Biopics: a new film genre?

During spring break in 1996, Dennis Bingham, associate professor of English and director of film studies at IU-Purdue University Indianapolis, researched the biographical film “I Want to Live.”

The movie told the story of a woman who was executed in California in 1955 and took the point of view that she was innocent, Bingham said.

“That was the beginning of my research on biopics,” he said. “They’ve always interested me, and I was also fascinated by the idea that the genre is so looked down upon.”

Bingham’s second book, “Whose Lives Are They Anyway?,” argues that biopics — or biographical films — should be classified as a genre. While there is not a particular look about biopics, as in western or science fiction films, Bingham said they have gone through changes like other genres.

“There’s a certain kind of film I call ‘appropriation,’” he said. “It takes a celebratory film and tells the story of a counterculture person who never would have been celebrated in the old days.”

Bingham also writes about gender roles in biopics. Beginning as a gender critic, Bingham said it seemed logical to look at the genre in terms of gender. He said he found that, starting in the 1930s and 1940s, many biopics were “great man” films that celebrated the lives of well-known men, such as Thomas Edison and Abraham Lincoln.

“Culture was not comfortable with women in public roles,” he said. “What you get especially starting in the ’50s is just about the downward trajectory; the woman who gets in with the wrong man.”

Until recently, Bingham said critics have not seen the biopic as a genre, and when it is considered a genre, the word is used in the negative sense.

“It’s fascinating to look at promotion material and find the number of directors that deny that they’ve made a biopic, even though they have,” he said. “You’ve got a genre that’s so vibrant on one hand and yet so trashed on the other.”

Because there was a run of biopics in 2009 that were flops in the box office for the most part, Bingham said critics saw the whole genre as “kaput.” Rather than trash the movies, he said, why not put a different set of criteria to them?

“You won’t find a biopic that doesn’t have invention,” Bingham said. “If the film tells you a truth of the subject’s life, it probably has some worth to it.”

However, many older biopics gave the idea that there was only one way of looking at a person’s life, Bingham said. Depending on who made the film, viewers were offered different perspectives that may or may not have been historically correct, he said.

“Maybe there’s no way to understand a person’s life,” Bingham said. “In good biopics, this is what we think we understand about this person, but the truth might still be out there.”

Freshman Kandace Greene said she agrees with Bingham that biopics should be their own genre.

“They all have similar characteristics,” she said. “In all genres, they share characteristics of that genre.”

Graduate student Yesim Kaptan, however, said she has her doubts. Biopics are a combination of fact and fiction. While they are similar to documentaries, she said, movies claim more fiction than fact.

“Maybe it’s a different category,” she said. “They’re not totally based on imagination. But the question, even in documentaries, is what is the percentage of how real it is?”