Real Person Fiction
Ana de Armas smiles through the pain in Blonde.
Why do some directors’ artistic interpretations feel like exploitation?
Fan fiction is fantastic. Whether you’re reading Milton (Bible fan fiction) or scrolling through the links on AO3, taking a work and remixing it is an excellent creative exercise.
Who doesn’t love Bridget Jones?
But what happens when the subject of your fan fiction is an actual human being? Called Real Person Fiction (RPF) on sites like AO3, most biopic films are a version of this exercise. They take a real figure and project a narrative upon them to make their life more interesting (and usually sexier). But when studios make biopics, they tend to pretend that fiction is the truth.
“Based on a true story” covers a lot of bases when you’re making a movie. And most moviegoers don’t connect the fact that “based on a true story” also means “not actually true”.
Should Movies Be Accurate?
When it comes to narrative filmmaking, movies are always going to print the legend instead of the fact. Did Elton John really stomp into rehab in a bedazzled devil outfit as he did in Rocketman? No, of course not, but it makes for one hell of an image.
So, at what point does dramatic license give way to outright lies? And why do those lies so often negatively affect female subjects and benefit male subjects?
2022’s Blonde doesn’t seem too interested in Marilyn Monroe’s life so much as her trauma. The movie does admit that it’s based on Joyce Carol Oates’ fan fiction novel Blonde, which invents plenty of sexy and traumatic exploits that never happened to the iconic star. But by spending the movie recreating real pictures of Monroe, Blonde seems to be asserting that the story is the actual context behind each image.
Director Andrew Dominik said that he was interested in examining the images, and the myth of Monroe. But during this examination, he’s really just offering his own myth, that Monroe was nothing but her abuse and trauma. A weeping naked figure to be leered at under the guise of empathy. One wonders if he glances past Monroe’s childhood sexual abuse because he couldn’t think of a way to incorporate star Ana de Armas topless and crying during the sequence.
The film he’s cobbled together from her most famous photographs is weirdly skewed. Dominik fetishizes the pain and humiliation of Monroe, casting out anything that doesn’t make her a victim. Gone is the Monroe who withstood incredible studio pressure and lawsuits to ensure she got a fair wage. Instead, we just have hysterical tantrums at every turn.
The Hulu mini-series Pam & Tommy takes a similar approach to their subject matter. Creator Robert Siegel pushes aside pesky facts so that he can tell a story of Pamela Anderson’s complete victimization by society. It’s not a bad take, but it is an odd one. Anderson’s miscarriage was linked to the release of her stolen sex tape. While Anderson did suffer a traumatic miscarriage, it was before the tape was released to the public. The show also bends over backward to minimize the abuse in the marriage, since it doesn’t fit with the mini-series over-arching theme that they were in love and torn apart by tabloid sensibilities.
While women are often victimized when their stories make it to the big screen, men get lionized.
Consider Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis biopic, which is more an “impression” of the singer than a factual retelling, absolving him of any agency in his own story. It’s true that Elvis was financially abused his entire life. But it’s also true that Priscilla Presley was a child when Elvis met her and began dating her. He also notoriously enjoyed orchestrating pillow fights between teen girls for his entertainment and said he couldn’t have sex with a woman who’d given birth. He also reportedly slapped Priscilla in the head when she did things that would give her wrinkles (like frowning).
But none of that fits in with the tragic handsome boy narrative Luhrmann was spinning so instead we get Elvis the tragically sexy boy with the sad eyes.
Of course, biopics will take dramatic license, and of course, they will pick and choose from a subject’s life what story to tell. But the real question here is by offering audiences such skewed narratives, what story are they telling? And would their subjects find the movies made fair?
Exploitation vs Exploration
Filmmaking is by necessity the art of abridging a story. You can’t tell a whole novel’s worth of plot in two hours. Things have to be changed, parts have to be skipped. It’s the same with biopics. The best biopics focus on one aspect of their subject. By exploring one element in depth they leave you with an impression of who this person is.
Sometimes, that works beautifully. Spike Lee’s breathless look at the life of Malcolm X offers an exploration of the man behind the powerful historic figure. Lee rewrote a script that was begun by James Baldwin and Arnold Perl in the late 1960s and pulled from the actual Autobiography of Malcolm X to craft a portrait of who the Civil Rights activist was and how he evolved.
While a frank exploration of a subject is always fascinating, a new genre has spawned, one that just wants to capture the “impression” of what happened instead of the facts. In Rocketman, the differences are fairly clear — it’s unlikely that anyone believes Elton John’s family walked around singing songs that hadn’t been written yet to themselves whenever things got dramatic.
