Facet of an incomplete emotion

Taking a break from my on-going blogging topic, here's a poem I wrote while I was sitting in my class today. I was way away from the place I was sitting at and yet I was nowhere. The poem perhaps is also incomplete just like the mood under which I wrote it. Just didn't feel like writing after that. Talk about being moody :) . Anyways, here it goes:

Around is the world;
The voices, the questions,
unknown answers, further discussions.

The world is moving,
and still is there a lull.

The silence within,
the desperation inside.
A braindead face,
an emotionless heart.

A drop of tear,
a needless smile.
A purposeless chit-chat,
a streak of fear.

A drooping eye tears through the skin,
am reminded, need some air within.
Staring at nothing, not even trying to make sense,
a restlesness is there, so is a silence dense...


Perhaps, there is a sense in a random ramble too. Or maybe not.........

WHY, WHO, WHEN, WHAT, WHO, WHY

So, as promised in my last piece, I start this one again with “The Dark Knight”. Though, this time it will be brief, very brief. The movie is a superhero movie with one of the most popular supervillains – Joker. Just like the hero, the villain doesn’t has a superpower either. Though, what he has is an ingenious and totally demented mind. He is ruthless, fearless and without emotions. Perhaps the exact words that may describe Batman too. But the difference is abysmal.

So, the movie begins. Goes on for some time and then you see the joker again. Making an entry at a congregation of mafia. You expect the expected. But the joker has a tad bid different idea of meeting expectations. And soon enough, you flinch, or rather I should say I flinched. The scene didn’t depict in-the-face violence. But what it depicts is an effect without showing the actual face of violence. A lot is said without showing.

And then there are couple of another scenes where Heath Ledger (Joker) explains, to his victims putting razor inside their mouth, how he got his scarred smile. This time, a fear is within your heart. This is a slow depiction and this time you are sure what is coming. Only that when it actually comes, you still flinch, even though the camera doesn’t capture the act.

The above were just an example of violence. Though, it’s a total understated violence. For the start, let’s keep it simple. And what we have is an act of violence in an otherwise normal conditions. A violence which is a bit gory but which still lies within the domain that perhaps a lot of us have fun watching.

Whether we accept it or not, violence is a part of our life. The channel may be us or just a stranger on roadside; an actual scenario we witness or just a mental image we imagine; a bout of few unwarranted harsh words or an actual physical blow to disrupt the physics and chemistry of the other. In one way or the other we all witness violence everyday. And to a large extent we enjoy it too. We often imagine taking revenge or sympathize with people who have been wronged and taking revenge. But what is the point when violence becomes totally unwarranted? When is it that we say that “enough is enough”?

The above two questions are largely subjective in its true form because we all have very different appetite for taking violence. Whereas a person may puke out on seeing a spurt of fake blood on screen, the other may actually have his eyes glued on the screen when a slow act of cutting through a human body is being depicted(and I am not talking about surgical operation here). We all consume violence and we also dare ourselves to see how much we can consume. More on this dare that we try, in later posts. For now, let me just note down the essentials in the supply and demand of this consumption:

WHY: Why are the producers and directors keen on making movies depicting ultra-violence, perhaps even unrealistic and too gory to consume in-the-face violence?

WHO: Is there a specific group of directors/producers who give us these kind of movies? What is the trend in these movies and what exactly is the nature of this violence that differentiates it from that shown in otherwise acceptable movies?

WHEN: Do people consume the gore all the time or is some specific state of mind that makes this violence more acceptable to them?

WHAT: What exactly is our appetite for this kind of torturous violence? What has been depicted until now on celluloid? Does the unreal scene increase our acceptance level of this kind of violence?

WHO: Who are the consumers of these movies? Does it has a universal acceptance or does it has a selective yet profitable consumer base?

WHY: Why do we consume the extreme torture sequence? What kind of thrill or pleasure do we get? Or is it just that we actually do want to be afraid?

There are many other dimensions to the above questions and even more questions. In the coming posts I will try to discuss each of these questions and more. The sequences might start to get very gory now and I hope I am able to get a direction towards the answer by the time I conclude this series of posts. At conclusion, let me ask something. Whenever I have watched such movies or wondered about them, I have thought that if Devil and hell actually exist, would they be having an appetite for committing an act of such violence as the characters in such movies do? Have we surpassed the mythical devil and hell by our own imagination of the acts that can be carried?

