Kabir Singh Part- I: How Much Do Movies Really Influence Us?

Source: IMDb, Wikipedia

Kabir Singh is a hugely divisive movie. If you’ve been following the conflict over it, it basically boils down to this conversation — One side says it will be a bad influence on the society as it makes a hero out of a person who ill-treats women in a number of ways, including threatening to rape at knife-point. The other side counters it usually by saying Gangs Of Wasseypur was a hit, but people aren’t murdering each other after watching it, are they? In this article, we’ll explore if movies do really influence people and if something could even be done about it.

Let’s first tackle the Gangs of Wasseypur argument, which is interesting because the movie itself portrays the influence of movies. Let’s keep that aside and go for what was originally meant — With so many gangster movies around, have all of us started murdering each other? The answer is — Of course, we haven’t done that. Wait a second, go back and reread that answer. You’ll notice, you can read that answer in at least two ways:

1. We haven’t done that as in we haven’t but some other people might have. We may not have committed suicide after watching a movie, but there’s a fairly well-established effect called ‘Suicide Contagion’, there’s a spike in the number of suicides when it is portrayed in a certain manner in the entertainment media. An example of a movie in India that triggered the suicide contagion was ‘Ek Duje Ke Liye’. Interestingly, for the gangster movies which are often given as an example for lack of movies influence, even the Godfather had an impact in a number of ways — it became a manual for new gangsters, so did The Town.
2. We haven’t done that as in we may not have shot at people after watching the movie but we might have picked on some other aspect of it. Every other Yash Chopra movie had Switzerland in it. So, while most of us weren’t having an extra-marital affair or carving our crush’s name on our chests, we did develop an idea of where to go when we had enough money to travel to foreign countries for pleasure — Switzerland. That was an Indian example, for international examples the year Jurassic Park released it saw a spike in the registrations for Paleontology courses. IMDb’s trivia page says, ‘Finding Nemo’ led to enough number of children putting their fishes into toilets that made officials put up a statement. There’s something called ‘Jaws’ effect which credits the movie Jaws with initiating prize hunting competitions of Sharks significantly hurting their populations.

I guess the reason we make so many movies and pay to watch so many movies is they do certainly have an impact on us. That impact is sometimes predictable, sometimes not. Where do we go from here depends on what we want to do?

Some may want to look on where to pin the blame and explore the question — How responsible is a filmmaker if his work plays a role in some undesirable act?

Some may want to skip the whole morality argument and check on the practical measures — How do we minimize the negative consequences of a film?

These are touchy questions, especially for artists. There’s a tremendous conflict in it for them. Artists often try to nudge societies into newer thoughts and ideas while avoiding the implication that their content might have a role in what other people did. They know how much of an FIR magnet that is. In fact, some wouldn’t even acknowledge the second question above because that might be used to pin the blame on them.

Any attempt to talk about this topic is going to be as divisive as Kabir Singh. So, let’s dive right into it…

(To be continued)