Double Trouble: SRK, Fandom, and Special Effects1 Anupama Kapse (bio) Fan is a finely stylized site of technological and affective innovation that rewrites SRK as a star-text. A film whose theme is one of the most beloved in Bombay Cinema—the fan’s adoration of the star—Fan is premised on a casting coup that plays off an aging, narcissistic SRK against his much younger and far more resourceful look-alike. A highly mediated, fantastic reworking of Shah Rukh Khan’s previous double roles that crystallize with Karan Arjun (Rakesh Roshan, IN, 1995) and continue into Ra-One (Abhinav Gupta, IN, 2011), Fan departs visibly from the trope of family likeness. The family has been used to naturalize the double in Bombay cinema for years—a convention ably suited to express kinship as one of its most deeply held values.2 The star as a double has almost always appeared in the guise of a look-alike brother, father, or simply a twin. Fan ruptures this dynamic in startling and provocative ways. By playing up the differences between a star and a fan who (kind of) look like each other (but not really), it dramatizes a series of conflicts where subtle differences in face, gesture, body, set, tone, and backdrop—all enhanced by a variety of special effects—set up an intense drama that pits the humdrum against the glamorous, youth against age, anonymity against fame, and cinema, as an analog form, against the digital. In the process, the film atrophies domestic tropes that privilege the family as an engine of melodrama and locus for staging narrative (Figure 1). A central concern of this essay is how Fan fetishizes the fearful, disturbing, and uncanny elements of likeness to such an extent that resemblance becomes deviant and threatens to subsume the very object it fetishizes. Indeed, the double is vital for Fan’s many formal and affective innovations. Equally, special effects prove crucial [End Page 187] for upending stable conventions that untether doubling from dearly held values of love and belonging. Such a conjuncture sets into motion unsettling but passionate emotional effects: fresh incarnations of the SRK-image rub tantalizingly against existing versions of his star-body. As SRK notes in a recent TED talk, in Fan “humanity [appears] like an aging movie star—self-obsessed like me.”3 Given SRK’s killer charm—he introduces himself as the “best lover in the world: I am not, don’t tell anyone,” in Fan he plays Aryan, a character very much unlike his beloved, affable, and witty public persona. In Gaurav, Fan invents a double who is a nightmarish simulacrum of the star, someone who turns up like a digital “parrot” that echoes the star in infinitesimal, annoying detail. The double is by turns seductive, self-pleasuring, loyal, and fickle but always hypnotic. It represents a new interface for playing off mechanical media against the virtualized, offering critical reflections on how the digital can ape the indexicality of the analog. The abundance of motion-capture performance where live action is framed against a digitally variable background has changed the basic grammar of Bollywood cinema during the last decade. An emphasis on the mutability of the human form; the dominance of the vertical axis; the defiance of gravity; an interplay between slow/accelerated, delayed/rapid motion; and the bulking up of the male body have been defining characteristics of action in a virtualizing, digitized cinema. Editing patterns have changed to accommodate scenario changes imperceptibly. Shots can be coupled seamlessly along a vertical, horizontal or diagonal axis. Cuts and dissolves have given way to compositing technologies that allow space to be bent, molded, or extended instead of being chopped or “cut” according to an older shot vocabulary. Scenes of continuous stimulus based in immersive, relentless spectacle have found new ways to mobilize and extend the star-body and its performative capabilities. In turn, the ascendancy, power, and range of fan practices Fan considers converge viscerally on the body of the film star. Older incarnations of the star compete with a mediatized form of celebrity that wrestles with the fan as a monstrous creation of the star. The conjuncture of these varied and...
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Nov 1, 2017
Anjibabu Merneedi + 2
Open Access