Why Vijay is the Last Superstar | Video Essay Script

Hi, my name is Kishor and this is MOVING IMAGES. Today we are doing a star study on a genuine movie star, audio release event personality, and everyone’s anna “Thalapathy Vijay”. While Vijay has one of the largest fan bases in Tamil film industry, not all of his fans actually get to meet him in person. They instead know him through his film performance, his film promo event speeches, and his carefully crafted public persona. Films, promotion or publicity materials, and criticism are various forms of textual materials that mediate the identities of stars. As star texts cluster around a given name, they define the identities of individual stars, and as they accumulate over time, they also form a public sense of film stardom in general.

While Vijay has surely had his share of lows and flops, he has always managed to jump back and remain the favourite of the masses. And with every comeback he has tweaked his image to suit the ever changing tastes of his audience at the same time also retaining the old school charm of yesteryear stars. While his peers have largely left the “masala” entertainment roles behind due to box office disappointments, Vijay still manages to throw an audience into a frenzy through punch dialogues. This image comes from years of careful tweaking his on-screen performances as well as his off-screen public persona. So much so that he has blurred the lines between the two and can now get the same reaction from the audience when he delivers punch dialogues in real life too. Today we are going to explore what are the various aspects of Vijay that makes him a star and how he has carefully worked on it to stay relevant all these years.

PERFORMANCE

In an acting career spanning almost three decades, Vijay has achieved stardom by entertaining the masses through his performances that offered all around good time for the family. The entertainer image was a product of not only his characters but his dancing, dialogue delivery, stunts, and his comedic timing too. Looking at the kind of roles he has done recently to the ones he did a decade ago, it might seem like not much has changed. He has had phases where for a period of time he would almost choose the same type of roles until they don’t work with the audience anymore and then he would change strategy. Like we had the golden age Vijay with him catering to the youth market by portraying college student roles or ones involving finding first love and such. His roles were mostly urban and educated. Then came the transition phase to mass hero which was riddled with hits or misses until he landed with the right combination in Thirumalai. In the silver age, he embraced being a “local” and it worked for him in Thirumalai and cemented the formula in “Ghillie”. This was also the time his dancing skills were getting recognised and Vijay capitalized on it from film to film, grinding his knees to the ground. This was the rise of the complete entertainer phase and his films worked with B and C centers now, increasing his fan base. Vijay sort of retained the same look and type of characters for a while and it seemed to work, until it didn’t. But this time Vijay was quick to change his looks and roles film after film which gave him mixed results until Thupaaki. Now back to the educated and sophisticated type roles, no longer was he a youth but a leading man with a proper job and mission.

MISSION

Let’s talk about the mission for a bit. Post Thupaaki, Vijay’s films have gone beyond mere entertainers and were laced with agendas and messages for the masses. We are now in the bronze age and Vijay’s films have slowly turned to weaponizing intertextuality. Each of his films had a mission to be carried by his character and these missions were objects, people, or situations that would trigger an emotional response from the audience at that time. Be it fighting against big corporates, nirbhaya, jallikattu, medical negligence, and so on. It was like how comics during World War II showed their superheroes going up against Hitler and solving the world’s problem at least in their fictional world. These gave the people hope during dark times and also skyrocketed the comic book sales. Vijay has weaponized intertextuality to show people that his characters and in extension he is aware and ready to tackle the problems in our real world. This formula isn’t something new, MGR has done it and many more have attempted it too. But what is interesting is that Vijay is the only one of the current actors who is still using this archaic approach and it still seems to be working. But showing yourself as an able lead and a one stop shop for all our current problems on-screen isn’t enough.

OFFSCREEN PERSONA

It is interesting to see how an introvert like Vijay has changed into this engaging stage personality oozing charisma. One has to acknowledge the effort he has put into shaping how the public sees him. Vijay started off as a soft-spoken person while promoting his films. His on-screen persona which was loud and engaging was the polar opposite of who he was in real life. Vijay did not seem comfortable promoting his films and was definitely not comfortable discussing why a certain film failed. This was his lowest point when it came to public appearances. Following which Vijay has slowly over the years started reducing his interviews to the point where he no longer does them for promoting his movies now. Instead, he uses the stage during the film’s audio release to address his fans directly. His stage appearances have become something his fans look forward to now and Vijay too seems to enjoy performing for his fans. But the brilliant part is where Vijay by addressing his fans directly, he gives his fans a sense of proprietary over him and his image. An image now a huge subsect of his fans would maintain by fighting and abusing others. A negative side effect perhaps, but Vijay’s stage appearances in the end accomplish his goals, which is to bring him closer to his fans, gives him a chance to address current issues and where he stands in it, and importantly blur the line between his reel and real self. So the next time a certain issue crops up you can be sure that Vijay would tackle it in his film and maybe someday in real life too.

Until next time, this is Kishor signing off saying…