ON THE WALL of Cambodia’s Angkor Wat temple, a buff, bejeweled monkey towers over an army of Hindu gods. The 49-meter bas-relief depicts Samudra Manthana, a mythological event during which gods and demons churn an ocean of milk to glean the nectar of immortality. None of the gods, except Vishnu, matches the stature of the […]
The post A Disproportionate Display of Force: The Lure of Epic Rage in “Monkey Man” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.
ON THE WALL of Cambodia’s Angkor Wat temple, a buff, bejeweled monkey towers over an army of Hindu gods. The 49-meter bas-relief depicts Samudra Manthana, a mythological event during which gods and demons churn an ocean of milk to glean the nectar of immortality. None of the gods, except Vishnu, matches the stature of the monkey, who is a divinity himself, the legendary Hanuman. Here, Hanuman models control and stability, anchoring the band of deities. But in another fresco within the same temple, he fiercely leaps to attack his opponents, embodying a very different persona: Hanuman, the militant action hero.
Like other divinities in the Hindu pantheon, Hanuman is a polymorphic figure. By turns a minor presence in the epic Mahābhārata and a major one in the Rāmāyaṇa, his feats are recounted in countless myths and devotional hymns, which circulate not just in India but also in Cambodia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Nepal. He is something of an intermediary figure too: considered an incarnation of Lord Shiva in some legends, thought to be born of mortals and blessed by the god of wind in others.
These inconsistencies pose a challenge to anyone trying to extrapolate from legends of the divine monkey a plot that would be legible to a global audience accustomed to Aristotelian unities. It is a challenge Dev Patel takes up in his ambitious directorial debut, Monkey Man (2024). But in adapting and riffing on Hanuman in the current historical moment, Monkey Man enters a conversation not only with a long tradition of South Asian and Southeast Asian art but also with the present-day political propaganda of the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), a right-wing Hindu nationalist group—commonly known as the “Saffron Party”—that has ruled India since 2014 and has made wide use of tropes and characters from the Rāmāyaṇa to power its sectarian politics. Although the epic is a multifaceted literary work, the Saffron Party and its allies typically deploy it to supply what scholar Sheldon Pollock calls two “imaginative instruments”: “on the one hand, a divine political order [that] can be conceptualized, narrated, and historically grounded, and, on the other, a fully demonized Other [that] can be categorized, counterposed, and condemned.” Hanuman—as an ally of the exiled prince Rama—has become a role model for right-wing Hindu leaders, while the targets of their dominant prejudices have been recast into the mold of Ravana, the king of the Rakshasa clan and Rama’s rival. Hindu nationalism, or Hindutva politics, is a demon-producing machine: illegal immigrants, Muslims, Kashmiris, the oppressed castes—indeed, there is no dearth of candidates to fill the epic’s template.
Cognizant of the harms immanent in Hindutva’s divisive agenda, Monkey Man strives to reappropriate tropes from both the Rāmāyaṇa and the vaster repertoire of myths involving Hanuman to make a political statement. It falters, however, mainly due to the limitations of structuring a plot intent upon the enactment of revenge.
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Set in a fictional village in contemporary India, Monkey Man is an underdog revenge drama, featuring choreographed fights set to music that unfold like song-and-dance routines in Bollywood musicals. The narrative revolves around a traumatized and orphaned boy who grows into an angry young man intent on the singular goal of avenging his mother’s death. Coming from a disenfranchised background, born in a forest, the character—played by Patel, and identified in the credits as “Kid”—finds strength in the figure of Hanuman and wears a monkey mask to fight in seedy underground clubs for cash.
In the opening sequence, Kid is brutally thrashed and defeated in a match. As blood streams through the mask’s nostril holes, we become acquainted with Kid’s pain before we see his face. While masked wrestling is a common sport in many cultures, the scene invites a different interpretation by inserting a mythological intertext. An earlier scene—sort of a prelude to the fight—showed Kid’s mother recounting the legend of Hanuman to him as a child. The scene nudges audiences to note the similarities between the masked fighter and the demigod, and directs at least some, I imagine, to wonder what kind of ethics and politics the cinematic narrative will wring from the protagonist’s association with Hanuman.
