The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture

Tom Brown, Belén Vidal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415899406
• eBook ISBN: 9781135950378
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The biographical film or biopic is a staple of film production in all major film industries and yet, within film studies, its generic, aesthetic, and cultural significance has remained underexplored. The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture fills this gap, conceptualizing the biopic with a particular eye toward the "life" of the genre internationally. New theoretical approaches combine with specially commissioned chapters on contemporary biographical film production in India, Italy, South Korea, France, Russia, Great Britain, and the US, in order to present a selective but well-rounded portrait of the biopic's place in film culture.

From Marie Antoinette to The Social Network, the pieces in this volume critically examine the place of the biopic within ongoing debates about how cinema can and should represent history and "real lives." Contributors discuss the biopic's grounding in the conventions of the historical film, and explore the genre's defining traits as well as its potential for innovation. The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture expands the critical boundaries of this evolving, versatile genre.

part one Cultural shifts

one Facebooking the present The biopic and cultural instantaneity

Rebecca A. Sheehan

DOI: 10.4324/9780203384572-1

I just wished that nobody made a movie of me while I was still alive.

—Mark Zuckerberg, interview, June 2010

A recent surge of biographical pictures have cast living figures into a genre heretofore reserved for dead ones, displacing the present from itself through a historicizing representation that remembers the still-living. From roughly 2005 to the present, biographical pictures have emerged internationally that focus either on a controversial living person, or persons from the past whose lives speak to hot-button issues of the cultural and political present. These pictures fall, more or less, into two categories that maintain a similar relationship to history, politics, and cultures of media and mediation. While films like Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), and Milk (2008) use a public figure or incident from the past to comment upon and even to intervene in contemporary cultural issues, films like The Queen (2006), W. (2008), The Social Network (2010), Invictus (2009), Fair Game (2010), and the recent HBO movie Game Change (2012) comment upon the present not by reviving a past personality or era but by portraying a living political figure, taking the broadly known events of this person’s life and, through them, remarking upon an ongoing political or cultural event.

In their different ways, both of these trends within the genre of the biographical picture present us with historicized pictures of our immediate political and cultural present. This paper focuses on three recent biopics that depict living figures: Oliver Stone’s W., in which Josh Brolin is assigned the awkward task of portraying George W. Bush in a film that premiered at a politically awkward time in the latter’s presidency; Stephen Frears’s The Queen, in which Helen Mirren enacts the stoic characteristics of Queen Elizabeth II and Michael Sheen plays a Tony Blair whose popularity was soaring during the story time of his portrayal, but plummeting at the time of the film’s release; and David Fincher’s The Social Network, in which Jesse Eisenberg mimics the ironic anti-social behavior of Mark Zuckerberg, the wunderkind founder of Facebook. It will be my ongoing claim that it is no coincidence that this kind of biopic emerges during a period with a paradoxical relationship to televisual and Internet media. The particular cultures of information and the out-of-sync temporality these films represent, and from which they emerge, help chart a departure from the well-observed tendency for historical films (and biographical pictures can generally be described as such) to respond to and emerge from anxieties particular to the moment in which they are produced.¹ These “instant” biopics, by being about a historical moment not yet past and by meditating within their narratives upon media that put a premium on instant information, push the trend of historical films to an unprecedented point of paradox in which the present is figured as both historical and ongoing. The coincidence of the present as both past and enduring within these films, elaborates the collapsed distance between the actual and information that attains its own reality: a collapse that ultimately accounts for the fatalism in each narrative.

