Introduction
This paper situates itself at the intersection of film studies, science fiction studies and posthumanism while also using insights from queer studies. The paper offers an analysis of the Tamil film Iru Mugan (Anand Shankar 2016) with regard to the ambivalence in the depiction of its queer/transgender antagonist. In the film, a transgender scientist engages in the unethical use of techno-scientific knowledge which threatens national and global security while also destabilising the conventional, heterosexual boundaries of human life. The film uses the “masala filmic conventions” (Kaur 2013, 286) typical of Tamil/Indian cinema to create a narrative that articulates anxieties about the boundaries of the nation, the human body and techno-scientific knowledge. To analyse the depiction of the transgender terrorist, I draw upon Jasbir Puar’s (2007) formulation of “sexual exceptionalism” which she elaborates in the context of U.S. national security wherein she suggests that the status of homosexual subjects gets constructed as outlaws/deviants/terrorists because heterosexuality is regarded (by the state and the wider society?) as “a necessary constitutive factor of national identity” (4). Further, one of the primary ways sexual exceptionalism is executed is through “discourses of sexual repression” which lead to “geopolitical global mapping of sexual cultural norms” (9).
I also borrow Rosi Braidotti’s (2016) exposition of “posthuman critical theory”.In the essay, Braidotti pushes for thinking about the posthuman subject through the notion of “nature-culture continuum” which calls for collapsing the distinctions between humans, animals and machines – the unity of all matter organic and non-organic – as well as the unprecedented technological mediation of human life (19). Collapsing the difference between nature/biology and culture/gender also allows conceptualising sexual diversity of humans and “post-gender sexualities” by borrowing insights from the “sexual systems of nonhuman species” such as animals and insects (18). Cultivating posthuman subjectivity also entails inculcating detachment or objectivity towards the self and the human species as a whole which requires taking into account the “specific modes of belonging” of the self which draws attention towards the stratification of the society on the basis of class, caste, gender, sexuality, race, etc. leading to “discriminations and injustices” (15-16).
I would like to suggest that a film such as Kanchana (Raghava Lawrence 2011) (also known as Muni 2: Kanchana) is an important precursor for Iru Mugan. Dhusiya (2014) has analysed the Tamil horror film Kanchana (2011) for its depiction of a transgender ghost who possesses the straight male protagonist of the film and thereby narrates a story that foregrounds the contemporary issues of the local transgender community (called aravanis) of Tamil Nadu. As elaborated by Dhusiya (2014), Kanchana is unique in that it narrates the difficulty faced by transgender community to get better educational/professional opportunities particularly in the context of (medical) science. Dhusiya argues that the film forces the audience to “[reflect] on the overwhelming power ‘science’ and biological determinism have wielded over the trans-community, and shows this community as both aware of this power and as wanting a structural stake in this power” (9). I suggest that Iru Mugan takes forward Kanchana’s ideological/ethical project insofar as it shows a queer/transgender character as a purveyor of science and technology. In Iru Mugan, the same actor (C. Vikram) plays the hero (R&AW Agent Akilan) and the villain (transgender/queer scientist Love). This is similar to Kanchana where the heterosexual hero starts behaving effeminately after being possessed by the ghost of a transgender. Thus, the actor’s body is interpreted or depicted within two divergent modes of sexuality.
Science, sexuality and gender politics
Iru Mugan depicts Love as a queer, entrepreneurial-scientific-criminal mastermind who designs and sells pharmaceuticals to terrorists. The central science-fictional artefact of the film is a capacity-enhancing drug named ‘speed’ that is filled in asthma inhalers. A person who consumes this drug experiences a short-lived spurt of aggression granting him/her with superhuman capacities. I would like to suggest that what also needs to be deemed as a novum is that this drug is designed and developed by a transgender diasporic Indian scientist. The film pushes the limits of queer depiction in that it depicts the queer character as a person trained in the ways of modern, western science. However, the unconventional depiction of a queer character as a futuristic scientific genius is tempered down by her disposition towards criminal activities, megalomania and anarchy. At one point in the film, Love also likens herself to ‘great men’ like Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler.
