For cis-het boys and men, Marvel & DC’s comics as well as the movies are almost a rite of passage. It is the quintessential way in which transmission of cultural knowledge happens, and also one of the ways in which boys learn their gendered role and attached expectations. Simply put, they learn the ‘cool’ way to be a man. These heroes are the prototype ‘great’ men: fantastical but also aspirational, saving the world but also cracking jokes. They’re usually tall, muscular, and uber powerful, the main characters of not just their own stories but literally the whole damn world. The women in these films are everything but women; they’re a supporting character, a love interest, a catalyst who will lead the hero to transform into his supreme potential, a cinematic tool to drive the larger narrative toward the climax and conclusion.
They’re not you and me. Not real characters with an arc and a personality. They’re something even better: enter Manic Pixie Dream Girl!
The Manic Pixie Dream Girl (coined by Nathan Rubin) is a popular movie character trope observed in female leads who exist as characters only to enhance the spiritual/emotional growth of their usually dull/unambitious/hesitant male main counterpart. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is essentially just that: a dream, a fallacy, an amalgamation of all heterosexual men’s potent fantasies of women as wild creatures who are also caretakers, mythical creatures who appear and disappear without notice, who must be chased and craved and are delicate and tender all at the same time. They’re unreal, depthless, in the story only to serve further the man’s journey towards a cinematic climax and once it is achieved, they’re gone. Or at least, the audience can stop caring about them.
In Brahmastra, the award-winning, trailblazing actress Alia Bhatt — currently emblematic of the most vibrant and original talent — is reduced to a characterless, empty, Shiva-babbling prop. She’s Manic Pixie in its most extreme form I have ever seen; Isha dedicates her entire existence to a stranger who on their second meeting talks about having visions of an extra-terrestrial conspiracy ring. She does so without a shadow of a doubt, and throughout the film keeps going along with every eccentric inter-state getaway, car-chase by killers, physical injury and more without a single moment of hesitation.
When Isha gets physically hurt, she downplays it. Smiles and says, ‘your love consumed me’. When she reaches a pivotal destination after a harrowing car ride chased by monsters, the ‘Guruji’ doesn’t even acknowledge her being in the room. She is summarily dismissed from the secret society as the male protagonist begins to discover his inner superpowers. Alia Bhatt stands, frame after frame, in scenes with zero dialogue and screen presence while her male counterpart continues singing, and dancing, and playing with fire. His backstory will now inspire two sequels in this franchise. You don’t even know if she has a job. Or parents. Or a real life.
Through three hours of brilliant visuals, cringe-inducing dialogues, and a faulty plot, I kept waiting for her character to reveal something of herself. Anything. In the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope the woman, toward the climax, will reveal her troubled past: either an estranged relationship with a parent, an episode of mental illness or just about anything to make her at least half a human. With Isha, there is nothing. She retains her ‘ideal’ self till the end. After all, she is the hero’s ‘button’. If there’s anything wrong with her, Shiva will die. And the entire goddamn universe needs Shiva!
Let me be clear: I am all for self-sacrificing love too, just as Brahmastra advocates. In a true partnership of love, individuals positively let go of egotistical conceptions and actively work towards the emotional growth of their partner and themselves. They make the world better around them. But if this is not a reciprocal relationship — like most of us from dysfunctional, patriarchal families have grown up around — it is not love. It is abuse. You cannot give and give and give. You cannot give and receive in crumbs. And do I really need to remind you that women have been socialised all their lives to be the ones giving, sacrificing, cleaning, cooking, caring, and supplementing their male partners’ transformation into a superhero?
The worst part about my entire experience of watching this feminist nightmare of a film, seeing the box office numbers scale higher and higher, and the reviews plummet lower and lower is that there’s not a single mention of how damaging and, in my opinion, insulting Alia Bhatt’s character really is. While we can collectively agree that an actor of Bhatt’s caliber deserved a better role and needed more dialogues other than ‘Shiva’, not a single review acknowledges that as groundbreaking a film as this one couldn’t care enough to invest more time and development in its female lead? That even in an Astraverse and not MCU, women are still secondary characters? Second class citizens? Incapable of calling the shots, not interesting enough to have a backstory or, in this case, to even have superpowers!
Finally, I want to address the most common argument that those on the other side will give to this rant: that it’s just a movie, just a character. It’s not real life. So what if this is a story just about Shiva and not the female character, what’s the big deal?
Firstly, this was not a movie just about Shiva. Brahmastra is literally attempting to construct its own universe wherein surprise, surprise yet again the most important characters/storylines/sequences concerned the men. If love really is the biggest ‘astra’, couldn’t the women had some say in it?
Secondly, to the just-a-character crusaders, here’s a call to action for you. With the explanation of Manic Pixie Dream Girl I’ve provided above, ask any/all of the heterosexual women you know if they’ve ever deliberately or not tried to emulate this behaviour toward their romantic partners. Ask them what the consequences of that behaviour. Ask them about how they perceive and accept love in their everyday lives. I promise you, you’ll be surprised to find how much of this ‘real world’ is a cinematic universe.