manage to seduce the
public with images of shiny superficiality and their subliminal presence.
This is also the thrust of Adorno and Horkheimer’s postulation about the
‘Culture Industry’ which is responsible for ‘comfortably numbing’ the minds
of consumers who become addicted to the pleasure of immediate and momentary
gratification. This allows them to operate in a pseudo democratic set up
where consumers cannot transgress the limit of provided choices, with
alternative choices systematically eliminated or blocked out of view.
Over the
years corporations like Disney, McDonalds, Time-Warner etc have grown to
claim a large share in the semiurgic economy. They produce films,
merchandise, resorts, food and other image propagating enterprises that have
imprinted their presence in public memory all over the world. This
propagation is marked by standardization, stereotype and conservatism and
according to Marcuse it indoctrinates and manipulates to promote a false
consciousness, immune against its own falsehood.
However,
Marx has described culture itself as a creation of subjective reality by the
individual. It is therefore a fiction created by us to immerse ourselves in.
Indeed even the origins of religion can be traced to idols, puppet-like
masks and cave-paintings that formed part of the magical rituals of ancient
men living in caves. To illustrate this further we can examine Frye’s view
that "At the level of ordinary consciousness the
individual man is the center of everything, surrounded on all sides by what
he isn't. At the level of practical sense, or civilization, there's a human
circumference, a little cultivated world with a human shape.. But in the
imagination anything goes that can be imagined, and the limit of the
imagination is a totally human world."
Thus,
according to Frye we are confronted with an ‘inhuman’ world and our response
is reconstructing our physical environment to make it more facilitative to
our needs. We build roads, farms, cities, etc. Traffic regulation rules,
governance hierarchies, language and other social institutions can be
identified as contractual simulations accepted for their functionality. In
conclusion, it would not be wrong to say that simulations are inextricably
linked to the human mind, becoming projections and potential realities for
the same.
The point
is that simulations lie on the continuum of real and artificial which are so
seamlessly connected that it is not possible to identify where one ends and
another begins. A life stripped of all simulations would be meaningless.
Perhaps this is the central dilemma of existence, as also identified by
Nihilism: To be or not to be is the same thing.
- Khushboo Ranka
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Mumbai and Me
Every
Megapolis is like and unlike every other. They have the same kind of modern
histories and the same kind of recurring histories. Heavy industrial growth,
labour strikes, student revolts, urban pull, immigrations, displacements,
mega shutdowns, multiple languages, social diversities, dramatic economic
inequalities, art produced for mass consumption, underground art movements
reacting to the mainstream, cultural fusions, (a comparatively more) liberal
citizenry, infinite choices, the illusion of infinite choices, cruel pace, corporatisation, monoculturisation, simultaneous existence of many utopias
and many dystopias, terrorism paranoia and the need to move on, no matter
what. Having been born and brought up in a city makes it impossible to
objectively determine how the city influences your work – because the answer
is that it does in every single way. The city breathes in my work and is
inseparable from it.
A local
self appointed “social worker” offers any help I might require for my film
“legal or illegal”. A senior cop helps me shoot my film in a public place
and in return, he demands that I listen to his screenplay about police
encounters, where he suggests that his auto-biographical character be played
by the Bollywood star Nana Patekar. Another Bollywood influenced cabbie
discuses philosophy with me and surprises me with his grasp of concepts. A
man meets me on the steps of a building and we spend four years building an
alternative theatre movement together. A friend leaves his job at MIT to
fight against Enron in India, almost successfully for four long years of
frustration, pressure and threat calls; broke, founds a software company,
gets wrongly sued by an American company for a random figure of a billion
dollars. A friend of a friend wins a case at the Supreme Court and gets the
government release his anti-government film on National Television and even
gets them to pay for it.
Everybody
carries a story and every story changes yours. Because of the sheer number
of trajectories, it is impossible to trace back the line of causality. The
butterfly effect in a city like Mumbai has its very own karmic complexity.
In my first film, a young man in his haste to go out, shouts at his mother
and appreciates his brother’s painting, setting off two cycles of hate and
love that pass from one character to another in a domino effect, eventually
both affecting his own life. In another story, a man learns from his wife
the recipe of a chocolate pudding, which he requests to be engraved on his
tombstone after having safeguarded it all his life, a chef reads the recipe,
makes the pudding for a guest, the guest gives the pudding away to a poor
kid, who finds will to draw that night and gets picked up by an art curator
driving past. The two films are highly simplified versions of my concept of
karmic causality. The city is constantly giving the answers and I am trying
to get my questions right.
The
questions of philosophy rose by children that even scholars fail to answer.
The city incessantly confronts me with ethical, epistemological and
aesthetic problems that I can only begin to understand by laying them out in
my work. The great fifteenth century Indian poet Kabeer used to stand amidst
the town market and mock it. Zen master Kakuan’s tenth bull depicts a master
with his wine bottle in the market. In my more reclusive teenage days I used
to fancy myself to be Kabeer or Kakuan, living in the heart of this market
of a city, and yet, blessed with objectivity. Renunciation has often been,
for me, a reaction to fulfillment. Besides the problem of the ownership of
responsibility in an interwoven causality, renunciation has been a central
philosophical problem in most of my work.
