The Bechdel Cast - RRR with Ritesh Babu

Episode Date: May 11, 2023

This week we're celebrrrating Caitlin's birrrthday with an episode on RRR with special guest Ritesh Babu! Check out Ritesh's piece "RRR is an incredible action movie with seriously troubling politics" -- https://www.vox.com/23220275/rrr-netflix-tollywood-hindutva-caste-system-oscars-2023 (This episode contains spoilers) For Bechdel bonuses, sign up for our Patreon at patreon.com/bechdelcast Follow @riteshwriter on Twitter. While you're there, you should also follow @BechdelCast, @caitlindurante, and @jamieloftusHELPSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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It's the big day, Caitlin. It's the big day. It's the big show. And it's Caitlin's birthday episode. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Woo! We come to this place. We come to this podcast to celebrate. And it's Caitlin's birthday episode. We come to this place. We come to this podcast to celebrate Caitlin Durante's birthday. And on their birthday, we of course cover one of their favorite movies. But first, this is the Bechtel cast.

It is. Which means that... Yeah, what does it mean? I'm Jamie Loftus. It does mean that you're Jamie Loftus. It means that I'm Caitlin Durante. And it means that we talk about movies through an intersectional feminist lens, using the Bechdel test simply as a jumping off point. Jamie, what is that?

Sorry, my mouth's full of biscuit. Well, you are the biscuit gobbler as we've established five minutes ago. Yeah, I proudly self-identify. There's a biscuit. It's complicated. Listeners, there's a really gentrified biscuit place that opened down the street and I've been gobbling it up. I don't feel good about it.

Gobble those biscuits, Jamie. But I do get so hungry. Here's what the Bechdel test is. And that passed. The Bechdel test. Us talking about gobbling biscuits that passes it's true because biscuits are famously genderless um so the Bechdel test is a media metric created by queer cartoonist Alison Bechdel sometimes called the Bechdel

Wallace test uh lots of versions of this test was originally made as a bit as a joke for alice and bechdel's amazing comic collection dykes to watch out for a lot of versions of the test here's the one we use we require that there be two characters of a marginalized gender with names speaking to each other about something other than a man for more than two lines of dialogue. And sometimes, and I'm just like spitballing here, there's movies that could be three hours long and not pass this test. It's true. But yeah, that's the one we use.

And then we also use a more important metric, which is the one that we made up called the nipple scale. Perfect. Flawless. I don't know what I would want the nipple scale to be called if we started the podcast today I feel like we could have punched it off disagree I if we had to do it all over again that's the one thing no regrets no regrets that I keep well happy birthday Caitlin it's your birthday it is my birthday and as such I have selected one of my a recent favorite but one of my favorite movies RRR which is a Telugu language language movie from India. So it's Tollywood, not a Bollywood film that I saw last year. So it was released in March 2022. It had a release in the US and kind of by word of mouth, it grew in

popularity. I saw it in July, or maybe June or July of 2022 a friend of mine was like what you haven't seen RRR you'd love it so I went to the theater I mean it is a romp it is it is a a RRR romp yeah a RRR romp it's a romp romp romp and I was in not a super full theater because it was just sort of like a regular screening, but it was a rowdy crowd. The best way to experience this movie is in a theater with a crowd who is cheering and clapping. And that's how I saw it the first time. And then I've since seen it six times in theaters total. Often in Q&A settings, right? six times in theaters total often in q a settings right yes the director with the director in like

huge theaters you know i think the biggest one was a like a 1500 seat theater in downtown los angeles i saw it at the chinese theater a few months before that we saw it on the west side at some point yeah we saw it in santa monica because caitlin did and i i enjoy the movie but you dragged every single person in your expanded universe to this movie to a screening at one point or another it's true and if not to a screening then to your personal home yes it is true and sammy would show it to me you were you were working full-time unpaid. You were a full-time unpaid intern for the movie RRR. This movie really spoke to me because, and we'll talk about its many issues later on, but there's also, I think, a lot to love about this movie. I think probably most people are

at least familiar with it if they haven't yet seen it it is on netflix uh the version on netflix is the hindi dub um so it's not in its original language and then it won a golden globe and an oscar for best original song yeah i think it's like on people's radars um for the most part if you're if i think even if you're like a casual movie fan this has probably come across your desk at some point right but yeah it did feel like kind of a rare. And we talk about this with our guest in a bit. And I guess we're formatting our episode a little bit different today where most of the discussion will be with Caitlin and myself. And we have an amazing guest coming in later to give us more historical context and the reason i say that is because there are very few indian

movies that cross over into the west in the way rrr has right and i think honestly like in preparing for this episode and watching this movie through the bechdel test lens and or bechdel cast lens rather um it's just recurrent i mean mean, I know so little about Indian film. And yeah, I mean, I don't know. It made me think. It made me think. And also RRR is such a fun movie. And if you don't know any historical context for it,

maybe watch it once without knowing and then listen to the second half of the episode and then go back and watch it again and watch responsibly but it was really like because you insisted making it sound like I was under duress but I did it was a it was a carload of Bechdel cast luminaries because it was you and me went and we're the hosts of this show it's true there's no doubt about it there's never been any others and then also guest sammy junio and katherine leon were also with us katherine and i had not seen it before you and sammy had seen it maybe 50 billion times at that point yeah that

sounds right and so um it was exciting i mean like watching people react to the movie in real time. And like, I mean, it was a bit scary at times. Sure. But you know, it was very we come to this place vibes. I really liked it. It's a movie that feels like a movie. Yes, I truly I'd never seen. And I mean, I'd seen Indian movies before, but never like a big epic the way that this is. And it's I think it's kind of interesting for western audiences because we're just like not used to it to have a movie that changes genres several times right when like it's almost it's like a really pleasant creative jump scare where you're like oh I guess you could just start singing too like and I know that that is like pretty commonplace

in a lot of Indian movies and also there's such a huge diverse film community because there's so many languages. There's all of these different industries. But I know in the East that that is a more common sort of film, filmic language. Right. But for a crowd full of people in Santa Monica, they're like, oh, my God, it's a rom-com. Oh, my God, it's an action movie. Oh, my God. It's like a-com. Oh my God, it's an action movie. Oh my God, it's like-

A buddy comedy. Yeah. It's like there's so much happening. Yeah. I looked up the budget for this movie. What would you guess the budget for this movie was? I don't have to guess. I already know.

Oh shit. Well, it's the highest budget movie I believe ever made in India. I think that's true. Yes. But it made me laugh at hollywood movies because they're they can be such flops where it's like the last star wars movie cost like 275 million dollars is like running on absolute fumes babu fric truly the only shock of life that exists in that movie meanwhile this movie is on all cylinders the whole fucking time

and it was 72 million dollars usd it really makes you wonder what hollywood is spending money on with these wildly inflated budgets i hope they paid babu freak 100 million dollars the puppet yeah and it's the third highest grossing indian film worldwide and the second highest grossing telegu film worldwide the highest grossing one being another of this director's movies bahubali oh shoot i don't know if it's part one or two because there's like the beginning and then the conclusion all this to say that um this is a huge movie globally like you said jamie one of the few movies from india that crossed over and had and has like a huge following in audience in the u.s it also has a huge following in Japan. And I'm kind of speculating here. But I think something that might account for that is that, and I'm not super familiar with

a lot of anime, but everyone I know who does know a lot about anime and who has also seen RRR, they're like, yeah, RRR is just an anime film, like a live action anime. Oh, interesting. So I think that might account for at least partly why it was so successful in Japan. And yeah, so it's like this global phenomenon. I mean, this is the kind of movie where it's like there's fucking something for truly everyone. It's like if you're not loving this movie, just like wait 20 minutes. Like, yeah yeah probably something totally different that you might like a lot better will probably be happening at that point it's

pretty like it's pretty amazing I really hope that um I mean I know that there are there are well actually I don't I don't know I don't know what I don't know but I am very pro and now we're doing this but it still feels like it's all cohesive enough. There are some times where you're like, hmm, that guy just changed rather quickly. Right. I do think that there is a moment in the, and this isn't even a criticism, but there's a moment in the movie where Beam goes from being such a doofus to like the most blood thirsty man in the world. He has a good half hour of just full on doofus to like the most bloodthirsty man in the world he has a good half hour of just full-on

doofus and then he's like actually now i'm hard as fuck for the rest of the movie and you're like yeah all right his love for jenny made him doofy he's kind of like hillary duffing a little bit i'm not he's kind of just like oh like you know yeah that's my and then he's like wait a minute i remembered the mission that i'm on i have to save a little girl and then yeah he does that i mean i would love to see hillary duff on a rescue mission movie it's just not what it's just not yet at the time of this recording hillary duff has not headlined a uh blockbuster action franchise but but never say never well that's because we have yet to write it she oh i i mean my unproblematic queen i think hard to say i think as far as we know haven't heard a bad word about her i just know she's like

married a lot of hockey players oh which i think is just like a fun habit good for her. Just not the sort of thing you would think would happen more than once. Anyways. Okay. So let's take a quick break and then come back and do the recap.

Yeah, let's do it. Okay. We'll be right back. Hey everybody, this is Matt Rogers. And Bowen Yang. We've got some exciting news for you. We'll be right back. of comedy herself. Get ready for a conversation that's as hilarious as it is insightful. Tune in for all the laughs, the stories, and of course, the culture.

I feel some Sandra Bernhardt in you. Oh, my God. I would love it. I have to watch Lost. Oh, you have to. No, I know. I'm so behind. Katherine Hahn can sing.

Oh, I'm really good at karaoke. What's your song? Yeah karaoke What's your song? Oh I love a ballad I felt Bjork's music I just was like who is this person I gotta hawk this slalom I'm not hawk the slalom I absolutely love it

It was somehow Shakespearean when you said it It was somehow gorgeous Listen when you said it. It was somehow gorgeous. Yee, my slok, you hollum. Listen to Las Culturistas on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Pradente. And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline,

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th 2017 was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now the situation is desperate My name is Manuel Delia I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere a podcast that unhurts the plot to murder a one-woman WikiLeaks. Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price.

Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. To listen to new episodes one week early and 100% ad-free, subscribe to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. And we are back. A little context before I even begin the recap so this movie is loosely based on two indian freedom fighters who i don't think ever collaborated in real life but basically this movie like re-envisions history and is like what if they did collaborate and what if they were best friends and also is a very it's funny I don't again I I don't think I've ever seen a movie framed this way precisely where there is a lot of and we talk about this a little bit with our

guest as well but um there's a lot at the beginning of like hey this is these are real people but the story is not real so like you cannot get upset and you can't be mad and you can't see me and you can't yell at me because it's not it's not real it's me I made it up it's real people but I made it up right okay and you're like it almost like I don't know not to keep I just love to compare things because I'm judgmental um but it almost reminded me but this like doesn't happen in Inglourious Bastards but it almost feels like an Inglourious Bastards level of like for sure none of this shit happened yeah I didn't I honestly didn't look in to see if these two people had ever collaborated beam and Raju but I also know that it's like a very

like overly simplistic almost like a mythic view of these figures versus being super based in their actual politics or critical of any of their political legacies which we'll talk about later in the episode but yeah it's like i was honestly surprised to see that they were using actual historical figures for this because it feels so like mythic i don't know right yeah because it takes again these two real life indian revolutionaries aluri sita rama raju and komaram beam and envisions them as superheroes basically right so and especially after doing some research and speaking with our guest this movie is also very centered on hindu figures and is pretty exclusionary of muslim figures which is something that we talk about in our interview because i think that a lot of westerners who just like who went to this movie and got fucking pumped

like we don't all have that context so if you don't have that context don't feel bad but you know i certainly didn't the first time i watched it and had to do a lot of my own just sort of research and digging yeah to learn about um just a lot of things regarding indian history the current political climate of india and how this movie fits into all of that and that's something yeah we'll get into later yeah yet another way that the american schooling system failed us i don don't think I learned anything about India in school for the most part, outside of British colonization. That's all I knew about. I mean, when I was a kid, my major frame of reference for India and Indian culture came from watching movies. And many of those movies were horribly racist, such as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Or they were told from a colonizer's perspective. Like I watched The Little Princess a lot. Oh, right. Yeah. I mean, we're exposed to so much colonizer perspective in media. And then also even with, I feel like I keep foreshadowing this interview because this isn't our normal format. But also with RRR, it's like RRR is very anti-colonial and anti-imperial on its face, but also excludes a lot of context that it's like not quite as radical as it appears. And so it's so, I don't know, I think we've been, we also, listeners,

you'll know that we recently covered The Woman King. And so we've just been like covering a lot of like loosely historical epics recently that are obviously going to influence people's views of the time and the people that are being discussed in the movie. I mean, and even for us watching RRR for the first time last year, it gave us kind of a skewed view of, I mean, a lot of different issues. And so I just, I don't know. I don't know what to say.

It's a very tricky problem because it's like, it shouldn't be the job of movies to educate you, but it's also like willfully kind of ignorant to say like well i don't know i don't i'm i'm just i'm just a creative goofy goof messing around and you're like well but but you also kind of have a responsibility to represent things responsibly right and it doesn't mean that every movie has to be a documentary. But I don't know. Complicated, ongoing discussion. I'm sure we'll get to the bottom of it and the changes will be permanent. Yeah. And we will fix society because of it. Surely this isn't an unknowable question.

Anyways, let's talk. Okay. So for this first chunk, we are going to be talking about the movie and the story, and then we will return to the historical context because otherwise my brain will explode. Yes. So here's the recap. The movie is very long. It's not as long as Titanic. No. It's 10 minutes shorter.

And at the theater, they give you an intermission, which I think is so fun. I love that. Yes. Oh, felt good um so the movie is very long and i'm going to leave out some details and characters uh but this is the gist of it we open on a village in the adilabad forest in india it's the 1920s. The Gond people who live in the village are playing reluctant host to Governor Scott and his wife, Lady Buxton. Whose name is Kathy too?

Yeah. I was like, wow, I'm sensitive to Kathy Slander. But this Kathy is the worst Kathy in the world. She's really bad. Also, Governor Scott makes it seem like his last name is Scott, but it's Scott Buxton. So Scott is his first name. So that would be if people were like, oh, Governor Jamie. That's so President Joe. Yeah. What?

But everyone calls him Governor Scott. So that's his name. So they are British imperialist colonizers. A young girl malay is painting skin art on lady buxton she's singing a song and lady buxton decides that she wants to keep malay so they abduct her from the village her mother is obviously crying and devastated that first i mean yeah it's absolutely brutal

she's kidnapped she's kidnapped right in front of and then her her mom i i thought the first time i saw the movie that her mother was was killed but fortunately she's not killed but she was her i mean yeah in the opening sequence there is a young girl who is abducted and another woman who is beat brutally. Yes. So right out the gate. It's very intense. Also, I just wanted to shout out the young actor who plays Molly's name is Twinkle Sharma, which is my favorite name I've ever heard. I love that.

Like Twinkle. I love it. I love it. I love her. We'll continue to follow this young star's career. We sure will. So we see this devastating opening sequence. Then we cut to the outskirts of Delhi,

where we meet Rama Raju, played by Ram Charan, a police officer working for the British government who is tasked with arresting a protester. We then see a long sequence of him beating his way through a crowd of hundreds of protesters and eventually reaching and arresting the guy and it's like it is it is why it's it's wild it is really you it's hard to describe how many things happen because so many things happen yeah if this if we didn't make this clear yet this movie is like everything is dialed up to an 11 yes the action sequences the there's also almost constant music happening and like and it's big music. Yeah, big epic music. As musicians, the music big.

The music is big. We are scholars. It's one of my favorite scores of all time. It's such a beautiful arrangement of music. But yeah, everything is just like cranked all the way up in this movie. There's no subtlety whatsoever. Everything is just like boom, boom boom boom boom there's no rest so if something sounds really intense it is that's what it's like but yeah huge huge fight scene to establish the strength and will of rom right and also that he is working for the british

at the beginning of the movie yes and we will come to understand rom's particular motivation for being an officer later on and even though he like accomplishes this like bananas feat of like beating his way through this crowd and arresting this person he is still not promoted to special officer which uh upsets him so much that he punches a hole in a punching bag because he really wants to be special officer for again reasons we will understand later then we see a meeting where this guy edward who is governor scott's right-hand man. He is being advised to return Malé, the girl who was taken from the village, because there is a man from her tribe

who will stop at nothing to hunt down her captors and find her. And then there's a really thrilling intro shot, unlike anything you've ever seen. Oh, just, oh. Oh, Beam's intro shot, it's really good. Yes, we meet Komoron Beam, played by N.T. Romero Jr., aka N.T.R. Jr., while he's chasing wolves and tigers in the jungle to capture them for reasons that will also become clear later. And then Beam heads to Delhi, where he and his brother Lachu and a couple of their friends are trying to figure out how to get into the palace to rescue Malay. They notice this woman, Jenny,

who lives in the palace, and she seems nice.enny's whole thing is every i mean and again it's like part of this really broad storytelling of of like she is the one british nice she's the nice colonizer yeah you like her right okay you're like um i guess no we like her she's governor scott's niece but sometimes she's like hey stop that yeah that's literally the extent of her allyship is hey cut that out don't don't do it yeah that's how we meet her she's saying hey cut that out yeah when um an officer is beating a man for no reason she says hey hey cut that out yes Yes. And then so Beam is like, awooga, who's that? She's pretty and she's nice. And they figured that if they can befriend her, she could be their ticket into the palace. Meanwhile, Edward and Lady Buxton are like,

hmm, I guess we should be worried about this guy who is going to come for the girl. But we also know nothing about him, his name, what he looks like, anything like that. But whoever is able to capture this man will be promoted to special officer. So Rom is like, I'll do it. I want to be special officer. So he and his uncle figure that this guy will probably be going to revolutionary meetings so they go to one such meeting and sure enough they meet beam's brother lachu and so rom and his uncle pretend to be Lachu's ally. But Lachu figures out that Ram is an undercover police officer. So he runs. There's a chase.

He books it, yeah. And Lachu escapes into a huge crowd. Nearby, a train is like leaking oil everywhere. It explodes and derails. There's a little boy in the middle of the water he's fishing it's like the stakes are always like a million sky high this little kid is gonna explode if yeah rom and beam don't become friends right now right so what happens is there's this little boy who's about to die no one seems to want to like risk their life to save

him except for beam and rom so they team up not realizing that the other one is their enemy they save the boy and this is the beginning of them becoming best friends because we get this montage of something that's usually reserved for like falling in love. Like falling in love. Uh-huh. You know? But it's just like them having a fun time together. They're eating.

They're going on little day trips. Oh, they're riding horses and motorcycles. Oh, they're frolicking through fields. Oh, they're playing tug of war. It's pretty nice. Oh, Beam is doing squats with Rom on his shoulders. Also, while this is happening, there's a song playing called Dosti. And the lyrics are like, wow, it's pretty wild that these two guys have become friends and that they don't know that they're actually enemies.

This is probably going to end in bloodshed and betrayal huh and then we're like hold on what um i'm kidding i do i do love and i know that this isn't this habit but it's just like the exposition montage was really delivering for me i loved it yeah it's like a greek chorus kind of thing because also this movie is like a greek tragedy it's just it's everything so one day rom helps beam meet jenny we will talk about this meet cute later there's no time it's egregious yeah this movie is a lot of things particularly interested in women nope it is not but basically the movie becomes a rom-com for a while like a half hour or so yeah beam meets jenny and spends the afternoon with her and even though they don't speak the same language they hit it off and she invites him to an upcoming party so beam and rom get all dressed up and go

to this big fancy party in a scene that was giving me because there are some titanic parallels but there's a scene where like rom is giving beam a little makeover and like putting him in a suit because he's like what are you gonna wear to the party and beam is like this and he's like no you have to wear a suit and it's very much like molly brown being like jack what are you gonna wear to the party and beam is like this and he's like no you have to wear a suit and it's very much like molly brown being like jack what are you gonna wear to dinner and he's like shine up like a new penny yes oh yeah that was that was very sweet and then they go to the party and they look great oh they look so great and now they're at the big colonizer party and yes we're about to have a dance-off this is the iconic oscar-winning song yes um because there's this british guy at the party who's super racist and he's like you don't know anything about art or

finesse or dance and they're like um have you ever heard of natu and then they do the natu natu song and dance and they win an oscar about it or rather mm kiravani does because he's the one who composed the music for the flim that scene is so um just exciting it's so good and also especially like i don't know seeing it for the first time you don't see it coming like you're like oh this is going to be like a rom-com comedy of manners more stuff with like beam and jenny but then it's like no it's a huge dance number it's it's gigantic it's just like so it's my favorite scene no contest it rocks it's the best jenny also loves it and she's like wow beam it was so cool when you danced do you want to come to the palace with me

so he goes to the palace where he finds molly and she's locked up behind bars she's treated as a prisoner and beam is like i can't rescue you now but don't worry i'll come back for you So he and his friends plan their siege of the palace. But oh no, Ram has captured Lachu and he's like, where's your brother? Still not realizing that the man who Ram is looking for is his own best friend, Beam. Then we cut to Ram's home village where we meet his lady love, Sita. And all of the people are like, when is Ram coming back? He's been gone for years. And she's like, he's a flop and he doesn't even remember you.

