The release of the film ‘Animal’ directed by Sandeep Reddy Vanga on December 1, saw a country wide reaction. From film critics to the common people to the parliamentarians, everyone had something to say about the visual representation of a hypermasculine protagonist played by Ranbir Kapoor in the silver screen. Hyper-masculinity refers to the gender-based ideology of what it means to be a man, when caried out in an exaggerated way. It can also be understood as the exaggeration of male stereotypical behaviours. In the context of gender studies, characteristics of hypermasculinity exist on a wide range especially with the amplification of male domination and aggression at one end and the respect of the strong, buoyant male protector on the other. Bombarding the viewers with fast-flying images of physical adroitness, showcasing high-tech killing machines, presenting danger as exciting and violence as manly, ‘Animal’ presented an idea of ‘man’ that is rooted in hyper-masculinity tied up in a spectacle.
‘Animal’ attracted a huge audience to the theatre and is claimed to be a successful venture going by the box office numbers. This leads us to the question, why were the criticisms against the movie irrelevant to the cinema goers? Or, why a section of people liked the movie and others did not? A stylised presentation of a good-looking dominant protagonist, a catchy background score magnifying the impact of each scene, excellent editing skills, a docile love story and the presentation of an angry young man fighting singlehanded against an army made the movie achieve the ‘wow-affect’ on the surface which attracted interest and audiences in the theatre. Tied into this spectacular viewing experience, however, is the re-circulation of hyper-masculinity in a mediated format. The circulation of exaggerated images of the male persona winning seemingly impossible battles, degrading poetry and intellectual abilities as lower to physical attributes, treating woman as secondary, if not inferior, performed with hard-hitting precision, reaffirmed the stereotypical image of the typical hypermasculine male.
Yet, the creation of spectacular images by the makers was a powerful tool for engaging the viewer. The seemingly convincing performances of the actors, the production design, the tactful use of music and most importantly the style of narration adopted by the makers catered to aesthetics of a spectacle. The layered effects of lighting, camera angles, and the editing style in the production process further enhanced these performances with continued emphasis on surface, style and presentation. Because of such an emphasis on the glossy image, little critical analysis was given to the narrative the movie was presenting before an audience, who are seated in a dark room for three and a half hours viewing it. Consequently, many bought into these performances as spectacle was laid out in front of them, without realizing the narrative it upheld.
The movie ‘Animal’ is important in terms of re-invigorating the debates on hyper-masculinity and its representation in mass media. Several studies have been made to understand the consequences of such representations especially on the adolescences and people who have been victims of violence in any form. For, these viewers in particular, and society at large, ‘Animal’ is perfect example of ‘hypermasculine expression’ in visual media. Mosher and Sirkin in their 1984 study defined hypermasculinity as comprising of three core attributes, ‘a callous sexual attitude towards women’, ‘a belief that violence is manly’, and ‘the experience that danger is exciting’. The movie, Animal, portrays, if not celebrates, all the attributes of hypermasculinity listed above.
A callous sexual attitude towards women can be seen throughout the movie, be it the reference to the lead actress’s pelvis that apparently ‘could accommodate healthy babies’ (re-assigning the conventional role of women), asking another female character to lick the man’s boots to prove her love, or the pointing a gun to a pregnant woman going through labour, the movie is filled with images of callousness towards women. Further, violence is presented as the ultimate manly attribute. Right from the beginning, there are narratives of the ‘Alpha man’ who are supposedly the real doers in the society, they are fearless and violence is their second nature. Using this as a reference, the lead character Ranvijay is presented as a violent man who uses ‘toughness as emotional self-control’, brings a machine-gun inside a classroom to threaten the perpetrators of ragging, slits the throat of the anti-hero with a dagger, and kills hundreds of people with an axe and stylishly lights a cigarette after that. But the most important part of the movie has been its conscious choice of music to magnify and stress upon the narrative of danger being exciting. Be it the actions sequences where the lead actor kills his brother-in-law by chocking him with bare hands on the background score of a thrilling music, or the sequence where he kills many with an axe while his companions encourage him by singing the ‘Arjan Vailly’ song which was originally sung by Kuldeep Manak as a tribute to the courageous Arjan Singh Nalva, also known as Arjan Vailly, who was the was Commander-in-chief of the Sikh Khalsa Fauj in 18th century, the army of the Sikh Empire. In fact the music played a very important role in magnifying the impact of each scene and engaging the audience.
In the analysis of Hollywood cinema, Erlend Lavik observes that "the use of spectacle…tends to be conceived of as an appeal to the lowest common denominator" and that higher value is placed on the narrative of the film rather than its excessive visual displays. Rosalind Galt mirrors this diminishing of spectacle's value, stating that "the rhetoric of cinema has consistently denigrated surface decoration, finding the attractive skin of the screen to be false, shallow, feminine, or apolitical." Despite this devaluing of spectacle's aesthetic properties and its lack of attention in academic scholarship, spectacle is still favoured in mass popular culture, evidenced by capitalist gains especially in terms of record-breaking box-office hits exemplified by movies like Animal. But what requires is to go beyond the surface of spectacle and reflect upon the larger narrative a movie upholds or portrays.
(Anee Bhattacharyya is a research scholar at Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai. Views are personal Email: aneebhattacharyya@gmail.com)