“On
getting shot at,
The first
one cried “Rama”
The
second one cried “Mao”
The third
one cried “Potato”
The
postmortem report informs that the first two had their bellies full.”
This
small piece by one of my most favourite Hindi poets Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena
reflects the lack of a strong collective introspection in India. It becomes,
for me, the defining problem of art in Mumbai. When all production is
intended to meet the basic needs, all intellectual problems become
secondary. Any civilization needs the “potato” in place before it can hope
to start wondering about the more abstract problems of life. The central
epitome of art for mass consumption in India – Bollywood – is this potato.
For me, it’s impossible to think of the culture of Mumbai and not think of
Bollywood.
Like most
of my peers, I have been brought up on an overdose of Bollywood. My mother
and my grandmother are hardcore theatre, pop literature and cinema buffs. My
grandmother had even led a campaign against a writer of a weekly magazine
fiction series for having shuffled off the protagonist's mortal coil. The
campaign came full circle when a trash, but highly popular soap opera I
wrote became front page news – a fan allegedly got a heart attack after
watching an episode where the protagonist of the show was killed. In both
the cases, of course, the characters had to be brought back to amnesic life
following an overwhelming public demand.
India is
probably the only country in which even the most serious newspapers carry
entertainment news so often on the front page. We are a people defined by
our need to be entertained – the need to have a song for every possible
emotion and idea, and the need to dance, though quite unlike in the Indian
films. When a friend from Vancouver visited me in Mumbai, she was actually
surprised that Indians do not break out in song and dance routines like they
do in Bollywood musicals all the time. The kitsch mindlessness and ridicule
inviting naivety of Hindi mainstream cinema maybe a thing of novelty for the
West, but Mumbaikars take their cinema to the heart. So did I, and everyone
I knew, as a kid.
My mother
had given a local tailor some canvas to stitch three bags for us. I was
eight and went along with her to get the bags. The tailor said that he had
run out of canvas after making two bags. My mother flared up, searched his
home and found a schoolbag he had made for his daughter from our canvas. She
tore it up and demanded that he stitch a bag for us from it. I was very sad
to see her like this. I recalled film after film where the evil landlord
humiliates the poor farmer, whose only “sin” is his poverty. Back home, I
confronted my mom, and she gave me my first anti-film analysis. My voluntary
suspension of disbelief had been challenged and I understood that things are
always much more complex than Amitabh Bacchan insists they are.
Indian
mainstream cinema is largely commendable for its secularism and its role in
nation building. Most Indian names have meanings and it doesn’t take much
time to determine one’s religion-creed-caste from one’s name. So, all the
big villains of all the big productions had absurd names, not only giving
them an edge, but also making it impossible to bracket them in a race or a
faith. Other villains were always rich landlords or corporate giants
exploiting the poor. Though it was always through the characters of the
sidekicks that cumulative effect of political events were communicated in
these films.
I was
four when the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was shot down by her Sikh
bodyguards in retaliation to her Operation Blue Star. I learnt that Sikhs
were people with turbans and beards. That was my first taste of social
prejudice and paranoia. Obviously nobody cared to explain to me the politics
of the situation at that age. That it was the Sikh community that was being
targeted and systematically victimized, and there was no reason to be scared
of those large friendly men with turbans and beards, who drove cabs in
Mumbai. I remember how I would ask my mom to take public transport instead
of taking a cab when she would leave for work everyday. Thousands of
innocent Sikhs were massacred post Indira Gandhi’s death in Delhi and other
Northern cities. Mumbai remained unaffected, but not untouched. I got my
first nightmares of riots, that later recurred throughout my life, 1993-94
bringing the scariest nightmares following the infernal riots between Hindu
and Muslim communities in Mumbai.
People of
Mumbai are not very good archivists. There is only one museum in the city,
made invisible to public by a somebody-else’s-problem-shield. There are no
art galleries with permanent exhibitions of any masterworks. No community
libraries – no memorials to musicians – sculptures by modern artistes in
public places are rare ever to be spotted. But turn any corner, and there
are Bollywood memorials all over the place – dingy theatres, seedy film
posters, struggling actors, parents wanting to see their kids on the screen.
History is polished, simplified, ugly parts dramatized, uglier parts
removed, accidental heroes glorified into legends, and preserved on
celluloid in my city. The general idea is, “Who has ever learnt anything
from history, so why try?”
Once
everything about this city – from poor living conditions to badly sanitized
hospitals with no slopes and lifts for the disabled – frustrated me to a
state of acute depression. Surrounded with so much cruel irony, I have
somehow learnt to see humour in it. I write very few stories and make fewer
films. I spend most of time meeting people, traveling aimlessly through the
city, sharing stories, ideas, music and art. The sheer absurdity of everyday
violence of Mumbai has begun to become perversely amusing.
