Ram Gopal Varma Blog #221. Emotional Violence

When I put a line at the end of ‘Satya’ “My tears for Satya are as much as for those whom he killed”. I said that because I truly felt that emotion which came from my understanding of his emotion.

Anyone who takes up violence would not do it on a conscious decision (unless he is a psycho path) of wanting to live by it. All People who use it as a tool of power or who sadistically enjoy its effects would be far lesser in numbers compared to people who would have been compelled to embrace it by the sheer necessity of a situation they find themselves in or they are put in by powers which are completely outside their control.

This is what I have realized in the course of making ‘Rakht Charitra’. Every single one of the emotions of the characters of RC will be coming from a very familiar space to each and every member of the audience meaning that they would have felt a similar emotion some time or the other in their life time, so as long as the emotion exists dormantly in each and every one of us all it will take is just a certain extreme situation to trigger it off which will then just spiral out of control. Even the man who instigated it won’t be in control many a time.

I believe that the success of any true great conflict in cinema is only when any member from the audience cannot take sides with any one particular character which effectively means that their understanding is complete of where each of the conflicts are arising from and the audience just get caught in a limbo of what to say to whom.

For instance in ‘Satya’, one consciously cannot think that either Satya or Bhiku or Bhau or Gurunarayan or for that matter any other character is wrong. That’s because every one of them had a certain compulsion to think, act, and feel in a certain way. Similarly in ‘Company’, you understand the conflict between Malik and Chandu but you can’t really empathize with one more than the other.

Coming to ‘Rakht Charitra’, the primary difference between ‘Satya’, ‘Company’, and RC is that the characters of RC are many folds more emotionally volatile and that’s because the situations they are placed in are many more folds more volatile than in the other two films, which would naturally result in an eruption of highly violent emotions.