On Shah Rukh Khan in Zero
Cary Grant once said in an interview, ‘Everyone wants to be Cary Grant, even I want to be Cary Grant’. The tragedy of stardom, encapsulated in that statement, is that the star image becomes bigger than the person it originates from : more a trap than transcendence. Male stardom, though, comes with its own share of entitlement. In his latest film Zero, Shah Rukh Khan does not want to be Shah Rukh Khan anymore. The thing is, no one knows what the alternative is.
There is no doubt that Zero is a bizarre film, but much of its bizarreness comes also from this confusion. It does not have the clarity of Khan’s much earlier Chennai Express where he was only trying to relive his stardom, pretending like he was mocking himself, while all the while demanding reverence. He has, thankfully, moved beyond that. It is perhaps similar to Fan but does not have its arrogance.
Zero’s confusion is genuinely baffling because it does not demand reverence from the viewer. At the same time, despite its self-consciousness about what it sees as the flaws of a typical Bollywood film (like its running joke about a song), it does not want to forget this stardom either. Consider the scene where Shah Rukh is surrounded by the heroines he has worked with in his career — ranging from Sri Devi to Alia Bhatt. The line-up includes someone like Juhi Chawla who does not have the entitlement he has, owing entirely to his gender, to live a career crisis on-screen and attempt resurrections, one film after another. That sequence is meant to be a nod to Shah Rukh Khan the star, not Bauua Singh the character he is playing. And yet as the scene plays out, the joke truly is on him.
One of the pleasures of Bollywood stardom, the kind Shah Rukh Khan’s career is built on, was this play between recall and forgetting. We knew he was Shah Rukh Khan and we also knew he was Raj and Rahul. But was that the only thing those films were doing? None of those films had this self-consciousness either. It seems quite pointless to see Bauua Singh explain the logistics of a song sequence before singing it. It feels even more pointless because the song that follows, Mere Naam Tu (composed by Ajay-Atul), is complete in itself and works because it needs no explanation. In fact it is more genuine than Bauua’s earlier attempts at flirting with Aafia, with references to his dimples or about ‘Kapoor brothers’ thrown in. Zero’s confusion is also that it doesn’t understand the Bollywood it is wanting to move past, while reducing its weaknesses to caricature.
There are two striking moments in the film, both involving Katrina Kaif, an actor struggling with changes beyond her too. A change in the demands of acting style has made her cruelly irrelevant today, even though it is precisely why she was liked in the first place. Kaif plays Babita Kumari, a filmstar struggling with post break up loneliness. In one sequence, surrounded by millions of fans, she yells at them to go screw themselves. I would do the same if I was her.
This however, changes in a beat to a “love you”, the two indistinguishable from each other. This masochistic relationship with stardom is reflected in another Freudian slip-like sequence. Bauua wants to leave Babita Kumari’s life but for some unexplained reason, cannot do so unless she grants him permission. He can only leave if she genuinely humiliates him, he tells her, in one of the film’s very confusing sequences. I haven’t seen a better articulation of male stardom’s relationship to their own star image, and to the audience.
But watching the film also made me think about the other half in this equation — the audience, me. Zero’s Shah Rukh Khan actually often does manage to transcend his star image, only to make you wonder what if you liked him because he played himself (even when he pretended like he wasn’t, like in Swades and Chak De! India, or in the recent Love you Zindagi)? What if there is nothing else there? When he is self-consciously acting “well”, he falls flat, evoking no emotion. Compare this to stray moments of genuine emotion, like in a scene towards the end. It almost made me miss his earlier version.
Unlike Salman Khan’s current avatar, much of Shah Rukh Khan’s star image has been gentler, a large part of his fandom predominantly women. As times change, our reverence for masculinity, our patience with it, even what appears the gentle kind will change too (hopefully). Stardom is as much about the individual as it is about the particular context in which a star is made, which the star image responds to. During the interval in the cinema theatre where I saw the film, I overheard a woman say, almost in a resigned voice, that the days when a Shah Rukh Khan film meant a full theatre have gone. We were in Scotland, so I doubt she was being literal, enough people had turned up. It was more a comment on the quality of “Shah Rukh Khan” we were watching on screen, who was not making sense in the way he used to at one point. Was it him or was it also us? She was much older than me, but having grown up on Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, I recognized the emotion in her voice. There was no hate in it.
