BASTARDIZED BIOPICS
Creative liberties or downright offensive??
Questioning the accuracy of any biographical film has been around since their inception. Impersonations will never be the real thing. Life itself isn’t always a perfect 3-act structure, and moviemaking is in the business of entertaining and selling.
There are biopics that are able to achieve the grand feat of depicting real events while also stretching some information to achieve a cinematic payoff. My personal favorite, Stanford Prison Experiment (2015), regarded as both highly accurate and an entertaining watch, still manages to achieve about 90% of the truth, according to the creator of the real life experiment himself. The Social Network (2012) was just a great watch regardless of historical accuracy, thanks to Aaron Sorkin’s writing and Mark Zuckerberg being an IRL freakbot.
But let’s not mince words here: It’s an epidemic, and it’s getting tiring. 43 biopics were released in 2023 alone. Oppenheimer, expertly partnered with Barbie to amass one of the biggest marketing campaigns of the 2000s. The results are in: biopics are profitable, seat-fillers. Even if you know it’ll suck, you’ll still go, because…. I don’t know, you liked that one Elton John song.
Every single time, there’s backlash, and every single time, it doesn’t matter. Some of them are just unremarkable. Who cares. What we love is some deranged shit.
From offensive to incendiary to just downright confusing, I am here to rank biopics released within the last 15 years that beg the question, now why in the hell would they make this?
5. Most Annoying: DUMB MONEY
We don’t need to relive this. Even for Paul Dano.
"I like the stock!" If you weren’t on the internet for like 5 days in January 2021, you probably don’t know or care about the events that inspired director Craig Gillespie’s 2023 biopic, “Dumb Money”. I don’t know much about stocks, so I’m going to be brief with my description: a simple working class underdog from Reddit caused a Gamestop “short squeeze” and thus screwed over a bunch of Wolf-On-Wall-Street investment CEOs. A real Robin Hood tale (no pun intended). Awesome, right? Epic bacon moment?
This one ranks high purely for its annoyingness: annoying turnaround time, tone, characters, references, fanbase, I could go on. Think about what a Reddit movie would feel like. That would be this movie. I mean, it’s about stock market anomalies but also 2021 TikTok culture and dank memes. And that’s just rough to see on an IMAX screen. It’s hard to digest the the triumph of the film’s David-and-Goliath tale when the Goliath wasn’t really that wounded. The investors are still rich and getting richer and I’m getting more annoyed writing this. It’s probably a true-to-life film, but I don’t care enough to check.
Dumb Money just leaves a skidmark of internet cringe behind.
4. MOST RANDOMLY PRo-LIFE: BLONDE (2022)
Not enough misogyny for you? Let’s zoom into Marilyn Monroe’s birth canal.
"You won't hurt me this time, will you?"The controversy for this film is truly begins at its core with its diabolical director Andrew Dominik, who promised, from its development, that the film will “offend everybody”. Great start to his comically villainous press run.
And offend it did. Let me get to the point: This film is torture porn, straight up. Dominik takes a tragic public figure and decides hmm yes, I’ll evoke some more tragedy upon her for entertainment. There’s long and graphic sexual violence, inaccurate anti-abortion propaganda, and complete erasure of Monroe’s accomplishments and female friendships.
The most controversial scene is definitely the abortion one (TW: TALKING FETUS!! TF?!) but Monroe didn’t even have an abortion (at least by public knowledge). She did have various miscarriages, which many historians have speculated were caused by endometriosis. Genuinely tragic.
Can we leave this woman alone now?
3. MOST ASsASSINATED CHARACTER: BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY (2018)
Mama, they’ve killed a man.
Firstly, the most offensive part of Bohemian Rhapsody was winning Best Film Editing.
Second, a time ago when I first thought about biopics and their inevitable inaccuracies, Bohemian Rhapsody came out a month later. Something about it was so corporate, something real-life Freddie would likely despise…
I couldn’t get it out of my head. Yes, the minor changes were weird but harmless. Anyone could easily look them up. A Night at the Opera was Queen's fourth album, not their second. Freddie didn’t know he had AIDS until after their Life Aid performance. So what, it’s a movie.
The biggest change that stuck out to me was Freddie breaking up the band.
What’s up with making Freddie the villain? There’s this final story line that drama queen Freddie decides to go solo, ‘cause money and fame and gay, which pisses everyone off and breaks up the band. But in reality, all members decided pursue solo music at one point and were never estranged, just burnt out from constantly touring.
Freddie wasn’t alive to monitor his story. His bandmates, though…
Look, screenwriter Anthony McCarten pumps out big-budget biopics like candy (The Theory of Everything, The Darkest Hour, The Two Popes). He’s not a Freddy Mercury historian. He likely doesn’t actually have a vendetta against him either. He’s selling entertainment.
But that’s just the paradox of it all- when you try to make a shiny blockbuster out of an uninhibited figure like Freddie, it just falls flat on its face. Its bush-mustached, prosthetic-toothed face.
2. MOST SHAMELESS: THE GREATEST SHOWMAN (2017)
"Hey! You looking for freaks?"So…Y’all know who Joice Heth is?
Yes, I’m starting strong here. Joice Heth was the blind and paralyzed slave woman the real life P.T. Barnum purchased and forced to work up to 10 hours a day, marketed as “George Washington’s 161-year-old mammy”. When she died, Barnum allowed spectators to view her autopsy live for 50 cents a pop.
The real life P.T. Barnum suuuuuucked. He sucked so bad.
