I realize I linked to it on Friday morning, but I want to go back to my post on Howl for a minute. I wrote a deeply cranky post last fall about why I was sick of the Oscar-searching mentality that seems to motivate so many biopics. I still basically feel that way, there is no upcoming biopic that I am particularly excited about seeing. But as a critical problem, I remain interested in the question of who gets to be the subject of a big-studio biopic.
The historical figures who are portrayed in biopics scheduled to be released this year include Alfred Hitchcock, Lili Elbe, Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame, William Gaines, Abraham Lincoln, Colonel Percy Fawcett, Susan Boyle, Ann Lister, Joan Jett, Cherie Currie, Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Twain, Mary Baker Eddy, Robert Ripley, Marvin Gaye, and Ian Dury. That list is, to say the least, eclectic. Someone like Lili Elbe isn't internationally and universally famous, but she's got resonance for people who are trying to understand what it means to be transgendered, or what it means to love someone transgendered. Colonel Percy Fawcett, similarly, is historically interesting but not universally famous, but he's going to be the subject of a biopic because a book based on his life, The Lost City of Z, was well-reviewed and commercially successful, and because people like adventure stories. Abraham Lincoln unquestionably is famous enough, and his story dramatic enough, to be the subject of a major biopic, which of course raises the question of why it hasn't been done in the biopic-crazed recent past.
In other words, biopics are just as random as anything else. They come to pass based on other waves in popular culture, based on the personal interest of individual writers and directors, and the interest and resemblance of individual actors to individual historical figures. But none of this has anything to do with the extent to which individual lives make good narratives and good movies.