All three films partake of the tragic narrative device responsible for generating a sense of belatedness, of “time out of joint,” reminiscent of Hamlet’s famous lines.² This “joint” constitutes a divide between knowledge and action, established through repeated warnings containing information about a character’s future or fate that are ignored in the face of brash confidence.³ Rita Felski’s recent work traces contemporary reevaluations of tragedy that are helpful for this essay. In Rethinking Tragedy, Felski argues that Greek tragedy is an “exemplary source of insight [which] … in its very remoteness from the present … throws light on the dilemmas and contradictions of modernity.”⁴ She later describes the tragic protagonist as characterized by “miscalculated confidence and its consequences. … Rather than breaking free from the past, … [he] finds himself entangled in its meshes; the weight of what has come before bears down ineluctably on what is yet to come.”⁵ All three of the films that this essay engages with borrow narrative cues and fatal character flaws from some of the most widely known Greek tragedies, while the very repetition of this ancient past, a past whose narrative is so familiar to Western audiences, lends its role in these contemporary films a similarly fatalistic air. In what could be an echo of Aeschylus’s Cassandra to Agamemnon or Sophocles’s Sphinx to Oedipus, The Social Network opens with a scene in which Erica Albright, Zuckerberg’s soon-to-be ex-girlfriend warns him, “you don’t care if the side effect [of trying to get into a final club] is blindness,” and, later, she utters words that return in the final scene of the film: “You’ll go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd but that won’t be true—it’ll be because you’re an asshole.” These are the first of a number of unheeded warnings about the dissonance between Zuckerberg’s intentions and actions that come true. Similarly, W. is riddled with unheeded warnings. After announcing his plans to run for President, George W. Bush’s mother warns her son that he’s too much like her in that he “acts before he thinks,” while Colin Powell, the Cassandra to the invasion of Iraq, pleads caution from the initial scene in the Oval Office to a war-mongering administration unwilling to throw the brakes on a half-hashed plan to take down Saddam Hussein. The Queen gives its spectator a similar feeling of the unavoidable as the Queen ignores Blair’s suggestions about how to acknowledge the nation’s grief for an ex-Royal.

As stories built upon classical rhetorical structures of tragedy, the characters of these narratives are subject to and guilty of realizing information too late to act on it. This dissonance between information and access to it is reflected in each of the three narratives as they deal with the complexities of a culture whose demand for instant information threatens to overwhelm our agency over history. In these stories, the virtual via the representation of the real, or what Jean Baudrillard may have at an earlier moment in televisual history referred to as a simulacrum of the real, gains a life and agency of its own.⁶ A contradiction at the heart of instant televisual media—whereby we desire both proximity to and distance from the reality to which it gives us access—resonates with the temporal coincidence between the release of these biographical pictures and the still-living people and ongoing events they depict. This contradiction can also be articulated as a desire for “truth” that the very premise of televisual media deems impossible. The instant imaging of a distant and private world—be they of our troops on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan or of the parties of the friends of friends—brings us no closer to what we seek from those worlds when we watch them, no matter the speed with which they reach our screens. The premium placed on instantaneity in contemporary media is clear in ways that directly influence these stories: Facebook promotes a streaming feed of “status” updates that promise to disclose what “friends” are doing or thinking at any given moment, its invitation to upload photos from parties that are not yet over but can be broadcast to entire cyber communities around the world expanding upon a “democratization” of the same recording media that promises instant coverage of war through the speed and ease with which mobile and inexpensive devices give us fast access to images of battle on the ground, digitally recorded by reporters and soldiers and then streamed over YouTube, Skype, and instant messaging networks.

In their representations of on-going political or cultural events, these biopics depict and exemplify a culture that places such a premium on instant information that it invites representation to trump reality. For the Bush presidency, this culture of the instant was evident in the war that promised to be over instantly and was largely screened in real time. Zuckerberg’s network illuminates the paradoxes of instant representation as it instantly broadcasts social relationships and encourages friendship to be experienced at the same paradoxical distance and proximity television and the Internet have afforded war. In The Queen, immediacy and the instant are embodied by the speed with which the media broadcasts the private lives of the Royals as well as their actions following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, before they have time to think about their response. Instantaneity is also evident in the timing of the film’s release as it coincided with the plummet in Blair’s popularity; this moment is remarked upon and heralded at the end of the film as the Queen teases Blair about his willingness to assist her in handling the media’s portrayal of her and the Royal Family’s response to the death of Diana. She tells him, “You saw those headlines and you thought, ‘One day that might happen to me.’ And it will, Mr. Blair, quite suddenly and without any warning.” Indeed, in the moment of the film’s UK release in September 2006, Blair had recently been handed a fatal blow to his premiership—losing 18 councils in the local elections of 4 May, 2006, a failure largely chalked up to the public’s dissatisfaction with the Prime Minister’s decision to join America in going to war with Iraq.

