Cast the last stone: on Nagraj Manjule’s brilliant Fandry

The black sparrow. The trapped piglet. The makeshift kerosene lamp. The pair of jeans. The carrom board. The talcum powder. The broken bicycle. The village school with a painting of Ambedkar adorning its wall. The girl viewed from a distance. The sensitive boy, afraid of being mocked. The stones.

These are some of the constituent elements of the Marathi film Fandry, written and directed by Nagraj Manjule. By themselves they mean little, but their use here – how they accrue, deepen, add layers to our understanding of the central character – makes this one of the most powerful films I have seen in the past year. Fandry is about a Big Subject, the evils of the caste system, but it doesn’t achieve its ends through lecture-baazi: it observes, focuses on minutiae and lets us into the lives and emotional states of its characters until the horror of a situation hits home. The protagonist, a boy named Jabya (Somnath Avghade), is written and performed with careful attention to detail, and so is everyone else in the film: Jabya’s family and friends; the scornful (or wary) upper-caste people in the village; the girl, Shalu, whom Jabya watches shyly, like a version of Gatsby staring at the green light. Even the black pigs – which have become a local menace and are considered so filthy that a student must go home from school because she accidentally brushed against one of them – are an organic part of this setting, though their symbolic function seems obvious when you think about it (this is very much a story about the dangers of being contaminated through touch).
 
Through a series of languid, slice-of-life scenes, we learn things in increments. The way Jabya uses his proper name (the imperial-sounding “Jambawant”) while signing a love letter to Shalu. How traumatised he is at the thought of having to join his family in catching pigs just outside the school, where his classmates might see him. His relationship with a man named Chanakya (played by Nagraj Manjule himself), who could be an oddball living on society's fringes, or a savant who wants the boy to continue dreaming and hoping**. Or a marvelous little throwaway moment where we realise (though we really should have known if we had stopped to think about it) that Jabya’s father cannot read. At intervals, Jabya and a friend try to catch an unusual bird that lives around a tree in the wilderness just outside the village. They speak of the “need” to catch it and wonder if what they have heard about it is true. It isn’t until more than halfway through the film that we learn why this bird is so important to Jabya, and when the revelation comes it isn’t presented in big bold letters, it is simply dropped like a pebble in a lake – but the ripples travel a long way.

Throughout, there are reminders of the huge gulf between the fantasies and realities of the unprivileged, and they arrive just when you’re in danger of getting complacent as a viewer and thinking Jabya isn’t so badly off (at least he is getting to go to school, he has a good friend he spends time with, and this is a sweet coming-of-age tale after all). When a truck runs over the cycle he has been using to peddle ice lollies, the suddenness with which this quiet, dreamy-eyed boy is reduced to a wailing wreck comes like a bucket of cold water in the face, as does the shot of the mauled vehicle being carried aloft as if in a funeral procession.

Other brilliantly observed sequences include one where a boy’s family comes to see Jabya’s elder sister, and a pointed but non-abrasive conversation takes place about the dowry required – with shots of the groom’s side whispering to each other, and our knowledge of how much hinges on their decision. I also liked the short scene where the family talks to each other while cutting wood from trees – it seems homely and unremarkable until a man comes hollering at them from a distance and they scuttle off with the few pieces of wood they have stolen from his land. The film is getting us to know these people closely, to feel invested in their problems, but for a very brief instant we see them as this man does, as anonymous, nuisance-creating intruders. And this is done with economy and lightness of touch.

I know it seems like I’m just listing scenes, but then this is a film of vignettes, poetically woven together (and punctuated by a gentle music score that carries the slightest hint of menace – a hint that a dam inside Jabya, as he struggles so hard to maintain his dignity, might burst some day). It is only at the very end, with a Fourth Wall-demolishing final shot that an explicit statement about discrimination and injustice is made. And the biggest compliment I can pay Fandry is to say that in my view, even though that hard-hitting final shot is just the thing to get an audience applauding as the screen darkens, I don’t think this film really needed it. Everything that went before is so effective on its own terms.

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** Reading in a interview that Fandry was an autobiographical  story gave me a new perspective on the Chanakya character played by Manjule - though the character is very much part of the narrative, it also feels like the writer-director, in an act of wish-fulfillment, has cast himself as a sort of guardian angel looking over his own younger self.