And she's like, I don't know. But Sita is like, she's like Christ-like in her faith and patience in her fiance. Like, and I mean, I know like everyone in this movie is a huge star, but I think she in particular, I want to make sure that I'm saying her name right, Alia Bhatt. She's like a huge, huge star. And I feel like she gets like the star reveal shot when she's because you turn around and then there's like a pause for applause um and she's great I just I just wish that we had more I mean I don't know I don't I I just I was like wow she's so virtuous awesome yeah she's really just sort of passively waiting around for her fiance yeah i

was like wow if i was sita i would be getting a nosebleed fucking daily being like probably like walking around being like he's probably dead like i i'm gonna move on and kiss someone else oh god that's what that would be me. That's see, we're different. I would feel walk around having a panic attack. Um, but she's like, Oh,

you've been gone for three days. Well, it's time to move on. Find another lover. I feel like, but she's doing neither of those things. She's just like, no,

I believe everything is great. Cause he's the greatest. And, and blah, blah, blah. And I would be like, he's probably cheating on me.

Wow. Meanwhile, I'm stuck back here in flop town there um so back in the city uh lachu throws a poisonous snake onto rom and he gets bitten and so rom is like stumbling around and dying beam finds him and saves his life and then reveals his true identity to rom and rom is still like actively dying so he can't do anything about it but he's like oh my god my best friend is the guy who i've been hunting down this whole time what do i do and then he recovers because beam has saved him and he's punching his punching bag some more and he's upset um then it's the night of this big celebration to honor governor scott which is when beam and his friends unleash an attack so they can rescue male they crash into the party and let a bunch of animals loose including that tiger from the beginning there's just like utter chaos as all these animals are

running around it is oh and another i was like because we like hollywood movies have so many badly cgi'd animals these are well cgi'd animals they look good they look pretty good i would say it's not the best i've seen i mean no cgi animal looks amazing but like it's certainly except for paddington it's i don't know we can't get into this today i think paddington looks a little scary sometimes um but um but i mean it's certainly doing donuts around like the lion king reboot and shit like that where you're like oh like you can't look at it horrifying looking yeah so all this chaos is happening but before beam can reach male rom shows up to arrest him and beam is like what the fuck you're a cop you're my enemy and then they fight each other for a long time they're beating each other up and then it culminates in beam

being captured which is where we get the intermission or the interval yes then rom gets promoted to special officer because he captured beam just like he always wanted and then we see a flashback with rom's backstory so when rom was a child his father was training their whole village to fight back against the british but they don't have real weapons so the reason that rom wanted to be special officer so badly is that it would give him access to a lot of guns which he would basically like steal and distribute among his village and he had made this promise to his father that he would supply everyone in the village with a gun because one day while ram is still a child the british army raids their village and kills ram's whole

family so he sees like his mother and his little brother and his father killed in front of him it's horrible and it's also very um mythic in the way it's presented as well for sure yeah back to the present ram is feeling very conflicted because he wants to help his people in his village but he realizes he's hurting people along the way, including his new best friend. Then there's a scene where Rom has to flog Beam publicly, and Governor Scott makes everyone come to watch because he wants to make an example of Beam. And during this beating beam sings a song that empowers the crowd to riot and revolt against all the british soldiers yes after which rom realizes he needs to help beam escape especially after beam is sentenced to death by hanging so rom orchestrates this rescue mission for beam and male and they successfully get away

though beam doesn't know that rom helped him he still thinks that rom is his enemy so then beam and male go into hiding because the entire british military is out looking for them and they happen to cross paths with sita rom's love, who tells Beam about Rom's grand plan to become a special officer so that he can supply his village with weapons so they can revolt against British colonialism, but that he kind of lost his way and betrayed his best friend. But then he got caught and now he's going to be executed and beam is like damn okay he was helping me i have to go save him so beam goes to the barracks where rom is being held prisoner breaks him out there's another like extended fight sequence where they're fighting

their way through the british soldiers with Rom on Beam's shoulders because his legs were badly beaten. They escape the barracks and go into the woods. More British soldiers come. There's another long fight sequence where Rom and Beam kill all of them. Beam is throwing a motorcycle around. Rom is firing arrows with grenades attached to them. Yeah. And at this point, as we'll talk about in a bit, Rom looks like the mythic way that Rom is presented. And like, they're sort of, or no, this is a little bit before that happens, right? So after they escape the barracks, Beam, because he knows medicine, he treats ram's wounds and then there's like these like orange flags nearby this place of worship uh so he like takes the flags and the bow and arrow from

this like rama god statue and then basically styles ram to look like this Hindu god and then they fight the people in the woods and then they are like all right bitch it's time to kill Scott so they head to Governor Scott's palace they steal a bunch of guns for Ram's village they destroy the palace and kill Lady Buxton and Governor Scott and they kill and it's a great plant and payoff moment when they kill governor scott because there was this whole long evil speech that he seems to make all the time all the time about the value of a bullet yes um which you can imagine i thought that that was kind of a fun touch of like most fucking evil colonial blowhards like that have like one speech they know how to give but then they're always like hot like god but so anyways they give the speech to him and then

they fucking yeah kill him boing boing it's very cathartic it is very very exciting um and if you have no context for the rest of the movie you're like wow this is a radical movie right and then you read a book and then you're like oh wait no it's not but it's still a good moment it's a good moment yes indeed so then having defeated the villain beam and rom return home rom is reunited with sita jenny is there for some reason male is returned her mother. And the movie ends with a big song and dance number that pays tribute to a bunch of Indian revolutionaries. Although, as we will talk about. There's a lot of omissions. Yes.

And the director, Azaz Rajmouli, is in the conclusion. Like he is in the conclusion like he's in the final scene and so it's like this fourth wall break that is sort of like stating what the thesis of the movie was which is I guess when you think about it a little bit pretty nationalistic um and then it's like not only is that there's like the big thesis song but also the director of the movie like joins in um which again i wouldn't like i wouldn't hate that if martin scorsese started doing that at the end he comes out he's like what'd you think yeah awesome and then we'd be like yes clap clap like cheer cheer i love it it's like those awkward um i feel like it's only happened since movie theaters have been

open but every once in a while you'll go see a movie and then it's just like Margot Robbie being like hi thanks for coming to Babylon at the movie theater uh enjoy the movie and you're like what the fuck was that yeah why did you do that just yeah so it's like we i mean in the same way that why is nicole kidman doing an advertisement for the theater that you're already in and about to see the culture it's for the culture and we come to this place for that culture but those little blips that are like barely produced and clearly in the middle of a press junket day and they look like they want to die i'm like this is not getting me excited for the movie i forget there was like a director too that was like welcome back to them and you're like oh my god just start the movie enough yes um so let's take well that's rrr yes and let's take another break and we'll come back to discuss.

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And we are about to include our segment that we did with our special guest, who we'll introduce in a moment. But we just wanted to kind of give a little bit more context for the production of the movie so it was written and directed by ss rajamouli aka ssr um so screenplay by ssr story by vj andra prasad who is ssr's dad dad who they collaborate a lot with. Okay, fathers and sons. Yeah, and so SSR, look, hot topic these days. He's a nepo baby, folks. His dad is a very well-regarded screenwriter in India who has been working since the 80s, I believe.

And now they very often will collaborate together including on this so sometimes movies are about fathers and sons including this one other times movies are made by fathers and sons and often they are made for fathers and sons those are kind of those tend to be who movies are made for so uh you know good for you guys you fuckos uh but no very very famous um not just director but from a famous movie family yes similarly um the two main stars ram charanan and NTR Jr., are also from acting dynasties. Yes. So. Well, as is the actor who plays Sita.

Right. Like, there's so much. I mean, this is just entertainment in general, but, and how power works. But yeah, we just, because we talk about it in the guest segment as if you already know who uh made the movie um what you need to know is that ss rajamouli is a very successful film director who collaborates frequently with his father his politics uh he doesn't like to talk about politics which usually means something and um he makes these, I mean, especially in this phase of his career, it seems like he makes big, big blockbuster movies.

For sure. And with that, let's bring on our guest, who is a writer and critic. You've seen their bylines in Vox, Panel by Panel, Polygon, among others. And they were the author of a particular piece in Vox that we found and really loved entitled RRR is an incredible action movie with seriously troubling politics. It's Ritesh Babu. Hello. Hello. Thank you so much for being here. Happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

Oh, it's our pleasure. It's our pleasure. Oh, sorry. Okay. I feel like I'm contributing. Yes. Tell us your just kind of general thoughts on the film RRR. What's your relationship with it? The film is the latest entry by the South

Indian filmmaker from the Tollywood industry, which is the Telugu language speaking cinema industry of India. It's the latest film by the biggest filmmaker of that industry, who is now also India's biggest filmmaker. And I grew up with his films. I remember watching his first movie as a kid and I've kind of always known his films like I watched everyone as it came out because like my father would make me watch them and so they were like a thing that I always pretty much knew and so it's been a weird interesting experience to watch like the guy your dad talks about

at your home suddenly become like the guy everybody and their mom talks about. You know, globally, it's kind of a weird experience. But it's been interesting. So this is the latest film he's made, and it's kind of like the biggest explosive version of what he does. And my relationship to it is, it's complicated is definitely the word I would use. Because it's a film that is a great big spectacle

that works as a big action spectacle but is also reflective of all the flaws and like the limitations of the filmmaker and the kind of space it approaches from and like so there's a weird tension there that is kind of like yeah this is fun but like I remember walking out of the theater I had a walking out of the theater i had a great time at the theater i went to watch it with my dad and it was like it was a blast to watch but i i sat there with that knot in my chest throughout and like even as i walked out i was like there was that knot and you know until i actually sat down and wrote it wrote about it it was kind of like it was a weird experience where i just had to untangle that knot and kind

of like think about it so that's kind of where even writing about it came from right I think that that's so because this was very much my entry point to his catalog um reading your work and and others work on just their relationship with this director in addition to this movie and sort of all of the baggage that comes with it is so interesting because I think like as you have witnessed it's sort of like in western movie culture it's like oh you know it's like a secret like oh you've seen this movie that is one of the hugest movies in the world but here it's still sort of relegated to like really enthusiastic letterboxed users filling a movie theater on the West Side. And so honestly, when I first saw this movie, I did not know that the story was rooted in any sort of political ideology at all until I read your work. And just to speak to your kind of complicated relationship with the movie, that's also like so

many of the movies we cover on this podcast, especially ones that we grew up with or have some kind of nostalgic attachment to or love in any way, we sort of have to reconcile that like, oh, yeah, it was a really entertaining movie to watch but oh no there's all these things that you have to unravel art isn't always what you want and that's kind of eternal struggle for sure so we've been kind of hinting at this sort of political and cultural context that again if you're not pretty intimately familiar with already, which like Jamie, I was not either. I only, I mean, I of course know of the caste system in India, but I don't know, or I didn't know really any of the nuances of it. I didn't,

there's just a lot of things about it that i didn't fully comprehend and also it was only very recently that i learned about the far right uh like hindu centric uh government that exists in india right now and how that informs quite a bit of media and like there's a lot of like propaganda and a lot of people are calling rrr like hindu yeah casteist propaganda so yeah and this is what your piece the the writing that you've done about this movie is uh largely about that so we're just curious kind of your thoughts on all that so regarding the casting you know the guy in get out who's the white guy in get out who's like i would have have voted for Obama a third time or whatever?

