And so I have returned to my awkwardly placed and uncomfortable keyboard with an aching spine and thorny disposition to rail and harangue at popular culture once more. Since I've already had a go at militaristic and jingoistic propaganda designed to make young Americans believe in the moral rectitude and patriotic value of running off to a foreign country and being an imperialist aggressor, maybe I'll have a run at the aesthetic failures of other attempts at cinematic enterprises. Next up in my metaphorical crosshairs are a numerically significant category of films - biographies.
BioPics
I'm fairly certain that it was not my conscious decision, but a pack of recent dramatic productions have seemed to be biographies of 20th century individuals. And they all seem to suffer from a similar malady of mediocrity. I'll drop a few examples:- "Battle of the Sexes" - Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs
- "Rebel in the Rye" - J.D. Salinger
- "Goodbye, Christopher Robin" - A.A. Milne
- "Darkest Hour" - Winston Churchill
There were a pack of others that I've viewed recently that are similarly flawed, but history has already condemned them to the rubbish bin, so I don't need to savage them any further.
The problem here is that I can see how these films were conceived, produced, and created, and I can see the artistic compromises made. What this means is that actual historical fact takes a back seat to someone's directorial conception of a narrative.
Quick aside here - I haven't yet seen the film "The Post" starring Odenkirk, Hanks, and Streep. Listening to Tom Hanks describe the film in an interview with Graham Norton, he gives the impression that this particular production may have had enough clout and money to shrug aside the usual studio marketing considerations and done some things purely for artistic or factual purposes.
So, pushing "The Post" aside until such time as I can properly evaluate it, this recent host of biographical dramas appear to be running off the same assembly line. Sure, they have different feels, different casts, tone, setting, incidental music, editing, etc. But what they all share is inauthenticity. If the point of a biographical film is to bring the audience to a closer and greater understanding and rapport with the subject, then a lot of people are following the wrong playbook.
Here is what I sense: some scriptwriting/creative story people get a hold of some biographical material, but not autobiographical material. Then, they get some production people interested.
"Oh. That guy who wrote Winnie the Pooh. People know him. We can get some funding and insurance for something about him."
Then they get the actual film people involved with sets, locations, cameras, costumes, music, and the rest of it. The director gets the script and storyboards the shots.
This is where Salinger, Milne, King, Churchill, etc. get left behind. The information of their lives is boiled and distilled into little discrete granules. Episodes, vignettes, anecdotes, and scenes are all crunched into things that are dramatically and cinematographically interesting. Then they are shot and stitched together and presented as a story. Remember that I said that the source material is distinctly non-autbiographical.
So what you get is a pastiche. A montage of snippets of conversation and tableaux of images. Here is the one time that Billie Jean got very abrupt and snippy with a reporter. Here she is being apologetic to some hotel staff member who recalls her being very kind. Here she is being very aggressive and forthright, as one of her colleagues depicts her as being at the time.
These individual and disconnected soundbites and snapshots make for some interesting mise-en-scènes in terms of directorial decisions, but they are unhelpful to an audience seeking to understand the nature of the character they are observing.
It's sad, really. "Goodbye, Christopher Robin" appears to want to press home the point that Winnie the Pooh destroyed C.R. Milne's childhood, life, happiness, etc. If that is the objective of the narrative, it doesn't quite succeed because it doesn't give enough evidence. There are a few scenes where A.A. Milne's son is given the lines to say that Winnie the Pooh has destroyed his life, blah, blah, blah, but the choppily edited excerpts of that life are so discombobulated that one can't attribute the character's misery to any specific one of a myriad likely sources. His mother resents him, his father has PTSD, his nanny is Scottish, the family doesn't live in the West End... all sources of heartbreaking anguish and sorrow and all blamed on a fictitious bear. It sounds nice as a pitch to a production company (fuzzy, lovable bear harms inspirational child), but when you have to cherry pick from very sparse source material, you end up with a makeshift narrative that doesn't have enough fabric to cover the entirely of the matter.
Showering Serenades
- Blue Light, by David Gilmour
- Straight to Hell, by The Clash
- I Want to Be Your Man, by The Beatles
- In the Evening, by Led Zeppelin
- Big Shot, by The English Beat
- Dr. Evil Edit, by The Alan Parsons Project
- The Rain Song, by Led Zeppelin
The most interesting thing to note in this instance is not just that Led Zeppelin had two tracks appear - a statistically unlikely occurrence - but that every single artist or group listed is English. Not Scottish, Welsh, or Northern Irish, but English. The English Beat is even explicitly named. What does this mean?
Granted, some of my Liverpudlian mates may argue that the Republic of Merseyside is an unofficial political entity, considering the way we were treated during the Thatcherite years of repression and poverty, but according to the geopolitical landscape as reckoned by the international community and the United Nations as a body, we are dealing with England as a subunit of the United Kingdom.
Does this forebode some sort of international development relating to dear old Blighty? One can only hope that there will be some sort of Brexit reversal, transportation nationalization policy, overwhelming Tory defeat, Jeremy Corbyn election triumph, and NHS revitalization. They would all be wonderful outcomes, but any single one will suffice to assuage my sense of existential political angst.
And so until next time, goodnight England, and the Colonies.
—mARKUS
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