The story behind the unkindest cut!

Lorena (4-part Documentary, 2019)
Amazon Prime.

All this while, Bobbitt' case, in my mind, was about slicing off a part of body-part quite dear to the heart of a man by a wife scorned. More often than not, Bobbitt's name is invoked in jocular, tongue-in-cheek conversations rather than anything serious. The truth of the matter is that this case bares open the hypocrisy of a society that considers itself advanced. It also exposes the nation's fixation on sex and how the community uses people's misery for personal gain.  It reveals the various deficiencies in the American law about domestic violence and women empowerment.

At that time in June 1993, when Lorena Bobbitt, a 23-year-old Ecuadorian immigrant, in an apparent fit of rage, sliced off her husband's penis and threw it into a field, I never really got the whole picture of what actually caused the entire fiasco. The media was also biased in painting a picture of a deranged woman of South American descent acting in an un-American way rather than the drama surrounding the whole debacle.

Lorena came to the USA with a student visa, met John Wayne Bobbitt, a US Marine, and got married. She was 20, he, 22. Just a few weeks into their marriage, John Wayne started becoming abusive towards his timid wife. There were even accusations of marital rape and bodily harm. John had left the Marines, and Lorena was the sole breadwinner, working as a nail salon artiste. The torture went on, with multiple police reports and counselling until the fateful day.

John had come home drunk. He forced himself upon her and performed anal sex against her wishes. She sliced his organ with an 8-inch kitchen knife after the act.

After much real-life medical drama, John's organ was successfully reattached.

All the media excitement started after that. Some women's rights activists thought the incident could lead to more awareness of domestic violence. Instead, the case became a tabloid sensation and fodder for comedians. Media publicists represented both parties. TV coverage was a rage. Even small-time entrepreneurs in Manassas, Virginia, made a killing selling memorabilia and T-shirts. Manassas, a sleepy satellite town to Washington DC, became alive with reporters.

One person's misery is another person's 

source of income. T-shirts bearing this

wordings were found sold outside

 the courthouse of Bobbitt's trial.

The Bobbitts were subjected to two trials. The first one was the accusation of marital rape. Because of the technicalities of law in the State of Virginia, John was acquitted. In the second case of Lorena's assault on John, things became complicated. It became a case of 'he says' versus 'she says' as John denied being physically abusive but instead accused Lorena of being the aggressor. Luckily, the previous police intervention and John's friends and neighbours' admission of seeing his darker side helped. 

The jury had a tough time deciding whether Lorena's assault was pre-meditated or due to temporary insanity, as there was a lapse between the abuse and the assault. Finally, the jury agreed that an irresistible impulse occurred after years of abuse and pent-up anger. She escaped imprisonment but spent 45 days in a hospital for mental assessment.

Both the Bobbitts' lives followed different trajectories. Lorena stayed on, became an American citizen, had a child with a new partner in 2006 and became a sort of a feminine icon against domestic abuse. She runs a charity organisation that creates awareness of domestic violence. John, however, spiralled down the rabbit hole of decadence. He became a porn star, got a disastrous penile extension and had a few brushes with the law for battery and theft. Despite all the publicity stunts and job opportunities, he became bankrupt.

Abducted, raped, burnt and
dumped into a pond by
a British police officer
in March 2021.

Whatever was said and done, the people who had the last laugh were the media people. They used the whole imbroglio to their advantage, laughing all the way to the bank. Despite all the ugly prejudices that this case highlighted to the world, almost 30 years on, the world is still fighting the same issues about gender equality, spousal abuse and media frenzy about bedroom issues.

(PS. Isn't it funny that the media is quick to highlight and discredit Eastern cultures when it comes to women empowerment and societal discrimination against ladies? The recent turn of events in the UK has shown that even women there are vulnerable to random killings by unknown assailants for no apparent reason. Women in the USA are not far behind living in fear of domestic violence and brutal beatings.)

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Cannot have the cake and eat it?

Now that I am getting older, naturally, people think that the School of Hard Knocks would have knocked some wisdom in the thick skull of mine, and they approach me for advice.

One of the questions asked to him in my capacity as 'Dear Thelma' or 'Auntie Agony' is about an interpersonal relationship. Why is it difficult to achieve life ambitions? I have so many things that I want to attain in my lifetime, but family life is pulling me down. My partner does not share the same fire that I breathe. The offsprings wear me down, dragging me together into a cesspool of hopelessness. Is there no relief from all these, they ask me. 

I am no self-help guru by any imagination, so I try to dodge the question. "You know that is a very profound question. Philosophers for aeons have been trying to find that answer." 