Yeah, yeah. It's like that kind of vibes where people are like, Obama won, racism is defeated, it's over. And like, people act like that, but like, reality is, it's like absolutely not. Casteism is kind of right everywhere. And casteism is built into a little sect of like, the way things work.

So that's kind of how that works. But regarding the movie itself, its genesis is in the very specific Telugu-speaking region in South India where there was one state. It was called Andhra Pradesh. Andhra is the place. Pradesh essentially means place or state. Andhra Pradesh. And what happened was a few years back in the mid 2010s they divided the state into you know

a state called andhra and like you had another state formed called langana which was a long thought you know struggle like that state being formed was a long movement and one of the key figures of that sort of movement was kumarampim, who's, you know, one of the figures in the movie, right, and the other figure in the movie, Sita Ramaraju, is like the Andhra figure, so essentially the movie, as Rajamouli tells it, began with the idea of watching this one state become two states, both speaking essentially the same language, but like in different dialects for the most part, and trying to make a movie to kind of like showcase their unity essentially and so the langana symbol being peen and like andra symbol being ram and they're sort of like imagined constructed brotherhood

on screen as a way of like symbolizing that sort of imagined friendship and unity of the states and this is framed through sort of like you know roger's big sort of mythic influence where like he grew up reading you know some directors like if you're in america you grew up reading i don't know some spider-man comics or like batman comics or stuff like that right because those are american pop culture but like for someone like roger he grew up on amara comics which are like essentially Amar means immortal, Shetra means you know picture, kata means story, so immortal picture stories. He grew up on those comics which are largely about retellings of like Hindu mythology and like stories about gods and like demigods and

figures like that. So those kind of informed his work and so and he that's you see that evidently his prior film most evidently there in Bapu Bali, which is two parts and it was a huge thing a few years back. But you also see it here where like his mythic influences and like all of those filter into the film where Ram is framed at the end of the movie, like the mythic Ram, the god. And Pim is like almost framed in the context of like the film, like Pim from the Mahabharata. So there's a lot of stuff like that where it's like, you see his influences and the

way the film works is essentially, it's a big rallying cry. It's like celebratory and nationalistic. But the problem is in the way it is, see, this is interesting because like when you see a movie like this, like when the West first discovered RRR, the response was largely kind of like almost built in like a sort of hyperbolic reaction, like, oh my God, this is the greatest movie I've ever seen. I've never seen anything like this.

There's a tiger and like, it's kind of like over the top response. And also there's the kind of like, and I think there's a certain, I understand that on a certain level, because like when you look at Hollywood, what all of these movies are made in is a sort of like white Western hegemony. And so everything kind of exists and comes out through that mechanism and that machine that means certain kinds of films just don't get made there or films that do sometimes get made are kind of exceptions so when you see something where like you know the british and like the white people are kind of largely treated like the way you know say indiana jones treats the nazis they're like oh my god this is so cool this is kind of like radical and like all of that because like this is anti-colonial this is anti-imperialist but the reality is when you

look at post-colonial societies and post-colonial nations what happens is like when they're taken over and inflicted with all that they're inflicted with across time and when the oppressors kind of like left and there's the independence what's left is the sense of like there's a kind of hole of like what we were what we became and who we are and what we are going to be. And so there's their sense of a lost past, a lost what we could have been that is sought and seen. And so a lot of the times it's with stuff like that that nationalism is built. And when you're a colony and when you're oppressed,

that sort of nationalism is a very powerful revolutionary radical act to fight against the oppressor. But after the oppressor's gone and decades have passed passed on and like it's almost been a century right that nationalism can sort of take on a different sort of flavor or fervor like it can feel a bit different because like at that point it's kind of all internal machinations and politics and so that's kind of what you're dealing with because like the hindu nationalism and hindutva animates a lot of the stuff that you see now about india and rooted in india it goes back to the early 19th century when india was still occupied by the british weren't like you know the hindu right-wing figures like literally went over to like mussolini's italy and like toured all of that fascist nonsense and were

like yeah you know this is pretty cool we should like we should get into this and so it's kind of like taking from that and like combining it with like the worst aspects of like old school hinduism and you get this very right-wing ideology which forms the rss which is a stupid death cult of like fascist idiots and that cult is what what the members of that cult is the person that killed and shot Gandhi and so that cult got banned very early on for ages but later on in the 20th century what happened is essentially you have figures like I think it was exactly the 1980s when like the RSS kind of came back and like you know made a kind of big thing and they made a party called the BJP. And then the BJP would slowly grow. And, you know, now it's kind of, it kind of runs the country much like the RSS runs everything.

It's they're bigger than ever. And it's, it's kind of a distressing affair. We have back to the movie. It kind of is, it's very much a status quo movie in the sense of like the most average, you know, MCU or like an American blockbuster is kind of is it's very much a status quo movie in the sense of like the most average you know mcu or like an american blockbuster is kind of like it you don't go to these movies for radical politics right because like in the context of a film like this even though for a western audience this might seem radical because it's like you know all the white people are not kind of great and you know it's kind of like anti-colonial anti-imperialist the reality in the context of post-colonial societies is like when you look at a film like

this being anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist can still very much be a conservative position as opposed to a radical position when you're dealing with places where like naturalism and all that is used to serve right purposes right because again like on the surface just for writing purposes. Right, because again, like on the surface, just for like an average American viewer watching this movie, it's like, wow, here's a big fun spectacle with music and dancing and over-the-top action. And it's got these themes of anti-imperialism

and anti-colonialism and also friendship. And the British people are the bad guys. Friends defeat imperialism together, right? Yeah. So it's just like, again, the first time I saw it, I was just like, woohoo, I'm cheering in the theater, I'm having so much fun. And then, you know, I started to do some digging about the like context from which this movie comes out and as you outline in your vox piece and um there's another piece you wrote yeah one of the words that you use in your vox piece that really

stuck with me is that this movie decontextualizes a lot of history yeah which i mean seems absolutely true and also does it under sort of false pretenses? Because if you don't know the history, it does seem like either this is made up if you're not familiar with the figures, or you're receiving some sort of grand historical epic context, because we just covered the woman king as well. And there a uh not not a similar issue but a historical figure who's represented as being abolitionist who absolutely was not but that's how it's presented in the movie and unfortunately you know and this is like a issue with historical epics across everything yeah but uh that's often about as far as people will you know take an interest and so

this movie breaking through with this specific viewpoint it's a bit scary right because um you talk in your piece about how there's a lot of indian media that again is coming out in this pro-hindu is it pronounced uh hindutva hindutva yeah which is this political ideology that is like reinforced by militant groups that's just like pro-hindu anti-islam that it's the idea that it's the idea that india essentially a Hindu state and should always be a Hindu state. And it's kind of just, it's repellent. Right. And it's leading to extreme oppression and violence toward Muslim people who live in India. And then it's also reinforcing the caste system, which is a very elitist and oppressive system idea of a hierarchy which is kind of always there and it's interesting it's like you look at this film and because we're you know we we are on the Bechdel cast so let's talk about that aspect of it I'm not sure this movie actually passed the Bechdel test because like this movie is rife with a male centrism that is like very indicative of raja molly's work

and like in fairness to him i think it's also just like the kind of space he emerges from so it's not just specific to his work but definitely the movie is a glaring display of like limitations in that sense because you look at the female characters in the movie and it's like it's jenny and you know it's sita right and both of them are kind of just framed in relation to these men and kind of all they do is kind of in service of the great man story like i remember recently there was a great interview of the new yorker you know conducted by simon abrams with rajamouli the director and rajamouli completely impromptu brings up the fact that he loves ayan rand and like the fountainhead and shit like that. And suddenly everything kind of makes perfect sense.

It's like, it fits. And like, I think that kind of helps contextualize for Western audience in some regards. Yeah. So I've been to multiple screenings of this movie where SSR was like there to do a Q&A. It's when he was coming to the US a lot to campaign for like awards to like try to get nominated for Oscars and stuff like that. It worked.

And so I've seen him in the flesh four times, brag, and people would always ask, like they would try to like get him to say that this was like a political film making political statements and he would get him to say that this was like a political film making political statements. And he would always refuse to say that. And,

and at one point he was like, Oh, um, some of my influences in like American cinema are Mel Gibson. And I was like, no, yes. It was so funny.

I was there for that one. You're like, Oh, okay. We're having such a nice time so goofy um i'll say after this other thing in that interview in that very same new york interview he talks like okay so his dad is a screenwriter right that's kind of how he broke in his dad was a screenwriter established screenwriter he got him work and like that's where he broke into the industry and did

all of that so his dad is a seasoned screenwriter and he's currently working on a big RSS movie for this fascist stupid death cult. Oh. So the dad who wrote RRR, Koro, worked on RRR with him because every movie Rajamouli makes is mostly with his dad. That dad and his writer and closest collaborator is working on this RSS movie for the rss hired by them and having done research and work on that movie he came out of it with a very favorable view towards this organization and when asked about this rajamouli in that interview was like well i don't really know what the rss is but i read the script and i cried and it's an amazing script and it's so emotional and it's it would be a beautiful movie and it kind of like, that's where the exact moment of like, okay,

one saying he does not know much about the RSS is like total bullshit in the context in the modern India he lives in. That's kind of just disingenuous. Right. I was like, that sounds like a lie. Yeah. And like two, it's kind of like, it lays down the bullshit of like, I'm a political filmmaker. Like, no, even what, even your supposed political a political stance is a clear political stance because his stance is essentially a bare minimum basic status quo affirming stance and the thing about the status quo forming stances is that like it largely

affirms the systems and the way things are as opposed to any actual radical change it doesn't actually have an imagination to imagine beyond what it is. It can only see what has been. Right. That's something I've read that New Yorker interview as well. And it's really interesting that and that you mentioned that about seeing SSR speak in person, Caitlin, where it does seem like any time he is confronted with a political question, there's this tendency to be like, well, I'm just an entertainer, which is definitely a pattern that I recognize in people who are clearly making political stuff, but don't want to necessarily label themselves as such.

