Before I was ever introduced to Superman or Spider-Man, or even any concept of any superhero at all, I had one idol, one figure whom I wanted to be more than anything: Hanumanji. I would try to replicate his godly feats of strength, would climb anything I saw to imitate the ape demigod and even broke my collarbone trying to leap through the air like him. Dev Patel (“The Green Knight”) similarly broke his hand in the first week of filming “Monkey Man” doing exactly what I did: attempted godhood.
Patel’s directorial debut starts with the story of Hanumanji, narrating with a picture book how the son of the wind god preceded Icarus by mistaking the sun for a fruit, pursuing it until the sun was swallowed whole. For this challenge to nature’s hierarchy, Hanumanji was cast down back to Earth and stripped of his godhood. That’s not exactly the story I was told growing up, but that’s OK. “Monkey Man” is defined by these challenges and contradictions, growing instead in the conflict that would threaten to break other movies.
Perhaps the most salient metaphor for the duality of representative forces is the underground Mumbai fighting ring helmed by a white South African organizer, where Patel’s protagonist, Kid, is a heel. The white man stands between primeval, animal aspects of Hindu culture: the snake king Vasuki, the bear god Jambhavan and the aforementioned monkey demigod Hanumanji. He then not only announces them as and reduces them to Western categorizations — the Marvel villain King Cobra, Rudyard Kipling’s Baloo, King Kong — but also opposes them against each other, using their animalization as further degradation. It is this same force that heightened Indian caste tensions and discrimination. It is this same force that buries Hinduism’s historical representations of Queerness by constraining it to Western heteronormativity. It is this same force that cherry-picked the incredibly expansive canon of Hindu gods and chose Sri Ram as the fascist Hindutva movement’s — one focused on establishing a Hindu hegemony in India — hypermasculine figurehead; this makes Sri Ram’s undocumented absence from the eponymous “Ramayana”- and Hanuman-tributing “Monkey Man” is all the more meaningful.
But, let me correct this bit of a generalization first. When citing the origin of issues in India like casteism, Queerphobia and fascism, there’s another dialectic created between attributing these original sins to either colonialism or the cultures they colonized. It is, of course, not as simple as blaming everything on colonialism or pointing fingers at original Indian cultures (like we can for India’s long-documented history of Islamophobia): It’s a dialectic that “Monkey Man” aims to resolve. The very existence of “Monkey Man” is as dialectical as its title: a film set in India released for American and European audiences, a bilingual blur through its English and Hindi scripting, taking as much inspiration from the modern Western action blockbuster as it does from eastern Bollywood spectacle and Korean revenge thriller.
However, introducing a dialectical political analysis through structure is one thing; how does the story resolve it? “Monkey Man” has been criticized for a lack of political subtlety and nuance in its script, but in some part, these comments miss “Monkey Man” for what it is. While it’s true that Hindutva attempts at appropriating chants like “Jai Bajrang Bali” still direct violence against oppressed groups in the name of religious motivation, this somewhat misses the intent of “Monkey Man” as a political action movie. The action film’s text is indeed used to allude to modern-day political issues in India. But, much more of the movie’s meaning is encoded in its action, the same way the songs in a musical are.
The famed choreographer Bob Fosse (“All That Jazz”) explains the extraneous actions of a musical thus: “The time to sing is when your emotional level is too high to just speak anymore, and the time to dance is when your emotions are just too strong to only sing about how you feel.” Action films work the same way: When tensions are too much to just speak, then punch, and when tensions are too much for one punch, fight. So where other films would criticize, “Monkey Man” chooses instead to brutalize.
The film’s antagonistic forces are stratified with its immoral religious leader, a puppet fascist party prime minister candidate, their government’s corrupt cops, the criminal underbelly’s sex traffickers and scores of nameless thugs. As Kid takes each one down, the film imparts a tangible sense of regret over his violence that lessens as he steps up the hierarchy and further annihilates it, as he moves away from fighting men whose bodies are being trafficked the same way this organization’s prostitutes are. Two of these leaders are Queenie (Ashwini Kalsekar, “Andhadhun”) and Rana (Sikandar Kher, “Monica, O My Darling”), the latter of which translates to “King” in Hindi. Above them is someone holier, the aforementioned “holy” man Baba Shakti (Makarand Deshpande, “Sarfarosh”), whose name translates to “Father Power.”
Even though the religious zealotry he commands is a very clear real-world parallel to India’s reigning Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, the movie takes steps to hide that fact. It swaps the BJP’s claimed secular saffron coloring for red, it uses lion symbology in place of the BJP’s lotus, and — as previously mentioned — their usual figurehead Sri Ram is nowhere to be seen, even as “Monkey Man” references the epic that bears his name and displays murals of his battles with evil alongside Hanuman. So what effect is produced here? The levels of evil rank from thugs to soldiers to kings — especially pertinent with the fascist party’s symbolic king of the jungle — but what’s a king to a god?
“Monkey Man” is defined by dichotomy, starting with its own title’s beast: human dialectic. It’s only when the protagonist meets the hijra, India’s community of individuals who exist in a superposition of masculinity and femininity — where the title “transgender” wouldn’t fit as well when hijra predate the Western gender binary — that the movie reveals it doesn’t deal in duality, but in resolving its dialectics with divinity. They pray to a unified idol of the god of destruction, Shiva, and his female half, the goddess of growth, Parvati. Even when the film’s fascists try to claim otherwise and assert their authority, the hijra are holy; they are warriors and divine in their own right. The unnamed hero claims the only name he can as the hijra’s and his country’s savior: the avatar of Shiva. He becomes a persona full of paradoxes: both a man and a monkey, a mortal and a god, a destroyer and a grower. Hanuman. In doing so, Patel illustrates an India in “Monkey Man” that is set on reclaiming its Queer culture from colonization, on liberating its working class from fascist tyranny and its narrative, gods and representations from Hindutva ideology. This includes Sri Ram, who even in his undocumented state, can have his meaning reappropriated by the invocation of the “Ramayana.”
Despite crucial moments of self-censorship by Patel, “Monkey Man” still has not been released in India, which only further shows the power the film has in a restricted state. Just as Sri Ram not appearing in “Monkey Man” attempts a unique reappropriation in his absence, the absence of “Monkey Man” in Indian cinemas alludes more to its power than further attempts at a censored release ever could.
Patel has used the structure of a revenge thriller to swing the arm of vengeance toward an entire system that has wronged his characters rather than just one individual. Sometimes the only way to destroy a fascist’s false sense of superiority is with fists. In casting his antifascist action in the canon of modern tributes to Hinduism, but one specifically opposed to Hindutva, Patel has created a holy imperative to fight back against injustice. Demons, fascists and false prophets all bleed the same. Injustice is not inevitable, it is enacted — so injustice’s opposite is indeed inevitable. The need for justice is primal, even, as the karmic cycle turns its wheel once again.
Daily Arts Writer Saarthak Johri can be reached at sjohri@umich.edu.
The post Will India ever unban Dev Patel’s beastly, blessed dialectical directorial debut ‘Monkey Man’? appeared first on The Michigan Daily.
Leave a Reply