Stanley Kramer, Rama Sethu and The Inheritors of Wind

(First published at Desicritics)

A few weeks ago, I happened to watch two powerful Stanley Kramer courtroom dramas: Inherit the Wind and Judgment at Nuremberg (they now join my all time favorite in this genre - Sidney Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men). What drove me to write about these films are the Ram-Sethu issue and the subsequent spate of arguments on Desicritics.

Inherit the Wind is based on the famous Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee, where the legality of teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution of humans was questioned by Biblical fundamentalists. Both the film and the real trial were star-studded affairs (the irascible H L Mencken reported on the real trial).
To be fair, much of the credit for the film’s grand fireworks goes to writers Jerome Lawrence and Robert E Lee, on whose play the film is based. But lets give Stanley Kramer credit for those haunting close ups of the fundamentalist prosecutor-statesman Matthew Brady (Fredric March) on stage, shot from below, towering him in our eyes for the messianic sway he holds on the masses. It’s as though the camera were searching his face and inquiring, in an attempt to understand the ‘other’.
Equally memorable are the tense respect-disagree dynamic between Brady and the agnostic defense lawyer Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy) captured on a quiet Tennessee night, the sweat oozing out of the film as a literal and metaphorical reminder of the heat in that state, and the theme song, “Gimme that ol’ time religion”, used to contrast the two forms of religion-the cacophonous public version sung by the village crowd versus the dulcet private version accompanying the last shot of Drummond.

Judgment At Nuremberg is a much more complex film. It is set in post-World War II Nuremberg, where judges were tried for the “justice” they meted out in the Third Reich. As Hans Rolfe, the German defense lawyer, Maximillian Schell deservedly won the Oscar for his powerhouse portrayal of German indignation. Here, too, it is he and the Hitler-hating German judge Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster) whose close-ups and monologues seek to understand the ‘other’.
During the trial, Rolfe points out how Churchill and American businesses flirted with Hitler before the war, and asks, “Are they not to be blamed?” And as Stanley Kramer’s alter ego, Judge Dan Haywood (Spencer Tracy, who else?) concedes when sentencing the judges, “There is some truth in this”. Haywood doesn’t condone Ernst Janning; in fact, he denies Janning redemption by pointing out that the latter had lost moral ground the very first time he sentenced an innocent man to a concentration camp. But what is remarkable about Haywood is that this doesn’t blind him to the finer side of Ernst Janning.

Stanley Kramer’s strength lies in this very quality: He takes an almost egalitarian view of human flaws, and yet maintains an empathetic, noble worldview. His moral compass is a sensitive one; its needle surveys the entire moral dial, but always settles at the right position. He is tolerant of contradiction, but not of dishonesty. (Mani Ratnam’s “Is he a thug or a genius?”, “I think both” in Guru is the Indian example I can recall). His morality is not the hasty judgment of the preacher; it is the calm, dispassionate analysis of the philosopher. His camera is always zooming in on the ‘other’, always inquiring. And his only fierce commitment is to the relentless pursuit of truth-that often unpalatable, usually messy and almost always imperfect ideal.
This commitment is what makes the best in science and art score over judgmental doctrine. With its blind, algorithmic opportunism, science mainly ends up being a dispassionate description of how the universe is, not a passionate prescription of how it ought to be. And the best writing is always peopled with gray characters, it always appeals to empathy rather than moralistic judgment, it is always more feely than preachy. The Ramayana is such writing; reading it literally diminishes it. Those who do so have inherited nothing but wind.

To Be And Just To Be

First published at Desicritics

It’s impossible not to feel anything when independent India turns sixty. Given our conjoined-twins-like history, India’s freedom reminds me of two Pakistanis; specifically, it reminds me of two Urdu short stories by writers who, post-Partition, became Pakistanis.

No-land’s man Manto’s Toba Tek Singh is arguably the more famous one. The story is about the dangers of asserting demarcations - what Richard Dawkins calls the “tyranny of the discontinuous mind”. Freedom lies in freeing our minds from such arbitrary categorical boundaries.
But it is the other story-Ghulam Abbas’s Anandi that really gets to the heart of the freedom issue. The struggle between arbiters and freethinkers is a perpetual one, still being played out in India and everywhere else. As Faiz observed (with typical melancholy),

na apnii rasm nayii hai, na unkii riit nayii
na apnii haar nayii hai, na unkii jiit nayii

My prosaic translation:
Ours are the same old ways, as are theirs too
Our defeats and their wins, none of these are new

But Anandi ends on a note of irony, not melancholy. Years after a new, vibrant city has sprung up around the banished red-light district, its own council is ready to banish them again. No society can flourish without mirth, and there is mirth in the freedom to think. That is the freedom that Taslima Nasreen, Fehmida Riyaaz, and countless others have sought from the Indian state:

You’re sixty, O Great Referee
Retire, and let us be.

Pan's Labyrinth: A Tale of Two Worlds

All of us have seen movies and read books that we love despite our disagreements with them: Guillermo Del Toro’s exquisitely shot Pan’s Labyrinth is such a film for me. Actually, it isn’t as much of a disagreement as a childish demand on my part that such a beautiful movie would conform entirely to my worldview (I don’t buy that “objective” review stuff. I review movies because I’m passionate about them. I’d rather be fiercely subjective, as long as I’m completely honest).

The plot is ingenuous and quite extraordinary: Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) and her pregnant mother join her stepfather (Sergi Lopez), a Captain in Franco’s army. Ofelia is a die hard fairy-tale buff and lives in her own universe, hobnobbing with fauns and fairies. Like Mercedes (Maribel Verdu), the guerilla mole in the Captain’s labyrinth, Ofelia too is fighting for a better world; only her fight takes place in that world of fauns and fairies. She is, we are told, a princess who must undergo some tribulations to unite with the king and queen in the underworld-the faun’s labyrinth. Ofelia and the Captain are cleverly introduced: she extends her left hand for a handshake, he corrects her. What a way to pit the creative mind against convention! You can’t help but cheer the doctor who mocks the Captain, “Obeying for the sake of obeying is for men like you”. Ofelia’s assignments parallel those of Mercedes. Mercedes, too, holds the key to a better world, and has to destroy the greedy monster at the root of Spain, so her country can flower.
Del Toro’s execution is remarkable; for the most part, he leaves room for viewers like me who don’t want to read the obvious religious subtext. But walking the tightrope between the real and the imaginary is never easy. And the couple of occasions (the priest’s affirmation of God when Ofelia’s mother dies, or Ofelia eating the forbidden fruit and being denied paradise) when he trips stand out-like one color smudging into another across a fine boundary. (This is almost a mirror image of Vishal Bharadwaj’s Makdee, where the reality smudged onto the imagination.)
It is to Del Toro’s credit that I could still see Ofelia not as Jesus (or Uncle Tom), sacrificing herself for the world, but as a little girl who possessed that rare gift: the power to imagine. In that light, Ofelia looks like Azar Nafisi, desperately clutching her fiction to make sense of reality, and Pan’s Labyrinth becomes a wonderful paean to human imagination, the escape it offers from reality (Ofelia warning her unborn half-brother that it’s bad out here), and the possibilities it creates to improve reality.