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Dilip Kumar, Nargis, Hema Malini, Amitabh Bachchan, Sridevi, and more recently, of course, Shah Rukh Khan.2 Additionally, the double or dual role is also subject to considerable variation in the popular film: for example, while certain films feature look-alikes who have no visible biological connection to each other, others deploy the double in quasi-metaphysical narratives of rebirth and reincarnation where a single \"soul\" passes through multiple lifetimes.3 Although in some films, the two characters remain separated by temporal or spatial imperatives-in other words, both characters are not present onscreen within the present-tense of the film, for example, SRK's characters in Karan Arjun (Rakesh Roshan, IN, 1995), Don (Farhan Akhtar, IN, 2006), and Om Shanti Om (Farah Khan, IN, 2007)-the most enduring spectatorial pleasure of the double role is harnessed by witnessing the doubling of the star-body within single scenes and sequences.[...]narratively and stylistically, the double offers certain unique opportunities and challenges, ranging from scenarios of lost-and-found siblings, mistaken identities, deception, and masquerade, to the mobilization of special effects that enable the doubled star to be manifest within the same frame.Indian cinema's long romance with the double role makes the relative absence of scholarly explorations of the trope somewhat perplexing; what might account for this aporia, even as the field continues to expand at an impressive rate? I would wager that this oversight has something to do with the overwhelming dominance of melodrama as a theoretical optic.Since so much of the popular form's proclivities have been categorized and understood as melodramatic, a figure like the double has simply failed to garner particular attention.Focusing on the Karan Johar films, Ganesh and Mahadevan, for example write, \"the most critical component of SRK's soft masculinity is that he demonstrates his emotions without any inhibitions by crying and making others cry.[...]tears . . . are not representative of weakness but of sensitivity and empathy.When an anguished Lachhi enters the altered nuptial chamber, she discovers that the ghost-lover now possesses the hapless husband's body![...]the plenitude of Lachhi's desire is interrupted, but not destroyed in Paheli; the abjection of the lawfully wedded husband and the monumental deception of a heteropatriarchal social and familial order are enabled by the figure of the ghostly doppelgänger.

Crowning SRK as the King of Bollywood is not just a way of signposting Bombay as the largest film producer of the world, it is a way to draw attention to the secret power Indian film stars enj oy, a means for acknowledging South Asian stardom as an area ofeconomic and cultural surplus.[...]a vital task ofthis dossier is to unpack the textual, aesthetic, industrial, and affective intensities that undergird \"the-biggest-star-you'venever-heard-of \" soubriquet.Ostensibly, Fan was conceived as a determined rejection of the masala form; in effect, however, it congeals as a lament for that (now defunct ?) formal system.[...]fittingly, all five essays wrestle with questions of recall-the older star/fan/celebrity culture, Hindi cinema's primordial use of the double, older idioms of romantic love aligned to the song sequence and to looking, etc.-even as they illuminate what remains startlingly new and unexpected in Fan.The double allows the film to explore the logics of original/ copy, singularity/interchangeability, and liveness/mediation that dominate the proliferating circuits of contemporary star habitation.[...]as a film where SRK plays a double lead, Fan jettisons the deep centrality of heterosexual romance in Bombay cinema.[...]in some cases, SRK has returned money to distributors to compensate for flops.

Almost a century after his birth and several decades after his death, the specter of Satyajit Ray continues to haunt Bengali “new cinema.” This essay looks at the afterlives of the Ray film and the manner in which his life and work continue to be repurposed in the era of digital media. While the Ray archive has become more available than ever via digital technologies and the Internet, a whole slew of filmmakers harness the tropes and energies of his filmography in startling new guises. Ray is today a compendium of meanings and affects that can be easily deployed to generate a nostalgia that is determinedly resistant to the political. What is at stake here is the very relationship between the political and the cinematic, and, under the aegis of the market, the Ray text is being commodified in a very specific way.

In the middle of this century's first decade, \"bromance\" emerged as a term denoting an emotionally intense bond between straight men. Yet bromance requires an expression of intimacy that always toys with being coded as something other than \"straight\" male behavior, even as it insists that such intimacy must never be misinterpreted. In Reading the Bromance: Homosocial Relationships in Film and Television, editor Michael DeAngelis has compiled a diverse group of essays that address the rise of this tricky phenomenon and explore the social and cultural functions it serves. Contributors consider selected contemporary film and television texts, as well as the genres that historically inspired them, in order to explore what needs bromance attempts to fulfill in relationships between men—straight or otherwise. Essays analyze films ranging from I Love You, Man to Superbad, Humpday, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, The Hangover, and the Jackass films, and include studies of representative examples in international cinema such as Y tu mama tambien and classic and contemporary films of the Bollywood genre. The volume also examines the increasingly prevalent appearance of the bromance phenomenon in television narratives, from the \"male bonding\" rituals of Friends and Seinfeld to more recent manifestations in House, The Wire, and the MTV reality series Bromance. From historical analysis to discourse analysis, sociological analysis, and queer theory, this volume provides a broad range of methodological and theoretical approaches to the phenomenon in the first booklength study of the bromance genre. Film and television scholars as well as readers interested in pop culture and queer studies will enjoy the insights of Reading the Bromance.