Take two - books about secret sharers, ghosts and other doubles

[From my theme-based books column for ForbesLife India – a piece about some books featuring doubles or doppelgangers. As always I had a much wider list to begin with, but it was a 1000-word space, so... ] 
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In an age where flash fiction has made way for tweet-sized narratives, an online group recently invited entries for two-sentence horror stories. Among the submissions was this little shiver-inducer: “I begin tucking him into bed and he says, ‘Daddy, check for monsters under my bed.’ I look underneath for his amusement and see him, another him, staring back at me quivering and whispering, ‘Daddy there’s somebody on my bed.’ ”

The staple interpretation would be that one of the two kids is a monster, but the possibility that both might be authentic is equally intriguing. It taps into our deepest subconscious fears built around the idea of the double or the doppelganger – a shadow-self that may be more “real” in some ways than we are, implying that our knowledge of ourselves and the world we take for granted is incomplete.

Readers familiar with Bill Watterson’s great comic strip Calvin and Hobbes may picture the brattish Calvin as the boy in the story. Drooling monsters under the bed are a feature of Calvin’s rich inner life, but so are alter egos and doubles, beginning with his stuffed tiger and companion in fantasy Hobbes. In fact, a website containing off-kilter, subtextual movie analyses has an essay suggesting that the protagonists of the film Fight Club – an unnamed man and his aggressive, hyper-masculine hidden self – are versions of the grown-up Calvin trying to deal with his isolation. I doubt that Chuck Palahniuk – the author of the novel on which the film was based – had any such thing in mind, but his book, like Watterson’s series, comments on the schizophrenia that accompanies the stresses and demands of modern life.

Doubles or nemeses in literature go back a very long way though. There are the classic formulations in works such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (a doctor isolates the darker side of his nature, then finds that the primal savage he has thus unleashed is the dominant self) and Edgar Allan Poe’s William Wilson (a debauched young man is shadowed by a lookalike, who seems intent on revealing the former’s misdemeanors). But there are also stories where the double theme is less immediately apparent. Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer is told in the voice of a young, unnamed ship’s captain who allows a mysterious man named Leggatt aboard his vessel one night and keeps him hidden in his cabin; as we learn about the stowaway’s past, we see how it could be a cautionary tale, a pointer to things to come, for the narrator.

Interestingly, when the story first appeared in print more than a hundred years ago, it was called “The Secret-Sharer”, meaning simply that the captain and Leggatt shared a secret – but Conrad later decided to remove the hyphen, making the title more ambiguous. His most influential novel Heart of Darkness can be read in similar terms too, with its premise of Charles Marlow, a man from the “civilised” world, travelling into the Congo to meet an enigmatic slave-trader, Mr Kurtz. Thanks to his brief encounter with the deranged Kurtz, Marlow eventually returns with his own sanity intact and a clearer understanding of dark and dangerous places – not just in the physical world but also in the human soul. In one sense, he is like a Jekyll who gazed into the abyss and survived the test.

As should be evident, the main tenor of the doppelganger theme is gloomy and oppressive, but there are lighter narratives too: in Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper two young boys, who happen to be dead ringers, switch places so they may live each other’s lives, and in Anthony Hope’s adventure-thriller The Prisoner of Zenda an Englishman impersonates the king of a small country. Neither of these books is weighed down by psychological analysis, but they have interesting things to say about the tenuousness of identity and the nourishing aspects of role-play. Then there is Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, a follow-up to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in which Alice steps through a mirror and discovers a world that is not quite a straight “reflection” of the one she knows. Carroll’s books have inspired several tributes, such as Neil Gaiman’s novella Coraline – a modern horror-fantasy for children – about a girl discovering a locked door at the back of a house she and her parents have just moved into. Behind it lies a distorted-mirror version of her own house, complete with “another” mother and father who are pallid and automaton-like and have buttons for eyes. That sounds creepy, but haven’t most of us, at some time or other, viewed our own parents in similar terms? And can Coraline trust herself to make the right choice?

