Does crime pay?

The dichotomy between law and justice on celluloid is always baffling

Tabu in 'Drishyam'

HYDERABAD: Watching the huge success of the Malayalam film ‘

Drishyam’ and its various remakes across the country raises a serious question. Is it all right to be a criminal provided there is a sense of ‘justice’ attached to it? The dichotomy between law and justice has always bothered modern societies because law always seems to have a well-coded class/power bias while justice seems to be argued in highly nebulous zones of social entitlement and human compromises. Let’s look at the basic story. On seeing her mother in danger the young daughter hits the blackmailing intruder hard on his head with a rod, causing his instant death. The father arrives at the scene, disposes the body and lays down an elaborate plan full of lies so that the family can escape any form of police interrogation.

The logic is, since the intruder was a criminally-minded blackmailer the victim/viewer claims an entitlement to hit back. In the process the viewer is asked to compromise and support the crime.

Unfortunately, the young dead man happens to be the son of a senior female police official and she is not going to spare the criminal. The local policeman is also a vengeful corrupt man itching to get back at the father/hero who never panders to him. The law throws the rule book out and resorts to sheer superior state power.

The two cops are convinced that the father is bluffing but have no evidence to nab him. The hero’s friends have also ingested the false story and repeat the same sequence of events indicating that he and his family were out of town on the night of the crime. Strangely, considering that the primary male protagonists of these language versions are all superstars there are no heroics in the narrative to deserve this kind of ‘public cover-up’. As a kind of moral counterpoint, however, the hero and family are flogged mercilessly in the police premises in order to extricate the ‘truth’. Were these long scenes backed by some ‘horrendous’ music, to be seen as retribution for a crime committed? Pain for pain; an eye for an eye!?

Although Drishyam is a pale comparison, films like ArdhSatya , Deewar and Mahanadhi in the 70s and 80s, condemned the executive force of state power, namely the police by expressing their retaliation/ dissent to such post-colonial institutions. Film study experts saw this and other such tropes in popular culture as a ritualistic way of exorcising the vestiges of a post-colonial system running out of sync with contemporary realities.

Almost forty years later today, when few of us remember our colonial history and modern films showcase the world of gangster violence as more terrorizing, why is this policing wing of the state machinery still so menacing? Why do members of the police force who are also normal citizens, when not in uniform, still continue to be objects of revulsion? Or did Drishyam do so well because the story and its extraordinary performances managed to touch the emotional cord of a generic fear/ violence lurking in every citizen?

I am sure many of our readers, including me, may have never experienced any form of police brutality personally. Yet that ‘brutality’ seems to haunt the nation as a hallmark of the police. The disconnect between Law and Justice which perceives crime as rewarding needs to be amended.