My own initial response to the sequence was shaped by my experience visiting Delhi and Kolkata earlier this year, where I had witnessed glowering monkey gods, fiery tilaka marking their foreheads, staring down at me from saffron flags, on the eve of the inauguration of a three-storied temple dedicated to Rama in Ayodhya. The temple has been constructed at the location of a now-demolished 16th-century mosque that allegedly stood upon Rama’s birthplace, making it a contested religious symbol. In 1990, a senior Hindu nationalist leader organized a chariot procession to the mosque that stirred up frenzy among devout Hindu factions. A militant group climbed the mosque’s domes and planted saffron flags. When the security tried to remove these ensigns, a monkey perched on top of the dome, supposedly to protect one of the flags. That’s how the monkey—and, by extension, the monkey god—became an icon of “saffronization,” or Hindutva, a political theology that today threatens to obliterate India’s identity as a secular nation.
Thus, I must admit I was more than a little nervous watching a monkey similar to the one on the saffron flags—angry, frustrated, nose and brows scrunched in displeasure—throwing punches in Monkey Man. But through Kid’s palpable disdain for the on-screen counterparts of the Saffron Party, the film underscores from fairly early on that it does not endorse Hindutva propaganda. Of the myriad legends involving Hanuman, the screenplay explicitly mentions a story in which the mythic figure, as a child, mistakes the sun for a fruit and makes an Icarus-like attempt to get close to it, for which the gods punish him by skewering his body. In this episode, Hanuman is a foolish but innocent child, a victim of the wrath of powerful gods, and thus an easy analogue for the oppressed. However, the film also includes numerous allusions to the Rāmāyaṇa in which Hanuman is an aggressive warrior and a devout celibate. The combative avatar of Hanuman is evoked through a puppet show that Kid remembers watching as a child. Episodes from the Rāmāyaṇa also appear in paintings and murals decorating the spaces where Kid faces off with his enemies. For example, a foul-tempered client makes out with an escort against the backdrop of Raja Ravi Varma’s 1895 oil painting that shows Ravana kidnapping Rama’s wife.
The emphatic intertextuality between the action portrayed in the artworks and that of the cinematic scenes unfolding in front of them will be legible to audiences to varying degrees depending upon their exposure to the epic. Less conversant viewers may note the overt connections but miss the nuances, which is perhaps why some commentators have used the vague and neutral word “culture” to describe what Patel brings to the action genre. Indeed, Monkey Man shares a lot in common with John Wick (2014), Joker (2019), and Taxi Driver (1976), films in which male angst and dissatisfaction drive the pursuit of something that looks like justice.
But Monkey Man’s extended engagement with the Rāmāyaṇa is distinctive—if perhaps not in the way Patel intends. While at first glance the presence of Hanuman-related iconography in a revenge drama featuring a South Asian lead could come across as a typical Hollywood attempt to capture a broader audience by expanding on-screen cultural representation, Patel is undertaking a more complicated task. No artwork drawing upon the Rāmāyaṇa can ignore the epic’s functions in the political sphere, and Patel’s film doesn’t pretend to be agnostic. It’s clear that Monkey Man is trying to free Hindu iconography from the death grip of the divisive Hindutva regime. But the reclamation project turns out to be a fraught one since the film recruits various myths and symbols without detaching them from the hypermasculine angst that characterizes their usage in Hindutva propaganda. Monkey Man simply locates the fictional right-wing Saffron leaders as the morally corrupt Others, criminals culpable for the death of the protagonist’s mother and, therefore, deserving targets of his rage and retribution campaign. In this way, the film actually extends the logic of reactionary violence it attempts to refute.
