Singing. About the Dark Times.
A slightly unusual watchlist to help navigate impending dystopia.
Monday morning began for me — as it did for many others across our country — with the news of the arrest of a student-activist for his alleged involvement in the Delhi riots in February. The student, who interestingly was not in the capital during the time of the riots, was arrested under a 21st Century upgrade of the Rowlatt Act on the basis of a 17-minute video of his speech calling for fighting dandas (the favourite weapon of members of an organisation founded in the 1920s) with tirangas. After six years, the villanisation of the tricolor, however, seems very less surprising. No awards are left to be returned, and when almost everything warrants an outrage it becomes monotonous and tiring.
As the day progressed, news of the police assembling 11 lakh pages worth of data pointing towards the student’s rioting role came to light. A couple of hours later, the Ministry of Labour and Employment went on record to say it did not maintain any data of migrant workers who lost their jobs and lives during the extended summer lockdown. The Health Ministry gave a similar reply a couple of days later when asked about casualties of health workers due to Covid-19. Thousands of miles away, forest fires continue to ravage the American state of California. The pandemic seems to be in no mood for stopping, global superpowers are inches away from locking horns with each other, and we had yet another eye-opening documentary tell us how technology is massively contributing to creating an unsafe, inhumane, and heavily polarised world.
These are confusing and highly uncertain times. Changes are rapidly becoming new-normals, and even newer-normals are becoming a reality faster than we can adapt to them. Popular culture in such times helps us navigate and express our emotions and reactions to these times more accurately. Art also tells us that not all of what we are seeing is happening to the world for the first time, and relatability provides solace to the mind like nothing else. Here are five such (slightly unusual) movies and series’ which are set in times of uncertainty and confusion, and which may provide the comfort of relatability to our puzzled minds.
The Great Dictator
Perhaps the most “normal” entry on this list, Chaplin’s first talkie had him play a double role, with one of them being a parody of Adolf Hitler. His last outing as (a named, talking version of) the beloved Little Tramp, The Great Dictator uses satire to examine the futility of the hunger for all-encompassing power and pokes fun at the meaningless megalomania and stupid self-importance that political leaders are defined by so often. The movie’s final speech, although seen as inconsistent with the remainder of the plot, remains one of the most famous messages of love and kindness in popular memory.
One can rent the 1940 film on YouTube Movies.
Reply 1988
The third installment of tvN’s nostalgia franchise is set in a Seoul neighborhood of the late 1980s, and one of the main supporting characters in the series is a bright university student who causes despair and agony to her parents by being a frequent part of intense and often dangerous student-led pro-democracy protests. Her parents complain that they are poor and simple people who do not want to get involved in matters of the police and court and view the protests as a nuisance as opposed to the actual dictatorial regime. Their only dream is to see their daughter study hard and become a high-ranking government official, which she would be unable to do once a police case gets registered against her.
The series, along with the two earlier installments of the Reply franchise, can be streamed on Netflix.
Shanghai
Dibakar Banerjee’s 2012 adaptation of Greek Novel Z (written by Vassilis Vassilikos) is an ode to the simultaneous existence of गुड़ (jaggery) and गोबर (cowdung) that is our motherland. When an IAS officer is given the task of investigating into a hit-and-run involving a socialist academic, he digs deep to find how elected representatives menacingly manipulate their people to satiate their greed for more power and pull. The film is an honest depiction of how popular sentiments can easily be bought and how mobs and riots are often not as sudden as they appear. The movie is fueled by powerful performances by its cast and leaves its watcher with a lot to think about how much our leaders really care, in case they do at all.
Shanghai is available for streaming on Netflix.
The Lego Movie
Before you go full “what-was-he-thinking?”, let me explain. When Orwell had written 1984, Aldous Huxley (of Brave New World fame) reached out to him with his theory that mass surveillance would not be as effective as seduction systems to control the populace. Bricksburg in The Lego Movie uses both and achieves optimal results. Its citizens are constantly reminded that President Business (who owns EVERYTHING in the universe) has his eyes on everyone all the time, but they are content to have their Taco Tuesdays and listening to and singing Everything is Awesome all day. As a result, most of the people are taken by surprise when they eventually discover the sinister plans of their evil leader, whom they thought to be a decent well-meaning chap who just happened to be all-powerful, even as he casually announced on TV every day that those found to be not following instructions would be “put to sleep”.
The Lego Movie is available on rent on YouTube Movies.
Casual S4
The fourth and final season of this Hulu family drama is set in a near, unspecified, future where driverless taxis are a reality. True to its title, the show very casually predicts a reality where non-neutral internet will be normal, the NFL would be having its final season ever, and our lives will be heavily assisted (read: controlled) by egg-shaped speakers called Ova, which would have more data on us then we would ever be able to collect. The show also makes throwaway predictions of us being in a much more stable political climate. Perhaps, a universe like the final season of Casual would be a precursor to the one in The Lego Movie, with every person by that time feeling too tired and exhausted and powerless to do anything even remotely revolting, let alone make threats of unfurling the national flag, and we will all choose to be seduced instead by the belief that Everything is Awesome.
All four seasons of Casual are available for streaming (in India) on Prime Video, and (globally) on Hulu.