I have
simply learnt to dodge bullets now. I get a call from a television producer
offering me a show. The money is tempting – enough to buy myself an FCP
Studio setup within a month. If I end up putting two years of my life into
it, it can even buy me a good house, a car and a good HD camera. Confronted
with this choice every time, I am not sure what it is that gives me the
strength to make the difficult choice of turning it down. In my more
romantic hours, I fancy it’s some internal integrity, yet unharmed by my
spoilt urban needs. I know still it’s just a default decision, a survival
instinct of sorts that pushes me to total inaction instead of compromised
economic activity. Rather choose freedom and poverty over having to deal day
after day with myopic television executives, giving portions of my life to
the collective dream of McDonaldising and Walmartising India. Ideas resonate
in my head. House slave versus field slave. The brown man who pulled the
trigger for a meager pay from the East India Co. I am not actively
political, but I definitely have no intention to help Reliance sell more
crappy services to the unsuspecting kid in Jaunpur. So I politely refuse.
Now, I find it difficult to get back to a story I was writing about a vegan
animal rights activist confronted with the only option of taking medication
tested violently on animals. I check a listings magazine to see if there’s
any festival on and I take off to see a documentary about the subconscious
art of graffiti removal.
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The
Cheeky Guide to Instant Art-House Success
Prologue
“All Artists are willing to suffer for their work. But why
are so few prepared to learn how to Draw?”
– Banksy
This essay is long.
It’s highly opinioned.
It even has opinions about itself.
It’s arrogant, irreverent and generally sarcastic.
It aims to be an academic essay, but can’t be, because of the
cheek.
So it aims to be cheeky.
It also aims to reason, but sometimes just runs out of
patience and infers.
This prologue falls a little short of being a disclaimer.
The article is alternatively named – The Clichés of What We
Know as World Cinema and of Scholarly Film Criticism and Look, I’m So Cool.
Chapter One – The Art House Cliché
“Where are the snake charmers? Where are the elephants?”
“In the zoos. Where do you keep them in
London?”
- Bombay
Boys
Every niche has its own cliché – it’s the stereotype that
keeps the niche alive and commercially viable for artistes to cater to. So
whether you are into filmmaking or film studies, you do need to acknowledge
the existence of this stereotype and choose whether or not cater to it at
some level. That is not to say fresh grounds cannot be broken – but to
accept that it’s a phenomenon that meets any success much rarer than we’d
like to imagine.
After all, how many Iranian films have you seen that are
about the urban Tehranian elite and their problems – as against films about
vulnerable, poor and golden hearted villagers, small-towners, and people of
the working class and those living on the brink of or below the poverty
line? How many Mexican or Brazilian films have you seen that are not about
poor kids, repressed youth, and suppression induced crime and are not
entirely or partly based in favelas? How many African films have you seen
that are not about labour exploitation, AIDS, drug abuse, riots, crime,
repressed tribes and are not entirely or partly based in Kibera? How many
Eastern European films can you remember that are not about political or
religious ideology or the fragmented / alienated lives of low income groups
in a conspicuously war-ridden / post-war / communist / post-communist
society?
The answer, with a few groundbreaking exceptions is
generally, NONE. If there was ever a world cinema match-the-column it won’t
take any self respecting cinema lover longer than it takes to say
mise-en-scène to connect
Palestine
and Israel with the subject of Suicide Bombers and Religious / Political
Introspection.
That’s not to say that other classes, types of people,
cultures and their issues do not exist in these societies, nor does it mean
that good films exploring these “other” subjects are not made. What it means
is that Western
Europe and the US
are not very interested in them (an alliance that pretty much rules our
imagination). All pragmatic observation clearly points to one plain fact –
when it comes to the “rest-of-the-developing-world”, the West is more than
mostly interested in its poor – not a real-life interest as much as the
curious interest in an amusing hunger artist (an interest, it invariably and
ironically, manages to rub off on the rest-of-the-world). The reason behind
this fascination is an entirely separate branch of philosophical
anthropology or world history (the latter largely concerns itself with
invasion, imperialism, guilt and lot of QT-style blood and gore).
We’d rather limit our examination to the recipe of instant
international recognition and arthouse success. You’ll find in the following
chapters the right ingredients and tried and tested readymixes with
straightforward microwave usage instructions.
Chapter Two – The Art of Flattery
“Sir, we have a
Broken Arrow situation”…
“I don’t know what’s scarier, losing a nuclear weapon or that it happens so
often there’s actually a term for it.”
- Broken Arrow
Human condition, generational conflict, minimalism,
anti-plot, loss of innocence, doppelganger and identity, non-linear
narrative, multi-perspective, alternative realities, collective amnesia,
social schizophrenia – the very fact that these terms exist, bears witness
to the fact that these themes and forms have been observed so often in films
that there is a need to categorically define them.
Every time an academician invents a new term, a new
phenomenon comes to existence, the same way a disease taking lives for
generations only comes into existence only upon laboratory classification.
