I’m Not ThereGenre

Focus Questions(what you should be able to answer by the end)

- What is a biopic and what does it try to achieve?

- How does I’m Not There ‘explode’ the biopic genre?

- How does this connect to the notions of re-framing identity?

Genre knowledge

What’s the point?

Like with short text and with Shakespeare, understanding the purpose of the genre is a useful strategy for getting at the wider purpose of the text.

So, with short text, we could look at how Ford’s stories brought the average, every-day struggler into the realm of literature. In Shakespeare, we examined how the play fits Nietzsche’s belief in what the purpose of tragedy was.

And so with film, we begin by considering the relationship between I’m Not There and its genre.

What is a biopic?

Basically, the dictionary definition of biopic is:

“a biographical movie.”

But this is problematic. We need to ask a slightly deeper question, especially if we’re to examine I’m Not There in relation to the biopic.

Examples?

- Erin Brockovich

- Remember The Titans

- A Beautiful Mind

- Elizabeth

- Walk The Line

- Into The Wild

- Mao’s Last Dancer

- Sophie Scholl

- The King’s Speech

- The Blindside

- Moneyball

- The Social Network

What is a biopic?

What do we expect of a biopic? What should a biopic involve? What are the genre rules for the biopic?

What is a biopic?

Chronology

Think about any of the previous examples and you’ll see that the Hollywood biopic revolves around creating narrative chronology - this means a focus on cause and effect from childhood to adulthood, or within a specific stage of life.

e.g. The Social Network following the life of Mark Zuckerberg through the creation of Facebook in and ordered fashion, pinpointing moments of crisis.

What is a biopic?

Relationship between crisis and truth

One of the key genre conventions of the Hollywood biopic is narrative emphasis on crisis, e.g. The King’s Speech, Mao’s Last Dancer (basically all of them) where the narrative focuses on points of crisis within the life of the subject. The notion here is that through moments of crisis we see the subject at the most emotionally raw, and therefore at their most true.

Therefore crisis equates to truth.

What is a biopic?

The idea that a truth exists

The traditional biopic assumes, and ultimately normalises, the idea that by investigating the life of a subject we can ‘discover’ them.

e.g. We understand Li Cunxin (Mao’s Last Dancer) because we see the process of his decision making and we are taken to the core of who he is. He is a dance hero, champion of the people, etc. There are no other narrative lines for him.

What is a biopic?

Linearity - cause and effect

The idea that a life can be drawn as a straight line, where you can get from A to be Z through the process of steps, or that A and Z are ultimately related to each other, but are distinct and discrete moments in an existence.

To an extent, Z is unrecognisable from A, and can only be discovered by tracking back through Y, X, etc.

To what extent...

...does I’m Not There fit into our expectations of the genre? - Include specific examples.

...does I’m Not There point out the limitations of the genre?- What is it suggesting that regular biopics ignore, or simply don’t seem to understand?

“Mr Haynes’s film hurls a Molotov cocktail through the facade of the Hollywood biopic factory, exploding the literal minded, anti-intellectual assumptions that guide even the most admiring cinematic explorations of artists’ lives.” - A.O. Scott, New York Times

What does this mean?

Scott is suggesting that I’m Not There shatters the audience’s genre expectations by denying all of our expectations of the genre.

There is no chronology, there is no linearity, there’s no cause and effect. I’m Not There is circular if anything, seeing Dylan as many lives that reference each other rather than being directly connected.

What does this mean?

The suggestion that regular biopics are “literal minded and anti-intellectual”:

This suggests that I’m Not There isn’t, it goes beyond literally depicting the subject, and moves into the realm of the symbolic and abstract - it is an intellectual conception.

To an extent, we could describe the film as an ‘anti-biopic’ because it essentially works to undermine the concept of the biopic as it exists - this is your wider world thinking for essay writing.

Even bigger, even broaderBy doing this, by exploding the genre, Haynes starts to do some very interesting stuff around the stability of identity.

Because the film is undeniably a biopic, yet refuses to follow the rules of the biopic, it suggests that Haynes doesn’t believe the traditional biopic can achieve what it sets out to achieve, i.e. to reveal a/the/some truth(s) about its subject. And so Haynes’s attitude towards the genre hints at a belief that there is no truth to be revealed - we don’t discover Dylan by watching the film, if anything we leave more confused than when we began.

All the way back to Nietzsche“The doer is merely a fiction added to the deed - the deed is everything.”

Haynes is a post-modern film maker and so his work will reflect post-modern ideas like what is often found in Nietzsche. What Nietzsche suggests here is what Haynes sees as problematic with the biopic as a genre - it refuses to acknowledge the fictionality of the subject by trying to give us a literal, definitive version of the subject that is explained through a series of life events.