24 frames per second

A while ago, Indian-American comedian Hassan Minhaj put out a standup special called Homecoming King. It was a fairly well put together act that was framed as a series of “autobiographical” stories about finding oneself as an immigrant in America.

I put in the quotes not because I didn’t think it was autobiographical but because I didn’t think it mattered. I don’t watch standup with the expectation that the stories told are real. Not that this stopped an intrepid journalist from fact checking a comedy special. Minhaj’s response, when questioned, was that he was seeking to present an emotional truth, not what actually happened in it’s most precise form. There are facts in there but they’re meant to hold up whatever he’s building, not reality per se. The article came out, he put out a rebuttal… It became a whole thing.

Like I said, I don’t look for facts in standup. Storytelling is a tool of the trade, as is making the story autobiographical. Plus, practitioners of the genre often evolve from telling jokes to constructing arguments where the humor is not in the argument but in the telling.

[Now, to be fair, this allows comedians to have it both ways. If you agree with the point of view and find it insightful and funny, great. If you think it’s not a well-constructed argument, hey, it’s just meant to be funny. But that’s a whole other topic, meant for another day.]

Now, why was I thinking about Homecoming King? The answer is a recent Bollywood release.

In case you haven’t been living under a rock these past months, you might have noticed that there’s a whole cottage industry of people responding to the Dhurandhar duology and talking about how it lays out the terror-enabling infrastructure in Pakistan in great detail. And another cottage industry discussing how it’s all propaganda. They’re either assuming that the director intended to put out a factual truth, or alleging that he didn’t.

Is there an ecosystem in Pakistan that enables terrorism in India? There seems to be enough evidence to support this. Does it look like the film described? We don’t know. Did governments before the current dispensation actively undercut our own intelligence apparatus? There’s been some evidence of this happening in specific cases but my guess is that it’s a broad generalisation that would not stand up to scrutiny. So which cottage industry got it right?

My guess is, both are actually responding to the emotional truth of the film.

Now, does a film based on (some) history owe it to us to be faithful to the facts? I guess it depends on how invested you are in the reality being portrayed/distorted. When Airlift came out, I quite liked many parts of that film, but I had a colleague who was in Kuwait at the time of the events depicted and she wasn’t so thrilled. It was, after all, her story being told up there, and in her view, the film owed her its fidelity to the truth. She was quite persuasive actually – I’ve never heard lemmas and theorems in a film review but she made it work!

That being said, there are some problems with that view. Firstly, Airlift didn’t have to work as more than a story for me or a lot of others. Secondly, Any cinematic depiction is going to take some creative liberties with the source material, so where do you draw the line? Geeta Phogat’s win in the Commonwealth games wasn’t the close run thing that Dangal had us believe. But does that matter? What about when Akshay Kumar is cast in the role inspired by a real person from South India?

At the end of the day, a filmmaker is engaged in a commercial enterprise, and will pick what sells. We might want Arunachalam Muruganantham to be depicted as a South Indian and played by one in Pad Man, but for all we know, that movie might never get greenlighted. So we are left with Akshay Kumar and what eventually made it to screen, and it falls to each of us to figure out if the emotional truth the film presents works well enough for us to ignore the deviations from history. If enough of us feel it’s okay, there’s a positive return on investment for the producer.

Cinema is, as Vetrimaran once said, first commerce, then science, then art. Did you find any mention of facts in that list? There you go.