Integritus Prime

I recently watched the film Animal, and I don’t think I’ve ever cringed this much in the space of a few hours. It was the incessant violence (well, the treatment of women is horrible too). I still watched it though, because underneath all the blood and guts (spoiler alert), was an even more ubiquitous and compelling thread of severe trauma.

In particular, Ranbir Kapoor’s character, Ranvijay Singh Balbir, is an extremely unstable, violent, and unpredictable example of what can happen when you’ve been raised with childhood emotional neglect. Neglect of Ranvijay’s emotional and psychological needs by his father, Balbir Singh, played excellently by Anil Kapoor, is revealed in detail towards the end of the film. The scene between father and son, as they role play each other, is perhaps the most powerful scene in the whole film, at least from a trauma perspective. That scene reveals just how neglected Ranvijay felt, who was married to his work, running what is India’s greatest enterprise in the movie: a steel plant.

Childhood emotional neglect includes a set of actions by parents, intentional or not, and here I’ve put in bold what Ranvijay’s father, Balbir, did:

• Indifference to a child
• Viewing or labeling a child as a burden
• Ignoring a child’s needs
• Parental substance abuse
• Apathy toward a child
• Mindless or uninvolved approach to parenting
• Blaming a child for their behavior
• Pretending a child doesn’t exist
• Constantly calling a child ‘bad’

As a result of Balbir’s neglectful parenting, Ranvijay is unhinged, and he responds by overreacting to anything that has to do with protecting his family. One of the examples we see is how he takes a gun to school to threaten the boys who teased his sister. He shuts down his new bride, played powerfully by Rashmika Mandana, for saying one derogatory comment about his dad. It becomes clear that violence, both physical and verbal, are a huge part of Ranvijay’s coping mechanisms. Ranvijay is also a vehicle for normalizing violence – he doesn’t bat an eyelid when it comes to killing and torturing others.

Here are the characteristics of adults who were neglected as children – the ones in bold are exhibited by Ranvijay:

• Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
• Panic disorders
• Bipolar disorder
• Substance misuse
• Distorted sense of self
• Higher risk of suicidal behavior
• Difficulty maintaining relationships
• Depression
• Anxiety disorders
• Distrust of others
• Inability to ask for help
• Persistent feelings of loneliness, guilt, or shame
• Inability to deal with emotions or emotional volatility
• Fears of abandonment
• Inability to set boundaries
• Dissociative behaviors

In the film, Ranvijay is unable to stop himself from doing everything possible to try and save his father from those who want to kill him and take his wealth – he sleeps with a woman he correctly suspects of being a mole to gain intel, at the risk of losing his marriage; he kills multitudes of people who have been sent to kill him and his father; he fights to the death with the man who ordered the hit on his father. Ranvijay almost dies trying to protect his father. His need to prove his worth and to have some loving attention from his father drives his every desperate act.

In the end, Balbir is diagnosed with late stage cancer and given mere months to live. While Balbir realizes his neglectful parenting at this stage, there is already a lot of damage done both in terms of Ranvijay’s mental health, and the atrocious violence to others.

While the film has become a hit (earning ₹660.78 crore (US$83 million) so far and rated as the highest grossing adult only Indian film of all time), likely due to the glorification of violence and sex – picture handsome men in black suits walking around killing people and older men having sex with or raping younger women – the theme of neglect trauma continues to scream loudest to me from the film though. I am left wondering whether the masses who have watched this film loved it because they endorse the violence and misogyny (which is very distrubing), or also because they resonate with wanting to be loved and appreciated by their neglectful fathers. Either way, we have a lot of work to do as a global society on all fronts: healing childhood neglect and other forms of trauma, improving how we value and treat women, and creating pathways to stop the glorification of violence.