What makes movies tick

Movies, the most sensual of all arts, are also the most misunderstood. Critics try to rationalise them, to make them conform to their standards of propriety, and more often than not, they fail abysmally. They assume that audiences react to them basely, but that’s because many of them, if not most of them, visit the theatres as invitees, and therefore miss out the responses which popular audiences tend to blurt out when they’re watching a film. On principle, I feel, reviewers should be made to watch the works of directors from the perspective of uncultured, unrefined audience members; this business of inviting them as guests makes them miss out on the one element that makes films tick: you and I, people with busy schedules on our hands who look out for that one free day in which we can all go to the theatre. The most misunderstood art in the world is misunderstood, not by us, but by the critic.

Is it any wonder, then, that films tend to be misinterpreted more often than they are interpreted? I myself have been guilty of this misdemeanour; more than once I have muddled up a plot element, got the symbolism (what little of it there is) confused, and even got the names of the characters and the actors wrong. Film directors try their best to rationalise everything in their works by distributing brochures and leaflets at the theatre, and this is undoubtedly a solid guide for us to not get the plots and symbols and names wrong. But by themselves, such guides are not enough: what is needed is concentration, and the human mind, which has the leisure of rereading a book or a photograph or even a painting, does not have the privilege of re-watching a movie to gain that concentration. That requires payment for the ticket, and though we aren’t stingy enough to make that payment, we hardly find the time these days to go watch Aloko Udapadi or Kusa Paba or Infinity War again, even if we truly, badly want to.

What makes movies tick is the fact that the way we react to them is not the way others have reacted to them. Aloko Udapadi is, for instance, to me an ambitious half-success in which the great battle scenes, inflated and clearly beyond the confines of reality and common sense as they are, are compensated for in no small measure by the vividness, the clarity, and the lucidity of its first half. But when you talk about it with teenagers who are still going to school, you realise that to them, those battle scenes are what matter. Conversely, when you talk with an elder, preferably a Sinhalese Buddhist for whom the last 2,500 years are a matter of pride when it comes to his or her identity, those battle scenes are what epitomise his or her heritage and history, thus validating the weaknesses of the plot (of which, I am sorry to say, there are very many). For teenagers, the battle scenes are what drive away the banality (in the form of schools and tuition classes and god knows what else) of the outside world they have to return to; the elders, by contrast, who have the leisure of contemplating on what they see, want something more, something that validates an abstraction (in this case, the fact that their identity is Sinhalese and Buddhist and that it is under siege).

Sometimes these responses differ on the basis of where the movies come from. Obviously teenagers and adults are not going to react to Infinity War the way they would have reacted to Aloko Udapadi. Since of late, I’ve been walking everywhere and talking with people from all walks of life, trying to ascertain what it is that they want to spot out in a film. Then I realise that their attitudes have been conditioned by what they’ve come to accept at the movies. Going by this, they are picky when it comes to the shortcomings of a Sinhala film; take a teenager to watch Bandanaya or Adareyi Mang and chances are he’ll look out for the defects, the little details which stand out. But chances are also that he’ll be willing to overlook those little defects in a movie like Black Panther. The reason is simple enough: Black Panther is set in a vast canvas, an alternative dimension within our dimension (Wakanda), and the special effects and the seamless union of The Lion King, Hamlet, and science fiction (at times it feels like space opera, which I think is part of its charm and which distinguishes it from most of the other products from the Marvel movie universe), while Bandanaya concentrates itself within two families, and neighbours, feuding over a piece of land by resorting to black magic. It’s easy to come across defects in family drama, even if it’s fused with supernatural horror. And for the record, it is this fusion, this weird appropriation of The Exorcist, which teenagers found to be at once both appealing and raucous about Udayakantha’s movie. It wasn’t a failure (Udayakantha’s films never do), but then it wasn’t the overwhelming success we thought it would be.

Talking with one young man over Bandanaya, I came across this complaint: “It’s full of promise, and it flows along well, until that last bit, silly as it is, where Hemal Ranasinghe has to physically fight with the devil.” It’s like watching out for the rain: the slightest onset of clouds from afar makes you think that a thunderstorm is coming. Likewise, the slightest little jarring detail is enough for anyone to rant and rave against the whole history of the Sinhala cinema. I don’t see this attitude of being picky and testy with, say, a DC Comics movie. Superman versus Batman, to give just one example, was hyped beyond the wildest dreams of a comic book fan, and at the end of the day turned out to be a colossal void. Yet the fans here were defending it against the highbrow critics from that part of the world (in The Atlantic, New Yorker, and Variety) who were unanimous in their criticism of the plot. Part of the reason for this, I think in hindsight, is that with familiarity, contempt grows, so we’ve conditioned ourselves to not be so easy and generous with our own movies. But there’s a bigger, deeper reason: the critics. Specifically, their inability to call a spade a spade when it comes to the shortcomings, and defects, which colour up those movies in question.

The greatest damage to our movies continue to be done by those who don’t know what makes movies tick, those who believe that their own notions, academic and intellectual beyond the dreams of a University don, of movies and cinema are all that matter. I’ve written about this at length, here and elsewhere, over the past year, and I’ve based what I’ve written on what I’ve seen at film festivals and in newspaper columns. Critics settling into art house, serious films write as if they’re knighting the directors of those films and bestowing a benediction on their work. At one level, it’s a subtle gesture of condescension from their end: if we don’t know what we’re seeing, we assume that’s because we aren’t intelligent enough to appreciate art. Heaven forbid any discussion of the merits of the film; the premise, for these critics, to any such discussion is our appreciation, unconditional, uncritical, of the work. If you don’t like it, and if you have any flaws to pick on, they you have to leave that discussion.

Movies are best dissected by those who see them as a habit, or even a pastime. When I recommended, to a young man, still in school, a list of horror films he said he wanted to watch while recovering from an illness, I found out that the usual recent titles – even the ones which weren’t screened here – he had seen. Then I recommended a film which should have been screened here but which was not: Jordon Peele’s Get Out. But Peele’s film couldn’t be categorised as horror in the same way that the other movies I listed out (Lights Out, Ouija, Ouija: The Origin of Evil, Annabelle) could, so he was disappointed. At one level, this ignorance, this obsession with considering a film on the basis of its fidelity to a specific genre, may exasperate critics like me who prefer variety to staticity, but at another level, it’s an indication of the restlessness of the young, who want stability but can’t find it in their restless, banal lives. In that sense, art has gotten closer to advertising: people want to know that the money they spend on a ticket is the value of the film they’re seeing. (Critics, invited as special guests, don’t have to spend money on those tickets; the director, by inviting them, is flattering them into giving favourable reviews to their movies.) They don’t have much time on their hands – particularly the school-going demographic and the working class – and out of the little time they have, they want to have a good time: by watching movies and reading books which hit on their senses and fulfil their expectations. Even if they don’t fulfil those expectations, they want to be routed, to be fiddled around with, and to be given endings and resolutions which they can be excited about. This is what makes up the charm and the cleverness of Hitchcock’s early thrillers (the original Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, and The Lady Vanishes): they distract you from the defects that colour up films like Bandanaya, so that afterwards, when you reflect on them, you aren’t moved to anger or spite, but rather to enjoyment. Our movies and our critics, in that sense, distract us the wrong way. They don’t take us from boredom to excitement. They opt for the other way around.

Written for: Ceylon Today ECHO, June 3 2018