I wrote this in my mind two weeks ago on Sunday April 7th so please interpret the tense as such.
Iâm not a film critic (nor do I wanna be) but last night I watched Monkey Man and Iâm still SHOOK. Was it the best action movie of all time? Idk thatâs not usually my genre. Was it completely culturally accurate? Idk enough about Hindu deityâs. Was it truly fucken badass to watch a very fine brown man (whoâs not in Bollywood) get revenge and do so amidst a cinematically stunning backdrop? Yes. Was dope to see said fine brown man work with Jordan Peele on this project? Yes fam. It was. As a true non critic, iâll let you watch the trailer and get a sense of what the whole thing is about while i wax lyrically about why it reached inside of me and pulled my fucking heart out. Red. Pulsing. Covered in blood. Like the visuals.
Iâm always thinking about representation. IRL yes, but especially when it comes to the importance of seeing ourselves in mainstream culture. I have these second nature-like, instinctual thoughts everywhere I go. Are there brown people here? Am I the only one? How far do I need to toe the line on tokenism? On TV screens, in movies, comedy theaters, music festivals â you get my drift. When I was little, our family would FLIP out if we saw another brown person on TV, let alone a Punjabi person. If we ever caught a glimpse of a man wearing a turban in the background of a show, the whole house would errupt in laughter and excitement. If we happened to record the show, weâd replay that scene over and over again just to peep the blur one more time. It just wasnât the norm and thatâs what made it so exciting and sad at the same time. Itâs probably why movies like âBend it Like Beckhamâ still mean so much to us. That film was epic. It was the first time I really felt like I saw myself on the big screen. Like JESMINDER, I too was a teenage girl playing football in womenâs league with a cute white coach. Except he wasnât into me so maybe it doesnât matter that I donât remember his name? Watching that film at Slough cinema, I felt like my world had opened tenfold.
I think itâs really dope that the world is finally starting to recognize brown people beyond our stereotypes. I donât want that sentence to be misconstrued: Dope brown people have been doing dope shit since the beginning of time but discovering them hasnât always been easy. Underneath the Aziz Ansariâs and the Mindy Kalingâs the last few decades have been steadily birthing amazing creative talent tapping all verticals. And the more it happens, the more accurate the stories are. The problem has never been whether such talent exists, but more so how it gets exposed and what selective platforms are used for its display. Itâs hard to access these spaces because brown people are usually lumped into one category. Asian American Pacific Heritage month (AAPI) is a perfect example of this. Asia is vasssssssstttttttttttttttttttttttt my guy. Navigating this month can be hard with an entire continent fighting for a spotlight on the stage. And they all deserve it. This has been particularly weird to navigate in amerikaaa over the last decade. Growing up in england, brown people predominantly refer to themselves as Asian (peep BBC Asian network) so seeing how that doesnât quite translate here in the states immediately speaks to how blurred the lines all really are and the appetite to keep us in a box for their own understanding. People used to look at me crazy when I said I was Asia.
For a long time I referred to myself as Indian. That was the other box I could tick. Thatâs technically where my parents are from. But thereâs also nuances here, India is fucking massive. And given its current political state, clarity is necessary so I donât continue to add to the umbrella term and my own state of confusion. Iâm proud to be Punjabi. Even though Iâm pretty sure Iâm agnostic, Iâm proud to be Sikh. Saying it out loud is validating, even if that means diddly fucking squat to someone. Maybe theyâll google the term, and in doing so, might discover some cool tings outside of Sidhu Moosewala. 𼺠RIP.
So whatâs this all got to do with Monkey Man? Well as I sat watching it, clutching my pearls in the form of a vod sod (vodka soda), I felt SEEN. And not in the way you feel when a meme catches your eye during a meaningless scroll. I mean seen to the point of tears. Particularly during scenes that showcased Hijra (third gender / trans) community, or brutal protests against Indiaâs far right, or innocent groups of people being dragged from their homes because some greedy fucker wanted their land. I saw my own story in so many moments.
