What is it about?
Two recent biopics, The King's Speech (dir. Tom Hooper, 2010) and The Theory of Everything (dir. James Marsh, 2015), seek to give a voice to their historical and contemporary subjects who could only speak in disembodied voices. The films navigate the fine lines between public disgust of voice disability and the craving for what might be called “supercrip” figures—figures who are defined by their physical limitations but who, because of their disability, are perceived as possessing extraordinary talents and abilities. The adaptations of King George VI's and Stephen Hawking's life stories show their uneasy relationship to the "troubled-white-male-genius" genre and to the vocal embodiment of their subjects who lose and gain a voice through therapy, technology, and their will to live a full life. The films carefully skirt the edges of public disgust and pity of differently abled bodies: how the stuttering King George VI struggles to find his voice and adapt to the then emerging and increasingly important radio broadcasting technology; and how the physicist Stephen Hawking speaks through a speech synthesizer.
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Why is it important?
This is the first academic research article that connect screen images of Stephen Hawking and King George VI in terms of their vocal disability. This original study argues that the biopics share an uneasy relationship to the figure of troubled-white-male-geniuses.
Perspectives
“Can you hear me?” asks Stephen Hawking towards the end of The Theory of Everything. Slumping in a motorized wheelchair, theoretical physicist Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) poses the question in a monotonic, computer-generated voice with staccato quality to an eager audience through his speech synthesizer. Even though he is physically present, his disembodied voice fills the auditorium in ways that suggest both his earth-bound reality and transcendental status. The question “can you hear me” is a profound moment that invites various levels of interpretation. On a literal level it is a quotidian question about legibility and whether the speaker is audible, but it bears symbolic significance at the end of this film, which generates consensual pleasure. On a philosophical level, it asks both the audiences within and outside the film’s universe whether they understand him after following the biopic subject around in his wheelchair through his tribulations and triumphs. On a metacinematic level, it asks whether the biopic as a redemptive genre merely speaks for its subject or allows Hawking to speak for himself.
Ms Alexa Alice Joubin
George Washington University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Can the Biopic Subjects Speak?, November 2019, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1002/9781119554783.ch15.
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