Deepa Gahlot

There is a startling piece of information about The Godfather in a piece titled The Mob, The Movies and Me by Peter Bart, in which he writes that director Francis Ford Coppola was "totally ignorant of Mobdom", and that writer Mario Puzo wrote a book on a subject he knew nothing about. (Bart was on the production team of The Godfather)

Don Corleone and The Family came out of their imagination, yet they created such a powerful piece of cinema that The Godfather became the standard mafia movie for everyone to follow --- the capo di tutti capi [the boss of bosses] of the genre, so to say. In all probability real life gangsters started dressing, talking and behaving like the characters in the movie. If art imitates life, life has curious ways of returning the compliment.

Above all, the honorable don movie lent glamour and respectability to the mobster. It was like, hey, these guys are not bad, they are family folk, loyal friends and brave killers. Just like you and me, if we had the nerve or inclination to kill people for a living --- a good living, too.

From being the hated villain, the gangster crossed the rubicon to become a hero. The stylish noir thrillers made way for gleeful bloodbaths.

If Hollywood opened the floodgates for "morally repugnant movies featuring charismatic scumbags as sympathetic protagonists" to quote Joe Queenan in The Kidnappers Are All Right (a piece in which he analysed America's fascination for evil), the pernicious trend led by Quentin Tarantino, Brian de Palma, Martin Scorcese, Guy Ritchie and stars like Robert de Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci --- Mumbai was bound to follow.

While there had been the grey character in many old films --- played by Dev Anand (Baazi, Jaal), Raj Kapoor (Shri 420), Amitabh Bachchan (Deewar) there was no doubt about the fact that what they did was bad, and they would repent before accepting punishment.

The new antihero has no moral qualms, kills casually while eating his vada pav, wipes his bloody hands on the victim's shirt, cracks a joke with his buddies and goes home, or to a swank bar, to unwind.

According to a crime site, 'Where does the fascination [for evil] spring from? Perhaps it is due to the fact that identifying with criminals has a cathartic function, allowing us to live vicariously through the crimes of others so that we don't feel compelled to engage in them ourselves. We like crime movies because they show us an underside to our society that we don't get to see too often, and these people kick some ass.'

Another theory goes, 'Alfred Hitchcock used to say that the audience has no morals, meaning that you can get people who are watching a movie to identify with a killer in a tight spot if you do it cleverly enough. He demonstrated this truth in several movies, but never managed anything like the trick pulled off by Puzo, Coppola and other filmmakers. These people sold the idea that a genuine menace to society can still be an honourable fellow. The criminal-as-sexy-rebel myth was propagated by the media, particularly the movies.'

Vic Fortezza writes in his piece on mafia movies, "America's fascination with the Cosa Nostra is more a reflection of its long love affair with the outlaw than bigotry. Billy The Kid, Jesse James, Butch Cassidy and Sundance, Dillinger, Bonnie And Clyde, the films of Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney and [George] Raft, enthralled Americans long before the mafia became a staple of screenwriters.

"Like porn stars, gangsters connect with a longing for freedom, a shunning of convention, a doing-what-you-please whenever it pleases you.

"Of course, these rebels may be no more free than the rest of us, but the mythology that builds around them makes it appear they are."

Interesting to note then, that a gangster on being asked his reaction to the Godfather movies, said they sent them "gloriously floating out of theatres."

Which was undoubtedly the case with Ram Gopal Varma's Satya and the Mumbai gangster. The boy coming out of bleak chawls and hopeless rural wastelands would feel comforted by the power and respect films like Satya, Vaastav and the recent Company gives him.

In these films, in a kind of spurious moral turnaround, the gangsters are killed or incarcerated, but the media gives enough coverage to the lifestyle of real life dons for people to know that very often crime pays.

In Satya, the eponymous protagonist was a man without past who is unwittingly forced into a life of crime. Bhikhu Mhatre, the gangster who inducts him is seen as a cheerful devil, who flirts with his wife and dances at weddings.

In the director's new film Company, Chandu (Vivek Oberoi) is a slum boy who willingly recruits into a gang, because he wants the clout and easy money. Neither his conscience nor his hand trembles when he kills. Unlike the mother of Vaastav, who is aghast at what her son has become, Chandu's mother is quite happy that he has a well-paying job with a nice boss Malik (Ajay Devgan).

Unlike Satya's innocent girlfriend, Chandu's girl wants to marry him because he is a bhai (gangster).

The decent person's horror of crime and the shame that a family would have felt --- until a few years ago --- if their son went to jail has been replaced by a swaggering pride. Gangsters live a life of luxury abroad, which is any day a more attractive proposition to a poor unemployed boy whose only prospects are to be a peon or courier if he wants to lead an honest life.

As Chandu says in the film, nobody goes up the straight way. Of course it is a failure of society at large if the poor feel stifled by the lack of opportunity. But that is also a very convenient explanation. The fact is that our society has become immune and desensitised to violence. It would be foolish to say that films, TV and the media lead to violence, but they do offer the methods, respectability and social acceptability to criminals.

If a social worker or freedom fighter gets a one para inside page obit and a gangster gets front page reports and 'homages' on his death, anybody would be attracted to a life of crime. If today, in India, Arun Gawli and Afroze are heroes --- the former with a bright political career ahead of him from all indications, would a chawl boy rather be a labourer or a hitman?

Films have started portraying killers and criminals as 'cool'. People in the audience titter when Chandu kills a corrupt cop in Company. Both the cop and the gangster come from the same social background, but according to the film, an amoral killer is superior to a bad cop.

Who would a slum boy rather be, a killer or a cop? Sure petty gangsters get killed in encounters all the time, so do businessmen who cannot pay extortion money. And innocent bystanders.

Sure, there is an element of reality in the portrayal of criminals and terrorists in films today, but how gangsters are perceived has a lot to do with film and media hero-worshipping of the man with the gun.

A small research project conducted in the US that examined the image of gangsters particularly Italians --- asked respondents which Italian they recalled instantly and non-Italians replied: 3% Mario (Video Game) 3% Luigi (Video Game) 3% Gotti 3% Mussolini 6% Al Capone 6% Rocky 9% Tony Soprano 12% Al Pacino 15% Godfather (movie character) 16% Joe Pesci 24% Robert de Niro

Were they fascinated by the Mafia lifestyle? Males: 90% Yes; Females: 35% Yes

Were Americans fascinated? Yes: 98%; No: 2%

The success of most gangster movies in India (also in the West), and the media acclaim they get, makes an anti-violence and anti-glorification-of-criminals stance very unpopular.

In Hollywood they would say forgedaboudit.

In Mumbai, they say Khallas.

Earlier column
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