Multiple observation and definition thereby makes the world of unknown
suddenly accessible, understandable and therefore, manageable and no longer
scary. Corollarilly, it implies that the more lexis you flex (themes,
categories, genres, imagery, memes, theories, phenomena, allusions and
generally interesting sounding adjectives in English language), the easier
it is for you to pass off as a serious film scholar, without having to spend
thousands of dollars at NYU or change your last name to Bazin.
After noticing an obvious lack of anything remotely
interesting in a clearly over-celebrated film (IMDB > 7.5 / Rottentomatoes
meter > 80% / Top 100 Lists / Golden Palm, Lion, Ape / Film School cult /
Master Director’s new work / Acclaimed masterpiece - in its ascending order
of peer pressure), you might sometimes find the honesty and instant
enlightenment to see through the film’s bluff and call it so.
Sometimes, however, you might just be too scared to be honest
or too unsure or both, and left with only one option – to lie – for all you
know, you are just a part of the emperor’s vast audience and they’ve all
sung songs about his new invisible-to-others clothes. So you won’t be able
to get away by just lying and calling it “awesome”, oh no. You’ll have to
talk about its visual poetry; hunt for three shot sets of sequences to call
them haikus or compare its broken imagery to the poetry of T S Elliot, look
up the net to find if the acting style is Noh or Kabuki, neo-realist or if
it has roots in the French revolution. Is the form Brechtian? Goethian?
Kafkaesque? Self-reflexive? Is it structured like a fugue? Or simply go for
extremely generic and cool sounding infallible terms like “meditative” and
“introspective”. You might want to talk about the myopia induced by social
alienation in a post-war / post-industrialisation urban setup.
You’ll have to intimidate your readers / friends into
believing that what they saw as illogical, stupid, regressive, pointless, or
out rightly boring is actually the deeply self analytical nature of this
redemptive deconstructive examination of the human condition.
Here’s a cookbook of some readymade phrases that you can
freely plagiarise in your critiques, using a little common sense and a
little Wikipedia –
Urban dystopia, social collective memory versus individual
perception and the fickleness of both, loss of innocence and alienation,
toll of war and isolation, poetic imagery, human frailty, soulful
examination, moral code, ethereal atmosphere, eviscerating intensity,
understated beauty, profound insight, impossible to describe with words,
intimate, intensely personal film on the process of healing and catharsis,
dark comedy about obsession, revenge, redemptive drama, replete with subtle
irony, cerebral and not corporal, poignant and heartbreaking portrait,
haunting exploration of, paradoxical, self-reflexive, profoundly moving
testament, allegorical, metaphorical, momentary abstraction, hyperbolic
character study, chiaroscuro, mise-en-scene, montage, catharsis,
doppelganger, dénouement, intelligent, comprehensive, deconstructive,
postmodern, idiosyncratic, magical realism, collective amnesia, articulate,
fluid, lucent, illuminating critical evaluation, contemplative introspection
of the subversive, transgressive, confrontational, and provocative…
You won’t be surprised when people will start noticing things
that even the makers failed to.
Chapter Three – The Choices
“There are only two or three human stories, and they go on
repeating themselves as fiercely as if they have never happened before.”
- Willa Cather
And so do camera angles, montage techniques, narrative forms,
acting styles, etc. Innovation is the most abused term in the English
language after love. Conformation is often mistaken as innovation –
conformation to the norms of alternative, independent or high art so that
the elite audiences of these arts can easily decode it and appreciate it and
pride themselves for being among the very few connoisseurs with the ability
to do so.
Yet every once in a while a filmmaker writes in a handwriting
so refreshing that it feels like a new language that we can immediately
speak. Yes, reinvention is always possible. The same overused themes are
revisited with such brilliance of craft and mastery of art that your
temporary suspension of disbelief threatens to take over your permanent
world view – and sometimes it does! Unfortunately, genius is an item number
played not to often. Found often is a code of symbols taught by artistes
over years, till the audiences no longer require the babel fish of an
analyst in their ear for comprehension. Code becomes language and a pattern
emerges…
Themes
Repression, suppression, exploitation, poverty, violence,
handicap, the human condition; loss of innocence, the toll of war, the
holocaust, the apartheid, communist censorship; memory, perception, illusion
v/s reality, amnesia, schizophrenia; alienation, isolation, ennui;
generational conflict, renewal, fate, chance, co-incidence, redemption and
religious fundamentalism.
Subjects
Terrorists with histories, the spirited otherly abled,
incest, child abuse, dysfunctional families, racism, immigrants, displaced
peoples, depression, lots of pointless sex shot extremely naturally and
casually, criminals produced by social forces, suppressed poor with golden
hearts and nowhere to escape, the alienated, urban dystopias, the choice of
one’s sexuality, schizophrenia, amnesia, dreams, an artiste’s introspection,
identity and identity crisis, teenage confusion, teenage angst, Nazism and
the holocaust, aprtheid, riots, the two world wars, wars, tryst with death,
the chaos theory, generational conflict, religious motifs, religious
allusions and imperialism.
