The Beauty of Meaninglessness in Cinema

The art of enjoying films in a mode of disorientation.

There’s a cinema not too far from me that regularly has a screen showing an Indian movie (Bollywood, Kollywood, Tollywood). I always enjoy them. Last night my wife and I saw a movie that highlighted a way of seeing I sometimes bring to the theater experience, as a primarily sensory experience, with no concern for understanding narrative arcs, continuity, or what people are talking about.

The movie we saw was the Tollywood movie “Sarkaru Vaari Paata”. You can seek out the trailer, if you wish. What was attractive about the trailer to me was that I had no idea what was going on: slow-motion violence mixed with sentimentalism and jokes I did not get.

The film did not disappoint: the tonal shifts were very unexpected for a Hollywood audience: the primary male protagonist started out with a tragic backstory, became a violent villain, then started using righteous violence (i.e., the audience is expected to be on his side), then changed again started giving long political speeches about Indian banking policy, and finally immersed in sentimentalism, all the while never cracking anything but a smug self-confident expression.

The most powerful weapon in the world of the film was love of India, and shame at not living up to an ideal of nationalistic behavior.

The primary female protagonist started out deceptive, but suddenly turned at some point into someone who longed only to be a traditional wife.

There was seemingly little regard for maintaining logic or continuity in the on-screen universe. For example, at one point, the protagonist is on a motorcycle blocked by a horde of henchmen. He turns away, and someone on the roof starts gloats about this over a mobile phone. As this conversation occurs (implying real-time continuity), less than thirty seconds later, the protagonist is now the driver of a very large truck that is now hurtling towards the henchmen, with the apparently magical ability to leap high into the air from a perfectly flat road in order to flatten a fence.

The grasping mind cannot relax and enjoy such cinema. The film might make complete sense with a native cultural context and familiarity with narrative conventions, but the wonderful things is that I don’t have such means, and so can relax into the dreamlike sequence of events and give up any attempt to understand what is going on.

This mode of cinema-as-dream experience has become a common mode for me. While I appreciate continuity, tightly plotted narrative arcs, comprehensible evolution of characters, and understanding cultural references, I no longer require them, and now even delight when these are absent. It is the enjoyment of a dream: personalities change, sudden transitions occur, and mysterious motivations abound.

This way of seeing is generally easier to locate with a film that makes less inherent sense for me, but, beautifully, can also be brought to bear on a tightly plotted Hollywood or art-house film. Disorientation can spice up any movie. For me, one gateway into this is to identify with the location of the camera’s point-of-view. This often yields an experiential whipping around in space, as the camera cuts from shot to shot.

The experience of cinema-as-meaningless, as discontinuous sensory events, can be a richly rewarding experience.