There is an old adage, as comfortable as it is convenient, that cinema is merely a mirror held up to society. It reflects our existing prejudices, our violence, and our chaos back at us. If there is blood on the screen, the argument goes, it is because there is blood on the streets.
But this perspective, while partially true, lets the projector off the hook. Cinema is not a passive mirror hanging on the wall; it is a feeder. It is a pipeline that pumps imagery, ideology, and morality directly into the cultural bloodstream. It doesn't just reflect the world; it actively sets the agenda. It dictates what is aspirational, what is acceptable, and, most dangerously, what is normal.
If that is the case, we must ask a terrifying question: Where is the cinema of today taking us?
The Aesthetics of Agony
Look at the recent slate of blockbusters. Animal. Dhurandar. O'Romeo. These are not films that simply contain violence; they are films that worship at its altar. They serve up violence that is deliberately "unfiltered"—raw, lingering, and devoid of the old moral training wheels.
In the cinema of yesteryear, violence had a cost. It was the last resort of the righteous, or the tragic flaw of the villain. Today, it has become the primary language of expression. The heroes of these films do not solve problems with wit or diplomacy; they solve them with carnage. Brutality is framed as therapy. Mass murder is packaged as loyalty.
The Female Gaze: Absent and Objectified
But the violence is only half the story. To understand where this cinema is taking us, we must look at how it treats its women. The agenda being set here is perhaps even more insidious.
In these red-hot Bollywood blockbusters, the female form is not a character; it is a trophy. It is a landscape to be conquered, a prop to service the hero's journey. The "unfiltered" approach to violence is mirrored by an increasingly explicit—yet emotionally vacant—approach to sex.
The intimacy on screen is transactional. It is shot not from the perspective of passion or connection, but from the perspective of possession. The camera lingers on the woman's body in the same way it lingers on a smashed windshield or a bloody knife. She is there to be looked at, not to be understood. She is the reward for the violence, the spoils of war.
This is not progress; it is regression dressed in designer labels and a higher certification rating. In the name of "bold" cinema, we have returned to the most primitive archetypes: the hero, the threat, and the object. The woman's desires, her fears, her interior life—these are irrelevant. She exists merely to validate the hero's masculinity, either through her submission or her suffering.
When you combine the glorification of violence with the dehumanisation of women, you are not just feeding the audience entertainment. You are feeding them a worldview. You are teaching that power is the right to dominate—dominate lives with a gun, and bodies with a glance.
The Agenda Being Set
So, what agenda is being set?
We are witnessing the mainstreaming of toxic hyper-masculinity dressed in designer clothing. We are seeing the desensitisation of the human spirit. When the camera objectifies a woman with the same cold gaze it uses to survey a crime scene, it teaches the audience, scene by scene, that this is normal. That this is desire. That this is love.
This bleeds out of the cinema hall and into the public square. It influences political narratives by normalising the idea that power is violent. It influences social narratives by reducing half the population to accessories. It creates a culture where we scroll past real-world atrocities—and real-world misogyny—with the same numbness we felt watching a fictionalised exploitation ten minutes prior.
A Necessary Course Correction?
If cinema is indeed a feeder, it has the power to poison, but it also has the power to nourish. The question is not whether we should stop depicting darkness—art has always grappled with it—but how we depict it.
A course correction is urgently needed, and it doesn't require us to abandon edgy cinema. It requires us to mature as storytellers.
1. Restore Consequence: Violence must have weight. Sex must have context. It should hurt. It should matter. We need more films that show the morning after—the trauma, the grief, the emotional fallout. Show us the high of the kill and the high of the chase, but also show us the hangover.
2. Redefine Strength: We must challenge the narrative that equates violence and sexual conquest with power. True strength in 2025 looks like empathy, restraint, and vulnerability. We need protagonists who fight for something, not just destroy because of something. We need heroes who can see women as people, not prizes.
3. Illuminate, Don't Glorify: There is a vast difference between exploring exploitation and indulging in it. A filmmaker can show us the male gaze to critique it; the new wave of blockbusters employs it to celebrate it. We need to shift from exploitation to illumination, from objectification to actualisation.
Cinema has always been the campfire around which we gather to tell stories about who we are. Lately, the stories have become fever dreams of destruction and dominance. It is time to stoke a different kind of flame—one that doesn't just reflect the darkness, but helps us find a way through it.
