Transcendence or trap: The pitfalls of Imtiaz Ali's SHE
A still from She (2020).
Aiming for transcendent commentary on female sexual power, the Netflix series SHE fails in providing true agency to its heroine, falling instead in a powerless trap.
In She, a generally docile female cop, Bhumi (Aditi Sudhir Pohankar) is made to take up the disguise of a sex worker to ensnare two big-shots of Mumbai’s drug underbelly. It is not the entrapment that is the focus here; instead it is Bhumi, and specifically, her journey and her flickering feelings about embodying a sex worker. The transformation from being ‘not woman enough’ to being able to ‘seduce every stranger on the street’ tells a tale of a woman’s empowerment, one who finally reconciles the image of the sexy woman to the one she sees in the mirror, her back arched.
But what her own sexual awakening? As its currency, the show mistakes or conflates sexual empowerment through prostitution for sexual empowerment as prostitution. And, as She goes on to demonstrate, that is no power at all; the provider of pleasure is the pawn, not the pimp.
The code to this warped understanding of sexuality lies in the show’s foundations, which occupies a chunk of the series. In being taught how to perform femininity, Bhumi is sensitized for conquest. Like fruit with teeth, all men are turned into bees.
This drive for domination is as Simone de Beauvoir describes in The Second Sex: “The ‘feminine’ woman in making herself prey tries to reduce man, also, to her carnal passivity; she occupies herself in catching him in her trap, in enchaining him by means of the desire she arouses in him in submissively making herself a thing.”
As its currency, the show mistakes or conflates sexual empowerment through prostitution for sexual empowerment as prostitution. And, as She goes on to demonstrate, that is no power at all; the provider of pleasure is the pawn, not the pimp.
What is absent in She, however, is any shred of awareness in Bhumi of her ‘object’ status; or conversely, in the men of her subjectivity. This war unfolding on the body of a woman is not illuminating—and it doesn’t inch towards her liberation.
Created and written by Imtiaz Ali with Divya Johry, and directed by Arif Ali and Avinash Das, it often seems that everything that She tries to be is all but a vestige. The show is Hindi soap for the sexually inclined, a sexualised tale of a woman for men, another gangster/police flick that wants to convince you of its erudite. Which is okay, except that the seven-part series aflame on Netflix among Indians desperately wants to be the dashing hero of intellectual commentary on modern society. It’s prime interest/subject: women.
But is this inclusion really commentary?
Dreams of castration are transposed by dreams of submission. The pleasures of femininity now unlocked, hitherto perceived as in need of obstruction, as de Beauvoir writes, are made weapons “of her weakness and of her strength, it is not a matter of designing calculation: she seeks salvation spontaneously in the way that has been imposed on her, that of passivity, at the same time when she is actively demanding her sovereignty”. She is denied, and even then, she is asking.
Sex-work offers a unique advantage here. This is the role Bhumi finds herself parroting; a role that society simultaneously covets, produces, and is incensed by; a flagrant sign of a physiological need of the sexes, its transactional nature and the failure of normalised society to provide it (despite efforts to reduce women to its provision), where one is served through it, and the other chastised. While in commonplace male-female romantic relationships the value of sex is often ambiguous and unequal, de Beauvoir says, “exchanges—it is a fundamental law of political economy—are based on the value the merchandise offered has for the buyer, and not for the seller”. This is hardly just a spectre of economic parlance, seeing as this dynamic is prevalent in much of our collective culture: the ‘giving’ of virginity, the risk associated with promiscuity of women (who is in danger of running out: the purchaser or the seller?), the figurative ‘ownership’ of women (“She’s my girl”; or a father giving away his daughter to the bridegroom).
Typical heterosexual relationships try to marry two conflicting views of sex, marred by society and its prescriptions, while maintaining its mutually beneficial arrangement that is very clearly skewed. By allowing the seller (to an extent) to put a price on it, sex-work has its worth clearly defined, and further provides it in the currency of our economy. But She, despite having Bhumi recently endowed with the awareness of her sex appeal and in a simulation of the pleasure industry, never really considers the question of the significance of sex or of its different implications for the sexes. This, despite having endless opportunities to do so, with all its characters dispersed in varied stages of power and desire, sex-work boils down to another plot-point, a convenient method for nabbing mobsters with a woman caught in the role.
One wouldn’t need to look much further for other examples of women designated to similar roles on TV. Released on April 8 (a few weeks after She) the MX Player web series Ek Thi Begum is also similarly set in the figurative Mumbai underground, and weaponises either female sexuality or the female body (I can no longer tell). This time, however, instead of the lofty status of being a part of the police force, this ‘weapon’ is being used to avenge the woman’s husband.