The
Script
No or very little dialogue, Non-linear narrative,
Multi-plots, Multi-narrator narratives, Flashbacks and flashforwards,
Self-reflexivity, Ambiguous endings, Extremely cynical endings, Multiple /
alternative endings, Obvious irony, Parallels – characters and stories,
Stream of consciousness, Uninhibited use of expletives, Film within film,
Delusions – dreams, hallucinations and lies, Pretentious poetry, Ponderous
absurd dialogue, Random conversation, Alternative possibilities…
Cinematography & Editing
Shot in black and white; high contrasts; obvious colour
tints; story specific colour tints in case of multi-plots, low key lighting,
long deliberately boring shots with nothing happening for a long time;
tracking shots of the character just walking, long pans / POV revolving pans
encompassing all elements of the environment in the shot – the wilderness,
the empty spaces, the concrete jungles, etc. – sometimes, before finally
making the character enter his / her own POV; long mildly smoky close-ups;
jump cuts, montage sequences, time lapse sequences, visual metaphors…
Acting
Deliberately underplayed poignant expressions; Lots of
pregnant pauses; Exchanges of meaningful looks between characters;
Meaningful looks used as a device to get rid of dialogue; Exaggerated
theatre forms with roots in exotic regional cultures; Bad acting covered up
by calling it a deliberate experiment…
Casting and make-up
Weirdly handsome men; Unconventionally beautiful women; High
cheekbones; A mild stubble; Deliberate uglyfying of otherwise beautiful
people with make-up.
One can go on and find many such repeated motifs in other
aspects of films as well – for example, the other day when I was watching a
film about suicide bombers with my friends, we unanimously predicted that
the blast in the end will be depicted with an abrupt silence and a blank
screen – and eureka! It did!
Chapter Four – The Four Varnas
“Mera naam Phoolan hai, bhenchod! (My name is Phoolan,
sister-fucker!)”
– Bandit Queen
There are four broad subject categories (The Divided, The
Downtrodden, the Divine and Bollywood) for Indian films that will definitely
receive a Western nod:
The Downtrodden: The mother of all clichés – the Holy
Grail of the Indian arthouse export – the staple diet of world cinema –
infallible, if politically correct and emotionally manipulative enough, its
success resting in the extremely perverted human need to feel sorry! Social
repression, abject poverty, drug abuse, exploitation, reaction, low income
groups, the handicapped, slum dwellers, orphans, sex workers, child labour,
child abuse victims, people living below the poverty line, criminals
produced by social forces, repressed castes, repressed sexualities, eunuchs,
rape victims, the marginalized, the under privileged, the suppressed, the
ultimate underdog. – some examples – Salaam Bombay, Bandit Queen, Water,
Fire, Dharavi, Meghe Dhaka Taara, Bhavni Bhavai, Ankur.
The Divided: Religious fundamentalism, social
division, partition, riots, class politics, terrorism, racism, casteism,
victims of the state, social reform activism, religious orthodoxy v/s
spiritual renewal. A sub-category of this genre works very well among the
Indian arthouse audiences, but not as much abroad – Political divisions
–Corruption v/s integrity, idealism v/s reality, communism v/s state
supported capitalist forces, labour v/s factory owners, etc. – some examples
– Khamosh Paani (Pakistan), Train to Pakistan, Drohkaal, The Terrorist,
Parzania, Fire, Black Friday.
The Divine: Spiritual exotica (and erotica) and
cultural Exotica – Kamasutra, Khajuraho, Himalayas, Dharmashala, Ladakh,
yoga, kumbh melas, colourful melas, karma, reincarnation, Krishna, Buddha,
Shiva, ritualistic theatre, the old order, mythological renderings, kitsch
art (truck art, firecracker package art, matchbox art), folk music,
rajasthani deserts, benares, the Ganges, spiritual journeys – Siddhartha,
Kamasutra, The Warrior (UK), Samsara, Utsav, Himalayas, Ayurveda.
Bollywood: Bollywood as we understand it and as the
West perceives it are two different things. It’s the amusement from the
entirely brainless and the novelty of the entirely pointless, out right
stupid and yet, so uninhibited and celebrative, that fascinates them. Smart
Indians have cashed on the kitschy fad and made the song and dance routine
more accessible to the West – either by spoofing or referring. Eg. Slumdog
Millionaire, Monsoon
Wedding, Bollywood Hollywood, Bend it Like Beckham, Bride and Prejudice,
Bombay Boys, Bollywood Calling.
Dénouement
“Everything in this book could be wrong.”
– Richard Bach
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The
Man Who Flew Too Much - Part I
Here's the first part of the first draft of a video essay I am setting
out to make. It's a 90 minute performance piece. The actor goes into a
fit of uncontrollable rambling and subject hopping...
All of us, at some point, share the universal feeling of feeling thirsty
and wanting to pee at the same time. I wonder why the internal parts of
this body mechanism can’t settle it amidst themselves. One part wants
water and the other wants to flush it out. And how about feeling thirsty
when chlorinated water adamantly stays stuck in your ears after having
taken a dip in the pool? That itself should be proof enough that there
is no God. Natural
selection
is still constantly learning at a fast pace of one lesson per billion
years. At what point, I wonder, natural selection chose to perceive
images through light-reflection over echolocation.