Because even that Ayn Rand question, he says, I understand parts of her philosophy, but that goes over my head when she gets into it. I'm not such a deep thinker. I'm more of a dramatic thinker. So I like the drama part of it. And it's like, yeah, but, you know, it's the essential like decontextualize. It's the idea of decontextualizing something and making it pure character drama. But he does not seem to realize or maybe he doesn't he's

not you know willing to admit it openly that you can't really decontextualize certain ideas and certain fantasies from their nature when you're you know his essential problem and it's a problem that you'll see across his work is that this he takes things and you know presents them but he never actually critically engages with them or is like hey maybe wait a minute what does this actually mean what does this choice or what does me packaging or representing this kind of thing implicate he does not really think about that he's just like wow cool right there's no interrogation of oppressive structures and Yeah. groups in India, such as Muslims and people who belong to lower castes. But it is centering and uplifting already privileged groups of people, and subtly, or maybe not so subtly, promoting this

existing Hindutva ideology. Because as you say, in your Voxx piece there's a number of indian films that have come out just over the decades that frame a muslim character as like the evil villain or or or more likely like there's things like the krishnamurthy files which are just blatantly like vile evil and kind of like this is you can't even stand to watch this fucking frame of it it's like it's so wild and heinous it's kind of just disgusting and repugnant on site and that's like a very clear far-right extremist film but like something like rrr is i think something like it's a much more it's a quote-unquote liberal film and that you have you know muslims but like or even when like keem is kind of like portrayed or even when like he was kind of like portrayed as

a muslim he's kind of like the simpleton or like it's very much the idea of like it's liberal and that like everybody and everything is subservient to this sort of like the super hindu hero which is kind of wrong like right everything is kind of like there's a hierarchical perspective is kind of what it highlights even as it does not necessarily want to demonize anybody if that makes sense exactly yes that's that's what i mean the status quo yeah right and another example is beam is an indigenous person in real life and the character is indigenous and comes from the gond tribe and uh the movie kind of like rewrites who that character was um yeah comoron beam was a well-educated person who could read and write but the movie paints him as this sort of like uncivilized simpleton along with the entire community he comes from yeah like at the end the

end of the movie right the big sort of like climax has him ask peen you know this figure for like the gift of education when like in reality peen was an educated man i think that kind of is illustrative of like the sort of hierarchical view the movie has and presents which is kind of like the baked in casteism of like roger moly films you'll see again you know if you watch probably which is the big you know mythological blockbuster film and the casteism is kind of also rife there so that it's the hierarchical perspective the idea of like hierarchies and who gets to be on that and the way stereotypes derive from that perspective that's what you're seeing here right it does yeah and and like if we are viewing this as a propaganda film to some extent it's very effective because you don't really realize it's happening.

It's not good propaganda if it feels like propaganda. Right. It's kind of like, you know, a lot of American blockbusters, right? Like the politics, you're like, you kind of just accept that they're going to kind of be fucked in a lot of ways. Like you watch Top Gun and like Top was just gonna say top gun it's a fun cool movie if it's like a fun sports movie like the first one is a fun sports movie the second one's like for dads and sons and stuff and it's fun but like if you stop for a second to think about it it's like yeah you know this is really fucked american imperialist propaganda. Absolutely. And it's bought and paid for by the American military.

Like Top Gun invented that whole system. And I mean, that's certainly not what everyone I know thought the first time they saw Top Gun. And the numbers sort of bear that out. There was like a spike in Air Force after that. Yeah, absolutely. I guess this is maybe an extremely overly simplistic question, but for our listeners, what do you feel are kind of the most glaring oversimplifications or changes that Raj educated, having to ask for the gift of education from a sort of Ram who is presented as like the more tragic, you know, Bim is not a third of the interiority of like Ram. If you watch the movie, Ram is like this complex, tragic figure burdened and like all of these things, whereas Bim kind of isn't a third.

Bim is kind of like a simpleton who's kind of in response and reaction to the great complex figure of rom and so there's definitely that aspect of it you also get um a long sequence of rom's backstory and you get no information about beam's backstory the movie doesn't care to contextualize his character that's it's the thing of like everything and everybody kind of becomes subservient to the story of this great figure and it's kind of very much like that and it's interesting because like i look at this film and there's a lot of it is about like people talk about history and like history isn't just an assembly of facts right history is something that is constructed over and over and over again and how it is presented how it is like built and curated and that's kind of like

when you look at the end credits of this film it is very much a specific curation of history with the historical figures who chooses to show like for instance you don't want it you will not see you know um in the end of the film who's a legendary activist that is kind of like a father of the indian constitution and possibly Dalit activist who's kind of like the father of the Indian constitution and possibly the greatest Indian figure that like the West probably should know over Gandhi but somehow Gandhi is the one people know anyway but like you don't

see figures like that but you will see I don't know Shivaji in those credits and like it's baffling because like Shivaji was like had nothing to do with fighting against the British like that was kind of after his time but the guy is kind of after his time. But the guy is kind of now a figurehead in like the modern kind of Hindu discourse.

So like he's in there. It's very much a kind of like, I'm not being political, but I also, I totally am by just like just curating things. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

It sounds like a lot of it is by omission versus by explicit rewriting. He's more than a product of being a very uncritical and unthinking creator and artist. And at some points, when the guy says, oh, I don't know much about the RSS or anything, that's sort of dishonesty. Right, right, right. Because when he's backed into a corner, you just have to start lying at some point yeah um also in the end credits he omits a number of muslim revolutionaries uh revolutionaries from casts that are considered to be quote-unquote lower omits secular revolutionaries also to add another aspect of the film i think it's interesting

like one of the things that i found people were really calling to is just the idea of like oh this film finally portrays like you know these white brits as like the total bad guys and like absolute monstrous caricatures or like the nazis and indiana jones are like you know these terrible monsters and that as being a radical choice and like being something very cool but what I found fascinating and telling is that like the movie's conceptualization and presentation of whiteness is so simplistic so it's very much all the white people are bad and then there is this one white person who is good it's Jenny as opposed to actually thinking or reckoning with the idea of complicity and system and like Jenny as complicit and the privilege she gets

for being who she is and her relation to that. It's kind of never really, the movie has no conception of that. It's just simple. There's good, there's bad. It's that simple idea. So there's not much actually radical or interesting things. It doesn't actually think in terms of systems or complicity.

It just thinks in terms of like these sole individual figures doing things and it's kind of it's the limitation with roger mulligan the film right yeah i at the end when like beam reunites with jenny and everyone claps in the theater every time i'm just like what are we clapping for this woman is so complicit like her family are literally the governor's needs yeah she lives in the palace with these imperialist colonizers like what what are we celebrating here it's the case of like the film not really having capacity to think or like really doing it it's kind of just a very simplistic piece of work in that sense not that every you know big super action blockbuster needs to you know really reckon with complicity and avoidance, all of that in this movie.

But like, if you're actually saying this is radical, I think it has to actually be radical as opposed to like, be, you know, really simplistic. Right. Yes. I wanted to ask about, because this stuck with me the first time I saw this movie, the disclaimer at the beginning of the movie is really intense and pretty long. And it's, I mean, like going in with little to no context, you're like, ooh, what is this? Like, this feels defensive. I wonder what, like, this is kind of going up against. But, you know, like this film, apart from showcasing the culture and geography of India, doesn't imitate or imply any person, whether living or dead. Doesn't indicate any race, caste, creed, or tribe. Any resemblance whatsoever is purely coincidental.

The producer, the director, or the technicians of the movie have no intention whatsoever of hurting anyone's sentiments or disrespecting any traditions or maligning the beliefs of any individual or group. What do you make of that? I just think it's kind of like, it's indicative like a film rather, isn't it? It's kind of like it's indicative like the film rather isn't it it's kind of like this don't think of this as anything except cool character drama guys don't think of this as anything meaning anything it's like it's not political I'm just a cool dramatist right like don't yell at me I'm not doing anything bad and it's like yeah well you are though um and I still oh I can't not love this movie like i it's it's a fun time

it's a fun movie and like i think that's okay it's just the case of like you can like like i love top gun and i love top gun maverick and like the key is knowing hey these are fun movies about like fathers and sons like sports action shit but also like it's kind of fucked. And like, you kind of have to like live with that complexity. That's hard. The, I mean, the whole ethos of our show is you're allowed to love whatever you love. Just be critical of the media you consume. Yeah. Just think. And that's what we're doing.

