A meeting point of these two opposing views of the state seems to be visually represented through the character of Jafar, who is at the same time a well-reputed police officer and a crime lord of the underworld. He seems to serve the state in public, but he is actually the boss of all local goons and corrupt businesses in private. Thus, in the guise of serving the country, he utilizes state power to protect the interests of anti-social elements. Very much like the case of Deshpremik, in this film the pain of Jafar’s betrayal is represented through the disintegration of Shanto’s family. Only after losing his two siblings could Shanto finally realize Jafar’s true nature. Shanto’s failure to decipher Jafar seems to allegorically represent the confusion the common people feel about the role of their state. Consequently, the script’s developing Jafar as a state employee can be seen as the film’s visual embodiment of the complexity that marginal people feel when thinking about the state they are living in. The high ideology found in the state’s official discourse is here connected to the grounded reality of its failure and villainy. Thus, the film ties this character’s success to the people’s precarity. Moreover, Jafar’s association with the criminal world might symbolize the amalgamation of the state with a profit-driven economy working against the interest of the masses, reminding one of Ruud’s suggestion of Bangladesh as ‘polycracy’ as well as Jackman and Maitrot’s framing it as a ‘party-police nexus’.

A similar kind of duality can be found in the character of Mirza Shahib, Shanto’s father. A conscientious supporter of middle-class values and a firm believer in the redemptive power of the modern state, Mirza Shahib further articulates the dilemma that marginal people face in such a state. As a law-abiding citizen and as a lawyer himself, he cannot support Shanto’s physical violence, while as a father, he understands the daily realities which compel Shanto to take such a stand. In a courtroom scene, in defense of Shanto’s crime, he requests that the Judge acknowledge the limitations of the law to protect its people; while at home, he rebukes Shanto for his deeds and asks him to choose the path of a decent life.[11] [open endnotes in new window] Thus, through this character, a synthesis is sought between two extremes that the modern system has created while verbally articulating the existing discrepancies between them. It can be added that the film takes a clear side for Shanto's case in the climactic scene when the father Mirza Shahib comes out of his state of confusion and kills Jafar and declares that Shanto was not guilty of any crimes.[12]

In the narrative techniques of the film, the dubiousness of the state is represented by two main aesthetic choices. Very much like Deshpremik, a delayed revelation technique is used to reveal the ‘true’ identity of Jafar. For up to the first 92 minutes of this 158-minute film, Jafar remains a good police officer. However, an affective sound clue used at Jafar’s entrance and the extra-diegetic baggage of this actor, Humayun Faridi, surely create an aura of suspicion for the regular cinema audiences.[13] Thus, for a significant period of the film, regular audiences of FDC films are encouraged to embark on a journey of suspicion regarding the true nature of this character. Dubiousness thus becomes a message that the film delivers through emotion.

The other significant aesthetic choice used in the film is to use spectacular violence. Unlike Deshpremik’s middle-class, intellectual dissent and its philosophy of persistent resistance against the ruling elites, Shanto Keno Mastan promotes confrontational resistance and highlights an aesthetic of spectacular violence. The pleasure of the spectacle emotionally challenges the sovereign power of the state as the sole arbitrator of violence and thereby empowers the masses through affect. In the film, Shanto not only protests crimes, but also protests them with extreme violence. In the beginning, when a local goon assaults his sister, he beats the goon to death. The film makes a spectacle of that fighting scene as audiences are shown in detail how Shanto literally rips off one hand from the assailant. The amputated hand and the dead body of the opponent are even shown in separate shots. Interestingly, even after this daylight murder and his subsequent imprisonment for 4 years, Shanto keeps saying that he did not do anything wrong. It seems Shanto is simply unable to acknowledge any excess in his violent protests, and audience sympathy for him is established. Viewers can cherish what Shanto did as something appropriate to the situation. Upon release from his imprisonment, Shanto accepts his derogatory title ‘haat kata Shanto’ (roughly translates as ‘Shanto who amputates hands’).  Then, in several other action sequences, Shanto twists, knifes, and chops down his opponents’ hands.

Further glorifying his otherwise derogatory title as Haat Kaata Shanto (Shanto who amputates hands), he is often seen in such violent action against the local goons.

This excess in Shanto’s revenge is made part of the entertainment package that this popular film offers. Indeed, for such exploitative use of violence, such films are often categorized as ‘vulgar’ in middle-class intellectual discourse about Bangladeshi cinema. Thus, this film seems to be a good example of what Raju claims as the ‘massification’ of the industry and a specimen of the ‘extreme action genre’. It may also be seen as the result of the ‘ghettoization’ of the local film industry, as claimed by Rahman.[14]

However, the use of spectacular violence in such films can be further excavated for understanding its connotations and affect. For example, the film shares characteristics with pornography as a ‘body genre’ film. In several sexual assault and song-dance sequences, the female body is objectified, and audiences are offered voyeuristic pleasure. Similarly, the fight sequences are lengthy, and they go beyond the mere purpose of serving the plot. Audiences are invited to participate in Shanto’s chivalry that justifies the pleasure of watching his violent outbursts. In other words, the film very clearly aims to produce affect and expects audiences’ ‘projection’ (Plantinga) into the character of Shanto, performed by highly popular film star Manna.