The double motif has had an extensive life in genre films too – it recurs through Alfred Hitchcock’s body of work, for instance. The Hitchcock film that most explicitly dealt with the split personality was Psycho, based on Robert Bloch’s book about a lonely motel-keeper and his mysterious “mother”, but an equally notable occurrence is in Strangers on a Train, adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s tightly crafted novel. Highsmith would later write a series of thrillers featuring Tom Ripley, a chameleon-like conman who slips into other people’s identities – but Strangers on a Train is her first, chilling take on the phenomenon known as the folie à deux (“a madness shared by two”), which has been a touchstone of much modern crime writing. Here, the upwardly mobile Guy Haines is persuaded by the sociopathic Bruno Anthony to “swap murders” – each of them does away with someone the other would like to get rid of, so that linking the two deaths would be impossible. Guy and Bruno are initially presented as very different personality types, but by the time the former is implicated in the plan, the line between them is disappearing.

The line between an author and his characters can be just as blurred. A notable example of a character who functions as a novelist’s alter-ego is the fictional Nathan Zuckerman, who has narrated many of Philip Roth’s books starting with the aptly titled The Ghost Writer in 1979: like Roth himself, Zuckerman is a Jewish writer of literary fiction, which gives some of these narratives the texture of a hall of mirrors. At age 73, Roth finally put his literary double to rest in Exit Ghost, in a story about a writer suffering from physical ailments and an unreliable memory but still hankering to be “back in the drama, back in the turmoil, wanting to be with people again and […] feel the pleasure of one’s power again”. Was saying goodnight to Nathan a way of slaying the monster under his bed and acknowledging his own mortality at the same time? After all, writers and their creations are secret sharers too.

A Cuban sandwich and a little secretary: thoughts on Chef

Jon Favreau’s engaging (if occasionally slow-moving) new film Chef – about a well-regarded restaurant chef who decides to go back to basics after getting a thumbs down from a leading food critic – reminded me of a quote from Alfred Hitchcock’s conversations with Francois Truffaut. In what can be read as a variant on the termite art-elephant art discussion, Hitchcock says of Ingrid Bergman:

You see, she only wanted to appear in masterpieces. How on earth can anyone know whether a picture is going to turn out to be a masterpiece or not? When she was pleased with a picture she’d just finished, she would think ‘What can I do after this one?’ Except for Joan of Arc, she could never conceive of anything that was grand enough; that’s very foolish!

The desire to do something big and, when that’s successful, to go on to something else even bigger is like the little boy who’s blowing up a balloon and all of a sudden it goes Boom right in his face […] In those days I used to tell Bergman, ‘Go out and play a secretary. It might turn out to be a big picture about a little secretary.’ But no! She’s got to play the greatest woman in history, Joan of Arc.

I’m not saying this is an exact analogy for what happens to Chef Carl Casper in Chef: for one thing, Carl’s troubles begin not because of his own decisions but because his boss Riva orders him to play it safe, to serve the restaurant “classics” when the Eminent Critic comes a-dining. (Is Riva a version of big-studio producers telling Ingrid she is now such a big star that she must only do “prestige projects”?) But we also see that Carl wants to do larger-than-life things. Though he is a likable guy, not the stereotype of an arrogant, snooty achiever, success is an albatross around his neck, and he doesn’t realise that he may have reached the top of a personal plateau. At this point in the film it’s hard to imagine him doing something as plebian as manning a food truck, serving Cuban sandwiches and yucca fries (the very definition of a basic lunch) to working-class people. But when backed against the wall, this is exactly what he does. It becomes a journey of self-discovery, as well as a chance to bond with the son whom he never spent much time with earlier, because he was too busy chasing his highbrow creative aspirations.

And Carl is presented to us as a creative person. He speaks the language of the frustrated, self-questioning artist (“I don’t know if I have anything to say”), he seeks approval obsessively, as in one tragic-comic scene where his friends are sampling one of his preparations and he repeatedly asks “Is it good?” The refrain becomes so pronounced, so desperate, and yet so self-contained that one realises no answer will be good enough for Carl. His friends might honestly think that what he has just served them is the best thing they have ever tasted, they might do everything in their powers to persuade him of this, but once the seed of self-doubt has been planted this man can no longer trust what the people around him say.

