10 Years Of Fan: The Uncontainable Lives Of Digital Fandom

There are two separate lines in Fan (2016) that film star Aryan Khanna’s fan Gaurav Chandna (both played by Shah Rukh Khan) says about himself. In one, he says, “Jo kuchh bhi usne kiya, maine uska cut copy paste kiya.” (I did a cut, copy, paste of whatever he did). In the other, he says, “Aryan ko banane ke baad jo mitti bachi usse mereko bana diya.” (I was made with the mud that was left over after Aryan was sculpted). It implies that one belongs to the other in essence.

Maneesh Sharma’s Fan was, perhaps not surprisingly, a box-office failure—one that people associated with the film’s production, including Khan himself, have often lamented about in interviews and conversations. Yet, it remains one of the most discussed, written and talked about films of the last decade, still regarded by many SRK fans and cinephiles as a landmark in his filmography. In a career that has seen Khan don too many hats—the stalker, the jilted lover, the loafer, the sanskari son and the romantic hero—Gaurav Chandna sticks out as the fan who becomes the stalker and the jilted lover. The film flips the mirror onto the star himself, through a conflict between film star Aryan and his crazy fan, Gaurav. Khan, often considered as one of the few self-aware stars, channelises this awareness to bring in a kind of self-reflection that only he could. Through this process of reflecting on his stardom, Fan has become one of the most fascinating archives of the relationship between the star, the industry, and their uncontainable digital afterlives. German moving image artist Hito Steyerl uses the term ‘poor image’ to make sense of digital copies of original images. She describes it as ‘an illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original image.’

Gaurav is that bastard copy that Aryan keeps trying to contain but fails, as the latter keeps mutating throughout the film. Gaurav belongs to a generation whose mediatic engagement has seen the shifts from analog to digital. As a child, Gaurav watches Aryan’s films on TV. Cut to a grown-up Gaurav’s life—we see him taking a printout of Aryan’s photo from his computer. Between these two scenes lies an entire history of fandom that has seen the shift from analog to digital and continues to carry the ghosts of its analog pasts. A pivotal example of this is the numerous newspaper cut-outs that adorn the walls of his house and the cybercafé he runs. A crucial point about the shift from analog fandom to digital fandom is a media infrastructure where images circulate at a speed that makes it impossible to contain them. A lot of the copies coming out of this circulation are informal in nature; often termed as ‘pirated’ or ‘illegal’. The film takes this conflict head on, while acknowledging its failures to contain the informal networks.

Though the film starts with the fan chasing the star, it shifts to the star chasing the fan in an attempt to get a hold of him. The more Aryan tries, the more Gaurav slips away, while continuing to move about and impersonate him at various venues. In Gaurav, we see a moving-dancing copy of Aryan. While the stance of film industries on piracy has always been about straightforward rejection, their relationship with human copies of film stars has always been complicated. Apps and features like Tiktok dubsmash and Instagram Reels (which have also become regular tools of film promotion) were conceived on the back of this culture of copying popular codes and gestures of films. This culture has been built on the informal circulation of CDs, Bluetooth transfers, and file shares. Gaurav’s performances at his local fair as Superstar Sitara are explicit citations of Tiktok dubsmash videos and Instagram Reels of people copying film sequences and dances.

Gaurav, thus, does not just represent a fan madly in love, but a culture of circulation that is impossible to contain. In its various aesthetic choices, the film plays with the ripple effects of copy culture. In a pivotal scene, where Gaurav and Aryan meet each other for the first time in the prison, we see their faces reflected on an infinity mirror in the background, which multiplies their images infinitely. In an interview with Priyadarshini Shanker in 2017, Manu Anand, the film’s cinematographer, said that while the mirror was not a part of the initial screenplay, he became fascinated by it after chancing upon various images during his research. The production designer went further ahead to create a run-down toilet to justify the presence of mirrors in a police station. The mirroring of images, he added, is ‘a subliminal cue’.

Gaurav’s encounter with Aryan’s statue at Madame Tussauds, in a way, also mirrors his first encounter with the star himself. In his meeting with the real Aryan, Gaurav cannot touch him, despite being in close physical proximity. At Madame Tussauds, we see a face-off between Aryan’s living copy and his non-living copy, with the former calling it ‘fake’. Gaurav has, over the years, made himself appear like Aryan, using his images as his reference point. The wax statue on the other hand, has been made after taking actual measurements of Aryan (if we go by how statues at Madame Tussauds are actually made). Statues at the Madame Tussauds are meticulously sculpted, including the insertion of actual human hair, strand by strand, over weeks. Both Gaurav and the wax statue are copies. Gaurav is an informal copy and a product of years of fan labour; the wax statue, a legitimate one. Gaurav’s very physical dismissal of the wax statue, thus, embodies the threats that informal networks pose to legitimate copies, always questioning their existence. The statue’s immobility is helpless against Gaurav’s mobility, who moves across London and around Dubrovnik to leave his trace, always slipping away from the star body of which he is a copy. Gaurav is not just mobile, but keeps getting dematerialised through the digital as he mutates himself.

The film then, becomes an analogy for the star, and in turn, the industry’s continuous attempts and subsequent failures to contain informal copies, while also being aware of the ways in which they are dependent on these networks. No matter how much Aryan tries to hold on to Gaurav, he cannot stop him from slipping away, eventually ending in the latter’s poetic fall as Aryan makes a desperate attempt to save him—reminiscent of the forgettable deaths that informal copies often face in the hands of the crazy circulation machine.

At an industrial level, the film rides on the back of the very digital ecosystem that creates fans like Gaurav, to create a copy of Khanna, and thereby Khan. It is interesting to note here that digital effects are often used to portray a sense of reality. In general film production standards, the more one hides the use of digital effects, the more successful it is considered. In Fan, however, Gaurav’s frequent facial and voice transformations to uncannily resemble Khanna often make the audience conscious of the special effects that are in use. These transformations perhaps embody the ease with which informal copies can replace the original. Fan not just acknowledges these possibilities, but foregrounds their role in industrial practices. While Aryan Khanna must contain the circulation of his digital copy, he also cannot deny its role in his stardom. In that, the film takes head on and forever suspends itself in the intermezzo that is the digital—as long as the digital exists, the bastard copy shall exist and keep mutating. There is no star or stardom without his bastard copy. As Gaurav warns Aryan on his disillusionment with his star: “Gaurav hai toh Aryan hai. Gaurav nahi, toh Aryan kuchh bhi nahi.” (Aryan exists only as long as Gaurav exists. Without Gaurav, Aryan is nothing). A decade later, Fan remains one of the most self-aware fables to have come out of the madness called Bollywood.