One of the most ridiculous accusations hurled at Celine Song’s underwhelming new film Materialists was that it was peddling “broke man propaganda.” Some folks felt that Dakota Johnson’s self-centred character made the wrong decision by choosing the rudderless struggling actor played by Chris Evans at the end of the film, when she could’ve easily married Pedro Pascal’s multimillionaire instead. How could Materialists, they wondered, encourage independent young women to settle for a loving relationship when they could enter a financially secure marriage of convenience? Romance movie tenets aside, this was a wake-up call for the rest of us. Younger audiences aren’t watching movies like they’re supposed to be watched; they’re viewing them through an entirely new lens. They don’t care about underdog narratives or the power of true love. For them, a happy ending involves compromise; for them, it makes all the sense in the world for Johnson’s character to have abandoned someone who doesn’t bring value to her life. You wonder how the same people would react to something as earnest as La La Land, or even something as beloved as Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa.
The original “broke man propaganda” movie, Pyaasa was released in 1957. It was directed, produced, and co-written by Dutt himself. After years of making genre films for others, he gazed inwards, confronted the demons festering in his mind and soul, and produced something so personal that it should’ve been seen as a cry for help. It wasn’t. In Pyaasa, he plays a destitute poet named Vijay; educated but unemployed, loved by his mother but disowned by everyone else. He wanders around town, clutching his precious poems next to his heart, hoping to get them published. It is revealed that his old lover left him for a wealthy publisher, because he was jobless and broke. Fate brings the three of them together, and drama unfolds.
Film star Guru Dutt and Mala Sinha in Pyaasa. (Express archive photo)
Pyaasa is like Materialists, if it were told from the perspective of Evans’ character. He’s waiting tables when we first meet him, serving beverages and hors d’oeuvres to his ex-girlfriend and her wealthy new suitor. A similar scene unfolds in Pyaasa, when Vijay is made to serve drinks to his ex-partner at a party thrown by his boss, her husband. In both stories, the tortured artists are as seen as a burden on society, deserving of being dumped by their upwardly mobile girlfriends. Of course, we’re supposed to sympathise with them. But then, why did audiences view Evans’ character with such disdain?
Having grown up in a post-recession world, the Gen Z are in an even worse position than the millennials. Not only are they entering the job market at the dawn of the AI age, they’re also unwilling to sacrifice their personal well-being for a future that’ll barely be spent above the poverty line. Their predecessors weren’t like this. Conditioned to internalise a low self-worth, millennials put up with just about everything. Until, that is, they entered the quarter-life crisis phase that Johnson and Evans’ characters in Materialists seem to be floating in. Remember, they’re probably in their early 30s, while all the criticism for the movie is coming from people who’re at least a decade younger. This demographic doesn’t view the world the same way; they haven’t lived through 10 years of corporate slavery to realise that it isn’t worth it.
Guru Dutt and Mehmood in the film. (Express archive photo)
While Vijay in Pyaasa had the misfortune of graduating from college only a few years after Independence, millennials like Evans’ character came of age in a world disillusioned by the one-two-three punch of warfare, a recession, and a pandemic. He could be forgiven for shunning material wealth in pursuit of his passion. But does the world care for such characters? They would, if he was a successful actor on Broadway and not someone who performs in cramped basements to a crowd of 15 people. His artistry could remain the same, but his individual worth will always be attached to abstract ideas like fame and money.
Not a single person who reads Vijay’s poems in Pyaasa is left unaffected by them. While it’s never really established if Evans’ character is actually talented, there can be no doubt that Vijay is a gifted writer. And yet, the publisher refuses to run his work because he isn’t established. Of course, when a volume of his poems is released after his supposed suicide, Vijay is garlanded with posthumous success. He is hailed by the public, perhaps like Vincent van Gogh was many years earlier. Vijay observes from the sidelines, fulfilling the morbid curiosity of someone interested in knowing who’d show up at their funeral. His cynical suspicions about the world confirmed, Vijay denounces his past life. “Yeh duniya agar mil bhi jaaye toh kya hai (If these are the people whose validation I crave, I don’t want it),” he sings at the end of Pyaasa, framed in striking Christ-like pose, taking a omniscient view of the chaos around him.
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Guru Dutt and Waheeda Rehman in the film Pyaasa. (Express archive photo)
Like Van Gogh, Dutt struggled with mental health during his lifetime. They died at roughly the same age. Untreated mental illness often manifests in feelings of self-pity. Because Dutt couldn’t comprehend what he was feeling, and because his illness remained unaddressed and undiagnosed, he began blaming the world for his predicament. Not because the world was actually to blame — it’s equally unfair to everybody that inhabits it — but because this was the only way he could make sense of his feelings. Why else would he write a character who is unemployed, unloved, abandoned, and alone? Pyaasa’s narrative mustn’t be viewed as realistic. It is an expressionistic peek inside a depressed mind.
And this is perhaps why the character endures. There are others like him out there, especially in our country. India has much work to do when it comes to respecting the arts and supporting the mentally sensitive. Ask yourself this, why are the two most popular archetypes in Indian cinema the ‘Angry Young Man’ and the ‘Devdas’? They occupy the two extremes of the male psyche, but they reflect the reality of what untreated men in our country experience daily: rage and sorrow. Pyaasa quenches their thirst to be seen and heard.
Post Credits Scene is a column in which we dissect new releases every week, with particular focus on context, craft, and characters. Because there’s always something to fixate about once the dust has settled.