Which means there is only one way out for him. He must travel back into the past, into a less self-conscious time when he could enjoy what he was doing without worrying too much about fame or affirmation. (He must learn to become a termite artist again.) So Carl goes to Miami, the place where he got his start in the profession, where his son was born, where he and his ex-wife spent happier times, where he was presumably less stressed, more relaxed. And here he learns (or remembers) that even the lowly Cuban sandwich can, like anything else, be done indifferently or done brilliantly – it can be made with the passion, commitment and attention to detail that can catch the eye of even a highbrow food critic who spends most of his time around haute cuisine. What the “little secretary” in a big film is to Saint Joan in an average film, Carl’s lovingly created street food is to the assembly-line lava cake that brought him so much grief.

P.S. Chef isn’t “just” about food, or art – it is also about the scarier aspects of the connectedness of modern life; about being a public figure in a world of social media and constant opinion-generation, and how difficult it can be to maintain one’s composure and dignity in such a world. Twitter, selfies, instantly created and uploaded videos…these are all vital ingredients of this film, and the technology-unsavvy Carl bears the brunt of all of them at some point or the other. But the script doesn’t take the easy way out by only bemoaning the negative aspects of these things. They also become an empowering tool for the chef; by the end, they have helped him step out of his ivory tower and reach out to a new “audience”, much like authors forced into self-promotion in the internet age.

Saved by the screen - thoughts on Filmistaan

Nitin Kakkar's Filmistaan has many platitudes about Indians and Pakistanis being essentially one people with a shared culture, a shared passion for cricket – and for Hindi cinema, which ordinary people in Pakistan watch with enthusiasm even as religious leaders and militants warn them against its corrupting effects. When Sunny (Sharib Hashmi), an aspiring actor, assistant director and incorrigible movie buff, is kidnapped by terrorists near the border (they were after the American members of his film crew) and awakens to learn he is now in the Pakistani wilderness, he can’t tell the difference – everything looks the same, people have similar faces, speak the same language. In a moving scene that follows shortly after, he hears a folk song sung to the tune of “Yaara Seeli Seeli” and joins in by warbling the lyrics as he knows them – it brings him comfort, as do the nighttime DVD screenings of films such as Maine Pyaar Kiya. Like a benshi providing vocal accompaniment to a silent film (or a “chalta-phirta Bombay Talkie”), Sunny gets to speak Salman Khan’s lines for the wide-eyed audience when the soundtrack on the pirated DVD goes dead.

Even if you can relate to Sunny’s obsession, you might feel ambivalent about him: as film dialogues trip off his tongue in almost any given situation, he can go from being likably funny to exasperating in the space of a few seconds. But by the time he has made friends with a young Pakistani named Aftab – a fellow film buff who wears colourful, flowery scarves, illegally peddles “seedi-yan” and decides to help Sunny escape his captors – the viewer’s sympathies are fixed.

And how can they not be? After all, we are in a hall ourselves, watching a film. And set against these two kindred spirits are the terrorists, who are suspicious – or outright contemptuous – of movies. “Kanjar!” they mutter at the wannabe actor (much like Prithviraj Kapoor’s disapproving father did nearly a hundred years ago, and look how that turned out). Using guns to terrify people and threaten their children is part of their way of life, but the other kind of shooting is an idea only the devil could have thought up, and the camera is a “manhoos cheez” for them. Though they are briefly seduced by it when Sunny goofily offers to help them make the film they want to send the Indian government, listing their demands.

“Film chaahe chhoti ho, par dil se banaana chaahiye,” Sunny says as he prepares to shoot this video. Real life meets melodrama in these scenes, which are a little too cute (what with the refrain of “Roll. Rolling. Acting” spoken by the militants) – but perhaps this is part of the point. The divide between fantasy and hard reality is stressed in another scene at the film’s halfway mark: Sunny, fooling around with a rifle – putting on a show for the village kids by mimicking how Mithun Chakraborty and Ashok Kumar might fire a gun – doesn’t realise that his own life is in very real danger. But even this tense scene is followed by a shot of a hakim speaking what we might think of as filmi lines: you are lucky the bullet only grazed your shoulder, he tells Sunny, and then they bond over the hakim’s memories of Amritsar’s kulchas and Sunny’s memories of his dadaji’s love for pre-Partition Lahore and its kebabs.

