Perceptive Images

In this extended weekend that I have had, I watched three movies: Crash, Wait until Dark and Hollywood Ending. Each one of them is brilliant in it’s own right. What connects the first two movies, in larger scheme of things, is the way our perceptions about the world around us get shattered every time we stereotype it.

“Crash”, for me resounded with this theme. Apart from the fact that it had too many coincidences (why do we pan only Hindi movies for them?) and too many characters, it was well made and well edited. For once, Hollywood quit being politically correct in depicting a backslapping black-white camaraderie and instead touched the layers of the American psyche (and here I mean across all races) that are quiet invisible to outsiders. It didn’t moralize and sermonize, just presented images and left the viewer to decide his interpretation of them.

"Wait until Dark", on the other hand, is an old thriller which is set in a mere two-room apartment. Again, one doesn’t expect a blind Audrey Hepburn to fight off three goons alone, well, neither did they when they planned their charade to fool her. It takes a creative director and an excellent script to keep the audience on the edge of their seats with a two-room set. Just goes to prove that you need “real” imagination to entertain, not obscenely obese snakes (Anaconda, Cobra, Python and perhaps Green-eyed Yellow banded Boa Constrictor) and bloody-faced dolls (Chucky 1, 2 right up to 43225).

“Crash” and “Wait Until Dark” do talk about expecting the unexpected and not judging people by their race, color or for that matter physical incapacities, but is that really possible in a world of 6 billion and counting? Why, the very basis of Carolus Linneus’ classification is grouping common characteristics. We could have argued with him that dog A and dog B are not to be put under the same genus because dog B is smart for he knows tricks but dog A is dumb. Mr. Linneus would then come back to us with a statistic saying that 73% of all dogs don’t know tricks and he would conclude that dogs are generally dumb (No offence pooches and Maneka Gandhi). I am not saying that we are planning to classify and remember characteristics of 6 billion people like we did to the animal and plant kingdom (ok I know there are 5 kingdoms)! The point is, human learning and knowledge stems from categorizations: wasn’t it easier to learn geography grouping the iron producing areas with the steel industries? This tendency to classify, stereotype and generalize gets rubbed off when we meet people too. We look for commonalities between one depraved personality and another and we tend to keep away from them. If nine out of ten terrorists happen to be Muslims we draw our conclusions about Islam. Where we actually go wrong is in inferring that every Muslim is terrorist: the case of every square being a rectangle and every rectangle not being a square! We confuse generalizations with blanket rules. I am all for generalizations: they give a broad idea about a personality, more like first impressions.

On a lighter note: Woody Allen’s "Hollywood Ending" was superb. For the benefit of those who haven’t seen it, it’s a story of an eccentric director (Woody as Val) who faces the vicissitude of Hollywood through his psycho-somatic blindness and ends up making his best film blind: of course it gets panned by all Hollywood critics. I hope for the sake of sanity and sense in Indian films that KANK bombs big time too. Of course I would never watch it even for free, like I didn’t watch Kal Ho Naa Ho. The Kekta Kapoor of 70 mm, Karan-Kreatively-bankrupt-Johar, thought he was breaking new ground in Indian cinema with a theme of divorce and infidelity! Well, here’s news for you Kkkkaran: stay home one afternoon with your mom/bajuwali aunty watching serials, you don’t need to overhear a couple break-up over a Koffee in Starbucks for your next script, try plastic surgery or amnesia. I know the movie is not going to bomb, as long as there are nut-case desi New Yorkers watching it after paying what could have been an orphan’s meal (oh yes at least pretend to weep about that)! After all like Val said in Hollywood ending, “I may be a bum here, but I am a hero there”. Val’s movie was a hit in Paris!