In the span of a few minutes, Lucky Singh cracks at least three different “jokes”, rich with double entendre. Mohanlal’s most recent character as a turban-wearing businessman hiring a cab in Kochi hardly has a quiet moment in the film Monster. Honey Rose plays the unfortunate cab driver who has to listen to the crass jokes, full of explicit sexual innuendos for anyone to miss. And if someone still doesn’t get it, Lucky’s exaggerated expressions will tell you this is no passing matter, pause and take a moment to guess his meanings.
In this case, the jokes revolve around the words ‘dickey’, ‘jacky’ (car jack) and ‘stepney, all of which are slangs with sexual innuendos referring to body parts of women and sexual acts. Honey appears to not notice the underlying messages even when Lucky repeats the lines (“I can’t believe girls don’t know what a jacky is”) and laughs ‘naughtily’. But young men in the audience do, cheering the star on, clapping and hooting and laughing aloud.
Use of double entendre and glorification of misogyny in Malayalam cinema is not at all a new phenomenon, but the frequency had come down in recent years, especially after the row around Kasaba and its infamous lines uttered by Mammootty’s policeman character. That was in 2016 and 2017 (the row erupting months after the release and leading to many discussions). Even if the women who called out the celebration of the blatant misogyny were relentlessly harassed online, filmmakers appeared to tread a cautious line after that. Stars began sprouting lines in their films, about the need to respect women, even when there was no context to it. Some of those came across like a disclaimer, in the same tone as ‘no animals were harmed in the making of this film’.
Watch: Trailer of Monster
It was also a time many new filmmakers emerged to change the character of films. These films mostly came with younger and newer actors but a few veterans like Mammootty also embraced them. Despite the very unique and unusual themes the movies were based on, glorified misogyny hardly ever came into the picture. It did not mean that cruelty to women was not portrayed, or insensitive lines avoided. But these were not made to look or sound heroic. If a guy exhibited misogyny, the film painted him as the man you can’t expect better from. Not someone to clap and cheer for.
It was not only a question of political correctness which some critics felt were taking things overboard, when just about everything seemed to offend someone. But making sure that films were inclusive, and not indifferent to any particular group of people.
Watch: Controversial scene in Kasaba
Even so, the old formula of writing comedy at the expense of another would occasionally surface. Since it couldn’t be so explicit as before, writers turn to double entendre, as if that makes it less offensive. The idea being, make a cringy insinuation and then give it the garb of humour, no one will mind.
The writer of Monster had also scripted Mohanlal’s Aaraattu which released earlier this year. TNM’s film critic described Mohanlal’s lead character in it as a “sleazy man who passes lewd comments on every woman he meets, makes fun of political correctness and is an assertion that Malayalam filmmakers and actors who’ve been criticised for their misogynistic and insensitive depictions in the past, need not be apologetic or think about evolving.”
Not thinking about evolving is right. In the beginning of the year, the producers of the Mohanlal film Narasimham, made 22 years ago, felt the need to share the clip of a proposal scene from it on Valentine’s Day. It wasn’t a proposal scene on the lines of another much admired one from a 1986 Mohanlal movie, Namaku Parkam Mundhiri Thoppukal. In Narasimham, Mohanlal plays a rough, unruly character, a macho hero, whose proposal would make an average woman rush to the nearest bathroom and throw up, but has the heroine shriek and leap up in joy. The proposal scene in question "offers" the woman kicks when the man returns home drunk, a "chance" to give birth and raise the man’s children and an "opportunity" to thump her chest and cry when he dies.
Watch: Proposal scene in Narasimham
The scene got dug up in February after a new film showed its heroine tell off the dominating hero with a two-word profanity and the line got used in memes calling out the misogyny in old films like Narasimham.
Many actors had spoken worse lines in earlier decades. One of the most common jibes thrown at women was, “nee verum pennanu” (you are just a woman). It was really bad in the 1990s, a time when Mammootty’s hugely misogynistic ‘sense, sensibility, sensitivity’ line came out in The King.
Watch: Scene from The King
But those ideas were carefully shovelled away when newer generations began speaking out, stating how problematic the expressions were, and newer crop of writers and filmmakers respected that. The counter argument has always been that it is just cinema, it should be seen as such, not taken to heart. But remember the young crowd whom we described as hooting for Lucky Singh? Those young people were lapping up ideas that should have been long buried. Why are they being dug up and receiving validation all over again?
One would think that all the awareness and awakening created by conversations in and out of social media in recent years would ring a warning bell or two in the ears of scriptwriters when they sit to write. And strike down any thoughts of adding a bit of bashing down of women just to win a few claps. But when it doesn’t happen, you need to keep calling them out. Look what it’s helped achieve in the past.