A Crazy Little Idea... To Begin With... The Virus...The Idea Itself...!!!

What Is Reel? What Is Real? What is Unreal? Is the Reel Always the Unreal? Or is the Real Always in a Way Reflected in the Reel? Is what we see on screen the reflection of the real life? Or what the screen or the Reel projects into our minds, later, grow and shape our Reality? These are the FAQs painfully thrown at the world of Cinema and TV and the people habituating this ambiguous world.

There is no simple answer to this complex question. But let’s attempt to find some believable conclusion and conglomeration between this eternal love-hate relationship of the Reel and the Real.

Well, honestly, and with all humility, I believe, that we, the dream merchants, the cast and crew of the so-called ‘Glamor World’ (Oh! They see our Glamor but fail to notice the Grit, the Grime, the Blood, Sweat and Toil, but that’s another topic altogether!!!) are possessed by this Dichotomy between the Reel and the Real. And our pathetic yet glorious state is best described in the dialogues of the much-applauded movie ‘Inception’, “She (Mal) was possessed by an idea, this one, very simple idea, that changed everything. That our world wasn't real. That she needed to wake up to come back to reality, that, in order to get back home, we had to kill ourselves.”

We, the ones who are passionately in love with the world of Cinema and Television and the weird, real-surreal world of the Audio-visual are almost in a similar state as Mal from the movie. We all are possessed by an ‘Idea’… the ‘Idea of Creation’ that constantly makes us feel that the world we live in is not ‘enough’ Real… just a bit short of ‘Really’ satisfying…and so we need to Create…we are possessed by the virus of an Idea that only ‘Creating’ is Real... very much in accordance with Plato’s concept of the ‘Original’ and the ‘Copy’ and the constant jostle between which one comes before the other, I presume, and hence this ‘Idea of Creation’ bugs us… eats us up day in and day out and drives us up to making every Friday box office rush and every Wednesday TV TRP traffic work out at their best.  Like Mal, our world, the one we live in, in our all physicality is only part real. We are mostly possessed by the Idea – the colors, the sounds, the action, the drama and the catharsis. And this catharsis is what is similar to Mal’s description of ‘killing ourselves’. 

In every movie one watches, in every TV show that one weeps and laughs over, we, the makers, the mothers and the fathers, the ruthless laborers of this world of entertainment, lose our real selves, kill our own ‘Real’ identities and ‘Create’ another ‘Reality’ to be projected on to the Reel.  We, the Writers, as we write, become our very Protagonists, donning their roles, their shades, entering their stream of consciousness and kill ourselves for that one Idea. The Directors lose themselves and become the altar-ego of their characters, donning their voice, their body language, their thought process. The Cinematographers lose their own vision to don these characters’ POVs. The actors, more so, lose themselves completely, Kill themselves in order to wake up to another Reality and birth new faces, looks, bodies and souls. The same with the Music Directors and the Choreographers who launch into another world of sound and movement, of waves and vibrations that are so poignant that it becomes the supreme vessel to transport the audience to the final world of the Real-Unreal. And last but not the least, the Producers, the Channel guys, the Distributors, the nameless Poster-boys and much-forgotten Spot-boys, they all are, day in and day out, though much-unseen and behind the scene yet very-much in-front-of-the-line Dreamers, the Souls who are possessed by this very same Idea of the Unreal-turned-into-Real and vice versa. The struggle, the fight, the war, of Love, of Passion, of more-than-mere-merchandise and of the final Star-Studded Success… !

All for the sake of an Idea. One seed. One thought. One concept. One picture. One sound. One dash of color. It all begins from there and just as Cobb (De Caprio) in Inception says, “What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient... highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed - fully understood - that sticks; right in there somewhere.”  And then it goes on taking on a larger shape, a larger frame and a larger scale and the world of ‘Reel’ is Created…very much out of the ‘Real’. 

Are you Tired and Perplexed by this heavy-duty Deconstruction-Theory-like-Insipid explanation of ‘The Reel and the Real’??? Ahem… Excuse me! But you see, I too was possessed by an Idea… the Idea to shape and explain the whole dichotomous world of Cinema and TV as A Real Virus, A Resilient Bacteria, An Internal Enemy we are very much in Love with, the Self-Destructive Process of Creation, forming itself out of the Real World, the Real experience and yet like Magic, having the charm to transport one to the Unreal. But no more! In our next discussion we will get down to a more ‘Real’ approach to Cinema, with our film reviews, TV talks and any other interesting news from the world of Entertainment. So, till then, Dreeeeaaam Onnnnn of the Unreal, but with your feet grounded into the Reality! Because, we, the Dream Merchants, apologize for not being able to take any responsibility for your getting infected by some unseen yet potentially poignant virus created by us – by some Idea of the Real-Unreal!