The recent Bangla blockbuster Toofan (2023), directed by Raihan Rafi and starring Dhallywood megastar Shakib Khan, has renewed excitement among Bangladeshi audiences and has taken them back to theatres across Bangladesh. Toofan stages brutality, toxic masculinity, and corruption within a spectacle of violence. This paper, through a close analysis of selected scenes, argues that the film kitschifies violence to generate sensational appeal. Its action-driven portrayal of violence, intertwined with melodramatic diegesis, is aesthetically intensified through exaggerated uses of colour, sound, songs, dance, and visual effects. Familiar clichés, such as avenging a father’s murder, a gangster’s rise to power, the struggles of a junior artist, and a gangster’s romance with a bar dancer who later becomes a heroine under his influence, structure the narrative. By relying on recurring tropes and sensational imagery and capitalizing on Shakib Khan’s star persona, the film amplifies violence. Heroic masculinity, revenge plots, and stylized physical performances function as kitsch symbols that evoke familiarity and collective pleasure, even while flattening the ethical and psychological complexity of violence. Following Toofan’s success, films such as Borbaad (2025) and Jongli (2025) emerged, similarly banking on violent spectacle and toxic masculinity, resonating with Adorno and Horkheimer’s notion of the “culture industry.” These depoliticized, sentimentalized productions, consumed purely as entertainment, now dominate Bangladeshi commercial cinema, where violence remains central to box-office success. Examined through the lens of kitsch, this phenomenon illuminates the tension between art and mass culture in Bangladesh and reveals the ideological function of cinematic violence in sustaining escapist fantasies.

Authors:
Israt Jahan, East West University, Bangladesh

About the Presenter(s)
Israt Jahan teaches at the Department of English, East West University, Bangladesh, as an Assistant Professor. She is a PhD researcher, and her research area is Bengal Partition Films.

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/israt-jahan-5a120989/

Additional website of interest
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=pitC8GkAAAAJ&hl=en

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