‘I liked Dhurandhar, but…’ is how India is watching films now

The film claims that it is based on real events and has been extensively researched on. Albeit the facts of killings of various terrorists in Pakistan by unknown gunmen cannot be nullified, the timeline of these incidents and the government in office do not completely coincide. Moreover, ‘creative liberty’ has been used as a cloak to conjoin the scattered nuances in the film and gaps in timeline.

The film asks you to believe. The ‘but’ asks you to think

Towards the end, it no longer feels like just creative liberty and dramatisation rather an intentional persuasion. The film screams at us with its ‘absolute cinema’ and larger than life portrayal of characters in good-spiritedness, asking us to believe everything it has to say without a second thought. Dhurandhar: The Revenge is such a well-crafted film that its message just slips in unnoticed.

The film puts us, the viewers, in a dock-like situation. It persuades us almost instantly to buy the idea of a ‘new India’ while subtly misaligning facts and timeline of events. It glorifies heroism, decisiveness and leadership but at the same time undermines complexities and policy failures, as the audience’s focus shifts from terrorism as a problem to the dopamine-effect of how effectively it is being tackled.

And this is not new. We have seen it before. War films, since 2000, have shifted from chaos and ambiguity to precision, intelligence and success. We have seen it in films like Uri: The Surgical Strike, Shershah and Top Gun: Maverick and Zero Dark Thirty.

Propaganda doesn’t announce itself anymore

Propaganda and cinema have evolved in parallel. In Nazi Germany, Hitler took over the German film industry, and films like Triumph of the Will were produced. How propaganda works as a tool has been explained by Edward Bernays, who wrote a book called Propaganda in 1928. It makes us believe that what is being shown can be easily accepted as common sense, and that we are not being told what to think, but have arrived at it ourselves.

And, the consumer who is engaged is more susceptible to falling for it rather than the ignorant one. This is why it is even harder to distinguish propaganda from disinformation and categorically harder to resist.

War films reorganise our perception of power under the tag of ‘patriotic films’. Is this propaganda? The agenda-setting theory, given by journalism scholars Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw, argues that the media may not be successful in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling them what to think about.

It is difficult to decode and distinguish soft propaganda as it is appealing, confusing and almost instantly makes us want to believe in it, keeping our rationality aside. It is so emotionally persuasive that it feels rewarding. It takes away our focus from difficult questions to easy narratives. And, yes there should always be a space for appreciation, just not loud enough to make the audience go deaf.

‘I liked it, but…’ is the most honest review

Coming back to Dhurandhar: The Revenge. Why is there so much chatter around the film being a propaganda? The answer lies in us, the viewers. In the first part of the film, we rejected the idea of how an Indian spy would look and dress up in Pakistan and were criticised in our language, by memes. The reception, interpretation and our reaction to films tells us what kind of an audience we are.

It’s actually good to hear people around you speaking about the film boldly or with a sense of doubt, sometimes in abstract broken sentences saying, “I don’t know. I really liked the film, but…” The sentence here ends with a but to something which is unsaid but is there. It makes us wonder and ask how and where does creative liberty end and disinformation, or intentional narratives and persuasion, begin.

Jaques Ellul, whose 1965 work on propaganda remains the most rigorous analysis of the subject, argues that it can not be fact-checked either as facts were not the primary handler. The primary work is carried out by factors in the background which directly appeal to our senses.

One thing is for sure that India is watching films with political consciousness and is no longer a passive audience. We have long threads decoding how propaganda works to how factually correct the film is. There’s ample space for all kinds of opinions, as it should be. Aditya Dhar’s ‘peak detailing’ has also been thoroughly fact-checked by audiences attempting to engage more critically with the film.

It can be said that a film can be factually ‘nearly correct’ and persuasive at the same time. Again, art and films can not be apolitical as they reflect what goes around and beyond us. Sometimes, films help us confront ourselves, sometimes we take a dive into a fantasy world and delve into escapism but we can never abandon it.

With all that has been said, art and all visual modes of communication do not cease to influence us. Every painting, film or a visual has some meaning and thereby it has an influence on us. However, whether it has a propaganda or not is still debatable.