Animal—the Review

There was once a Marxist scholar by the name of Gramsci. According to him, one of the biggest reasons why there had not been a revolution of the working classes, in the way prophecied by Marx and Lenin, was popular culture. Instead of spreading awareness about inequities and rousing the violent tendencies of the downtrodden, which is the Marxist wet dream, popular culture has acted like a drug, making everyone happy and satiated, papering over differences between the oppressed and the oppressor.

Gramsci would be happy if he saw the world today.

Movies are arrows in a culture war, as the very definition of “art” is sought to be cast within the ideological framework of what Marxists define as a “critical theory”— cinema is “good” only if it leads to “social justice,” and “bad” if it does not: entertainment be damned. Disney has defined its criteria for what it wants to make in terms of representation and equity, and the Oscars, from 2024, have set the line for what they consider to be “good cinema” in terms of diversity. Even though Disney’s franchises like Marvel and Star Wars fail consistently to engage and entertain the audience, and the Oscars grow irrelevant, the studio heads stay their course because of pressure from agenda-pushing billionaire shareholders with a missionary zeal to evangelize the world through cinema. By controlling the means of production of the fount of what defines morality, namely popular entertainment, they get to define what is fascism, what is racism, what is communalism, and if you disagree, you are all of these bad things. Popular entertainment is now the tool of the revolution, and their heralds are the Huffington Posts and Buzzfeeds of the world, and in India, their wannabe cousins (you know who they are). Together with their footsoldiers, ideologically aligned social media dittoheads drunk on the woke Kool-Aid, they will browbeat you into submitting to their new notion of what is right and what is wrong and what is justice and who must step back to pass the mike to whom.

As a dinosaur from the patriarchal, regressive past of Bollywood of the 90s who does not care for this politics, I try to avoid today’s cinema, especially in the popular sphere, at least till the time they come on streaming, where the only thing I am losing is time, as opposed to going to the theater, where I lose both time and money. “Animal,” when the movie came out to terrible reviews and amazing box office numbers, was, and that is what I thought then, yet another missile in this war, except this, was the anti-matter version of “critical theory programming,” the Patriot missile to the Scud, where the director was essentially passing every convention of the “woke Bollywood movie” through a “NOT” gate, flipping the gender and religious politics of “Netflix Bollywood.”, the Sith to the Jedi or the Jedi to the Sith, depending on which side of the culture war you were.

This, to me, was as non-sensical as that against which it was made. Why? Because “Animal,” the way I saw it, did not start from the point of story or character, as good works of cinematic art were once presumed to, but from ideology. This was the thesis to the Marxist “counter-thesis,” a silly, petulant “let me rub my dick in your face” (an actual metaphor repeated in the movie, at the very start, and at the very end) middle-finger (yes, I am mixing my metaphors here) to the progressive thought mafia, an extreme to another extreme, its target audience the “other echo-chamber,” a savvy business strategy for this age of polarized politics, but one that I personally wanted to have no truck with.

This was why I did not see “Rocky Aur Rani ki Prem Kahani” in theaters. I could make out from the trailer and the promotional publicity, that this was not so much a movie with an honest intent to entertain, but an apologia, with Karan Johar apologizing to his cocktail circuit for his role in furthering structural inequities through different expressions of “-archy” and “-phobia” and “-shaming” in his body of work.

Once Rocky Aur Rani came on streaming, I did see it, and it was everything I thought it would be, Karan Johar donning the burlap sack for all his sins in the eyes of the Church of the Progressive. And it was terrible and boring because it was trying too hard to push its agenda, but I sometimes couldn’t even understand what it was trying to say, like when Ranveer was shown to be progressive because he tries on his mother-in-law’s bra at a shop because women wash men’s underwear so this is somehow…I guess this was a point too evolved for my regressive brain. There was so much over-the-top self-flagellation in Rocky Aur Rani that it degenerated into self-parody. Even though the movie did poorly for such a AAA release with top stars, it got Karan Johar back into the good books of the cognoscenti, and with the money he has, maybe that was a good enough return on investment for him.

But not for me, or for the time I put into it.

With similar trepidation, I turned on my Netflix to see “Animal” streaming, hoping to have my apprehensions of what it was confirmed.

Boy, was I mistaken. Never judge a book by its cover.

“Animal” is mind-blowing, in true “Gunda” style.

Just like Gunda, Kanti Shah’s magnum opus, was a critique of modern consumerism, the pharma industry, corporate politics, and the inequities of law, a woke movie in the shell of something diametrically opposite, a Dadaist masterpiece because none of it was intentional, Animal is a grenade within a nuclear bomb, you go in expecting Sunny Leone, but out pops Sunny Gavaskar.

