Binge drinking, binge watching and the downward trajectory of Indian cinema

“Binge watching” is a term whose popularity has soared in direct proportion to the detonation of the OTT epidemic. The first usage of the word binge, recorded in AB Evans’ Leicestershire Words, Phrases and Proverbs (1848), was as a dialectical verb meaning, “to soak in water a wooden vessel, that would otherwise leak; to tighten up; putting hot water into a churn to make the wood swell before putting in the milk”.

AB Evans, the Headmaster of the Market Bosworth Free Grammar School, also supplies another delightful connotation of binge: “A doyed a-bingein’ [i.e., died binging] is a not uncommon comment on the death of a drunkard, implying that his constitution was not strong enough to stand the process of making himself drink-proof.”

By 1854, binge was used both as a noun and verb to almost exclusively mean “soak up alcohol, drink heavily.” In fact, the Kannada-ised English word “tight,” has retained the original connotation of binge: i.e., heavy intoxication. Some phenomena are universal constants, transcending space and time.

Around World War I, the usage of binge extended to gluttonous bouts as well. Fast forward seventy years and the term, Binge-watching trumpeted its appearance in 1996, the gilded age of videotapes and the dawn of DVDs in America.

Netflix born as DVD rental service

Fifteen years since binge-watching has been transformed into a quasi-idiom in what is known as popular culture, and OTT has globalised binge-watching and has Americanised Indian cinema in an asphyxiating sense.

On the consumer side, the ongoing binge-watching frenzy across the world evokes Somerset Maugham’s terse, eerie and captivating description of the visuals of those infamous Chinese opium dens of the early 20^th century: “It is dimly lit. The room is low and squalid. In one corner a lamp burns mysteriously before a hideous image and incense fills the theatre with its exotic scent. A pig-tailed Chinaman wanders to and fro, aloof and saturnine, while on wretched pallets lie stupefied the victims of the drug. Now and then one of them breaks into frantic raving. There is a highly dramatic scene where some poor creature, unable to pay for the satisfaction of his craving, with prayers and curses begs the villainous proprietor for a pipe to still his anguish.”

Maugham has painted in prose a compelling miniature of addiction. Without stretching the analogy too far, the “villainous proprietor” in our context can be likened to faceless and impersonal technology which literally pushes the binge-watching fix in gazillion packets of Zeros and Ones at lightning speeds right down into our palms.

The global OTT streaming market is currently valued around $140 billion and is pacing ahead roughly at a CAGR of 15 per cent. The spinoff or ancillary market that it has spawned is the movie and web series review industry, which has created thriving, niche media houses and wealthy, individual reviewers. These are substantial if not undeniable economic indicators of the extent of normalised binge-watching.

Even without making any value judgements about the binge-watching epidemic, there exists an eminent case for examining the course of a recent social and cultural trajectory.

Chalo, picture dekhne chalte hai!

“Going to the movies,” “chalo, picture dekhne chalte hai,” used to be the ubiquitous indicator mostly denoting an event involving family or friends or both. To a large extent, it still is, and it cohabits with the rapid and pervasive incursions made by OTT. But the haste with which all film production houses across the world are scurrying to hawk their goods on streaming platforms barely weeks after the theatrical release tells a separate story.

In pre-liberalisation India, movie-watching involved deliberate planning, budgeting and project execution. The first victims of the post-liberalisation era were the drive-in theatres. These were not merely movie-watching expeditions but a tasty gamut of sensory experiences one used to boast about. Single-screen theatres were felled next, and the ensuing consequences are familiar to most of us living in the regime of multiplexes.

But the underlying social impulse or outlook towards cinema had remained the same for decades: apart from being just another form of entertainment, cinema was simply a pastime or an enjoyable hobby at most. Among other things, technology, globalisation and wealth-generation at unprecedented levels have altered this social and cultural landscape in a far-reaching fashion.

Two other intrinsic forces were at play as well.

The first was that the middle-class India of the pre-liberalisation era actually frowned upon watching movies excessively, regarding them as corrupting if not corrosive influences. This socio-cultural attitude has proven to be one of the most durable civilisational inheritances, having its origins almost in the dawn of drama.

Every Dharmasastra treatise unequivocally and unanimously warns about the tainting influence of drama and reserves severe condemnation for actors. Likewise, every text on statecraft including the Arthasastra recommends unleashing spies to invigilate the behaviour and lifestyle of actors and to track their movements.

Spilling well over into the 19^th century, Europe also had punitive laws punishing actors who entered a village or town on the grounds that they would corrupt and debase the morals of fine young virgins belonging to respectable families. For centuries, actors were forbidden from receiving sacraments unless they gave up their immoral profession. It might sound harsh and vulgar, but the recent slew of sordid and sleazy revelations from Bollywood have unambiguously proven that reality triumphs over even the ‘vulgarest’ imagination.

The pre-liberalisation period in India also boasted of an impressive marquee of truly well-informed and erudite film reviewers who were able to place both a specific movie and cinema overall, in perspective. It is still a treat to read those archives, and especially, the standard of movie reviews published in South India were truly exceptional. That corpus of reviews still remains a collector’s delight. Filmmakers of that era were justifiably terrified of these reviewers.

There was also a non-filmy side to this: it was only on rare occasions that filmmakers and film stars were invited to discourse on issues beyond films…on everything from open heart surgery and India’s GDP to Mangalyan.

Woven with the first was the second force. This force was represented by the class that comprised both filmmakers and refined connoisseurs of art. This class correctly regarded cinema as an art form and an aesthetic experience. It was not merely an outlook or an academic approach that this class had consciously cultivated. It was the natural flow of a millennia-old aesthetic tradition that this class was proud to have inherited, imbibed and then infused into cinema.

The essence of the two aforementioned forces is that a healthy balance and stability were maintained. Rousing agitation, promoting extremism and pushing the toxic Leftist ideology by using cinema as a cloak was still nascent. That propaganda would come much later as we shall see.

[To be continued]

The author is the founder and chief editor, The Dharma Dispatch. Views expressed are personal.

Read all the Latest News, Trending News, Cricket News, Bollywood News,
India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.