For example, consider a fight sequence in the middle of the film where Shanto is attacked by two top goons who intend to kill him. However, instead of carrying guns, they have come with swords. Shanto responds to their aggression by fighting physically. He does not seem to have a gun at that time, though in an earlier sequence, audiences see that he has a revolver and is not hesitant to use it if needed. Why is it sword and physical fighting instead of gun firing then? In fact, the film prefers physical fighting over shooting as the former allows more screen time to display violence. In the lengthy fighting sequences, the film gets sufficient time to create suspense with the details of each punch and each kick that Shanto delivers or endures. In the process, audiences are welcome to connect affectively with Shanto’s heroism and empathize with the zeal inside him. Amid such violence, Shanto’s occasional twisting or cutting of his opponents’ hands not only awes his audience but also makes them cherish this brutality. Violence is thus aestheticized and legitimized as a form of protest from the working-class masses.

How a sequence is developed. Using swords provides much scope for creating spectacles and affect.

Very much like the acknowledgment and satisfaction of repressed desires in pornographic films, the spectacular violence empowers the working-class audience, at least for the time being, by providing them the power to commit violence at a spectacular level against all the odds that they have to face in their everyday life. In the process, such films also normalize violence and drag it outside the sole territory of the sovereign state. It can be seen as an onscreen acknowledgment of the ground reality that violence is not the state’s monopoly, and the film subversively claims a ‘legitimate’ right to its use as self-defense by the precarious viewers. Violence thus is set loose, and cinema’s aesthetic of violence as a survival technique becomes a representation of popular fantasy.

Conclusion

According to major scholarship on Bangladeshi cinema (e.g., the works of Raju, Hoek, and Rahman), the local film industry has experienced significant changes in production, distribution, and exhibition infrastructures along with changes in its viewership from the 1980s onwards. This period overlaps with the one in which the political elites were experimenting with neoliberal policies in the local economy and state affairs. Thus, the denationalization of local industries and deregulation of local markets are linked to the emergence of a new working class at the urban peripheries. At the same time, policy changes in media regulation, like the 1979 permission for video import and the 1983 taxation system, explain how the local film industry was asked to change in correspondence to the infrastructural changes. Though such changes in the narrative content and cinematic style of the films are often described pejoratively as ‘Bollywoodization’, ‘ghettoization”, ‘massification’, etc., along with frequent use of adjectives like ‘vulgar’, ‘obscene’, and ‘unhealthy’, we can go beyond such aestheticist evaluations and attempt to read what the onscreen narrative worlds tell us about the fantasy of these working-class masses and their understandings of the state.

I argue that the changes were two-way. Far from being a mere superstructural phenomenon solely controlled by the economic basis, the FDC films sent back to society new ways of conceptualizing the present State, especially from the perspectives of its new working-class audiences.[15] Close readings of the narrative worlds of such films show that the moral and ethical values of the society were being re-evaluated, and the traditional images of the state, civil society, and various institutions were questioned. Considering the precarity imposed on these masses when the state and the capital merge under a neoliberal economic policy further alienating labor, such bottom-up views can give us alternative, counter-hegemonic discourses about the state.

Whether through the story of Alam or Shanto, in these films we see an acknowledgment of the state, at least at the surface level. Whether to comply with the demands of different regulatory agencies or not, the films pay lip service to the top authorities of the state. As M. Madhava Prasad explains the arrival of the police at the end of most Hindi films, these Bangladeshi films also ensure restoration of the equilibrium at the end. Thus, they are not directly subversive. But before such compromised endings, the films register that the sincerity of top state officials is often nullified by the corruption at the bottom. Thus, the films inscribe the failure of the state to reach its people and the resultant precarity.

Moreover, the films incorporate other elements to resonate with the experience and fantasy of its working-class audiences. In this regard, two distinct feelings are recorded in both of the films, suffering and anger, and both are shown to be due to the failure of the state. Here, South Asian cinematic tropes are often used to cinematically convert those feelings as ‘moods’ (Plantinga). Motifs of disintegration of family and the suffering that ensues–a recurring plot in many South Asian cinemas—are used in both these films to imply multiple layers of meanings. Whereas such a plot may echo the situation of lonely migrant workers in the city, it also represents the pressure of modernization on traditional values.

Such plot developments can also be seen as contributing obliquely to a new understanding of the modern state. That is, the failure of the police and other regulatory agencies often disrupts the harmony of life at the bottom and thereby causes intense pain and suffering. The disintegration of the family members can be seen as a cinematic and affective rendering of such disappointment with the state. The ensuing anger is represented through another South Asian cinematic trope–the law versus justice. By challenging the ability of existing laws to ensure justice at the ground level, the films point out the superficiality of such ‘universal’ laws as mostly hegemonic discourses, while contrasting them with the existing inequalities and inadequacies at the bottom. Furthermore, spectacular violence is used to dispense an affective articulation of such anger. Other narrative techniques of melodrama, such as delayed revelation and ambiguous characters are also applied to represent the themes affectively.

Thus, these FDC films, having to tread a fine balance between top-down impositions of the state and bottom-up fantasies of resistance, often offer multilayered and equivocal narratives to their audiences. Using familiar cinematic tropes, they attempt to accommodate heterogeneity within a narrative polysemy. As a result, the authoritarian, neoliberal, party-state of Bangladesh with its intervening police power is simultaneously acknowledged, formally appreciated, and cinematically critiqued in these films, which ultimately contribute to the depiction of a dubious state on screen.