You think, but you know, most people don't do it. And this make this, I've been thinking so much about just historical epics in general it makes me want to go back and revisit more of them because no i'm kidding oh my god that's actually a big influence on the guy is it yeah that makes sense i mean because they're whatever the historical genre and i think I would put this movie in that category for at least big chunks of the movie. And almost every single time,

they have a very loose grasp on history and are often sort of the only interaction that a lot of people have with the history at all. Yeah, and it's interesting because like, you look at art, right? Art's purpose isn't exactly meant, you know, to recreate history necessarily, but it's a case of you judge art on merit of like, okay, what is this trying to say? And what is this constructing? And merit and like I think a lot of the films kind of when they do construct history they kind of struggle with not thinking certain things through and that's kind of where the pitfall is but if you actually think things through and like

can do something with it I think you're kind of like more okay with that yeah absolutely this is my my last question but I I guess yeah with any historical epic, it's like, well, why are we choosing this story to produce on such a large scale at this moment? Do you have an opinion on that, of why SSR would choose this story in this moment? Yeah, I definitely, like, to go back to the original point, he talked about the genesis of the film being the separation of those two states and and like so i kind of understand why because like in andra rom is kind of a big figure who's known like you'll see if you go around a street you will see like big you know statues of the guy around streets and stuff like that and so and he was a huge figure for that film kind of movement so there's a kind of sense of like oh he would of course he would make that movie and that kind of makes sense especially because there was a tradition of like having made films on you know rom before there's a big classic

movie based on rom too before like ages ago starring a big iconic star back in the day so it's not new essentially so he's just kind of part of that tradition and making films in that mode and like even the interesting thing is like you look at a lot of film cinema and like there is a lot of it that draws on mythology and constructs and frames its heroes or figures through that divine lens or like frames the makinta gods and stuff like that so he is part of that lineage and tradition so i think there's a sense of oh of course he would make this movie like it makes sense to me in that sense but then you hear something like yeah we're working on rrr two now and like we're like we're working on a script and you're like but why though why

it's kind of baffling yeah who's that gonna be about um right yeah i mean i i wasn't able to find a lot of information on it outside of just like any time something is successful they're like do it seven more times but it's like this is these are yes these were people like what do you what are you uh intending to add everything is ip now truly um do you have any final thoughts anything else you'd like to share on the film itself the way i think about it is just like it's a fun movie and i think people can like have whatever feelings they have about it but it's just the case of like i would like people to just think through and like kind of like understand what they're watching and kind of if anything see the saddest thing about the movie for me was just like watching people

watch this and kind of watching the response going man people really know nothing about indian cinema at all huh because like we're india is a huge country with like hundreds of languages and each state is almost unto a nation itself in the sense of like each state has its own language it's its own like whole thing yeah and it's kind of like it's it's comparable more to europe in the sense of like it's a big thing as opposed to just one you know thing that's like it's a hugely diverse place and there's like almost 20 industries that are separate for each language to make separate movies in those languages and there's a rich long tradition of movies in all of them and i was really struck by the idea of like wow people, people know nothing about this. And it was kind of like,

so if I have any last thing, it's I guess just like, I would like people to explore Indian cinema more and just like, rather than going, okay, I watched this. I would like people to like engage with and like see more movies in general and kind of like, I don't know,

develop a taste, a sense for it as opposed to just kind of like making this one hit thing. I would like people to watch more movies period do you have any recommendations of films to check out that don't like uphold a troubling status quo the way that rrr does well so the interesting thing is i've really been liking this sort of recent movement The Tamil film industry has recently in a few years seen a movement of like film makers and like artists who are making their own art.

And so I would really recommend people check out stuff like that. So like P.A. Ranjith and folks like that have been doing some interesting work. I would say definitely check that out. And that's an interesting perspective. And like, that's a lot of like, I think where a lot of future stuff is going. But yeah, mostly I would say,

I want people to understand and like engage with film across the board. Because there's so much cool history to film beyond just the sort of like, okay, there's like America. And then in dialogue with America, because of monster movies and samurai movies, there's Japan.

And then there's Hong Kong. As opposed to just kind of that, it's kind of of like let's kind of fully grasp with that cool yeah i'm going i have a subscription to z5 which is a streaming service for anyone who doesn't know is i think dedicated specifically and primarily to indian film and tv So I have access to a lot. Yeah. Well, Ritesh, thank you so much for joining us. This has been such a delight. And thank you for your work too.

It was incredibly useful and I'm very glad that you're doing it. I appreciate it. Thank you. Of course. Where can people check out more of your work and follow you online, all that good stuff? Yeah, so I'm at Ritesh Writer pretty much everywhere. And you can find me there in my newsletter. I guess you can subscribe to that,

though I haven't written more since my RRR piece. RiteshBabu.com is my website. So if you want to hit me up, that's where you do it. And that's kind of it. Amazing. Thank you again so much for joining us. Thank you do it and that's kind of it amazing cool thank you again so much for joining us thank you for having me this was fun yay once again we wanted to thank Rivesh Babu for coming on the show giving us some context

and giving us better insight into the movie that was so so awesome. Very helpful. We, I, I like to, I mean, we like to at least try to be honest about our biases in watching movies and what we, you know, you don't know what you don't know. And,

um, even after I saw RRR with you, I read his work like that night and it was so, so helpful. And I don't know. Yeah. It was really cool for him to come on the show definitely look at us praising a man sickos um okay and and and now uh return to business which is with that historical context in mind um let's talk about the characters

let's talk about the relationships in the movie yes shall we start with the representation of women ever heard of it it's it's bad it's bad uh here's what i'll say it's not good not good at all honestly i it was it was pissing me off um yeah but in at least different flavors of not good but i did there was repeat at any time a man was talking to or about a woman, it was stuff like, wait, I kept writing it down. Any time Rom talks to Sita, he says one thing, and he's like, you're my strength, babe. Wait, what is he saying?

Like, I am fighting for freedom freedom and you are my strength. And like, that is how men view women. Sita, my courage has always been my strength, but your courage will help me succeed. Um, it's just a very,

it's very reductive of Sita, but we also see Ram's father discuss Ram's mother in that way. Exactly. Saying that, Oh, she is my courage. She is my strength, which, you know, I think it's interesting because it's like in that way exactly yes saying that oh she is my courage she is my strength which you know i think it's interesting because it's like that sounds good but it also right inherently implies inaction it implies like you hold down the fort while i go do man stuff exactly

truly what it yeah is where he's just asking her to and not to say that that is unimportant or valueless work it's not but it's very i think very gender essential to be like all right you're my strength if you weren't my my fucking wife like i couldn't kill all these guys or whatever you know it's just very traditional view of gender right and i know that that happened historically because of gender roles and patriarchal but nothing in this movie happened so you could like as we just talked about for an hour this movie doesn't have much of an interest in being historically accurate so it does feel like a modern decision like that that was a 2020-whatever decision to sideline women in this way. Yeah, women don't exist to be men's inspiration and source of strength.

Exactly. I mean, but there are like slightly different, I mean, honestly, the only women that we get to know are Sita, Kathy, and Jenny. So three very different women. And let's sideline Kathy for a second. The two women we are supposed to like are Sita and Jenny. Sita, for the most part, like we were just saying, she is waiting. She is waiting.

She's waiting. She's waiting for Ram to come home. Passive. She's reassuring everyone Ram's got this. Towards the end, she does get some stuff to do i've noticed that sita and jenny both iconically do one thing yes uh sita's one thing is that she thinks really quickly when police um raid the space where she has just met beam and molly yeah and she says that someone has what disease what smallpox smallpox yes so she says that someone has smallpox and the police get the fuck out of there and that is like her active her one thing right to protect someone

else which is great for sure it's one thing in three hours but but it's great and then jenny's one thing happens in montage from what i could tell uh but the one thing jenny does is she gives beam a map yeah so that he knows where to rescue which is i think the only time we see her be like explicitly rebellious towards. Yeah, her family. We'll get to her in a second. But yeah, like they both do one thing. And the thing that Sita does is accompanied by some violence.

And so I wanted to bring up the kind of use of violence in this movie, which there is a lot of. This is a violent action movie. Yes. But violence is used to brutalize women in this movie in a way that it's generally not used to brutalize men, with a few exceptions that I'll get to. But there's the scene where Sita like does this quick thinking and she's like, oh, someone has smallpox. And then she is violently kicked by a British officer. There's another scene early on where Male's mother is struck on the head. We mentioned that one already.

Both are moments of brutal violence that sort of seem to imply, like, look how weak and helpless these women are while when men do violence in this movie it's like exciting action sequences with a few exceptions that i can think of all involving beam such as the scene where beam is brutally beaten by that one officer who brings his motorcycle to the mechanic shop as well as the scene where beam is flogged publicly by rom which as we've discussed beam is treated differently from rom where unlike rom beam is not elevated to this like godlike status he's not given a backstory all these different things that like create this like imbalance between these two characters who we are supposed to like who are supposed to be equally important but rom is like elevated in this particular way right probably because beam

is indigenous and indigenous people in india at this time I'm not sure if this is still true today. Again, I only have a pretty peripheral understanding of the caste system. But this was definitely true at the time that indigenous people exist outside of the caste system because they are considered to be below Brahmanical supremacy, which is the ideology that dictates the hierarchy and elitism of the caste system. So I think because BIM is indigenous, and I know we're talking about the women and I am sidetracking and talking about BIM, but I just wanted to like, point out the ways in which marginalized people, such as women and indigenous people people the way violence is handled with them versus when like rom is doing violence it's like look at this fucking awesome superhero

and like all of his cool action well yeah that takes uh that takes me back to what we were talking about um in our interview where it was presented that beam was not an educated man and he was right in real life he was serves the purpose of this story to downplay that and and and and an exchange that i didn't remember to bring up was at the end one of the last interactions maybe the last interaction that rom and beam have clearly establishes like rom is the guy which the political implications of that is beam at the end is like i want you to teach me like that is so he like they don't really end as equals which is so weird because the whole thing is that they're holding each other's hands and it looks like that fucking meme where it's like yeah but it's like the the power dynamic between them

is actually always a little uneven because it's implied that rom has an education and beam does not rom is bilingual beam is not like there's all of these things that always give rom like quote-unquote the edge right over beam and it doesn't nullify their friendship but it does but the movie still sort of ends with that being the case where beam is like i want to be your student rom and it's like and the movie ends with yeah beam saying like teach me to read and write and then rom writes a phrase on a flag the real life historical figure comoron beam that was his saying like that was his like ah and but instead it has ramaraju like this movie attributes that phrase to him the phrase is jal jangle zamin i'm sure i'm not pronouncing that correctly but it translates in english to water forest land and it makes sense that an indigenous person would value

those things and have that be their slogan for freedom but instead this movie tribute attributes like the coining of that phrase or that slogan to Rom. Also, there's a scene in the movie where Sita is explaining to Beam why Rom went into the police force. And Beam responds by basically saying, like, oh, my vision has been so narrow. Here I am only trying to save one person, but Ram is trying to start this whole big revolution. Like his scale is so much grander than mine. And then Beam says, the tribal that I am, I did not understand. So again, it's positioning Beam, this indigenous person as being simple-minded and not able to see the bigger picture which is just so insulting and reductive to characterize an indigenous person in that way do not like um all right back back to back to the gals yes yes yes um so sita yes i think that sita is presented as kind of your

classically um virtuous it's it almost it is like a you know woman waiting for her man to come home from war kind of character uh she does get to do one thing she is subjected to violence immediately and and i totally agree with what you're saying there is like the violence is to demonstrate that they that like they need men to protect them kind of thing they cannot protect themselves and then we have jenny who has a whole different set of issues i mean i just like i don't know i mean jenny and Sita are written very differently. Jenny, as we discussed, I think it is a big weird problem that like she is so I don't even know. It's like whatever the level above complicity is like it feels like too simple to say that she's complicit. Her aunt Kathy is, on the other hand, like a full on fucking tyrant and is actively i mean there's that

whole sequence when beam is being beat by rom it's such a hard scene to watch where she keeps suggesting like more and more brutal weapons to hurt him she just has a spiky whip in her dress question mark and she's like here use this oh yeah i forgot she had it on her so she is obviously not the uh top colonizer that's governor scott but she is actively perpetuating violence against indian people the entire movie and is often suggesting to her husband to turn it up to an 11 and make the violence even more brutal. So she is a very active character in the worst way. Which as we're talking about, that is sort of one of the things this movie gets really right. And I think what is very striking to all audiences audiences but I think western audiences in particular where we're

