Why Does Hollywood Keep Making Biopics?
Another cycle of Oscars season has passed us by, adieu! Thanks for the Hollywood glamour and for the surprising and heartwarming wins. Yet, we’ve noticed that despite the historic wins for Everything Everywhere All at Once, the film is the exception, not the rule. The films that the Academy nominated betray an age-old fascination with the celebrity biopic.
From this year’s nominations, we have Baz Luhrman’s cinema of attractions in Elvis, to the problematic portrayal of Marilyn Monroe in Andrew Dominik’s Blonde, and even Tàr’s hyperrealism bears resemblance to the genre and was mistaken by many as a biopic. Last year’s nominations followed a similar pattern with King Richard earning an Oscar for Will Smith (famously) for his portrayal of Serena Williams and Venus Williams’ father; Spencer was applauded for its fictional imagination of Princess Diana’s Christmas while Jessica Chastain took home an Oscar for Best Actress for The Eyes of Tammy Faye. According to Slash Film, biographical films compose almost a quarter of the 581 films nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars over its history.
The landscape of contemporary Hollywood today feels barren – composed of Marvel superhero films and biopics and filled with the same cloying rags-to-riches stories that are here to cement the idea and feel-good illusion of neoliberal possibility and individual exceptionalism. It seems to question contemporary culture’s ability to imagine new horizons, instead of repeating and regurgitating the same stories built out of nostalgia for a time past and all its bygone glamour pre-Internet, pre-Instagram mystique.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
In Mark Fisher’s seminal Capitalist Realism, he complains that our culture has been stunted in its imagination, unable to think of alternatives beyond neoliberal capitalism, one that privileges individual difference and exhausted aesthetics. The muddled practice of re-creating stories that push continual myth-making drives much of mainstream film production today; filmmakers are looking to stories that already exist, with tried-and-tested formulas that ensure Oscars nominations and box-office hits.
For Hollywood, the biopic is a continuation of the Classic Hollywood Star System - built upon the cult of personality, of ‘discovering’ a struggling artist and shooting them to new heights of fame. Fame is not just the recognition of talent within an individual, but also the invention and manipulation of image. It’s important for the Hollywood machine that this form persists: to sustain the marketable symbol of the American Dream through a celebrity, a mythology that re-instates the glories of individuality. As William Kohler details for Little White Lies, “By centering the story around a well-known individual, a studio is able to greatly increase the marketability of a medium budget film that might otherwise struggle at the box office with the dominance of the small screen.”
However, there is more to this idea than pure profitability. The individualism of biopics feeds into the present form of our digital lives – of image-making through Instagram and Tiktok that characterises the individualised narrative that we want to produce of our ‘authentic’ selves – the marketing of unique and irreplaceable self that deserves to be noticed. The popularity of the biopic grew in the 2000s through the 2010s during the proliferation of social media where the internet became oriented towards the image, worshipping all forms of self-presentation: It is no longer about knowing, but being known, no longer about seeing, but curating how we are seen.
The biopic and social media market the unique “self” – your interests, hobbies and methods of personal expression are excavated to be sold – by achieving fame, you can leave your humble beginnings behind and secure a position at the top of society, perpetuating the ideal that success is determined by personality and defined by materialistic gains. Take the classic biopics Walk The Line about Johnny Cash and Ray detailing the life of Ray Charles as an example. They follow the narrative arc of personal struggle then reward for their efforts, rinse and repeat until you have 120 minutes of run time.
However, there’s emerged a marked difference in current productions of biopics, of questioning whether these individuals possess the power that they exhibit. In Baz Lurhmann’s Elvis, we do not view the icon’s story from his point of view, but from Tom Parker’s, Elvis’ con man manager. Parker is a “mister nobody for nowhere”, a wily master of self-marketing and performance, an American social climber, using Elvis to help him achieve fame and fortune. Luhrman seems to focus on the greedy vision of the huckster rather than the talents of the artist. As Presley descends in bathos towards self-parody towards the end of the film, Parker’s perspective helps expose how often art and ownership can be exploited in a capitalist system.
Nevertheless, even while Elvis attempts to unveil the uglier sides of fame, the film’s visual excess and saccharine style perpetuates a glimmering sense of nostalgia and fails to scrutinise Elvis’ excavation of Black music. All too often, the film positions Elvis as a white hero discovering the “exotic” Black artists of his era, where Big Momma Thornton and BB King exist merely as his supporters, smoothing over the complicated relationship Elvis had with Black art. By skewing the narrative to make Elvis look like an individual that thrived based on pure talent rather than oweing his fame to Black artists and their cultural inputs, the film is burdened with trying to keep Elvis unreachable and mythical, rendering the whole biopic predictable and true to its form – an exercise in image-making.
In another iteration, Tàr seems to both parody the biopic form and derive its power for it. Many viewers mistook Tàr as a biopic and I found myself looking through Twitter to see that I wasn’t the only one, to my relief. On the film’s Letterboxd, the description reads: set in the international world of classical music, [the film] centres on Lydia Tàr, widely considered one of the greatest living conductors and first-ever female chief conductor of a major German orchestra; an ambiguous description that suggests that she is real. And indeed, the film fulfils most of the tropes of a classic biopic: we follow the life of an exceptional individual who has “overcome” her lower-class background as a marker of success, she’s overcome misogyny and homophobia as one of the only women in classical music and has won all the accolades of modern success: a Grammy, Oscar, Emmy and Tony, she is an EGOT.
“When will there be a new cinema dedicated to the collective, of the impossibility of creating and living without others, of the power of belonging together rather than striving to be celebrated alone?”
The film is clever in its meta-fictive comment on the continual image-building of public figures in a world that worships a cult of personality. As the film progresses and Lydia Tàr is left to deal with the after affects of her abuse of power, the film pointedly remarks on the way biopics often make heroes out of characters - real people - who may not actually deserve it.
In Blonde, the biopic of Marilyn Monroe, we begin with an image of young Norma Jeane AKA Marilyn at her childhood home with her mother Gladys, overlooking a photograph of her father that hangs over a long crack along the wall, marking the central theme of the film – a girl with daddy issues. Although Dominik claimed to be challenging the constant sexualisation and objectification of Marilyn, she is seen as a girl (not a woman) defined by the men in her life, jumping from one relationship with one daddy to the next. The film fails to represent any of her ambitions growing up – from her love of cinema as a child, because of her mother Gladys who worked at a film studio during the time, or her work as a model and pursuit of acting classes. Rather than reveal her as an individual with ambition and a complex relationship to fame as a sex-symbol, we see how Marilyn the person is effaced by Marilyn the commodity, the image. What we see is the double bind Marilyn is in: celebrated for her image yet her individual will is slowly broken down against a capitalist system that can usurp her image for profits. If anything, the film begs the question on whether the power of the image is completely illusory, as its interpretation and reception is left up to those who are doing the viewing and judging.
Capitalism is the celebration of the individual, but do any of the individuals in these biopics possess any power beyond their image and their leftover relics? Being seen is not a guarantee of success or safety. The hope of cinema to celebrate the glamour of the individual is shadowed by the overwhelming sense of a capitalist Hollywood star system reinvigorating their myth to earn box-office hits for an audience fed on a diet of self-marketing and self-as-profit.
How much longer can studios keep churning out the same narrative, feeding into a sense of voyeuristic nostalgia. When will there be a new cinema dedicated to the collective, of the impossibility of creating and living without others, of the power of belonging together rather than striving to be celebrated alone?
Words: Cici Peng
