Animal, Pushpa, KGF: When cinema turns violence into heroism | Let Me Explain 176 | Pooja Prasanna

A 15-year-old girl was attacked with a chainsaw inside her classroom in Andhra Pradesh. The brutality of the attack shocked people across the country. 

After the initial shock, another conversation started. Many began pointing to films such as Animal, KGF and Pushpa, where extreme violence is presented as an expression of masculinity, anger and power.

And then came a response from the overlord of alpha-male cinema, director Sandeep Reddy Vanga.

He said that when a horrific crime takes place, the first response should be empathy for the victim. He accused critics of using the incident as an opportunity to target filmmakers and said cinema was being made a scapegoat.

Watching a movie with violence alone does not automatically make someone violent. There is little evidence to establish such a direct cause-and-effect relationship.

But that is also a rather simplistic way of looking at the criticism.Because the question is not just whether films make people violent. It is about what kind of violence we are normalising, what kind of masculinity we are celebrating, and what happens when brutality is repeatedly presented as an expression of love, anger and heroism.

And people like Vanga have to be open to this criticism.

Let Me Explain

This episode builds on an article by my colleague Jahanvi on The News Minute. Cinema and popular culture are subjects we always follow closely. We don’t look at films in isolation but look at what conversations they are sparking in society. And what reactions and cultural shifts they evoke. And gender sits right in the middle of it. Because these conversations go well beyond the screen. 

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My colleague Jahanvi who has written this piece says, men have been violent towards women long before Animal or Kabir Singh came along. Stalking, attacks on women who reject romantic advances, and violence arising out of wounded male egos are not new phenomena.

In fact, an incident similar to the attack on Gopika took place 22 years ago, in Vijayawada.

In 2004, a postgraduate student, Yelchuri Manohar, hacked his classmate Ravuri Srilakshmi to death with a knife inside a college classroom. She had refused to go out with him.

So, clearly, we cannot blame a particular film or a particular filmmaker for the violence we see around us.

In Gopika's case, even if Hemanth was a film buff, it would be irresponsible to conclude that watching violent films made him commit this crime.

Research on whether watching violence in films causes aggressive behaviour is ambiguous. There is very little India-specific research. 

But that’s not a clean chit to people like Vanga. 

Studies do suggest that media violence may be one contributing factor, but aggression is influenced by several things: family environments, peer groups, psychological traits and the larger social and cultural context.

Studies have shown that repeated exposure to violence can desensitise people to it. In other words, when we keep seeing brutality, we may gradually become less disturbed by it.

So, no, we cannot say that a person watches Animal or Kabir Singh and then goes out and attacks a woman. But we can ask whether repeatedly consuming certain kinds of violence changes the way we respond to violence in real life.

And this brings us to the distinction that often gets lost in this debate.

There is violence in cinema, and then there is the glorification of violence.

Two VERY different things. 

In a slasher film, a terrifying man might chase someone, attack them and leave a trail of blood. The audience is meant to be horrified. But we identify with the victim. We fear for their safety. We want them to escape.

There are also films where violence has a narrative purpose. We can debate on whether the violence is necessary, and how much of it, but there is a clear narrative. 

But look at the violence in films such as Paradise, Animal, KGF and Pushpa.

Here violence is often not about showing us something horrifying. It is about showing us how powerful the hero is. And it makes the violence almost aspirational. Whose side the filmmaker is on becomes very obvious in the kind of camera angles he uses,the background score and the overall tonality.

Let's take Animal.

In one of the film's most discussed scenes, Ranvijay, played by Ranbir Kapoor, walks into a college classroom carrying an assault rifle. He fires multiple rounds into the floor to intimidate students into revealing who sexually harassed his sister.

On the surface, you could argue that he is doing this because he loves his sister and wants to protect her.

But look more closely at what the film actually shows us.

His sister is pleading with him not to do anything. She is clearly distressed. But Ranvijay is not interested in comforting her or understanding what she has experienced. He wants to know whether someone has touched her. Possibly stemming from a belief that a woman’s ‘honour’ is the family’s ‘honour’.

He later crashes his car into the men he believes are responsible, while his sister is sitting beside him, crying and telling him that she regrets sharing the incident with him.

In fact, much of the violence that follows in the film is also framed as an expression of his love for his father.

Everything revolves around the hero. Even the traumatic experiences of the women in his life become reasons for him to display his aggression.