During the first half, lacking both power and tact, Kid is chased, shot, and nearly killed while exacting revenge. But these scenes do not cast doubt on the efficacy of revenge as a tactic. Rather, Kid’s defeats establish him more firmly as an underdog trapped in an oppressive world. A hijra (third-gender, including transgender) community living in an old temple in the city’s fringes resuscitates him. As Kid heals, his mission becomes ever so slightly inflected by the collective purpose of preventing the “Sovereign Party” (the fictional stand-in for the Saffron Party) from seizing land that is home to the hijra group. But this collective purpose only resonates with him because of his personal history: the police chief working for the party leaders raped and murdered his mother when she protested their land-grabbing. In other words, his sense of solidarity with the hijra community arises from his personal trauma, which could, but in his case does not, transform into real political conviction.
The past is the dark tunnel through which Kid catches glimpses of the present. When the plight of a sex worker reminds him of his mother’s assault, he forges a sympathetic bond with her. The suffering of others is legible to Kid only when it matches the contours of his own unhealed trauma. Within such a psychological landscape, the myth of the monkey god performs the double function of aligning him with the oppressed and authorizing his unrestrained personal vendetta. And while Monkey Man shows the Sovereign Party leaders weaponizing the names of gods for monetary and political gains, it elides the very direct ways the regime deploys the militant persona of Hanuman to valorize their crusade against marginalized communities. In short, Monkey Man seems unaware that its own narrative, far from critiquing Hindutva propaganda, engages in similarly reductive maneuvers: distilling the same affective economy of anger and an ethics of revenge from the much more intricate schema of action presented in the Rāmāyaṇa.
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From an ethical perspective, the revenge scenario is a troubling one. Revenge scenarios in cinema induce powerful emotional responses in viewers that range from, as the scholar Carl Plantinga argues,
anger, resentment, and hatred at the evil that is perpetrated on a sympathetic protagonist [to] delight and relief as vengeance is taken and the scales of justice are perceived to have been brought back into balance. Along the way, sharp distinctions are drawn between the righteous and the unrighteous. The pleasures of revenge scenarios depend upon Manichaean distinctions between good and evil.
Kid’s traumatic backstory, the bane of modern literature and television according to Parul Sehgal and Elizabeth Alsop, is deployed in Monkey Man to persuade audiences to recognize his bloodthirst as reasonable. Shaky camera movements artfully materialize Kid’s tortured consciousness. In action scenes shot through distortions and reflections, glass, water, and strobe lights all channel his skewed vision. Meanwhile, the film underscores the baseness of the already corrupt Sovereign Party leaders by having them deploy forces to evict the hijra community. Intertextual references reinforce the homicidal police chief’s wickedness: the cinematography and editing visually align him with Ravana, the embodiment of evil in the Rāmāyaṇa, further manufacturing audience consensus for the graphic violence unleashed by the traumatized protagonist.
But aligning Kid’s enemies with the Rāmāyaṇa’s villain, however narratively satisfying, leaves unexamined the Manichaean distinction between the good self and the evil Other on which Hindu nationalist politics in particular, and fascism in general, is founded. In this sense, the film raises a broader question that pertains not only to Monkey Man but also to the genre of revenge films such as James McTeigue’s V for Vendetta (2005) and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) and Inglourious Basterds (2009) more broadly—namely, can the narrative paradigm of revenge perform a critique of fascism?
My contention is that the conventional revenge scenario is an inadequate instrument of political critique since justice is easily confused with payback. Put another way, revenge scenarios may be popular because, as Plantinga argues, they seem to resolve negative feelings such as anger, loss, and grief. But revenge is an effective political tool precisely because it is an ineffective antidote to hurts. Philosopher Agnes Callard (whose polemical ideas and hot takes enjoy viral notoriety) links the insatiability of anger with the righteousness of revenge. “Once we let go of this assumption that anger can be undone—you have a reason to be angry forever, after all—it is not hard to produce an argument in favor of revenge,” she writes. “The Argument for Revenge is simply that revenge is how we hold one another morally responsible.”
