Chapter 2: Narrative

Essay: The Biopic and the Historical Drama

Any story, even a life story, can be told in many different ways. The best biopics—that is, biographical pictures—and the best historical dramas balance fact, history, and reality with fiction, story, and art. Partly because of time limitations, even the best biopic cannot duplicate the detail and scope of a good written biography. What it lacks in intellectual content, however, a biopic can make up for with visual spectacle and through its ability to convey the looks and sounds of figures, periods, and events.

Frida (2002)

The artist Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) led such a remarkably cosmopolitan life that the high points seem right out of a Hollywood screenplay. Born into a well-to-do family in Mexico City, Kahlo grew up at a time of exciting political and cultural change in Mexico. She was, for example, one of the first women to attend the prestigious National Preparatory School. But Kahlo also suffered hardship; as a child she contracted polio, and at eighteen she barely survived a horrendous bus accident. During her long convalescence, she began painting. Aided by a mirror that hung from the canopy of her bed, she painted a number of self-portraits. What started as a schoolgirl crush on the famous muralist Diego Rivera eventually led to marriage. Rivera and Kahlo shared an intense interest in Marxist politics and a love of painting; both indulged in affairs, however, and Kahlo's lovers included Communist-in-exile Leon Trotsky and American-in-Paris Josephine Baker. In her paintings, Kahlo combined elements of Mexican folk art, the surreal, and her own surroundings and sufferings. In 1954, Kahlo enjoyed a triumphant one-woman show in Mexico City, endured the amputation of a leg, and died in her sleep. Her final diary entry reads: "I hope the end is joyful-and I hope never to come back."

The real Kahlo on the left and Salma Hayek as Kahlo on the right		Salma Hayek now adorning the cover of the famous Hayden Herrera biography, the basis for Julie Taymor's film

Frida Kahlo's real celebrity came posthumously, when she was adopted by feminists who saw in her life story the elements of an iconic hero: a Leftist Mexican woman (with a German Jewish father) who became a celebrated artist despite crippling illnesses. Feminists also admired Kahlo's unbridled embrace of her bisexuality and her fierce response to Rivera's affairs. In the years after Kahlo's death, many directors and actors expressed interest in creating a movie version of her dramatic life. For example, in the early 1990s Luis Valdez, who had directed La Bamba (1987) and Zoot Suit (1981), hoped to film a script about Kahlo by his wife, Lupe Valdez; but when a non-Latina actress was cast for the film, Latina actresses protested and the production was shelved (Reynolds). Later, Francis Ford Coppola planned to produce a Kahlo biopic starring Madonna. Partly because of strong sentiments that a Mexican or Latina actress should play Kahlo, the Hollywood version of her life that finally came to fruition starred Mexican Lebanese actress Salma Hayek.

Julie Taymor's Frida embraces the magical realism of Frida Kahlo's work, using the artist's colorful and surreal paintings as templates for its mise-en-scène. Known for her original and bold imagery in the stage version of The Lion King (1998) and the motion picture Titus (1999)—a postmodern adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus—Taymor approaches Kahlo's life story more with the eye of a stylist than with the pen of a historian. In many scenes, Taymor transforms events of Kahlo's life into paintings, moving collages, theatrical celebrations.

The young Kahlo's terrible bus accident is presented through nearly operatic spectacle, as her body is dusted with gold meant to adorn a church ceiling:

For this nightmarish post-accident, post-surgery scene, director Julie Taymor employed the famous animators the Quay Brothers, who depicted Kahlo's surgical team as Mexican Day of the Dead puppets:

The film brings to life one of Kahlo's famous portraits of herself and Diego Rivera:

This homage to a well-known scene from Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack's King Kong (1933) conveys the time period, depicts Kahlo's active imagination, and plays with Kahlo and Diego Rivera's stormy relationship:

The Frida DVD includes an interview with Julie Taymor that reveals the director's unique approach to Frida Kahlo's life story. In the excerpts below, Taymor alludes to the challenges of creating a film biography that both accurately represents the subject's life and succeeds as a work of dramatic art.

