There’s a rawness to their sex appeal that almost isn’t even meant for anyone but other men to appreciate. In most - if not all - of the pan-Indian movies that have come out, or have released a “first look,” so far, men strike poses that are meant to captivate other men. In pan-Indian cinema, a strange thing occurs: men do the look, and they’re also the ones looked at. Feminist film scholar Laura Mulvey famously defined the male gaze in cinema as one wherein men do the looking, and women are meant to be looked at. The masculinity gets so toxic, however, that, pan-Indian movies almost flip - or rather, extend - the idea of objectification that is typically attributed to women. Vetticad noted this with regards to Pushpa: “…in an India torn apart by religious bigotry, language chauvinism and caste, potential uniting factors include misogyny, patriarchy, crass female objectification and a desire to control/own women.” Women are once again reduced to mere props whose lives are only relevant insofar as they further the man’s character arc. How OTT Films Perpetuate an Upper Class, Caste Aesthetic for the Social Media Generation It appears as if the “angry young man” archetype is back - but where the trope used to direct the anger at societal injustice (with Amitabh Bachchan in Sholay as the quintessential AYM), it is now the default setting. In all of these, the aesthetic is rugged, urgent, and gruff: depicting brooding men in a crisis, rippling with strength and power in an undercurrent of palpable rage. And Pushpa: The Rise, features Allu Arjun with an ax. Brahmastra features Ranbir Kapoor armed with a trishul, or a trident most commonly associated with the Hindu deity Shiva. KGF features actor Yash wielding a hammer, seemingly his weapon of choice. The first looks of each character, moreover, showed one facing off with a tiger’s open jaws, and the other nocking an arrow on a bow. In RRR‘s poster, the two male leads are frozen, mid-roar, with one’s horse and the other’s motorbike partially lifted off the ground. Their posters include beefed-up men looming large, often with an angry, menacing look on their faces and intimidating weapons in their hands. Many of the most recent films touted as “pan-Indian” have this in common. But there’s a missing piece to the success formula of pan-Indian films that’s hidden in plain sight: a resurgence of hypermasculinity. The rise of “pan-Indian” films since Baahubali, then, is said to be driven by this idea: that there’s no longer such a thing as Hindi, Telugu, or Tamil films. The film, released in multiple-languages, showed how it was possible to dissolve cultural barriers in moviemaking, by telling stories that bring all of India together (seemingly). When Baahubali: The Beginning (2015) released more than half a decade ago, it started something that has come to become the mainstay of how movies are made now.
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