How do people binge through show after show ?

A few months ago, I watched the veteran actor Ciaran Hinds play Julius Caesar in the series Rome. Hinds has been a familiar presence in many films and shows – he is an Oscar nominee this year for Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast – and here he was in the Ides of March scene, blood-soaked, flailing about, and Et-Tu-ing.

What I didn’t know was that Hinds had once played the perpetrator of a famous underhanded killing: the night-time guerrilla attack on the Pandav camp in the Mahabharata. A younger, leaner Hinds was Ashwatthama in Peter Brook’s stage and 1989 screen productions of the epic.

I first watched Brook’s Mahabharata in the early 1990s, but have revisited it and shown scenes from it during an online Mahabharata course. You could even say I was over-familiar with it. And yet, I never made the Hinds connection until I happened to flip through a book about the production. It is one of a few ‘Whoa! That was the same person?’ moments I have had lately while watching actors across a range of shows and films.

Another recent epiphany was that the educator Kamla Chowdhry in the new series Rocket Boys was played by the actress Neha Chauhan who played the salesgirl in Dibakar Banerjee‘s Love, Sex aur Dhokha more than a decade ago. LSD was a favourite film, and I remember wondering what had happened to its lower-profile actors. But it took a visit to IMDB.com before I made the connection between the T-shirt-and-jeans-clad Rashmi, emotionally abused by a co-worker, and the elegant Kamla.

At such times, one wonders if the old memory receptors are corroding due to age. For obvious reasons, I prefer alternate explanations. So, here’s one: such disorientation is inevitable in this cluttered era of movie-and-series viewing. We have a much larger pool of things to see than ever before. Those of us who move outside comfort zones (rather than following algorithms) may, in the same week, watch a Tamil film followed by a Nordic crime series and then a mainstream Hindi film populated by shiny debutants who turn out to be the grandchildren of actors we knew in the 1980s. We encounter a number of performers, across cultures and genres, whom we may have only seen fleetingly before.

How this affects you – or whether you even realise it – hinges on the type of viewer you are. I am the sort who keeps a film’s Wikipedia page open so I can look up an interesting performer’s other work, or a plot point that wasn’t too clear.

This is partly necessitated by being a professional writer who must take notes, but it is a personality kink too. I don’t get how people binge their way through show after show without taking a break to absorb and think about what they have just watched. Even as a younger, fresher movie buff, I couldn’t watch three or four films back-to-back at a festival.

Which is not to say that such confusion never happened back then. As a teenager getting into world cinema in the internet-less early 1990s, it was thrilling to form an impression of an actor’s persona and then to subsequently see him or her in a very different role or environment. Here, for instance, is Toshiro Mifune as the scruffy, bearded samurai of the Edo period in Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 Yojimbo, and then as a clean-shaven cop, walking noirish mean streets in contemporary clothes in Kurosawa’s 1949 Stray Dog.

Once, upon realising that Chishu Ryu, the old man in the Japanese Yasujiro Ozu-directed classic Tokyo Story, was still only in his 40s and youthful-looking in other films of the time, I wondered if this was a case of extraordinary versatility or a viewer’s disconnect caused by unfamiliarity. Would a non-Indian viewer have a similar experience if he first saw Rajesh Khanna as the elderly man in the 1983 Mohan Kumar-directed Avtaar (a Tokyo Story-like narrative about neglected old people)? Would this viewer be astounded if he then saw RK as he was at the time, still playing romantic hero – even if the films and performances were pedestrian?

These are questions to ponder. But alas, one can only think about them – if one does – in the very narrow spaces between our binge-watching sessions.

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