That’s Entertainment!

A platitude keeps creeping up all the time. About movies as entertainment. A certain dissonance is introduced between cinema as artistic ‘object’ or one of thought and the mundane category of entertainment. In one corner of the ring the high art of cinema, in the other the low. And it is a struggle as we will soon learn! The ‘entertainment’ side of the opposition is always presented in banal fashion, as completely ‘neutral’. It is then equated with the idea of a majority vote in a bit of circular logic. What ‘everyone’ (the majority audience) likes is of course ‘entertaining’ and because a film was ‘entertaining’ in the first place it appealed to everyone! This is a bit like suggesting a politician was popular because he or she won the election. The figure of the politician will also turn out to be a necessary one. Because as we will also learn very shortly this entire debate has a political coding through and through. To think that there is something called ‘entertainment’ in the text of a film that is completely unrelated to the film’s narrative themes or its ‘politics’ or its ‘aesthetics’ is the worst kind of obfuscation. Note how people often refer to the lack of entertainment in a film almost exclusively with certain kinds of cinema. This complaint is often heard when it is the Raavan kind of film, never when it is the Kites sort. The former is of course ‘alternative’ cinema in some sense and certain characterizations are immediately attached to it (boring, dry, confusing and so forth). The latter though operates in an already authorized genre which is supposed to have ‘entertainment’ built into the system. Hence here when the reviewing is negative other terms have to be used to criticize the film. This entire opposition essentially derives from a bourgeois ‘ordering’ which is of course the only one represented not only in the traditional media but also the online variety. All these perspectives emerge from the very same resource of opinion which accounts for their hegemony. There are no real alternatives. Once upon a time when the ‘art movement’ took hold in Hindi cinema the adjectives I have just outlined were more or less the ones used for this cinema. A poor commercial film that no one likes or enjoys is never considered boring. It is only supposedly an example of ‘bad’ cinema. But alternative films can be boring even when they are dimly seen as ‘worthwhile’. Let me finally break the news here — there is no such thing as ‘entertainment’. One can be ‘entertained’ by movies which is really about a level of pleasure one derives from any work. But there is nothing called ‘entertainment’ embedded in a film that gives an audience a certain ‘fix’ and in turn satisfaction. I shall begin again with two examples. I found it very hard to sit through Kal Ho Na Ho the first time around. I went a second time as a favor to someone and slept through most of the film. Some years prior to these I saw Dil Se three times in the theater without being bored even for a single minute in any of the viewings. Sadly I was in the minority as I have indeed been with films like Thakshak or Dev or Mangal Pandey and more recently Delhi 6 and Raavan. If I were occupying the 1970s (which to my eternal regret I do not) I would have proved to people how films with greater substance and certainly much greater political edge usually outgrossed the merely escapist flicks. People in that period of Hindi cinema were usually not entertained as much by fluff. They expected and demanded narratives that extracted a certain emotional investment and ‘cost’ from them. The ‘cathartic’ is that which always leaves one with a wound. Today (which is to say since the 1990s even if thankfully we have exited the worst of that phase) it is the opposite. The cinema usually considered most entertaining is one in which the audience skits on the surface of things without ever getting invested in any sense. A total horror of the film that tries to startle the audience, or even move it too deeply, let alone disturb it profoundly. An audience that does not wish its political veins to be touched. Why politics? Entertainment is an ‘ideological’ category through and through. There is no ‘truth’ to such a noun beyond the index it provides of ideological choices. What we like in cinema we call ‘entertainment’. The standards of what an audience finds entertaining differ so drastically from age to age that there simply could not be nominated that one set called ‘entertainment’ which would contain a list of features equally applicable in every age in terms of gauging popular taste. Most audiences today who do not have any exposure to the riches of the past would find it quite impossible to sit through many Dilip Kumar classics that once enthralled an entire generation of movie-goers. The films work very differently in terms of their pacing, narrative elements and so forth. These would be and are often deemed ‘boring’ by contemporary audiences. The reverse is also true (even if bankruptcy exists only on one side of this equation). ‘Entertainment’ is the seemingly neutral, inoffensive term favored by bourgeois audiences to define films that they support in any given age. The opposite set is comprised of films that subvert the ideological choices encoded in the ‘authorized’ one (the films that are always ‘entertainment’). Any audience can never find a film entertaining the worldview of which it cannot digest. Some audiences are just better in this regard than others. A 70s ‘rickshawala’ to use the old cliche showed much greater sophistication than the 90s ‘auntie’ (my own ‘completion’ of the same cliche). Not because that older cinema was ‘greater’ in every respect but for the far less commonly understood reason that in that earlier age the biggest box office successes were often the better films if not indeed the best ones. If one examined for example Amitabh Bachchan’s career in that period one would note that actually his strongest films did the best, not necessarily the weaker ones that were also otherwise successes. ‘Strong’ here simply means a narrative less ‘escapist’ than another and insistent on more ‘engagement’ by the audience. In other words the ‘rickshawala’ was sophisticated enough to