The all new 50 Books Challenge!
This is not a typical review, but a special edition and I saved it to be the last book of the year for that reason. I explain below!
Title: The Biopic and Beyond: Celebrities as Characters in Screen Media by Melanie Piper
Details: Copyright 2022, Bloomsbury Academic
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): ""This book makes a compelling case for the term docucharacter examining topics in the intersection of various forms of screen and celebrity cultures, from biopic to sketch comedy to fan culture."
Doris Berger
Vice President of Curatorial Affairs, Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Los Angeles, USA
"The Biopic and Beyond explores an engaging set of questions concerning the ways in which stars and celebrities appear on our screens. Examining the different relationships between characters who we know from the public arena and their representations-- by themselves and others-- in a variety of films, television shows, and media texts from the United States, Piper poses a set of complex conceptual examples that interrogate these increasingly pervasive cultural encounters."
Lucy Bolton
Reader in Film Studies, Queen Mary University of London, UK
________________________________________
Biopics and other movies and television shows based on real events are increasingly appearing at the multiplex and on streaming platforms alongside blockbuster franchises and adaptations. The appeal of movies and television shows based on true stories is that they claim to tell us what really happened, with the public and private versions of events packaged into one coherent narrative. But how do they do it, and what makes this version of events so appealing?
The Biopic and Beyond investigates the process that turbans the distant public figures that populate news and entertainment into screen characters that we can engage with and try to understand a little better. Even though they aren't the real thing, our engagement with fictionalized versions of public figures can, for better or worse, color the way we understand the real person behind them. Screen engagement with the fake person behind the real person doesn't only happen in biopics and docudramas, with media as varied as sketch comedy, fan fiction and the celebrity cameo contributing to the ways we understand public figures. Using case studies such as Mark Zuckerberg and The Social Network, Sarah Palin and Saturday Night Live, and Louis C.K. and Louie, The Biopic and Beyond will make you think about the way you see the world through a fictionalized version of it."
Why I Wanted to Read It: Here's the thing. This is a review that's not a review.
A dear friend of mine whom I've known for many years and have even had the pleasure and privilege of collaborating with before, has become a fancy published author (as well as a PhD holder, ahem) and written a book, this very book in fact. She was kind enough not only to send me a copy, but to shout me out in the book (I'm not telling you where, you have to read the book to find out). I knew I'd already love the book, not just because it's written by a close friend (and I make a point of purposely surrounding myself with talented people), but because I'd been a fan of this friend's writing since before we even were friends.
With that in mind, it wouldn't be right for this to be a regular review, let alone a review with a grade. I can't possibly even attempt to treat my friend's book the way I have other authors, and even if I could (and I can't), I still shouldn't. I haven't had, say, Alice Hoffman read my work and offer suggestions both serious and funny. I don't have really fun memories of a New York trip with, say, Franchesca Lia Block. David Sedaris, say, hasn't seen me do incredibly embarrassing things in Times Square. I don't have a host of inside jokes and references with, say, Isabelle Allende. I have never had drinks and shared fun writing stories and ideas with, say, Stephen King.
But at the same time, I can't have a project where I talk about the books I'm reading and not mention this book. For one, it's flat out just too good, for two, I have a friend who just wrote a book, dammit.
So with that in mind, this is a review that's not quite a review.
How I Liked It: With the last review here, I mentioned about the importance of timing in producing media, and also came to the unfortunate conclusion that timing was about the only thing that author had. With the blizzard of high profile biopics in the last year alone (seriously, Blonde AND Elvis were the same year?) and what certainly seems like more biopics in the last decade to the point where parodies of the genre are becoming a genre themselves (2022's Weird, a popular parody of rock star biopics, starring Daniel Radcliff as Weird Al, couldn't exist without 2007's Walk Hard: the Dewey Cox Story, a parody of rock biopics in general), I wouldn't say we're living in the era of the biopic, since frankly it's always been a staple of cinema and television, but it's safe to say we're living in an extremely biopic-friendly era. Which makes the timing of this book perfect, but unlike the past author, timing not all this author gets right.
