A Reflection on Shankar and ‘I’

A lot of what follows should also be read as a ‘sequel’ to this earlier Enthiran piece..And incidentally there are absolutely no spoilers here..

It ought not to be a deeply philosophical observation anymore to state that at the very moment when, in our age, the human is becoming increasingly android-like, dependent on a whole range of technological supports, that at this very moment there is also a spectrum of biological research and practice that also renders the human more animal-like than ever before. That which brings the human closer to the machine but also that which is already machine-like in biological processes relating to human evolution. In the same way that which is animal-like in the human because of biological possibilities inherent in the latter. Techno-biological manipulation then brings to the fore the ‘robot’ in the human, the ‘animal’ in the human, finally the ‘inhuman’ in the human. It is not that we just lose the traditional and comforting sense of being human. The true horror is that being human was always about being a kind of animal and being a kind of machine. In an analogous vein the brain sciences reveal how certain kinds of physical or emotional trauma can also render make the human ‘inhuman’ by canceling out all kinds of psychic economies. In any case, if such are the stakes of our age, our present moment, it might well be that Shankar is the contemporary Indian commercial director who has intuited this better than anyone else and Vikram in turn is the commercial star whose history represents this intersection in exemplary fashion.

”I’ is very much a sequel of sorts to Anniyan but it is as importantly a complement to Shankar’s last film, Enthiran (not surprisingly there is lots of homage to that film here). But it is as much the culmination of a grand star-actor career that begins with Sethu and finds an epitome of sorts in the current release. One might state without exaggeration that the Vikram mythos is closest to Shankar’s larger set of concerns even if these are not exactly the same (and later on I will argue that Shankar stumbles precisely where he moves away from the logic of the former). Shankar’s world has always been keenly invested in the advertisement-soaked surreality of the present or a hyper-mediatized time where increasingly the human passions can only be represented as so many audio bites and frantic cuts and where the human is ultimately reduced to a plastic ‘actor’ in an ever-mutating world of the fleeting and the virtual (consider the by now classic and seemingly nonsensical Shankar lyric that highlights all of this in one love song or the other). On the other hand this is balanced out by return-of-the-repressed primal moments that forever threaten to destroy that other aesthetic and in a way terrorize the globalization compact. Put differently the beast forever stalks the robot and perhaps vice versa. In any event the beast does not come out of nowhere. It is what has always been suppressed or denied or evaded. And so in Shankar’s current work scenes of garbage and destitute urban sprawl alternate with vaster canvases of landscape beauty but more importantly with glimmering images of consumerism. Much of this one also saw in the director’s two major works prior to this, Anniyan and Enthiran. The theme of garbage for instance is also available in Enthiran. Or the beastly makes an appearance in Enthiran. But even looking at the larger trajectory of his career it is clear that this major opposition doubles over as one between the present and the past. This is why the period element has always been crucial to Shankar’s major films. A song video might illustrate this, elsewhere an entire colonial archive, sometimes there might be injections of genre that herald these other histories. From dancing princesses to caped avengers to mythic ‘ancient’ figures Shankar runs the gamut. The beast-robot couple is never far from all this. To put it in somewhat different language even as Shankar is always in step with ‘New India’ and its consumption economies this representation is forever jostling with ‘Old India’ realities. One could argue this entire anxious split is much more definitional of Indian upwardly mobile classes over the last two decades than any naive separation between the two would leave one to believe.

But there is another sort of cinematic coding apparent here as well. The mythic or epic modes of ‘old masala’ are secularized by Shankar or given pseudo-scientist garb in a manner consonant with the present (not just in India but equally elsewhere). In this director’s universe one can still access the gestures and grandiosity of the masala universe but refracted through a different prism of plausibility. From genetic codes to robotic creations everything is possible and ‘for’ a reason! The unsurpassable statement on one half of this couple I’ve put forward is of course Enthiran where Rajnikant’s grand screen history is twinned with this Shankar thematic to create a robot every bit as iconic and heroic as the star and where his final fade also turns the page on an entire star-event as well as the brand of masala associated with him. In other words a star like Rajnikant is disabled precisely where a robotic likeness can do the job as well. Hence those garbage dumps, not just of industrial waste but also a chapter of history. Which again is an ambiguous move because without a proper accounting of the old the new becomes monstrous.

In much the same way the shadowy figure of the beast conjures up another memory of the masala tradition. Those old angry young men forever seeking to upset the socio-political applecart, forever seeking to upend its economic inequities. Tamil tradition here has a much stronger archive than the Hindi sequence offers. Here one often finds mangled, disfigured bodies forever shunned to the margins (one could even add as a bit of an aside here that there is a contrast between the machine-like Rajni signature, employed in film after film, with a familiar set of repetitions and replications, and his twin other Kamalahaasan, who often represents the ‘inhuman’ other to the former’s darker romantic, therefore ultimately rational, type). In Vikram’s career both strands are inherited. The normative hero-figure and his uglier, more threatening double. Certainly in the star’s peak sequence from Sethu through Anniyan both Rajni’s and Kamal’s histories are identifiable. But finally it is the beast or the inhuman in this sense that is Vikram’s truest avatar. It is this that allows Shankar a sort of summation move beyond which it is not easy to foresee where the director might go.

