The movie Janaan doesn’t offer much on the cerebral front — though it didn’t pretend to in the first place, so there’s nothing wrong with that. It was meant to entertain and it delivered on that, somewhat. Mildly amusing.
Even well-meaning film-and-TV content made in a Pashtun setting have their paint-by-the-numbers Pashtun stereotypes but this particular film didn’t indulge in those too much. And if the intention was to present the positive side of Pashtun culture, they didn’t lay it on too thick, so it seemed effortless. So good for them.
It isn’t exactly in the must-watch category; the primary reason to watch it, perhaps, could be the achingly beautiful female lead. At least that’s why I watched it.
Now, though it is otherwise a feel-good flick — weddings and all — there has to be some tension in all scripts, some resolution of an issue, as per the classic three-act structure of screenplays. In this case, that tension and resolution was provided by a powerful local figure who was, in fact, a paedophile. Now, this bit about paedophilia was used only as a narrative device; Janaan wasn’t a film about paedophilia. Not the way Shoaib Mansoor’s Bol was about a host of issues like family planning, preference for the male child and, again, paedophilia. Here, it was used as a prop, a device. If some NGO funded this aspect of the film, either the screenwriter did a good job of not letting it seem like that or this NGO didn’t really ask for its pound of flesh.
No issue with the film on this. My issue is with the audience. At emotional bits in the movie, particularly at a point where a domestic worker tearfully admits to having been sexually harassed by the creep, the audience at the multiplex that I watched it at erupted in guffaws. Males, mostly, though a smattering of females seemed to find it funny as well.
Which is disturbing. I’m not being some culture snob here. I’m not holding the audience to a high standard here, expecting them to be able to appreciate nuances and subtleties and the meaning of higher art. I do not begrudge their laughter, even in this movie, at some of the lazily written, predictable jokes. None of that. It is the laughter at the sexual abuse of children that I find disturbing.
Am I setting the bar really high here?
Let me talk to you about sexual abuse for a bit. An overwhelmingly large majority of the Pakistani males reading this piece would have undergone sexual abuse. I wouldn’t be surprised if a paltry ten percent are the ones who haven’t gone through it.
The male reader, emasculated and enraged, would either deny this, or furiously claim to be a part of that tenth. Which is wrong, actually. You see, when the term sexual abuse is used, we generally have its absolutely worst form in mind. Sexual abuse is actually a spectrum. And the overwhelming majority of males in this country have had an experience somewhere firmly on the spectrum. This spectrum would have been framed by the west’s sensibilities, some of you might still insist; are we to raise a generation of delicate flowers or strong young men who are unfazed by minor incidents?
That’s is a hideous line of reasoning. A crude, lecherously obsessive class-teacher, one completely frank about his depravity to a seven-year-old boy will be terrifying for the child, even if the teacher doesn’t once lay hand on him. Terrifying enough to modify his behaviour. Terrifying enough to stay with him for the rest of his life and affect his relation with his family and the world at large. Forgive me if I think that it should be thought of as sexual abuse.
None of the above is meant to imply that the worst form of sexual abuse is rare either. But it is only this entire spectrum with which almost the entire male populace is covered. I keep bringing up male sexual abuse because I feel the nation’s young boys’ plight is overshadowed by the admittedly far greater plight faced by the girls. Had the instance of abuse cited in the movie involved a girl, we wouldn’t have heard this group of young men laughing; the mood would have been sombre.
That brings us back to the young men in the Lahori multiplex who found the subject matter hilarious. Zeroing in on the worst form of sexual abuse, there might have been maybe two to three victims in this group of fifteen. Taking the entire spectrum, we might have all of them as victims. What, specifically, did they find funny? What pain were they hiding in their grins? Why were they laughing at themselves? What defence mechanism was this?
Post-script:
On the issue of the media: given the sheer scale of the problem and the attitude towards it, is cinema the best way to provoke thought on this topic? The TV serial Udaari, though not exclusively on male sexual abuse, seemed to have touched a chord. Was it because TV has become, specially in the age of the internet, a solitary activity? Not the family huddling around a screen anymore.
None of the groupthink of cinema, which is more suited for infectious laughter than anything else. I know this would sound like I am belittling the power of cinema but I am not; much could be done with it. This particular problem, however, given its baggage, is another kind of an animal. Content that deals with it needs solitary consumption by the viewer. Let us learn from the lessons of Bol and now Janaan, both of which had audience members breaking into nervous laughter, specially by groups of young men.
