Thuppaki (The Gun) : Why You Shouldn’t Mess with India

In an effort to be less predictable and acquire a bit of street cred, the name of social anthropology, I found myself in Cinecity, Maradana (call me a newbie and make what you will of this, but a cinema atmosphere unlike anything I’ve previously encountered. We’re talking whoops, whistles, claps and cheers after every and I mean every scene of arguable significance- including a close-up of the hero’s biceps- i.e. every few minutes).

I am a relative stranger to Tamil cinema, its gloriously-kitsch-frolicking-on-Swiss-mountainsides-dishoom-dishoom-aesthetic occupying an entirely ignored periphery of my cinematic interests.

Thuppaki (The Gun) is essentially an action flick centered on a terror plot to destroy Mumbai, with a sub-plot of modern Indian romance and marriage (aptly summarised in the most inventive lyrics I have encountered: ‘(Girl) are you an Apple product?’ and the sage advice: looks fade, so marry a guy who makes 200,000 a month, even if he looks like a toad).

A young Tamil, Indian army officer named Jagdish (emphasis on Indian Army in all it’s multi-coloured, multi-ethnic, multi-religious badass, song and dance glory) returns to his family in Mumbai on vacation, where his parents and sisters take him straight from the train station to the home of a potential bride, Nisha. Jagdish discards Nisha assuming that she is an old-fashioned girl (meaning demure, sari-clad and neck tattoo concealed by chaste braid). He later finds out that she’s a father-slapping, short skirt wearing, red-wine drinking experimental smoker who plays every sport imaginable aside from being a pro boxer, which inevitably ends up in an irrational and comedic arranged marriage  triangle (cue song: ‘Why does my heart slide on Antarctic ice? Are you a penguin? Are you a dolphin?’) and ultimately undying love, as is usually the case. Easy peasy.

The main storyline revolves around a terrorist plot, by an Islamist terrorist group (trendy) with vague (completely unexplained) motivations to blow things up and create chaos in Mumbai.

Fabulously outlandish plot. Gloriously-kitsch-frolicking-on-Swiss-mountainsides (More progressive song lyrics: ‘I ran a search on google and found no one crazier than him’)-dishoom-dishoom-with Matrix-style slow-mo fight scenes, expert assassinations and explosions at sea. A ‘cold-blooded murderer’ of a hero who ‘extensively tortures’ the baddies (chopped off fingers, forced suicides- the works) and can single-handedly take out an entire armed terrorist cell and rescue five girls (one of them on the knife’s edge of a Youtube execution) with the help of a retired police dog and one gun.

What’s not to like, right? Right.

Contrived Portrayal of Diversity:

Representing ethnic, racial, linguistic, cultural diversity hand in hand with sexuality, stereotyping, typecasting are hot topics within the entertainment industry, where films and largely (American) television shows are being actively analysed and critiqued for their mono-everything casts.

I’m all for diversity, but Thuppaki is so consciously (and consequently unnaturally) diverse.

The Indian army, a central symbol of strongman virtue (including apparently a no-strings-attached license to torture and kill at the whimsy of individual operatives) is composed of all varieties of Indians imaginable, to the point of laboured. The last scene of the film, where the hero’s army train departs to Kashmir, the Muslims (identifiable by skullcaps, beards, covered heads- all typical expectations fulfilled) stand out on the platform (token, human white flags to all the Muslims they offended in the first 2 hours and 20 minutes of the film by saying, HEY the Indian Army adores Muslims, they are our loyal cold-blooded, torturing highly-trained assassins, and they are fighting for our consciously-portrayed-as-diverse-and-united-India against extremist Muslims with Jihadist tendencies. Yes.)  A major plot point in the film also revolves around a wardrobe revelation, the coat and tie attire typical to the Christian wedding (diversity for the win?) that helps the terrorists identify the Indian army assassins, who cannot be identified but the fact that they were in suits is common knowledge and where do people wear suits to? Naturally, Christian weddings- get me a list of all the Christian weddings in Mumbai (population a gazillion) so that I can identify and avenge with speedy success.

Extensive Torture? No big deal:

I may have been appalled by the casual and sometimes comedic tone the representation of torture was dealt with in Thuppaki. Jagdish apprehends Terrorist #1, beats him up, chops off his fingers, locks him up in his closet (yes, right behind those dress shirts) and shoots him?  Apparently this is completely unacceptable behaviour from a highly-trained Indian Army intelligence type, who will have to answer to no one about his public killing spree. This and the assassination of people in malls, cinemas, boats etc., more torture, using one’s sister as bait to annihilate terrorist cell, etc. You know, the usual.

It is true that films sometimes cast things in black and white, the existential questions and metaphysics puzzles of the grey an irksome inconvenience to the whooping-clapping-whistling masses. But how okay is such light-hearted portrayal of torture? Are we saying we will die and kill for our countries, the greater good of an artificial filmic celebration of diversity?

