The Viewfinder is a fortnightly column by writer and critic Rahul Desai, that looks at films through a personal lens.
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When I was a child, I watched movies about grown-ups. Grown-ups falling in love, grown-ups fighting, grown-ups speaking, grown-ups winning, crying and singing. These adult characters rarely behaved like they had a past. Their personalities played out in a vacuum. I never knew where they came from, but I always knew where they were going. Once I was older, I watched movies about growing up. But these weren’t stories about actual kids and teenagers. Instead, a specific kind of growing up was implied. I took a fancy to protagonists who were the fragile consequences of dysfunctional families. I was captivated by the way they rebelled against their past. I was intrigued by how they existed despite themselves.
In savouring the symptoms of the shattered, I noticed a pattern.
Only the extremes of the spectrum have earned the scrutiny of storytelling. Only the theatrical have earned the language of cinema. There are the gifted ones who grow up by refusing to grow old – the outliers who aggressively overcompensate for their lost youth. Like the tragedy of Jackson Maine in A Star is Born, a wasted singer who tries to transfer his spirit to a purer soul before perishing. Or the triumph of Beth Harmon in The Queen’s Gambit, a troubled chess prodigy enabled by the demons of her history. Or even the tragic triumph of Brendon Conlon in Warrior, a haunted MMA fighter determined to give his family the future he never had. Each is a product of formative damage – some of them survivors, others victims.
Then there are the emotionally stunted geniuses who grow old by refusing to grow up. Take, for instance, the toxic celebrities who physically avenge their stolen childhoods. From the documentaries unpacking the legacies of Michael Jackson and Tiger Woods to the semi-autobiographical Honey Boy of Shia LaBeouf, there is no dearth of cautionary tales in this category. The spotlight accentuates their shadowy silhouette. Whether real or fictional, the common thread is universal: Monsters and magicians aren’t born, they are created. The flashbacks are ugly. Forced to be adults during their adolescence, they become defiant adolescents in their adulthood. More often than not, their juvenility perseveres, emerging in reckless spurts to consolidate the canonised link between art and abuse.
But there’s also another invisible sort of dysfunctionality.
It’s a pattern that is reserved for the ordinary, for the every-people who escape the binary shackles of fame and fortune. Not everyone reacts to trauma in 70mm; some of us heal in modest hand-painted strokes. It’s the grey straddling the pitch blacks and blinding whites. I know this unfilmable colour all too well.
I felt older than my years as a youngster. My knee-jerk response to two parents in a stormy marriage was unusual. While my heroic on-screen counterparts burnt holes in the fabric of destiny, I went the opposite way. The rockier the boat got, the more righteous I became. My childhood was a reactionary exercise in course correction. Maybe I felt the inherent urge to balance out their vices – the drinking, the smoking, the parties, the screaming matches, the unseen violence – by being the only ‘adult’ in the house. Consequently, I never broke curfew. I rarely lied. I made my own tuition schedules. I lectured wayward friends. I intended to marry the first girl I dated. I was a 13-year-old agony aunt. I became the paragon of morality – a teen of vengeful virtue.
This extended into my college years. While classmates discovered the joys of quarter bars and impromptu Goa trips, my idea of cutting loose was three consecutive films in the nearest cinema hall. While friends planned a post-graduation backpacking trip across the country, I braced for job interviews. I resisted the impulses of youth. The primal immediacy of home had turned me into a “sorted” kid – the kind that other parents referred to while berating their own. I didn’t bother with higher studies abroad because I couldn’t imagine leaving my parents alone with one another. In fact I rarely travelled; the guilt of being away superseded the glee of escaping.
It’s only after my parents separated that I woke up from this trance of borrowed maturity. Suddenly, I was left with the shrapnel of missed time. I subconsciously started doing all the things I should have a decade ago. I became a confused drifter. I discovered the headiness of social drinking. I dated and made mistakes, loved and unloved. I learnt a new sport. I embarked on adventurous college-budget trips. I made online friends. I shared an apartment. I slacked. I zoned out of political conversations. I daydreamed. A stable career seemed like a distant prospect. In short, I relived my college days after failing to live them properly. Much of my 20s was spent in a growing body vehemently at odds with its teenage zest.
I’m 34 now, but my head has long embraced the existential dread of the 20s. Marriage and investments still seem like something “elders” did. Kids annoy me. Banks unnerve me. Commitment weakens me. Romantic relationships crumble as soon as a future comes into view. I seek out hostels and cheap bars while travelling. I shy away from materialism and luxuries. I prefer my own company. I choose exotic backpacking trips over owning a car or house. I pay taxes only so that I don’t face visa-application problems. I hate paying bills. My passion is my profession. I relate to the fitful anxiety of 20-something strangers more than the shackled strife of my 30-something friends. I exercise and eat like I’m 25 – without method, rashly, in quantity rather than quality. (A vague equivalent: a marriage defined by a sizable age difference, except both partners are me.)
I suspect my 40s will see me mentally enter my 30s. Love may finally assume the dimensions of a practical position instead of a theoretical construct. I may never “lose control” like the quintessential man-child; my onwardness will never be dramatic enough to be storified. This is because mine is perhaps a brand of in-between dysfunctionality where evolution is neither arrested nor retarded; it is simply delayed. Growing up becomes a belated phase rather than a volatile threat. It is an eventuality – a when, not an if – that has elegantly postponed its own arc so that my life can reclaim the linearity of its narrative. I started old, grew young and continued into oldness.
I still look for representation on movie screens. But I only find the driven and the destroyed. The underdogs and the wolves. It’s difficult to script a human who flouts the social norms of age, as opposed to a character who flaunts a sustained resistance to time. As a result, I’ve spent the last decade feeling behind the curve: slower than the rest, a ‘marble short’ so to speak. But the truth is more nuanced. The cultural discord between what you do and what you’re supposed to do diminishes with age. I imagine being an 80-year-old geezer living – thinking, breathing, working, walking – like a 65-year-old man. Suddenly the intellectual dissonance looks less pronounced.
Perhaps today’s late-bloomer stigma is tomorrow’s superpower. And dysfunctionality, just an altered form of functionality. To paraphrase the heart of M Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable trilogy: The broken are the champions of evolution...but the deferred are the athletes of revolution. After all, what is living if not a busy adjournment of dying?
Read more from 'The Viewfinder' series here.
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