There’s poetry in RGV’s fall and it’s kind of brilliant

Ram Gopal Varma became a pugilist at an age when most artists - most artists who endure - become composer-conductors. His gaze has since then become too fixed and his eyes don't avert easily.

He seems to be on a perennial quest to throw punches, often at bored and, sometimes, invisible opponents.

Since his 2005 release Sarkar, Varma has relentlessly taken one character after another and tried to build a shrine for each of those characters.

As a director, his standout attribute seems to be a talent for capturing people, all dispersed in a sea of superlatives: at their most menacing, their most thoughtful, at their crudest, at their thirstiest, moving from very afraid to super frightened, the extreme rage expressed as uncontrollable raunchiness, or trapped in that supremely serene moment after which a bullet is put through their temples.

In Varma's world, one that he occupies today, there are only high points and even a whimper is a personal best.

"They are everywhere and their omnipresence suggests an artist's confidence - a return to form perhaps," hopes a friend.

True that the posters of Ram Gopal Varma's Veerappan are everywhere I go.

There's Veerappan - Varma's reimagining of the former dacoit: growling, teeth-gnashing, eyeballs-glaring, almost frothing at the mouth, kvetching; in general terms, looking very, very pissed-off.

And in those posters is embedded the biggest proof and the biggest beauty of the goof-up that Varma has been committing for more than a decade now. 

10,000-plus internet images of the real Veerappan and here are the most recurring emotions expressed: contentment, curiosity, maybe even a search for compassion, and a strong sadness commonly seen in newspaper photographs of mass murderers.

Stacking the posters against the real-life shots, what strikes one as most ironical is that Varma just doesn't get what the real Veerappan knew all along: that if, in his pictures, he would just pare down his style and his horrors, and let our imaginations fill in from the terrifying stories we would read about him, he would seem like a true master.

In the theatre of the real Veerappan, psychological havoc was inflicted not through reinforcement, but through contrast.

And such was the deep-contrast between the dacoit's exploits and his sad-looking face that it's only the word Veerappan on Varma's movie posters that suggests anything close to an ever-threatening danger; and all that the faces on the posters seem to be doing is "parodying that sense of danger".

"It's not even cool, anymore, to trash RGV," the friend, opines.

Agree, but I think Ram Gopal Varma's is a case study to note, because it isn't the clean-cut tragic tale of a man who frittered away all his talents. It fits, more, in the mythic mould, as a story of someone who faded away, chasing the wrong kind of perfection.

Not many people seem to have an instinct for memory.

Not many seem to remember that even when he was dubbed the "Voice of the Vanguard" Varma was always a man with a weakness for the grand splashes - citing, on numerous occasions The Sound of Music, The Exorcist, and Sholay, among his ideals.

Varma didn't become a vanguard-director by conscious choice but because he couldn't afford making the grand movies, he so loved.

And like it's true of all artists pushed to the wall, courage became his natural expression and subversion, his chief preoccupation. There were aspects of heroism he had worshipped as a child and now was the time to invert them.

To scale his heroic men down naturally, he distributed their energies all around and that gave his frames and his characters a sense of vividness we hadn't experienced till then. His poverty was, in a sense, enriching his art.

In Varma's movies, dockyard heroism took the form of street machismo; veiled dispensers of vigilante justice became nightwalkers; the confident leading men became the bumbling heroes; quick-thinking men became fast-talking men; sidekicks became guardians of honour; Vijay became Bhiku Mhatre.

Varma changed the rules of filmmaking at a rapid pace, but hardly tinkered with our presets of viewing pleasure.

When Satya shoots Jagga, point-blank, in Jagga's own den, that was the familiar underdog uprising turned inside out. The difference was in the aftertaste: it was paranoia, as vital as blood. 

Back then, those who called him the rule-breaker didn't even realise that the rule-breaking part of Varma stemmed actually from his love for popular cinema; in fact, popular cinema for Varma was the true catalyst.

Company, 2002; when Malik climbs the stairs to Aslam Ali's house, there are his long legs that hardly pause for air and his shoe-heels that make ominous sounds - like someone heading to clean the Augean Stables.

Nothing showy there; just that, it affects you in ways you can't quite verbalise. And yet, there is a familiar sense of heroism about that scene which when viewed from a distance, gives off new meanings.  

Visceral art works only as a movement against mass art (which has its own virtues). Transmutation is the key.

However, when visceral art is applied straight to mass art, it turns itself into banality, into self-conscious trash.

What Sarkar granted Ram Gopal Varma was a sense of security but what it took away in good deal was his verve.

Movies that are made by "surviving each day" and movies that are made with "great comfort" call for two very different kinds of disciplines; they require two different sorts of directing talents.

Last year, Anurag Kashyap faltered with Bombay Velvet primarily because the project wasn't scaled to suit his febrile temperament.

There was a brand of heroism Varma always loved, one from which he had created his own brand of self-effacing heroism, but Sarkar called for nothing but absolute prostration. 

This was, perhaps, the kind of movie that got Varma started on the movies, but by the time he got down to making it, his temperament was so attuned to taking the primitive and turning it into visceral, that he turned Sarkar into self-conscious trash.

It takes two to make an accident and what further sent the man drifting away, was the general press consensus: If it is an RGV movie, it has to be great.

The truth, however, was that Sarkar was the Varma movie, to that date, with the least amount of vitality - a movie that was exhausting because everything in it was just "big numbers".

And yet, most reviews of Sarkar just applauded the effrontery. 

An enfant-terrible appreciated for his mediocrity, slides down fast. So lousier Varma movies broke through one after another, and at the same rate with which he had once changed the rules.

Something like Aag wasn't an aberration but a culmination, the nerve-centre of which could be traced back to that moment when he decided to polish aspects of his moviemaking that were beautiful only in their unpolished forms.

Perfection is a marketing goal; the ultimate artistic goal, perhaps, is pursuit of truth. For an artist, edginess is in his fluids; for a marketer, it's a pin on his lapel.

An artist's "touches" becomes a marketer's "scream". And in his very nucleus, Ram Gopal Varma, today, operates out of "marketing briefs" and not "artistic briefs".

This means that even if those snappy camera-angles and deafening background scores are taken out, Varma's movies will continue to irk.

They say Ingmar Bergman's subject was always "The Human Face".

But those were faces captured at their most unrehearsed. Ram Gopal Varma wants to create shrines out of the faces he captures but they are "planned shrines".

Worse, he now wants to raise everything in his frames - everything from a coffee mug to a stone - to the level of a shrine. 

When failure "happens" to great artists, it can be accounted for. Sometimes, the artists end up losing their touch permanently and many other times, they regain it magically.

Like it was once the case with his successes, Ram Gopal Varma has today created a new standard for failures. For when an artist so meticulously plans his failure, the sting is felt beyond the realm of a cautionary tale.

It becomes the search for an apocalyptic orgasm.