Masala Movie, Profound Dialogues


Late one night, when I couldn’t fall asleep, I decided to watch some TV. And as luck would have it, I ended up watching a very thought provoking exchange of dialogues in the movie, The International. The movie’s a regular Hollywood masala flick about a very powerful, evil bank versus an Interpol agent, Louis Salinger.

The part I saw has Salinger trying to get a very old ex-communist from East Germany, Wilhelm Wexler (who is now a senior guy at the bank) to spill the beans on the bank. Salinger tries to use ideology to persuade Wexler to defect and asks him how a man who supported communism and hated capitalism all his life could now be working for such a big, capitalistic institution? I loved Wexler’s answer:
“Well, this is the difference between truth and fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”
That is so true. Our lives don’t necessarily have a “purpose”, it often just seems to meander on; and I don’t mean that in a “I am so depressed; let me kill myself” kind of way.

A couple of minutes later, the old man goes on to explain why life is that way:
“We cannot control the things life does to us. They are done before you know it, and once they are done, they make you do other things. Until at last everything comes between you and the man you wanted to be.”
Or as they say: one thing leads to another. And before you know it, you can be completely and often irreversibly off course from where you wanted to be.

In case all this sounds very depressing, then wait till you hear Salinger’s response to the above:
“Sometimes you find your destiny on the road you took to avoid it.”
Sometimes. You just have to hope that it happens to you yet.

What is it about Western audiences that allows for such dialogues from both the bad and good guys even in their masala movies?

Comments

  1. KumarFebruary 15, 2013 at 12:18 PM

    Why, what Spiderman said has become a good quote, "With power comes great responsibility".

    Not that it is not known before but something about he way Spiderman uttered it makes it catchy. (That quote is extremely relevant in India where there is a scam a week. Our politicians have gone by the motto for decades now, "With power comes great money (yes, yes - for politicians' comfort and personal use), and with power comes a lot of people falling at our feet and praising us like god for improper favors; and once power comes, there is of course the ability for us, the politicians, to stay above the law!")

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