Body/Building: Special Effects Technologies and the New Tollywood Mass Hero on a Global Stage

• In Event: Media Studies Interruptions of STS - IV

Abstract

Since the 1980’s, the Tollywood male hero has anchored the action film through a dual bodily performance as dancer and fighter, whose capability for acrobatic choreography and punishing physical violence is enacted through unbounded physical spectacle. Alongside the gradual removal of logics of patrilineaty from the intra- and extradiegetic construction of the hero’s authority and authenticity over the last few decades, a gradual process of unmooring can be seen in the increased temporal, corporeal, and environmental unboundedness of the star body which is increasingly produced and represented through digital capture and animation technologies. My project reads these shifts alongside the logics and labors of literal bodybuilding – including star training and diet regimens and the labors of scores of VFX workers - in the construction of the Telegu action hero’s fantastical bio-technical corporeality.
Drawing on Bhaskar Sarkar and Joshua Neves’ concept of the penumbral global and Hye Jean Chung’s notion of media heterotopia, I complicate the persistent logics of immateriality applied to bodily special effects technologies in media industrial and media studies discourses, particularly around the digital morph, as well as static center/periphery models of globality which gloss over the contingent and the emergent. Operating at the fecund junction of STS, media studies, and postcolonial and queer critique, this project fleshes out the male Tollywood action star as special effects technology, returning the material to the seemingly immaterial by situating it within globalized circuits of laboring bodies, and attending to the affective and material dimensions of digital bodies onscreen.

Author

• Rachael Ball, University of California, Santa Barbara