Conclusion: The Postfeminist Biopic

Abstract

To date scholarship of the biopic has been pessimistic about the representation of women in the genre. Influential academics in the field have argued that the lives of women are almost inevitably presented in the female biopic according to a depressing cycle of ‘failure, victimization, and the downward trajectory’ (Custen, 1992: 102–07; Bingham, 2010: 24). Only a small number of feminist biopics have been interpreted as actively deconstructing this set of conventions. The responses from academics to contemporary biopics about women from history reinforce the accepted position that the conventions of the female biopic remain intractable, unless actively subverted. In a typical example, reactions to Artemisia (Agnès Merlet, 1999) have largely focused on the film’s rendering of the painter Artemisia Gentileschi as an object-to-be-looked-at, a passive recipient of creative masculine influence, and as therefore not responsible for her own artistic achievements (for example, Pollock, 2001; Garrard, 2003; ffolliott, 2005). This book has identified and described the emergent subgenre of the postfeminist biopic. I have argued that this contemporary form of the biopic establishes an alternative set of genre conventions, different from both the classical and the feminist biopic, for portraying the life of a woman from history.