In fact, during Adi Sankara's travels from Kerala to the four corners of India, he had various debates with sages of other schools of philosophy. Adi Shankara, who hails from the School of Non-Dualism (Advaitha Vedantha), liked to engage in intellectual discourses wherever he went. In one such travel, he had the privilege of debating with Vandana Mishra, a proponent of the ritualistic part of Veda (Purva Mimamsa School of Hindu Philosophy, and his wife, Ubhaya Bharathi in Mahismati, Bihar or maybe Madhya Pradesh. 

They had protracted month-long discussions about the superiority of knowledge over rituals in gaining an understanding of life. Shankara also believed that to understand life and attain liberation, one must be celibate, whereas Mandana and Ubhaya felt householder duties (i.e. conjugal obligations) needed to be also performed. Rituals can bring forth bliss.

Six Systems of Indian Philosophy 

Ubhaya was the Sankara's choice of the umpire in their debates. When her husband was defeated, she continued debating. Even though she started asking about sensual pleasure sensations and emotional intimacies, the brahmachari still managed to reply via his yogic powers. Both Mandana and Ubhaya became Shankara's followers.

It was agreed not everyone can attain moksha by leading a hermit's life. It only works for some. The others have to go through the whole gamut of trappings of life, its up and down, and to set motion the circle of life.

See around us. Some sacrifice certain pleasures to achieve other ambitions. As Peter's Principle dictates, we can scale only as high as our incompetence. We should know our limits. We cannot eat the cake and still enjoy staring at it.

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We are not nice!

Squid Games (오징어 게임, Korean; 2021)

Screenplay & Direction: Hwang Dong-hyuk

Childhood games prepare us for what is in store for us ahead in our lives. Failures are inevitable, and winners take it all. It is not and was never a level playing field, and some get favours merely by starting with an added advantage. Life is no bed of roses; deal with it. The players may claim fair play, but deep inside, we can sense insider collusion.

We are taught about the need to be fair to others. They tell us about 'one good turn deserving another' and our past karma haunting us until the end of time; hence, the need to do good and be fair. But, just look around us. Nature does not give a fair crack of the whip to all. The floods terrorise the poor who can ill afford the expensive real estate on higher grounds. The pandemic intimidates the economically challenged layer of society where living space is a challenge.

We always fight for equality for all. We want the system to be fair for all. We criticise the various economic and political modules presently available, and we scream for change. We think communism is the way to go. How wrong we were. See how the upholders of the tenets of communism, China and the Soviet Union, have crumbled and modified their social agendas to meet their worldly demands.

So we decided that money was the panacea to all our woes, the very thing that we thought was the root of all evils. What actually makes us happy? To what extend do we push the boundary to achieve this happiness at the expense of betting our lives on it?

This, being the theme of their experiment, the story writer went around studios after studios selling his script for almost a decade. The fact that that story, Squid Games, is now the number #1 hit on Netflix is testimony to the age-old adage that perseverance pays.

Capitalism has clearly failed us. Even Covid threat did not make us realise our vulnerability. We thought we would drive to recognise our vulnerability, but alas, we forget. On the contrary, we continue our rapacious hunt for material things. The divide between the haves and have nots continue escalating at phenomenal proportions. 

We use material gains as a yardstick to determine one's attainment in life. Hence, wealth is what everyone wants. The trouble is some of us are excellent at acquiring whilst others fail miserably, digging themselves in a quagmire of hopelessness. We thought that by having equal distribution of wealth, we could reach a utopia. Sadly, the world has all our needs but not our greed. Deep inside, we are all evil, and this miniseries perfectly depicts our selfishness and the evil that resides in us all. It unleashes when our desires are not met. We would turn against each other for money. 

456 members of the public are gathered together (selected) in a secret location to partake in a series of games. These games are mainly the ones that most Asian kids played as children, Red Light - Green Light, Tug-of-War, Squid Games, marbles, etcetera. The only trouble is that here the losers pay it with their lives. As one by one, the players get eliminated/killed, the prize money snowballs. The idea is to have a single winner who would acquire the accumulated cash. The players are not given a clue on the game they will play; hence, they cannot strategise. As there can be only one winner at the end, the players use their own way to outdo the other. 

One common denominator unifies all contestants - they are all desperate for money. From a highly erudite university graduate to a loafer, to a gangster, an immigrant running from the law, a North Korean refugee, to a senior citizen with a brain tumour, they are all desperate for the big prize. 