Director Julie Taymor on treating the Frida Kahlo story as a love story

I was really moved by the story. I had a lot of very superficial ideas about Frida Kahlo; probably like most people, from the 1980s, when she was this feminist icon of suffering and arrows and all of the paintings, and pretty horrifying paintings—striking, but also disturbing. But I didn't know enough about her life and when I read this screenplay I was really taken with the humor, the bawdiness, the joie de vivre, that made her transcend the dark part of her physical life, and then this incredible love story. And I will say that it was the love story that really touched me. Two artists who truly supported each other and tortured each other in a way that they still would be together at the end of those thirty years. What is all that about?

Director Julie Taymor on using Kahlo's paintings as the autobiographical hook for her biopic

I really wasn't that keen to do an artist movie, but what is different about Frida, and what gave me the hook into it was that her paintings are autobiographical. So that first question of why, what is on that canvas, why is it there—you know why if you read her story, if you follow her biography, for the most part. You understand why mostly they're self-portraits. A woman who spent fifty percent of her life looking at a mirror hanging on the canopy of her bed. And then I knew that if I could tell this story from a subjective point of view—because what you get in a biopic is an objective point of view: this event, that event, this event, that event. And it's very interesting; it's a life worth telling. But then I want to tell the life from Frida's point of view.

Director Julie Taymor defends her film against the charge that it underplayed Frida Kahlo's feminist aspects

Yes, I definitely thought about all of it. The thing is that if you, you've got a couple of things going here. You've got thirty years in two hours. So you already have to decide what your point of view is. And as I said a little earlier, I really did love the love story. And I think that's accurate to Frida. I think partly what you're saying is that you take whatever you want to take from Frida Kahlo's story, from whatever books you read or whatever stories, but there is no truth. Because the one thing about biography: nobody was in the bedroom; nobody was there. What I have are her diaries. You read her diaries: Diego, Diego, Diego. That is her feminism. What I actually loved about this screenplay, seriously, was here was . . . this feminist icon that Frida was in the 1980s played much more of the, um, abused female who stood up, but still had to go through this womanizing bastard of a husband, a monster. Frida adored her husband Diego, as monstrous as he was with his infidelity—they really loved and supported each other as artists, and she wanted to be with him. Those are true stories.

Patton (1970)

The film . . . omits much, dispensing with incidents irrelevant to its implicit theme of disgrace followed by redemption. . . . For instance, when Patton felt sexually lonely in England and France, his niece Jean Gordon was available nearby as a Red Cross doughnut girl. She and the general had long been intimate, to the outrage and fury of his wife. The film makes no allusion to this interesting matter. Nor does it include reference to the mad, private, gravely ill-advised tank raid Patton undertook in March 1945 to rescue his son-in-law from a German prisoner-of-war camp deep in enemy territory. The raid was a disaster, killing and wounding many Americans. The son-in-law was seriously wounded, though not freed. . . . The result of these omissions is a simplification that supports the always popular folk theme of the redemption of the bad boy. Paul Fussell, Past Imperfect, 244

Franklin J. Schaffner's epic biopic Patton successfully depicts the life of already-larger-than-life General George S. Patton (George C. Scott), focusing particularly on Patton's actions during World War II. As Paul Fussell notes above, real-life events were omitted from the film, perhaps because they would not easily have fit into the "redemption of the bad boy" theme; whatever the reasons behind their exclusion from Patton, these absent episodes shed light on the constraints of cinematic narrative, which demands a unique kind of dramatic cohesion and focus. A film biography must come together as a work of art, as a narrative, and as a thematic unity. Generally, in a biopic storytelling takes precedence over the comprehensive communication of historical facts. As the controversies surrounding, for example, Oliver Stone's JFK (1991) and Nixon (1995) suggest, we should not expect any biopic to be entirely historically accurate and unbiased. Part of our task as viewers is to judge the relative importance of the inaccuracies and biases we detect, to weigh them against the movie's aesthetic aims and its fidelity to the spirit, if not the substance, of the life.