The book deep dives in not only to biopics and how they're constructed and what they do, but also to sketch comedy like Saturday Night Live and the role it plays shaping in public persona, as well as fan communities and how memes and fan fiction shape perceptions of public figures as well. Some of the author's descriptions are of media you're likely to have seen (and that's the point), but plenty aren't (we live in a media-dense time, after all) and the way she describes all of it will make you want to quickly pull up the scene and have a look for yourself (please allow time to do this, incidentally; it not only adds so much, it's incredibly entertaining).
And while you may be comfortable musing away on how the lives of the rich, famous, and powerful are dissected and shaped, don't get too comfortable, because the author's got some haunting and pointed arguments about why if you engage in social media, you're producing a version of yourself not unlike a biopic (which is a terrifying and fascinating premise).
If all of this sounds intriguing to you (and it should), but you're whinging about the fact you don't like academic books, I'll tell you up front: yes, this is an academic book. But it's not dry, dusty text buried in academic jargon thick enough to smell the institutional gatekeeping (I've read a lot of academic books, is what I'm saying). It's a book both for students but also those weirdos like myself and probably you too that are just fascinated by media and how it affects us, be it from what Mark Zuckerberg actually thought of The Social Network, to how Saturday Night Live creates a public image, to how your favorite meme is affecting what you think about the people used therein, to much, much more. Hey, if you're among those this past year alone who watched Weird, Elvis, Blonde, The Crown, She Said, and hundreds more I'm forgetting, not to mention those still on the horizon but generating hype (a new Whitney Houston biopic has dropped trailers and supposedly Madonna has a biopic in the works), you need to read this book.
We are awash in biopics and deconstructions of celebrity culture, which has become inextricably intertwined with at least the politics in the United States alone, now more than ever. When a biopic series like The Crown holds enough sway that at least some of the subjects therein and their supporters want a warning label across the series, we're talking about something with a lot of power. When public perception of political candidates can shift on a meme, we're talking about something with a lot of power that needs to be explored.
Timing can be everything, and this isn't just the perfect book for our times, but an excellent read for any time.
So what are you waiting for, an engraved invitation? Consider this it: GO READ IT!
Notable:
At the risk of piling too many quotes from the book (and I do want you to go read it for yourself), I limited myself to just a scant few favorites.
Similarly, it is useful to consider the docucharacter's relationship to factual and fictional discourses as taking place on a spectrum. As will be explored throughout the study of the biopic, the position of a docucharacterization along the fact-fiction continuum is dependent upon factors such as genre, form, audience, and mode of production. For example, the docucharacterization of Captain Chesley Sullenberger in Sully (2016), a film based on the Miracle on the Hudson pilot's memoir and made with his cooperation, is understood to be far more engaged with factual discourse on the fact-fiction continuum than a satirical piece of fan fiction that depicts Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in a master/slave relationship. (pg 10)
BET YOU'RE PAYING ATTENTION NOW, HUH.
Just as a geographical location where a novel (or film, or television series) is set "may not be identical with the place on the map on which it is based," the characters sharing the same name as a real-world public figure do not occupy the same space as their real-world referents (Pugh 2005:231). (pg 137)
That's an absolutely fascinating idea and a perfect analogy. The Paris (for example) depicted in the The Red Balloon is an entirely different animal than the Paris found in Emily in Paris.
That the texts examined in this book were all largely produced in the late 2000s and through the 2010s is perhaps not just a means of restricting the pool of options for textual analysis. The divisions between public and private are becoming ever more increasingly liminal and questionable for both the famous and non-famous. Celebrities with reality television shows stage their "real" life for the cameras, and ordinary people share their personal stories and public performance of self reality show contestants. The widespread use of social media also gives ordinary people a platform to construct multiple potential versions of their public self to share with their followers, friends, acquaintances, and strangers alike. With these factors of the contemporary mediascape, particularly the everyday, widespread use of social media, P. David Marshall, Christopher Moore, and Kim Barbour write that the "practice of constructing a public mediated identity is now pervasive and proliferating" (2015:289). Bernie Hogan (2010) argues that there is a difference between Goffman's dramaturgical metaphor of self-performance and the way we construct public selves in social media, and that the difference is in the traces that these digital performances leave behind. (pg 152)
PUT ME DOWN FOR YIKES ON MULTIPLE LEVELS.
