Hardly a coincidence that everywhere you look, you find smartphones and social media as protagonists, if not the onscreen anti-heroes
A still from the film Logout, starring Babil Khan
Recalling a line that did not make it to the final cut of his film Logout (drops on ZEE5, April 18), director Amit Golani tells me, “It was about comparing social media to [the advent of] cars—and how they once replaced horse carriages.
ADVERTISEMENT
“It would have led to some confusion/pandemonium, right? But that doesn’t mean cars are bad. It’s just that society had to [subsequently] devise traffic rules, streets, cops, self-control, before they became safe; or better sense prevailed. Same for social media.”
Logout is about a social-media influencer, caught in the digital trap of a fan, who’s got access to his phone. Firstly, I find some of these terms, including fan, a misnomer.
I mean, just because someone has several million followers, online, doesn’t alone make them a leader of any sort; let alone that they can influence thoughts, opinions, purchasing decisions, etc.
We could follow for fully frivolous reasons. I know digital/influencer marketers think otherwise. Let them burn cash, for all we care.
Director Amit Golani
But having watched Logout, back-to-back with couple of episodes of the new season of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, after Philip Barantini’s Adolescence, I wanted to check with Golani, if he feels the cellphone, or social media, is the new onscreen villain of our times.
Every generation throws up a universal cinema villain—think of the zamindar and money-lender in Hindi films of 1950s, ’60s; rich capitalist/sethji, or the ‘system’, in the ’70s; or Pakistan, for that matter, late ’90s onwards.
Minor irony with Golani, who quit his day-job in 2009 to pursue filmmaking, is he was originally part of a YouTube collective, TVF—itself a popular product of social media, with ‘viral’ for its middle name.
I did a cameo once on a TVF sketch, directed by Golani, parodying TV anchor Arnab Goswami (with Biswapati Sarkar; writer of Logout, in the part), Jitendra Kumar as Arvind Kejriwal, among others.
Golani remembers they uploaded that video; stepped out for lunch. In a couple of hours that they returned, they were shocked—“woh aisa phata”—looking at the ‘likes’ getting clicked away at the speed of light!
This was around 2013; early years of YouTube.
That ballgame, he says, has dramatically changed over a decade since—given stakes running into billions, with wars over brands, and ‘influencers’ at the centre of this reality show.
Which explains the protagonist of Logout competing with his ex, over who will hit 10 million followers first!
Babil Khan, 26, plays this protagonist, with the social media handle @pratman. When they’d shortlisted 10 actors for this lead part, Golani says, they didn’t know Babil, as in the great Irrfan’s son, had auditioned for the role.
For about 90 per cent of the screen-time in Logout, the camera is fixed on Babil, alone in a room. It’s a tough frickin’ role. And to be fair, he lifts up the screenplay, through and through. Also, we should be allowed a certain bias towards young Babil.
I first met him briefly as a li’l boy, over breakfast with Naseeruddin Shah and Irrfan—both were shooting for separate films in Lucknow. Irrfan introduced Babil as his shy, quiet son, that he was getting home-schooled then.
I don’t know if, like his father, Babil formally learnt acting. But there’s an inherently untrained naturalness to his performances that perhaps schools can’t teach. It’s obviously unfair to compare him to his late dad still.
You watch anxieties of a youngling so attached to comments of people he will never know, making up a follower count, that defines his very life; income, included.
The opening slate of Logout reads, “It’s a prison designed for your mind and it has over 7 billion prisoners. There is a reason it’s called a Cell Phone.”
But the larger motive behind the movie, written during the pandemic, as Golani points out, was to mirror our engagement with technology in the present—as against “Black Mirror, that peeks into the [near] future; so does [Vikramaditya Motwane’s] CTRL, for that matter.”
For inspiration, Golani cites Rob Reiner’s Misery (1990), based on a William Goldman script that, in turn, was adapted from a Stephen King novel of the same name.
Wherein a romance novelist is held captive by an obsessive fan at her dim and distant home. TIL: It’s the only film based on a King novel to win an Oscar (for the female lead, Kathy Bates).
Except, the detention in Logout is digital. The fan’s just got hold of her favourite content-creator’s phone, which is enough.
Golani tells me he’s himself lost his phone for a couple of hours, and freaked out over the kind of access the finder may have, and what they may do with it.
With less to lose, you could also deem it an excuse for social detox! Naah, the greater worry, as Golani says, is “how you don’t need to be a tech junkie anymore to pull off the sort of stunt [in Logout]. You could [evidently] be the girl-next-door.”
True, I’ve had an anonymous, online stalker making all sorts of claims—having reported them to Bombay’s cyber-crime cell, and Delhi Police personnel; knowing it could be any rando. It doesn’t stop still.
This point hits home in Logout—although embellished far more than enough for an OTT crime-thriller.
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture.
He tweets @mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
Subscribe today by clicking the link and stay updated with the latest news!" Click here!