The similarity with Gunda is unintentional, I am sure, and that’s what makes it so epic. Not only does the highlight action set piece happens on a tarmac, and not only is there “Kundan lagayoonga tera badan pe Chandan” type over-the-top brotherly grief at the end, enough talk about free-hanging dicks and no underwear “khulla”-ness, and “mard banoonga haan” to satiate all devotees of the cult of Gunda, along with memorable performances by Shakti Kapoor in both, the inspiration runs much deeper. If there are intentional inspirations and homages, it is to the beats of Godfather, from the assassination attempt to the side-chick in Sicily to the climactic departure of Kay, with dashes of Kill Bill (but if the Crazy 88 were singing and dancing during the fight sequence) and Scarface in the bathtub, but it is the un-engineered alignment with Gunda that elevates Animal to something surprising, in the best traditions of art. That and another unintentional homage to the song from a Kamal Sadanah-Divya Bharati starrer, “Rang”, whose lines went “Na jaaaye Musoorie, Na jaaye Dehra Dun, Aeroplane ke andar manaye honeymoon” in the scene where the hero and heroine consummate their marriage in a private plane.

I know that’s a lot to unpack. So let me explain.

Ranvijay Singh, played by Ranbir Kapoor very early on in the movie, explains what an “alpha male” is. “Alpha male,” a concept first introduced by primatologist Frans De Waal, not to be confused with Dravid the Wall, is a term made popular by Whatsapp evolutionary biologists and X-addicts with a crush on Jordan Peterson. When men lived in tribes, only better than animals, there used to be “alpha males” who, by dint of their masculinity, confidence, arrogance, and power, attracted all the females. The women, fluttering their eyelids, then flocked to these “asli mards,” for offspring. This left un-mated the “betas” (not to be confused with Anil Kapoor when he had chest hair and crooned to “Koyel se teri boli”), who then fought back against the “alphas” through morality and monogamy, or as Ranvijay Singh says, through “poetry and false promises of romantic love,” in order to level the playing field of “Khela hobe.”

I rolled my eyes when I saw it because I knew immediately where this was going. Oh God, now we are going to see Ranbir Kapoor embark on the path of “alpha-ness” in true “Mard ko dard naheen hota” style, a Howard Roark from Fountainhead cosplaying as Sanju from Sanjay Dutt, crossed with Inspector Kale of Gunda who said “Badshah ke behen ho ya fakeer ke beti har kisi ko ana parta alpha male ke neeche bajane ke liye citi” (Ok, he didn’t say “alpha male” but bear with me).

Boy, was I mistaken. The movie, rather than celebrating alphaness, is a takedown of “toxic masculinity” in the greatest tradition of Disney and the Academy Awards. Throughout the three hours of its running length (the director, Mr. Vanga, does not believe in editing his work, just like he does not like shaving body hair in different areas), the character, played by Ranbir Kapoor keeps on whining and whining about his daddy, Balbir Singh, played by Anil Kapoor, because Daddy, bo hoo, did not give him the attention he wanted.

Now, as the movie shows him, Balbir Singh is a dad against whom one should not have much to complain about. He buys his son everything money can buy, stands by him as he does criminal acts, bails him out, and spoils him much more. Yet the “man-baby” cannot forget that one day of the Michael Jackson concert, and his emotional unavailability, the archetypal snowflake whose complaint is he was not hugged enough as a child. Alpha male indeed ! When his wife, played by Rashmika Mandana, mutters something under her breath, swallowing half her dialog, about his father, Ranvijay Singh, instead of engaging in “alpha-level” stoic silence, Mr. Alpha lashes out at his wife, looking for attention, in the way people do when they say “I am angry at you but I won’t tell you why.” This mard ko continuous dard hota hai, and he needs to brandish huge phallic guns, to do the “tu mard bana” activities defined in “Gunda”. When he cheats on his wife, he does not say, as an alpha would, “This is what defines the alpha”, but instead makes up some gobbledygook like “I was trying to seduce her to give up her plan.”

And this is where the biggest, most beautiful surprise is. Animal posits that those who consider themselves “alpha males” are rarely that; they are overcompensating “betas” with daddy issues, whining and seeking attention for mild emotional hurts, saying, “I do not care for your validation, khayega kela” (yes, Gunda again), while continuously complaining they do not get validation. If this isn’t the biggest takedown of toxic masculinity, I do not know what is. To this, when you add some super surreal scenes like the army of hardy gun-wielding bodyguards breaking into song and dance during a pitched, over-the-top action sequence, Bobby Deol doing haseena ka paseena with haseenon ka mela, you wonder whether you are watching a movie or a magic trick, one thing promised, one thing shown, then vanished and then brought back, like Nitish Kumar from NDA to JDU and back.

A true masterpiece, subversive in spirit, that turns the culture war on its head.