Simulacra of the present

The contradictions embodied by instant information are also reflected in how the narrative of each film represents opposing desires to make an image or idea real and to make the actual into a distanced image of history. This translates into the ambivalent nature of each film’s representation of and emergence from a cultural present. Each of these films engages in a mode of retelling events that are part of an ongoing present as history. This trend may be critically understood as redefining the “nostalgia for the present,” which Fredric Jameson identifies in the way films and novels of the 1950s through the 1980s treated their present as past, telling a story that takes place in the future or avoiding it altogether by indulging in “lavish images of specific generational pasts.”⁷ In Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism, Jameson argues that novels and stories like these invite us to return to the past, noting earlier that:

Historicity is, in fact, neither a representation of the past nor a representation of the future (although its various forms use such representations): it can first and foremost be defined as a perception of the present as history; that is, as a relationship to the present which somehow defamiliarizes it and allows us that distance from immediacy which is at length characterized as a historical perspective.⁸

For Jameson, the historicist novel and film distance us from the immediacy of the present but they also tempt us to try and grasp the present as “a kind of thing.”⁹ Historicity creates an oppositional attitude toward the present in which we at once want nothing to do with it and we want to grasp it, making it our subject rather than seeing ourselves as its object. Jameson reads two films from 1986, Blue Velvet and Something Wild, as showing a “collective unconscious in the process of trying to identify its own present at the same time that they illuminate the failure of this attempt, which seems to reduce itself to a recombination of various stereotypes of the past.”¹⁰ It is unavoidable to acknowledge the contemporary biopic as taking part in and expanding each of the trends Jameson identifies as endemic to the late twentieth century’s representation of itself and of history. However, films like W., The Queen, and The Social Network are historicist in an even less intermediary way than the works Jameson speaks of. That is, they perceive the present as history but they do this more directly than any of the works cited by Jameson.

Jameson’s critique of the nostalgia film, as producing “not a list of facts or historical realities … but rather a list of stereotypes, of ideas of facts and historical realities,”¹¹ is also of value for a discussion of these three biopics riddled as they are with mythic details that substitute the real with the idea of the real. These details give us a sense of greater proximity to the characters and events they depict while merely rehearsing their actual distance from our comprehension and the distance of their culturally consequential actions from our agency. Details that parallel Jameson’s argument about how the representation of the 1950s in the nostalgia film is limited to stereotypical signs like “Main Street, U.S.A., Marilyn Monroe … short hair cuts, early rock and roll, longer skirts”¹² emerge to a similar effect in these contemporary biopics. W. brims with well-broadcast moments of his time in office, which a number of tell-all books and articles from insiders and presidential historians, television comedians and newscasters had made almost common knowledge by the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, when W. was released. Stone does not shy away from representing those moments: the scene in which W. almost chokes on a pretzel;¹³ when his brother, Jeb, loses the gubernatorial race in Florida, eclipsing his parents’ joy at W.’s own win in Texas; the details of his evangelical rebirth and his reputation as an alcoholic party boy; or his insistence on holding high-level cabinet meetings at his ranch in Crawford, Texas—all details which had been painted in the American imaginary long before Stone’s film. Similarly, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and director David Fincher repeat details about the founding of Facebook that had become lore: from Zuckerberg’s breakup with his girlfriend to his business cards that read “CEO, bitch”: or Sean Parker’s sexual promiscu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• list of illustrations
• acknowledgements
• introduction: the biopic and its critical contexts—Belén Vidal
• part one: Cultural shifts—Tom Brown and Belén Vidal
• part two: Cycles and performance—Tom Brown and Belén Vidal
• part three: Icons and auteurs—Tom Brown and Belén Vidal
• bibliography
• contributors
• about the american film institute
• Index