I think kind of used to being asked to empathize with the colonizer or to see that like even in modern movies to be like okay so colonization is obviously wrong but the way that the tone of this movie makes it completely possible for all of the colonizers to just be like cartoonishly like as cartoonishly evil as colonizers are yeah so it's like fun and cathartic totally though the movie she's the one exception of like white colonizer woman who doesn't get let off the hook because the movie lets all the other ones off the hook and the only other one we really get to know is jenny but like jenny there's that whole party full of people yeah that's exactly yeah like which recontextualizes the party in a way you're like oh it's such a good dance scene but like what are we doing and yeah and like all the all the white women are like let's dance along to the not to not to song and these men

are boyfriends they feel threatened by these brown men and they're trying to compete against them. Right? Like every white woman is an ally. Yeah. And it's like, well, no, that's not how that happened. So yeah, I appreciate Lady Buxton being in the movie and like depicted the way she was in a weird way because the racism and other prejudices that a lot of white women perpetuate should not be ignored or let off the hook although yeah they are too often so i appreciate that this movie shows like yes like white women can be complicit and or actively perpetuating yes like just because you are not the most powerful person in the world right does not mean that you do not hold a lot

of privilege and cannot weaponize it against other people uh also fun fact um lady buxton is played by oh my gosh allison duty who is the nazi woman from indiana jones and the last crusade so she is very good at playing evil white women what an interesting life of typecasting like um wild yes okay so back to jenny back to jenny okay so like point well taken with lady buxton i agree but then also like jenny undercuts that same thing right where jenny is their niece and it's i'm not saying that like it's within jenny's power to dismantle colonialism like that's an unreasonable expectation however i feel like she's presented because she is nice and because she is not actively individually perpetuating harm against individuals and has, I think there's like two different instances. One is when Beam first

sees her, she tells off a police officer for beating someone for no reason. And that is like her technically using her privilege for good because she has more clout than he does and so he stops good yeah and then the other time that we see jenny lightly lightly push against a system of oppression is when she brings beam back to the palace or the house whatever the big the big man the big old place yeah colonial manor and an officer or a guard or a soldier what's the difference some guy you know some guy assumes that beam is the help um and jenny says fuck off and then apologizes to beam and they kind of move on so it's like individually sure you know she does the

right thing in those moments but i feel like those moments are illustrated of like therefore she is totally good and like i don't know i just thought that like her level of complicity was not examined in any meaningful way in a way that there was room in this movie to happen like and it seems like i know that beam you know loves her but it seems like he is the sort of person because he is so smart and because he is so motivated to dismantle the colonialism that's affecting everyone he knows it seems like the sort of thing that he would want to talk about so it's kind of like it feels like it it suggests that like women are so wayfish and powerless that it's like not even worth the discussion to examine

their complicity or like i don't really know what that decision was it felt a little out of step with who we know beam to be but the whole like beam rom-com section of the movie feels a little out of step with who beam is for the rest of the movie right it's just like I don't know if it's suggesting like the attention of a woman softens him up a little bit for a while or something. I don't know. Because see the kind of one point when the, when the tiger is attacking everybody, he like puts Jenny in a car who is dressed exactly like bell from beauty and the beast in that moment.

And she, she is very bell. I mean, she looks like bell too. Yeah. But he, I don't know. Every time I see that scene and he puts her in the car and it's supposed to be like i will protect you yeah you're my gf now whatever but he puts her in a car i'm like that could be that could be a kiss of death that could be so bad for her yeah that car could explode like this i wouldn't want to be locked

in a car in the middle of a war zone it just feels like you're almost more vulnerable more vulnerable than if you could move but right what do i know yes hard to say um in any case with with the three main women that we get to know they're different enough i think sita and jenny have certain qualities in common such as passivity um and only being able to do one thing oh that's what i was gonna say there's that scene when beam is beating oh yeah there's another moment where like an indigenous character is being brutalized when rom beats um lachu beam's brother he's like flailing his weapon his like stick around and his bracelet flies off yeah men be flailing their sticks around and his and rom's bracelet flies off and we get a flashback where we see like the significance of this bracelet because like sita has the other

half of it and it's sort of like oh they literally have like Claire's necklaces on that are like best friends literally and he's like wait a minute I'm reminded that I have a girlfriend and maybe I should be conflicted about how I'm beating my fellow Indian you know like it's just such a weird like the way the function of women in this movie is yeah just like to be passive to be the like also to represent purity and goodness and non-violence and like can't we just stop fighting and you're like and even with i mean molly is i feel like molly represents something similar to what the women of the story or at least Sita and Jenny represent which is like this is what we're fighting for that kind of like nationalistic and I guess Jenny doesn't

actually really factor in there but like Sita and Molly I feel like definitely represent like this is why we do what we do for the women which which is in any nationalistic narrative. I feel like that always comes up. I mean, it certainly comes up in American media all the time. It comes up in Mulan. They all want a girl worth fighting for, you know, and it's a very common, and this movie doesn't challenge that. This movie, I mean, honestly, once you can get past the thrill of it, this movie doesn't challenge very much outside of imperialism and colonialism,

which is very important to challenge, obviously. But yeah, as we've discussed, it upholds the status quo in many other ways. The other thing I wanted to say about Jenny is the scene the meet cute yes so this is a really wild scene where so rom is like i'll be your wingman beam oh you want to talk to jenny okay so rom grabs a handful of nails and throws them in front of jenny's car to flatten her tires so that beam will have an excuse to talk to her jenny the scene is played so goofy it's an

extremely goofy scene jenny is completely oblivious as to what is happening because she's driving her car, but she is not looking at the road. She's seen just like staring off at the distance being like, do-do-do. And then when Beam realizes what Rom did, like you would expect that reaction, his reaction to be something like, what the fuck, dude? You can't just like throw nails in front of a woman's car to get her attention. But instead, Beam is like, thanks, bro. It was awesome to get her attention but instead beam is like thanks bro it was awesome that you did that and rama's like yeah it was pretty awesome that i did that and jenny is like what happened my tires are flat for some reason literally it is so like it it is it

seems like it's like almost like vaudevillian in the way that it plays out because you're like yeah i mean it is very weird that beam is like oh cool thank you and also it doesn't seem like beam really notices that wrong like why can no one see that this is happening and it also presents jenny as being like not very smart and completely oblivious to the world around her because you could like as an audience member you can feel you can hear the nails fall to the ground and the way she's driving it's like she's not looking at the road she's like looking at the yeah like they're just they make her look like oh like she has like two brain cells yeah yeah

like it which is again which is like doesn't feel like a very, again, it's I know it's a different film industry than we cover, but it's like it felt weird to me of like 2022. Really? Right. Yeah. A movie like I have no doubt that men did things like this throughout history because men are famous for doing scary things to get the attention of women but because this movie came out in 2022 you would think that there would be a more modern version of that where at the very least like if rom is gonna throw the nails beam would be like what you can't just be flattening women's tires bro yeah this movie is takes so many creative liberties that i in moments where it's like no

i think that that is i'm not saying that this is something that ssr has ever spoken to or as far as i can tell been asked about because it is like this is very much our wheelhouse of like what we what we would talk to him about but like i feel like in big movies like this this is a very broad statement and feel free to disagree but like it seems like it's only in moments like that that creatives will like who maybe are not very interested in telling women's stories or anyone but men's stories will be like well that was the history that's that would that's historically accurate right yeah you also had a guy like beat a tiger like why is this your stickler yeah like why is this the place that you are sticking to like

well this is how it would have gone in this state and you're just like all right man sure fucking sure and speaking of uh not being interested in telling women's stories there are a number of women who fought for Indian independence, though, as per usual, their stories are usually not told. History tends to erase them. And media about Indian freedom fighters like RRR tends to focus on men

and ignore women's contributions. Yes. I'm pulling from scholarly journal Wikipedia, of course. Hit it. I'm ready to learn. Just to name a few, Prithalata Wadidar was a member of an Indian Republican army who died after leading a siege, a successful siege, on a European club in Chittagong. Sarojini Nadu was an Indian political activist and poet.

She was a proponent of civil rights, women's emancipation, and anti-imperialist ideas. Rani Lakshmi Bey was a leading figure of the indian rebellion of 1857 and it became a symbol of resistance to the british raj for indian nationalists i don't know if that means the same thing as what i think it means but maybe i don't know anyway, and then there is Katsurba Gandhi, who was a political activist married to Mohandas Gandhi. And with her husband and son, she was involved in the independence movement for India. So those are just a handful. I'm sure there were many more leaders of the movement. And then also just again, women's contributions to a movement like this in general are still like crucial, but their stories are often never told.

Even if they weren't like leaders of the rebellion, women were still doing shit and people often ignore those narratives. So, yes. ignore those narratives so yes and i feel like that is something that again it's like it's so tricky again we we just covered the woman king and it seems like there is just now there is some or more interest in portraying uh women through history like this which i think is a really good thing and but then the tricky part of that is like okay i don't i don't know this is kind of a discussion for another day and this isn't about the woman king specifically but i always worry where it's like oh now we're gonna show like war heroes who are women and then it's like okay but are we gonna undo any of the really

fucked up like narratives that happen in war movies and the glorification and the nationalism or are we just going to leave that as is and now it's it's like a i'm so sick of this race but like it's like a girl bossy kind of thing it's like well now we're going to show women perpetuating women can be warlords right oppressive war like i don't know that's a broad just gut feeling that i i feel like we've seen that happen before in various genres and now it's seems like it may have become time for for this genre so it's interesting um i don't know i don't know we're all you know the the world's gonna explode in like 10 years so really hard to say but uh yeah did you have any other uh thoughts on the women of the not the fun the women's um but i do want to

talk about uh something that often gets discussed in movies about male friendship or where there are men who are friends which is everyone everyone is like, they're gay. We've talked about this before on... It's like our Top Gun episode. Top Gun. We've talked about it, I think on Fast and the Furious. We talked about it.

