Transnational Stardom

International Celebrity in Film and Popular Culture

R. Meeuf, R. Raphael, R. Meeuf, R. Raphael

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349443390, 9781137268273
• eBook ISBN: 9781137268280
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

Combining a diverse range of case studies with discussion between leading scholars in star studies and transnational cinema, this book analyzes stars as sites of cross-cultural contestation and the essays in this collection explore how the plasticity of stars helps disparate peoples manage the shifting ideologies of a transnational world.

Part I

Discussing Transnational Stardom

1

A Panel Discussion on Transnational Stardom

Mary Beltran, Corey Creekmur, Sangita Gopal, and Raphael Raphael

No collection of essays can adequately address the multiplicity of ideas and avenues of inquiry associated with a particular topic. And while we feel that the chapters in this volume offer a wide-ranging set of case studies of the transnational circulation of stars and celebrities, such research cannot entirely convey the rich and nuanced issues that scholars today are grappling with in their understandings of transnational stardom. In order to offer a glimpse into some of these issues and debates, we have assembled a small panel of scholars who work on stardom and transnational cinema, and organized a live, online discussion of the topic. Moderated by Raphael Raphael, the panel includes Mary Beltran, Corey Creekmur, and Sangita Gopal, who are introduced more thoroughly at the start of the discussion. While by no means a comprehensive overview of all the relevant debates within a critical understanding of transnational stardom, the discussion helps illustrate some of the key concerns of scholars in the field and suggests important areas of future research. The transcript that follows has been edited in minor ways to ensure clarity while maintaining the flow of the original live discussion.

Raphael: Hi everybody. Welcome to our webinar on issues of transnational stardom. This webinar is accompanying the upcoming release of the book Transnational Stardom: International Celebrity in Film and Popular Culture, looking at the phenomenon of transnational stardom across intersecting geographical borders and time periods.

So we’re delighted to have with us a very distinguished panel of some of the most important voices currently working on issues related to the ways that star flows and the construction of celebrity circulate within and between national borders. And we’ll get a chance to hear from everybody in just a minute. But I’d like to just take a quick chance to introduce our panel.

Mary is Assistant Professor of Radio Television and Film at the University of Texas at Austin. And her scholarship focuses on the construction of race, class, and gender in entertainment media and celebrity culture. She focuses on Latino and mixed-race representation in the US. Publications include Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes: The Making and Meanings of Film and TV Stardom, which looks at construction and selling of Latina and Latino film and TV stars in the US since the 1920s, and the anthology Mixed Race Hollywood, which she co-edited with Camilla Fojas. Thanks for joining us, Mary.

Mary: Hi everyone. I’m really happy to be a part of the discussion.

Raphael: I also would like to introduce Corey Creekmur, Associate Professor of English, Cinema and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa. Corey’s work focuses on international popular cinema. And he especially focuses on American and South Asian cinema, looking at cross-cultural film genres and the ways that popular film interacts with other media, particularly music and comics. He’s really interested in engaging with discourses of race, gender, and sexuality. His most recent work looks at popular Hindi cinema and male stars, the international film musical, and Asian film noir. Welcome, Corey.

Corey: Hi! I’m happy to play a part.

Raphael: And Corey, I want to jump into your question in just a moment about cross-pollination of stars between India and the West, and we’ll come back to that in just a moment. But I’d like to also introduce Sangita Gopal, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oregon. She’s the author of Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema and the co-editor of Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Film Music and also The Fourth Screen: Intermedia in South Asia. She also has an essay coming up on new media and stardom in Comparative Literature. She’s also working on intersections between TV and cinema in India. Welcome, Sangita. How is everything in Eugene?

Sangita: Beautiful summer. Thank you for inviting me, Raphael and Russ, to participate in this event. I’m looking forward to it.

Raphael: Terrific, Sangita, we’re happy to have you here. So let’s go ahead and jump in. We’ll have a chance to hear from everybody in a moment, but what we’re going to do first of all is briefly go around our digital table, and give everybody a chance to quickly mention something that they find particularly interesting about issues in transnational stardom.

Then with these thoughts on our shared table, we’ll jump in together to consider a few questions about the ways that transnational stardom and celebrity flows, what they might have to offer us. So Corey, I’d like to go ahead and jump into the question that you had, and it was very close to something I was thinking about last night, too, as you sent it. You’re looking at some of the problems of cross-cultural sharing of stardom between the US and India. Can you share with us what you were thinking?

Corey: Yes, and I’ll rely on India because it’s the context I know best, but I think this applies in other contexts as well. It struck me in reading the introduction to the volume, which was terrific, it struck me nonetheless, that it was fairly upbeat, and [it recognized] that the flows of transnational stardom, these movements across borders, are possible now in a way they simply never were before, for all kinds of reasons.