Poverty is not the only reason for the game to exist. Even the super-rich find life purposeless, without having some thrill of seeing the helpless and the poor squirm and die. It is just horse racing. The only difference is that here, the horses are people. The moral understanding of the extremely wealthy, the 'Squid Games' wants us to believe, is essentially egoistic. The hedonistic need to stimulate the senses and feel the experiences occupy high on their list of priorities. They assume everyone shares this sentiment, making it perfectly normal to prey on others. Conversely, the remaining 99% has to deal with the didactic quandary between egoism and altruism.

The characters are all so complex and have a life of their own, possibly spurring the possibility of a second season. The winner, after the first season, feels compelled to return to the game to correct something. What is that?

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All the small things!

#Home (Malayalam, 2021)
Director: Rojin Thomas

We look at other people's lives and go agape. We think our lives are nothing to shout about compared to others, but we soldier on with our otherwise unglamorous life. We tell ourselves that it is our God-given duty or dharma to do the things we do as our responsibility, our raison d'etre. What is more, when we are old and unproductive. This world is no place for ageing dogs. As they say, when you age, even your shadow does not respect you. Your life experiences and life lesson are considered passé. They are deemed too worthless to put to use to fight the challenging current times. In essence, we are looked upon as a mere goods train being pulled by the engine, dragged to its destinations.

The seniors go on accepting their situation as fait accompli. Yeah, our lives sucked, but it is what it is. Of course, we were once young. We also had dreams and ideas of what was right and what was not. Unbeknownst to us, our actions must have impacted somebody's life somehow. There must be someone somewhere who benefitted from our efforts.

This is one such movie. Oliver Twist (yes, his father was a bibliophile) is a retired man who is quite happy doing all the handiwork around his home, caring for his aged father, and occasionally chatting with his childhood buddy Surya. Oliver's elder son, Anthony, a first one-hit scriptwriter, has hit writers' block. As his producers breathed down his neck for the script as multiple deadlines came and went, he came back for inspiration. Every time Anthony sees his father, he feels frustrated. He asks himself why his father is such a bumbling old man and a constant embarrassment. He fancies his girlfriend's father, an erudite person with a PhD who had just written his autobiography. 

Anthony gets desperate as another deadline approaches, and he has no script to submit. Oliver has a great story of his past to tell Anthony but fears that it is not glamorous enough.

Life in Oliver goes through ups and downs. Finally, the seeming good-for-nothing father-figure in the family actually has performed such a tremendous life-altering deed that saved somebody's life. That somebody is none other than his girlfriend's father. If not for Oliver, the PhD holder would not have such great heights.

We should continue doing our small deeds. Somehow, these insignificant gestures would snowball into something big and potentially earth-shattering.

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No end to espionage!

No Time to Die (2021)
Director: Cary Joji Fukunaga

In my youth, I used to think, "with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, soon these espionage movies will all be passé." How wrong I was. And here I am in the 21st century, and the Russians are still posing a threat to the Western capitalist world, so we are told.

The Slavs, dressed in Red Soviet uniform then, have changed into their sharp suits, digital devices, and oligarchic money to play the same espionage and political manipulation game to portray a rosy picture of communism to the world. World domination, it seems, is high on their agenda. 

But frankly, let it be vulture capitalism and Red ideology; they are merely just two sides of the same coin. Think US election, think Bashar al-Assad to usurp power, think despotic leaders trying to suppress dissidents, you will find American and Russian handiwork in action. It is all about world domination, absolute power and total control by the powers that be. So, come the 21st century, or 25th century, the story of one group trying to dominate the others stay relevant. It is the story of mankind. 

So, it is no surprise that the Man with a Licence to Kill is still relevant today. In keeping with the changing times, however, the writers had altered some characters to appease members of the woke generation. As Daniel Craig was said to be doing his last appearance as James Bond in this film, the filmmakers are dangling the prospect of the next 007 to be a black female. Earlier, they had also introduced Miss Moneypenny as black. Q is possibly gay too. 

As I see it, the movie will be remembered as one generic offering that flew us by. Frankly, I was looking for a grand opening as I did in Casino Royale, but sadly many, if not all, of the action scenes had a sense of deja vu in each of them. Let it be a car chase, bike ride or massive island hideout destruction, the familiar feeling of 'haven't I seen that' kept coming back. 

After seeing Rami Malik perform brilliantly as Freddie Mercury is 'Bohemian Rhadsody', his talent is really wasted here. He just appears as an expressionless baddie with a puckered face. He does not make us hate him (or pity him).

The screenwriters must have tried to infuse emotion into Bond as it is Daniel Craig's swansong. But the idea of carrying a child in a car chase with the crooks shooting at the car is disturbing, to say the least. And the idea of a Bond illegitimate child?! We have all seen Bond escaping from more death-defying feats; why not this? Verdict: 2.5/5.