Take Pushpa 2.

When the villain strips his niece, Pushpa, played by Allu Arjun, bites into the villain's neck and tears away flesh because his hands are tied. The scene is presented as a moment of spectacular revenge.

Or take The Paradise, starring Nani. Jadal pushes a man's head into a bucket, slices his neck, and lets the blood fill the bucket before kicking him into the air. The blood splatters across the crowd cheering him on. He then throws another man into a jaggery crusher and watches his blood gush out like sugarcane juice.

These are not simply scenes of violence. They are staged as moments of triumph.

And this is not restricted to violence against men. Recent films have also drawn criticism for the graphic violence inflicted on women and children.

In The Paradise, a heavily pregnant woman is electrocuted with clamps attached to her belly until she delivers two babies.

In Ranabaali, a pregnant woman's abdomen is cut open without anaesthesia to deliver a baby.  

Vijay’s Jananayagan movie had a graphic scene with a child rape victim.

Rajinikanth’s Veiitayain had an elaborate, horrific rape scene

Even when the perpetrators are villains, the suffering of victims often serves one purpose: to establish how angry the hero should be and how brutal his revenge should become.

The victim's pain becomes a device to build the hero.

Now onto the relationship between Telugu cinema and its audiences.

In Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, film stars are not simply entertainers. Their identities and their characters occupy a very significant place in public life.

Fan associations are powerful. Some fans develop intense parasocial relationships with their favourite stars. Film dialogues also travel well beyond cinema halls.

Remember the Pushpa 2 dialogue in which Pushpa threatens to chop off his rivals' heads, comparing it to the beheading of animals during the Gangamma temple festival?

A YSRCP worker was arrested for displaying this dialogue on a placard during a political rally. 

The Telugu Desam Party subsequently used the phrase 'Rappa Rappa' as a way of attacking the YSRCP. YSRCP supporters, in turn, made videos of Jagan Mohan Reddy repeating the dialogue.

This is how cinema becomes part of political and cultural expression.

Of course, not every person who enjoys these films subscribes to misogynistic beliefs. That would be an unfair generalisation.

But the concern is about the cultural environment in which these films are produced, marketed and consumed.

And this is not a new debate.

In 2016, the murder of Swathi at a crowded railway station in Chennai sparked a major conversation about the romanticisation of stalking in Tamil cinema. Her stalker, P Ramkumar, murdered her after she rejected him.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that after 2016, mainstream Tamil cinema has largely moved away from openly romanticising stalking. There have been a few exceptions like Siva Karthikeyan’s Remo that glorified stalking. One reason for this change is definitely the outrage. But it could also be that the aging heroes can’t play stalking lovers anymore. 

So, what are we asking filmmakers to do?

We are not saying that every film must have morally perfect characters or that audiences should never be made uncomfortable.

Cinema is art. It can provoke, disturb, challenge and even disgust us.

But filmmakers also need to think about the stories they are telling and the cultural context in which those stories are received.

When Telugu movie Baby released, viewers cheered when the male protagonist called his girlfriend a whore. Director Sai Rajesh said he had not anticipated these misogynistic reactions.

When audiences cheer a hero slapping a woman or celebrate a character's possessiveness as love, filmmakers cannot simply dismiss these reactions as something beyond their control. They need to engage with what their films are communicating and how audiences are interpreting them.

And this brings us back to Sandeep Reddy Vanga.

After Kabir Singh came under criticism, particularly following the murder of a woman by a man who had been obsessed with her, Vanga said filmmakers were responsible for their craft and needed to consider its repercussions. He insisted that his films did not endorse murder.

But then came Animal, and the criticism that followed. Vanga has repeatedly responded to feminist readings of his films with derision rather than engaging with the questions being raised.

Filmmakers cannot control every interpretation of their work. But they can certainly reflect on the cultural climate in which their work exists.

The attack on Gopika should not become an excuse to blame cinema for a crime whose motive we do not yet know. And it should certainly not become an opportunity to demand censorship.

But neither should the discussion be shut down by saying that cinema is being unfairly targeted. 

Because cinema, like every other form of art, has the power to move us, make us think and challenge our beliefs.

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Produced by Megha Mukundan, script by Dhanya Rajendran, story by Jahnavi, edited by Nikhil Sekhar ET, camera by Ajay