This scene chillingly foreshadows the theme of “escape”, a theme that can be found throughout the film. When Rathinavel is stopped short of destroying Maamanna and Athiveeran, he chooses to draw blood from their pigs instead, because in his head, the two are about as meaningless as the pigs they herd. And just like the black pig that survived years back, a young black piglet comes out unscathed, amidst its fallen clan. “Why does your son rear pigs?” an aide to Maamanna asks him, contorting his face at the “asingam” that is the pig. We get an answer to this much later when Athiveeran opens up to his girlfriend Leela (Keerthy Suresh). He tells her of his dream — a dream that he had as a young boy, he has been trying to chase all through his life. “I dreamt of pigs with wings. What if all pigs had wings?” he asks, as he paints and makes his dream come true on canvas.
But before the pig’s slow rise to rebellion, there was yet another invisible animal that walked on fire. Much of Karnan revolves around two hoofed mammals. At first glance, a horse and a donkey might look similar, but one one is mounted with honour while the other is kicked around with disdain. In Karnan, the two animals can be seen in any given scene coalescing in the background, leading one to read the film as a donkey’s metamorphosis — a metaphor for Karnan and his village — to a horse. But I found myself looking at Karnan as a donkey’s struggle to be accepted and celebrated for who it is, rather than its transformation into something it’s not.