The Postfeminist Biopic: Narrating the Lives of Plath, Kahlo, Woolf and Austen PDF
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The Postfeminist Biopic The Postfeminist Biopic Narrating the Lives of Plath, Kahlo, Woolf and Austen Bronwyn Polaschek © Bronwyn Polaschek 2013 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-27347-5 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-44525-7 ISBN 978-1-137-27348-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137273482 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. For Mum and Dad For Mark For Iris, Ned and Vivienne Contents List of Figures viii Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 1 Feminist Film Theory and Postfeminist Culture 9 2 The Biopic Genre 38 3 The Postfeminist Historical Woman in Sylvia 60 4 Frida and the Postfeminist Artist Biopic 81 5 The Hours, Feminisms and Women’s Art 104 6 Postfeminist Spectatorship in Becoming Jane 127 Conclusion: The Postfeminist Biopic 149 Notes 164 Bibliography 168 Filmography 182 Index 185 vii List of Figures All images are the author’s own screenshots 3.1 The literary establishment in Sylvia (2003) 70 3.2 Sylvia Plath (Gwyneth Paltrow) as transcendental woman in Sylvia (2003) 76 4.1 The saintly Frida Kahlo (Salma Hayek), from Frida (2002) 87 4.2 Divergent perspectives on America in Frida (2002) 102 5.1 Laura Brown’s ‘perfect’ family, from The Hours (2002) 111 5.2 Clarissa Vaughan’s shocked face, from The Hours (2002) 111 5.3 Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) as immortal in The Hours (2002) 124 6.1 Jane Austen (Anne Hathaway) escapes conventional life in Becoming Jane (2007) 137 6.2 Eliza and Jane gazing, from Becoming Jane (2007) 143 6.3 Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy) trapped, from Becoming Jane (2007) 146 viii Acknowledgements Many people helped me to complete this book. Thanks must go to my teachers, in particular Suki Ali, Peter Beatson, Rosalind Gill, Don Slater and Sadie Wearing. My postgraduate colleagues at Otago University provided friendship and practical advice, especially Pam Fossen and Ellen Pullar. A number of other university colleagues encouraged my work, including María del Azcona, Celestino Deleyto, Catherine Fowler and Barry Keith Grant. I owe special thanks to my supervisors. Hilary Radner’s steadfast con- fidence in this project and her intellectual rigour have been crucial. Annabel Cooper’s encouragement and incisive feedback helped shape the work, including its title. The book would not have been published without Felicity Plester, Catherine Mitchell, Chris Penfold and the rest of the team at Palgrave Macmillan. I am indebted to my friends and family. Alex Greig, David Lawerence, Amanda Lyons, Joy Skye, and Hamish Tocher assisted with research and technical know-how. My father, Nick Polaschek, was always available for conversations about my work and gave constructive feedback on several drafts. My mother, Linda Polaschek, provided a sympathetic ear as well as high-quality childcare. My parents-in-law, Di and Jervis Cleary, gave me time and space to work by hosting my family on many Sundays. Finally, thanks must go to my husband, Mark Cleary, whose care and support have been invaluable. The author wishes to thank Michel Houdiard for permission to repro- duce ideas and material from ‘Film Scholarship and the Artist Biopic Frida: From Suffering Martyr to the Death of the Artist’, Generic Attrac- tions: New Essays on Film Genre Criticism, edited by María del Azcona and Celestino Deleyto, 398–410. Paris: Michel Houdiard, 2010. Ideas and material from Chapter 3 appeared in ‘The Life of Lady Lazarus? An Analysis of the Film Sylvia as Historical Docu- ment’, Select Refereed Papers, edited by Hilary Radner and Pam Fossen, 182–90. Dunedin: Film and History Association of Australia and New Zealand, 2009. ix Introduction This book identifies and describes an emergent subgenre in film: the postfeminist biopic. While Conglomerate Hollywood has largely neglected female audiences, since the 1980s a collection of films have nevertheless emerged that draw upon and reconfigure classical genre forms aimed at women, including contemporary melodrama, roman- tic comedy and costume drama. The development of these reconfigured genres has been attributed to the entry into contemporary mainstream Hollywood of women directors who