The Death of The Star - On Record India

The Era Of Superstardom Is Over

The spectre of a starless culture is haunting us, no one has the aura or the wherewithal to completely hold the imagination of the audience anymore. The gravitas of the celebrities of the yesteryears are diminishing, and the present ones cannot even dream of reaching such heights.

Imagine the likes of Cary Grant, James Stewart, Marlon Brando, Amitabh Bachchan walking into a room. It is not possible to imagine a room of chatter with the likes of these men in the room, what they carried was their charm and the weight of a cultish obsession with their celebrity. The audience did not just love or obsess over them, they literally worshipped them.

It is difficult to imagine this kind of raw pull or stardom being carried by an actor or celebrity of the newer generation. Can the likes of Robert Pattinson, Timothe Chalamet or a Ranbir Kapoor warrant the cultish obsession that was generated by Marlon Brando? It is difficult to imagine, the sheer fascination with Brando’s persona seems impossible to repeat now.

The Power to Transform is Long Gone

Brando’s approach to acting was idolised and put on a pedestal, his performances in a Streetcar Named Desire and, On The Waterfront, turned an acting method – method acting – into a literal acting commandment. His off-screen persona, which was the brooding, anti-establishment rebel quickly became a mythical archetype that every man wanted to embody.

Marlon Brando in In The Waterfront

His complete refusal to conform to acting conventions and norms single handedly defined masculinity for generations – being defiant, being vulnerable yet strong. Similarly, Amitabh Bachchan in the 70s changed what it meant to be a man in India – he embodied the angry young man frustrated with an unchanging system, people all over India scrambling to get into theatres to be like Bachchan.

What this shows is the capacity of the yesteryear star to significantly change culture to the direction of their path, there is no possibility of the modern celebrity to wield such awe-inspiring power. There are a number of reasons for this changing tide, and it is not because modern celebrities have less charisma or that they are any less interesting than the famous people of yesteryears.

Distance Invites Aura

There was a certain distance between the star and the audience that helped build the allure and the mystery of the personality, not being able to see them all the time or know about them all the time created a need, and a gap. A gap that was never filled. Fans and seekers always had things to look forward to – childhood facts to learn, relationships to gossip about. The underwhelming, problematic aspects of the celebrity hidden, the dirty laundry not aired out in the open most often. The mundane, humane aspects that would have made these stars seem human were often not as accessible as they are today.

Walter Benjamin writes in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction that the essentially distant object is the unapproachable one and that unapproachability is a major quality of the cult image. What Benjamin means here is that the object that possesses aura cannot simply be consumed like an ordinary object. Its aura lies precisely in the fact that it cannot be fully grasped.

Walter Benjamin

The Annihilation of Distance

With the accelerating whirlpool of modern technology, this distance between the fan and the star has been absolutely obliterated. A new kind of media landscape has emerged today. A landscape that does not afford any kind of space to the individual, a landscape where there is an abject distancelessness between the viewer and the viewed. With the advent of Social Media, our most intimate lives have become fodder for the world, a television show to be broadcast to the whole world.

Orwell warns us about mass surveillance in 1984 but what he did not account for is the voluntary submission and self-participation in mass surveillance. People auto-exploit themselves, and almost surveil themselves till their most vulnerable point. This is becoming true for everyone that has been on the internet, including the actors and the celebrities. What this auto surveillance does is it annihilates any sort of difference between the common man and the celebrity.

The audience stops viewing the celebrity through a larger than life mythical lens, there is nothing really to separate them apart from the fact that they are in different professions. The celebrity has three meals a day, hangs out with his friends, attends family gatherings, has unflattering moments – just like the average fan.

The Democratisation of Media

Walter Benjamin, in the middle of his famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, predicts the collapse of the distinction between the author and the public. He states that this distinction is about ‘to lose its basic character’ – and he states its reason to be the democratisation of the printing press. He writes – “And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing” (Benjamin 12).

The difference then becomes merely functional. The democratisation of media has allowed every individual with an internet connection to publish a poem, make a song, make a professional video, make a film, post a review and make an infinite array of media products that would have otherwise been impossible.

In such democratisation, every hierarchy is levelled out. A celebrity has the same number of characters on X as a random anonymous troll that just wants to create chaos. This has unprecedented psychological consequences, a random person on the internet might think that they know more about leg spin bowling than Shane Warne. Or a small-time struggling theatre actor could think that Marlon Brando’s method was shameful and could make his opinion heard.

