Abstract

Horkheimer and Adorno, in their book Dialectic of Enlightenment discuss the “Cultural industry” and how art is produced keeping in mind the consumer’s taste and acceptability to incur maximum profit. Using this concept in mainstream Hindi cinema, where the recurring themes are either patriotism, casteism, social hierarchy, love interests, or environmental concern, we notice how these movies are made for the audience to numb their thinking capacity or help them derive pleasure. In this paper, I am going to focus on commercially misogynist Bollywood spy films and how the East follows the tradition laid down by the West, which produced films like Mission Impossible or the James Bond series. Females in such misogynist films are either presented as mothers, seductresses, or as objects of love interest. I shall study the depiction of female characters in such films from a feminist perspective (keeping in mind what Mulvey discusses in her essay “Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema” as voyeuristic scopophilia and fetishism) using psychoanalysis and Frankfurt school theories. Through this paper, I shall explore the dichotomy of how females try to act as predators (to prey upon male spectators and lure them to the movie hall) but eventually end up being preyed by the system (as they are the object of desire and are subjected to the male gaze). In all these roles that a female plays, she does it only to be a part of this phallocentric society and help the audience obtain their promised pleasure. I shall also be dwelling upon the animal instincts in such women and how they are assigned qualities of wild beasts that often make them look like natural predators.