It\u2019s hard to imagine that any movie about Shelley could top Ken Russell\u2019s Gothic <\/i>(1986), which, rather than attempting to cover the whole of her life, or even a large section of it, limits its scope to one day and night, for the infamous gathering at the Swiss estate of exiled poet Lord Byron, wherein Mary (along with her lover and future husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and her stepsister Clair Claremont) took part in a competition to see who could come up with the best ghost story. This night would birth the horror and science-fiction genres as we know them today, by way Shelley\u2019s entry: Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. <\/i><\/span><\/p>\n Gothic<\/i> is a surreal piece of phantasmagoria in line with Russell\u2019s other over-the-top cult classics (The Devils<\/i>, Tommy<\/i>, Altered States<\/i>), though one in which he melds his own obsessions with those of Mary Shelley and the Romantics, thereby creating a film that holds up as both an authentic historical drama and a stand-alone horror fantasy.<\/span><\/p>\n And Gothic<\/i> is far from the only speculative cinematic biography. Other entries in this specific sub-genre can be found for figures across a variety of fields \u2014 from politics (Robert Altman\u2019s dark Nixon drama Secret Honor<\/i>), to music (Todd Hayne\u2019s kaleidoscopic examination of Bob Dylan\u2019s cult of personality I\u2019m Not There<\/i>) to literature. Indeed, of all those examples, it is the writer for whom the speculative biopic is most well suited. <\/span><\/p>\n Unlike every other artistic or performative endeavor, the act of writing has little to no visual currency. A film about a musician can show its subject performing; a film about a politician can fall back on big speeches and backroom dealmaking; hell, even a movie about a painter will be able to show off a finished painting in order to give insight into character and theme. But writing? The only way to get the essence of a writer\u2019s work is by reading it.<\/span><\/p>\n The speculative biopic partially circumvents this problem, usually by inserting its subject into a plot that resembles or references their own best-known work. Being that said work initially required these writers to traverse imaginary landscapes in the pursuit of their obsessions, they come as ready-made protagonists.<\/span><\/p>\n Ken Russell is particularly adept at this type of narrative (the film he made following Gothic<\/i>, the decadent comedy Salome\u2019s Last Dance<\/i>, used Oscar Wilde in a similar manner), but he\u2019s hardly its progenitor. <\/span><\/p>\n Examples of such films trace back to at least 1944, with The Adventures of Mark Twain, <\/i>which <\/i>freely combines elements from Twain\u2019s autobiography and his fiction in order to create something of an omnibus myth for the great American fabulist.<\/span><\/p>\n The speculative literary biopic has served as a welcome alternative to the\u00a0 <\/span>standard (read: stuffy or sentimental) biopic, even if the results tend to vary in quality. For every film that goes on to find commercial success and middlebrow acclaim\u2014 think Oscar darlings The Hours <\/i>(about Virginia Woolf) and Shakespeare In Love<\/i> (about, well, obviously) \u2014 there are forgotten flops such as Michael Apted\u2019s brutally slow Agatha <\/i>(an <\/i>\u201cimaginary solution to an authentic mystery\u201d regarding the brief disappearance of Agatha Christie in 1926), or the more recent \u2014 and barely watchable \u2014 The Raven<\/i>, which places Edgar Allen Poe at the center of a truly idiotic serial killer plot in the days leading up to his own death.<\/span><\/p>\n Much of the same can be said for Steven Soderbergh\u2019s sophomore film Kafka <\/i>(1991). Soderbergh, newly anointed prince of the burgeoning independent cinema movement of the 1990s, chose to spend the cachet he\u2019d earned following the surprise success of sex, lies & videotape<\/i> (1989) to make an expressionistic conspiracy thriller shot almost entirely in black-and-white and inspired by the life and work of Czech writer Franz Kafka (played by Jeremy Irons). <\/span><\/p>\n Thanks to its unique cinematography and inspired set-pieces, Kafka<\/i> is far from the disaster that its reputation would suggest (its critical and commercial failure nearly ended Soderbergh\u2019s career before it began, and it has never been made available on DVD). It is, however, altogether too formal and lifeless, as Soderbergh himself has admitted. <\/span><\/p>\n More broadly, it fails to say anything of real substance regarding Kafka or his work. While it pays lip service to some of the more obvious themes that run through his stories \u2014 the oppressive nature of bureaucracy, the erasure of the individual in the face of a nameless and all-encompassing system of authority \u2014 it offers only surface-level insight, while conveying little of the mordant humor, maddening absurdity, or implacable spiritual terror that made Kafka the standard bearer for modern-day existentialism.