An analysis of celebrity repositioning through reality television

PurposeReality television is a dynamic, profit-making platform that occupies prime-time slots on the television almost all over the world. Despite its immense popularity and influence, it has received little attention in the extant literature and almost none in terms of its impact on celebrity repositioning. This study aims at examining the relationship between the film stars as brands and the impact of the platform of reality television in repositioning these celebrities in the Indian context.Design/methodology/approachThrough extensive literature review and qualitative interviews, the paper expounds that reality television provides an opportunity to celebrities to successfully reposition themselves at crucial junctures in their career. The framework to study this repositioning has been adopted from the work of Chris Simms and Paul Trott (2007) who created it to study the brand repositioning of various consumer goods.FindingsThe literature establishes celebrities as brands. This study provides evidence that brand repositioning through reality television is possible for these celebrity brands. The symbolic and functional repositioning of these celebrities is presented through thematic content analysis.Research limitations/implicationsThe study provides a useful framework to understand celebrity brand repositioning through reality TV. It can also be replicated to understand the repositioning of a wide variety of celebrities other than film-stars such as sportspersons, social media influencers and politicians.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to the need of expanding the corpus of Indian reality television and explains how Indian celebrities reposition themselves through reality television.

Queering Bodies: “Becoming-unrecognisable” in Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together

This paper is interested in the cinematic apparatus’s potential to produce affect which defamiliarises the visible presence of star-bodies in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (chunguang zhaxie, 1997), thus invoking non-normative and new modes of thinking about queer identification and representation. By close reading the mise-en-scène of the two Iguazu falls sequences, the on-screen star bodies of Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung are defamiliarized when they produce Gilles Deleuze’s affect and “become-unrecognisable” as on-screen subjects. Through this, the encounters with the Iguazu Falls allow us to queer heteronormative and linear narrative time that is associated with (a movement towards) futurity. This inability to pass judgement, I argue, is the ethics of sexual desire which Happy Together proffers when we understand the body that queers and becomes unrecognisable through productive affective assemblages. Instead, we move through the transsensorial potentials for the cinematic assemblage to rethink modes of queering normativity and to redefine bodies in terms of plurality and multiplicity. To that end, this paper presents a new way of thinking about how film stars, familiar tourist spots and even a classic text like Happy Together may be defamiliarized through productions of affects, new-sensations, to provide more ways of revisiting and regarding the film anew.

Black skin, white masks: Izzat as an appropriation of Othello

Izzat was the first mainstream Hindi film to reference Othello and has so far escaped the attention of academics who have begun researching the underexplored field of Bollywood Shakespeares. The film stars Dharmendra playing both versions of a fair- and a dark-skinned twin, which is a novel take on a Shakespearean trope. As a mainstream film, Izzat does not aspire to the pedagogical cultural capital of Shakespeare that Saptapadi does, nor does it reference the performance traditions of Othello onstage or film. However, references to Othello that seem superficial at first glance are embedded throughout the film. The only direct reference to the play is when Deepa meets Shekhar (who is pretending to be his twin Dilip) for the first time, and he sees she has been reading Othello. This sparks off a conversation about appearances and colour prejudices that is quite alien to an industry that traditionally favours light-skinned protagonists but rarely acknowledges it. Through this article, I would like to explore the ways in which Shakespearean tropes, and in particular Shakespeare’s Othello, has been used to explore postcolonial anxieties about identity in India by juxtaposing Adivasi identities with more typical urban Indian identities. The film also suggests that the colonizers have been replaced in Indian society by the urban elite who value superficial white masks and practise a racism that is much more insidious by discriminating against other Indians based on colour, caste and class. Through this exploration, I will also examine how Othello impacts the Indian psyche and why the referencing of Othello in this film points towards the many ways in which Othello is adapted and appropriated in Indian mainstream media.

