Bala karthiga M

We often wonder about the origin of the universe. Where do we come from? Where are we going?

To answer that, we need an understanding of discrimination and the human mind. Our mind makes us believe that we live in a world of duality.

But the truth is this: there is this perceived world, and there is also this underlying essence. 

Super Deluxe decodes this mystery of consciousness and transcends the audience from a state of duality to a state of non-duality – the essence of every Buddhist and Vedanta teaching.

Duality is a recurring concept in Vedanta and in Buddhism. Our minds discriminate against this and that, based on complexes of superiority, inferiority, equality and so on.  Duality is the foundation of all suffering.

And non-duality or singularity is the remedying idea that frees us of this suffering.

The movie starts out exhibiting the duality of life and slowly transcends into non-duality.

Why do you need to transcend?

It’s all to do with realizations

In a very polar world, this movie tells us that everything is one.

There’s no positive-negative. There’s no male-female. There’s no human-extraterrestrial. There’s no pornstar-deity. 

Super Deluxe is a super awesome visual translation of the Sanskrit word – Advaita. The identification of the self with the ground of reality.  

Let’s begin with our darling Shilpa. 

I believe that LGBTQ persons can be considered to be special gifts of the Universe, not in spite of, but precisely because they are different and don’t fit within normally accepted societal gender or sexual attraction categories.

Keeping in line with the satirical theme of spirituality in the movie, her character perhaps represents God is both male and female. God is fully androgynous……God is, therefore, trans-gender if you will……beyond and transcending and yet including, all gender categories.

The duality of Shilpa’s character stems further into the fact that while she wins our heart with her seemingly harmless and genuine personality, she reveals towards the end that she’s sinned too.

This duality transcends into non-duality when the peak of her character’s arc, is not around the fact of her biological gender, but because of the fact that her son doesn’t discriminate! He punishes her for abandoning him, by letting her stew in her own guilt for an entire night.

I have to mention the wife here. When Shilpa sorts things out with her son, the wife slowly stings at her transgender husband with this remark:

‘Unakku mattum dha vazhkaila prechana irukkuma?’

I particularly loved that moment, because while the audience is fixated on the struggles and harassments that Shilpa is subjected to because of her gender, the story splits that point open by throwing out the perspective of discrimination, and pointing out that despite the differences and polarities in their lives, everyone suffers through it all the same.

Man. Woman. Transwoman. Child.

The duality theme extends up even more from Shilpa into Arputham aka Dhanasekaran. I can’t even imagine how brilliantly this character was etched, and I can’t believe I am even saying this, given I am a die-hard fan of Vijay Sethupathi, but Arputham’s character tugged at my heart a little bit more than Shilpa’s!

The struggle with one’s faith –  it’s such an internal process.

Spirituality is a long, tiresome and personal journey, and I never knew it could be translated visually without being dramatic and cheesy.

Arputham’s character opens with him – a healer – scorning at God. If that isn’t a badass opening scene, I honestly don’t know what is!

His narrative of the movie, had me wondering at moments that this was perhaps a twisted, dark and pulp fiction style retelling of Pi from The Life of Pi. While Pi holds on to his faith, through storms, flooding, and starvation, Arputham openly revokes his faith and refuses to preach and practice when he begins to realize that perhaps all his work was based on a lie…. Which brings us to everyone’s most favorite moment duality in the movie – the core of the plot, as I see it.

The Miracle of Arputham’s God And Shilpa’s Block of Stone.

Shilpa begs Arputham for the absolution of her sin, and he denies to, calling her the worst sinner he’s ever met. But once Arputham realizes that he was not the only one saved by God during the Tsunami, and Shilpa (the sinner he just refused to absolve) was holding on to the same statue that he was – the very foundation of his faith is shattered.

Shilpa gets into his head. And he begins to marinate in his doubts.

To him, his faith is often being represented as something complicated or difficult to experience while he pursues it.

But then he suddenly shuns it, and enter – the diamonds, and his faith becomes quite ordinary and available at every moment. 

And suddenly, the discrimination between the Miraculous Statue of Arputham’s God, and Shilpa’s block of stone disappears, and we just see them both, in a very real sense, as extensions or expressions of God – or The Force Of Creation And Destruction.

Nondual consciousness is the natural state.

Oneness is a fundamental quality of everything. Everything is a part of and made of one non-dual consciousness.

The Buddhist Alien 

The part of this movie that made my hair stand on its ends HAS to be the part with the alien, talking Mahayana Buddhist philosophy.

When she splits open the teen boy into two that’s when it finally hits you that the movie has transcended into a realm of singularity.

Why do you need to transcend?

It’s all to do with realizations.

We’re stuck in our ways of thinking, our ways of perceiving things, which keeps us tied in our paradigm, in our own personal realm of reality. I think it’s time to point out here, yet another character, who keeps hinting at his frustration with the lack of singularity in his world – Mughil. 

At a dialogue I particularly love, he tears down the glamour and pride in being attached to the ideas of one’s caste, language, and nationality  – three clusters of identifications no Tamil writer or director has dared to club together ever before – and demonizes all of them as points of discrimination. Why should someone who glorifies their language be praised but someone who glorifies his caste is vilified? At the end of the day, all of these segment us into different groups, ripping us off of our empathy for each other. Shun them all, and the human race will progress – he says while stuffing a dead body into his mattress.

Every character struggles to break through the duality of their existences and find peace in singularity.

Which brings us back to the extraterrestrial in the story. She’s a prophet of sorts, a Buddha from space, who enlightens the teenage boys with a live demonstration of duality.  When she sits on the terrace at the end of the movie, chatting about the universe and its mechanisms with the human boy – it’s again a message about the singularity.

I’m not kidding you – I had chills of excitement when she talked Mahayana Buddhism and the concept of consciousness in even electrons, the human being is made of cells, we are made of non-human elements. So looking like that, you are made of elements that are not you. But it’s those elements that work together in unison to make you-you. Similarly, while it’s the humans like him and extra-terrestrials like her, that have to work together, in order to make the universe – the universe. 

Our minds discriminate. What you perceive when you see, it’s the product of what you think, what you feel and what you believe in.

What makes Super Deluxe interesting is that the writers never define this deliberately and say, ‘Look within, explore yourself, and you will discover it.’

They don’t give it a name.

It just is.

Which is exactly how several mystical traditions talk about Awakening.

XOXO,

Bala.

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