{"product_id":"9780813549309","title":"Whose Lives Are They Anyway?: The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre","description":"The biopic presents a profound paradoxùits own conventions and historical stages of development, disintegration, investigation, parody, and revival have not gained respect in the world of film studies. \u003ci\u003eThat is, until now.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eWhose Lives Are They Anyway?\u003c\/i\u003e boldly proves a critical point: The biopic is a genuine, dynamic genre and an important oneùit narrates, exhibits, and celebrates a subject's life and demonstrates, investigates, or questions his or her importance in the world; it illuminates the finer points of a personality; and, ultimately, it provides a medium for both artist and spectator to discover what it would be like to be that person, or a certain type of person.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThrough detailed analyses and critiques of nearly twenty biopics, Dennis Bingham explores what is at their coreùthe urge to dramatize real life and find a version of the truth within it. The genre's charge, which dates back to the salad days of the Hollywood studio era, is to introduce the biographical subject into the pantheon of cultural mythology and, above all, to show that he or she belongs there. It means to discover what we learn about our culture from the heroes who rise and the leaders who emerge from cinematic representations.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBingham also zooms in on distinctions between cinematic portrayals of men and women. Films about men have evolved from celebratory warts-and-all to investigatory to postmodern and parodic. At the same time, women in biopics have been burdened by myths of suffering, victimization, and failure from which they are only now being liberated.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTo explore the evolution and lifecycle changes of the biopic and develop an appreciation for subgenres contained within it, there is no better source than \u003ci\u003eWhose Lives Are They Anyway?\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Rutgers University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47124004897008,"sku":"9780813549309","price":32.5,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780813549309_p0.jpg?v=1763743555","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780813549309","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}