Over time, I’ve come to associate the origins of core emotions — my freshest feelings, my moments of vulnerability, sadness, awe, disappointment, strength and introspection — with the physical sensation of walking down the stairs. For long, this seemingly mundane act has coincided with my racing heart, swirling mind, a fiercely desperate need to be alone. Yet, ironically, these descents are anything but solitary. They’re noisy, but only because quietness can’t be heard. These oft-decrepit corridors harbour invisible bubbles of space, mental cages of privacy, to accompany the omnipresent buzz of a hundred other footsteps. A thousand other silent voices. A million other thoughts jostling for individuality.
Because there is nothing quite like walking out of a cinema hall. There is nothing quite like the immediate aftermath of movies. There isn’t anything like exiting an air-conditioned prism of alternate universes.
The uniquely unpleasant gust of warm air reminds us to reflect on the manufactured life we’ve lived for the previous hours. The resourceful zigzagging of treacherous staircases leading into basement parking lots is a trademark of our ‘multiplex generation.’ But these crummy tunnels have been my awakening. You remember them precisely for how much you don’t remember. In no time, you’re on the bustling street, wondering how you floated here absent-mindedly from above. There’s a certain timelessness to this phase — like entire flight durations consumed by time difference — where one drifts in an existential vacuum between two environments. My six-year-old brain discovered fear here after Yash Chopra’s Darr ; observed my mother after Karan Arjun to identify shades of a forlorn Rakhee if I were to be murdered by an evil warlord; proudly relived the glory of winning my school a cricket match on being propelled by Lagaan . The prospect of failing to latch onto my parents’ fingers in the frantic post-movie scramble wasn’t so terrifying anymore.
After Ram Madhvani’s Neerja earlier this year, I had stumbled down the stairs, as if just allowed to flee from a hijacked aircraft. Relief washed over me, followed the exhilaration of having seen a thrilling film, soon to be drowned out by odd grief. I had pictured my own mourning mother in Shabana Azmi’s (as flight-attendant Neerja Bhanot’s mother) horrid situation; I visualised her trembling voice, her tears, the way she’d have perhaps stammered through a strong eulogy. Each step down felt like a steep slope upward. I remember surrendering to feeling: something, anything at all.
Affective cinema does that; it compels you to simulate the workings of its soul. It’s not only about escaping, relating to something familiar, or being entertained by something unfamiliar. It’s about discovering how you feel about your own life through it, about envisioning the familiar in the strangeness of it all.
For example, the sight of an alienated character can indirectly concretise one’s views on minorities, differently-abled beings, alternate sexualities, abandonment and even stray dogs. The scene of a young couple discussing divorce papers triggers memories of a future one may not have experienced yet. I sense my own version of their back story: a joyous wooing phase, heady honeymoon period, intimate mornings, messy breakfasts, late movies, petty debates, and then I feel pained and sorry for sitting at this solemn table on the verge of losing it all.
Cinema, by nature, is intimate; it isn’t a very different communicative device from a telephone, except it allows you to speak to yourself. Suddenly, the man grieving for his wife on screen bears the hypothetical agony of your own paramour leaving you without notice. The scene begins to assume the hollowness of realising a future without your person. In the case of Anu Menon’s Waiting , watching a retired professor (Naseeruddin Shah) endlessly care for his comatose wife gave me enough time to absorb this loneliness. I found myself reminiscing about my own attachments, fearful of growing old and losing the privilege of companionship. His melancholic flashbacks made me identify the one person I’d be crushed to lose. As did the predicament of the younger Benjamin Mee (Matt Damon, in Cameron Crowe’s We Bought A Zoo ), a single father struggling to understand his children after his wife’s (Stephanie Szostak) death. The last scene has Benjamin enacting to them exactly how he had first met her at a café. His cheesy pick-up line prompts her to look up from her book. “Why not?” she responds, with a twinkle in her eye, designed to remind you of the precise trait — a quirk, a whim, a skipped beat — that makes you dizzy about someone. Such films make you miss something you don’t even have yet; like I did when square-jawed Carl Fredrickson (in Pixar’s poignant Up ) loses childhood sweetheart Ellie after sharing with her a life full of unfulfilled dreams.
I glided down the stairs nervily after Bajrangi Bhaijaan , internalising the anxiety of a child separated from his parents. Watching tiny Shahida (Harshaali Malhotra) reunite with her mother reminded me of my own parents’ sheer haplessness when I had once decided to walk back home after missing the school bus. Even the brutality of Badlapur made me stomp down the stairs, wondering who in my life would be worth avenging if they were to be killed.
It’s widely believed that film critics can’t afford the luxury of feeling; they must smother the heart and embrace the cold, analytical core. This kind of reflective writing even tends to be dismissed as ‘nostalgia porn’: like it were a crime not to sound impersonal about an inherently personal medium. I’ve noticed contemporaries resist the urge to emote while walking down those stairs. This gait is unnatural, much like ‘failed filmmaker’ Georges Méliès’s (Ben Kingsley, in Martin Scorsese’s cinematic ode to cinema, Hugo ) grumpy-salesman demeanour, before he meets little Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield). There’s still a deep love in Georges’ resentment, quelled by an adult’s duty to sound mature about childishness. Similarly, circumstances seem to have put in us an academic dishonesty about films. This suppression is somewhat misguided, a self-defeating byproduct of adhering to the voice-of-reason reputation. But must reason always acquire hues of dispassion? Isn’t analysis founded on the passionate urge to explore? Isn’t criticism the cornerstone of natural prejudice?
I believe it’s important to let every movie change us a little. It’s important to get a little carried away. It’s essential to avoid those elevators and be a little irrational on those steps. It’s important to look at every film the way 12-year-old Hugo looks at his deceased father’s broken automation. Explore it, fix it, kick it, find its purpose, but express it, with self-fulfilling zeal.
One must remember that even Mr. Méliès, who would perhaps be the quietest moviegoer on our staircases, begins, and re-begins, his pioneering career with a voice promising magic: “If you’ve ever wondered where dreams come from, you look around…this is where they are made.”
The writer is a freelance film critic, writer and habitual solo traveller