It’s interesting to imagine that bats actually “visualise” through
echolocation… they do not approximate… they “see” through sound. Colours
and shapes are just codes corresponding to wave lengths of light and
trajectories of reflection. A wavelength
of 400 nm
is seen as violet by the mind and a wavelength of 650 nm seen as red.
Similarly, colours can be encoding wavelengths of sound in bats. Did the
route of natural selection that eventually led to homo-sapiens ever come
across the migratory birds’ ability to perceive earth’s magnetic field
to stay their course during long flights. The birds perceive the earth’s
magnetic fields as bands of colours. But besides natural selection,
there is genetic drift to account for as well. It has been discovered
that in the brains of the blind, the visual cortex has not become
useless, as they once believed. When blind people use another sense --
touch or hearing, for example -- to substitute for sight, the brain's
visual cortex becomes active, even though no images reach it from the
optic nerve. Echolocation creates its own images. There are examples of Daniel
Kish and Ben
Underwood,
both blind, who use echoes of sounds to navigate through the world. Kish leads
other blind people on mountain biking tours and hikes in the wilderness,
visualizing and describing the picturesque sights around him through
echolocating. And there are people like Ingrid Carey who have a rare
neurological condition called synesthesia,
allowing them to actually feel colours. She tastes, hears and smells
colours. Numbers and letters, sensations and emotions, days and months
are all associated with colors for Carey. Number 2 for her is green and
orange is her colour of pain. It is believed that the migratory birds
have this neurological ability as well. The birds that look dull to us
might have a plumage radiant of near ultra-violet, or a skin texture
reflecting sound in a certain unique way associated to a certain radiant
colour that the female of their species can get attracted to. That takes
me to another fundamental question. The perception of pleasure and pain.
Why are some things perceived by the brain as pleasure and some
perceived otherwise? Is pleasure an in built incentive for a life form
to aid survival, continuation and evolution? Common observation shows us
that food and sex provide maximum pleasure for most people. Evolution
doesn’t necessarily always promote or guarantee adaptation or survival.
For instance, when nutrients run low, individual myxobacteria (slime
bacteria) may come together to form a fruiting body to produce spores.
Lab studies have shown that cheating myxobacteria that only produce
spores and never help form the non-spore producing parts of the fruiting
body can drive populations to extinction. Humans can choose not to
reproduce and thus eliminate their genes from the gene pool. The notion
that human brain is fittest for survival turns around with the emotional
complexity that comes along with an evolved brain. One can argue that
the human choice of not reproducing can still be aiding the survival and
continuation of life on the planet, after all. This could also be one of
the explanations of acts of charity where an individual puts social and
collective interest over self interest. Why doesn’t evolution discourage suicide?
I wonder if any animals apart from human beings commit suicide. Suicide
should be defined as a premeditated anticipated act of self destruction.
Dogs are known to starve themselves to death on separation from their
loved ones. Scorpions are known to do anomalous action of biting itself
to death in very high temperatures. Soldier sterile termites blow
themselves up so the enemies get stuck in their goo. Stinger bees die of
the injury from stinger amputation that happens after they sting. Are
these animals aware of the ultimate effect of their actions? I think
not. “There is only one true philosophical problem, and that is
suicide.” That was Camus. It has inspired me to give a lot of thought to
suicide, aging, death, evolution and pain. Back to my original question.
Why are pink and
sky blue such
pleasant colours for children? Is it social conditioning or a rather
“purer” physical attraction? How does a radiant plumage on the head of
the male bird translate as better genetic condition and better
opportunity of survival and reproduction in the brain of the female
bird? In humans, the plumage is replaced by Prada.
I had once worked for an idea company. It was a company that sourced
ideas from all over, patented them for the creator, pitched the ideas
and profited from the commissions earned from realised ideas. My idea
was software for cellphones. You fill up an exhaustive form asking you
all sorts of questions about yourself when you buy the software. It’s a
really long questionnaire and it would take you at least a couple of
hours to fill it up. You are questioned about everything from your
political inklings to your favourite authors to your tastes and ideas.
This information is encoded and installed in your phone software, that
is linked to the universal server. Now each time you cross somebody
sharing your interests or ideas or having interests in allied
disciplines, both your phones beep and the shared connections are
highlighted on your phone. The software ensures that you don’t cross
your potential “soulmate” at a mall or on a plane and lose the
opportunity. It can act as a great ice breaker. “Oh, you like Borges? I
love Marquez.” Or
“Oh, you are a trolley driver? I am a philosopher. I have a problem for
you.” Or “So, you are schizophrenic, eh? Sad. Have you always been a
large rabbit?” What is with rabbits and schizophrenia? Look at Harvey, Alice in
Wonderland… In Watership Down, rabbits can count up to four and anything
more than four is too many for a rabbit. Is it true that rabbits fuck a
lot?
