By H. F. Chacon Jr.
I rarely pay attention to the previews that theaters play for some 20-odd minutes after the ticketed “starting time” for a movie. Still, I can’t help but realize a commonality between seemingly every upcoming movie: Hollywood has been on a musicians’ biopic crusade. According to a quick Google search, musician and band biopics that are being made now and in the near future will cover Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Amy Winehouse, Michael Jackson, The Grateful Dead, Bee Gees, Fred Astaire, and so many others.
Hollywood is not new to making biopics. It’s not even new to retelling them. Take a random person from history like, I dunno, General Armstrong Custer, the American Cavalry Commander during the Civil War. Custer has been depicted in 30 Hollywood productions since 1912, the most recent being in 2015. Though some of these could hardly be called biographical in nature, most commercially market themselves as such. For this reason, it is important to note the semantic nature of the term “biopic.” The Biographical Motion Picture is a marriage between informing an audience about the existence and significance of an individual, event, or group, and portraying a story in an art form which seeks to entertain and dramatize. These two things are, a majority of the time, inherently immiscible.
In order to dramatize historical events, one will eventually have to take creative liberties when depicting said events. Considering that most modern American adults don’t watch anything longer than a TikTok, historical literacy is — and has been — a diminishing quality with every additional generation. This means, by and large, that these motion pictures will just have to be the gospel of history going forward, which only spreads an even more misrepresented account of history when you consider the changes directors liberally make.
Historical accuracy is hardly the only issue with biopics. The act of overlooking the complexity of a person’s tumultuous life and thinning it down to a two-and-a-half-hour runtime might lead to either a half-baked portrayal of a story or a confusing-to-the-uninitiated pile of pulp, failing to complete the biopic’s entire purpose.
Regardless of whether the audience knows the truth about the historical events being falsely depicted, they are losing. If they do know the truth, they either feel mocked by the creators’ attempt to pass off their depiction as fact or have their suspension of disbelief ruined by the event. And if the audience does not know, they’ve just been bamboozled into believing someone else’s fabricated retelling. This is why biopics cannot, at times, serve their own purpose. That purpose is unfortunately not a constant throughout the genre of films. The term “biopic” is deceiving, considering that it is completely up to the creator to decide how much truth to sprinkle into their tale no matter what should be considered a “biographical” work.
At the end of the day, it is up to the audience to be cautious of their own gullibility when it comes to biopics. If a filmmaker is really on a mission to educate people on a certain topic or person, the best they can do is a documentary. Though not as buzz-worthy as a feature film, the lack of constraints, such as time or needing to be entertaining, allows for a more honest depiction of true events.
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