Doubling Offscreen and Onscreen: Queering the Star and the Fan in Fan

Abstract

Doubling Offscreen and Onscreen: Queering the Star and the Fan in Fan Nilanjana Bhattacharjya (bio) At the climax of Maneesh Sharma’s film Fan (IN, 2016), an obsessive, deranged fan chases a Bollywood megastar onto a rooftop, and the megastar pleads, “Be a good son to your parents—a good friend, a good boyfriend. Stop being a fan!” But the fan refuses to let go of his obsession with the star, and in doing so, he rejects heteronormativity as he plummets to his death. The relationship between the star and the fan necessarily distances the idol from his admirer, a relationship that S.V. Srinivas has defined as the fans’ “surplus investment” in their stars’ performances.1 Fan portrays the collapse of that distance between the fan and star in multiple ways—as the obsessed fan pursues his star, the double casting of Shah Rukh Khan in the role of star and fan, and, with CGI modifications and makeup, the uncanny resemblance between the star and the fan. But the film also portrays what happens when the star pursues his fan and, in doing so, inverts the conventional relationship between the fan and his star—which is itself al ready non-normative. Furthermore, the consistent seepage and deliberate interweaving of the excessive narrative of actor Shah Rukh Khan’s established stardom onscreen and offscreen into his double roles in this film serves to undo the present narrative of Shah Rukh Khan’s stardom. Khan’s contemporary stardom has been most memorably established over the last two and a half decades in his repeated casting as the heterosexual, romantic hero onscreen and through the entertainment media’s frequent allusions to his offscreen relationships with his wife, Gauri, and their children in his actual life. At the start of the film, the audience familiar with Shah Rukh Khan’s stardom [End Page 161] offscreen recognizes Fan’s fictionalized star Aryan Khanna as a stand-in for Shah Rukh Khan himself and thus conflates those roles. Therefore, when the star in Fan pursues the fan as an object of his obsession, the star assumes the non-normative subject position previously occupied by the fan and, in doing so, queers his identity as the fictionalized star onscreen and, through the conflation of his real life and fictionalized identities, his real life offscreen identity as well. The fan’s pursuit of the star and, later, the star’s pursuit of the fan both recall Shah Rukh Khan’s memorable antihero roles in the early 1990s that preceded his rise as the romantic hero. In films such as Darr/Fear (Yash Chopra, IN, 1993), Baazigar/Gambler (Abbas-Mustan, IN, 1993), and Anjaam/Aftermath (Rahul Rawail, IN, 1994), Khan’s violent characters stalk their victims and either cannot or will not engage in conventional heterosexual romantic relationships. In this sense, Fan’s citation of these early roles undermines the narrative Khan’s stardom has constructed as a conventional romantic hero. The double casting and seep age of offscreen and onscreen stardom narratives generate these unexpected, queer relation ships, all of which converge into the suggestion of narcissism. The trope of the deranged, deviant fan unhealthily obsessed with his star is well rehearsed in stories about fans, especially on film, and as the film Fan starts, it seems as if it will tell this story too. As Joli Jenson describes it, in these stories a deranged fan fixates on the star as “a form of psychological compensation, an attempt to make up for all that [his] modern life lacks.” Unsuccessful in his own social relationships, the fan attempts to address this lack of social connection by trying to establish contact with the star.2 As he focuses on the star, the fan forgets his own inadequacies and becomes potentially dangerous as he loses the ability to distinguish between states of fantasy and reality. In the film Fan, the star Aryan Khanna is internationally famous, leads a transnational career, has a beautiful wife and two children, and, at several in stances throughout the film, self-consciously refers to how his hard work transported him from his humble, middle-class origins in Delhi to his present identity as a global...