Left out, yet Fixed in
Image: Unsplash
As a child about I never questioned the four to five Tamil song sequences in each movie. I didn’t know why they were there, but I knew it was normal for Tamil movies to include them. While they weren't musicals, they also I couldn't imagine them in any other way. As I got older, I started to wonder about the placement of songs that rarely enhanced the movie’s plot in any way.
I viewed these songs as separate from the movie entirely, having a purpose all on their own. Item songs, in particular, locked in identities, especially of female sexuality. Often, the messages within these songs and movies, in general, were directed at Tamil women, despite not ever featuring Tamil women on-screen. While this isn’t necessarily a call for representation because representation without any fundamental changes to how the industry works would not amount to anything other than tokenization, it’s worth speaking about.
The concept of “the gaze” or “the look” has been theorized in many ways. When we speak about the “male gaze”, concerning cinema, we refer to the images portrayed on screen constructed for and by cishet men. These images, including songs, fix Tamil women into a version of sexuality, which made the most amount of money. Interrogating how these images infiltrate our social, political and personal spheres reveals their impact on our minds over time. Our response to on-screen images and dialogues holds the potential to eliminate the gaze that essentializes identities.
Revisiting movies from my childhood, almost 20 years later, I’ve been able to reclaim certain narratives despite movie makers’ original intentions. For Neelambari from Padayappa, who is arguably the most iconic character ever to grace the screen via a Tamil movie, provides a different reading of this gaze. Characterized as an antagonist in the movie, written off as “modern” or “foreign” due to her time abroad consistently placing her “outside” of Tamil culture. However, reclaiming her narrative as an example of challenging the male gaze is integral in remembering the character and her influence.
This is especially evident in the song Minsara Kanna. In the song, some scenes enter a fantasy between Padayappa and Neelambari. When I first watched the movie, I didn’t understand why the scenes were added; the Bharathanatyam was capable of carrying the song on its own. Now, having watched the movie again, I realized that those scenes are Neelambari’s fantasies. The song ends with Neelambari kissing Padayappa in front of a crowd of people. In 2021, Neelambari is the main character: subverting the gaze and standing in the power of her sexuality.
“Our response to on-screen images and dialogues holds the potential to eliminate the gaze that essentializes identities.”
The gaze that fixes identities into a particular time frame or cultural understanding of gender and sexuality pairs with another kind of gaze: one that regulates us. Surveilling women, a result of the internalization of messages that deem women needing to be tamed, continues to permeate our spaces. The digital space has reignited conversations on culture. While there has been a variety of commentary on the purpose of culture, we forget that culture changes. Culture has changed before, and it will change again. Participating in disciplining women online for wearing what they want has nothing to do with preserving culture and everything to do with misogyny. I return, here, to the item songs I mentioned before. Placing sexuality within the walls of 4 or 5-minute song sequences implies that a particular kind of sexuality can only exist in a contained space, in private. How we bring these images into the public spaces shifts consciousness.
In other words: We look back at what is looking at us.
