Whose lives are they anyway?

Rutgers University Press

2010

xi, 432 p.

9780813546582

Introduction: a respectable genre of very low repute -Book one: the great man biopic and its discontents. Strachey's way, or all's well that ends Welles: certain tendencies of the film biography --Rembrandt (1936) -Flashback/flashforward: Citizen Kane and the biopic -"But does he really deserve a place ... in here?": Lawrence of Arabia and the subject-turned-object -Nixon, Oliver Stone, and the unmaking of the self-made man p.s.: W. -Ghost picture: 32 short films about Glenn Gould -Lust for tripe: the biopic of someone who doesn't deserve one -Appropriation or assimilation, or the postclassical biopic and African American subjects: Spike Lee's Malcolm X -Raoul Peck's Lumumba: drama, documentary, and the post-colonial appropriation -Book two: a woman's life is never done. Prologue Toying with the genre, or the bare bones of the female biopic: superstar: The Karen Carpenter story -Criminal woman, male discourses, and female biopics: I want to live! -Barbra and Julie at the dawning of the age of Aquarius: biopics and the fall of the female star -Funny girl -Star! -Suffocation: female biopics of the 1980s -Gorillas in the mist -Re-framing the female biography: An angel at my table -"She's like a superhero": Erin Brockovich and Hollywood feminist revisionism, after a fashion -Notorious, or present and future lives of the female biopics -The notorious Bettie Page: feminism, free will, and God's will -Marie Antoinette: the female biopic gets the guillotine -I'm not there: some conclusions on a book concerning biopics.

The biopic presents a profound paradox—its own conventions and historical stages of development, disintegration, investigation, parody, and revival have not gained respect in the world of film studies. That is, until now. Whose Lives Are They Anyway? boldly proves a critical point: The biopic is a genuine, dynamic genre and an important one—it narrates, exhibits, and celebrates a subject's life and demonstrates, investigates, or questions his or her importance in the world; it illuminates the finer points of a personality; and, ultimately, it provides a medium for both artist and spectator to discover what it would be like to be that person, or a certain type of person. Through detailed analyses and critiques of nearly twenty biopics, Dennis Bingham explores what is at their core—the urge to dramatize real life and find a version of the truth within it. The genre's charge, which dates back to the salad days of the Hollywood studio era, is to introduce the biographical subject into the pantheon of cultural mythology and, above all, to show that he or she belongs there. It means to discover what we learn about our culture from the heroes who rise and the leaders who emerge from cinematic representations. Bingham also zooms in on distinctions between cinematic portrayals of men and women. Films about men have evolved from celebratory warts-and-all to investigatory to postmodern and parodic. At the same time, women in biopics have been burdened by myths of suffering, victimization, and failure from which they are only now being liberated. To explore the evolution and lifecycle changes of the biopic and develop an appreciation for subgenres contained within it, there is no better source than Whose Lives Are They Anyway?

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