The Mysterious Case of Life v. Art

The past year was an interesting one for a genre I have a love/hate relationship with—the biopic. There were, of course, a number of straightforward movies of that kind—though people can’t quite agree what is and what isn’t a biopic. For example, I saw She Said on a list of biopics from 2022. I haven’t seen it. I know it’s about real people, but it I don’t think it qualifies.

To me, a “biographical picture” is an attempt to tell the story of a real person’s life in a summative way. It needn’t be their whole life—indeed, how could it be? But it should cover a significant portion of the person’s life, not just one extended incident.

These movies are often predictably bad. They are constantly subject to complaints about deviations from the “true story,” and they often try to cram in too much incident. One popular subgenre is the Portrait of the Artist and, if the artist in question is modern and well-liked, it’s a risky venture. If the subject comes across differently in the movie than in the public’s imagination, it’s often very controversial.

For example, Blonde, Andrew Dominik’s adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ Marilyn Monroe novel, was despised by many who felt it was unfair to and untruthful about the historical Marilyn. Since few of those people actually know the specific details of Monroe’s life well enough to claim this with any authority, they focussed on the difference between the film’s Marilyn and their fantasy image of Marilyn’s persona. They found the portrayal of misogyny in the film to be too stark, too raw, too explicit, to process. They said the director was a misogynist for creating such a depiction (which, again, was based on a character from a biographical novel, a work of fiction.)

To me, this disconnect came about because Dominik was not making a biopic, as people expected, but was making a horror movie in the guise of a biopic. The subject of that movie was celebrity and misogyny, not Marilyn Monroe, but this proved a trickier distinction than most viewers could navigate. They forgot, for example, that Dominik is Australian and doesn’t have the same cultural sense of Marilyn as Americans do. Forgot—or ignored, in the typical American way of assuming ours is the universal point of view.

Blonde is a biopic, but a warped one, that satirizes the tropes as it uses them to structure the narrative. Then it uses the narrative to depict the savage violence done to women in our culture with Monroe as an avatar of that suffering.

Compare this to Elvis, another Australian’s take on an American icon. Another biopic, but also another skewed version of the genre. Like it’s subject, Elvis is flashy, colorful, exciting—and astonishingly shallow. But similarly to Blonde, Elvis director Baz Luhrmann uses the biopic form to another end. The tropes structure the movie, to a point—but Luhrmann treats those life moments in an almost generic way. That’s not actually the story he’s telling.

Instead of trying to sum up Elvis’s life as a man, Luhrmann (predictably) focusses on his music. He emphasizes Presley’s influences—the sublime Black blues music he grew up on—without direct political comment. He leaves it to our imagination to consider what might have happened if Black musicians—who invented most (all?) American musical forms—had been allowed to become as popular as the white musicians who coopted their songs. But he also shows us that that music was Elvis’s music, authentically, as a poor southern white kid who lived much of his early life around Black people and their music.

He whisks us through Elvis’s biography, but that’s not what you’ll remember from the movie. Instead, you’ll remember the performances depicted. How Austin Butler goes for broke in his portrayal, inhabiting the King-as-performer, how the movie sometimes skips around in time to compare his early sound to his later work, putting them side to side.

Unlike most biopics, which strain to prove the larger cultural importance or tragic life lessons that shaped the hero, Elvis simply wants to shake its hips and sing. It’s refreshing—because at the end of the day for most of us, none of the details of Elvis Presley’s life matter next to his artistry. This is part of the strategy, I think, in using Tom Hanks’s fat-suited and latexed Colonel Tom Parker, as the narrator. As portrayed in the movie, Parker cared almost nothing for Elvis as a person—but understand his impact as a performer profoundly. He’s the villain—but the movie has some ironic ambivalence about that. After all, we don’t care much about Elvis the person either.

Among the scores of biopics released each decade, perhaps the rarest is the autobiopic. It’s so rare, that’s not even a real term. Steven Spielberg’s latest, The Fabelmans, is a very lightly fictionalized coming-of-age story about the great director. In the midst of many funny scenes of young “Sammy” discovering his passion for filmmaking, comes a scene with Judd Hirsch, as Sammy’s great-uncle. He recognizes the teenager’s artistic obsession right away as the same kind that led the uncle to join the circus in his youth, or that led Sammy’s mother to once consider a career as a concert pianist. He warns Sammy that there is a fundamental tension between the demands of one’s private life and the demands of art, one that will tear you apart if you let it.

Art will give you crowns in heaven and laurels on Earth, but also, it will tear your heart out and leave you lonely. You'll be a shanda [disgrace] for your loved ones. An exile in the desert. A gypsy. Art is no game! Art is dangerous as a lion's mouth. It'll bite your head off.

In the film’s coda, John Ford (played with perfect irascibility by David Lynch), echoes the uncle’s advice when he asks young Sammy why he would want to be in the picture business. He’s more succinct. “This business,” Lynch as Ford says, “it’ll rip you apart!” Then he goes on to give Sam some shot framing advice and kicks him out of his office.

Spielberg has told the story countless times in interviews. I was thrilled when I heard Lynch was cast in the film—because I knew immediately that he would play Ford in a dramatization of this true story. It’s a great way to end The Fabelmans, as it sends Sam off toward a future we know a lot about. The scene in the movie varies a little from the real-life version. Spielberg wrote the script with Tony Kushner and it’s interesting to think about the unusual situation of a master filmmaker (and master writer) making, from the raw material of the director’s early life (and the painful divorce of his parents), an autobiography in all but name.

Very few artists get the opportunity to tell their own story like that. In the film’s title, Spielberg seems to acknowledge the slippery nature of biography—but suggests there may be other uses for the form, other than the strict reporting of facts. Larger uses—the stuff of fable and drama and terror and artistry.