The expectation of customized content is also a part of contemporary media consumption that is perhaps related to the ways public figures are adapted to screen characters. Eli Pariser (2011) has articulated the concept of the "filter bubble" to describe the ways the algorithms of online platforms such as Google, Facebook, and Netflix learn our behavior and preferences through use, then use that behavior to deliver the content we wish to see at the exclusion of other subjects or points of view. The process of the filter bubble often happens without our knowledge, with these kinds of personalization filters "indoctrinating us with our own ideas, amplifying our desire for things that are familiar" (Pariser 2011:15). The way the world is reflected back to us online as we wish to see it, customizing content for our own needs, is echoed in the creation of docucharacter. RPF fan fiction is the most obvious evidence of this, as fans follow the tradition of textual poaching to remake media texts in ways that cater to their various individual or collective wants and desires. Ezekiel Kweku (2017) writes about the culture of political memes in much the same terms, referring to the characters created from parody characterizations, Twitter accounts, and memes (such as the Texts from Hillary meme, or The Onion's "Diamond Joe" Biden) as "liberal fan fiction." Kweku argues that there is a place for fun and humor in the consumption of politics, but as these are comforting idealized or comedic characterizations are recirculated among the same ideologically connect publics, the perception of reality is distorted when "as with any other metaphor... you return to it so often that you start projecting the characteristic of the metaphor back onto reality" (emphasis in original). There is not that same sense of audience power for creating a customized filter bubble in mainstream Hollywood film as there is with audience-generated content like fan fiction or memes. However, the approach to contemporary biopic that Rebecca A. Sheehan (2013) describes, the "instant biopic" that quickly serves up in modern history dramatization or takes the more distant past and frames it in ways that resonate with contemporary issues, does work to customize historical or contemporary events in ways that enable the audience to make a more personal connection with them, potentially transferring the understanding gleaned from the metaphor- the cinematic representation- onto the actual event. (pgs 155 and 156)
If you doubt the effect of this, I'll just ask you to do one thing? Name an American President from any era. What's the first thing that come to mind and why? I will bet you anything it's been inspired by a biopic, impression, meme, or the like.
Viewing metaphorical representations of the real as lies that tell a truth is a useful way to combat the literalist interpretations often used to malign fictionalized media based on true stories. A "lie that tells the truth" is frequently used as a way of referring to something that is purely fictional, but it is equally applicable to the biopic and other stories based on real people and events: those lies are based in truth, and in doing so, they can access other kinds of truths. As these stories based on real events are lies that tell a truth, so too are the characters adapted from real people. The lie is in what is invented, the truth is communicated by making the lie plausible enough to believe. What truth it tells, and whose truth it tells, can be deconstructed by considering the various factors at work throughout the analysis conducted in this book's case studies: who is producing the contents and how it is produced? What is included and what is left out? How is fact supplemented by fiction? How are producers, audiences, genre, medium, and performance offering explanations through their storytelling? RPF fan fiction may tell a truth about its writers and readers. A contemporary biopic may tell a truth about the culture of the past in relations to the present. A sketch character may tell a truth about the unspoken subtext of a public image. These truths are experienced and exposed by the ways audiences connect with characters and stories that help explain the real world in which they were first staged. Stories help explain things, and when the light shines on that silhouetted image, what we see gives us an understanding of something. Its factuality may be a fixed, objective state, but the truth we each take away from it can become something entirely new. (pgs 158 and 159)
....Goddamn, that's good. And chillingly accurate.
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