This ‘type’ of woman has many names: honeytrap, temptress, femme fatale, coquette, Delilah, Circe, Jezebel. In her book Conflict Is Not Abuse, Sarah Schulman writes, “Women, of course, risk all kinds of slander and are tagged as predators for revealing erotic feeling.” The more disconcerting stream of events would have been had She, at her own behest, decided to explore her sexuality. But thanks to her role in the police force, morality is added and this woman’s sexuality is deemed beneficial.
The more telling aspects of the show lie between the folds of its dramatics: a colleague’s resentment after essentially becoming Bhumi’s driver in her new role; Bhumi’s whip-smart sister with a dozen quips per second; or her boss Fernandez leveraging praise for manipulation. These are revelatory characters, threatening to bubble up and swallow (or drown) constructs of plot around it with their real-world poignancy.
Bhumi is a shell, rattled, as she parrots the phrase, “I get my salary, so I’m okay with it”. Pre- and post-undercover operation, Bhumi lacks a sense of self and striving, and never seems in want of one, either. An act of courage by her is transformed into a malignancy of desperation. At the end, we still have no idea who she is except for the purported product of abuse and repression.
Near the end, Bhumi, in conversation with a drug-lord who is banking on getting a new population addicted to drugs, closes the series with the poignant words, “You do what you think is right”. Is this what they see as consent? Consent after permission, the consent when your short skirt is been exchanged for a sari, the consent in captivity.
What unblocks years of trauma? Leaving aside the problems related to the overuse and abuse of the trope that is woman-disfigured-by-abuse-as-a-set-curse-for-life, She tries to further suggest that another traumatic incident to top it all off is just the recipe needed to undo past damage. If the thesis to sexual assault is lack of consent, is the synthesis the creation of the conditions needed for consent? The tectonic shift that Bhumi undergoes—not only in exercise but towards a radically different self-image—is one that begs some more process.
The most lauded aspect of the show has been the acting of Vijay Varma (of Gully Boy fame) who plays Sasya, the predatory drug dealer, and of Pohankar playing the show’s protagonist Bhumi (short for Bhumika). In their scenes together, Varma and Pohankar evoke a firecracker of emotions, a storm of revulsion, fear and anger meeting with a snake-like slyness. Sasya is the best crafted character of the show, from gait to look, Mumbai-man-with-a-tongue-laced, topped off with atmospheric and shadowy lighting. But the police/gangster plot hoisted around the two standouts fails them, and like with the characterisation of Bhumi, no attempts are made to go beyond the smooth-talking criminal façade, or even face the garish nightmare left in the wake.
A trigger warning for sexual assault should accompany this show from the first episode on, but with the ghost of another, supposedly more deadly criminal abound, the show muddles its morality and hides behind the farce of police meting out punishment instead. But this show is not concerned with justice, or even retribution.
Near the end, Bhumi, in conversation with a drug-lord who is banking on getting a new population addicted to drugs, closes the series with the poignant words, “You do what you think is right”. Is this what they see as consent? Consent after permission, the consent when your short skirt is been exchanged for a sari, the consent in captivity.
If all this is as intended, then the show falls short of communicating its message. Imtiaz Ali—the show’s creator and co-writer—fails to impart any measure of self-awareness to his characters, and fails at making them (and hence, the viewer) question the borders and the broader dynamics of the very issues he wishes to tackle.
Throughout She, two peripheral/background characters pull out their phone and pose as if to take a selfie every time they occupy any portion of the screen. We have seen this ubiquitous pose blown up on billboards all over the country. It is a unique selling-point, targeted at the young Indian market, signaling that the current moment isn’t only fun, but sharable, too. However, this reflexive and commonplace action doesn’t amount to meaningful exegesis in the absence of any supportive narrative structure or character-building significance.
This is how the show functions. Since its release, She has often ranked as one of the ten most-watched series on Netflix India. But, despite its popularity, Ali’s show has a dramatic lack of depth. Every assertion/implication it intends to make falls flat, and its judgments on power, abuse, sexual empowerment, and the rest are in need of much closer examination.
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Sabah Virani is a writer, currently at ATS Studios, but otherwise occupied with the world of thought, structures and histories. She has words in Paper Planes, Youth Ki Awaaz and on her medium. You can find her Instagram: @__theweather and Twitter: @catgotsabah.
