The portrayal of mental illness in the Malayalam film ‘Kumbalangi Nights’
Mental illness is incorrectly portrayed in films often, causing existing stigma to increase and more misinformation to spread
Fahadh Faasil is an excellent actor. His portrayal of a character in ‘Kumbalangi Nights’ who smiles in a way that would give Heath Ledger’s Joker competition is very scary.
Faasil’s character is at best, a somewhat angry, patriarchal figure and at worst a person who gravely assaults the women in his family and a non-family member, is abusive to varying degrees and has some serious rage issues.
In a scene towards the latter half of the film, his mother-in-law says, “Please call the police, Shammi (Faasil’s character) is mad”.
A very popular and constantly debunked narrative on social media since 2016 has been that Donald Trump has serious mental health issues. People who live with mental illness constantly clap back to say, NO, to be a person drunk on power, to be misogynistic, to be abusive is a function of toxic masculinity; do not conflate this with mental illness.
In case of incidents of shoot-outs by the ‘lone wolf’ Caucasian cis man, often, news reports follow of the person having a mental illness. In response to this, people who live with mental illness talk about how they have managed to exist so far without feeling the need to shoot anybody. So no, mental illness can’t be the ascribed reason behind this hate crime.
A visual portrayal is very often a lot more alluring and arresting than written material. It lives on in popular memory for long and becomes a topic of discussion by way of example, remembrance, humor and other emotions it elicits.
In a ‘Kumbalangi Nights’ scene, Faasil’s character eerily switches between looking very sad to smiling in a sinister fashion. This reminded me of the Shobana-starring Malayalam film ‘Manichitrathazhu’. It has been re-made in different languages with its Hindi version ‘Bhool Bhulaiyaa’ featuring Akshay Kumar and Vidya Balan amongst others. In the original, Shobana’s character has dissociative personality disorder and the film ends with her starting to receive psychiatric help. Even so, it gives a bad rap to persons living with dissociative personality disorder.
PDs (personality disorders) are highly stigmatized. As compared to depression and anxiety that have in recent years received high media coverage, a person with a PD is still considered to be someone who is very difficult to get along with, is not fit to hold a job, can’t be in a loving relationship. There is a large amount of literature available online that is full of such inaccurate information.
The question of whether mental illness does affect a person where harm can be caused to yourself or another is not something that hasn’t been explored. As per the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017, a mental health professional can divulge information about a client if there is a real danger of them causing harm to themselves, someone else or property.
There is a lot to be said, asked and discussed about how mental illness affects a person’s behavior in such aspects.
But this discussion and these questions can’t be used to justify and explain away abusive behavior by a person. Doing this increases the amount of stigma for already misunderstood mental illnesses.
Like film reviewer Nandini Ramnath said in her combined piece about ‘Uri’ and ‘The Accidental Prime Minister’ in Scroll.in, it is the better-made film that is far more insidious when it comes to propaganda. The Rs 300/- crore-at-box office scoring ‘Uri’ is well made and foments more danger than ‘The Accidental Prime Minister’.
Faasil’s acting is terrific and this marks more problems for a country full of opinions that read, “Call the police, he is mad.”