Patton's opening scene provides an excellent example of how films treat the complexities of history. Poised for the invasion of Europe, General Patton rallied his troops with a speech that employed foul language, vivid description of combat gore, and unabashed enthusiasm for killing the enemy. Because only conflicting transcriptions of the speech exist, and because Patton's family resisted issuing public versions of the uncensored speech after the war, disagreement exists about the exact words Patton spoke. And yet we know that—ironically, and perhaps due to ratings concerns—the 1970 film version of the speech uses less colorful language than the general actually used.

From the film:

An army is a team. It lives, eats, sleeps, fights as a team. This individuality stuff is a bunch of crap. The bilious bastards who wrote that stuff about individuality for the Saturday Evening Post don't know anything more about real battle than they do about fornicating.

From a historical transcription:

An Army is a team. It lives, sleeps, eats, and fights as a team. This individual heroic stuff is pure horse shit. The bilious bastards who write that kind of stuff for the Saturday Evening Post don't know any more about real fighting under fire than they know about fucking!

Fully employing the film's widescreen format and the visual power of cinema, Patton's opening scene creates a bold iconic image of the general in front of a massive American flag.

We do not see or hear the large numbers of soldiers who attend Patton's speech. Indeed, the microphone, honor guard, military band, and dozens of other high brass that share the stage are missing. In this opening scene, the film presents an intensely focused visual treatment of one man and his passionate philosophy of war—a dramatization that exists outside the particularities of time, history, and fact.

Paul Fussell notes the further anachronism that the decorations Patton wears in this scene are those he wore after the war was over, by that time a four-star general extravagantly decorated by numerous allies—when Patton gave his famous address, he was still just a lieutenant-general.

In this opening scene, the film presents an intensely focused visual treatment of one man and his passionate philosophy of war—a dramatization that exists outside the particularities of time, history, and fact.

Another interesting blend of history and cinema occurs when Patton restages army documentary footage of Patton's landing in Sicily. This film-within-a-film mimics actual army newsreel footage in the narrative context of German intelligence reviewing captured film. By placing actor George C. Scott within a film style we automatically associate with the visual historical record, this Hollywood production further enhances our sense of it as a primary historical document.

The Alamo (1960)

For ten years, John Wayne sought to film the story of the 1836 defense of the Alamo.

By persistently exploring independent funding, Wayne successfully produced, directed, and starred in The Alamo in 1960.

Like many events in American history, the story of the Alamo contains legendary and mythic elements that improve on the truth. Filmed in Texas and featuring a fairly accurate re-creation of the Alamo mission, Wayne's film focuses on some of the most mythic elements of the Alamo story. For example, the film's depictions of its three legendary figures, William Travis (Laurence Harvey), Davy Crockett (Wayne), and Jim Bowie (Richard Widmark), are largely inaccurate. In Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, historian Marshall De Bruhl describes the film's portrayal of Travis, Crockett, and Bowie this way:

As depicted in the film:

The final Mexican attack begins with a spectacular artillery barrage.

Excessive artillery

Early in the battle, Bowie is wounded and put to bed in the chapel, but he defends himself heroically and dies fighting.

Bowie fights from bed

Travis is equally brave: He dies at the gate, defending himself with only his sword.

Travis dies late in assault

Crockett, carrying a flaming torch, retreats to the powder magazine. At the door, he is impaled by a Mexican lancer, but he frees himself, staggers into the powder room, and blows up the place.

Crockett dies in battle

The best historical record:

This is nearly all wrong. If Santa Anna has as much artillery as this film suggests, the Alamo would have been reduced to rubble in a matter of minutes. Bowie was not confined to his bed by a wound; rather he had spent the entire siege there, suffering from typhoid. Travis died early in the assault, falling backward from the wall with a bullet through the head. And Crockett, according to Mexican accounts, surrendered. Gen. Manuel Castrillón interceded with Santa Anna to save Crockett's life, but Santa Anna, who vowed to spare no prisoners, summarily executed Crockett and the other survivors. (119)

Given the biopic's general tendency to glorify myths and legends, it seems ironic that Wayne's film does not include the famous legend in which Travis draws a line in the sand with his sword and asks those who wish to stay and defend (and die) with the Alamo to step over it.

