"Based on a true story."
I take these words as a warning,
that a life in all its complexity, contradiction, and paradox
is about to be rendered down into a trite, Hollywood stroke-job;
to please as many people as possible
with absurdly simplistic life lessons and bogus uplift
cynically calculated and implemented.
Especially when it comes to the biopic-short for biographical picture-which usually presumes to tell the life story of some famous and noteworthy person from history.
How do you make a human life fit within the artificial confines of the dogma of three-act structure?
The film I've seen that did this thing best was Shohei Imamura's The Insect Woman, and that was a totally fictional film that felt like an authentic biopic. Right at the two-hour mark, it managed to make you feel as though you've experienced decades of a woman's life in Japan from the end of World War II through to the early 1960s. I have no idea how Imamura did it. I tried to figure it out years ago, and all I could do was profess my admiration for it, note its unusual qualities, and move on with my life.
The Elephant Man is one of two movies David Lynch has directed-so far-"based on a true story"-with the other one being The Straight Story, and I would place them in second and third place behind The Insect Woman as far as conventional biopics are concerned . . . even though The Insect Woman isn't even a biopic, technically speaking. Sometimes good cinema screws up the usual categories of things. And if you don't like that, or you don't agree, well, um, it's my blog, I determine the reality 'round here, bub!
