01 May, 2007

Torture porn and the Kingdom of the Father

Kira Cochrane has an excellent piece in the Guardian, ”For your entertainment,” on the bewildering rise of ‘torture porn,” the “nasty, unrepentant and terrifyingly pointless violence” aimed in women in a lot of new cinema. I get her point: it is easy to imagine a few strange misanthropes enjoying “a man taking a blowtorch to a woman’s face, her eyeball coming out and dangling from the socket.” But when such a film (Hostel) becomes “a massive hit,” you have to wonder what causes its appeal.

Indian films aren’t quite there yet, but our society unleashes subtler horrors on its women. Mrinal Pande, who writes a fortnightly column in Mint, looks at the regressive attitude of the Bachchan family and correctly concludes that in India, “power remains both a primal word and a primal relationship in the Kingdom of the Father, and the individual family unit that defines and showcases that power is rooted in the idea of women being men’s property.”

Indeed, I really can’t think which is worse: being married to a tree, or being married into a family that believes in things like manglikness, and behaves in the manner Pande describes in her column. What is worse is that the Bachchans are such role models across India, and that Amitabh’s attitudes will validate the medieval beliefs of millions of his countrymen. Pah.

(Guardian link via email from Kind Friend.)