If we don't change the channel, the channel will change us.
https://music.apple.com/in/album/saari-duniya-jalaa-denge/1727144163?i=1727144808
But this perspective, while partially true, lets the projector off the hook. Cinema is not a passive mirror hanging on the wall; it is a feeder. It is a pipeline that pumps imagery, ideology, and morality directly into the cultural bloodstream. It doesn't just reflect the world; it actively sets the agenda. It dictates what is aspirational, what is acceptable, and, most dangerously, what is normal.
If that is the case, we must ask a terrifying question: Where is the cinema of today taking us?
The Aesthetics of Agony
Look at the recent slate of blockbusters. Animal. Dhurandar. O'Romeo. These are not films that simply contain violence; they are films that worship at its altar. They serve up violence that is deliberately "unfiltered"—raw, lingering, and devoid of the old moral training wheels.
In the cinema of yesteryear, violence had a cost. It was the last resort of the righteous, or the tragic flaw of the villain. Today, it has become the primary language of expression. The heroes of these films do not solve problems with wit or diplomacy; they solve them with carnage. Brutality is framed as therapy. Mass murder is packaged as loyalty.
The Female Gaze: Absent and Objectified
But the violence is only half the story. To understand where this cinema is taking us, we must look at how it treats its women. The agenda being set here is perhaps even more insidious.
In these red-hot Bollywood blockbusters, the female form is not a character; it is a trophy. It is a landscape to be conquered, a prop to service the hero's journey. The "unfiltered" approach to violence is mirrored by an increasingly explicit—yet emotionally vacant—approach to sex.
The intimacy on screen is transactional. It is shot not from the perspective of passion or connection, but from the perspective of possession. The camera lingers on the woman's body in the same way it lingers on a smashed windshield or a bloody knife. She is there to be looked at, not to be understood. She is the reward for the violence, the spoils of war.
This is not progress; it is regression dressed in designer labels and a higher certification rating. In the name of "bold" cinema, we have returned to the most primitive archetypes: the hero, the threat, and the object. The woman's desires, her fears, her interior life—these are irrelevant. She exists merely to validate the hero's masculinity, either through her submission or her suffering.
When you combine the glorification of violence with the dehumanisation of women, you are not just feeding the audience entertainment. You are feeding them a worldview. You are teaching that power is the right to dominate—dominate lives with a gun, and bodies with a glance.
The Agenda Being Set
So, what agenda is being set?
We are witnessing the mainstreaming of toxic hyper-masculinity dressed in designer clothing. We are seeing the desensitisation of the human spirit. When the camera objectifies a woman with the same cold gaze it uses to survey a crime scene, it teaches the audience, scene by scene, that this is normal. That this is desire. That this is love.
This bleeds out of the cinema hall and into the public square. It influences political narratives by normalising the idea that power is violent. It influences social narratives by reducing half the population to accessories. It creates a culture where we scroll past real-world atrocities—and real-world misogyny—with the same numbness we felt watching a fictionalised exploitation ten minutes prior.
A Necessary Course Correction?
If cinema is indeed a feeder, it has the power to poison, but it also has the power to nourish. The question is not whether we should stop depicting darkness—art has always grappled with it—but how we depict it.
A course correction is urgently needed, and it doesn't require us to abandon edgy cinema. It requires us to mature as storytellers.
1. Restore Consequence: Violence must have weight. Sex must have context. It should hurt. It should matter. We need more films that show the morning after—the trauma, the grief, the emotional fallout. Show us the high of the kill and the high of the chase, but also show us the hangover.
2. Redefine Strength: We must challenge the narrative that equates violence and sexual conquest with power. True strength in 2025 looks like empathy, restraint, and vulnerability. We need protagonists who fight for something, not just destroy because of something. We need heroes who can see women as people, not prizes.
3. Illuminate, Don't Glorify: There is a vast difference between exploring exploitation and indulging in it. A filmmaker can show us the male gaze to critique it; the new wave of blockbusters employs it to celebrate it. We need to shift from exploitation to illumination, from objectification to actualisation.
Cinema has always been the campfire around which we gather to tell stories about who we are. Lately, the stories have become fever dreams of destruction and dominance. It is time to stoke a different kind of flame—one that doesn't just reflect the darkness, but helps us find a way through it.
If we don't change the channel, the channel will change us.
https://music.apple.com/in/album/saari-duniya-jalaa-denge/1727144163?i=1727144808