Hindi Cinema is a business — but does it have to be junk food store?

It is no surprise to the frequent fan that, in recent times, Bollywood has been dethroned as regional cinema dominates the country, with moviegoers preferring stories from the South. While rescreening films isn’t foreign to the industry, with the iconic Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) still running at Mumbai’s Maratha Mandir, Bollywood leaning on it as a source of revenue and relevance shows the extent of its present woes.
The current existential crisis that faces the industry is this — has Bollywood done away with original storytelling? Not only is there an absence of originality, but also a surge in art that disconnects with creativity, the core of filmmaking. The preference for lazily using formulaic scripts over spending resources on diversity voices another deafening truth — the McDonaldisation of Bollywood.

Coined by sociologist George Ritzer, McDonaldisation is a phenomenon where the principles of the fast-food restaurant have dominated the food industry and much of the global market. It is sobering to see how principles of uniformity, cost control and portion regulation, initially intended for MacDees, have found their way in Bollywood. Audiences are forced to purchase a standardised selection assembled monotonously together, void of any creativity to prioritise efficiency, predictability, and control. Quality is equated with quantity, which means more of the same but on escalating scales.

The entertainment industry is transactional in nature. The commodification of stories and actors into consumable bytes of film, being sold to be “eaten” by the viewer is further bastardised when hundreds of films come out, in quick succession of each other. A combo meal supposedly gives you the “very best” of the selection. What will quench your thirst? A tall drink of Punjabi rap songs written by a Badshah or Honey Singh lookalike or item songs and hook steps that are choreographed just for its social media audiences? The initial hype, or fizz dies down with time and what you’re left with is a flat musical score that has little recall value.

Would you like a side of fries with that? How about tired and recycled side characters who are invariably short, overweight, or best of all, a caricature of a minority community, so that your hero can shine.

And how would you like your burger? Your plot — rare, medium, or overdone? Bollywood is now entering its universe era where all spy or horror movies are connected. Characters feature in 30 second cameos, inside jokes bounce from one film to another. Bollywood’s jaded “reuse, reduce, recycle” consciousness makes space for tired tropes and moulds and sadly enough, gets rid of creative risk and experiment.

If films are the opiate of the masses, the middle-class man likes to go to the movie theatre to escape their dreary reality. Is it fair then to use the principle of a first-food chain in a film, a medium that is supposed to be egalitarian and representative? Art is a business, but it needn’t be a burger.

The writer is an intern with The Indian Express