Love’s character has unmistakable intertextual references in iconic Hollywood antagonists like the Joker (Heath Ledger) from The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan 2008) and Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem) from Skyfall (Sam Mendes 2012). Like the Joker and Silva, Love also plans chaos as well as spontaneously manipulates and blends with her surroundings to her advantage to get leverage over the law and order agencies pursuing her. But what makes Love unique is that it is a queer/transgender character modelled along the aforementioned American or British villainous characters. A couple of scenes in the film reveal Love’s queer sexual orientation and gender preferences. In an important sequence in the film where Love is conversing with Akilan, who has been taken hostage by Love and her henchmen, Love reveals how she managed to stay undetected for four years with the help of Meera’s (Akilan’s presumed-dead wife played by Nayanthara) skills in hacking and computer data analysis. Love also reveals her impending plans to transport 10,000 ‘speed’ drug inhalers to different parts of the world which will be used by terrorists and criminals. During this monologue, Love reveals that she is not “too fond of women”. She then makes a proposition to Akilan. Love suggests to Akilan that they both should get together as partners so that they may rule over the world with Akilan as the king and Love as the queen. Later in the film Love makes a similar proposition to a Malaysian male police officer while she is imprisoned. In the same sequence, Love escapes from the prison – in a fashion reminiscent of Joker and Silva – by manipulating the Malaysian police officers and is later shown waking up in a women’s changing room in a mall. These sequences establish Love as a transgender mastermind who likes men and identifies as a woman.
What is also significant about Love’s character is that she has deep scientific knowledge regarding biochemistry and how it can affect the human body. In an absorbing sequence towards the climax of the film, Love disguises herself as a nurse – an intertextual reference to the Joker in The Dark Knight – and uses compounds like chloroform and nitrous oxide (laughing gas) to manipulate the hospital staff. She then uses a ventilation duct to reach an ICU suite where she uses chemicals (apparently) procured from the hospital to synthesize a compound (suxamethonium chloride) that temporarily paralyses Akilan and helps her to frame him for a murder that she commits before him with a sadistic ease. This sequence foregrounds the deep knowledge that Love has regarding chemical toxins and how it affects human biology. There are also other scenes in the film that foreground Love’s expertise regarding human biology.
Geopolitics, technophobia and national security
The depiction of Love as a gay terrorist needs to be seen against the geopolitical backdrop of the film in the context of India as well as Malaysia. I suggest that the film’s preoccupation with terrorism, warfare and national security plays out in the Indian context while its containment of homosexuality seems to be an allusion to the hostile Malaysian milieu towards the LGBTQ community.[1]However, the relevance of the repression of queer sexuality cannot be ruled out in the Indian context despite the decriminalisation of same-sex relationships in India in 2018.
The narrative is about Indian characters and is largely set in Malaysia with only a small portion of the diegesis taking place in India. In fact, the exposition is set in the Indian Embassy located in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia where a 70-year-old man, under the influence of ‘speed’, attacks and kills Indian and Malaysian security personnel. With the help of surveillance footage R&AW officers identify the old man as Love’s henchman based on a heart-shaped tattoo on his nape which is Love’s symbol. The predominance of warfare and terrorism in the narrative needs to be seen against the geopolitical events that followed the release of the film. The film was under production during 2015 with delays due to changes in cast and production crew. It was eventually shot and released in 2016.[2] The film was released on September 8, 2016: only ten days before the Uri attacks were carried out in India by a Pakistan-based terrorist group named Jaish-e-Muhammad. By the end of September 2018, the Indian army retaliated militarily with what came to be referred to as surgical strikes. Thus, retrospectively, the film may be regarded as a premonition about the impending terrorist attacks on India. In a crucial flashback sequence of the film, Love and his brother hack into the server of an international intelligence agency and find out that Agent Akilan underwent training with American spies after the 26/11 terrorist attacks on Mumbai in India. These details reveal the film’s preoccupation with national security and espionage as well as the use of the military-industrial complex as a motif in the film.
The military-industrial complex dominates the mise-en-scené of the film as well as the narrative of the film. The narrative exhibits a constant preoccupation with warfare and military technology right from the opening credits of the film which is an extended CGI sequence depicting the evolution of weapons and warfare from the days of horse-riding swordsmen to the present times of nuclear weapons and drone warfare. Moreover, the climax of the film is a series of action sequences shot in an old, dysfunctional military airbase. In the scene where the drug ‘speed’ is demystified for Akilan and Aayushi (a R&AW agent played by Nithya Menon) by a chemist/scientist who works for Love, the film also makes an elaborate reference to Adolf Hitler’s strategy of administering a capacity-enhancing drug to his armies. This is important considering the film’s anxiety regarding the misuse of techno-scientific knowledge as an element of terrorism and its implications for national/global security.