And then thereâs the juxtaposition of the directorâs PoV. Dev Patel is British Indian. I remember seeing him on Skins â the British Euphoria â for the first time in 2007 and being mind blown. Like wait, they have an Indian dude on here thatâs actually cool? Even if only by association to his weird Bristolian mates?
If weâre friends, then youâve def heard me talk a lot of shit about my 13-year long career in advertising and marketing, and the all too familiar experience of being the only brown person in the room. The problem with being the token â the one brown guy on a TV show or the one Punjabi girl on a creative team at some brand â is that it takes your limited beliefs about yourself and amplifies them. These occurrences always reaffirmed that there was no more space for me, for us. We had hit our quota. The table was small and I should be lucky that I even made it in the room, let alone got to sit down. Patelâs storytelling in Monkey Man, through so many different vehicles let us know that thereâs not only space for US, but thereâs space for all the of multitudes we contain as humans. You can take your experience as an Indian British lad, your understanding of a myth, your love for Bruce Lee, your resentment for injustice, and make a dope ass fucking movie about it. In doing so, youâve probably reclaimed parts of you that you thought were unreachable. Through our generation alone, immigrant kids have an infinite amount of stories sat on the tips of their tongues waiting to be told.
And representation isnât just limited to creative spaces. I had a chat with a friend the other day who recently was part of a big run event and was the only brown person OUT OF 1200 PEOPLE. Dude, look at that number. Say it out loud coz itâs gnarly as fuck. Itâs also not uncommon. We shared a similar conversation around the wellness space and how still, brown people are barely seen as contributorâs let alone athletes. And who even cares about the labels? Canât it just be that a group of brown runners got together and decided to run this thing because they had access? Sidebar: this is not my particular jam but s/o to all yousâ lot that do it.
Even better, canât it just be that a group of runners who happen to be brown got together and decided to run this thing like itâs the norm? By the time weâve spent talking someoneâs ear off about how we wanna be labeled, weâve diluted the craft or meaning altogether. Itâs exhausting. But reclamation is necessary and itâs how unconditioning works. Imagine if our wholes lives someone decided the sky was green, and then we realized weâd been lied to and it was actually blue. Weâre gonna take the time to learn the new colour because itâs the accurate and true in the present. Course correcting is necessary. Relearning is necessary.
Watching Monkey Man I felt all of this flash before my eyes (I promise I wasnât high). Patelâs unnamed character felt so real to me. His pain, anger, confusion, desire, hunger, was so visceral that I felt HOT. When it ended, I sat in my seat putting the pieces of the puzzle together. And then I started googling to see what others thought.
This was a mistake.
Review after review, written by you guessed it, brown writers !!!!! ripped the movie to shreds. I was so angry. I mean we know that internalized racism runs deep but fucckkkkkkk give the guy a break. The Juggernaut came in so hot youâd have thought they were more about the demise of South Asians. Sheesh! I smiled when I read the comments and realized that so many others were annoyed at them, too.
Like shut the fuck up bro. Case in point and my feelings on this below:
The road is long and weâre kinda paving it as we go. There are a couple of morals to the story here:
We really need to unlearn the facets of white supremacy and why it makes us hate each other. Thatâs a Shook discourse for another time.
When we give people the power to tell our stories, and they donât have the full picture, we give away our power.
Shout out to babygirl Sobhita Dhulipala for this breakthrough role and run, donât walk to watch her in Made in Heaven where youâll discover more brown coolness.
So, was Monkey Man the best action movie of all time? Who gives a fuckkkkkkkk. It was a reminder that no-one can tell your story like YOU. đđ˝
As always, Free Palestine. đ
Sparkling as always
Oh and also having critics of colour, who work at white-owned big-name media, critically bashing their people's work is the rage bait online economy we find ourselves in sadly, as it gets more engagement. đ¤ˇđžââď¸