Why Sunny Deol’s onscreen anger is the stuff of viral memes and a cinematic antique

Ameesha Patel and Sunny Deol reprised their roles as Sakeena and Tara Singh in Gadar 2, which released in theatres on August 11, 2023. (Image via Instagram/ I Am Sunny Deol)

Tom Cruise is many things - the greatest living megastar, a scientology fanatic and possibly the most decorated actor in recent history. He is also known for his running, not as a sporting pursuit, but as an acting tool. The sight of Cruise running, his veins pumping through the fabric of his immaculately stitched suits, has come to command the value of a pop-culture artefact. Few actors are iconized for the roles they do, fewer still are known for a trait or a characteristic that becomes their calling card. Closer home, Sunny Deol’s late-career return to the arid, but exuberant territory of cross-border heroism in Gadar 2, has not only underlined the value of nostalgia, but also re-emphasized his anger, his bloodshot eyes, his screeching baritone as a pop culture antiquity. And antiquity, that like memes, we are likely to collectively return to time and again.

Few actors are recognized for moments they produce, compared to the entirety of their work. It makes them sensational, instantly meme-worthy, and as Gadar2’s success shows, maybe even timeless. (Screen grab from Gadar 2)

Hindi cinema has obviously given us the Angry Young Man era, a point in time when angst became the conduit for disillusionment, violence became the defence against political rhetoric. It wasn’t quite anger, but a throbbing vein that popped into action at the sight of a filmy climax. It’s a pattern most of our cinema from the era that made Amitabh Bachchan the star he is, follows. Deol’s sinewy exterior, his somewhat distressed countenance, however, gave Indian angst the angry face it deserved. Not quite the red-face emoji, but Deol came pretty close to singlehandedly re-routing the low-decibel nature of angst to a level of expression that Indian audiences had seen or experienced.

In a scene from Ghayal (1990), Deol practically colonizes a police station by screaming his disdain for the justice system at the officers looking on. At one point, his sweaty, strained body looks capable of pulverizing the modest grill holding him back. “I will take you to court, you bastards,” he howls. In another scene, he imports chaos to a sedate, upscale party that he is forcibly ushered out of while screaming the memorable line “Main tera khoon pee jaunga.” There is something visceral and naïve in the plainness of that threat. It crosses, at least in its semiotic construction, several boundaries of modesty, humanity and maybe even sanity. It’s also what makes it so iconic that had memes existed back in the '90s, Deol might just have been the decade’s biggest star.

In Damini (1993), Deol’s anger might be physically restrained by the professional robes of his character, but is unleashed with equally intimating dynamism. He hollers his clinching argument, the kind of sentimental outburst that would get most lawyers disbarred. But in the grey area of fiction and fantasy, a disgruntled lawyer can possibly yell “Tareek pe Tareek” and walk away with what is practically one of Hindi cinema’s most celebrated and revisited moments. It’s a scene made by Deol’s brawniness, his inexplicably luminous eyes, an improbable register of voice and also the inability to do much else. Deol’s growling, young man identity was also the culmination of the physicality that simply couldn’t be put aside, the inflexibility that couldn’t, in the age of romance that followed, be hidden.

via GIPHY

The most iconic moment in Gadar 2, a comeback film for an actor not exactly renowned for his effusive use of subtlety, is Tara Singh’s slow jog towards an idle hand pump that practically disperses a mob. Not just disperse it in fact, but send it into a chaotic retreat where men trample one another. It’s obviously a recall to the first film, when a reluctant Singh is forced to uproot a similar fixture, somewhere in the heart of a newly formed Pakistan. More than just franchise recall, however, the scene also illustrates the somewhat puzzling longevity of Deol’s angry avatar, as a crowd-pleasing emblem of an indignant form of masculinity. In fact, compared the first film, Deol’s return as Singh - in his mid-60s, mind you - is shriller, rowdier and front-footed. There is none of the dreamy softness of the original, that made Tara Singh a commoner, reluctantly thrust into the shoes of a hero. Here, Singh is loud and bullish from the get-go as a sort of hat-tip to the very thing that makes Deol’s anger more than just a cinematic device. It’s a canon.

As his career winds down, and his gruff, stressed face gives way to an ageing landscape, Deol is finally starting to look like the sweet, unintimidating figure he never quite became on screen. From pointlessly flailing his arms in song sequences to awkwardly sidestepping the mandate for a supple leading man, Deol has perhaps true to his fierce image, marked his own unique territory. In doing so he has also produced the equivalent of a generational montage that though it shows him howling at people with wide-eyed bloodlust, enshrines him to that specific moment. A moment, that absurdly, might outlast everything else the actor has done or tried to do. Considering Gadar’s box-office run, it’s not the worst thing to be remembered for.

Also read: Fight breaks out inside theatre during 'Gadar 2' screening. Viral video