Showing posts with label lynch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lynch. Show all posts

Tuesday, 15 September 2020

Lynching in the 21st century!

Our world has become one which is ruled by mobs. We thought we had cancelled mob behaviours when we started engaging in intellectual discourses and discarded our weapons for civilised dialogues. We were made to believe so. The muffled undertones of passive-aggressiveness were always there in the background. It never really disappeared. In those days, the dominant ruling forces called it resistance, reformation or revolution. We learnt that numbers matter and recruiting the masses worked best to overthrow a seemingly impregnable and cruel regime. Most new religions came about through these ways - show the unthinking inebriated public the virtues and purpose of existence, riled their emotions to unite them against a particular cause, sometimes a self-serving one. The major Abrahamic religions began thus, creating a sense of fear, perpetually assuming that they would be besieged.

Fast forward to the present time. We thought that in modern times, with the ease of information at our disposal, we felt that we would be widespread in the depth of our knowledge and be empowered to choose what is best for us. We were never so wrong.


The law of the jungle and the Neanderthal code of ethics, if there ever was, is the law that prevails in cyberspace. The loudest, the most devious and the most insincere, wins the arguments hands down. Anyone who does not conform to the voice of the majority is mercilessly crucified. The 'voice of the majority' is not actually the plea of the most, but narratives of ringmasters of who are paid tools of their puppetmasters with vested interests. If in the medieval times, muscle power, blood and gore put the weak statehood in submission, modern-day cyber warriors do the same through cyberbullying, mass hypnotism and peddling of fake news. Oft-repeated nonsense gains credibility via mere repetition without giving opportunity for critical assessment. Anyone who even utters whispers of differing viewpoint is instantaneously shot down through cybertrooping activities, public shaming and cancel culture. Lynch mobs on social media are out for blood to sow communal hatred, assault on scientific knowledge and insult to our thinking faculty.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International 

Saturday, 25 June 2016

More questions, not answers!

Mulholland Drive (2001)
Story and Direction: David Lynch

I remember my school teacher telling the class a story about art and artists. A painter once smeared paint over his toddler's bare buttock. He then made him sit a white sheet of paper. What resulted was the silhouette of a perfectly shaped apple. He went on to exhibit his masterpiece which spurred rave reviews and stimulated great literary discourses. What he was trying to say was that behind a masterpiece, there is a story and that sometimes people are fooled by artists!

I watched this David Lynch's film with the same thought. This movie was initially intended to be a pilot for a TV series. Unfortunately, it was rejected by the TV company, but they decided to make out a feature film out of it. I think that is why there are many unrelated gaps and seemingly unrelated characters infused into the story. Or am I missing something? Still, these are very reasons this film attracts many interests, spurned multiple viewings and appreciated as a symbolism to our modern daily lives - so multilayered, an enigma, filled with mysteries and role reversals. The two disjointed parts of the movie are viewed as parallel stories, one in real life and the other in a dream but which is which, the first or the second? Maybe it is just the pilot was made with the subplots within which had to be trimmed away to cut into a 2-hour plus offering. Perhaps, it was intentionally left behind to give the flick a noir feel to it.

A happy goody two shoes Betty (Naomi) arrives in LA, hoping to hit it big in Hollywood. She comes to stay at her aunt's home, herself an established artist but is away on a trip. Just a hill away, a lady is attempted to be murdered by hoodlums but by a twist of fate, the car he is travelling in is hit by racing teenagers. The assailants are killed, but she escapes unscathed. She roams aimlessly amnesiac and lands in the same apartment that Betty stays.

That starts the cat-and-mouse routine which tries to establish the lady's identity while Betty attends her acting audition. It gets more intriguing when the woman, now calls herself Rita (after seeing Rita Hayworth's poster) has flashes of memory coming back. It becomes even murkier when a dead body turns up, and they land up in a Spanish speaking past midnight theatre where the performers perform brilliantly only to be found out to be lip-syncing! One has to watch it make his own impression. One will be left with more questions, not answers.   

Sunday, 19 June 2016

The danger that lurks within...

Blue Velvet (1986)
Story and Direction: David Lynch

My impressionable young mind used to wonder when I used to read of random shootings in schools and somewhat bizarre behaviours of certain people in the so-called civilised world. I thought the deviant acts were the price one paid for development. The phenomenon of adolescent psychology was not even an entity in this part of the world till about 20 years ago. Is it a first world problem as we set different priorities as our target and different role models to follow? Perhaps this film, another David Lynch classic, is trying to tell us that the dangers were lurking inside all the while. It is just that avenues are available to express now. It had just been swept under the proverbial carpet all this while.

It starts on an idyllic day in the 60s on a sunny day with everybody smiling and Bobby V's 'Blue Velvet' song in the background. A man is watering his lawn, and his family members are drawn to a TV series. The man is suddenly paralysed with a stroke. The camera shows him falling on the ground, the water from the hose goes all over the place, and it zooms down into the ground. Way down, showing bugs chewing on dead tissues and soil. That, in essence, is the message behind the story. Many unpleasant thoughts go deep in the minds of seeming perfect people.

The college son of the stroke returns home to mind the business. He discovers a piece of a severed human ear while walking through a short-cut to the hospital. He brings it to the police. He decides to be a 'Hardy Boy' kind of private investigator to unveil a web of kidnapping, blackmail, forbidden love, fetishes, masochistic love and a lesson in Freudian psychological development.

There are a lot of unnecessary displays of what would make members of the guardian of morality hot under the collar and symbolisms to prove the storyteller's point of view. Not everything that appears ascetically appealing is what it seems. Look at the dove. The dove, the symbol of peace and harmony, can also be destructive to survive. It swallows a bug whole while it is still alive. To the bug, a dove is a monster that draws the life out of down. It is anything but a sign of bliss!

Sunday, 12 June 2016

You do not get it?

Lost Highway (1997)
Written and Directed by David Lynch

An interesting concept. When you are already up there amongst the doyen who change the field, you can never go wrong. You must be right. Others just do not get it. It is not that you do not make sense. You are not playing with their minds. They do not get it, plain and straightforward.

This is another of David Lynch's thriller which appears complicated. A man is leading a quiet life, but it is later convicted of killing his wife. In a closed confinement, he actually changes into another person! Unable to contain an innocent person, he is released.

The released person meets a girl who is the same girl who was the wife who was killed. In a convoluted story, this man gets entangled with another murder and changes back to appear like the first man.

After watching so many movies with a straight storyline, this is a good distraction.










“Be afraid. Be very afraid.”*