The banners overshadowing street walls, the long queues in front of the box office, kaleidoscopically changing sound patterns inside the dark auditorium – all raise some vital questions.
What is responsible for such a phenomenal success of cinema among the multitude of masses? What is the clue to the vast empire of economic superstructure built by Hollywood or its miniature in Bombay? Is it the star?
The star is a byproduct of cinema, a product of divinity and idolization – the modern protagonist of the ‘hero myth’. The stars of today and yesterday have woven more legends around them than was ever recorded in human history. But what accounts for such a tremendous sweep of the star? Is it the charisma of the star alone?
No account of Hollywood, or for that matter Bombay, is complete without reference to star. In the initial period of cinema’s growth, the players were anonymous and the actors were unknown. Although the star does not constitute the essence of cinema, this is one of the perplexing aspects of film history.
The term star has a wide range of denotation and defies any definition. But primarily it implies the mystery, the distance and above all the dream. In this context it would be relevant to compare the _modus operandi_ of cinema and theatre in relation to the actor. Theatre denuded of all its artifice is the ‘dramatis personae’ – the actor. It is the physical presence of the actor and the audience that creates a bond between the two and it is precisely this that makes any theatrical expression an experience. But cinema acts differently.
Alone, hidden in a dark hall, we watch through half open blinds, a spectacle that is unaware of our existence. The actor presents himself through an intermediary stage between presence and absence.
This stems from the photographic nature of cinema, where the likeness of the image to the object (mirror like image) coupled with the time dimension creates a perfect illusion of reality. This is further intensified by the peculiar mode of perception in that dark hall we call the ‘auditorium’. There is no footlight that separates the audience from the performer. The aura of mystery surrounds the screen and this presence without ‘flesh and blood’ generates curiosity about the outer life of the actor – the real life.
By contrast TV presents its actors with such great intimacy that it almost demystifies them and leaves no room for any curiosity in their private life.
This can only be explained by the small T.V. image and our mode of perceiving that image. Unlike movies, TV is a low intensity (cool) medium and the image is completed by the active participation of the audience. The spectator does not behave like a hypnotized person under the spell of suggestion. He is aware of his surrounding and can switch the TV off at will or simultaneously do other things while watching the performance.
Coming back to the question of presence, we find that in theatre, the physical presence of the actor and the audience in one given space gives rise to a sort of mental opposition between the two. The audience never dissolves into the actor.
Rather he is always himself and in an irreconcilable state with the actor. On the screen, the characters are quite naturally objects of identification. Take for example, girls on the stage and on the screen. On the screen they satisfy an unconscious sexual desire and when the hero joins them, he satisfies the desire of the spectator in proportion to which the later has identified himself with the hero. On the stage the girls excite the onlooker as they would in real life. The result is that there is no identification with the hero. He becomes instead, an object of jealousy and envy.
Tarzan and James Bond are only possible in cinema because it enjoys liberation from the bondage of time and space and the camera (representing the audience) is endowed with the rare virtue of being pervasively present. The hero is an idea – an image and the ‘Star’, an embodiment of that idea which appeals to the largest number of people.
The image may vary from that of a tramp (‘the little fellow’ like Chaplin or Raj Kapoor) to the he-man (James Bond or Sunny Deol) or for that matter, ‘the eternal lover’ or ‘angry young man’. The magnanimity of the actor’s personality in any case borrows from the spell that cinema casts on its audience and the vicarious pleasure it breeds in profusion.
Coupled with the centrifugal space of cinema, its freedom from the bondage of time and space, the _hero_ becomes an ego ideal, the darling of the masses. As the hero assumes the role of demigod, the distance grows wider and wider between him and the spectator and it is calculatedly maintained through press and publicity to ensure incense burning.
In theatre, we rarely lose ourselves completely or give ourselves up totally to fantasy. We remain conscious of the audience, conscious of the theatre as social occasion, conscious of the actors as actors, conscious of the actor’s awareness of us, conscious finally of ourselves.
Movies, in contrast, make for an infinitely more absorbing, more private experience. We tend to lose all self awareness while watching a film, which is why we are so often jarred and disoriented while leaving a movie theatre.
All of us have shared this sensation – because we feel the loss of an entire world, a world that has seemed more vivid, more exciting, and more romantic than the dreary actual world that surrounds us.
It is precisely this dreamlike quality, this pleasurable sensation that gets attached to the Star’s image. It draws from the unresolved contradictions pronounced in a given society and eludes them by providing illogical or rather, mythical solutions to the problem. The script structure expresses itself through cross construction of accidents and coincident, logical fallacies and providential optimism.
They are the irreconcilable dilemmas of private and public value – the cherished desires hung up in labored hypertension. The Star provides mythical solutions by dissolving these contradictions through daydreaming. By the spinning of fantasies, he mints money and so does the producer.
In the words of Marshall McLuhan, ‘The movie is not only a supreme expression of mechanism but paradoxically it offers as product the most magical of consumer commodities, namely dreams. It is therefore not accidental that the movie has excelled as a medium that offers poor people roles of riches and power beyond the dreams of avarice’