Rewriting the stars: Surface tensions and gender troubles in the online media production of digital deepfakes

This article examines a cross-section of viral Deepfake videos that utilise the recognisable physiognomies of Hollywood film stars to exhibit the representative possibilities of Deepfakes as a sophisticated technology of illusion. Created by a number of online video artists, these convincing ‘mash-ups’ playfully rewrite film history by retrofitting canonical cinema with new star performers, from Jim Carrey in The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) to Tom Cruise in American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000). The particular remixing of stardom in these videos can – as this article contends – be situated within the technological imaginary of ‘take two’ cinephilia, and the ‘technological performativity of digitally remastered sounds and images’ in an era of ‘the download, the file swap, [and] the sampling’ (Elsaesser 2005: 36–40). However, these ‘take two’ Deepfake cyberstars further aestheticize an entertaining surface tension between coherency and discontinuity, and in their modularity function as ‘puzzling’ cryptograms written increasingly in digital code. Fully representing the star-as-rhetorical digital asset, Deepfakes therefore make strange contemporary Hollywood’s many digitally mediated performances, while the reskinning of (cisgender white male) stars sharpens the ontology of gender as it is understood through discourses of performativity (Butler 1990; 2004). By identifying Deepfakes as a ‘take two’ undoing, this article frames their implications for the cultural politics of identity; Hollywood discourses of hegemonic masculinity; overlaps with non-normative subjectivities, ‘body narratives’ and ‘second skins’ (Prosser 1998); and how star-centred Deepfakes engage gender itself as a socio-techno phenomenon of fakery that is produced – and reproduced – over time.

Screen Stars as Style Icons: an Examination of Audrey Hepburn and Sarah Jessica Parker

Through the examination of two film stars from different eras, Audrey Hepburn and Sarah Jessica Parker, this major research project (MRP) will examine how style icons are created. In order to achieve iconic style status, one must have a distinct and instantly recognizable look that represents new cultural ideals and appeals to a wide group of people. Style icons must actively participate in the fashion industry, taking a place on a creative side of the process by collaborating with designers, advertising fashion brands, and advocating and promoting fashion trends; this helps to establish their authority. Consumers of fashion also play an important role in the process. Screen narratives help actresses to embody the myths that are as repetitive and consistent as their looks circulating in the media. Through fashion, style icons represent these myths and embed them in culture. In return, they are regarded as cultural heroes and style icons.

Screen Stars as Style Icons: an Examination of Audrey Hepburn and Sarah Jessica Parker

Through the examination of two film stars from different eras, Audrey Hepburn and Sarah Jessica Parker, this major research project (MRP) will examine how style icons are created. In order to achieve iconic style status, one must have a distinct and instantly recognizable look that represents new cultural ideals and appeals to a wide group of people. Style icons must actively participate in the fashion industry, taking a place on a creative side of the process by collaborating with designers, advertising fashion brands, and advocating and promoting fashion trends; this helps to establish their authority. Consumers of fashion also play an important role in the process. Screen narratives help actresses to embody the myths that are as repetitive and consistent as their looks circulating in the media. Through fashion, style icons represent these myths and embed them in culture. In return, they are regarded as cultural heroes and style icons.

Agustín Espinosa, espectador del espacio insular: la influencia del cine en Lancelot, 28°-7° (1929)

The avant-garde description of the island of Lanzarote that Agustín Espinosa developed in Lancelot, 28°-7° (1929) proves that the writer shared the same interest in cinema that other young writers had expressed in their works during the 20s. However, the interartistic relation between cinema and literature in Lancelot has not been examined carefully yet. For this reason, this paper tries to study the different ways the cinema has influenced Lancelot, which includes not only references to film stars from the Amercian silent cinema, but also using certain film techniques. Thus, Espinosa offers new images of the island, now merged with universal artistic movements. To analyze this particular use of Espinosa’s cinema background in Lancelot, this paper will study the interest in cinema that the writer showed along his life, the way he uses different film techniques, the poetic imagery related to cinema, and the references to film stars included in the text.