But what happens when that line between impression and fact blurs? And how responsible are filmmakers for not further injuring their subjects? And why do women often bear the brunt of male creators’ “artistic interpretations”?
Consent is one of the big issues surrounding Pamela Anderson in the Pam & Tommy mini-series. The men on set ogle her and have meetings about where her swimsuit can sit on her ass. Talk show hosts demean her, making lude jokes about her pain. Lawyers force her to watch her stolen sex tape and read a transcript from the tape. Episode after episode features her beaten down by men who don’t care what she thinks or feels — she’s just an object to consume.
It’s the main point of the show. Poor Pam Anderson, no one ever asks her what she wants.
And evidently, when making Pam & Tommy, neither did the creators.
Anderson chose not to be involved in the making of the series. In fact, she didn’t even respond when the showrunners reached out to her. They didn’t have her consent. So what did they do? They slavishly recreated her sex tape, wrote about all the trauma she suffered, and wrapped the show up with some text about how she and ex-husband Tommy Lee were “the loves of each other’s lives”. Lee was sentenced to six months in jail for abusing Anderson, including striking her while she held their infant.
So Robert Siegel, Lily James, and Sebastian Stan are all incredibly concerned with Anderson’s mental well-being and comfort, as long as she doesn’t get in the way of their money and Emmy nominations. And while they’re at it, they’ll completely gloss over the abuse she may have been subjected to in her own home. And since they’ve so painstakingly recreated the intimate moments they say drove Anderson to a breakdown, are they not in essence stealing the sex tape and selling it all over again? Only this time the buyer is Hulu and the audience much larger.
Similarly, Blonde director Andrew Dominik doesn’t seem to be interested in Marilyn Monroe beyond her pain. The entire film for him is a technical exercise in recreating the photos. If the image he’s working with is black and white, so is the sequence. If the image is a wide shot, the scene is shot in a wide aspect ratio. On paper, it’s an interesting exercise from a filmmaker that clearly appreciates his craft.
What he doesn’t seem to appreciate is Monroe.
He claimed to be interested in images instead of reality, and he does believably craft scenarios that could have led to each famous image of Monroe he invokes. Troublingly, however, he seems to have made a nearly three-hour snuff film of Monroe’s trauma, not caring if it was true and also not particularly caring for Monroe herself.
When asked by Sight and Sound why Dominik omitted Monroe’s professional achievements he said, “That stuff is not really what the film is about. It’s about a person who is going to be killing themself.”
And that certainly is what the movie focuses on. Like Dominik, it seems detached from Monroe as a person, seeing her only as an object to be pulled around and posed, to fit in a certain frame. He decries her films in that Sight and Sound interview, throwing around words like “whore” and claiming her body of work isn’t important (except that one Billy Wilder film he liked). He’d much rather give a tragic context for every single photo ever taken of her, and shoot de Armas in paroxysms of grief and madness, because “I don’t think that matters. Why would it matter?”. In that way, Dominik is like the parade of men in Blonde who use Monroe for their own means.
Though Blonde is a work of fiction, it’s basically crafted to fool the audience at every turn. Dominik takes time to make every element as believable as possible. So when Marilyn cries piteously about the horrible things the tabloids and studios make up about her to garner publicity, are we not witnessing the same act? Is Dominik not invoking the images of a long-dead woman to encourage the audience to leer at her pain, to ogle her naked bloody body and think this was all there was to her?
Do Filmmakers Have a Responsibility to Their Subjects?
Modern history has spent decades adding context to facts. Yes, Thomas Jefferson invented the swivel chair. He also kept Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman who bore six of his children, in a windowless room on his estate. Neither fact negates the other. He is still the writer of the Declaration of Independence. History is complicated and ugly at times, but there’s been a push to look at it with clear eyes.
The same standard should be true for movies. And while any narrative film is obviously not a documentary, they certainly enjoy presenting themselves as truth (or at least based on it).
Would the subjects of the film be happy about the project?
We know how Anderson feels. Hopefully, her upcoming Netflix documentary will make her feel as though her story was properly told. As for Monroe, I’m not sure she’d be happy to be memorialized as a perpetually traumatized shell of a person, but she probably wouldn’t be surprised that she was sexually exploited by the filmmaker. But hey, Elvis would probably give Luhrmann a hunka hunka handshake for making sure his image remained sexy and relatively likable. So I suppose there’s something to be said for impressionistic filmmaking if you’re a man.
