“This was just the trailer. The real picture starts now.”
Thus quips supercop protagonist Chulbul Pandey partway through the opening fight in Dabangg (2010), his eyes just a few degrees removed from looking straight into the camera. His remark requires a slight revision: the rest of the scene, too, feels like a trailer, displaying a hyper-kinetic, collage-like aesthetic that embodies what cultural theorist Steven Shaviro termed “post-continuity,” or a contemporary visual style that deprioritizes clear screen geography in favor of formal play and sensory hyper-stimulation. In this scene, rapid-fire cutting abounds but often seems to serve contradictory purposes. At points, it compresses and streamlines the space and time of an action, such as cutting from a shot of Chulbul unwinding a fire hose to a shot of his leg kicking back to a close-up of his foot unlatching the valve that will release the soon-to-be-weaponized high-pressure stream; evoked here is the one-precisely-framed-action-after-another “constructive editing” that film scholar David Bordwell attributed to Hong Kong action cinema. Elsewhere, editing seems to arrest time, such as in presenting a spectacular maneuver from different angles or via axial cuts that seem to serve no purpose beyond lending the action a visual stutter. Temporal malleability is even more forcefully foregrounded in the scene’s toggling between speed ramp, “real time,” and slow motion, which occurs so frequently and fluidly that the distinctness of each time scale becomes subordinate to the act of moving between them. This time-shifting delivers a powerful physical jolt—the inertial kick when a speed-ramped segment shifts suddenly into slow motion, for example, or the catharsis of a temporally arrested maneuver rocketing into an accelerated impact—and helps thematize the power of the post-production specialist who fragments and remixes cinematic spacetime with abandon.
Indeed, this scene hinges on projecting a sense of power—both the power of our protagonist as an unstoppable physical force and the implied power of the post-production designer who, thanks to digital editing and visual effects software that enable more dynamic and fine-grained image manipulation, exerts an unprecedented level of control over the time and space of the image. To a significant extent, these two manifestations of power reinforce each other. Not unlike the famous “bullet-time” effect from The Matrix (1999)—which receives a visual nod in this scene—in which the “impossible” juxtaposition of multiple timescales within a “single” shot corresponds with Neo’s moment of empowerment (i.e., his newfound ability to manipulate the spacetime of the Matrix, which becomes an allegory for digital image plasticity itself), the foregrounded spatiotemporal malleability of the Dabangg scene seems to express and heighten our impression of Chulbul’s outsized power. Our protagonist is so much faster and stronger than his opponents that he seems to occupy a different plane of existence, phasing through space like an extra-dimensional entity unbound by physics at the human scale. Conversely, the way these stylistic flourishes are organized around the figure of the action hero (which, as film scholar Harvey O’Brien points out, is structured around a sense of agency and kinesthesis, a physicalized exertion of will with which the viewer can viscerally identify) seems to concretize the omnipotence of the post-production specialist in the onscreen figure of the action hero. On the one hand, Chulbul, in his power, is framed as being like the specialist, rearranging bodies, objects, and physical laws with seemingly omnipotent ease. On the other hand, the post-production specialist—whose role is underscored through the scene’s ostentatiously “remixed” style—comes to feel like Chulbul, a powerful and agential figure in complete control of their environment.
The effect of mutual empowerment isn’t perfect—as O’Brien notes, cinematic depictions of an action hero transcending normal physical limits often involve the use of self-reflexive techniques (e.g., conspicuous CGI or wirework) that, in their very self-reflexivity, threaten to undercut the impression of the action star as a real physical body in a real physical space. So it is with the Dabangg scene, in which the sense of Chulbul’s omnipotence is both enhanced by and challenged by the overt stylistic flourishes—challenged because the self-reflexivity frames Chulbul himself as just another image element to be remixed by the extra-diegetic post-production designer. That said, the way in which the techniques are systematically synced with Chulbul’s shows of force (e.g., a shift to slow motion to highlight the physical virtuosity of a particular maneuver, speed ramps to exaggerate the sense of crushing impact) tips the scales in favor of empowerment as the scene’s reigning impression and ethos.
This sense of power is further enhanced by the overwhelming star wattage of actor Salman Khan, who plays Chulbul and, at the time of Dabangg’s release, was experiencing a career resurgence that began with Wanted (2009) the previous year (he is currently one of the highest grossing actors in India). Within this pop cultural context, Chulbul’s specificity as a character dissolves into Khan the star; this character-actor conflation lends an extra-textual charge to the scene’s rhetoric of power, which draws on and allegorizes the meteoric rise of Khan-as-star at this juncture in his career. The emblematic moment occurs with Chulbul/Khan’s first appearance: after kicking down a door, whose toppling is speed-ramped to convey the kicker’s larger-than-life strength, the man appears in all his mustached, shades-sporting glory, framed in close-up and slow-motion and with accompanying multicolored text reading “Salman Khan as Chulbul Pandy.”
Emerging at the complex intersection of action-hero physicality, a digital “post-production aesthetic,” and mega-stardom, the experience of empowerment delivered by the scene is exhilarating. It is also disturbing, given that it sets the tone for a film about a cop who uses his “power” to do basically whatever he wants, from accepting bribes to shooting a fellow officer in the arm for laughs to hounding a woman until she marries him. Perhaps drawing extra-textually on Khan’s own status as what journalist Jasim Khan calls the scandal-laden “bad boy” of Bollywood, Chulbul’s ethical breaches are not condemned by the film but, rather, are framed as being mere rakish character quirks part and parcel of the man’s maverick personality.
On the one hand impressive in its brazen embrace of such an abrasive protagonist, the way Dabangg makes light of Chulbul’s offenses does feel queasy, and this queasiness begins in this opening scene, whose celebratory (even if also tongue-in-cheek) portrait of a cop vanquishing opponents totally, unreservedly, and without accountability sits uneasily with the history and ongoing reality of police brutality in India. What makes the scene thrilling is precisely what makes it unsettling: the multi-pronged aesthetic and rhetoric of power takes on a troubling air when mapped onto the figure of the gleefully irresponsible police officer, for whom “power” slips all too easily into its abuses. For better and for worse, the scene is a tour de force of force, indulging a fantasy of might that glosses over a reality of violence.
The Action Scene is a column exploring the construction of action set pieces, but it also considers “scene” in the sense of field or area: “action” as a genre and mode that spans different cultures and historical periods. By examining these two levels in tandem—one oriented toward aesthetic expression, the other toward broader contexts and concepts—this series aims to deepen appreciation for and spark discussion about action cinema.