Cinema’s primary job – or of ALL fiction content is to entertain. And while entertaining, if they end up educating the audience, giving a message or making society better, that is a bonus.

People should stop reading too much into cinematic content. What you see on screen is NOT a manual on how people are supposed to function. It is simply a fictional story.

Let’s look at some examples:

In cinema, mostly in the genre-category popularly described as a ‘rom-com’ or a ‘rom-dramedy’ (basically a comedy or drama with a romance angle to it), a man wooing/courting/pursuing a woman has, for decades, involved what one may refer to today as ‘appropriating her physical space’ (even often times, physically accosting her), till she helplessly fell in love with him. Public harassment of the woman was bonafide entertainment with hundreds of films having at least one song where the girl was chased (today it would be called stalked) by the boy in college corridors & city streets (Tezaab, Dil, Phool Aur Kaante, Ishq, Khiladi and many many more).

Amitabh Bachchan, possibly India’s best actors and a huge icon, has on screen:
– turned a normal day into a wet-t-shirt day for Kimi Katkar in Hum.
– slut-shamed Zeenat Aman in Dostana.
– cornered Zeenat Aman in Lawaaris and pretended he was going to molest her “to teach her a lesson”.
In all of the above cases, the lady fell head over heels in love with Bachchan’s character.

Further:
– The molestation threat was also repeated by Aamir Khan in Dil with Madhuri Dixit ‘to teach her a lesson’, only to have her fall in love with him too.
– Govinda’s stalking of Karishma Kapoor in Raja Babu was a big hit.
– Shah Rukh Khan’s manic obsession in Darr turned him into a phenomenon.
– Most characters in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara use multiple anti-women expletives.
– Tere Naam of course turned the obsessed lover-turned-kidnapper, into an object of sympathy for his one-sided passion.
– The double-meaning songs with women in participation, in Mard, Vidhaata and many more mainstream films, were celebrated mainstream music.

And it is not just the 80s & 90s, even the ‘classics’, which have been enjoyed by both ‘the intellectuals’ and ‘the masses’, are ‘guilty’ of this stuff:
– Raj Kapoor slapped and manhandled Nargis in Awara (1956) because she playfully called him ‘Junglee’.
– In An Evening in Paris (1967), Shammi Kapoor dangled from a helicopter in a revealing bathrobe to ‘attract’ his love interest. He also ran around behind her singing “Akele Akele kahaan ja rahe ho”. In real life today, these things would be considered criminal offenses of ‘indecent exposure’ and ‘stalking’.
– In Gulzar’s Ijaazat (hugely modern & progressive by all standards back then) an ex-wife touches the feet of her husband in the last scene, even though it is the husband who morally failed their marriage.
– There was also the upright ‘good-boy’ leading man of Basu Chatterjee’s Swami (1970s) who repeatedly reminds his impetuous wife Saudamini that she must behave because she is a “Vaishnav ki patni” and that her place is with nobody else except,……….you guessed it……., her ‘master’, her husband, her ‘Swami’.

Now, clearly such behaviour is not meant to be repeated in the real world. But these themes existed back then because they were representative of prevalent ills in society. Women had less agency back then. Caste-structure was more rigid, etc. In today’s world, these ills have almost been eliminated and hence such behaviour on screen almost does not exist. And even when it does, is almost always portrayed in a negative light.

A movie like Kabir Singh, while being enjoyed by many (KS made nearly 300Cr), also had its share of detractors who were ‘outraged’ by the misogyny and patriarchy of the lead character. Not me. I actually liked the way the director of Kabir Singh spoke of the “Kabir-slapping-Preeti” scene which evoked a lot of reactions among people. He spoke about how he saw it as a natural action/reaction of 2 people who were passionately into each other but were having serious problems with each other as well and were completely frustrated and at their wits end with each other. Also, that it is a fictional story, and it was NOT supposed to be an instructional video for how boys should behave with girls. And the director was right.

To look at another example – let’s look at Dev D, by Anurag Kashyap. AK’s Dev D is a man who is vindictive, petty and weak. He wants the world rearranged as per his convenience. He is involved in a drunken driving episode where someone dies. Now, this is completely contradictory to the original character he is playing on screen – Sarat Chandra’s Devdas. Chandra’s Devdas knows he is a moral failure and that he has failed as a lover and a human-being so he drinks himself to death. Dev D on the other hand lives in a haze of utter impunity in which he continues to have a love-interest who tenderly bathes him in a tub while his ex-girlfriend (now married to someone else) shows up one day to his messy room and………..ends up washing his clothes. I found this to be complete nonsense. But I still liked the movie a lot………..so did a lot of people. So much so that Dev D is celebrated as a modern-day masterpiece by men & women alike, despite all the character flaws of the lead character. Of course, the excellent music, great direction by AK and lovely performances by everyone made liking the movie easier, but in essence, the movie worked because it released to a changing Indian society that was ready to give people second chances.

So what is the point of me writing and you reading, all this?

Often-times cinema needs you to suspend your disbelief to enjoy a film as a fictional story. It is this suspension of disbelief that allows you to enjoy a fictional ‘reality’ where a man flies through the air backwards and lands 10 feet away when being punched by Inspector Singham. Or that a retired old jailer can shoot an exact map of India around a villain using a machine gun. Or that 3 men can donate blood at the same time, with their blood going into a common bottle and the same bottle is being used to transfuse blood into a woman, all in real time. Or that a dog, inspired by God no less, can save an improper marriage from happening.

Just like there is suspension of disbelief in cinema, there should also be ‘suspension of political-correctness’. Yes, there are people who want everything in the world to be politically correct, sexuality-agnostic, gender-respectful, culturally appropriate, etc etc. However, if they look for the same thing in the fictional world of movies, then they are just setting themselves up to be disappointed.

As much as anyone may think they are or should be, movies are entertainment and are not agents of societal change. So, looking for a moral-science class in movies is as appropriate as looking for snow in Mumbai. Movies depict events & incidents as they are in that fictional world the creators have created, not as they should ideally be in real life.

If society changes, so will entertainment content. Movies / cinema is a soft-target which can be easily ‘blamed’ for society’s ills. And when we do that, we take away any real chance of change. Grown adults molesting women because they are ‘influenced’ by cinema, no matter how glamorous the ‘hero’ is, is complete nonsense and a canard that has been played out for too long in our society. The people who claim this are absolving themselves of all personal responsibility. And those who amplify this thought are just as horrible because you are making Cinema out to be what it is not. We should basically be watching movies for what they are, and stop looking at them as instructional videos on how the world should function.

Unless we accept that both cinema & society are influenced by the two real agents of change – our family system and our education system – two institutions which are supposed to instil values & learning in our lives, we will always continue to have this argument on whether cinema influences society or does society influences cinema.

To sum all this up – Yes, both Cinema and Society influence each other and will continue to do so. But the two real agents of positive change in our world are – our family & our education system.

P.S.
All that said, I do have one hope. For the longest time, our police forces have been portrayed in a negative light in our content (especially in the 20th century). Over the past 20 years or so, we have started to see them portrayed in a much more positive light – both men & women. Movies like Singham, Sooryavanshi, Mardaani, Delhi Crime, et al are showing them as heroes & agents of positive change and I hope that it ends up causing the average Indian to look at our police forces with a more positive outlook, coz they deserve it…