Action movies have a different fan base and they are widely loved all over the world. Do they have some effect on the mind of audience? Let’s find out.
Terence McSweeney asserts that the common dismissal of popular culture notwithstanding, there is no more potent a cultural artefact or a more resonant and compelling cultural barometer than the popular film. Films are not to be taken at face value nor naively assumed to reflect the cultures in which they are made. Instead they should be regarded as “dynamic texts”– almost living time capsules – that are rife with the “discontinuity and ambiguity” that characterizes the decades. Thus, in these films, the fears and anxieties of the times are projected on the screen for all to see.
Roja(Mani Ratnam, 1994)
There was a sustained scholarly debate on Roja in The Economic and Political Weekly (EPW) initiated by Tejaswini Niranjana followed by contribution by several films scholars. This was a debate that focused primarily on the implications of representation. Yet, there are important observations made by scholars like Ravi Vasudevan, Nicholas Dirlks and Sumita Chakravarty. Nicholas Dirks 2001): Cautions that only a “political reading can unfairly simplify the reading of the film as well as the explanation for its appeal. Ravi Vasudevan (2002): The “debate derived its energy from the approach to film as a contemporary political document.” Sumita Chakravarty: Points out the dissonance between the views expressed by critics of Rojaand Bombay and its g=huge popular appeal cutting across religions.
American Psycho
Marco Abel in his book Violent Affect (2007) describes the profound impact the physical experience of reading Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho (1991) had on him in the summer of 1995. American Psycho is a first-person chronicle of a 26 year old investment executive who is a psychopathic serial-killer. As a parable and critique of capitalist values, Abel finds the book exceptional but the graphic and grisly descriptions of the killings are intensely revolting for him. Unable to stand the nausea-inducing passages, he decides to go for a walk in the sweltering heat and humidity. What made this reprieve in the unbearable summer heat preferable? Abel realizes that he is less morally outraged by the contents of the book than physically affected by the experience.It was the book’s capacity to physically affect that fascinated Abel, inspiring him to theorize from an a-signifying perspective and ask, not what a particular work means but what it is able to do. Therefore, according to Abel, the significant question is not so much “what does it mean?” but “what does it do?” and “how does it work?”.
