[NOT a review of Revival. Or of Manmohan Desai films. Just a
rambling bunch of thoughts and connections]
I just finished reading Stephen King’s latest book, Revival. [There will be spoilers here,
so beware]. The book spans almost the entire life of its hero, Jamie Morton.
Beginning from when he’s a small kid, and ending when he’s past sixty, it talks
of his multiple encounters with Charles Jacobs, a pastor and later carnival
showman, miracle healer, and researcher into pseudoscience. The climax is a
disquieting peep into the afterlife – a hell enforced by Lovecraftian beings
and giant-ant-like creatures.
As it stands, the book is good. The question I came away
wondering is, is this really a story that needed recounting of an entire
lifetime to tell? An alternate novella-length version could have started from
just before the climactic Frankensteinian experiment, covered the revelations,
and ended, say, with all the characters dying or mad. King’s decision to let
the tale unfold over a lifetime does give us more to chew on, of course: the
fates of the various patients cured by Jacobs, the slowly disintegrating Morton
family, the changing of the world and technology.
One thing is for sure. The way the book has been structured,
to be a narrative of a life rather than of a set of events, there is no scope
of a sequel. There isn’t going to be another four stories where the pastor
shows up and heals people in mysterious ways. Perhaps the full impact of the
climax was felt only because this was the single more important thing that
happened in Jamie’s life.
And this brings me to a peeve I always had in days past: why
did Bollywood movies never have sequels? No matter how much you enjoyed, say, Amar Akbar Anthony or Sholay, you couldn’t imagine a proper
sequel being produced in the next couple of years. I used to watch, say, Armour of God Part 2: Operation Condor and
enjoy the idea of watching the characters in more adventures. Why couldn’t
Hindi movies do that?
With the years, I realized the reason was the scope of the
typical Hindi movie: it wasn’t a single event or a sequence of events, but a
chronicle of an entire life. Amar Akbar
Anthony, say, or Zanjeer, or Sharaabi or whatever, documented the
absolutely most important events in their protagonists’ entire lives: getting
separated from their families, or growing up with significant family issues, or
being wronged by an epic villain, and then over the course of the movie,
righting these wrongs. When these characters got old and retired from their
job, they would put their grandkids on their knee and tell them about the
events that were depicted in these movies. Their neighbours would always know
them as “the guy who caught and killed Loin”, or “the guy who was separated
from his parents, but finally was reunited with everyone”, and so on. It would
be too incredible for them to have any more adventures in their lives.
On the other hand, Jackie Chan in Armour of God, or Sean Connery in the James Bond movies, or Mel
Gibson in Lethal Weapon, was just
solving another case. Once it was done he was pretty much walking away and
ready to do another one. You could imagine Mel Gibson having hundreds of weeks
similar to the events listed in Lethal Weapon.
There are exceptions on both sides, of course: There can’t
be a sequel to Titanic, or Independence Day, for example. And there actually
was a sequel to Sholay and one to Jewel Thief and another one to Nagina, not to mention the sorta-sequel
to Munnabhai MBBS. But the structure
of these movies, on both sides, proves my point.
What does it say about desi movies in the 80s? Well, to
powerpoint my thoughts:
·
Bollywood movies have a smaller number of
writers, writing a large number of movies. So, many movies are written by
people who had written at least the same number of movies as Stephen King has
written books.
·
As you keep writing, your plots tend to get
bigger and bigger in scope, until you really need to write about entire lives. I
really need to analyse the typical story arc period for a Bollywood screenwriter
over his career to prove this, but I can see how this makes sense.
·
Or maybe it says that experience teaches you
that large events reverberate through entire lives, so you need to paint your
canvas at lifetime-level to explore your plot properly.
·
Or maybe audiences of Hindi movies wanted large
scale in everything: the villains larger than life, the dialogues and the
soundtrack reverberating for the ages, the hero’s journey a lifetime long, the
heroine the most beautiful woman in the world…
In any case: Revival
is very good. Read it. Also watch Amar
Akbar Anthony if you haven’t seen it yet.
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