Review of “Udta Punjab”
Tommy is an unknowing religious figure for the young people of Punjab. He sings popular songs about drugs and hedonism attracting a youth disillusioned by religion and the existing world order and returning to the sensual experience of the body. Influenced by western atheistic ideas, they no longer believe in the primarly religious, existing order, and so they do not know what IS good so they return to what FEELS good. He represents the Dionysian in the Paglian sense and this movie shows all too well what Paglia said, “the Dionysian is no picnic”. He becomes aware of the responsibility that comes with his role as a religious leader when he is in a prison and finds out about his incredibly destructive influence on two die-hard fans. They look up to him and want to be like him, believing as everyone does with their own religious figures, that these human beings embody the behavior they should have if they are to live life rightly. English subtitles of his first song: “Don’t bullshit me, / I can read the future / You follow your god / I need no nurture” … “Snort that heaven inside”. It is clear Tommy is lost and represents an unfettered and unguided, corrupt Dionysian.
His feminine counterpart, Bauria, who had dreams of being a hockey player but fell on hard times, attempts to remedy her misfortune by a large single act of crime. Instead, she ends up being sexually and physically abused, given drugs and prostituted to several men including local police officers. Eventually she manages to escape.
Sartaj, the low ranking police officer, represents the Apollonian half of the Apollonian and Dionysian dichotomy and he too had an underdeveloped moral compass. Even more on the nose, he represents society’s corruption, the true source of this being the willful blindness and acceptance of its constituency.
While helping Sartaj’s brother, Balli, Preet, Sartaj’s feminine counterpart, uses her judgement to hold Sartaj to a higher standard than he holds himself to and it is because of this as is typical in a hero’s journey, that he overcomes his willful blindness and acceptance of corruption, and begins on a path to a greater morality.
Tommy goes out to his audience and begins to preach, maybe hoping to awaken his followers, just as he has been awakened. He calls himself a “faddu”, meaning “loser”. He says talking about himself, “He just knew one thing. Drugs. And he sang about it. And you folks thought it was philosophy? *laughs* You folks are bigger losers than I am”. He understands that he was a religious leader for these people and he was doing much more than just singing songs about drugs, but he calls the crowd losers for not being able to recognize his own human capacity for being limited and lost. Worse than the blind leading the blind, is a child leading children, is a normal human being being led to lead a masse of immoral beings. He only knew drugs and his culture grew from the feedback given to him from his audience. They asked for what they wanted and he gave it to them. No longer giving them what they want, the crowd becomes angry and belligerent. When Tommy realizes that he won’t get through to his fans, he recognizes them as beings with agency, not so much being led by him, but instead using him to get what they want, so he breaks ties and has to go into hiding to avoid their rage. In hiding, he meets Bauria. Her recapture provides an opportunity for Tommy to step up and redefine his morality.
Balli kills Preet attempting to escape from the rehab facility. I feel like it must mean something that the only two completely infallible characters interact resulting in the most tragic moment of the movie. Preet is clearly incredibly moral and Balli is completely a victim of his circumstances, far too young to be expected to have the agency to not do drugs with his friends. Despite neither being wrong, in that moment, they are opposed, and this results in catastrophe.
In the final scenes, the heroes finally and barely meet and take down the police and captors. Both halves of the Apollonian and Dionysian duality are necessary for freedom. And they never speak, they have one more look at each other before their journeys become separate again. The two storylines do have significantly separate endings. Sartaj’s storyline ends with his brother crying in front of him while he’s expressionless and also Preet is dead. Tommy’s storyline seems to end better with him calling Bauria from prison while she is in Goa. He asks her her name and she says “Mary Jane” reaffirming Dionysian sensuality. In this subtle way, the movie is not really saying that drugs are bad, but rather there is a difference between feeling good and being addicted. This also demonstrates the difference between what is known explicitly and what can be known through art. Before the actual movie begins, there is a “Don’t Do Drugs” visual. This is in contrast to what the movie is actually against which is institutionalized evil and evil resulting from widespread willful blindness and enabling or allowing immorality in others.
This movie did an incredible job of maintaining two very good parallel storylines each marking important similarities, the whole while being distinct except for that final violent scene. Both masculine figures are redemptive and are motivated by their feminine counterparts, the Apollonian motivated by judgement, the Dionysian motivated by love and selflessness. Both the feminine characters were incredibly strong characters. It was stated that if all the men of Punjab are high, then the women must do something about it. I think this speaks true generalized to if men are weak, women must do something about it. Both the masculine figures individuate (in the Jungian sense) by developing a sense of morality that separates them from and renews the old, dysfunctional morality they inherited. In trying to separate and renew, the old culture manifests tyrannically, trying to suppress change in the face of ever growing insufficiencies.
One thing that I didn’t like was that, every class of wrong doing being was given a chance at redemption except the politician. I think this says two things about the culture from which this movie is born:
1. An unconscious longing to shift the individual responsibility that produces positive change shown so very clearly to a group of people. The strongest message in this movie is that to solve the really big problems society faces, everyone from all walks of life need to act righteously. Yet, despite continually sending this message throughout the film, the movie leaves a backdoor that doesn’t allow the chance for a politician to do what all of the main characters have done, which is to recognize their being complicit in evil, and stop.
2. People who are leaders, by virtue of their power and responsibility, don’t get second chances. If you are going to be a leader, then you better act righteously because it is far worse to take on responsibility and act immorally than to not take on that responsibility.
Things to think about:
1. Hitler was in a Tommy-esque situation. Imagine if halfway into his political career, what would have happened if Hitler decided to shout to his audience that he had realized he was being immoral and so was everyone following him? I think his audience would have acted just as Tommy’s did. He would have been killed and possibly replaced by a puppet, who could better allow people to be the malicious selves they want to be. I believe this is what Hannah Arendt noticed in the trial of Adolf Eichmann. She was trying to highlight institutional evil.
2. What was up with the captor that held Bauria? I don’t have a good idea of how to process his psychology. I think that Camille Paglia’s quote “Men chase by night those they will not greet by day.” is relevant. I think that sexual predation may be a result of society not properly socializing its men. But it’s definitely more complicated than that.
3. Bauria says after she wards off Tommy’s attackers, that her worst mistake was trying to sell the packet of drugs she found. I think this brings up the important question of whether she would prefer her life had she not done it at the end of the movie, or like Nietzsche’s “Amor Fati” she would maybe many years later come to prefer her life gone down the path that it had so she could become who she became. Obviously at that moment when she is saying this, she would absolutely prefer this whole era of her life rather not have happened, but would this still hold true, 10 or 20 or 50 years into her future?
4. Before Bauria’s recapture, Tommy says “Why don’t you quit?”, and she replies “Punjab? Or the needle?”. I think this brilliantly states the duality of the environment and the individual in drug addiction. It is not enough to quit one, one must quit both.
5. There were maaaany other characters of significance that I do not have the time to explore.
So, <RATING HIDDEN>, because of the lack of politicians’ redemption. Fantastic movie! Thanks Akshay for choosing it.
Peace,
Aman
<RATING HIDDEN>: See my rating and review here: https://letterboxd.com/twistedaman/film/udta-punjab/
