Warning: The dialogues mentioned in the article can be triggering to some. Reader discretion is advised.
Animal released last Friday, and it came with a lot of ‘discourse’. There are two very divided sides – as was the intent – as it was promised. We can or cannot call out the misogyny. We can or cannot talk about the filmmaking. At this point, any discussion would make sense to people, and it wouldn’t to the rest. How we perceive the film and how we critique it, will not be met with a healthy discourse. It’s one of those times where calling out something for being wrong is met with more criticism than the wrong.
However, this is also one of those times where having any opinion will say a lot about you – because things are no longer entirely grey. So, it’s better that people choose what they think of the film.
Here are some dialogues for context, given that writing is just as much an element a film.
1. A scene establishes the beginning of the relationship – where Vijay suggests that Geetanjali should chose him over her fiance because he’s an alpha-man. He goes on to say that HE THINKS she can bear healthy children.
2. He also hates his existing brother-in-law, and so he tells his single sister that he’d choose the man she marries. This is how it goes:
3. Since he hates the brother-in-law, he also expresses his desire to kill him. Vijay then goes ahead to warn his sisters.
4. Vijay thinks his wife whines too much about menstruating, and he has bigger problems – given that he faces health issues. So he feels the need to compare the two things.
5. Here’s how he asks a woman to prove her love:
6. Vijay also thinks that there should be a sense of fear in a marriage, and women should be kept ‘in control’.
7. Since Vijay comes from a LOT of privilege, he wears a certain kind of undergarment that is washed with a specific detergent. It pisses him off when that doesn’t happen.
8. He threatens his wife with physical abuse.
9. Then he tells her that she shouldn’t wear clothes that are revealing, to turn him on, because he can manage THAT in a jiffy.
10. Vijay thinks going around and threatening to murder people is normal, when it comes to protecting the family. He ‘protects’ women from men, but there’s no man to protect the same women from him.
11. There are evident daddy issues.
12. After he cheats on his wife, she says that she’ll do the same thing to see how he’d react – given that he wanted her to forgive him. He also threatens to kill the person who’d come close to her.
13. Aziz, who’s another one of the “bad guys,” says this to a woman – because she thought she was nauseated at the sight of blood.
14. He controls the lives of the women around him, because he’s ‘a man’.
I’m not saying hate it. I’m saying, you can justify ANYTHING, if you’re hell bent on supporting it.