The beginning - The Dark Knight

“Fcuk man!!!!!!!!!!!! That was awesome......... that was one awesome fcuking dark movie I saw and I am just not sure how much exactly I liked it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” – This is what my gtalk status message reads right now. And this was somewhat my state of mind when the movie today was in its climactic stage. I was simply not able to understand if I was loving the movie or not. The truth being I was loving it but the movie had dig a hole in my heart. My heart was sinking. I was thinking, “The movie is dark. It’s really dark.” Not that I haven’t watched a darker movie than this nor that I haven’t watched a movie that plays with your emotions and mind in a more cumbersome way. But seldom have I watched a movie which combined both and managed to blow you apart.

I guess I should stop to write about the movie now otherwise I will simply keep on going on and on. And today, I am not here to write a review. Today, I am a man with a mission. A mission that I had been postponing for a very long time. And that mission is to write the second blog entry of my life. But before I start with the actual topic, for the people who haven’t yet guessed the movie, it is THE DARK KNIGHT.

Now, to get back to the blogging topic – It has been long since I have been thinking of writing this one. But I never could make myself do it. I am just way too lazy and need a really big impetus to do something (My body structure also demands something of similar sort J ). I should thank the movie for giving me that push. And though I had decided to write this today but I am sure I wouldn’t have, if not for this movie. And in fact, I am lucky to have watched the movie. But then, that’s another small story which is perhaps boring. Though, I did have a feeling that my luck was good enough for me to ask anything today and I might just have got it. But the nice guy that I am, I didn’t wish for the not-so-nice things that keep on giving my grey cells the only work out they have ;) .

The movie stayed with me. It tortured me. The right won over the evil and still there was something so dark about it that kept on lingering even before the movie had started to finish. There was perhaps only one movie that had tortured me like this or perhaps more than this, and it was “Seven.” I remember that the afternoon I had watched the movie, the sun had simply stopped to shine when I finally came out of my room after finishing it. Thankfully, this movie hadn’t that sort of effect on me because it was already dark when I came out of theatre. But what this movie gave me was the idea to start analyzing the thing that I was intending to. And that thing is the depiction of torture by humans in movies.

I am a big movie fan. Perhaps a very big fan. But I shall also confess that I am more of a popularist movie watcher. I perhaps can’t watch most of the classics including the great Oscar nominations. Neither do I have a great idea about the out-of-the-world directors, though I have watched a few of those movies and loved them. Now, coming back to the topic, this movie that I watched today depicted some scenes in not so graphic way and still I flinched at them (Not disapprovingly though). The same goes with the movie Seven. Both these movies didn’t have scenes which depicted torture. And still the pain could very well settle within me. On the other hand, there are movies which show torture in such a graphic way that perhaps keeping eye fixed on the screen becomes a heart-stopping process. But then, that is just perhaps me. Or else, people just like getting their heart being stopped. Be not mistaken, I am not talking about small thrills like going on a dangerous fun ride of the sort that Aamir Khan dares Priety Zinta to take in DCH. I am talking about scenes with people torturing other people, mutilating them, making them bleed and what not. To get a more clear picture, you can perhaps visit http://www.imdb.com/ and check out couple of movies like “Cannibal Holocaust” and “Caligula”. These are some very “horrible” movies. And I have often wondered what prompts humans to make these movies or watch them. What makes us to think, imagine and relish something that perhaps devil (if it exists) also wouldn’t have thought of doing, to make human soul his (or her, let me not be sexist and I give the fairer sex full opportunity of being devil).

This is just the start of the journey that I will take to try and question the behavior of consumption of torture. There will be lots of questions and perhaps a lot of Freudian type (with perhaps far lesser sexual element) analysis making no sense. But all in all, there will perhaps be absolutely no answers. But let’s not mind that. Let’s try and understand this phenomenon. And I will perhaps need help from you all. So, as the starting, why not give me the names of the movie(s), which you think had depiction of torture inflicted (not by dead people or bad ghosts, but by human characters) on humans, which you felt was surreal.

That’s all for today. Tomorrow will be the next chapter in the journey with the first question. And as will be the trend for coming few days, the piece of writing will start with discussing THE DARK KNIGHT (If you haven’t understood by now, I perhaps am just in the awe of the awesomeness of the movie). Just to end this piece I will love to quote a line from the movie. And no, the quote didn’t come from Batman aka The Dark Knight nor did it come from the joker. It came from Harvey Dent aka Twoface and here is goes: “You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”