In RRR, too, pain is intimately linked to pleasure - when a snake sting causes Bheem to undress Rama Raju’s convulsing body, when Rama Raju gets to whip Bheem whose knees refuse to scrape the ground, when they exhaust themselves doing the ' Naatu Naatu,' when they jump off a bridge together tethered to two ends of a rope, slide onto each other’s shoulders when the other’s knees are weak.Īny pleasure this film gives its characters must travel through pain first, a relationship that is best expressed in queer cinema, through the pain of anal sex ( LOEV ), the lingering question of disease in a stray moment of flooded eros ( Theo And Hugo ), the veneer of isolation in an act for two ( Firebird ), the bubbling threat in cruising ( Stranger By The Lake ), what queer critic Leo Bersani describes thus, “The greatest human happiness is exactly identical to the greatest human unhappiness.”
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But for Lacan, jouissance is that moment beyond the threshold of pleasure, when pleasure becomes pain. Jouir is French for coming, the zenith of sex. Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, expresses this relationship most explicitly with the French word ' jouissance.' Simply put, it is pleasure. There is, Sigmund Freud suggests, a relationship between sex and violence, a connecting thread between the pleasures from pummeling - on the streets, between the sheets. This insistent erotic queerness in a violent film is not surprising. The sex itself is irrelevant in this case, then.
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You do not necessarily have to be queer if you are coded as queer, anyway. With RRR tapping - quite insistently - into the former, it would not, I presume, make the desire between them more or less queer if they actually had sex. If the two men actually had sex, would that have made the film more queer?Ĭatherine M in her book The Sexual Life Of Catherine M, where she impersonally narrates her prolific sexual life, from gang bangs in Italy to orgies in Paris, notes, “To have sexual relations and to feel desire (are) almost two separate activities.” In that case, there is queerness with respect to desire, and there is queerness with respect to the act of sex. Like he is inventing cinema and cinematic awe, desire, and desirability.Ī thought experiment, then. This is SS Rajamouli’s sensibility, tapping into the familiar - the myths we have heard, the templates of storytelling which we have assumed as the contours of life - but wrapping it in the heightened outrance of drama that it feels like whatever you are watching, you are watching for the first time. Both Ram Raju and Bheem are given female lovers as narrative charity, each woman burdened by an insurmountable distance - with Sita (Alia Bhatt), it is literal, and with Jenny (Olivia Morris), it is linguistic they do not share the same space or the same language.Īll the markers of the traditional love story are, instead, given to the men - a meet cute, a musical interlude intensifying affection, the exchange of a protective thread, a conflict, a chasm, a reunion. There is no space for the feminine, elbowed out as it is by the male gayze. Perhaps, the two men, Ram Charan as Rama Raju and Jr NTR as Bheem, should have just had sex.įilms drumming masculinity and muscularity to the point of feminine redundance offer themselves as willing, submissive bodies to a queer perspective, like the Kannada gangster film Garuda Gamana Vrishabha Vahanam, like the Hindi bromance War, and the Tamil tickle-trickster film Kadaseela Biriyani. The kink of whipping your lover, the eros of undressing their feverish bodies, the intensity of feeling - both love and hate - between the leading men in RRR lends itself effortlessly to a queer reading of the homosocial as the homosexual.
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Queer Gaze is a monthly column where Prathyush Parasuraman examines traces of queerness in cinema and streaming - intended or unintended, studied or unstudied, reckless or exciting.