What then separates the common man from the celebrity? Nothing, except for the fact that a lot more people know the celebrity.

Metaphysics of The Star

Baudrillard, in his book, Seduction, Baudrillard argues that fascination depends on concealment and not disclosure. He writes that the presence of the ‘star’ serves to submerge all sensibility and expression beneath a ritual fascination with the void, beneath the ecstasy of her gaze and the nullity of her smile. Baudrillard makes a radical claim here, that the power of the ‘star’ is dependent on the fascination with what lies beneath the veneer and not the veneer itself.

He writes – “The great stars of seductresses never dazzle because of their talent or intelligence, but because of their absence. They are dazzling in their nullity and in their coldness – the coldness of makeup and ritual hieraticism” (Baudrillard 96).

All the essential items of the celebrity of the past – Makeup, ritual gestures, and hieratic (priestly, formal) behaviour created a kind of icy distance. You were not watching real faces, you were not watching intimate and authentic gestures (all gestures were meant for the public and mediated through institutional media, hence, all gestures were carefully thought out and ritualized) – instead, the audience was watching priestly, formal behaviour. This kind of coldness paradoxically invited the viewer to imagine what the ‘star’ was actually like, or whether the veneer was the personality itself.

This blurring of the line, this ambiguity, of whether the acts and gestures belong to the star itself, create friction and hence, fascination.

Jean Baudrillard’s 1979 book ‘Seduction’

The Star Killer

The problem with today’s stars is that the media landscape has completely changed: from exclusively institutionalized media to every individual person becoming their own media institution. This absolutely intimate and distanceless media (Facebook, Instagram, X) destroys this fascination. They destroy the essential markers of the celebrity of the past – The audience can see you without makeup, there are not ritual gestures anymore – celebrities literally stream their entire lives 24*7 which destroys the line between significant and insignificant gestures, there is no priestly or formal behaviour anymore.

Celebrities stream their walks with dogs, telecast them having lunch, exercising, partying, going out with friends. The icy distance is removed, the coldness between them and the audience is removed. Total transparency creates disinterest. Why would the audience want to know more about a celebrity or star if all they do is broadcast every tiny detail

The Stars of the Stream

The streamer presents an important exception to the death of the star. At first glance, they seem to confirm the very argument being made here. IShowSpeed and Kai Cenat have almost completely annihilated the distance between themselves and their audiences. Their lives are not hidden behind the institutional machinery of cinema or television; they are constantly visible, unedited, chaotic and immediate. And yet, despite this absolute transparency, they have managed to become genuine stars.

The crucial difference is that the streamer does not ask the audience to know him, he asks the audience to watch him. Streaming turns transparency itself into a spectacle. There is no hidden personality waiting to be discovered beneath the surface, no mystery behind the performance that the audience is invited to uncover.

The performance is the continuous production of presence itself – the reaction, the joke, the outburst, the absurdity, the spectacle of simply being there. The streamer occupies the field of emptiness itself. There is nothing behind the stream that the audience needs to discover; the stream is the content.

New Stars

This is why Speed can be completely transparent and still retain a form of stardom. His appeal does not depend upon mystery, but upon his ability to transform constant exposure into entertainment. The audience does not want to know more about Speed in the way an audience once wanted to know more about Brando. It wants Speed to keep appearing, reacting, screaming, laughing and performing. The endless disclosure of the self does not destroy the spectacle because the disclosure itself has become the spectacle.

Streamers Kai Cenat and iShowSpeed

But this also reveals just how difficult it is to produce a star through this new medium. If visibility and transparency were enough to create stardom, there would be thousands of IShowSpeeds and Kai Cenats. There are not. The internet has produced an almost infinite number of people who expose themselves to the public, yet only an extraordinarily small number have managed to acquire anything resembling genuine star power. The very medium that makes everyone visible simultaneously makes everyone replaceable.

The streamer therefore represents a strange inversion of the old star. The old star became extraordinary by remaining distant; the new star becomes extraordinary despite having no distance at all. He must achieve what the old star achieved through concealment through the complete exposure of the self. The paradox of the new star is therefore that he must become larger than life while showing us almost everything about his life. He must somehow create fascination within a medium that was designed to annihilate it.

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