The pathetic man is rewriting the macho script

How filmmakers are redefining masculinity on screen by embracing vulnerability.

Fawad Khan in a still from the teaser of Barzakh. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

Pay Rs.50 and you can enter Thiruvananthapuram’s C Theater. A few streets away from the city’s bustling centre of temples and palaces, the theatre’s facade has crumbled, with the overgrowth of monsoon foliage left untended for its regular clientele—men who gather in rhythmic routines around 11:30 am, 2:30 pm, 6:30 pm, and 9:30 pm, and seat themselves in tattered chairs to watch soft porn on a screen so roughhewn they might as well be projecting those heaving breasts on jute.

Men eye not just the faded screen but each other’s squandered bodies too, walking towards them, sitting beside them, touching them, before finally leading them off to the bathroom outside on the edge of a field of overgrowth. They watch, they ask if they can be next, they queue, as if for rations.

These men are desperate. They stare, they demand, but it is all tinged with self-pity. It is not a roaring demand but a rumpled one. “Am I not handsome?” asked an old man circling around me.

A complicated masculinity was taking shape before my eyes. One that held its inadequacies on its shoulders and yet made the same male demands. The same but tamed by the possibility of rejection, even if not undeterred by it. It seems that the opposite of the hero is not the villain but the pathetic man, a man we see only too often in life. He is usually sublimated into the villain, who at the moment of being vanquished turns back into the pathetic man, pleading for his life or dignity or whatever the hero has stripped apart.

Remaking the image of the hero

While working on Soorarai Pottru (2020), the writer-director Sudha Kongara was insistent that Suriya’s character—the entrepreneurial hero—borrow money from his wife, feeling almost embarrassed about it, despite everyone in the writers’ room asking her to delete the scene. It was too pathetic for them, this scene, something no hero could ever retrieve from. They were seeing the very image of the hero elude their grasp. Kongara stood her ground.

While working on Soorarai Pottru (2020), writer-director Sudha Kongara was insistent that Suriya’s character—the entrepreneurial hero—borrow money from his wife. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

The pathetic man is a sight to behold because he extinguishes the very possibility of heroism. Through his wretchedness, he expresses the limits of desirability—the limits beyond which he is irretrievably lost to desire, to heroism, to that centralising glamorous force. Kongara, then, set herself a challenge—through the force of storytelling to bring the man back from the brink of the pathetic—a challenge she met with the relentless punch of dialogues and soundscape.

There are other ways, too, to perform this rescue operation. The Pakistani director Asim Abbasi sends a possibility from the other side of the border. A man is eating a mango, ravenous, eyes ajar, sucking the fibrous seed, his flushed pink lips puckered. A single father holds his young, bespectacled son in his arms as they sleep, the father’s arms curled around the son’s body. The taut arched lower back of a man showering in translucent white underwear, the cut of each muscle glistening.

It is most likely you will emerge from Asim Abbasi’s Barzakh with a stack of screenshots, the images I transcribed above, images heated with sex and tender with longing. How do you respond to Fawad Khan tracing kohl into the waterline of his eye, a close-up breathless with passion as though the image is in love with itself? Holding these images in your hands, you will try to imagine a show far superior, far more coherent than what you watched because the images themselves are poignant, touched by a softness we do not see attached to men, a patient eros they are not given to often expressing on screen. It is what we do with great art; we make excuses for it. The art here, to be clear, is not the show itself, but the still, captured fragments of it. What is the opposite of gestalt?

Barzakh is obsessed with the figure of the grieving man: a patriarch still wounded from his long dead first love, his two sons, one weeping over his closeted homosexuality, the other burning with guilt over his wife’s suicide. The women in their lives are entirely absent: recently dead, long dead, uninterested. At one point, now old and surly, the older brother asks the younger what he wants: “Pyaar chahta hoon, bhai, aur kya?” (I want love, brother, what else?) Abbasi has disbursed the nurturing, supportive nature of the female presence generally seen on screen to his many male characters. It is almost a negation of the demands we make of a man, and as a result of the woman too.

Pathetic man and commercial cinema

What does it mean to be a man represented? Masculinity on screen is often a central, mobilising road map around which everything else congeals: the state, the women, even justice. To be anything on screen is to react to the men, their masculinity, each show rippling with the force of the male throw. The heroic man is the one who celebrates this centrality.

The opposite of the heroic man, naturally then, is the pathetic man—the one who sees life slipping away from him, the image of Guru Dutt singing “Bichad gaya” on loop. He is inconceivable as a central character. After all, you do not surrender to a pathetic man as you would to a hero. Instead, you reassure him. He demands more from you.

Of what use is a pathetic man to commercial storytelling, then? At his best, he refashions the very idea of heroism. At the least, he is a challenge for the filmmaker to overcome, and Abbasi girds the pathetic-ness of his men with tender and erotic images of youth, to remind us that these men were once young and yearned in ways their bodies forgot. You are forced to see in them who they are and what they were, such is the pungency of the imagery.

Maybe that is what made the men in that forgotten theatre deeply palpable, even if not desirable. Conversations with them eventually fell into the same interrogations: how long have you been coming here? What is your story? One of them tells me he was a football player for the State. He unconsciously pats his paunch as though to say it was not there before. He wears a hat to cover his hairline. There was more here before. I imagine his past, even if it is to forget his present. I reassure him.

Prathyush Parasuraman is a writer and critic who writes across publications, both print and online.