The idea of a ‘mass film’ is an eminently recognisable one in south India, but just what is it? How do we make sense of the aesthetics and feelings that make fans say, ‘nalla mass padam’, and just why is it missing in some recent Malayalam films? Arjun Ramachandran writes.
Arjun Ramachandran
As we were sitting in the theatre waiting for Bheeshma Parvam to start, there was an excited buzz around us. We didn’t need to hear the words being passed amongst our co-spectators to know what the excitement was for, because we too were expecting it. “This is going to be mass“, they must be saying amongst themselves. But as soon as the film started, there was a tangible sense that something was amiss. Soon it became clear that the mass itself was amiss, and only a timid, forced applause reverberated whenever an antagonism was being played out on screen.
We exited the theatre after the show, and noticed the palpable change in mood amongst our co-spectators. True, a few stood by their favourite superstar. Quite a few more did not lose hope that the superstar would deliver better next time. They generally did not speak badly of the movie. But one could not shake away the sense that the mass was missing this time, and could not refrain from the doubt whether the mass is lost forever. The other superstar movie, Aaraattu, elicited similar doubts.
Back home, I turned on my TV to watch Pushpa as a consolation, and secretly also to be reminded that mass does exist. Pushpa did not disappoint. I confirmed with my fellow movie-buff friends. Yes, they said, Pushpa was mass. No, Bheeshma Parvam was not. Yes, Aaraattu was horrible. So, I thought, why does mass not work in Malayalam but does work in Telugu?
Mass has been a concept in currency for a while now, but it is limited only to Kerala. Friends in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra are unfamiliar with the usage. It apparently began as the epithet “mass entertainer”, one which is still used across the country, and soon got truncated as mass. This truncation liberated mass from its origin and it soon picked up associations, moved into different contexts, and evolved. Today, it associates as much with the concept of mass as people as it does with the concept of mass as heaviness – one hears the exclamation “Heavy!” used interchangeably with “Mass!”; “mass” literally relates to “heavy” as well, both referring to quantities of matter in scientific and common senses. It is shorthand for mass-culinity, but also connotes greatness that transcends simple masculinity; women too can be mass-culine. Cinema-goers in Kerala do not speak of mass merely in terms of how many people the film managed to enthral, but as a quality of the film itself. So, a straightforward reading does not suffice to explain why mass does not appear in every movie that aspires to be or even succeeds as a mass entertainer. After all, Bheeshma Parvam was hugely popular but still, the mass was found to be lacking.
In his The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger mobilises a critical distinction between an art work and an art object (Heidegger, Young & Haynes, 2002). To put it simply, while the art work lives in our ‘World’ and creates an opening through which truth may be accessed, the art object is an erstwhile art work whose ‘World’ itself is dead and so cannot help be anything but a remainder/reminder. This opposition is neatly embodied in the two institutions that house art, the Museum and the Gallery. The Gallery houses art works, those which are alive in a sense. The Museum houses dead art works, art that is already art objects.
The opposition of the Museum and Gallery exemplifies how we unconsciously relate to art. Even if we are unaware of the Heideggerian distinction between the art work and the art object, we associate two different modes of viewing art with the Museum and the Gallery. This is the reason why a certain mode of expression that we enjoy in an old movie (shall we say, Narasimham) nonetheless seems not to work in an Aaraattu. Even the most casual viewer is expected to be able to tell the difference between a Museum and a Gallery, a Narasimham and an Aaraattu. Many clues are abound on the surface of the art work – such as the material quality of the art work (in this case, for instance, the perceivable visual difference between a film shot on film and one shot digitally) as well as the discourse in and around the film; essentially the deployment of fragments of matter and language as metonyms for the present ‘World’.
The advancement of technology, by which the material basis of the medium progresses, and of discourse takes forward along with it the World of cinema as well. That which belongs to the old ‘World’ can no longer be reproduced in the new ‘World’ without a sense of unease looming over it, whereas that which belonged to the old ‘World’ can be fixed forever in history. Charlie Chaplin’s silent films still work as art objects for us, but a present production of silent cinema is bound to fail – recall that Michael Hazanavicius’s The Artist was forced to explicitly acknowledge the arrival of sound in its very last scene; without this acknowledgement, which is the goal towards which the film develops throughout, it would have become a piece of nostalgic kitsch.
The same is the case for films much more contemporaneous to us, such as Narasimham and Aaraattu. The collapse of the World of the former must be explicitly acknowledged and overcome in the latter for it to work—precisely what it fails to do. What strikes us when we watch Aaraattu is, on the other hand, the constant parodying and mimicking of the old World; one of the failed tropes in the first half of the movie is how Neyyatinkara Gopan deliberately echoes lines spoken by Mohanlal’s previous characters (from Narasimham, Twenty20 and so on) in a meta-gesture, a repetition which at first serves to make Neyyatinkara Gopan a pastiche. But the self-parody does not give way to a development which resolves prior insufficiencies, and the character quite seriously returns to the conflicts which defined the very characters he parodies. It is as if the filmmakers are aware of the collapse of their World but nonetheless choose not to enter a new World and rely instead on the pretext of mockery of the old World’ to keep that World alive for a little longer. They are like the Unni of Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Elipathayam in that this unwillingness to exit even as the homestead burns. It is all too obvious by the end of the film that their mockery was inauthentic and that they seriously wish to re-enter the old World of a wandering, unidentified, general category hero: a theme which permeated the world of 2000s films, like Aaraam Thampuran. The connoisseurship of mass films is alive to this sleight of hand, and did not fall for it, denying the status of mass to much of Aaraattu and even Bheeshma Parvam. Sleight of hand hardly works in such matters. What is more, the viewer who cannot see the sleight of hand—as in the case of the viral video of the fan who enjoyed Aaraattu—is, for us, a moron1 who takes too seriously the Big Other’s injunction that a degrading campaign is happening against the movie.