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Though Kafka<\/i> failed in its larger ambitions, two parallel works succeeded in theirs. By some strange, indeed Kafkaesque coincidence, Soderbergh\u2019s film was released in 1991, the same year which saw the release of two other speculative literary dramas, both of which likewise relied on a heavy does of paranoia and surrealism to gain insight into their chosen subjects: David Cronenberg\u2019s Naked Lunch<\/i> and the Coen Bros.\u2019 Barton Fink<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n Their similarities extend beyond their shared conceit. Both films are shot in muddy, sickly earth tones; both are obsessed with the aesthetic qualities of typewriters and insects; and both feature Lynch-like schisms of identity in which reality and fantasy coalesce to produce violent carnage as well as artistic and spiritual catharsis. In the most fascinating of their many synchronicities, the sacrificial muse at the heart of each film is played by actress Judy Davis. <\/span><\/p>\n Ultimately, both are darkly comic fever dreams that use real-life literary figures to explore the idea \u2014 as summed up by Pablo Picasso \u2014 that \u201cevery act of creation is first an act of destruction.\u201d (Oh, and Barton Fink<\/i><\/span><\/a> and Naked Lunch<\/i><\/span><\/a> <\/i>are also responsible for all-time classic jokes on The Simpsons<\/i>.)<\/span><\/p>\n It should be noted that 1991 also saw the international release of Andrzej Zulawski\u2019s La Note Bleue, <\/i>a <\/i>wholly speculative account of the final day in the relationship of ailing Polish composer Frederic Chopin and French author George Sand. Like Ken Russell, Zulawski is known for his intense, cerebral phantasmagorias. It is therefore not surprising that La Note Bleue<\/i> shares enough qualities with Gothic<\/i> \u2014 including a pastoral setting, a debauched party attended by celebrated artists of the time period, and the intrusion upon reality by otherworldly spirits \u2014 so that the pair would make for an aesthetically perfect, if utterly exhausting, double feature.<\/span><\/p>\n In light of the limitations of the standard biographical film, it seems odd that the speculative biopic is so rarely used as a template, especially when it comes to stories about writers. Not that films about writers, whether speculative or historically accurate, are ever in high demand \u2014 even the most acclaimed examples of the past few years, such as Bright Star<\/i> (about John Keats and Fanny Brawne) and A Quiet Passion<\/i> (Emily Dickinson) flew under the radar \u2014 but such narratives offer filmmakers a range of possibility when it comes to melding their own obsessions with those of their literary influences, all while being able to indulge their most wild and surreal flights of fancy. Despite the old saying, when it comes to films about writers, fiction is stranger \u2014 and much better suited to the medium \u2014 than truth.<\/span><\/p>\n The English Romantic writer Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley lived about as cinematic a life as one could, filled with historic achievement, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":506,"featured_media":9407,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,1399],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/506"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9406"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9406\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/DQjkvDMXcAACWyD.jpg\")
<\/a>Russell\u2019s film uses a variety of techniques \u2014 expository dialogue, prophetic vision, a book-end set in the modern day \u2014 to trace the broad outline of Shelley\u2019s adventures, while managing to avoid the pitfalls commonly found in cinematic biopics (the rise-and-fall structure, the CliffsNotes-style depiction of major events, the overemphasis on sentimentality). In addition to these individual methods, the film also frees its subjects from the strictures of the biographical\u00a0 <\/span>narrative by plunging them headfirst into the realm of the speculative.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/image-w1280-1-300x169.jpg\")
<\/a>Just as common are the fascinating misfires, such as Wim Wenders\u2019 American debut Hammett <\/i>(1982), which inserts mystery writer\/former private detective Dashiell Hammett (Frederic Forrest) into a convoluted plot of the type usually found in his fiction. While its troubled production history (the film was shot twice \u2014 once on location in San Francisco, and then once more on studio backlots) ensured that the final version is something of a mess, it remains an altogether interesting, enjoyable throwback to the film noirs of classic Hollywood, even as it suffers by comparison to other, better adaptations of its namesake\u2019s work \u2014 The Maltese Falcon<\/i>, The Thin Man<\/i>, The Glass Key \u2014 <\/i>made previously. <\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/Mugjuice.jpg\")
<\/a>Cronenberg\u2019s film \u2014 a loose adaptation of William S. Burroughs\u2019s experimental novel of the same name, as well as an even looser account of the author\u2019s accidental murder of his wife in 1951 \u2014 is the more obviously biographical of the two, but Barton Fink<\/i> uses real-life literary figures (with central characters modeled on writers such as New York playwright Clifford Odets and Southern novelist William Faulkner) to similar ends. <\/span><\/p>\n
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