RRR (S. S. Rajamouli, 2022) (Patreon)

It's unusual for a popular Indian film to gain much critical or commercial traction in the U.S., apart from the Desi circuit, a parallel distribution network that occupies American multiplexes but is typically treated like another world. RRR is probably the most notable crossover hit since Aamir Khan's Lagaan back in 2001. (Greater access to media in the digital age seemed to portend more cosmopolitan consumption patterns but in practice keeps us all within our narrow fiefdoms.). Since there are dozens of Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada movies released each year, it's pretty notable when one captures the broader zeitgeist.

RRR is a Telugu film, and the early reviews from Western media were almost rapturous. Like global / local directors such as Zhang Yimou or Bong Joonho, S. S. Rajamouli has, in the eyes of some, reinvented contemporary cinema, instituting a new language of explosive excess and unbridled bromantic-nationalist passion. Usually anything this unabashedly sincere would be mocked by irony-drenched American viewers, labeled cringe or even "cheugy." But it appears that audiences were hungry for some antidote to elevated horror and the endless mise-en-abyme of the MCU. In other words, RRR is having a moment.

Given the rarity of this crossover success, it seems worth asking why this, and why now. Part of it is the fact that, in terms of story construction and conventional notions of realism, Rajamouli throws the rule book straight into the Ganges. It's a film of panoramic sweep, a story of two friends-turned-enemies-turned-friends, so elemental that the two men are quite literally depicted as fire and ice. But whereas giant historical epics have usually embraced a De Mille / Lean derived "cast of thousands" approach, with massive period-correct sets and costumes and conveyances, RRR is a fully digitized data file of a film. Long shots are plainly constructed through digital imaging, and Rajamouli's frequent employment of slick, unconvincing CGI animals inspires both awe and disbelief. 

In other words, RRR is not trying to look "real," any more than the Wachowskis' Speed Racer did. The filmmakers fully commit to the bit, organizing a silly-sincere rebellion tale around fake-extreme (or extremely fake) giraffes and antelopes and explosions. And as an action film, RRR very clearly takes its cues not from the history of movies but contemporary gaming. Every act of derring-do tries to outdo the last. "Oh, you thought it was cool when he punched a tiger in the face? Wait'll you see him pick up a motorcycle with one hand and throw it at a guy!"

Of course, when you abandon the canons of realism, you often need something else to compel audience belief, to keep the thing from flying apart into rogue pixels. In this case, it's a combination of macho showmanship and nationalist subtext, the idea that if two men of such divergent temperaments can unite as an unstoppable if ambiguously gay duo, then why can't all of India bond across ethnic differences? All you need is an outsized enemy. For RRR, it's mustache-twirling, gleefully vicious English colonists. But as the conclusion suggests, it's the BJP's vilification of Muslims that will serve as the glue of hegemony.

Much of this will escape the casual (Western) viewer, and I defer to others to articulate the less than savory political subtext of RRR. It's a lot like Zhang's Hero in that regard. Most of us simply bask in the nonstop swordplay and large-scale pageantry. But back home in China, it's a story about the One Nation policy, unbreakable unity under the communists. It's always helpful to play fast and loose with actual history when you're constructing national(ist) myths, and RRR is a counterfactual "what if" that stages the meeting of two anti-colonial revolutionaries. 

Alluri Sitarama Raju (Ram Charan) brought politics to the less developed parts of the country, even raiding English police stations to acquire weapons. Komaram Bheem (N.T. Rama Rao, Jr.) was a Gond tribal who led rebellions against the British-aligned Hyderabad State. RRR characterizes Bheem as somewhat naive, someone who must be brought to revolutionary consciousness (and taught to wield weapons) by the more urbane Raju. In his dangerous role as an undercover mole in the Royal Police, Raju represents the idea that you can, and in fact must, dismantle the master's government with the master's tools. ("Load! Aim! Shoot!")

Back in the glory days of High Theory, Frederic Jameson introduced the idea of the political unconscious. Through engagement with certain kinds of aesthetic forms, he postulated, it is possible for ideology to insinuate itself within the viewer, regardless of whether they could make sense of the allegories at work in the text. I am not so sure about this. (If it were true, then conversely, Godard would have radicalized his bourgeois audiences.) But there is something intriguing about RRR as a cultural object for our time. It mobilizes Hindutva sentiments in a manner so overtly preposterous (and effortlessly entertaining) that it seems to aggressively divorce itself from any concrete politics. It's as if the phrase "it's just a movie," with all the critical quietism it implies, metastasized into a three-hour advertisement for itself.