And so I’m going to add the sort of downbeat note and say it still strikes me as interesting and important for us to think about how often it doesn’t work. And again, we’re past the impediments that we recognized from the past that were very material in cases. There was the need for dubbing and subtitling, and moving prints around the world, and the hegemony of Hollywood prevented that from happening in many cases. Now we know, you can get films from around the world, not in print, but you can get them on video and all sorts of ways. And so that impediment is long past. I can see Hong Kong films. I can see Indian films. I can see films from pretty much anywhere in the world.

But it does strike me—and I’ll use India as my primary case again because I know it, but also because it’s arguably, with Hollywood, the most star-driven popular cinema—why is it that a crossover there hasn’t happened, why an Indian star hasn’t really made it outside of India, at least in North America? And there’s a curious kind of thing that does happen, which is that—I’ll just put it this summary way—stars become actors when they do this.

So I just saw the recent Spiderman film, and the actor Irfan Khan appears in it. He’s not a major star, but he’s a star. He was also in Slumdog Millionaire. But it’s a small part. Anybody could basically have played the part in Spiderman. There’s no need to call on a major star from another cinema to do that. And then there’s Anil Kapoor, who was also in Slumdog Millionaire, a major star in popular Hindi cinema, but playing a kind of character role in the US. And then he went on to play a role on 24. This gets a lot of attention in India, and within the Indian Diaspora, but it’s someone going from a kind of major leading man category, into kind of a character role, almost a cameo part.

And so it’s telling to me that the super stars of Indian cinema—think of Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan—do have now a kind of circulation that they didn’t have before, but there’s never been much of an attempt, and certainly no great success story of them moving across a [Western] border. There’s always this sort of fear that if they did, they’d again move into minor roles, and so a major star would become a kind of secondary character in Hollywood film. So what I want to think about again, and there are certainly other national examples, is what are the limitations that remain in place for this kind of movement?

Raphael: Yes, that’s a fantastic question Corey because I was wondering, especially about Shah Rukh Khan, why he hasn’t existed even as a minor star, or even a minor character actor in—correct me if I’m wrong—any American, US-based films.

Corey: Right. There are a number of, you know, technically Indian, Hindi films entirely shot and set in the United States, but not marketed to a US audience. There’s a quotation about all this, and I have to admit, I’ve looked for the source of it. I remember it vividly, but I’ve had trouble finding the source, where arguably, the great superstar of Indian cinema, Amitabh Bachchan, a number of years ago, was asked about this: “Why haven’t you tried to make the crossover to a Hollywood film?” And he’s a great star, but he’s usually not given a lot of credit for keen insights necessarily. He’s not an intellectual, but he was very smart about this. He said, “why would I want to be the brown sidekick, when I’m the leading man to a billion fans?” And it struck me as smart on his part. Now, he is about to appear in Baz Lurhmann’s Great Gatsby, you know, a fairly small role.

So that’s going to be kind of interesting. He plays the Jewish gangster. He doesn’t play an Indian character.

Raphael: Interesting.

Corey: But it’s true for those figures—I think it would almost be an embarrassment for these idolized stars to move into a Hollywood film and play a kind of sidekick role.

Raphael: Mary, did you have something you’d like to say?

Mary: Sure. And it could have waited actually, but I was just getting excited by Corey’s discussion. I feel like it overlapped quite a bit with the question I was raising, which is just regarding how we can begin to study shifts of stardom as stars are traversing into other global regions, and you know, each region has very different notions of race and ethnicity and skin color and gender norms and so on. [In different regions,] do those stars take on new meanings? Or perhaps those stars, big superstars, are confined to becoming character actors and comic sidekicks, or they don’t get roles at all.

And our scholarship so far has often been very national in focus. And so I’m really interested in the challenges of beginning to look at global celebrity culture. And how do we begin to apprehend these sorts of transformations, and audiences perceiving actors—perceiving celebrities—in really different ways. It’s all really very fascinating. I’ll be quiet with that.

Raphael: Yes, and that’s very interesting, especially for American cinema, which divides industrially a lot of its work across racial lines, that you have very specific black films that are targeted to a specific audience, where Indian films don’t share the same, as you were mentioning, really racial categories, and so they really pose a challenge to a lot of the existing schema of Hollywood’s industrial categories for how to market them.

Corey (via text chat): Not racial categories, but complex regional categories. Raphael: Yes, agreed, Corey, complex regional categories. So let’s go ahead and I want to jump to Sangita, and Sangita, if you have an opening thought that you’d like to add to our discussion before we jump into questions, I’d invite you to go ahead and share it with us.