Car honks are shrieks of frustration, it’s a demonstration of
masculinity and speeding is a call for mating. Why is it that young
people speed and the elderly drive slowly? The elderly don’t have much
time left on their hands, so they should be speeding. Cops should have
an age detector with their radars… they see a car crossing the speed
limit, they should be able to go, “oh, but she is an old granny, she
doesn’t have much time left now, does she?” Slowing down a granny is
like giving an ambulance a speeding ticket. Zeno argues
that motion unexists. He gives us the Achilles’ paradox. Achilles, ten
times faster than the turtle challenges the turtle to a running race.
And the turtle is like, “what’s the point dude, you are ten times faster
than me… it’s obvious you are going to win, go play with an equal!” So
Achilles makes him an offer he can’t refuse. He gives the turtle a head
start of 100 meters in the 120 meters race. He starts running when the
turtle is already at 100 meters. By the time he crosses the 100 meters,
the turtle has gone ahead by 10 meters. When Achilles crosses those 10
meters, the turtle has gone further ahead by a meter. Achilles crosses
the meter and the turtle is now ahead by 10 cms. Achilles 10 cms, turtle
ahead by a cm, A crosses 1 cm, turtle ahead by a mm, A crosses the mm,
the turtle is ahead by 0.1 mm, A crosses 0.1, T is ahead by 0.01… so on
and so forth. Achilles shall never be able to overtake the turtle.
Though by definition, it’s a trick paradox… Achilles should be happily
overtaking the turtle at 111.11111 metres in the race… There is a modern
variation of Zeno’s paradox… Thomson’s Lamp… Consider a lamp with a
toggle switch. Flicking the switch once turns the lamp on. Another flick
will turn the lamp off. Now suppose a being able to perform the
following task: starting a timer, he turns the lamp on. At the end of
one minute, he turns it off. At the end of another half minute, he turns
it on again. At the end of another quarter of a minute, he turns it off.
At the next eighth of a minute, he turns it on again, and he continues
thus, flicking the switch each time after waiting exactly one-half the
time he waited before flicking it previously. The cumulative sum of all
these progressively smaller times is exactly two minutes. The following
questions are then considered: Is the lamp on or off after exactly two
minutes? Is the lamp switch on or off after exactly two minutes? Would
it make any difference if the lamp had started out being on, instead of
off? Or a more existential question like would it make any difference at
all if you figured this out, if there wasn’t a switch to flick, if there
wasn’t a lamp or if there wasn’t a you? It’ll be naïve to limit the
theoretical paradox by a physical imposition like the speed of light or
the time it takes for one to toggle the switch. One of the interesting
problems of the infinite is at what point does finite become infinite.
Galileo put infinity in a funny way. "Though most numbers are not
squares, there are no more numbers than squares." At what point does the
explicable become the absurd? The strict parameters of vagueness. The
ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned
had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians for centuries, for
they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and
stronger timber in their place. The ship was replaced part by part over
the centuries. The logical question that arises now is whether it’s
still the Theseus’ Ship or is it a new ship? John Locke (a 17th Century
English writer) proposed a scenario regarding a favorite sock that
develops a hole. He pondered whether the sock would still be the same
after a patch was applied to the hole. If yes, then, would it still be
the same sock after a second patch was applied? Indeed, would it still
be the same sock many years later, even after all of the material of the
original sock has been replaced with patches? There are many other
variations. There is George Washinton’s axe. The blade of the axe has
been replaced a few times and the handle has been replaced a few times
as well. Is it still the same axe? A corollary could be… what happens if
the replaced parts
were used to build a second axe. Which, if either, is the original Washington’s
axe? Tin Woodman is a lumberjack replaced part by part into an entirely
mechanical being. His discarded limbs become a part of the composite
man, Chopfyt. Jules
Verne alludes to this paradox in Dr. Ox’s Experiment. In the van
Tricasse's family, since 1340, each time one of the spouses died the
other remarried with someone younger, who took the family name. Thus the
family can be said to have been a single marriage lasting through
centuries, rather than a series of generations.Girish
Karnad’s
Hayavadana adds another interesting dimension to this paradox. An
athlete forms the third corner of a love triangle with his best friend,
an intellectual and the intellectual’s plain wife. The intellectual
sacrifices his head at a Mahakali temple,
the athlete comes looking for him… freaks out on finding him dead, and
chops his own head off in social fear.And then comes the woman… before
she can chop any more heads and add to the mess, Goddess Kali comes to
life and gives her a boon. She is now to place the amputated heads of
the men back on their torsos. She keeps her eyes closed from fear and
disgust and ends up replacing the wrong heads on the wrong bodies. So
now there is one person with the athlete’s body and the intellectual’s
head and the other with the athlete’s head on the intellectual’s body.
Here, the writer considers this question: Which, if either, of the men,
can claim fatherhood to the child in the woman’s womb?
(Musings on womb and cocoon and butterflies. Compound eyes. Moths.
Transformation. Silence of the Lambs poster. Dali’s painting of the
skull used in the poster. The skull itself is made of women. Optical
illusions. The physics of illusion – using the patterns of perception
and twisting them. Some great concepts of magic. Magical engineering.
