Social crusader in A Common Man

In this week’s column, we examine the role of social crusader played by The Man in the psycho-thriller, A Common Man by Chandran Rutnam. A Common Man is a Sri Lankan English movie which won Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor awards at the Madrid International Film Festival. It also won a bronze medal in the Feature Films category at the New York Festivals’ International Television and Film Awards. The star cast of the movie included Oscar Award winner Sir Ben Kingsley and Ben Cross and debut actors Patrick Rutnam (as IP Mohideen) and Fredrick-James Koch (as IP Rangan Jayaweera) who played important supporting roles in the movie.

A Common Man is the official remaking of the Indian Thriller A Wednesday. Although it was a re-making of A Wednesday, filmmaker Rutnam has skilfully re-worked on the screenplay, making it extremely relevant to the Sri Lankan context.

Social crusader

The film commences among bomb making materials and newspaper articles about LTTE bombings in Sri Lanka. Then, the scene shifts to a typical busy morning in Colombo. The Man (Ben Kingsley) plants five bombs around the city; A public bus, a shopping mall, the Polgoda police station, an intercity train and the Katukurunda Airfield. The man then establishes his mini control station on top a skyscraper in Dehiwala and calls the police chief Morris Da Silva (Ben Cross) and informs him that if four prisoners are not released, the bombs will be detonated.

The protagonist of the movie The Man brilliantly portrayed by Sir Ben Kingsley plays the typical social crusader in colloid similar in character to many such prominent social crusaders such as Shahenshah and Drona in Indian cinema and Superman and Bat Man in Western cinema. According to cinematic sociology, such characters like The Man in A Common Man have been defined as socially deviance characters.

Robert Wonser and David Boyns in a paper titled ‘The Caped Crusader, What Batman Films Tell Us about Crime and Deviance’, are of the view that films can reveal social deviance: “Cinema can reveal a lot about the sociology of deviance. From their explorations of subcultures, criminal syndicates, institutional corruption, underworld activity, and corporate malfeasance, films provide a unique opportunity to illuminate social worlds that often run against the grain of conventional society.

Many films explore issues of deviance by creating realistic portrayals of social worlds that exist on the boundaries of social experience. In such films, we are invited into the backroom worlds of corporate crime as in Wall Street, witness the grit and grime of police corruption like that of Training Day, or enter the microcosmic universes of inner city street life like that found in Boyzn in the Hood. While these films provide fictional accounts of deviance, they also invite viewers into sociological worlds that would not be surprising to encounter beyond the screen.

Other films stretch the boundaries of the imagination in their exploration of deviance and ask viewers to engage in what Samuel Taylor Coleridge ([1817] 1965:169) called the “willing suspension of disbelief.” These films take us into sociological universes that are beyond the realm of our conventional experience but, at the same time, provide a cinematic reality that illuminates sociological themes present in our own social world. ”

The sociology of deviance

In expounding the theory of deviance in Sociology Robert Wonser and David Boyns says; “ The study of deviance is one of the most enduring concerns in the discipline of sociology. In sociological analysis, deviance is understood as behaviors that circumvent, flaunt, and even challenge the normative conventions of a given culture. As Emile Durkheim ([1895] 1982) suggested over a century ago, deviance can be thought of as an inherent aspect of society out of which we forge and shape our collective sentiments and identities. In Durkheim’s analysis, deviance provides boundaries for social groups and helps outline the standards for both inclusive and exclusive membership. From this perspective, societies cannot function properly and coherently without group boundaries. According to Durkheim, a social order of balance and justice is important, but the deviance that challenges this order is vital and normal.

For Durkheim, deviance is a normal component of any society, as opposed to a patho­logical expression of those actions that stand outside the boundaries of social control. From this perspective, deviance has a twofold relationship to the normative social order: it is both common and even expected sociologically, and it represents a transgression of cultural stan­dards that constitute the norm.

Sociologists understand norms as conventionalised modes of behavior, thought, and belief that outline the activities of a social group. Norms are the cultural rules, laws, and codes of etiquette that members of a group are expected to follow.

For Durkheim ([1912] 1995), norms can be prescriptive, outlining forms of expected and preferred thought and action (i.e., what one should do), or they can be proscriptive, empha­sising the behaviour and beliefs that are unacceptable, taboo, and forbidden (i.e., what one should not do). In Durkheim’s ([1893] 1997) view, one of the most important challenges for a social group is how it handles deviance.

Durkheim argues that groups typically vary in the degree to which they either repress deviance outright (usually through severe punishment or group expulsion) or work towards the restitution of order that is unsettled by deviance. It is important to note that, in Durkheim’s analysis, cultural standards of normative thought and action are relative to sociological context and even to situational circumstance. Thus, what is considered to be normal behaviour in one culture or setting may be regarded as devi­ant in another. As sociologists often note, and as will be examined below, norms and devi­ance both are social constructions . ”

The kind of social deviance in A Common Man is, though different to Bat Man, shares similar objectives with Bat Man. The masterly crafted conspiracy The Man, by planting bombs at different locations in the city, ultimately resulted in the death of terrorists. The objective of the The Man is to see that justice is being done speedily to the terrorists who are in prison. However, it is an act of deviance from the laws of the land.