The Gaze

 

Today I saw some discussion on action movie twitter about Tiger Shroff (pictured above). But I have not seen any of his action movies and am not going to talk about him. Rather, I have been puzzled for a few years now as to why Bollywood is rapidly filling up with ever-more-perfectly muscled male stars. 

Sure, Bollywood (and Hollywood, and profit-driven cinema in any country) has always been full of very beautiful women. The male gaze blah blah blah. The standard for male beauty was always pretty lax. Even the unquestionable No. 1 leading man of the past generation, Shah Rukh Khan, hardly looked like a magazine model at his peak. I am sure Indian cinema had no shortage of heartthrobs back in the day, but the average level of looks alone among male leads was way lower than female leads. 

Something started to change in the 2000s. When I saw Lagaan in 2001, Aamir Khan looked more buff than an average guy, but still within normal range, but 13 years later in PK the older Aamir had even bigger muscles. There was a wave sweeping through Mumbai, apparently, that was forcing every actor, even the big-name ones, to bulk up to ever higher levels of physical appearance. 

Akshay Kumar, himself a martial arts practitioner, once said that he and another actor were the only two guys in Bollywood who had not used steroids. I believe him. I am not categorically against anabolic steroid use, particularly when it is a necessity for one's livelihood. Who am I to judge? But I am extremely curious about the forces behind this phenomenon. Who are they building the muscles for? The female gaze? Or another manifestation of the male gaze? Or both? (In the US context, excessive body-building has a rather ambiguous meaning of both hypermasculinity and homoeroticism, which might not be mutually exclusive.)

I always suspect that Indian popular culture has the instinct to appeal to the most massive of the masses. So it is fascinating to wonder what this trend says about the masses and the time. Whose gaze are these muscle men appealing to?