Manhandle

http://www.kashmirdispatch.com/others/10106313-manhandle-women-kashmir.htm

An ad of men underwear shows some goons in a restaurant teasing a girl and the hero (who is a cook in the restaurant and wears that underwear) comes to rescue the girl in trouble. He beats the men in his cookery style making each of them a recipe. The girl in the end swings into his manly arms saying the he cooks the food well, in response to which the hero, with that teasing tint in the eyes says that he also does home delivery. The ad is interesting in the sense that it depicts the women sexually twice. The goons tease her because they see her as a sex object ready to be exploited but she refuses not because she does not see herself as a sex object rather the approach of those men was not convincing and just after that the hero beats those men, and she swings in his arms and agrees to his home delivery, which of course has sexual connotations. The girl agrees to be taken sexually because the hero passes himself through bravery and by becoming a macho-man. Thus, the ad succeeds in imaging the women sexually twice – in her agreement with the hero as well as in her resistance to those goons. The proliferation of such images or the ‘feminine mystique’[1] as Betty Friedan calls them in her eponymous book, is enormous in movies, commercials, T.V. soaps, and sitcoms. These images are not new as such. They have existed in our society even before the boon of infotainment. Women in literature (with due exceptions) have been rendered through pornoglossia – a term that Deborah Cameron uses to describe the language that describes women “purely in terms of their sexual usefulness, availability, or attractiveness to men.”[2]

This pornoglossia, this feminine mystique casts female in the male gaze making them appear, appear passively, and precisely making them appear as passive sexual objects. This is evident in the movie Paranormal Activity. The handler/holder of the movie is a male. The camera is handled by male and it is through his gaze that we see everything and as spectators, we occupy his position, his gaze. It is through him/camera that we see his girlfriend and all the paranormal activities in the house. More precisely the male handled camera makes us, spectators as voyeurs and we indulge in a sort of scopophilia. The camera has been brought in to capture or investigate the paranormal activities but in the process the male gaze/camera tries to capture each and every activity of the female, which more than often are normal. So as a typical voyeuristic cinema, the male/camera investigates the female and through her the complexity of plot is resolved. It is interesting to note that the female does not want to be enframed or made visible in the male gaze/camera. She, most of the times, is irritated and male gaze/camera often threatens her. Thus, in a way, the coming of male gaze/camera enhances the paranormal activities in the female, which come to an end when she kills her husband and gazes right in the camera, on us, spectators and voyeurs. The man-handled camera, the male gaze is the real ghost/demon in the movie.

This patriarch enframing comes significantly in Dibaker Banerjee’s LSD. The three stories which we as audience watch as voyeurs, are enframed and captured in patriarch narratives as well as by the camera held by males. All the three stories become visible to us through male gaze/camera. The first story, a sort of meta-cinema, is a satire or parody of the popular bollywood movie Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (DDLJ). The girls in both the movies are the properties of their fathers and while the father of Simran (DDLJ) lets her go with the hero Raj, the girl in LSD elopes with her boyfriend against her father’s wish. It is interesting to see the patriarchal elements hidden in DDLJ which LSD makes explicit. Simran (DDLJ) does not go with Raj unless and until her father tells her to go and Simran of LSD goes against the consent of her father and she is killed by her father and we as part of that patriarch society witness it through the camera.

The second story reveals the feminine mystique and pornoglossia in the most explicit way. It exposes the patriarch view of woman as only a sex object ready to be consumed. The boys in the camera room keep on replaying the recorded shots of women where any sort of intimacy is developed by them.  In the end the girl wholly becomes the victim of male voyeuristic patriarchy, where she is captured by the male in the most intimate and personal moment and then consumed by the same society on mass level through internet.

The third story is the most interesting and different of all. It also has a male camera handler who uses it for good purpose – ‘trying to help a girl’. He hands over the camera to the girl, who has to trap the culprit. But, this sort of sting operation happens with a cost. She uses the camera by fixing it in her revealing dress. Unlike the male who just uses the camera, she has to use her body as the currency to pass as the holder of the camera.