Perhaps it is a warning of geopolitical significance, You Shouldn’t Mess with New India. Especially not the Indian Army- they will shoot you right between the eyes, if they’re not locking you up in a closet and torturing you first.

Have you seen Thuppaaki? Thoughts?

White Skin, Black Masks

There is a particular violence in Frantz Fanon’s polemic on race and decolonisation.

Both ‘Black Skin, White Masks’ (1952) and ‘The Wretched Earth’ (1961) controversially deliberated the inferiority complex of blackness in a white world, examining the psyche of colonisation and pugnaciously advocating a cleansing violence. The thoughts in this post were largely inspired by this paradox of black skins and white masks that marks how race is perceived by both the self and the other. Although, I feel the age of political correctness is perhaps behind us (As made evident by virtually any episode of 30 Rock)- are we so optimistic that race in cinema is immaterial, or is it still insidiously informing orientalist stereotypes of otherness?

Race and violence in cinema have been as multifaceted and complex as the colonial experience, where differences of race, ethnicity and nationality – with a healthy dose of villainised Eastern Bloc rasps in the cold war decades and breathy Middle-Eastern whispers in the post 9-11 years – have been conflated with cinematic identities of wickedness. Save for the psychokiller genre that focuses most exclusively on deranged white men or Charlize Theron, baddies come with accents, bred from the irrational evils that oppose wholesome Western do-gooding (Or do I mean American hegemony?) and maniacally seek world domination. Of course the dashing American hero (unless of course it’s Bond, James Bond with his wicked smooth British vowels) will save the world, a stunning empowered heroine and perhaps even a bright-eyed, quippy child from  unspeakable evils or a nuclear holocaust. Blue sky and sunshine unless there’s a sequel involved.

Have colonial race politics set the precedent for how race is represented along caricatured stereotypes in cinema?

D.W Griffiths’ epic Birth of a Nation (1915) (although extremely cinematically significant, it is the vilest piece of racist fecal matter in existence aside from being painfully long) that details the heroism of the Ku Klux Klan. If you haven’t seen it, yes, you did read right- the heroism  of the KKK in the pro-confederacy American South during the civil war against aggressive African-American men (played by white actors in blackface).

So does evil come with an ethnic/racial identity? Often I believe it isn’t a stretch to admit that it does.

Perhaps one of the most intriguing and interrogating portrayals of race in cinema, which plays with the construction and deconstruction of African-American identities like a clever kitty (or a cool cat) with a ball of rainbow yarn, is found in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000). A biting satire centered on a modern-day minstrel show featuring black actors in blackface, and the violence that ensues is a truly marvelous and intelligent piece of cinema.  Blackface forms a common thread in both Birth of a Nation and Bamboozled, despite the many decades and racial and political ideologies that separate the films. Bamboozled deals with the offensiveness and Fanonesque racial inferiority complex of the makeup phenomenon that originated a caricature of blackness as a racial identity in minstrel shows and Vaudeville.

I watched The Devil’s Double (2011) last week, featuring Dominic Cooper in an exceptional double role as the tortured political decoy Latif Yahia and the sadistic playboy Uday Hussein, the son of America’s ex-Public Enemy Number One, Saddam Hussein. I’m not going to deliberate the successes and fails of the film- it was quite excellent as far as Dominic Cooper’s performance goes and worth watching.

However, what I would like to draw attention to the less than Iraqi (Or well a broad umbrella of middle-eastern or a narrower Arab?)  cast that won critical acclaim for playing an entirely Iraqi cast (Ok so the female protagonist Sarrab was Lebanese, played unconvincingly by French actress Ludivine Sagnier). Don’t  get me wrong here, Dominic Cooper deserved every bit of the praise. His performance as the swarthy Uday Hussein was particularly arresting. However, what exactly does this fluidity of race, ethnicity and nationality mean? Particularly when the gradients of colours and inflections only believably turn darker?

Ultimately, this post isn’t an argument on cinema and race politics, but rather a query.

We have the great insult of blackface in cinema stirred by historical productions such as Birth of a Nation or satirical critiques such as Bamboozled. We have seen further fluidity of race on cinema as seen in Lawrence of Arabia (1962)  (and so on) with Peter O’ Toole and Alec Guiness flouncing about the desert in yet another epic bit of film. Today, we have an English actor convincingly playing the psychopathic son of an Iraqi dictator.

I suppose the question is, are we post-race where the best man does the job? Or are we harking back to an insulting precedent when racial politics permeated the cinema screen? After all, the reverse wouldn’t be entirely convincing- for then we would have White Chicks (2004), The Sequel.

Does villainy still have a colour and an accent?