Eleventh Global Studies Conference

Abstract

This paper understands globalization as a set of reversals of time and space enabled by new modes of cultural production. By looking at doubling in the films of Shah Rukh Khan (SRK), I focus on the star as a promethean configuration with a simultaneous ability to walk backward and forward in time and space. Examining doubling as a mode that embodies screen culture recursively, I show how it is tethered to the aging body of the fifty-two–year-old SRK in FAN (2016). Digital replication “youthifies” and transforms the star into a plastic sign of time past, present, and future. In turn, extreme VFX contrast star charisma with “simulated” performance to produce radically disorientating emotional effects. In particular, I focus on the chase and facial regeneration to show how the digital fabricates the global in Bombay Cinema.