Panel: Cinematic Adaptations of Life Writing Genres
Copanelists: Olga Aksakalova and Thomas R. Smith
The biopic (biographical motion picture) is an established Hollywood genre that has flourished in recent years. A series of films about the lives of pop culture figures suggest the form is a potent commercial if not critical success. These films include James Mangold’s I Walk the Line (2005) and Taylor Hackford’s Ray (2004).
The enabling conventions of the biopic demand a naturalistic mise-en-scene to support the filmic narrative’s truth claims, which are always, despite claims to the contrary, a blend of biographical fact and various fictions invented to heighten dramatic impact and to serve the necessary constraints of narrative compression (which necessitate that a life be reduced to the short time-frame of a film). The biopic is highly formulaic, and is most often characterized by a teleological narrative trajectory, comprised of scenes that dramatise significant personal and professional turning points in the life of its subject. The biopic translates life into art; it also fixes and reifies life.
Todd Haynes’s latest exploration of the form, I’m Not There (2007), apparently eschews the conventions of the biopic by having five actors portray his subject: the iconic Bob Dylan. Amongst Haynes’s actors are a black youth (Carl Franklin) and a woman (Cate Blanchett). Anthony DeCurtis commented that Haynes’s “preposterous idea” is “the sort of self-consciously ‘audacious’—or reassuringly multi-culti—gambit that, for instance, doomed the Broadway musical based on the life and music of John Lennon. Yet in I’m Not There, the strategy works brilliantly.”
This paper argues that Haynes’s celebrated film mounts a significant artistic and philosophical challenge to the conventions and assumptions we hold about the biopic in particular, and life writing in general. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s concept of “the open,” I will argue that Haynes develops artistic strategies that avoid the objectification of the biographical subject, thereby using the cinema as a “place” for disclosing Being.
Glenn D’Cruz is Senior Lecturer in Drama and Cultural Studies at Deakin University. He is the author of Midnight’s Orphans: Anglo-Indians in Post/colonial Literature (Peter Lang, 2006), and the editor of Class Act: Melbourne Workers Theatre 1987–2007 (Vulgar Press, 2007). He publishes scholarly articles in the disciplines of Performance Studies, Cultural Studies, and Life Writing.