Dutt Babu has done it again (last time he did it was on the excuse of a Mainak Bhaumik film named AAAG). T2 likes to rent him a full page. So this evening – on the eve of the fateful one month of the JU incident – let me distract myself on him presenting a ‘critique’ of Haider. “Tabu’s Gertrude, perhaps the ideal choice, becomes too sentimental and not lusty at all.” That’s really classic. Now, Hamlet is such a misogynist character taken to its logical extreme that it brings masculinity itself under scanner. Dutt’s is such an innocently un-reflexive patriarchy that to him Gertrude is bound to start in her ‘lustiness’ and end actually there. Therefore, he doesn’t notice that Vishal betters the Bard – Mr. Dutt’s Mr. William – in this account. If you take a flat character, entirely based on male prejudice, and take her few steps forward towards further complexity, you are bound to turn her cerebral. Yes, the difference between Gertrude and Ghazala is that – thanks more to Tabu’s performance – has a mind of her own, however inaccessible that might be. “Why did Ghazala speak so much before dying and Haider not given his best lines?” Duttbabu asks. Don’t tell him that it is ploy where a masculinist narrative is hijacked by an objectified woman who merely died in the last scene of the original play. Don’t tell him how her lines are just burning of a fuse, the masculinist narrative will just blow away in our face. “But where is Hamlet’s violence?” Just blew up in your face, Baba Dutt. “Why is it such an Gandhian ending? This is Shakespeare for God’s sake! Why can’t Haider kill and prove the fact that violence is inevitable but not the last word?” I saw bullets flying, bodies riddled, a suicide bomber, at least a couple of huge explosions, bodies shred and splintered all over, one survivor with no functional limbs (in the original it was a fencing game between mutually admiring opponents if you remember; a couple of knicks, one stabbing, one woman consuming poison unknowingly), Mr Dutt saw no violence. How you lay yourself bare, it would have been more like Mr. William had Haider successfully conducted a rampage. I thought you have reached the autumn of a patriarch, I never knew you were stuck in juvenilia. Haider not pulling the trigger doesn’t make him a saint – because it was not a conscious choice – it was an obvious act because ‘the act’ was left with no value at all after the preceding blast. “Why does Vishal do away with the main pillar of a construction called Horatio in Hamlet? … By robbing the primal, most important confidant called Horatio, Haider ends up having no worldview.” That’s epic! Since Horatio is the one to whom Hamlet doesn’t pretend to be mad and speaks out his mind when he is in his friend’s company we have access to his ‘worldview’. In an earlier post I argued that Arshia might be Horatio, let’s skip it now. So in an artistic text, if the ‘worldview’ is not spoken out, audibly aloud, we have no access to it! Mr. Dutt, I can hear your madly and – shivers – Bong Hamlet speaking a lot! Urgh!
Posted on: Fri, 17 Oct 2014 16:00:16 +0000
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