Stardom

Abstract

Film actors retain their hold as the ultimate stars in South Asia, even in the age of multiple mass media, varied audiences and celebrity culture. Film stars are celebrated in the films themselves, and in news media, gossip, fashion and lifestyle, and often seen literally as gods. Theories of stardom which have evolved from studies of Western cinema have been applied, contextualised and refined within the wider cultural context of South Asian cinema, although the biographical study of the star is more popular among non-academic readers. While many topics in film studies seem removed from the experience of ordinary audiences, the study of stardom straddles the everyday viewing of films as well as its academic theorising. Stardom is familiar to all as stars attract us to cinema and are the subject of much discussion beyond the viewing experience. Within film studies, stardom is explored theoretically as a way of finding meaning in films, linking production, text and audience. Richard Dyer’s (1979, 1986) foundational work on stardom offers lucid and convincing studies of how the star becomes a figure of meaning through a range of performances with frequent intertextual references, through images onand off-screen, and through rumours and gossip circulated across a wide range of media. It is useful to distinguish stardom from celebrity, where the focus is on the person’s private and personal life. Stardom has more to do with their professional life since the star has to be a successful performer. Yet the star is more than a performer – a manufactured image, trained, shaped and styled as a commodity who sells cinema. Several studies of stardom in the Indian context, most recently the edited volume by Michael Lawrence (2020), have developed in tandem with scholarship on Western cinema stars. Some distinctive features of South Asian stardom are necessitated and produced by the films themselves, in the widespread use of melodrama, reinforced by an excess of emotions in songs and dialogue, and a preferred non-realist aesthetic. These ingredients produce a heightened stardom enhanced by the two-way scopic regime of darshan where the pleasure lies in looking at the star and the feeling of being looked at, complicating Laura Mulvey’s (1975) theorisation of the visual pleasure where women become passive objects of the male gaze. Studies of the female star in South Asia have highlighted the contradictory nature and inherent instability of gendered stardom, evident from the screen image of the