In the same video, one could see utilitarian moviegoers who listed out pros (it had good fight sequences, nice comedy, Lalettan was good and so on) and cons (the climax was bad, the plot was uninteresting etc.) to come to a decision whether their money was wasted or not. This is the level at which non-mass movies nonetheless succeed in appealing to the people, by being simply the sum of their parts. The question then is removed from the high-popular ideal of mass and is displaced to whether this item song is worth twenty rupees in a theatre and that comic sidekick is worth fifteen. One may still speak of mass entries—the mass embodied in the introductory placement of a central character in a narrative—but they remain suggestions of what-could-have-been unless accompanied by other elements of mass, rather than autonomous assertions of mass. Bheeshma Parvam distributes enjoyment to its viewers through many avenues, which could be a good reason for its popularity. But its moments of mass do not live up to its billing; could it be because of its anti-fascist posturing, the ambition of which went unmatched by the limited scale in which its mass set-pieces played out? I only have speculations to offer, but it instinctively struck me that something was amiss with its retro-projected world of emergent Fascism in the 1990s, characterized by its opposing dyads of Good-Christian-and-Victim-Muslim (the protagonist and his allies) and Bad-Upper-Caste-and-Collaborator-Christians (the villains).
Mass is thus something that belongs to the art work, or at least the memory of the art work, especially of the cinematic kind. That pre-cinematic or un-cinematic art works do not elicit a feeling of mass is something we can verify empirically. For example, a photograph can become mass if it sufficiently mimics a cinematic moment of mass. We would be hard-pressed to find a uniquely photographic moment of mass. Similarly, a piece of music that brings associations with cinematic moments of mass may evoke mass, such as a score which brings to mind an image of a hero’s entry.
Beyond this formal demarcation, we can further make an attempt to pinpoint or narrow down what constitutes the content of mass.
Mass is maybe a new rasam, one that was birthed in a society that believes in breakaways and survivals. It is not merely the satisfaction of victory, it is also a hope of future victory. It is a rasam of optimism and hope, but also the rasam of discontent with the order of things, the exact opposite of shantham. Shantham is status quoist, mass mobilises discontent. Mass thus is unlike tragedy, it does not get trapped in the contradictions of the World as tragedy does. Tragedy invariably ends with a justification—perhaps a tragic justification—of the World as it is, and refuses to entertain the possibility of a changing world. Mass is the art of a moving World, with a future full of possibility, rashly hurtling through the vast emptiness of the universe, seemingly un-anchored to anything substantial; as opposed to the art that aspires towards Catharsis and the resultant shantham, which took shape in a World that saw itself as the centrepiece of a stable order. The ending of a tragedy or a comedy is thus the happily/sadly ever after, but mass ends with the destruction of the World as we know it.
What happens to mass when it is moved across Worlds? Ayyappanum Koshiyum and its Telugu remake Bheemla Nayak show us that there is an untranslatability—or at least only a limited translatability—of mass across Worlds. Worlds change every few hundred kilometres and every few years—in fact, many Worlds coexist tensely even in a single moment and place. The present world of Malayali society is yet to find its mass, although Ayyappanum Koshiyum is a good pointer in the direction. The gripping part of Ayyappanum Koshiyum is the inversion of the traditional form of the tension between the landlord upper caste and the landless Dalit, which is often explored as a question of rights and as a question of building a civilized society; here, it is presented as a clash of the most destructive tendencies of the two identities. They are both outsiders to the system, one being unshackled by his detachment from caste society (Ayyappan) and the other being detached by his shackling by caste society (Koshi). This inverted discussion of caste connects with the actuality of caste society, in which everyone is alienated and yet no one can bring it to an end. The film too ends on such a note, wherein the two protagonists overcome the tensions of their particular identities and see each other as equals—and yet nothing in the world outside has changed, the only destruction is the destruction of their own personal worlds. That destruction is what constitutes mass here. All these aspects, on the other hand, are completely lost in the Telugu remake, which attempts to recast the mass in its own terms—which succeeded in Telugu lands, but did not among Malayalis.
So can we suggest something about future mass? No, and nor can we be even sure whether there is a future for mass. The nature of our cinematic spectacles may change altogether into something less violent and more preservative. Or, more likely, we will stop referring to mass as mass. Something like the Avengers elicits mass in us, but only we in the South of India refer to this affect as mass. Perhaps we will take after such societies and merge mass with other concepts. In that case, we may look back on three decades of culture and society as a “really short century of mass”, during which a specific mode of exploring our world opened itself to us.
References
- Heidegger, M., Young, J., & Haynes, K. Off the beaten track. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 2002.
- Žižek, Slavoj. Less than nothing: Hegel and the shadow of dialectical materialism. London: Verso, 2012.
About the Author: Arjun is an independent scholar who has completed MA in Mass Communication at AJK MCRC, Jamia Millia Islamia.
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