Hold on, stop booing, I get it. Before you send your musical theatre goons after me, I understand that it’s a fun movie (Workers abuse aside). The film takes the real guy, says fuck it, and turns it into a story of self-discovery and compassion. Weirdness is embraced and rejoiced, being in a circus is fun, screw the haters! Barnum is a hero who loved his crew.
Let’s face it, Barnum loved to trick and make a buck.
Something about this film is so sinister to me. Glamorizing the ambition of this awful slave-owning salesman who exploited his disabled workers and abused animals for entertainment feels weird. I don’t want to be the audience watching the circus again.
There are plenty of ways to showcase a story of self-acceptance. There are plenty of ways to playfully represent disformities and disabilities. The Greatest Showman title is proof enough it’s not about the “freaks” (which btw, gorgeous and flexible Zendaya is a freak.. how? BY BEING BLACK?!) but P.T Barnum, who PTBarnums up every scene. There is so much emphasis on our lead and his awesomeness and its love life, that it diminishes the minorities were supposedly meant to empathize with.
I wish this movie could be P.T. Banished from my brain.
1. MOST CONFUSINGLY SEXUAL… MONSTERS: LYLE AND ERIK MENENDEZ
Once it’s been Murphy’d, it can’t be un-Murphy’d.
“How many shrimp do you have?”Ok, so Erik and Lyle Menendez. This is a story I actually have some knowledge on and can properly dive into.
This crime isn’t a whodunnit: Wealthly brothers Erik and Lyle killed their parents in 1990, were found guilty, and are currently serving life sentences for it. There’s no question about who did it. It’s the why.
Erik and Lyle stand by their reason: they were sexually molested by their father from the age of 6 onwards and were terrified. Abuse so horrific it’s hard to wrap your head around. It’s awful and completely crucial to the case. The prosecution argued twice, however, that they are lying, and killed their parents for money. So, why’d they really do it?
Ryan Murphy answers the why in the only way he knows how: sensationalize, dramatize, and sexualize. Call Deadline! Yes, Murphy, he’s the outrage machine, near next to Sam Levinson. One thing I can say he is exceptional at is creating noise.
One thing he’s definitely not good at is sensitivity.
Ryan Murphy can get a little carried away tonally, and yes, I’m totally feeding the bait right now by writing this. We saw this with the first season. We saw this in American Horror Story- Let’s not forget that Tate is a Columbine-inspired school shooter turned love interest story. But, fine, Monsters did completely hook me- I watched every episode. The actors were incredible. Periodically it would hit me: this is a real case.
The most particularly fucked up aspect of Murphy’s biopic series was oversexualizing Erik and Lyle.
People are not responding well to the little hints of incest Murphy peppered in (insane sentence) throughout the series.
There has been no actual allegations or evidence of a long-term incestuous relationship between Erik and Lyle Menendez. Yes, Lyle admitted to repeating his father’s actions onto Erik. I truly honestly have a hard time seeing that as a sexual relationship— I see brutally abused children who were never taught healthy, normal boundaries between family members.
Murphy was explicitly depicting fucked up boundaries between the brothers— but like, why? Why show Nicholas Chavez’s shiny toned ass getting out of the shower? Why sexualize two men were sexually traumatized since they were in 1st grade?
But the audience should understand that a sibling dynamic like this should be treated as deeper and darker than a homoerotic relationship and the news cycle is just repeating itself. It’s a story of how the millions of people treated publicized male sexual abuse survivors.
There were some random embellishments as most biopics do, but Murphy’s were wild off the bat: Lyle’s a coked up douche, Judalon’s a hysterical drama queen, Eric’s gay or bi deep down and enjoyed regularly being blown in prison(?).
I am someone with no life who watched all the court footage, and Erik clearly stated he wasn’t gay regardless of what sexual acts he performed or were performed on him. If it’s meant to reflect audience perception at the time of their trial, rumours flying left and right, I don’t know— I don’t see that as impressive or thought-provoking. Just repetitive.
It may seem like I’m ride-or-dying Erik and Lyle, but that’s not even it. I mean, they murdered their parents. I guess I’m thinking of countless other male survivors suffering from this kind of scrutiny. Being gay, being on drugs, lying for revenge, whatever, these are countless ways to discount male SA victims. It is deplorable but so, so sickeningly common. And I don’t know if Murphy really counters that in this series.
Here’s to hoping this is the last season of Monsters. Ryan does his best taking inspiration from real life, not trying to replace it.
CLOSING: BEING OWED THE STORY AS A VIEWER
Every film is a forced perspective. It will be cast, dressed, shot and edited with this in mind. And this is fun! I love film, I wouldn’t have wasted 4 years of my life studying it if it wasn’t.
I merely beg two things.
To Hollywood: please find some more original IP to pump money into.
To audiences: please use media literacy.
Consider the impact of lightly discussing Erik and Lyle’s story at the Thanksgiving table. Consider the impact of audiences as a collective society misremembering Freddie Mercury as a flamboyant Yoko Ono and PT Barnum as an awesome dude. Consider the families of victims on screen, like with the Monster: Jeffrey Dahmer series. Consider private lives vs. public personas.
Biopics fill in the gaps that don’t need to be filled, in my opinion. All these people were actual human beings, like you and me, and should be treated as such. Call me a snowflake.
Am I saying no more biopics? No more films based on true events? No!
It’s just a movie after all. Shall we treat it as fact or fiction?
