Good Fans and Bad Fans

My Mirror column yesterday:

Watching Fan made me think about the lives of Indian film fans, both on and off the silver screen.

Narcissism is integral to stardom. But in Fan, Shah Rukh Khan has gone where no superstar has gone before: he has played, in the same film, two versions of himself. As Aryan Khanna, the superstar, he looks like his contemporary self (and the footage supposedly from Aryan's early years in the industry is Khan's own). As Gaurav Chandna, the fan, Khan presents a persona that echoes his own screen self from an earlier era, the crazed young stalker of Darr and Baazigar.

The figure of the film fan has appeared in Hindi cinema before, but in every previous instance I can think of, fandom has been a route to romantic fantasy. Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Guddi (1971) cast debutant actress Jaya Bhaduri (who had just graduated from the Film and Television Institute of India) as a schoolgirl besotted with Dharmendra. Bhaduri's Guddi is a charming mix of precocious and innocent - confident enough to use filmi acting as a way of tricking the adults around her, and yet so dumbstruck by Dharmendra's screen image as to decide that she will be a lifelong adoring Meera to his unseeing Krishna.

Mukherjee's tone is gently pedagogic about the psychological impact of films on society - there's the sly scene in the beginning where the teacher tells Guddi's class to produce a "paanch pannon ka lekh" on 'Janta ka swabhaav, us par cinema ka prabhaav' and then promptly opens her copy of a Hindi film magazine to read while they write it. Dharmendra plays himself, with his friend Gulzar's script enabling him to add to his public persona this additional layer of the socially concerned film star who goes out of his way to undo the impact of his reel life on his fans' real lives. Gulzar and Mukherjee want us to see Guddi's emergence from fandom as a painful but necessary coming of age.

Fandom is an infantile state of being in the 1999 release Mast, too - just not one from which escape is encouraged. Instead director Ram Gopal Varma creates an infantile star to match the infantile fan. The schoolboyish Kittu (Aftab Shivdasani) runs away to Bombay to meet his idol Mallika (Urmila Matondkar). When he discovers that the superstar is actually a sweet, sad orphan kept under lock and key by her evil mamaji, the scene is set for the ultimate fan fantasy - the fan rescues the star, and she recognises him for the wonderful creature he is, and they live happily ever after.

Rajat Kapur's 2003 Raghu Romeo also features a crazed fan 'rescuing' his heroine. But if Mast entered entirely into the fan's imagination, Kapur's film is a sharp and often hysterically funny takedown, presenting the fan as someone unable to differentiate image from reality. Vijay Raaz, playing the eponymous Raghu with a perfect hangdog expression, kidnaps an uppity television star (Maria Goretti) ostensibly to save her from a hitman. He keeps the actress in captivity for days, driving her up the wall by insisting on treating her as the pious housewife she plays in the daily soap he watches obsessively. Many things happen, but Kapur's resolution to Raghu's fixation with 'Neetaji' involves not just her clear romantic rejection of him, but also her screen death.

Fan is different from these, because Gaurav's relationship with Aryan cannot be subsumed easily under the category of romantic love. He does not only love Aryan -- he wants to be him. Fan's premise is much closer to the real-life phenomenon of organised fandom in India, which is overwhelmingly made up of all-male fan associations focused on male stars. Many such fans model themselves on their heroes; those who manage 'duplicate' status can sometimes build a career out of performing the star's hit dances, just as Gaurav does in the film. It is a strange combination -- a mode of self-promotion that the fan presents as altruistic support of the star. (One such group of Salman Khan lookalikes in Nagpur featured in the insightful 2014 documentary Being Bhaijaan.)

Narcissism apart, Fan plays too much to its imagined audience of fans, with unending chases and fisticuffs between the two SRKs making the film drag. But its plot taps astutely into what the film scholar SV Srinivas, in his superb book about the Chiranjeevi phenomenon, has described as "conditional loyalty". "The fan is a loyal follower and devotee only if the star lives up to the expectations the fan has of him..." writes Srinivas. "This [sense of entitlement] results in a situation in which fans become the guardians of the star's image and resort to drastic actions in his name."

The irrationality of fans -- usually jobless young men -- is linked to potential criminality: black-marketing tickets, rioting or 'rowdyism'. Srinivas documents attempts by Telugu stars to school the fan into becoming "a responsible admirer committed to socially purposeful activities". It is this spectre of the criminalised fan that Fan summons up. It makes some token gestures towards suggesting the star's fallibility as a human being. But by presenting Gaurav as an infantile fan gone rogue, the film becomes another part of the pedagogic machinery by which SRK the star wants to 'reform' his fans.

Gaurav spends his whole life duplicating his hero, and when his hero finally talks to him at length, it is only to lecture him about living his own life. But Gaurav, it seems, can only step away from Aryan by dying. Is death the fan's one original act?

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 24 April 2016.

