Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Stereotyping Current Telugu Movies

I used to watch a lot of movies during my days in graduate school. I still do but a lot less than I used to. But I do keep in touch with the current movies and their trends. Recently I was driving and listening to NPR where the host and guest were discussing a hypothetical thought-if aliens would somehow get to see today's movies, TV drama or any literature, what kind of opinion would they form of us. They would think there was a lot of drama with violence and people hardly worked as most of our current literature rarely touches on the day to day aspects of our lives. This post is my crude attempt at extending this idea to Telugu Movies alone.

Imagine in few decades or centuries, humans do not exist and aliens landed in the part of India where people speak Telugu. In such a time suppose that aliens reach there and find videos of our current successful Telugu movies. If they were preserved without a blemish and these movies are their only means of knowing our world. What sort of opinion would they form? Here are my ten thoughts on what they could potentially theorize.

1. Men are from Orphanville: Most of the males of our times are orphans. They are either bastards whose mother dies giving birth to him or lose his parents when the guy was a kid in some violent or tragic accident.
2. Women are from Desperateville :The female protagonist is always trying desperately and unsuccessfully to make our male lead fall in love with her. Add to this drama, there is always competition - another lady tramp who is falling for the love of her life. She eventually succeeds.
3. Macho Men: Our male lead is macho in every aspect; no matter his upbringing and family history. He can make men and vehicles fly by touch of his fist. He is like a bee that will sting when disturbed and can make people(mostly men in white lungis) fly at regular intervals. Some guys machismo can make trains move.
4. Teleportation: The male and female lead can transport themselves to a distant colorful land(either a snow clad hilly mountains or just a small room with colorful sets) where they jump, dance and sing their guts out. The amazing thing is that there is big group of other people sharing the joy of our leads and dancing to the tunes that are well synchronized. They would be surprised as to why these guys are joining in on the fun; they have no relevance to our leads and disappear as quickly as they come.
5. Dreadful Dads of Beautiful Daughters: The father of the female lead is evil and very unpleasing to the eye. You wonder how he could have had such a beautiful daughter. If he is not a mafia don, he is factionist leader, or just plain evil dude who dotes on his daughter but doesn't like the guy his daughter is dating.
6. Bad Governance: The politicians, police and law are all evil and work hand in hand in creating trouble to our leads.
7. Dog like Friends: The male lead and female lead hang out with a bunch of loyal chums who are willing to follow and do anything for them. The male lead often abuses these chums but they still follow him with no animosity.
8. Sibling Situation: The male leads' sibling often end up in a tragic death. The female leads sibling often elope which makes parents become more protective of her. Tragedy of such measure is followed by locking her in a huge palace or bunch of goons escorting her where ever she goes.
9. Parallelism - humor and tragedy happen in life: Our society believes in parallelism. While there is tragedy and drama going in the main story, there can be humour either interwoven with the main leads or sometimes disconnected with them.
10. Disrespectful, Alcoholic and Violent Youth: Young people of the society were prone to drinking alcohol, disrespectful of elders without repentance and prone to violence.

1 comment:

Ramiah Ariya said...

But I don't think the aliens would understand that there is a male "lead" or a female "lead" or a villain in the movie - that would assume some familiarity with Indian movie culture.
To me it seems this way:
The aliens would see a society in which some men (men alone) have enormous power. Their powers are both physical (such as hitting any number of other men; and provoking extreme attraction in women); as well as social (such as being able to attract loyal submissive followers who take any abuse).
If the aliens evaluated the movies alone, they would imagine that society was split between a minority of such "powerful" personalities and a majority of slavish underdogs who either worshipped the powerful or tried to fight them. The movies then would show the futility of fightig the powerful because they can beat any number of other men and win every time.

In short, they may not see the "heroes" of current day as heroes at all. They would see the villains, heroines and friends of today's Tamil or Telugu movies as underdogs who either fight, love or worship the central "power person".
Thus they may consider today's movies as sad tales of a set of underdogs coming to terms with their own inferiority.

By the way Ursula Le Guin's "The Left Hand of Darkness" is a classic science fiction (sf) novel that examines a society of hermaphrodites from an alien's perspective.