In a narrative universe ordered by revenge, the aggrieved asserts an unquestionable moral claim to the act of retaliation, which invites audiences to accept mass murder as justified killing. Political outfits and authoritarian leaders know the formula. The idea of holding the Other responsible for one’s own trauma is infinitely more seductive than fulfilling one’s own responsibility toward the Other, and so revenge scenarios efficiently conscript support for populist campaigns, wars, and genocide. Baba Shakti, the guru-turned-power-broker puppeteering the fictionalized Saffron Party in Monkey Man, also has this formula down pat: he positions himself and his followers as victims of collective injuries. This collective suffering may refer to Partition or any number of historical conflicts. “We will rid Mother India of her scars,” he proclaims. Nowhere is the inadvertent alignment of ideologies between the god-man and Kid more apparent than in their mutual chronic dependence on narratives plotted in the verbal-visual language of trauma.
In Monkey Man, as in other grievance narratives, revenge is doomed to fail: as Callard notes, making someone else’s downfall one’s own good diverts the avenging party from pursuing anything else that might be in their own interest. They let the enemy infiltrate the patterns of their thought, colonize their fantasy. Revenge films show protagonists obsessively plot and prepare to confront their enemies to the exclusion of every other form of sociability and pleasure.
But by dramatizing the obsession for revenge, literary and cinematic narratives are able to show what Callard does not: that the antagonist of the revenge scenario is necessarily a phantom, a fantasy that continues to mutate and multiply. It is not accidental that a canonical and prototypical revenge plot such as Hamlet involves hauntings and ghosts. The Rāmāyaṇa’s villain has 10 heads and is shielded by a boon that makes him nearly invincible. Once we see that the antagonist of the revenge plot is an imagined Other, we also recognize that revenge operates in the realm of belief. It becomes an ideology governing the aggrieved party’s every action. No amount of force will ever be sufficient to exterminate a fantastic enemy, an opponent roaming a metaphysical realm distinct from the avenger. But such an unconquerable enemy can validate an inexhaustible outpouring of retaliatory violence. “They have destroyed our sacred values,” the god-man in Monkey Man announces in a speech, before asking the listeners to “stand with us” and “bleed with us.” He doesn’t need to spell out who “they” are, not only because his audience knows but also because it is actually irrelevant.
Living out the revenge plot means making enmity the most definitive and intimate social relation. Baba Shakti is shown cleaning and toning his body, but his power to move others depends upon his eluding their touch and company. He enforces distance from those he commands. Screens and windows separate him from the common people. Like the god-man, Kid lives apart from society—he forges connections with either potential accomplices (such as the hijras) or those who need saving and avenging (his mother, a sex worker, and the third-gender community). Beyond the period of his physical recovery in the care of the hijras, brawls remain his primary mode of contact with other human bodies. Perhaps aware of throwing its hero in the same pit as its villain, Monkey Man has the leader of the hijra group, Alpha, deliver a lecture to Kid on coping with trauma by reframing the past. An experimental montage suggests that Kid may be adopting a different lens, only to have him revert to his revenge scheme, this time with allies—as if alliances were moral chits that can wipe clean a trail of blood.
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While Monkey Man fails to rise above the ethical problems of the conventional revenge plot, there are moments in which the narrative successfully transcends the narrow ideologies of retribution and anger. These moments involve contrapuntal musical set pieces—action sequences set to music that offer metacommentary on the futility and impossibility of the revenge fantasy.
One of these campy sequences takes place when Kid runs into a decrepit brothel to escape the police. Inside, a peppy Bollywood “item song” blares out of speakers, undercutting the situation’s seriousness. As if to underline the vacuity of the revenge plot, a man with no relation to the narrative whatsoever charges at Kid with an axe, yelling “You want to fuck, huh? […] You bring the police to my place, huh?” It is ridiculous but in a self-reflexive way: the refrain of the song—“Ooh la la, ooh la la / Tu hai meri fantasy” (or “You are my fantasy”)—plays as Kid and the man strike each other. (Adding to the sense of absurdity, for those in the know, the song is from the 2011 film The Dirty Picture, which is about making soft-core porn in southern India.)