Shankar however has also always been a bit too much in love with that what he simultaneously examine a bit tongue-in-cheek. Nowhere is his humor, if not his satire, as caustic as it is in ‘I’. The director is almost encyclopedic in terms of ‘poking fun’ at the consumerist obsessions of the present from the addiction to gym bodies (which includes the sharp insight that the male body at least in this age is modeled and presented in the image of the female one) to the superficial celebration of sexual identities to of course his familiar investment in the eroticized gadgets of this technological age (very often the woman is presented as alluring to the exact degree that she might be compared with such objects or rendered into nintendo versions of herself). But even so Shankar is not quite able to stop feeding this consumerist beast. If despite all his vision and assuredly his considerable imagination the director is never quite able to come up with a Sholay-like moment of his own or a film that is truly important in that scheme of things this will have been the reason. And ‘I’ is a perfect example of this. It is arguably Shankar’s most interesting work, much more so than even Enthiran which in the end was still most legible indexed to the Rajni sign. He certainly has a vast set of themes to play with and he often does so very provocatively without sacrificing all those obvious and easy commercial parameters that have informed his work. But even though he is a harsher critic in ‘I’ of the worlds he has so often indulged in throughout his career he at the same time also succumbs more massively to its logic. This is not a narrative failure in any simplistic sense but he might have made one for the ages here had he simply chosen a bit more discipline. I am tempted to say that Enthiran was a more successfully realized film but my qualification here would be that Sankar’s indulgences are a more natural fit for this world than ‘I”s. Perhaps some of this was true even for Anniyan. In any case ‘I’ is superb when it sticks with the beast but quite ordinary when it is more ‘contemporary’ than this and this despite Vikram being so extraordinarily convincing either way. The problem does not lie in the juxtaposition of these two worlds. It is that when one is in the more epic mode of the beast’s underbelly of the city one is transported to a much darker, even gothic ambience that becomes quasi-fabular or fairy tale-like (this film could easy be read as a retelling of Beauty and the Beast) whereas the other portions of this work involve a totally prosaic set of references. In the latter case the performances and the humor might also make for perfectly compelling viewing but cannot really balance the greater romantic grandeur or else the awful sublime of the beast’s story. It is testimony to Vikram’s enormous star turn here (it is hard to imagine another star of his generation being able to pull this off and not just in his industry) that he nevertheless manages to bridge the divide. Shankar even in some of the set-pieces tends to err on the side of the cartoonish and certainly the grotesque, if the film is still rescued from these tonal inconsistencies it must be considered once more Vikram’s triumph. ‘I’ confirms, if there were any doubt about this at all, that Vikram in this larger-than-life format is simply the most authentic star-actor of the past two Indian decades.

Even with those objections I do not believe I have seen a more engrossing commercial Indian film this year. It has become familiar terrain for me to rue the absence of that greater film in any promising work (!) but ‘I’ justifies this lament more than those others. This should not just be read as some easy hint of the film’s ‘failure’. Even as it stands Shankar’s work is remarkable on very scores (for instance I liked many of the action sequences or I found his urban spaces more evocative here than anywhere else in his career) and perhaps one to be revisited. There is enough seduction here to offer such temptation. If the film is also Shankar’s ‘craziest’ it is for reasons that are at once provocative and deconstructive with respect to the goals of this opus. Towards the end of this lengthy (though never lagging) narrative there is a marvelous music video that offers a kind of unconscious ‘re-jiggering’ of the entire film. It is superbly managed (as are to lesser degrees some of the music videos here) and imagined in more ways than one but it also represents an artistic integration that one wishes had informed more of the film. But perhaps there is a different way of looking at this, Shankar’s indulgent ways notwithstanding. Perhaps that unified filmic space of an older masala or epic tradition can no more be presented. At least for now. The remaining options might then be either one of superficial repetition (the stale and plastic exercises in gesturality we have all become so immune to from North to South or else the somewhat more narrative-driven thriller formats) or more substantially the auteurist model taken by Ratnam for more than two decades now in a number of his works (in the context of ‘I’ the Raavan bilingual is a particularly instructive example) and followed to various degrees by others. Shankar has for quite some time and most interestingly since Anniyan been pursuing something in-between. On the evidence of these recent major works he is yet to find the perfect compromise but it might well be that no such thing is possible. At least for now. But within an unqualified commercial framework there might also not be a better inheritor than Shankar.