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Through the lens of a child's eyes!

El Sur (Spanish, The South; 1983)
Director: Victor Erice

This film has been hailed as one of the best films ever to come out of Spain. Ironically, the director refers to this film as an unfinished product. The remaining 90 minutes of the movie where the protagonist is supposed to visit the South of Spain never came out in the final product. Some say it was due to a lack of funds that the producer did not proceed with filming.

As children, as we were growing up, we wanted to know everything that was happening around us. We knew something not right was going on but just could not put the finger on it. The adults kept things secretive, but we sensed something was cooking. We put two and two together to paint a composite picture of what we perceive as complicated adult life. Sometimes, we understand more than we were expected to know. Other times, we got it all totally wrong.

This movie portrays the emotions beautifully that a child goes through the heady times of childhood in the uncertain times after the Spanish Civil War. Estella lives in the Northern part of Spain with her parents. Her parents are not precisely the lovey-dovey type of couple. The father is a medical doctor engrossed in his psychological experiments while the mother is contended to play housewife and knitting. There is not much intimacy going on; Father stays alone in the upstairs room.

Snooping around, Estella suspects that Father may have a movie star lover whom he jilted when he left the South. Father was active in the Spanish War on the Republican side against General Franco. His father, however, was on Franco's side. Both father and son had a falling, and Estella's father left with bad blood.

Realistically, Estella's father is suffering from PTSD. It could be a culmination of many reasons - his disappointment with the Civil War, his departure from the South, leaving his old girlfriend, trapped in a loveless marriage and the dull weather of the North.

As the years go by, Estella slowly understands what her father is going through, but nothing can predict what goes through his mind. All the while, the South remains a mysterious area to Estella. A single visit by her paternal in her childhood makes it even more intriguing. One day, Estella gets her chance to go down and endure the South. She goes there to study. The second part of her experience is not there in the film as it ends there.

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Everything is fake!

Spirit of the Beehive (1973)
Screenplay and Direction: Victor Erice

This offering is said the best film ever to come out of Spain. To a movie connoisseur, this film is all about what filmmaking is all about. It is about the depiction of subliminal messages in symbolism and in such a subtle manner that beats the censors but not the intended target, the audience.

To a regular filmgoer, the movie would be as exciting as watching paint dry. It is relatively slow, with frequent long pauses between takes. It is said that it was intentional to drive home the point about Spain's tumultuous times under the fascist dictator General Francisco Franco between 1939 and 1975. It tried to show how people led hollow lives; there was silence due to the dearth of human economic activities and governmental censorship that altered people's reality.

It narrates a family of four, a father, a mother and two young sisters with a live-in maid. Both the parents are obviously not on cordial terms. Both of them seemed to be engaged in their own activities. Father (Fernando) is into writing poems and tending to his beehives day in day out. Mother (Theresa) is in her own world, writing letters to an unknown lover.

The setting is 1940s Francoist Spain, in a small village where nothing is happening. The excitement of the day is the arrival of the movie screening van. That day, they were screening a butchered version of Frankenstein. The two sisters (Isabel and Ana) are watching the film. Ana, the younger one, is confused about the story and why Frankenstein is beaten up by the villagers in the movie. Isabel tells her that everything on film is unreal. Frankenstein is very much alive and is hiding in a nearby barn.

The director, Victor Erise, has a particular interest in telling stories from children's point of view. (See El Sur). Ana slow learns about death. She thinks that an army deserter who hides in the barn is the Frankenstein from the film. She feeds him and gives her father's coat to him. So, when the deserter gets killed, Fernando is summoned by the Francoist police, and Ana goes into hiding.

What about the beehive? What is the symbolism here? In my mind, the activities surrounding the beehive are pretty unproductive. The worker bees work laboriously in what seems like forever unfinished tasks. They appear perpetually busy, working non-stop. All their efforts, the intricate organisation, and the complicated distribution of labour mainly fatten the Queen Bee and ensure her fertility. The worker bee would probably get a pittance for his life-altering endeavours. His life purpose, much like the peasants in the lower rung of the pecking order in a fascist regime, is just to fatten the elites under the pretence of doing a noble job in the name of the country.

Capitalism, vulture capitalism and the post-truth era are not different from a fascist organisation. The commoners are sold a particular idea. That idea is emphasised and reminded repeatedly to generate a false sense of urgency in their minds. The powers-that-be utilises the power of media towards this end. We all end up doing a lot of unnecessary chores to satisfy the agenda of the top 1%.

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