Vijay’s GOAT is a film overburdened by its star

While this is not unusual for star films, what is exceptional is the limits to which GOAT stretches this.

Fans of the actor Vijay celebrating the release of his latest film, GOAT, on September 5 in Chennai. | Photo Credit: R. RAGU

The afternoon screening of GOAT was delayed by a bit; I expected this. The staff had to sweep the shards of confetti from between the cracks of seats and the carpeted floor from the previous show. They had been doing this after every screening, from 4:15 am onwards. It was the first day of the release of Vijay’s penultimate film in Mumbai, before he took the plunge into politics. I had on my “Annan Yaaru? Thalapathy” T-shirt. Outside firecrackers still ruptured erratically in front of posters and standees made by fan clubs, such as Chilli Boys, with the faces of all the men (all, men) in the club Photoshopped to look like a crowd next to Vijay, “The Greatest of All Time”, “Lion Always Lion”.

We were warned at the outset that this is not cinema as much as the liquidation of it. The director credit reads “A Venkat Prabhu Hero” as opposed to “A Venkat Prabhu Film”. That is to say, a film—a narrative snaking through a world peopled by bodies that congeal around a protagonist—has been sharply and densely shrunk into one person, the hero, who is its narrative, its world, its people. Cinema has been hollowed out and reincarnated as a fan reel, what the director called in an interview as a “fan celebration mode”. Fandom, or uncritical love, builds cinema; it guts it too.

Vijay plays Gandhi, a Special Anti-Terrorist Squad officer, but also Gandhi’s son, Sanjay. Sanjay is the villain, Sanjay Gandhi. It is not unusual that he plays both the protagonist and antagonist, a feat he attempted before in Azhagiya Tamizh Magan (2007). A risk, surely. Why would a star want to provoke disgust or anger by playing an antagonist?

This is GOAT’s singular feat. Irrespective of Sanjay punch-dunking Gandhi or Gandhi outsmarting Sanjay, the audience is never cheated of its promised rapture. They are not cheering for protagonist or antagonist but for Vijay. The fans during my screening were confused about when to pop the confetti; there are so many moments of celebration, that is, Vijay’s appearance, in the potholed film.

It is the kind of logic that expands cinematic joy while shrinking cinema itself. The film actively tries to pull the actor out of the protagonist, turning the protagonist into a shell and celebrating the actor instead. Instead of the film building the cult of an actor, the cult of the actor builds the film: it is an election advertorial, with campaign jokes and a cameo with an actor to whom Vijay passes the baton and bids farewell to the screen.

MGR

To energise fans knowing fully well that the border between a fan association and a political one is a shimmering mirage of a seam is what commercial Tamil cinema has provided a blueprint for. Marudur Gopalan Ramachandran, or MGR, was one such who emphatically tread that path. From the 1950s on, he created an image of himself as the subaltern hero or sacrificial bourgeois, in 136 films over 40 years. Then, jumping into politics, breaking away from the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in 1972, he started his own outfit, the Anna DMK, which became the All India ADMK during the Emergency so that it could pretend to be a national party, and had an unparalleled 11-year rule as Chief Minister from 1977 to 1987, when he died.

At one point, there were over 10,000 branches of the All World MGR Fan Association, which also served as the AIADMK’s mobilisation machine. Many AIADMK leaders, in fact, emerged from these associations. In an interview MGR said: “Fan associations and the party are not different.”

M.S.S. Pandian writes: “The hero’s invincibility on the screen acquires a certain authenticity and appears credible not merely because of the dream-like experience that film watching essentially is, but equally because the subaltern consciousness most often dwells in the interface between impossible religious myth and possible history.”

In The Image Trap: M.G. Ramachandran in Film and Politics, M.S.S. Pandian asks what delusions we must harbour for this distinction to not matter. That when we look at a hero, we sublimate his virtues into that of the actor, and the actor carrying these sublimated virtues hoodwinks an entire people into voting him to power and representing them. The pretence of power becomes, slyly, the practice of it. Thus, Vijay does not give interviews. If you want to know him, visit the theatre. That is him.

Pandian writes: “The hero’s invincibility on the screen acquires a certain authenticity and appears credible not merely because of the dream-like experience that film watching essentially is, but equally because the subaltern consciousness most often dwells in the interface between impossible religious myth and possible history.”

When this happens, consciousness raising is seen as separate from one’s material conditions. Pandian notes that despite MGR’s policies materially hurting the poor, the spinning of the MGR myth, mistaking cinematic fantasy as realism, advertising as truth, stoked his fandom. When he died, two million people landed up in then Madras from villages and towns across Tamil Nadu. Those who could not attend organised mock funerals where MGR images were taken in a procession and buried. Thirty-one fans took their lives in grief. The logical conclusion of clouded love: death.

Mourners viewing MGR’s body at Rajaji Hall, Madras, December 24, 1987. His mythical status, blending cinema with reality, drew two million fans despite policies that often harmed the poor. | Photo Credit: The Hindu Archives

It is not unusual that star films are burdened by the star. There is an entire genre that celebrates the desecration of cinema at the altar of fandom—some call it masala, some mass: stories told not because they need to be told but because they need to be received, making the distinction between art form and commodity clear.

What is exceptional is the limits to which GOAT takes this genre. Its postmodern posture—the refusal to tell a story but fragment it instead; the music coming out of nowhere, neither hinted at nor built towards; a rampless stage; exalted cameos; looking back at Vijay’s filmography; looking forward to his party manifesto—all this is not in service of cinema. It is in service of a commodity. The fragmentation is not radical, then. It is conservative, limiting, and artless.

At over three hours, the film grunts heavily, and even as a fan of Vijay, I realised I was being served Vijay: The Pre-Politician, not Vijay: The Lithe Jester. The actor was being shipped away. This farewell was not one of celebration—because not all fans will make that leap, from theatre counter to polling booth. 

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