Moral debt and payback are foundations of the revenge plot. But in this sequence, a disproportionate display of force overtakes the narrative, which is no longer trying to sell the bloodshed as righteous. Kid’s tortured earnestness gives way to a violence that is nonsensical. A child hiding under a bed trembles in fear as Kid wrestles with the pimp, which parallels the scene in which Kid witnessed the police chief assaulting his mother. Kid’s recognition that he is traumatizing another child temporarily pierces his veil of righteousness, but the fact that he will continue to unleash violence muddies the clarity with which the narrative universe endorses his moral claim to retaliation.
The most extended detour the narrative takes from the affective economy of revenge concerns Kid’s attempts to regain physical strength under the watchful care of the hijras. One night, unable to sleep, he wanders out to find them gathered around a tabla player (Zakir Hussain) who is telling domestic stories through percussion beats. In the following scene, the tabla player initiates a musical call-and-response with Kid, what is known in Indian performing arts as jugalbandi: the beats of the tabla invite Kid to respond, and he does so by punching the boxing sack. The musical conversation—almost a dance—is a beautiful and distinctive take on one of the conventional beats of the revenge plot, where the hero trains to take on the antagonist a final time. Kid’s rhythmic communication with the tabla draws an audience of hijras, who stand in for the actual audience. Kid becomes aware of their gaze, and as they giggle, he responds with a smile, acknowledging the aesthetic and sexual appeal of his body—a body that has been reduced to a weapon in almost every other scene. This interlude is a nod to the kinesthetic pleasures gained from moving in sync with Others rather than attacking them, the kind of pleasures celebrated in the collective dance sequences so common in Bollywood movies.
Unfortunately, this feeling doesn’t last. The final stabbings in Monkey Man occur in front of a sprawling horizontal mural that illustrates the battle of Lanka, somewhat similar to the mural in Angkor Wat. While Kid exacts his revenge, his eyes scan the destruction over which the figure of Hanuman soars in the bloody and smoky battlefield drawn on the canvas. The cost of revenge is on display, but the movie cuts to a black screen without dwelling on it.
This is where the revenge film departs from an epic like the Rāmāyaṇa, which does try to narrativize the consequences of revenge. Retaliatory violence of course features in the Rāmāyaṇa, which is why Monkey Man and Hindutva propaganda turn to it. It is even possible to interpret the epic as an argument for the proper use of force in response to pain inflicted by the Other. But as in the Mahābhārata, so also in the Rāmāyaṇa, revenge is tackled as an ethical problem.
A nuanced approach to revenge is not an intrinsic feature of the epic form, and epic traditions differ vastly in their handling of revenge ethics. Susanna Braund and Glenn W. Most claim, in the introduction to their 2003 anthology Ancient Anger: Perspectives from Homer to Galen, that “if different genres are particularly associated with different emotions, then [the Western] epic surely lays claim to anger.” Indeed, the Iliad opens with “Sing, Goddess, of the wrath of Achilles.” This is not to say that anger is foreign to epics outside the West; fury is one of the fundamental sentimental essences (rasas) evoked in South Asian arts. But veeram, or heroism, is a separate essence from fury. Besides, the foremost concern of the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata is the nature of dharma rather than the protagonists’ outrage.
There’s no doubt that the spectacle of fury and violence has an aesthetic appeal, a fact that clearly has not been lost on cinema—or on epic literature. Innumerable frescoes, paintings, and carvings depict the many battle scenes from the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata. But unlike Monkey Man, those epics also critically engage with the ethics of that violence. The Rāmāyaṇa is not a crude, linear history of a righteous hero slaying a villain—the story’s many versions, critical rewritings, and translations challenge its reception as a straightforward revenge drama. Framing revenge within a more complex story structure is one way of addressing the ethical limitations involved in peddling vengeance as justice. It is something that Monkey Man tries, and ultimately fails, to do. Films need not be morally instructive, of course. But one that uses political oppression and corruption to substantiate its aesthetics of violence cannot hope to evade an ethical assessment.
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