The Turk. Turing test. Our fascination with anomalies. Freaks. Dane
Arbus.)
Miracles, rarities, dreams, freaks are fascinating, enthralling,
riveting. Order brings a sense of security. Chaos is a show one would
rather watch from a distant seat of causality. If a monkey was to smash
the keys of a typewriter randomly, the chances of him ending up writing
Hamlet are one in infinite. Hell, the chances of a super computer fed
with all the words and rules of grammar producing even a page of Hamlet,
are one in infinite. But it’s exactly the kind of thing one would love
to witness. Throw a handful of grain randomly on a patch and you don’t
need to be a math genius to know that the probability of the grains
falling to arrange themselves in the shape of your face is one in
zillions. The chance of the unique four letter DNA words that made the
exact sonnet that is you? I wish all my ideas will arrange themselves
and connect in a way that makes perfect sense, with a nice moral to take
away – the way we arrange our memories and inferences to make sense of
our present. If you were told that the magician pulling a rabbit out of
the hat is not a trick, how would you believe something like that, and
if you did, won’t you freak out? Why is it that we like to be told again
and again that there is only one true love? I don’t know if there are
any monkeys that wrote Hamlet or if there are any handful of grains that
made Mona Lisas, but there are some funny absurd songs and some pretty
interesting patterns out there. And there are those of us who are as
excited about that unique one-in-a-million pattern that doesn’t make a
recognisable design as we would be about the one that does.
(Some random ideas about patterns. The use of pattern and colour in
culture. Patti Bellantoni's pop thesis "If it's purple somebody's going
to die"... If it's pink somebody's going to be beaten up in the case of
Rajasthan's Gulaabi Gang of women, dressed in pink, armed with rolling
pins, beat up wife abusers... collective enlightenment and economy)
Yeah, so I was telling you about deficit financing. Apparently there is
an international law that allows governments to print up extra currency
to fill up deficits. It’s some kind of a complex economics – how will
they maintain rates of exchange, and what if a government does it
furtively? Etc. There was a time in the 90s when you needed a government
license to own a colour laser or colour digital printer. Not for your
inkjet ones, but for the professional ones. The government was
apparently quite paranoid about them. They feared that people will start
printing money from their homes. Around the same time I had attended
this exhibition at Jehangir. It was quite mediocre. It’s amazing how the
most important gallery of the city exhibits the most mediocre of
artists. Anyways, why did I bring up Jehangir? Yeah, the currency
exhibition. So this artist had painted Indian currency to the minutest
detail. From a foot away, it was impossible to tell that the notes were
counterfeit. It was good craft, not art. The artist told me that he had
cut special size brushes for the detailing. By the way, brushes made
from sable and hog hair contribute in a major way to the economics of
slaughterhouses. Did you know that pharmacy is the prima-mover of
slaughterhouses, meat is a secondary product? I hate it when people
leave their meat on the plate. At least, finish your meal! Somebody died
for it! Do you remember that scene in The Restaurant at the End of the
Universe when they meet the Dish of the Day. It’s a dairy animal that is
genetically engineered to want to be eaten. "I just don't want to eat an
animal that's standing here inviting me to," said Arthur, "it's
heartless." "Better than eating an animal that doesn't want to be
eaten," said Zaphod. And then there was – "Something off the shoulder
perhaps?" suggested the animal, "Braised in a white wine sauce?" "Er,
your shoulder?" said Arthur in a horrified whisper. "But naturally my
shoulder, sir," mooed the animal contentedly, "nobody else's is mine to
offer." Such complex problems in ethic dealt with such imagination and
humour. DNA was discovered a year after DNA was born and he died at the
age of 49, seven years after 42. That’s the beauty of it. Dying at 49 is
as inexplicable and as random as 42. A physicist friend was telling me
the other day about a brainstorming session she was having with her
professor and colleagues, and it’s interesting how the line between
modern theoretical physics and philosophical abstraction is almost
blurred. At one point the professor goes, “I guess there’s only one
explanation – 42”. Even modern scientific thought can be as worryingly
limiting as religious cosmology. The monotheism of big bang and
singularity, for example. A more open thought, I feel, is the idea of
multiple and simultaneous big bangs. I checked out the pilot episode of
this sitcom called the Big Bang theory on the recommendation of a
teenager. He finds the show hilarious. He reads Nietzsche, attends
skiing camps in
Switzerland, listens to hard metal,
writes poetry about freedom of thought, etc… One of those kids… It was
such an unimaginative show! The characters are cardboard cutouts, and
their jokes are as flat as dimensions of M-theory. Where do you stand on
the string theory? Copying, duplication, imitation of the product is a
punishable offence is replaced by "This product at a microscopic level
might be made of strings. Manufacturer will prosecute to the maximum
extent of the copyright law any attempt to make a supersymmetric
version.” Have you heard this one? How many string theorists does it
take to change the light bulb? Two – one to hold the bulb and the other
to turn the universe around.
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