Travis foregoes line in sand

Screenwriter James Edward Grant refused to give credence to that piece of the legend and staged the scene without the line in the sand. Especially since in the cultural imagination John Wayne is a gung-ho, jingoistic patriot, one of the strangest aspects of The Alamo is the fabricated presentation of General Santa Anna as a gallant commander who allows the Alamo's noncombatants to leave the fort before the battle.

Women and children leave

In fact, Santa Anna is widely regarded as a tyrant who ordered the massacre and executions of captured Texans during the war. A careful viewing of The Alamo, however, reveals that one of the film's dominant themes is the honor and gallantry that can exist among fighting men. Many historical details that conflict with this notion of honor were apparently brushed aside.

Glory (1989)

Edward Zwick's Glory recounts the story of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the first African American Civil War fighting regiment in the North: the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Noted contributor to Past Imperfect: History According the Movies historian James M. McPherson considers Glory "one of the most powerful and historically accurate movies ever made about that war" (128). McPherson respects Glory not because it adheres strictly to the facts and details of the story of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry (it does not), but because it provides an antidote to the myths propagated by films such as Victor Fleming's Gone With the Wind (1939): "Perhaps Glory can restore the image of courageous black soldiers that prevailed in the North during the latter war years, before the process of romanticizing the Old South obscured it" (128). In spite of this high praise, McPherson finds fault with some of the historical liberties Glory takes:

Except for Shaw [Matthew Broderick], the principal characters in the film are fictional: There was no real Maj. Cabot Forbes [Cary Elwes]; no Emerson-quoting black boyhood friend of Shaw's named Thomas Searles [Andre Braugher]; no tough Irish Sgt. Maj. Mulcahy [John Finn]; no black Sgt. (and father figure) John Rawlings [Morgan Freeman]; no brash, hardened Private Trip [Denzel Washington].

Maj. Cabot Forbes (Cary Elwes)	Thomas Searles (Andre Braugher)
Sgt. Maj. Mulcahy (John Finn)	John Rawlings (Morgan Freeman)
Private Trip (Denzel Washington)

Indeed, there is a larger fiction involved here. The movie gives the impression that most of the Fifty-fourth's soldiers were former slaves. In fact, this atypical regiment was recruited mainly in the North, so most of the men had always been free. (130) Many of the events described in Glory are also fictional: the incident of the racist quartermaster who initially refuses to distribute shoes to Shaw's men; the whipping Trip receives as punishment for going AWOL; the regiment's dramatic refusal on principle to accept less pay than white soldiers, which shames Congress into equalizing the pay of black soldiers (this actually happened, but at Shaw's initiative, not Trip's); the religious meeting the night before the assault on Fort Wagner. (130)

The corrupt quartermaster	The whipping
Trip inspires wage revolt	Revival before last battle

McPherson forgives Glory's poetic license because he believes the film's inventions an attempt to dramatize a larger historical truth: the heroic role of African American soldiers during the Civil War. The well-documented story of Shaw and the Fifty-fourth represents the larger and more diverse role of African Americans' military contribution to the Civil War. Perhaps to emphasize the broader significance of Shaw and his soldiers, at the end of the film, all members of the regiment die heroic deaths at Fort Wagner; in fact, many members of the regiment survived and continued to fight in other battles.

FOR FURTHER READING

Carnes, Mark C., gen. ed. Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies.New York: Henry Holt, 1995.

General Patton's Address to the Troops.

"Patton Biography and Real Speech."

Patton Society Posters and Graphics.

Reynolds, Julie. "Las Dos Fridas: Hollywood's Long, Slow Race to Make the Definitive Frida Kahlo Film." El Andar (Summer 2002).