Dangal: Empowering or reinforcing patriarchy?

Aamir Khan’s Dangal raked big moolah in India and abroad, and reached the 2000 crore club. It won all major awards, and continues to get lauded by both public and critics. Dangal is definitely a feel-good, crowd-pleasing film. But the subtle narrative is not really about the two sisters. Instead, it focuses mostly on their despotic yet affectionate father and his unfulfilled dream.

Dangal is not a Bend It Like Beckham like movie where the female protagonist beats all the odds to achieve her dreams. The movie justifies dictatorial parenting and reinforces the age-old ideas that it hopes to fight . Yet, many people are touting it as a feminist movie, just because two important characters are female wrestlers from Haryana.

The female protagonists fight sexism and male privilege throughout their journey, but the girls are not chasing their dreams, instead striving hard to make their father proud. They are docile, puppet-like, and blindly obey their father, who is an autocrat kind of a person. He imposes his interests and choices on them. He is the decision maker, and believes he knows what’s best for the girls. That’s not even remotely close to empowerment.

Along the way, the girls face severe ridicules yet go against all odds to get successful and make it big in a world that’s traditionally envisaged by men. But, it’s not the girls who win at the end, it’s their father, the patriarch. From chopping off their hair, to denying their favorite food, and making them undergo grueling training even from a tender age, the father forces wrestling on them by all means. Does such a story propagate woman empowerment in any manner?

By putting the burden of his unfulfilled dream on his young daughters' shoulders, Mahavir reinforces the prevalent norms in our society. The movie is about his dreams, predicaments, and challenges. How on earth does this break misogyny?

That said, Mahavir is not a complete patriarchal stooge either. The father teaches the girls to be fearless and persist, no matter what the situation is. So, the movie definitely makes us want to cheer for women who make it big in male dominated fields like wrestling. But a Mahavir-like dad and his ‘hanikarak’ ‘craziness’ will do more harm than good in real life. Wondering why?

While all is hale and hearty in reel, it’s not the same in real when parents force their dreams on children. We can see an alarming rise in the number of students who choose suicide as a way to deal with wrong and forced career choices and pushy parents who project their unfulfilled dreams on their children. Why do they kill themselves? Because, they simply fail to deal with the intense psychological pressure. Still, several parents consider their children as tools fulfill their unaccomplished dreams, aspirations, and desires. Children should be allowed to chase their own dreams. They should not be forced to follow the dreams of their parents.

A strange obsession

A string of recent movie releases clearly highlight a strange obsession that most of our filmmakers continue to have. They are endlessly fascinated about the notorious and heinous people out there, and the fixation continues to grow every year. Two among the soon-to-be released movies are clearly gangster flicks that narrate nothing but sheer despicability and ruthlessness in all terms. The protagonists are violent, cruel, and psychotic most of the times, yet get treated like folk heroes on screen.

While filmmakers reiterate that the casts have little resemblance to anyone living or dead, and the movies are just fictionalized narrations, they drop many sly hints to underline where they have drawn aspiration from. Is the likeliness added knowingly? I don’t know. Perhaps, filmmakers are unwilling to openly admit real-life connection fearing backlashes, legal and otherwise.

While cinema is just a mode of entertainment, turning baddies into emblematic embodiments of valor and heroism is not even remotely close to entertainment. Do they stories make us feel good? Absolutely not! The increasing trend of extolling cruel, fearless, and unforgiving people in every second movie is highly disturbing to say the least. The impact that it will create on the audience is unfathomable negativity and sometimes a dangerous urge to emulate the characters on screen. Wondering why?

Protagonists of such movies try to control their destiny in their own way until the inevitable downfall. They steal and feed families, they lie unhesitatingly when it benefits somebody, and they kill remorselessly when someone rises strong enough to become a threat. And most part of the audience get easily fancied by such larger-than-life characters. Don’t such movies convey a distorted and disfigured sense of right and wrong? They do.

While we all know that films needn’t give out inspiring messages all the time, it’s disheartening to see how the appalling is transformed to become the appealing, while audiences clutch to their seats anxiously to see if cops catch the ‘virtuous’ protagonist or not. Very often, the lead character hails from a poor background which makes it totally ‘justifiable’ to take up crimes to make both ends meet. He grows up with larger-than-life persona with a unhealthy concoction of charisma, violence, and shadiness.

The audiences are so taken by the character, no matter what he does. He breaks rules, yet is regarded as the powerhouse of strength and mystery. Audience empathize first and then blindly admire them for all wrong reasons, no matter whether a hero stalks a woman in the name of love or kills someone to steal money. It’s high time to stop this glorification. It's not at all cool to be a law-breaker and there’s hardly any entertainment in narrating stories about ganglands and mind-numbing cruelty.