In some ways then, Filmistaan is a trite film. Like another film about a man caught on the wrong side of the border, Ramchand Pakistani, it is a little too pat and feel-good in places. Characters show unexpected self-awareness in spelling out their own predicaments (as in a dialogue involving a man who grew up in a madrassa under a strict father's supervision and was made to do azaan five times a day without fail but wasn’t assured of two meals); there are stereotypes such as the grinning do-gooder, the hardened older militant and the more introspective younger one. But perhaps the way to look at this film is to see it in terms of wish-fulfilment rather than as a hard-edged depiction of the realities of the India-Pakistan situation. And in this view of things, it may be lack of imagination that handicaps the terrorists, and the power of imagination that allows Sunny and Aftab to get away.

Imprisoned in a room, like a movie star in a screen, Sunny acts out scenes for the children outside – he is upbeat despite knowing he may only have a few days left to live. But perhaps this is because he knows he is in a film himself and that he will be rescued by the magic of cinema; perhaps the universe will conspire to help him. And indeed something amusingly ironic happens in the climax: a character who is not at all interested in cinema – the older terrorist Mahmood (Kumud Mishra) – does something filmi, in the style of the James Bond villain stopping to talk instead of quickly eliminating his quarries, and this buys some time for the good guys. The filmi duniya does have a way of bringing unlikely people into its fold.

  Soon after, it seems like Sunny and Aftab will be separated through the Sholay Trope: one friend will send the other off to safety and sacrifice his own life. But that doesn’t happen, and no matter, for there are other cinematic possibilities available. (Mild spoiler alert) The actual ending of Filmistaan reminded me of the freeze-frame that closed Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a scene that suggested cinema’s ability to keep hope alive – or, even if there is no hope, to spare us from seeing bad things happen to the characters we like. Whether Sunny and Aftab get away in the end is a much too literal question, almost beside the point. What matters is that this Indian and this Pakistani have made it together, hand in hand, to some mythical place where barbed wire doesn’t exist, where they can watch seedi-yan of the movies they love and perhaps even make a few themselves. Meanwhile, in the “real world” beyond their ken, life continues in a more complicated, less hopeful way.

Horror and its hidden layers - David Skal’s The Monster Show

“Tod Browning lay in his grave eating malted milk balls,” goes the opening sentence of a particularly gripping chapter in David J Skal’s book The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. What is happening here isn’t as otherworldly as that bald sentence makes it sound, but it is freakish and scary in its own way. The year was 1901 and young Browning – employed with a travelling carnival in the American heartland – was playing the part of the Hypnotic Living Corpse; the trick involved being “buried” in full view of gawking spectators and then spending up to 48 hours underground, in a wooden coffin with a hidden ventilation system and nourishment.

Among the lessons from this anecdote, one is that the public’s fascination with morbidity can always be relied on to sell tickets; another is that individual experiences of this sort have had a far-reaching effect on popular culture. Tod the Living Corpse would later become a film director and helm two of the most influential horror movies ever made, the 1931 version of Dracula starring Bela Lugosi and the viscerally disturbing Freaks (1932), with its cast of actual deformed carnival performers. All the time Browning had spent six feet under was “conducive to thought”, he told an interviewer once. Perhaps he passed his lonely subterranean hours thinking of a future where he might terrify large groups of people without having to himself undergo such discomfort. And perhaps it was natural for him to find his calling in cinema, where a director can be a puppet-master, pulling the strings from behind a curtain, watching his audience squirm in their seats (or as Alfred Hitchcock once said of his fondness for manipulating viewers’ emotions, “I play them like an organ”).

It is understandable enough that horror as a genre is not for all tastes. What’s more bemusing is that so many people regard it as something inferior and disreputable – as frivolous escapism – despite the fact that fear is one of the profoundest and most fundamental of human emotions (going back to the oldest folk-tales like the one about a group of primitive people being terrified by the mouth of a deep cave because they had never known the darkness of night-time). Skal’s book, with its many fascinating stories, is a study of a century of horror in American culture – mainly in film, but also in other media such as photography, painting, television and pulp literature. It is about horror as a reflection of social currents or states of mind; a mirror – or an antidote – to a prevailing zeitgeist. As the author points out, it is no coincidence that one of America’s worst years of the century, the Depression-afflicted 1931, was also the best ever for monster movies (the Lugosi Dracula, the Boris Karloff Frankenstein, Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde among other films).

