[Reader-list] Cinema in the Age of Hypervisuality

[Yousuf]

Cinema in the Age of Hypervisuality
Sadanand Menon
New Delhi December 12, 2008, 0:35 IST

The TV grab of filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma trudging through the debris at Taj Hotel will remain one of the more grotesque images of the aftermath of the sixty hours of mayhem in Mumbai, last fortnight. I have been trying to figure out what was so disturbing about it and why so many people felt offended by it. It was promptly dubbed ‘terror tourism’ and soundly berated.

In fact, it is interesting how so few of the Bollywood fraternity, who walk in and out of these 7-star hotels everyday, actually came there physically during or after the shootout. Even later, when an assorted bunch from Simi Garewal, Dia Mirza and Jaaved Jaffrey to Preity Zinta, Raveena Tandon and Sharmila Tagore did come on to the TV discussion panels, they sounded out of sync and had only banal or hawkish ideas to peddle. Despite the major glam star-cast, these TV shows were flops. Agents of the cinema seemed like sly interlopers here.

Let me try and develop this into a theory. No one will disagree if one were to propose that the entire thing was primarily a television event. It was almost as if it were carefully choreographed for TV cameras which were allowed to go not only very near the action but, at times, even seemed to perform the role of command control headquarters. The RAF first and the NSG commandos later, seemed like they were being coordinated by the TV channels.

TV spot anchors like Barkha Dutt and Rajdeep Sadesai and studio anchors like Arnab Goswami sounded like CEOs of India Inc and spoke with greater authority, impertinence and assurance than the Prime Minister or the Home Minister. Almost every politician who came to live by the camera, perished by the camera. Each one seemed to open his mouth only to change his foot. It was the TV anchors who ‘performed’. They talked twenty to the dozen, got emotional, gesticulated wildly, modulated their voices and brought up facial emotions that could put any koodiyattam actor to shame.

India Television was the most amazing. This Hindi channel seemed convinced that the entire reason why the bunch of gunmen had (as it is being suggested now) got into boats and come floating down all the way from Karachi to Mumbai, was solely to get into the luxury hotels, switch on the TV and watch this particular channel. So they periodically addressed the gunmen directly. And I am translating from Hindi: “O you aatankvadis (terrorists) who are in Taj and Oberoi and are watching our channel now, let us warn you that do what you may, but you are not going to survive. You have been surrounded by our brave security forces and you don’t have a chance in hell to come out alive”. It was Indian TV’s hour of glory.

Then the millions stuck to their screens were offered the excitement of ‘TV within TV’ — live grabs from the CCTV footage of two gunmen walking into the Chhatrapati Shivaji Railway Terminal spraying bullets, then walking down the road to the next building as if on an evening stroll and, soon enough, close ups of at least two of the gunmen. Now the drama came to boiling point. The repeat showing of these two young men, rather modishly cropped and dressed in aviator trousers and designer sneakers, with a blue ammunition sack casually flung over one shoulder and an AK-47 held at a stylish angle, brought in a touch of Hollywood and sent the TRPs zooming up.

This was all TV. Its reality aspect invests it with an ‘affekt’ that cinema simply will not be able to match. As the illusory reality of cinema pales, they overcome it with rounds of fantasy. It is not for nothing that some of the biggest investments, the past decade, have been for animation or digitally doctored films. But TV need not have any such worries as it capitalises on being ‘embedded in reality’. The cascading effects of such image bombardment creates the state of hypervisuality as audiences get addicted to increasing levels of spectatorship, subtly transforming the relation between the visual and its consumption. This directly affects all aspects of viewership, as anything less dense and constitutive begins to look pale and jaded and irritatingly boring. The eye thirsts for that over-souped visual experience which has emerged as the new reality; an exultation of the optic sense, which translates as our contemporary ‘spectacle
 economy’.

As ‘reality’ and its representation gets encroached, invaded and occupied by TV, cinema will have to find the ‘non-realistic’ route retain its impact. For all that Ram Gopal Varma might rummage in the misery of bombed-out ‘reality’, he will never be able to make a film that will replace public imagination with what they saw from the safety of their drawing rooms.

http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/sadanand-menon-cinema-inagehypervisuality/00/16/342933/