Biopic of Sylvia Plath

Hello guys,

I wrote an essay about my favorite American woman writer, Sylvia Plath. This article argues that Sylvia Plath's life and love, feminist and poetic sides on the branch of the movie called biopic. Have a nice weekend!

Movie branch has genres like literature or the other art branches, such as movies can be fictional, historical and biographical. Why do the moviemakers reflect important person’s life? Or why do they need to portray her period into the modern period? Moviemakers try to keep important figures of their country alive and teach people how they were important and what their contributions to the country are. Movies about biographies call “biopics”. The biopic is a genre about real, significant person’s life,“[T]he biopic narrates, exhibits, and celebrates the life of a subject in order to demonstrate, investigate, or question his or her importance in the world; to illuminate the fine points of a personality; and for both artist and spectator to discover what it would be like to be this person, or to be a certain type of person, or,.., to be that person’s audience” (Bingham, 10). The person whose movie shoots has to be known in public or has attracted life. Biopics should base on reality and the true knowledge, yet directors can’t know each step of a person’s life and add something from his perspective to fill the gaps and also moviemakers address to specific audiences who are fans of the person having biopic and they want to make them content, “the filmmakers see the need to “complete” history, to fill in what didn’t happen with what a viewer might wish to see happen” (Bingham, 8).  Dennis Bingham separates biopics in a two section as biopics of men and biopics of women in Whose Lives are They Anyway?. Biopics of women are different from men biopics, “[F]ilms about men have gone from celebratory to warts-and-all…. Biopics of women,.., are weighted down by myths of suffering, victimization, and failure perpetuated by a culture whose films reveal an acute fear of women in the public realm” ( Bingham, 10). There are many women biopics and most of them are a male point of view and women’s lives are told as a “failure”. Each person has bad and good sides of her/his life, “[F]emale biopics can be made empowering only by a conscious and deliberate application of a feminist point of view” (Bingham, 10) One of the female directors is Christine Jeffs who is director of Sylvia reflects Sylvia Plath’s life based on true and real knowledge. Yet, Bronwyn Polaschek who wrote The Postfeminist Biopic: Narrating the Lives of Plath, Kahlo, Woolf, and Austen, mentions that “Sylvia is not presented as a victim in the film, a typical strategy of the female biopic in Bingham’s argument. Rather, throughout their relationship Sylvia is a determining force” (Polaschek, 67) In the movie, Sylvia Plath’s life is not portrayed from her birth; her life story begins with finding her love, Ted Hughes in 1956 and ends with her death in 1963. Even though Plath was an American, the movie was British. Mostly the reason why the movie is British, Sylvia Plath fell in love with British poet, Ted Hughes and lived in England. In the movie, Jeffs reflects her biggest love, her turbulent mood and literary life from the female point of view. This is the only biographical movie about Sylvia Plath and there are many movies, music and so many branches that her biography used. “The reinventions of the poet by the media have subtly changed our view of Sylvia Plath and brought into focus the mediated, slippery nature of authorship. However, the focus set by her representations is on the means of mediating between the two, rather than establishing the truth about who Sylvia Plath really was. One is not contaminating the other; instead, both are complicit in a reinvention which is also embalming, an homage, and a gift” (Banita, 57)

Sylvia which is a biopic of Sylvia Plath takes places in England in the dates between 1956- 1963.  The film stars are Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia and Daniel Craig as Ted. The movie reflects their period and difficulties of being a celebrated poet at that time. Sylvia had melancholic, depressive mood after her father Otto died when she was 9. She attempted suicide with her mother’s pills but she wasn’t successful. In the movie, Plath told Ted her first suicide on his asking her scare. Ted and Plath met at a party and between them it was passion not first sight of love “ Hughes approaching her, reaching out to yank her earrings off, saying “Ah, I shall keep these” as he pocketed them, then leaning down to kiss her; Plath returning the kiss by biting Hughes on the cheek so hard she broke the skin” ( Kehoe, 99) Their first met was passionate and then their relationship began after a while they got married. Ted got W. H. Auden prize and he became celebrated poet besides that Sylvia’s poems were not accepted by critics and magazines. According to one critic, A. O. Scott, “Ms. Jeffs's understanding of Plath, like Ms. Paltrow's is deep and sincere, and ultimately more intuitive than analytical. ''Sylvia,'' rather than trying to explain Plath, wants to burrow into her personality without disturbing its mysteries.” Plath was always like a closed book and the director does not try to explain her, she reflects her as she was. They had two children named Frieda and Nicholas. Frieda was first child and she accused filmmakers of profiting from her mother’s death, thus she wrote a poem about the film Sylvia "Now they want to make a film / For anyone lacking the ability / To imagine the body, head in oven, / Orphaning children. Then / It can be rewound / So they can watch her die / Right from the beginning again" (F. Hughes).  Their love did not continue because of Ted. Ted always cheated on her and had an affair with a lot of women. He was womanizer and at last, they separated. Sylvia took the children and moved to London back from Devon. Ted left her for Assia Gutman who was also a married woman. Sylvia got insane and collapsed, John Kehoe describes her death in “The Biography Magazine”, “Sometime between the hours of four and six on the morning of February 11,1963 , Sylvia Plath Hughes put her head into the gas oven of her small London flat and asphyxiated herself” and also she protected her children, she did not want them to die obviously “she had put tape over the door frame to keep the gas from seeping into the next room, where her two small children- Frieda, almost 3, and Nicholas, 13 months- lay sleeping” (Kehoe, 89) Sylvia Plath could not stand that Ted had an affair with that woman. Before her death, Sylvia thought committing suicide twice, yet she thought her children and gave up until the last point that was Assia’s pregnancy.

