I was not ready for Dorothy.

I was not ready for Dorothy.

I cried, continued to cry as I watched the film. Not that kind of crying that comes with a sentimental scene, where you wipe away your tear and move on. I simply couldn’t. I felt very uncomfortable, anxious and eventually content. I am trying to comprehend all of it.

I have encountered this sort of violence before- in literature and cinema that stubbornly refuses to let us look away.

When I first read The Begetter by Imayam, I was a college student. It was a part of my syllabus and I had to present it to the class. I read the night before, I couldn’t sleep. A lump in my throat refused to move.

 The honour-killing episode and the violence inflicted consciously by the society broke something open in me. It wasn’t the violence that affected me but the terrible familiarity of it. The way such violence can be made inevitable, sanctioned and even ordinary within the structures that produce and sustain gender inequality.

 The next day while I was presenting the novel, I cried again and so did my classmates too.

And then, after years came Dorothy. The film unsettled me right from the beginning.

The way it dealt with violence – almost with an unsettling ease - made me anxious. The world of men and the conditioning they impose upon themselves and  the women around them, felt suffocating because it was all familiar and real. 

Men should not cry. They  can instead channelise the grief into anger or participate in violence, but they are not allowed to grieve - particularly not over women.

Usually, a story gives its engagers a scope for purgation, an emotional space to grieve or lament over the loss. Dorothy often refused me that comfort, up until one point. After which a major tragedy happens and against my wish, the plot stayed stagnant. The overwhelming grief became almost impossible to bear. There was no easy way to evade it. And perhaps that is precisely what the film is doing.

 

A seemingly simple premise – two childhood friends fall in love while one of them begins to experience their gender identity as fluid, causing  a rupture- opens into something much larger. Almost every frame carries the weight of caste, gender oppression and no character is free of its shackles.

The same system that suppresses men and women in different ways, abhors queer people. The irony is the system promises power to men, but their vulnerabilities has to be exhibited only through anger or violence. It tells men they are free but strictly policing how they grieve, speak, love and express tenderness.

The system confines women in the name of honour, tradition, protection and morality.  And what of people who associate between these two rigid gender binaries?

 Though the queerness is central to the plot, the film’s concern exceeds queerness. A larger concern where the societal structures decide how a man and a woman should be, but what of those who fall out of such rigid definitions.

Because patriarchy does not only suppress women but also the feminine in men. It tells men that softness is weakness, tears and vulnerabilities are to be concealed.

What becomes an outlet for such vulnerabilities?  Anger? Violence?  

 This is what kept returning to me while watching Dorothy: what becomes the valve when the suppressed tenderness and vulnerability in a man reach their  threshold?

 

I was not ready for Dorothy.

But perhaps that is exactly why I needed to watch it