Sangita: Most recently, I have been thinking about television stardom, and I know that this was a little bit outside of the purview of this particular collection. That’s kind of what I’ve been thinking about. I don’t traditionally work on stars, though I do work on global films for sure. And what has been of great interest to me has been the kind of transnational stardom definitely in a regional sense: eastern Asia, and southeast Asia specifically, stars of television drama, originating in South Korea—K-dramas—starting somewhere in the mid-‘90s, through to the present. These television stars enjoy incredible, incredible, immense popularity, both at precisely that affective level [the editors] talked about in the introduction. And now that I think about it, based on Mary’s and Corey’s interventions, regarding what translates, what doesn’t, especially as far as categories such as race and regional cultures and so on and so on.

I find the K-dramas to be incredibly interesting, in terms of this kind of shared, if you will, east-southeast-Asia, quote-unquote, culture, as well as aesthetic and bodily norms, and what counts for identification and recognition, and so on and so forth. So that was not my initial interest, but as I heard you speak, that thought began to occur to me, and I began to wonder to what extent star studies, especially the study of flows, needs to take these issues of identification into account, in terms of roughly a kind of associational web, if not strict national categories.

So there is a something called an east-southeast-Asia kind of look or whatever. Though what interests me greatly about TV stardom—and if some of you have expertise in this, I would love to hear more—is how we might think about it differently, especially given the milieu of the multi-episode drama that these stars inhabit. I’ll stop here.

Raphael: Yes, thank you Sangita. And with your question, it seemed that you were also very interested in—connected to that kind of identification— the kind of commitment that it requires from viewers, when they’re committing to 16-plus hours, which is dramatically different, of course, than a particular film.

Sangita: That issue of television temporality, yes, as well as the smaller scale of the TV drama, which doesn’t really allow for the sorts of projection that we typically associate with stardom, it’s very, very interesting to me. So how stardom functions in a different and a spatial and temporal milieu of the television drama, especially in the context of international circulation. Nationally, one can understand and theorize it in one way, but when this moves across national boundaries, a kind of star-driven movement. I mean TV soap operas have been popular from time to time in a transnational way, but the star-driven popularity is very interesting to me.

Raphael: Yes. Thank you very much, Sangita. And I’d like, if we could, to jump back to Corey’s initial question, and Mary began to address it, but Corey was very interested in why we really haven’t seen a lot of cross-pollination between Western cinema, particularly Hollywood and, I assume you’re thinking about Bollywood here, Corey, and often why it appears that major stars in Bollywood, in their industry, will suddenly become, when they do appear in Western cinema, minor roles that could be played by really any no-name actor. So anybody have any responses to Corey’s initial question?

Corey: Well, I’ll just add a wrinkle to it, if I may. I noticed in the introduction to the volume, there is a citing of, in Simon During’s term, the “global popular,” and one of the curious things is that for a long time [these flows didn’t work], and this now explains why in the past stars popular in different national contexts like Cantinflas, the great Mexican comedian, only had a kind of minor popularity in Hollywood films, but was the superstar of Latin America. We understand why in the past, owing to language and other issues, some of those movements didn’t work, but there’s an aspect that is not often brought up, that at least for North America, at least for the United States, popular films from around the world didn’t tend to get shown in the US. If we saw films—from Europe in particular—we saw art films. We didn’t see mainstream popular films. This is even true for Britain, where we saw the occasional Shakespeare adaptation, but we didn’t get Jessie Matthews musicals, for example, or a lot of British comedy. And this will start to change going to TV later, where British comedy comes in, and some of those stars become well known.

But it is striking that for a long time, at least, if any Indian films were shown in the US, and this is a familiar old story, they were art films. They weren’t popular films, and there’s a general notion that until we see the circulation of a large amount of material on video, it’s curiously hard to see popular films from around the world. You can see the art films, but you can’t see the mainstream films most people in those locations are seeing.

So I do think that’s a kind of curious shift. I think for the US—sorry to be so US-centric in this—but I think the real shift was the arrival of Hong Kong films, particularly Bruce Lee, and then later John Woo and Jackie Chan and those kinds of films. I think that’s one of the first times that a fairly significant number of Americans were seeing pop...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Discussing Transnational Stardom
• Part II: Hollywood Stars, Transnational Contexts
• Part III: Gender and Mobile “European” Identities: ’60s and ’70s Francophone Stars
• Part IV: Kinetic Bodies, Labor, and the Action Cinema
• Part V: Transnational Film Stars, Transnational Media
• Part VI: Popular Music Stars and Transnational Identities
• Notes on Contributors
• Index