RRR

And Homosocial Environments

In prison, I taught a film class a few times, an ACE class. It was successful enough that I eventually had a supervisor who would procure films for me to show, as long as he watched them in advance and they were PG-13 or lower. At one point, I devised a rubric for a ten week class that would be broken up in two-week chunks, comparing and contrasting two similar movies at a time.

I decided to start off with musicals, but I wanted to challenge the student a bit. So the first class, I showed “Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon”, which features music diegetic and non-diegetic to the audience – that being, songs played within the narrative by characters that are musicians, and songs played over the soundtrack by unseen pop stars that the characters cannot hear. I followed this up with “Singin’ In The Rain”, which is also filled with both diegetic and non-diegetic music. And like “The Last Dragon”, which mines Motown for a few hits, many of the songs in “Singin’ In The Rain” are repurposed would-be pop songs that didn’t deliver commercially. In other words, why is one of these considered a conventional “musical” while the other is not? Subquestion, who cares?

I thought about that during “RRR”, which fits the typical Bollywood mold in a conventional sense, while deviating in other ways. Yes, it’s three hours long, loudly nationalist and peppered with assertive song and dance sequences. Technically it’s a musical, technically most Bollywood movies are musical. But it’s only a musical insofar as movies don’t typically feature characters singing and dancing in unison in the middle of the narrative. It’s not not a musical, it’s just that other movies are non-musical, or less musical.

The point is that “RRR” is EVERYTHING. It’s a MEGA-movie, it’s maximalist in all the best ways. Granted, a lot of Bollywood films are like this, to an overwhelming extent. A couple of years ago when I was still fresh out of prison, I went to the theaters to see “Pathaan”, a Bollywood megablockbuster that borrowed as much from Michael Bay as it did from the other films from legendary leading actor Shah Rukh Khan. The movie was suffused with a now-familiar type of over-excess you see in big budget Bollywood. But it was less than three hours long, and there was only ONE abbreviated song and dance sequence, with a second one relegated to the credits. “Pathaan” had a maximalist appeal, but it was NOT a mega-movie.

I’m not up on my Indian history, but I understand this is based very loosely on two freedom fighters in the 1920’s, Komaram Bheem and Alluri Sitarama Raju. At the film’s start, Bheem pursues a British governor who kidnaps a young girl from his tribe, an all-out assault filled with fire, tigers and throbbing male thighs – they don’t skimp on the body glory here, these dudes are in shape. Bheem then launches an offensive, leading the Brits to employ Raju, an Indian police officer, to stop an uprising. A deeply cinematic event happens, however – Raju and Bheem haven’t met before they both notice a child in danger and they rescue the kid from a disaster. It’s a lot like that scene in “Spider-Man” when he has to save Mary Jane and the falling rail train, except it’s done without superpowers except the superpower of BROTHERHOOD.

What happens next is completely awesome, even to a guy like me, who is frankly sick of homosocial interactions after years in prison of only that. Bheem and Raju become the best of friends. There’s a closeness to them that never once becomes homosexual, just two dudes passionately respectful of each other and their accomplishments. It’s the handshake between Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers in “Predator”, except for several minutes on end. In one scene, one of them rides the other, and it’s totally cool because they are two hetero dudes who want to boost each other and their accomplishments. There’s such a “crisis of masculinity” in modern America, and it’s because dudes are afraid to show this sort of sincere appreciation of each other.

Raju even presses the less-confident Bheem to flirt with an English lady. I don’t approve of his methods – they toss some spikes onto the road to deflate her tires, just so they can have an excuse to fix her car and Bheem can court her. Pretty sure that’s how that FOX News pinhead Jesse Watters boasted of conning his current wife into dating him, on his show on live TV. You don’t want to follow in Jesse Watters’ footsteps, Bheem, he was cheating on his first wife when he did that. This scheme gets the two of them invited to the British inner circle, where they meet the Governor, who is played by the late great all-time villain Ray Stevenson. It’s always funny to see English-language actors in foreign films because it feels like they’re directed to put the wrong emphasis on certain syllables, but the best Punisher acquits himself well to this sort of aristocratic villainy.

It also gets them to a wedding, where the two perform “Naatu Naatu”. It is a rousing moment, and I only wish I saw it in theaters, because I would have danced my full ass off. It’s a classic “look what I can do” sequence, aggressive and exhausting and a worthy entry into the annals of musical history. They won Best Original Song at the Oscars for this tune, but it’s mostly for the scene itself, the performance and the energy. Not only are these two guys showing off, not only are they perfectly hyping each other up as they both show off, but they also have moments where they taunt the racist jerk who just blasted them for being dirty and lacking culture – there’s one moment where they make mocking faces at him while continuing to dance, which is pretty much the single most awesome way to bother a bully.

It’s not a detriment to the story to know where this all goes. Of course the friendship will be ruptured when they find out they’re on different sides. In fact, the news will be followed with more fire, and more tigers, and some of the most implausible and awesome stunts you’ve ever seen. What will follow is a revolution, one filled with violence and gravity-defying punch-outs, sure – all dumb fantasy stuff – but also brimming with the love Bheem and Raju learn to see in each other, the love that was once seemingly extinguished. I saw that recent garbage buddy movie “Heads Of State” with Idris Elba and John Cena, and I BEGGED for just five seconds of the awesome brotherhood found in “RRR”, and not the sour sarcasm and thinly-veiled homophobia these two grumpy men show towards each other. A couple of years after “RRR”, where two heroes comfortably ride each other, the billion-dollar “A Minecraft Movie” made a homophobic joke about a similar scenario. We have to be better, guys.

I can celebrate this stuff, but I probably can’t participate. Male skin, in all its forms, is gross to me. I can’t do it anymore. In prison, you’re surrounded by bare chests, bare feet, bare legs, all belonging to men, many of whom have lost any need to properly groom themselves. It’s bad enough that you’re so close with everyone, that there are beds in such close proximity to each other, that no one gets personal space.

I almost feel bad that the feeling of male skin touching mine makes me quiver. It makes me remember all the times we were in line for god knows what essential item we had to request. All the times we stood shirtless against each other, being tested for COVID, among people who surely already had it. All the times dudes would lie down, cross their legs, and thrust their disgusting feet in the air, unwashed feet from men who weren’t planning on spending any time with a woman any time soon. And then you’d have to hear the opposite. You’d have to hear dudes repeatedly say, “No homo” or “No freaky” to each other every time someone said anything that was even remotely homoerotic, from “Can you put this in there,” to “I’ve got to sneak some beef from the kitchen”. Every moment of this was a “Methinks the lady doth protest too much” moment, and it only reminded me how I lived with all these men, and there wasn’t a woman who cared about me for hundreds of miles.