I cannot even begin to count the number of times I have been told not to believe what is on the internet.
From a phony celebrity death hoax to yet another influencer claiming that they don’t photoshop their clearly edited Instagram photos, pretty much any corner of the world wide web is full of fabrications made to be eaten up by those who stumble across them.
What I was not forewarned of, however, was the amount of hearsay in some of the most popular films and series that are marketed as the truth. Much like the plethora of lies circulating online, the perfect place to find misleading disinformation is none other than biopics.
Short for biographical pictures, biopics are films or series that commonly follow the lives of celebrities and events. From Freddy Mercury and Judy Garland to Napoleon Bonaparte and Stephen Hawking, the rise of biopics, especially in recent years, has become increasingly apparent. And while some have warranted praiseworthy results, most have been chock full of lies and dishonesty.
Blonde, a 2022 biopic based on Marilyn Monroe, is one of these deceptive films. Featuring Cuban-Spanish actress Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe, this movie was right off the bat the target of much hostility; most of which was well-deserved. Following her boisterous but extremely successful career—or, more accurately, attempting to follow—the misrepresentation of Marilyn is clear almost immediately. While the real Marilyn Monroe was an extremely influential figure for women in the early 1900s, this production belittles her as nothing more than a blubbering, emotional mess.
From feeding into outlandish conspiracy theories to segueing into the stereotypical “dumb blonde” trope that Marilyn was often associated with, the only evident plot line is writing her as an easily manipulated, over-dramatic woman who spends most of the film crying or being objectified. While the movie could have explored more epochal moments of her early life as a child raised in foster care—a pivotal period of her life in which she herself went into detail—the film takes many unwanted turns, some of which lead to complete fictionalized events, that all lead to intensely victimizing Marilyn throughout the entirety of the film to the point where her character seems almost pathetic to viewers.
It manages to make her adversity her entire personality, rather than focusing on her many accomplishments and undeniable willpower that she possessed during her lifetime. Not only is the historical honesty akin to that of Harry Potter, but it shines a poor light on such an incredible actress like Ana de Armas. This “biopic” was purely 187 minutes of disrespect for who was, and still remains to be, one of the most celebrated figures in pop culture of all time.
Blonde, however, is not the only Hollywood stunt to tarnish the genuineness of real-life events. Similar to Blonde—although with the insensitivity cranked up to a whole new level—Netflix’s bio-series Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffery Dahmer Story, which tells the account of Milwaukee serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and his victims, remains possibly one of the most inconsiderate works of “entertainment” of all time. Starring American Horror Story actor Evan Peters, the ten-episode show takes the tragedy of Dahmer’s killing spree and makes light of it for audiences. Right from the jump, the descriptions of the episodes, rather than referring to Dahmer as his real name, gave him the moniker “Young Jeff.” The series also features scenes of Dahmer’s high school life, in which he was more of an outcast. The purpose of such scenes seems to be nothing but to try to drum up sympathy for the mass murderer and to give audiences a reason to feel bad for a mentally deranged serial killer.
Not only is there no need to bring such horrific events to life, but even more alarmingly, the production staff reached out to 20 families of the victims to consult them on how they felt about a television series of the events, and not a single one of them gave them the green light. After the release, many siblings, parents, and friends of the victims were rightfully angered, as the series not only pointlessly brought such devastation back to life, but exploited the suffering endured by those at the hands of one of America’s most notorious serial killers for money.
Even bio-series and films based on living people’s lives somehow find a way to falsify events. The 2010 film The Social Network—based on Mark Zuckerberg’s creation of FaceBook and starring Jesse Eisenberg—was so fictitious at times that Zuckerberg himself said that it was “hurtful.” On a similar occasion, a script for a Madonna biopic titled Blonde Ambition was written up and was soon abandoned when Madonna discovered it and immediately condemned it, stating that “no one could tell her story but her.”
Whether the deplorability of these films comes from profiting off people’s tragic experiences as a way to supposedly pay homage or from creating fiction from fact in the lives of real people, a common theme with all of these films and series is their tendency to dramatize or falsify events to make the film more entertaining to viewers, despite the fact that this ruins the integrity of the movie.
Unlike Blonde, Dahmer, and other similar films and series, one movie that does an excellent job of telling an accurate, entertaining story is Sofia Copolla’s Priscilla, a 2023 film based on Priscilla Presley’s caring yet turbulent relationship with Elvis Presley. Unlike Blonde, the real-life Priscilla was very closely affiliated with the film and—as it was based on her 1985 autobiography Elvis and Me—provided much of the first-person intel that kept the film on a path of biographical truth. While Blonde had no way of telling what happened behind closed doors, Priscilla was able to capture much more intimate details of the title character’s life while still leaving room for interpretation from the audience in terms of her relationship with Elvis. However, Priscilla remains one of the few biopics that value such qualities in their film.
While many biopics attempt to provide valuable insights into historical figures and moments, they are ultimately crafted for entertainment purposes, leading to artistic liberties, dramatizations, and distortions of facts. The complexities of human experiences and historical events cannot always be faithfully captured within the constraints of a two-hour film or a thirty-minute episode, leading to inevitable compromises in truthfulness. With the influx of production of such cinematic works and the many more to come, it becomes clearer and clearer that the only people who can create biopics of fidelity and accuracy are those who truly lived the events themselves.