Rajat Kapoor's filmi foolscape

Starting this month, I'll be writing a weekly column on Hindi cinema for the Mumbai Mirror. The first one -- on the tragicomic films of Rajat Kapoor -- appeared yesterday.

Rajat Kapoor's brilliant new film Ankhon Dekhi (2014) is about a man who decides one day that he has been living life all wrong. From now on, he announces, he will no longer trust other people's versions of reality. That world was a hazy photocopy. Based on the evidence of his own senses, reality begins to come sharply, often painfully into focus. 

I see Ankhon Dekhi as the third of a series that Kapoor began with Raghu Romeo (2003) and followed up with Mithya (2008). All three films are finely wrought tragicomedies: drolly funny, always thoughtful and often startling meditations on the nature of reality. And at the centre of each one is a fool. A fool, not in the common understanding of the term, but in the Shakespearian sense of the seeming simpleton who speaks and acts without fear, and thus seems to arrive at a truer understanding of the world. 

Vijay Raaz's Raghu in Raghu Romeo seems, at first glance, a besotted fan who cannot seem to tell life from television. Or does he just not want to? Perhaps real life, as his soliloquies remind us, is just too cruel. While the "Nita ji" of his television daydreams is the receptacle of all worldly goodness: she who cannot hate. When a hilarious turn of events forces him to confront the reality of the waspish actress who embodies his adored Nita, Raghu remains reluctant. 

Eventually he concedes that the object of his worship may appear to be 'Reshma, television actress' "from the outside," but there's a Nita ji hidden inside her. "Aapke andar koi Nitaji chhipi baithi hain," he insists to a stupefied Reshma. "Aur jo aapke andar hain woh aap toh dekh nahi paate. Lekin main dekh paa raha hoon. (And what is inside you, you can't see. But I can.)" 

That mismatch between the visible and invisible self, the gulf that appears on the 'outside' and what might exist 'inside', is another of Kapoor's persistent themes. At one level, it flags yet again his interest in performance as reality, opening up the never-ending question of what constitutes identity. Fatso (2012), one of Kapoor's flawed efforts, used a comic supernatural device to explore that idea - a young man who has died manages to come back to 'life' by taking over the body of his fat friend.But to return to the fool: Ranvir Shorey's VK in Mithya is another stellar instance. A bit-part actor with very little talent but a profound belief in the life of the artiste, VK puts his heart and soul into every role he gets, obsessing over whether his 'expression' was right even when he's playing the corpse in an action scene. 

What Kapoor's clever script does is to take this hungry performer and give him the role of a lifetime. But it's not a film or a play in which VK must take his greatest test as an actor - it's real life. In what is in many ways a droll tribute to Don, VK is the lookalike simpleton sent to replace the mafia don Raje Bhai.

But Kapoor is concerned with much more than plot, or the pleasure human beings always seem to take in doubles. 

If VK is the fool who picks out the police boss in the identification parade, he is also the fool who cannot seem to stem his natural affection even when it puts his life in danger. Then, in a tribute to the classic Hindi film twist, VK hits his head and loses his memory. 

Now he is truly a fool: the powerless pawn who believes he actually is a don. And yet there is a way in which his emotions are true -- truer perhaps than those of the dead man he has replaced, as Raje Bhai's wife and children seem to instinctively recognize. 

Ankhon Dekhi steps away from the cinematic meta-ness of the previous two films into an immaculately un-filmi Old Delhi milieu. The overwhelming noise of the lower-middle-class life - what Bauji calls "wohi kaain-kaain, chik-chik, bak-bak" -- was evoked in Raghu Romeo, too, and the harried mother has remained more or less the same from Surekha Sikri to the superb Seema Pahwa (Hum Log's Badki fits perfectly into this world, which sometimes feels like an updated, keenly funny version of Hum Log's '80s joint family.) 

But unlike Raghu, who sought solace in fiction, Bauji's epiphany drives him further towards fact. He demands "pramaan", not "anumaan". But no abstract mathematical or scientific truth will do. Experience is the only acceptable proof. 

Bauji's new principle of sensory truth turns him first into a figure of fun, then worry, then threat -- and then hero-worship. His insistence can expose the profound limits of his experience - as when he refuses to book tickets to Amsterdam because he's never been there, and his travel agency boss angrily demands to know where he has been. Bauji hangs his head. As Rafey Mahmood's camera frames him with tragic irony against the luridly fake fall colours of the travel agency poster, he has to admit he has been nowhere. Yes, he is a frog in a well. But it is his well, and he insists on getting to know it. "Sab kucch yahin hai, aankhen khol ke dekh lo," says the placard Bauji starts holding up at junctions. 

"Everything is here, open your eyes and look." That is the crazy, transformative truth of Ankhon Dekhi: when you have the eyes to see, everything can be beautiful. That way lies new experience, and the fool goes fearlessly forth towards it.