A LETTERED SOUL: REFLECTIONS ON LITERATURE, CINEMA AND CULTURE .

WHY WE NEED TO REASSESS NARRATIVES AROUND CRIME IN POPULAR CULTURE.

In 2020, a lot has transpired for collective humanity and while cooped up in our own private nests, we have undergone internal transformations. The time at hand has given passage for some of our irreconcilable differences of opinion to be mused about and clarified. Deep thinking always does exactly that so we are able to separate the majoritarian consensus from our own personal train of thought. What I am telling you here is very simple. As an admirer of the creative medium, I always looked to it as validating the best, worst and broader aspects of our lives with an unmatched accuracy.

However, I tend to think that the way it sometimes puts narratives of crime and underworld activities is not always in the best interests of the larger social discourse. Most of these enterprises are intermediaries negotiating between the realism of the medium and money- making shares. The profits coming from a juicy story and society's hypocritical, contradictory and unhealthy ( also male-centric) obsession with the exploits of charismatically presented men who have their own rules and regulations to run a lop-sided world, participating in violent and amoral/immoral means to settle scores and whipping up a body count, is so far away from the commonalities of the everyday that it becomes mythic and peddles an anti-hero honorific to them. There's nothing wrong in being captivated by a well-told story and those that go into the dark alleys of human behaviour or the antipathic subcultures operating within genteel society ultimately mirror the subliminal truth. Evil operates in ways we don't always notice. Power gets equated sometimes with such brazen means and ends that it produces more anti- social elements than law and order agencies can handle; and mind you, it is a male-dominated, dog eat dog tussle for power that makes criminals elevated to party leaders, politicians and several key players constituting votebanks. That truth is very much a reality in our current climate, whether it is the nexus governing our own national politics or the nebulous 'leaders' running the most powerful country in the world ( cue the stars and stripes)

I am noticing that several productions seem to glorify the overblown antics of such figures, giving their acidic, volcanic temperaments a glamorous avatar, atleast to grab initial eyeballs and casting actors who can bring their best in terms of performative ability. But by cuing slow motion cuts, wind-blown treatments and rock- tinged musical cues to people who are malevolent and a clear menace to society, aren't we cheering them on, in the most twisted, human way possible? As I see it, when we watch an image on screen, we don't just cheer the brilliance of the performer but the real-life or fictionalized figure he portrays is inextricably linked to our understanding. So when Zac Effron portrays a serial killer complete with his good looks and charming presence, it is adjunct with the way the real-life man he plays used his prowess of physicality to entrap victims. Now here, there's nothing about the performer. He is just delving into a malevolent personality and adhering to his craft that cannot only be relegated to a high-school heartthrob( in Efron's case); or take the case of the squeaky clean, titular teenage star of Disney show AUSTIN AND ALLY wearing the robes of a spiteful, monstrous young man in MY FRIEND DAHMER. Even the way we hold THE JOKER (as in THE DARK KNIGHT, 2008) in high regard leans towards those impulses. I am not here to fault the stories, the actors or directors. But whenever we end up saying a line like,' God, isn't he just too good looking to be a murderer' (as in the case of Ted Bundy) or 'just a hippie prototype trapped in the image of a cult' ( as in the Manson family's mastermind) or obsess over these violent images and the perpetrators' so-called 'enigma', we end up creating an admiration for the wrong kind of toxic culture to promote some kind of validation for a misdirected youth.

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It's actually very simple to grasp as a cultural point of reference: when we defend a misogynistic protagonist, the one who stalks a girl, doesn't take no for an answer, chainsmokes and drinks away to glory and still hoot and clap at the 'suaveness' of the characterisation, we know there's something fundamentally wrong with where we are headed in terms of mindsets. Male behaviour in its permutations of sexism, criminal undercurrents and conformities of hot-headedness, finding representation through the prism of able-bodied, Adonis like male actors, just cannot be the norm anymore.