It's like the Frodo and Sam from Lord of the Rings thing. Yes. Yeah. Where close male friendships are often perceived as having queer undertones because male platonic closeness is so

foreign to people that when people see it they often ascribe a romantic or sexual component to it which might be true for some male friendships but it's often like the default reaction where so many people who i know who saw this movie were like oh rom and beam like oh they're so gay for each other which like that being the default reaction it's such a complicated it's like an onion discussion because you don't want to be like no no but also it's like they're yeah it's like I feel like that I don't know it doesn't allow for the normalization of close platonic male friendship exactly with any sexuality like across right the the spectrum like you should be able to have intimacy with your friend without it being implied as romantic right and especially with men, again, like across the sexuality spectrum, men, I feel like the way men are another man or often another person at all.

Because we, you know, of deep platonic friendships between men and women is also always like, oh, you guys are in love with each other. And it's like, ugh, no. And like the shift of this reaction, I think, has gone a bit from like, oh, they're so gay. And isn't that gross? More to just like, oh, there's two guys and they're gay. And like, did I want to see Beam and Rom kiss? Yeah, kind of. So it's complicated.

But also. But yeah, I think it's like I agree with what you're saying is like just normalizing a strong deep platonic friendship is like a worthy thing to do and I feel like this movie does it is is one of the things that this movie does very successfully the idea of like loyalty to your friend is an important thing I think that that's really nice I think it's good um oh also the last thing I wanted to say was um anytime I think that like yeah in the movies that we grew up with and this doesn't really happen anymore except if it's like still happening on like network tv or something but anytime there's um you know two I'm thinking of like peak Judd Apatow movies where it's like anytime, like men can be friends in those movies, but they have to constantly qualify that they're straight.

Anytime they experience a moment of like, if they hug, if they touch, they're like, what? No, no. Like, just totally like kind of what a distressing time that was um anyways not the case for ramen beam they openly express their affection for each other by spending time together by going on day trips by i mean they are like physically expressive with the way they love each other and also like because the tone of this movie is so soap opera, like, these men are certainly emoting. You don't see, I think, like, a lot of Western movies show, like, a male protagonist swallowing the pain and it becomes a fucking brick in his stomach. And you're like, wow, that's acting. Meanwhile, Rom is like, ah!

Yeah, they're both crying at different points like this they're having emotions besides rage because like rage especially in like hollywood movies is like the only acceptable or like has been considered to be the only acceptable true emotion that men are allowed to express and feel but uh guess what everyone the full range of emotions is available to people of all genders everyone but also rom often expresses his emotions by punching a punching bag so there's that um do you have anything else you want to talk about i don't really think so um yeah i i think that that that we've had a pretty comprehensive discussion. Also, listeners, especially our Indian listeners, we recognize that we've probably gotten some stuff wrong in this episode. We did our best in terms of prep and all of that. But we are very interested in what particularly our Indian listeners have to say about this. Yes, please. And just in general, because we always want to know what you think.

Indeed. And tackling a big historical epic with which you are not familiar with the history can be kind of tricky. So if there's anything that we missed, please let us know and we will, you know, do what we always do. Indeed. Yeah, I think that's all I've got. Same. Does this movie pass the Bechdel test no there are a few small moments where women interact or female characters interact such as when um jenny gives molly a few gifts but molly doesn't respond no there's also a scene at the party where a lady says hey jenny jenny says hi

maggie how's max i know maggie says god damn it oh he's great and jenny says wonderful uh i guess that hi jenny hi maggie but that's not it doesn't count yeah because immediately she's like how's max and it's like who's max who cares like what do you anyway that's also with with jenny that's another way that jenny is shown to be kind she's the only person who's kind to a child they've kidnapped you're like that's not that's not enough i don't know i think i'm pretty i bought our captive dress and you're like fuck you yeah anyways okay uh well let's move on to the perfect metric our nipple scale where we rate the movie on a scale of zero to five nipples based on looking at the movie through an intersectional feminist lens um okay let me talk through this so on one hand okay this is a movie about indian people rising up

against british oppression and imperial rule and colonization and obliterating it which is very cathartic to see and it's very exciting it's a fun movie and the music and the two men are so hot and well that's an intersectional feminist win and yes so those are the good parts of the movie but as we've discussed it upholds the status quo of the current scary political climate of India and it's more or less serving as Indian nationalist propaganda. And I also want to be clear that our criticism of right wing Hindu centric Indian government is not a criticism of the Hindu religion. I'm sure our listeners understand that. But I just want to make that abundantly clear that we are criticizing oppressive fashy governments and political ideologies yes so the kind of like upholding of the status quo and which again is a scary status

quo along with the movie's treatment of women and indigenous people being very abysmal i also wanted to point out that uh again comoran beam was an indigenous person of the gond tribe ntr jr who plays him is not a gondi actor so there's that um but then you see governor scott's blood splatter over the words, the sun never sets on the British Empire. And you're like, woo! Right. I mean, it is, I think that like this movie is so unsubtle to its strength and its detriment. Yes. And its strength is certainly like best shown with its attitudes towards imperialism and British colonialism.

And that all plays very well and but yeah in terms of it having propaganda qualities right if not just being propaganda it it is kind of um I don't know yeah it is kind of freaky that like this movie can come to the come to a western audience and like it didn't register for, I think a lot of Western fans of this movie. For sure. And it's scary. It is scary. And it's complicated with all of that in mind.

I think I'll give it like one and a half nipples. I still love this movie. I'm going to keep revisiting it, knowing its issues and knowing its many problems. But as far as like entertainment value goes, it's a 10 out of 10 on the romp-o-meter. Oh, I mean, it's like seven movies in one. It's pretty fucking cool. So there's a lot to love about this movie. but we also um as always we are going to acknowledge the things that must be criticized

about any movie so 1.5 nipples um i'll give one to sita because i just wanted so much more for her she could have done two things she could have done two maybe even three now let's but let's be reasonable you're right i'll calm down that would be one thing per hour caitlin i don't know that's too much um uh and i'll give my half nipple to male twink what's her name twinkle twinkle sharma oh my gosh what a name twinkle sharma incredible um what say you jamie uh i i feel like i'm coming down kind of hard uh i'm gonna give it one uh in term again entertainment value gigantic do i enjoy watching the movie yes the i mean for kind of our classic bechdel cast purposes, women are in no way centered.

And they're like you're saying, like in like there have been many women who have fought for freedom in India. And, you know, this movie sort of casts a very wide, very broad, very familiar view of women as docile, domestic, waiting for men to get home. The reason we fight, certainly not the people who would be allowed to do anything so in that way i thought it was a very kind of traditional view of gender the way that jenny's character is positioned as the one nice colonizer is weird i don't think that that's an intersectional win of any sort. And also, I think that I'm coming down kind of hard on it because we've covered these historical epics recently. And in terms of intersectionality, no movie is going to get history exactly right. And it's not the duty of fiction movies to be documentaries.

I'm not implying that but there is i think like our discussion today um speaks to like when you get history so wrong or there's a lot of omission like that can perpetuate harm against marginalized communities which is what our whole contextual discussion was and so i feel and, I know that it's like, I am not well-versed in these issues at all. I still have a ton to learn, and a lot of this is new information. So if I'm coming down too hard, I apologize.

But from the information I have presently, it just seems like this movie gets history or willfully omits a lot of important history for sure in a way that doesn't you know it like erases a lot of marginalized communities and uplifts some harmful status quos yes which a lot of movies do but because again and like we talked about this in the woman king episode too when you involve actual historical figures that's when it gets super super super messy yeah and so that is sort of where i stand on that uh it's a super fun movie to watch it's really exciting i like and the live viewing experience someone threw a fucking like inflatable tiger at the screen it was just like it was a lot people get up and dance along with the not to not to scene like it's just an

electric viewing experience it's intense yeah i mean and so for the movie going experience it's fucking unbelievable like rajmuli is an incredibly talented filmmaker but a lot of the writing is a bit concerning and so i'm gonna give it one nipple i apologize if that's too harsh and i'm gonna give it to sorry i guess i'm gonna give it to i'll split it between molly and her mom because it is such a brutal two-punch um opening scene and i'm glad that they are reunited i really thought that they killed her mom and i am the movie is so long that sometimes i forget that she does live between the beginning and the end well because you only see her in the opening sequence and then in the credit sequence like she yeah she gets brought back to screen after the movie has ended and they're playing like the big credit song and dance number.

Yeah. I'm just glad that Molly got to reunite with her whole family. I think that that is very, it's what she deserved. So yeah, give it, give it one nipple. Sorry. And I love you. Happy birthday. I mean, I give it only a half nipple more than you.

So we're pretty much the same and but thank you it is my birthday why is media so complicated um well I'm covering Minions Rise Up Groove for my birthday and we're gonna have a hell of a time oh wow yeah can't wait yep listeners that's

our our our our our our our our rrr our rrr rrr thanks again to our guest ritesh babu make sure to check out their writing and you can follow us hey hey you know what because it's my birthday you can follow me on social media. Whoa. Such as. Unfollow me in observance of Caitlin's birthday. Yeah. Take your follow. Take your follow away from Jamie and give it to me.

Just kidding. You can follow anyone you want, but especially me on my special day. I'm trying to be more active on TikTok, which I don't know how to feel about. I'm less active on Twitter than I've ever been before, except to convince people to cast me in Paddington 3, which is at the time of this recording, and we're recording pretty far out, so hopefully this doesn't change by the time this episode comes out. But production on paddington 3 is slated to begin in july so there's still time to cast me and then instagram uh and i'm at all of those places at caitlin dorante please follow me you can also follow our patreon

aka matreon at patreon.com slash Bechtelcast. Five bucks a month gets you a number of bonus episodes. And that number is two. I don't know why I put it like that. And you also get- Two per month. Per month. And yes, you get access to, I think, close to 150 back episode catalogs at this point.

And then we'll be covering some of Caitlin's faves on the matreon this month so check that out you can also follow the bechdel cast on instagram and twitter at bechdel cast and you can buy our merch at tpublic.com slash the bechdel cast treat yourself to a little t-shirt a little phone case a little pillow whatever you want it's my birthday so treat yourself in observance of the national holiday yes yes wonderful okay uh well there's the episode we love you so much go have a nice springtime day do it oh also my book comes out next week oh my gosh yes rad talk may 23rd we going to be covering it in our, well not the book. We're going to be covering Sausage Party next week.

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