Aamir Khan is not PK

"I coulda had class. I coulda been a contendah. I coulda been somebody." 

Whether Marlon Brando was drawling the lines in a cab in On the Waterfront, raw-sexuality oozing boy genius capturing popular imagination as he was at the time, or threatening total annihilation with a mere nod of the head 20 years later in The Godfather, you believed him. This is what has come to be embody method acting since; his chameleonic ability to live the role. Sadly, today, it has come to mean sending out press releases about what one is eating or wearing in order to get into the role (oh look Riteish Deshmukh wore Genelia’s skirt, X Khan ate two tonnes of chicken for a month to get the muscle, and other such trivia), and it rarely translates to conviction on screen. Brando revolutionalised method acting because when he acted, he was not performing; the role was not apart from him. (More recently James Franco in an OpEd for the New York Times blamed this Brandoism of “Being, not Doing” for the modern-day destruction of actors like Shia LeBeouf and Philip Seymour Hoffman, but Bollywood is nowhere near there yet, so we shall save that argument for another day).

Marlon Brando was a giant for most of his life. Yet it was on screen, immortalised as The Godfather, where the gigantism of his legend stood. In real life, tragic, diminished by the travails of his children, broken by repeated alimony, and prone to binge eating, 20 million dollars in debt, Brando off screen did not overshadow who he was on screen. He did not believe in awards, the two-time Academy award winner told newspapers, not because he thought them rigged, and thus unworthy of him, but because he did not believe he was more or less than a spot boy or a cinematographer on his set. His job was acting, and he took on the role in the simplest of terms.

The star cult, as Govinda no less points out in Happy Ending, (one of the truest reasons everyone should have wished that film didn’t flop) is the bane of Bollywood, the interruption to every story line, the crown on every gilded hit. Christmas is Aamir’s, Eid is Salman’s and Diwali is Shah Rukh’s. The target audiences, from thinking women to brawn buffers, are demarcated like fiefdoms. There is a signature line, a signature look, a signature plot, inspiration, co-star and dialogue trailing from film to film. The signature of the star to his piece of work is held above the entire process of filmmaking, and indeed, the film itself. The star makes the Rs 100 crore film. No film is the making of the star. He wears the role like a costume, discarding it for the next one, he himself the constant from film to film. It is as though Brando did not make The Godfather. The Godfather made a Brando. Rahul Bose has always played Rahul Bose on screen. From English August to an Everyday dairy whitener ad. Tabu’s glory is that she is the fine Shakespearean Tabu, elegant, feisty, rippling marble with impact as she goes, that she already is. It is the curse of being Parineeti, that she finds her aggressive modern Punjabi girl act can only go so far. Ranveer stands in clear danger of stereotyping the boisterous unpredictable Romeo, much like Shammi Kapoor did in film after film before him. And Ranbir Forever-Finding-Himself-What’s-a-Bit-of-Fun Kapoor is capable of great things once he finds himself. Among the pantheon, it is true that it is Aamir, and to some extent Aalia Bhatt, who are able to mute themselves sufficiently to allow the Other to take over. But Aamir’s curse is that he has made his muting, his dressing down, his brand.

Which is why when protests erupt against Aamir Khan’s role as an alien chasing a mock Shiva through a toilet and on stage; no matter how much filmmakers hold that it was a role he was playing, it falls on deaf ears. An exasperated Deepika Padukone took to an online post last year to point out that Mohini the cleavage bearing stripper was a role she played, and not her reality. And that audiences and commentators should know the difference. Fair enough. Except that audiences today continue to see Khan, not PK, as the mock-God-chasing alien. And Deepika, not Mohini, as cleavage bearing. This is what comes of selling the personality, and not the role or the film. Let us firstly discard the notion that Bollywood has any method acting beyond Naseeruddin Shah, who manages to convince us often enough that he is a lesser actor than he actually is, and the once giant Amrish Puri. In the Indian film industry, it is no state secret that films are written, cast and sold as tributes to personality cults. If a film is sold as a newcomer film, it is a launch vehicle, and must either have one-wheel-a-star who is endorsing the newcomer, or hesitatingly attempts to tout "fresh faces" (such as with ABCD) as some sort of poor USP that every producer hails but will never back with their money.

In this temple to the personality cult, it is but moot that all acts on screen are seen as actions of the actor, not his character.

Next time, try to curb the press releases that speak of method acting. How seriously one is taking the role. How one is becoming the role. How much one cannot get rid of a hat. How one cannot show up for an event on time because one was discussing in the vanity van how one could be seen with a beard that no one knew was part of a look. Wear an adhesive moustache if you must. Let the film be sold on plot, and storyline. Not the mere fact that you are doing it. Be the role.

Maybe then someone will believe you, when you say it wasn’t you. But the character, who said or did what he did.

Brando coulda been something. Who do you think would have believed that?