began their careers in independent cinema, as well as the rise of a cine-literate female audience whose con- ceptions of femininity have been inflected by the ideas of second-wave feminism. I will argue that one subgenre to emerge as part of this broader trend is the postfeminist biopic.1 Films in this category depict women in a variety of professions but mainly in creative roles (including painter, writer, singer, musician and actress). Within the Anglo-American tradi- tion they include Hilary and Jackie (Anand Tucker, 1998), Isn’t She Great (Andrew Bergman, 2000), Frida (Julie Taymor, 2002), The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002), Sylvia (Christine Jeffs, 2003), Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus (Steven Shainberg, 2006), Miss Potter (Chris Noonan, 2006), Dreamgirls (Bill Condon, 2006), Becoming Jane (Julian Jarrold, 2007), Julie and Julia (Nora Ephron, 2009), Bright Star (Jane Campion, 2009), The Young Victoria (Jean Marc-Valée, 2009), The Runaways (Floria Sigismondi, 2010) and My Week with Marilyn (Simon Curtis, 2011). In his recent book Whose Lives Are They Anyway?, Dennis Bingham argues that the genre of the female biopic can be distinguished from the male biopic: while the male biopic has developed through various iterations, the conventions of the female biopic, a genre that typically presents a ‘warts-and-all’ portrait of its woman protagonist as a suffer- ing victim on a downward trajectory, have remained largely ‘intractable’ 1 2 The Postfeminist Biopic since the classical Hollywood era (Bingham, 2010: 99). The exception to this generic rule is a handful of ‘feminist biopics’ which consciously reverse the traditional strategies of the classical form of the genre by deliberately applying a feminist point of view. He states, ‘the fact that there are so few recent examples of such [feminist] films . . . shows how difficult it is to reinvent the female biopic’ (2010: 10–11). These com- ments are echoed in much of the literature about biopics featuring women protagonists. This study questions whether such pessimism regarding the female biopic is warranted. Has the genre remained ‘intractable’ apart from a number of select exceptions, or has the female biopic been reconfigured as part of the broader return of the women’s film since the 1980s? Are the two opposing categories Bingham out- lines adequate for characterising the form/s of the contemporary female biopic? I will argue that alongside the paradigmatic female biopic and the overtly feminist biopic, an additional category has emerged, which I identify as the postfeminist biopic. The concept of postfeminism originated in mainstream media and is now used by a group of scholars to describe contemporary culture since the early 1990s. The meaning of the term is contested. Postfeminism has been variously interpreted as a backlash against feminism, a dou- ble entanglement with feminism, a sensibility, a historical shift since feminism or an epistemological break from feminism (McRobbie, 2004; Gill, 2007a: 249–71). The backlash and double entanglement the- ses have proven particularly influential in feminist analyses by Susan Faludi (1992), Imelda Whelehan (2000), Sarah Projansky (2001), Angela McRobbie (2004) and Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra (2007), among others. These arguments suggest that even if feminist concerns are acknowledged within popular culture texts, postfeminism is foremost an insidious ‘reaction formation’ to feminism, which undermines the gains of the feminist movement by rendering it a ‘spent force’ (Projansky, 2001: 127; McRobbie, 2004: 255). The chapters that follow will explore these various perspectives on contemporary culture as postfeminist. Through the close read- ing of four postfeminist biopics, I will show that while the back- lash and double entanglement theses explain some dimensions of the postfeminist biopic, other dimensions are better understood in terms of a position that sees postfeminism as an epistemological shift. In other words, the postfeminism manifested in the postfeminist biopic ‘expresses the intersection of feminism with postmodernism, post- structuralism and post-colonialism’ and is therefore capable of chal- lenging modernist and patriarchal theoretical frameworks, as well as
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