THE TRUTH is out there

Rann is in a long line of movies that shows us how the media is manufactured,that it is made up of people who are opinionated and fallible.

Rann is in a long line of movies that shows us how the media is manufactured,that it is made up of people who are opinionated and fallible. But can todays cinema really afford to cast it as the bad guy?
By now,we should all have got the messagethat the message is the message. Harshvardhan Malik uses his TV channel to deliver the message,and suddenly,the film that is being piggy-backed on it discovers that it has a conscience. It is where Ram Gopal Varmas Rann has been leading to from the first frame: that it matters not that those around Malik are colluding to pollute the message and that much of the films length is spent on venal politicians and greedy businessmen hatching a plot to delude Malik. In the end,the good guys win.

Varmas is only the latest in a long line of films which look at the juxtaposition of media,power and corruption. And,of late,whether they originate in Hollywood or Bollywood,there has almost always been a common thread running through them. The villains who want to subvert the truth have a jolly old time trying to do it. But almost invariably,we,the people,are left with a ray of hope. The media,for most of us is The Mediathe fount of all knowledge. I saw it on TV may not have as much veracity as the older I read it in the papers,but the phrase still has heft.

Whats noteworthy is the increasing struggle the guys on the right side have to engage in to keep afloat,and its interesting to see how the films,made at different points in time,reflect that aspect. As the media invites more and more corporate raiders into its ranks,whose religion is strong balance sheets more than trenchant editorial policy,Doing The Right Thing is almost always the first to be dispensed with,because its the easiest thing to do.

In Orson Welless 1941 classic Citizen Kane,Charles Foster Kane discovers the power of yellow journalism,the first time perhaps the phrase is used in a Hollywood feature. Real-life publisher and original corporate raider William Randolph Hearst,on whose life the film is based,never made it a secret that his first priority was to sell his papers and down his rivals. In the film,Kane orders a reporter/photographer who telegrams to say that he cant find any conflict in Cuba,to just send the pictures,I will supply the war. So what if,in that pursuit,he twists the truth more than a little? The incident,according to a reporter who worked in a Hearst paper,was not entirely apocryphal.

Harshvardhan Maliks news channel India Twenty Four Seven clearly modelled on NDTV 24/7,just as Malik is modelled on owner Prannoy Roy,doesnt go as far as whistling up a war in a faraway country. The battle is closer home,and the channel is used by vested interests to bring down a clean neta,in order to tarnish his image,and replace him with another,the sort of corrupt-to-the-core politician we are familiar with from the papers and the movies,and,ironically,TV sting operations. The takeover is prevented only in the nick of time,and only in the face of tragedy: Malik loses his compromised son,but regains face by coming clean on prime time.

Using TV as a playground for contemporary mores is an old-style device,which James L. Brooks used so well in Broadcast News,his 1987 comic take on behind-the-scenes-in-a-news TV-studio. A good-looking producer is the cleverest person in the newsroom,not always to her advantage. A handsome new anchor is made to look good by having his lines fed to him. Whats next,asks a colleague sarcastically,lip-synching? In todays parlance,he would be dubbed a loser,because he has the smarts,but cant get the girl, in this case,the bright producer. In a poignant scene,cost-cutting sharks cause a veteran reporter to be sacked. In 2009,he would have got a faux-sympathetic George Clooney to let him go gently,like all those others pink-slipped in the recession chic comedy Up In The Air. Back in 87,the old-time reporter can face his boss directly,and say these words,laced with sweet venom I hope you die soon.

Just a year before,in 1986,an unusual film for the times,came out of Mumbai. Romesh Sharmas hard-hitting New Delhi Times bears a striking resemblance to Rann. Just as Malik is misled by bad information from someone he trusts,honest-to-the-core newspaper editor Vikas Pande Shashi Kapoor is persuaded that the wrong guy is the villain. Pandes proprietor is an old-style media baron,former freedom fighter Jagannath Poddar,for whom running a newspaper is a mission,not a business. But he,in turn,has to bow to his son,who is bent upon replacing journalistic scruple with sensation.

Story continues below this ad

Like Poddars son in New Delhi Times,Maliks son is the agent provocateur in Rann,and thats another similarity. But New Delhi Times doesnt kow-tow as much to populist sentiment as does Rann. The rising son in the former is the voice of the amoral future,the father is reduced to being a helpless old man; in Rann,the son is made to throw himself out of a high window,leaving the father to regain his rightful place via a long soliloquy about media and morality. Malik is allowed expiation; Pande,on the other hand,is pushed to the periphery. New Delhi Times is darker and makes no concession in its portrayal of the ideal,and the possible; Rann is about making us feel all right about the media choices we make.

When the really brave movies show us just how the media is manufactured,they are almost always an eye-opener,because they tell us that The Media is not this inanimate,perfect reflection of whats out there. They tell us that it is made up of people who are opinionated and fallible,and can very easily be bought,or swayed. Frost/Nixon,a set of interviews between a TV host fighting irrelevance and the disgraced former President of the US,is a fascinating glimpse of how real people can be turned into images of themselves: Frosts attempts,long-drawn and desperate,to get Nixon to say something incriminating are nearly coming to a frustrating naught when the tough old cougar slips and admits to wrongdoing. You feel Nixon does it almost deliberately because hes also looking for the mass forgiveness that mass television can provide: the film makes no excuses for either the vanity of the talk-show host,nor the compulsions of a beleaguered public figure who refuses to fade gracefully.

Can a Ram Gopal Varma in 2010 be quite as brutally honest about what makes the media both quite so strong and so horribly weak,as a Romesh Sharma could,back in 1986? There were not that many choices of free media in India back then. The only TV channel was Doordarshan,the sanitised voice of the sarkaar,there were no pesky TRP gods to be propitiated,and the printed word had the fixity of purpose which could withstand questioning. Today,the mediathe moving image rather than the word,saturates our every waking moment. Rann opens with a collage of TV screens,all running breaking news banners,all with the latest stock market figures on the bottom band and rapt viewers. We juggle screens all day long,TV,computers,phones. Can we really afford for our content creators to be the bad guys?
Of course,not. In 2010,when appearances are all,we need a Harshvardhan Malik. We need our media to appear to be telling the truth. Even if it is not.