Unpopular opinion: ‘Animal’ film.

Just reproducing my X (formerly Twitter) thread from a couple of days ago here as the only comment I shall make on this issue:

Any supply always exists for one singular reason: demand.

The problem of toxic masculinity isn’t, contrary to what right-minded people like you and I would like to think, films portraying & glorifying it, but that these films are super hits. Because people watch them. And love them.

Art imitates life imitates art imitates life. It is circular. We are worried that people pick up toxicity from these films. And they do. But that is not the origin of the toxin we are infected by and so despise. The truth is that films pick up toxicity from life first before feeding it back.

The makers are simply trying to make money. And will sell whatever makes more money for them. And while we may have a bone to pick as to how they choose to do it (as we should), the truth is that they are simply showing a mirror to society. And what we see is our own reflection. Warts and all.

It is one thing to hate our reflection and try and change ourselves from within and without to be better, more beautiful, more worth looking at in the mirror. And another to blame the mirror for our ugliness.

Don’t get me wrong. There are ways to show us what we are and have become without glorifying it. But it is not the job of the storyteller to be our moral compass. It is their job to find a niche story people would pay for, tell it well, and take our money.

Very few aspire to be the guiding lights we expect the to be. We cannot demand that every filmmaker be a Ray or Ghatak or Nihalani or Benegal or Paranjape or Manjule or Shantaram or Sen or Dutt or Mukherjee or Mehta or Chatterjee or Mishra or Ghosh or Hirani (amongst others).

By thrusting the responsibility of moral leadership on people just trying to make a living (for that is what this is; someone trying to make money off of what they see as a low-hanging fruit), we cannot surrender our own to be better humans. We must fix reality before claiming that the problem is with our senses that sense it so clearly that it makes us wince.

I cannot hate my nose, for example, for the stench of rotting food in my kitchen. I’d be better off cleaning the kitchen. There will always be good storytellers and bad ones. And there will always be good stories and bad stories too.

Let us, but all means, hold the good storytellers to account for telling bad stories. But let us not mistake the bad stories they tell for the real problem. The problem lies in reality. Not in the fiction that tells stories about it.

‘Animal‘ might be a horribly misogynist, patriarchal, violent film. It is not the first. It is not the only one. The problem isn’t with the film or the filmmaker (though, that too) as much as it is with the society that makes it a Rs.100 Crore hit.

That is all.

tl;dr: Someone’s selling you drugs and making a shit-ton of money. You are railing against him. You are right. But only partly. Because you are conveniently ignoring the mental health epidemic that is making people buy those drugs. Solve that issue. The drug problem will go away.

Even more tl;dr: सवाल सिर्फ यह नहीं है कि वह टट्टी क्यों बेच रहा है। सवाल यह है कि हम खरीद क्यों रहे हैं?