understand the distinction between Trishul and Khoon Pasina. This refinement was nowhere in evidence in the 1990s where even for that same conservative counter-reactionary ideological matrix (which I otherwise loathe) much better films could have been fostered. I often come across cinema where the ‘politics’ repels me but where I also have to admit the strengths of the films at other levels. But let’s get back to ‘entertainment’! Clearly the ‘entertainment’ standards are different for every age. This is only natural. But describing everything that does not conform to one’s sense and expectation of cinema as ‘non-entertainment’ is another matter. The bourgeois framework as I have been pointing out tries to delegitimize films that it cannot authorize not by ignoring them or even criticizing them but by introducing a new vocabulary for them. It is important for this ‘order’ to perform a move whereby the subversive work is not really seen as one in the overall set of choices for ‘entertainment’ but one that exists on the other side of the latter as the ‘boring’, ‘confusing’ work and so on. Notice how commonly it is said today that a film did not ‘connect’. This too is enunciated in certain contexts far more than others if not exclusively. Whatever the dominant bourgeois hegemony in a certain period ‘likes’ as cinema it also ‘authorizes’ as ‘entertainment’. Everything else is then banished from this realm where it exists in a black hole worthy of the attention of minorities who can then be called ‘out of the mainstream’ or ‘elitist’ or worse still ‘intellectuals’ (usually a term of abuse in India as it also is in the US). Amitabh Bachchan offered the most formidable challenge to this bourgeois hegemony by doing films that this segment of his audience found hard to absorb but which were also such miracles of script-writing that really for the first and only time in the history of Hindi cinema such ‘obstacles’ were overcome. But this audience also could not stop hating Bachchan or at least being suspicious of him for what he forced them to watch! Today it is another audience vastly more hostile than the one in the 70s and another Bachchan vastly less fortunate in the script-writers his industry produces. Hence the bourgeois order can drive itself to hysteria with his subversion, his failures. All in the name of ‘entertainment’. Raavan will not have been ‘entertainment’. It will have been ‘dry’, ‘boring’, ‘confusing’, ‘not for the masses’.. a long laundry list. Bourgeois audiences also have this complex. They indulge in all this labeling, all these ideological tricks in the name of the other, in this case the ‘masses’ or the ‘common man’. The dominant ideological choices of this class are presented in altruistic terms as simply enabling the ‘entertainment’ of the ‘masses’. It is never for oneself that one wants ‘entertainment’, only for the unfortunate other who depends on such escapist cinema. Much as one rarely rejects the subversive, alternative film in one’s own name. One insists that it is not for the ‘others’. ‘Bachchan’ is the exception to this rule, the name of that which can be resisted without recourse to the other. When a ‘traitor’ arises from within your class you must tackle him head-on! Why cannot Abhishek also be another ‘boy from Bandra’ doing multiplex films just like all his other peers? In the decade of the 70s at least this hypocrisy had a referent. Today it is rich irony to witness the bourgeois classes most responsible for the decimation of the entertainment of this ‘other’ (masses, B or C centers, single screens in A centers etc), responsible for the extinction of a cinema which formed the true dreamscape for so many such audiences, get up and posit ‘entertainment’ in the name of the ‘majority’. First neuter the space on which an ideological counter-balance might be produced, then pretend that what the other wanted all along was only one’s own politics! There is that other connected refrain — only certain kinds of films run! Yes of course! After one has eliminated the opposition only one party wins! Even as India democratizes in many ways (a move also not favored by the same bourgeois order.. note the disdain with which certain emancipatory political movements of the hinterland are held as opposed to those fascist administrators who are celebrated in metropolitan centers) and even as there is all this talk of ‘opening up’ it is rather sadly instructive to observe how the most democratic art form there has ever existed is appropriated by these same upwardly mobile classes, enabled by the economies of the ‘new India, and converted into its despotic opposite. Cinema only for the classes! The rest of you will never afford it, even if you do you will never find the subjects to your liking! We will call this cinema ‘refined’ and ‘sophisticated’, pretend this is an advance on the riches of the past (when other than technological gadgetry, which is not the same as cinematic vision, even ‘technical’ vision, we have nothing to put up against the triumphs of the past, except those few exceptions that we tear down as soon as they are released!) and chide those ‘masses’ for not getting better educated in these matters, those very ‘masses’ that we will occasionally becomes ourselves when it is a question of battling those evil intellectuals who make and support films like Raavan! And these intellectuals are so ungrateful. We have allowed them a space in our multiplex system to make minor and more minor films and do whatever they want but they insist on these large scale films to challenge ours. They even dare to keep losing money on them. Do they not even care for those ‘nice distributors’ whose livelihoods they are ruining? This is why India needs us. We take care of everyone — our families, our distributors’ families and we also fumigate when we spot the infection of subversive cinema! We will save India yet! Let’s round up all the subversives! Where’s Abhishek? [the image chosen here serves as an ambiguous sign of everything discussed here.. it is of course also the case that a certain remake is in the works and all kinds of rumors abound.. no one knows what the final casting will look like but whatever it is one or another observation here will be confirmed]