Liz Brown on the 'Bioptic'
Still from Todd Haynes' Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987)
... Even if Michael Douglas fails at playing Liberace, according to Susan Sontag, the film’s value as camp will skyrocket. I won’t be sorry. I’ve got plenty of shares of that stock. But I do hope Michael Douglas’s performance is actually good. I hope he imbues the Vegas showqueen with humanity and complexity and that I am not only entertained but also moved.
That said, I have no desire to see Douglas “disappear” into the role of the ermined pianist because there is a subgenre of the biopic that I love unreservedly and I’m hoping that Behind the Candelabra will take it to new extremes.
I’m thinking of Mommie Dearest as an example, in that I never stop seeing Faye Dunaway and Joan Crawford, whether she—or rather, they—are chopping down rose bushes or commandeering the Pepsi board room. I’m thinking of movies in which you see both actor and subject at the same time: a bioptic.
To fall within this particular category, both figures must inhabit significant and discrete real estate in the cultural imagination. Jimmy Stewart as Charles Lindbergh in The Spirit of St. Louis might fit, but then Lindbergh’s public persona hasn’t sustained quite the vividness that, say, Margaret Thatcher’s has. So Meryl Streep as the Iron Lady satisfies the conditions of the bioptic, but to my thinking Streep as Karen Silkwood does not because the whistle blower didn’t really figure in popular consciousness until after her death, and then even more so after Streep’s portrayal of her. Streep as Lindy Chamberlain (“Dingo ate my baby!”) doesn’t fit, but Streep as Julia Child does.
On some level you could say this is just famous people playing famous people, but Anthony Hopkins is famous and Alfred Hitchcock is famous and that pairing doesn’t create the kind of double exposure I’m looking for. Hopkins isn’t famous in a weird enough way. He’s famous for being a good actor but not necessarily for his off-screen persona.
So given this logic, Lindsay Lohan as Liz Taylor—if a bit overdetermined—fits the bill. James Franco as James Dean didn’t count when that TV biopic came out in 2001, since it was several years before Franco would hit fameballdom. But Franco’s interpretation of Riff Raff in Spring Breakers does, and certainly Riff Raff as Franco in One Life to Live counts—a bioptic and pop-culture ouroboros.
