PK: Aamir Khan as a popcorn religious experience

Half an hour into Rajkumar Hirani’s PK, I had a revelation: I wasn’t watching a mediocre Hindi film that would, in all probability, make more than Rs200 crore at the box office, but having a religious experience. Nothing else explained the events that were playing out on the screen before my eyes. It is easy to call PK contrived and in parts convoluted. I could perhaps write an entire column on why the film should not have been made in the first place, on how, pitched by ordinary hardworking writers, the script would have been thrown out of the window by any sane producer, but, truth be told, I experienced something far more substantial than watching a mediocre Hindi film.

On the surface, the film is about an alien who comes to earth to research the lives of human beings but who loses his remote control that will call his spaceship back and gives up his original plan in order to find his remote and leave the planet as soon as he can. But watch the film closely and you shall discover that Aamir Khan playing PK isn’t an alien who visits earth from an unnamed planet in an unnamed galaxy but a messiah. And like all messiahs the human race has witnessed since the beginning of time, PK too takes on organised religion that according to him confuses, confounds, and cheats the faithful.

His arguments are sensible but shallow, reminiscent of the logic that little children present in school debates, which is why they come across as highly original and in parts quite funny. The messiah never has any issue with the idea of God, but only His representation by ordinary fallible humans.

Once I made peace with the fact that Aamir wasn’t an alien but the Son of God, the film suddenly transformed from a boring flick into an experience which was at once palatable, pleasurable and perhaps even educational — in short a religious experience.

To be sure, PK is a subversive religious experience. Even if the film wasn’t about religion it would still have been a religious experience for moviegoers because the film subscribes to the messiah structure of film writing where the part of the protagonist is written out like a messenger of God or in the case of PK an actual incarnation of God who comes from the heavens above and sorts out the mess all of us find ourselves in when dealing with religion.

A protagonist in a messiah structure never has any weaknesses or imperfections. The only real problem the protagonist faces is the problem every messiah has faced: how to make people see the light correctly. An excellent example of how the messiah structure of film writing works is the last film Rajkumar Hirani made with Aamir Khan — Three Idiots — where Aamir plays a genius who enters an engineering college to deliver the message of following one’s passion and nothing else. He never faces any problems in the film but takes on the problems of others and solves it for them. In every scene the protagonist preaches and followers accept whatever he says with the blind conviction of the faithful.

In PK this ideology is taken to the next level where the messiah deals directly with his core business. Ostensibly attacking organised religion in India, the film actually promotes religiosity, albeit of different kind: a secular religion that believes in not many but only one God. Now where have I heard this before if not in a scripture of a revelatory nature?