The talking points in this book include things that have often come up in popular-film studies: for instance, the Godzilla monster as an embodiment of nuclear-age paranoia (the creature is a byproduct of radioactive waste, and it is of course Japanese in its origin). But there are others I hadn’t thought so closely about, despite having been a long-time fan of horror films. Contemplating the effect of World War One on horror in popular culture, Skal observes that “modern warfare had introduced new and previously unimaginable approaches to destroying or brutally reordering the human body” – and this found echoes in the Surrealist artists’ preoccupation with deformity and disfigurement, as well as in films like the Lon Chaney-starrer The Phantom of the Opera and the 1922 Nosferatu, with its rodent-like vampire and pestilential, plague-like images. The climactic scene of Abel Gance’s 1937 anti-war film J’Accuse – a montage of the ruined faces of real WWI soldiers – is notable in this respect: as Skal notes, these disfigured men, seen in unsparing close-up, could easily be the living models for the masks worn by actors like Chaney and Karloff in horror films. “As an unintentional revelation of horror’s major subtext in the Twenties and Thirties, [Gance’s film] is breathtaking.”

Equally engrossing is the chapter about the effects of the birth-control pill – which helped engender the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s – and the drug Thalidomide, which was safely prescribed to pregnant women but had horrific consequences and resulted in thousands of birth defects. These events found resonance in books and films about monstrous children, despairing parents and the idea that reproduction can happen independently of sexual intercourse: works such as Village of the Damned, Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, David Lynch’s Eraserhead and David Cronenberg’s The Brood, even the iconic scene in Ridley Scott’s Alien where a male cosmonaut violently “gives birth” when an alien embryo bursts through his chest.

Reading The Monster Show made me think about concealed layers of meaning in our own horror movies. The recent Ek thi Daayan, for instance, can be read as the story of a man who, from his childhood days, has had a long-suppressed fear of women; now, as he sets about trying to consolidate a romantic relationship, the fear surfaces again and he seems beset by witches and unsure who to trust**. Similarly, the atmospheric 13B – in which a man realises that events in his house seem to be mimicking the plot of a new TV drama his family has become addicted to – can be seen as a comment on the seductive power of television and how media affects our self-perception. A variant, perhaps, on the famous scene in the 1982 film Poltergeist where a little girl is made captive, literally, by a TV set.

But what of earlier, more apparently simple-minded horror films? The possibilities, if you start thinking about them, are endless. In the Raj Kumar Kohli classic Jaani Dushman, a long-time personal favourite, a hirsute, long-fanged beast terrorizes a village, abducting and killing young girls on their wedding day. Given this theme, and a final scene where three macho heroes confront the monster in a den, the film could well be read as a parable about a conservative society’s fear that its young women might be seduced, their honour “compromised”, before they have been married and safely co-opted into the system. The somewhat confused structure of the film leaves a question dangling in the end though: was the werewolf just a controlling patriarch with an abundance of chest hair? Or was he a saviour, trying to yank a regressive society out of the dark ages - and were the real villains the Sunil Dutt and Shatrughan Sinha characters, who went sauntering home, phallic guns slung over their shoulders, to their little women once it was all over? Go on, discuss.

P.S. a nod of gratitude to the erudite Just Mohit, who so thoughtfully gifted me Skal’s book. I hope to write more about it sometime, because it contains much else of interest.
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** What made Ek thi Daayan an interesting test case for me was that I could identify the exact moment when the film started to become a disappointment: it is (minor spoiler alert) the point where we get “objective” evidence that one of the characters really IS a witch. Before this happens, it is possible to view the whole story as a fever-dream suffered by the Emraan Hashmi character, who may be an unreliable narrator. Much of the tension comes from our wondering just how disturbed he is: does he have deep-rooted problems with women, which manifest themselves in “accidents” that cause injury to his female assistants, or sudden attacks on women with long “chhottis”? There is even a scene where a psychiatrist offers credible “rational” explanations for everything that has happened so far. Once the film reveals its supernatural hand, it loses some of its psychological dimensions and turns its leading man into a generic action hero. But this doesn't mean that the subtext becomes invalid.