Tell it like it is

Sometime in the early 1990s, I briefly became very taken with a book titled Hollywood Vs America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values by Michael Medved. Among other things, Medved argued that the violence and explicit profanity in modern movies (and pop music) was eroding family values and having adverse effects on impressionable youngsters. My own biases probably led me to attach more value to the book than it deserved: being obsessed with old Hollywood films, I enjoyed Medved's rose-tinted view of the “simple” cinema of the past, and his observation that it was once possible to make great films about unsavoury people (gangsters, for example) without subjecting audiences' ears to the foul-mouthed language that these people would have used in real life.

It seemed like a compelling argument at the time, but gradually I understood that Medved was a conservative political commentator and his book was shrill and one-dimensional, not covering the whole picture. (Studies have indicated that screen violence can also have a cathartic effect on viewers, making them more passive and less inclined to emulate what they see.) There will, of course, always be movies that use violence or bad language gratuitously — but it's equally possible for modern movies to push the boundaries, and to shake viewers up, by using options that were not available in a more conservative time.

As Martin Amis pointed out in an essay, when the Hollywood censorship code was revised in 1966, “film edged closer to being a director's medium, freer to go where the talent pushed it”. Watching recent films like Ishqiya, Yeh Saali Zindagi and No One Killed Jessica, it strikes me that Hindi cinema is somewhere near that uncertain place where American cinema was in the late 1960s. In the past couple of years, the censorship rules pertaining to profanity have become less rigid, and many films — especially the edgier ones set in the hinterland — now routinely use Hindi gaalis that would once have been unthinkable in a mainstream movie.

The results are mixed — new freedoms bring missteps, but there are also the occasional moments that feel just right. Take the early scene in No One Killed Jessica, which establishes the spunky character of the TV reporter Meera: when a co-passenger on her flight gushes on stupidly about the Kargil war being “so exciting”, she shuts him up by smiling sweetly and saying “Aap wahaan hote toh aapki g**** phat jaati”.

The scene is hugely effective for a number of reasons: 1) the startling use of a once-severely taboo word in the midst of a laidback conversation, 2) the fact that the line is spoken by Rani Mukherjee, who has played mostly vanilla characters (in terms of their speaking habits, at least) in her career, and 3) the guy so clearly deserves to be put in his place that we in the audience feel vicarious pleasure in his humiliation. The moment also adds to our perspective on Meera and the contrast between her and the film's other protagonist, the mousy Sabrina.

With Sudhir Mishra’s Yeh Saali Zindagi, on the other hand, I wasn’t convinced that it would have been less effective if it had slightly cut down on the maa-behen gaalis sprinkled through the script. They fit certain characters perfectly — the corrupt policeman, for instance —but at other times their use felt forced, as if the film was trying too hard to be gritty. On the whole, though, I think we are in for some exciting times as scriptwriters and directors work out how best to use the new liberties available to them. Who knows, eventually perhaps even we columnists will be allowed to spell out the words we routinely use in our speech, instead of coyly substituting them with asterisks in print!

Jai Arjun Singh is a New Delhi-based writer