Leaving cinema apart, what is interesting to see is the proliferation of real, private videos and more precisely the sex videos and the handmade videos of the military encounters or the most recent stone pelting videos from Kashmir. The immediate question is why does one feel the need to capture those intimate videos. Are we obsessed and fascinated with recording or is the case reverse, that there is no fascination left in the outside world, so a need to create one. Does it not highlight the point that J. G. Ballard raised in the famous introduction to his cult classic novel Crash:

I feel that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decades. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind – mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.[3]

To some extent the case is true. The bombardment of sexuality through pornography and fake representation of conflicts/struggles through media, press the individual to throw off this mask of falsity, of fake orgasms and computer generated fake encounters. Individuals who make these videos of sex and stone-pelting, work unconsciously as an artist, in order to create reality that will challenge the otherwise simulated world and it is done by capturing the private sexual acts or by capturing the real situations in which they have participated counter to those representations where they had no role to play and yet were captured. Pornography is an obvious example and in latter case it is mostly media reports or movies. Any bollywood movie about Kashmir has kashmiris as its subjects, yet when they see it they feel it is not them. Given to this situation it becomes necessary for them to create a ‘real’ one of their own and disseminate those videos or images that represent them in their real situations. Thus, a strong proliferation of sex mms’ and videos of encounters/struggles and stone-pelting in last few years.

In a way these videos act as ‘excess’ both in Bataillean as well as Baudrillardiean sense. This ‘excess’ acts as an act of transgression and disruption of the existing simulated reality of mass media.[4] It also is symptomatic of the fact that we have entered the age of simulation and these videos also suggest themselves to be an ‘other’ to the existing mass mediated system.

But even these videos also signify the fact that it is only males who are obsessed and only males who have this fascination of recording as can be observed in the above analyzed two movies. If one takes a look on the recent popular mms scandals form DPS to the latest one in Kashmir, one cannot fail to notice that all of them (with few little exceptions) were captured by males. And a close look into those mms’ will reveal the fact that almost all the males reduce the women to body in their videos. It is obvious how much patriarch they are otherwise they would not have captured these women in the first place. The women in these videos are passive bodies ready to be captured while actively doing what patriarch notions make them to do. But, what is interesting is to note that these males take their patriarch models of framing from pornography itself. They make the women in these videos do exactly what porn movies show them. Thus, it becomes a vicious circle between these individual videos and mass videos.

Same holds true for the stone-pelting videos from Kashmir. The fascination of recording is taken by males as almost all of these videos have been captured by males. Apart from the ‘excess’ element of these videos, what alarms me is the notion that these videos also take the models given to them by patriarchy and mass media (mainly movies and commercials). One of the clips, among many others, that shocked me was where these two boys have been injured badly by Indian military. They are drenched in blood and breathing their last and people are giving them water. The video tries to capture them in this situation, tries to capture their death. The question that was going in my mind was, why a need to capture this? Instead of attending those two boys, why would anyone make a video of them? I just said that this is excess and I was threatened when I remembered a quote from Baudrillard’s Vital Illusions, where he says, “Real is disappearing . . . not because of a lack of it – on the contrary, there is too much of it. It is the excess of reality that puts an end to reality.” [5]

I managed to cool myself off by suggesting that this video could only be captured by a male and what I craved was for a feminine version of this struggle. The guy who was showing me the video added his narration to the video where death for ‘motherland’ was heralded high, while his sister kept her eyes closed through the whole clip. I was craving…

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[1] Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, (New York: Norton, 2001), p. xv.

[2] Jeremy Hawthorn, A Concise Dictionary of Contemporary Literary Theory, (London: Edward Arnold, 1994), p. 155.

[3] J. G. Ballard, “Introduction” to Crash, (London: Vintage, 1995).

[4] Though in Bataille’s general economy it’s a transgression and disruption of capitalism.

[5]Jean Baudrillard, Vital Illusions, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 65-66.