While the attack on the Indian Embassy can be interpreted as a terrorist attack against India, the fact that it is Love who plans and executes the attack on the Indian Embassy – a Malaysian public place under strict state surveillance – by staying undetected within Malaysia metaphorically signifies the subversion of Malaysia’s policing of its social order with regard to the strict laws against the LGBTQ community. The exposition establishes that a queer person can easily (remotely) infiltrate and manipulate public spaces in Malaysia. Such a depiction may be interpreted as a subversion of the strict rules and norms against the queer community in Malaysia. This sets up the central conflict of the narrative. The R&AW agents such as Akilan, Meera, Aayushi and Malik personify the judicial arm of the Indian state that wants to capture a terrorist who threatens its national security, while the Malaysian police can be metaphorically interpreted as the judicial arm of the Malaysian state that is acting in cooperation with the Indian state in order to curb its queer community.
Conclusion
Although the queer community in India felt a sense of liberation in September 2018 after the Supreme Court’s decision to decriminalise same-sex relationships among consenting adults by invalidating some of the assertions in Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, Iru Mugan’s end speaks to a latent homophobia and indifference towards the queer community which exists in the Indian social order.[3]
Although Love is depicted as genderqueer, she ironically also personifies the trait of totalitarianism. Love embeds her henchmen with what seems like a microchip through which she can trigger an electric shock in their medulla with the help of a wireless device. Love’s inclination to torture and kill her henchmen that fail to follow Love’s orders alludes to the policing and ‘control’ (a word used by Love while describing her private army) experienced by bodies/people that transgress the majoritarian norms of gender and sexuality. However, Love’s tendency for totalitarian control also becomes the cause of her death. The end shows Love getting killed in a plane accident as a result of Akilan’s timely use of the remote control that kills all her henchmen, including the pilot and the co-pilot, with an electric shock. This is followed immediately by a scene that shows Akilan and Meera flirting and engaging in a conversation about starting a family while on a honeymoon. The end reveals the narrative’s bias toward heterosexual human existence over queer human existence. The narrative reinstates heteronormative sexuality as the essence of humanism while queer sexuality is eliminated as a posthuman deviant trait that violates the heterosexual boundaries of life.
Although the narrative shows the queer character in a futuristic and rebellious fashion with regard to her intellectual/professional skills and in a position of power over the society/state, the imagination is also marked by homophobia considering that the narrative chooses to depict the queer scientist as a villain that has to be terminated in the end. Iru Mugan’s concerns of national security and the misuse of technology fold within them the anxiety regarding non-normative sexuality. The technophobia is projected on to the non-normative sexuality and the otherness of the villain. Hence, I would like to suggest that the film’s anxieties regarding the misuse of human enhancement and threats to national security are an extension of the film’s latent homophobia. From a critical posthumanist perspective, in the Indian context, the inculcation of posthumanist subjectivity would entail the collective societal challenge of overcoming homophobia, and moving towards a post-gendered country with sexual diversity.
Works Cited
Braidotti, Rosi. 2016. “Posthuman Critical Theory.” In Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures, edited by Debashish Banerji and Makarand R. Paranjape, 13-32. New Delhi: Springer India.
Dhusiya, Mithuraaj. 2014. “Let the Ghost Speak: A Study of Contemporary Indian Horror Cinema.” Wide Screen 5, no. 1 (February): 1-24. Accessed 29-05-2021. http://widescreenjournal.org/index.php/journal/article/view/77
Kaur, Raminder. 2013. “The Fictions of Science and Cinema in India.” In The Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinemas, edited by K. Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake, 282-296. London and New York: Routledge.
Puar, Jasbir K. 2007. “Introduction: Homonationalism and Biopolitics.” In Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, 1-36. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
[1] A recent article published by Human Rights Watch gives details regarding the evolution of the laws against the LGBTQ community and their strict implementation in Malaysia. The article can be found at this link: https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/01/25/malaysia-government-steps-attacks-lgbt-people. Accessed 30-05-2021.
[2] The film’s production details are available on the film’s Wikipedia page which can be accessed at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iru_Mugan; accessed on 28-05-2021.
[3] An article published in The Hindu in September 2020 relates to the readers that despite the decriminalisation of same-sex relationships, there has been no significant change in the collective societal mindset towards the LGBTQ community. The article can be found at: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/two-years-since-article-377-annulment-lgbtq-community-still-battling-prejudice/article32534479.ece. Accessed on 27-05-2021.