Where are the gods of small screen?
Different stories require different mediums. A story narrated by a book may not have the same effect as the one told by a 70mm screen. Some stories are best left to the small screen. Similarly, oral renditions have their highs and lows too. Add music to a lore and you get ballads. What happens during a play is unique to theatre. A 30-second commercial is trying to tell a story too. And so on.
With time as its witness, stories continue to flow; their banks readjust themselves accordingly.
In an earlier post, I tried to understand how cinema comes across as a superior medium of storytelling due to its defiance of space and time. On record, all the elements are frozen—beyond amazing, isn’t it? A movie, whether it’s 120 minutes long or 300 minutes too long, manages to deliver an experience that could very well be the closest we’ll get anything unreal to real life. Comparatively speaking, a television series extends not only the overall timeframe but also the cumulative effect. A movie is a one-plate dinner whereas a TV series could be a 16-course meal.
Which brings us to the rise of television in the 21st century. Of course, I am referring to the West here. The less said about Indian television — especially the mainstream Hindi version — the better. Thanks to risk-taking behemoths like Netflix and Amazon, we are witnessing never-seen-before variety in home entertainment. What is more interesting about this trend is the investment in sincere writing. There is a desire to explore all possible angles of human nature instead of relying only on the usual suspects.
I am watching this miniseries called Godless (2017) and it struck me how much American (as well as British) screenwriters are open to strumming the spiritual chord through Christianity. Western cinema, thanks to religious stalwarts like Scorsese and Spielberg — The Deer Hunter (1978) and Schindler’s List (1993) to name two of their work — never shied away from tapping the divinity. In fact, there is a not a celebrated director out there today, be it Lee or Nolan or Fincher, who can confide in the agnostic nature of filmmaking. Almost all of them seek spirituality either through stark messages or via hidden religious themes—think of Life of Pi (2012), Interstellar (2014) or Se7en (1995) for instance — in their films.
The desire to touch God’s fingertip grows deeper with television though. Insofar, you’ll see more and more shows and miniseries are coming up that aren’t averse to spouting a verse or four from King James Bible. To be accurate, this isn’t nothing new because the Western writers, for decades now, strove to find a semblance between belief and disbelief. And the beauty of this exercise in spirituality is the chosen story neither judges nor pontificates what’s proper and what’s not.
Balance is a serious business and you get to note so in several television output more than feature films nowadays. By the end of Breaking Bad (2008-13), you’ll notice how the good guys are peculiarly irreligious while the bad dudes are flaunting their Jesus. Walter White, in the meantime, is busy playing God. True Detective (2014) commences as a quest in uninterrupted existentialism but concludes with an otherwise resilient protagonist looking up at the sky. All the three seasons of Fargo (2014-) have been heavy on godliness or the lack of it. You continue to confront characters who swear by the holy book irrespective of their actions. In a similar fashion, Preacher (2016) is entirely about the power of faith. Apparently, what you believe is not as essential as who you believe in. The Leftovers (2014-) dwells heavily on the biblical ending of the world. The only difference being it ends for some while others are left behind with unanswerable questions. The Sinner (2017) scrapes the ungodly bottom of morality with a protagonist who can’t distinguish between reality and memories anymore. Throughout her 8-episode journey, you can hear her religious parents reminding her of God Almighty.
The list goes on and on.
It’s worth wondering whether our desi writers will ever reach a point where they’d be able to test the limits of religion, let alone spirituality. Right now, as has been the case for ages, our supine storytellers choose to uphold the secular — a rather corrupt word in a diverse country like ours — fabric without dispersing the spiritual scent. Is it even possible to imagine a film or a TV series here wherein a character is confounded by the wisdom of Upanishad or pulled by the centrifugality of Dervish or the effusive palette of Zoroastrian hymns? Doubtful.
Not very long ago, we were presented Indian protagonists who are forced by their circumstances to enter a temple. Once inside, there would be an imaginary battle of ego between the atheist hero and the statued god, decidedly resulting in the latter giving in to the former’s demands. Of late, we don’t have the luxury to see such moments of divine interventions on the screen. God has no role written for him/her anymore. The farthest we can get to a spiritual connection is blindly accepting the secular blindness to religion. There are no more visible mauli or taveez or cross on the big or small screen. And without symbols, there is no way we can dig further in to the psyche of a believer. Hence we don’t get to go beyond the obvious. We know the protagonist is scared but we don’t care to understand what gives him hope.
Why is this so?
There might be many reasons but a palpable one could be our writers’ desire to keep things religion-free. Socially speaking from a middle-class point of view, the first word that blooms in our mind when we confront the R-word is communal and not spiritual. Sad as it is, nothing wrong with this approach either. Just that it leads to a place where stories displayed on the screen (big or small) are automatically deprived of the richness of consciousness.
A silver lining could be the fact that our writers tend to look West with a sense of acquiescence. If Hollywood does something successful, we tend to replicate the formula. An unwritten mantra for our industry. To that end, maybe, just maybe, we’ll reach a stage where our screenwriters will accept the downside of self-imposed exile from spirituality. Chances are the trend will trickle down from films to television. Or maybe the river of stories will flow the other way around. Who knows?
