Abstract
The Indian audience has always been enamored by the silver screen, creating a “cult-like following of actors and actresses” (Dickey, Citation1993, p. 52) which dates back to the 1930s. The Hindi film industry (Bollywood) underwent a pivotal shift in the 1940s when the studio system was destabilized and replaced by a star-centric system (Majumdar, Citation2009). This centrality—or as Srinivas (Citation2021) puts it, the recognition of the star as the “pretext and facilitator of exchanges between fans” (p. 85)—is a defining characteristic of Indian cinema. The evolution of the star system as the nexus of Indian cinematic discourse prompted newer modes of star-centric cinephilia. The percolation of cinephilia as a thematic construction beginning with Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Guddi or The Doll in 1971 augmented the establishment of stars as a “generic feature” (Anjaria, Citation2021, p. 119) of Hindi cinema. Post-millennial films including Main Madhuri Dixit Banna Chahti Hoon or I Want to be Madhuri Dixit (Arora, Citation2003), Om Shanti Om or Peace be with You (Khan, Citation2007), Billu (Priyadarshan, Citation2009), Heroine (Bhandarkar, Citation2012) explored distinct modalities of production, consumption and celebration of Hindi cinema and stardom. However, the profound upsurge of “liberalized media and surveillance culture” (Lau, Citation2022, p. 140) in South Asia began to destabilize the monopoly of the “gatekeepers of the celebrity industry” (Kurzman et al., Citation2007, p. 354). Films like Fan (Sharma, Citation2016), An Action Hero (Iyer, Citation2022), and most recently, Selfiee (Mehta, Citation2023) deftly explicate media’s percolation and even persecution of the star system. A remake of Jean Paul Lal’s Malayalam film Driving License (Citation2019), Selfiee is a mediated re-articulation of the quintessential star-fan relationship infused within the cinematic culture of India. The film revolves around Om Prakash Aggarwal (Emraan Hashmi), a Motor Vehicle Inspector, and his intense deewanapan (devotion) to the Bollywood superstar Vijay Kumar (Akshay Kumar). Selfiee (Mehta, Citation2023) adroitly replicates Akshay Kumar’s “Khiladi” (player) identity (Mukherjee, Citation2020, p. 196) while simultaneously reworking Emraan Hashmi’s “subversive”, “anti-hero” image (Chaudhuri, Citation2020, p. 59). Anchoring on the dynamics of the star-fan relationship, Selfiee (Mehta, Citation2023) unravels the intricacies of stardom and the transience of fame in the age of media sensationalism.