Sylvia was inclined to be a depressive and melancholic woman. After her father’s death, her mental health got worse because Plath was born on October 27, 1932, and her father died on November 5, 1940. So, she was a little kid when she met with the reality of death. However, she met Ted and fell in love, yet Ted caused her death. Her poems reflected herself as Ted said in the movie, “what I am trying to say that you already got your subject. It is you” (Sylvia, 0:30).  As regarded Sylvia Plath reflects her suicidal personality in her poems “Daddy”, “Lady Lazarus”, and “Ariel” by using references to her own life to show that male-dominated world is dangerous or seeing women as not individuals is all wrong because it causes no great things in daily life but creates gender discrimination. In the movie, these three poems united with Sylvia and she read a few lines through the movie with related to events. Ted and Plath talked about her first suicide and she united herself with Lady Lazarus she said in the movie “Like Lazarus. Lady Lazarus. It is me” (Sylvia, 0:16). Also, she wrote “Daddy” after Ted left her and children. Her feelings about death, her father, Ted, children are reflected in this poem. Besides, her sufferings did not get her down and she even became very successful in high school and in college. Instead of being lazy and become idle because of pains in her heart and in her mind, she transformed her pains and ideas into her art and she meditated herself. However, even the art itself could not help her distress and she committed suicide by turning on the gas on the morning of February 1963, and unfortunately died with entering her bakery that is full of kiln gas.

One of the closest friend and critic was Al Alvarez criticized movie and he said “Craig is a slighter figure than Ted Hughes, though he has the craggy good looks and bitten-back charm, but Paltrow's resemblance to Sylvia Plath was uncanny. With her hair piled up and her face tight with strain, she was exactly how I remember the woman. It was like seeing a ghost”, Jeff chooses stars similar to Plath and Ted yet Alvarez likes Paltrow more than Craig because she is more resemble Plath. Alvarez criticized Plath’s poetry and did not publish her works at the beginning. After they made acquainted and Sylvia and Ted separated, they met sometimes to talk about her poems. Alvarez said after she died “the most gifted woman poet of our time… the loss to literature is inestimable” (Kehoe, 119). The director also pays attention to reflect the 1950s with the music, clothes, setting and so on. In the movie, there was music which released the 1940s and it was 1930s and 40s group, The Ink Spots and their single called “Hey, Doc” was Plath’s period’s single and singer.

“Jeffs describes the film as primarily a “tragic love story”…” It was a love story between two giants”, also “given its centralizing of the love story between Sylvia and Ted, the film Sylvia might be read as symptomatic of the revival of romance in contemporary postfeminist text…” which means that the director portrays Sylvia Plath’s love life beside her feminism. (Polaschek, 66) She loved Ted with tremendous passion, yet when he betrayed her she left being a domestic woman. At the beginning of their relationship, Sylvia retorted to his words, Ted asks “What’s a poet? He is a shaman”, Sylvia says “or a she” (Sylvia, 0:10:22). After he betrayed and left home, Sylvia burnt his works, papers and she left with children. She was rebellion and she was not oppressed herself to the male dominant society. When she saw her husband with a girl who was Sylvia’s poetry teaching class, she got angry with him and threw him glasses and smashed them on the wall, they fought many times because of cheating. (Sylvia, 0:41-42). “Feminist’s saw her as a great talent betrayed by men” (Kehoe, 119). After Sylvia’s death, many people accused Ted, because he betrayed her and Sylvia committed suicide to cease her pain.

The movie portrays Sylvia Plath’s life from the director’s, Christine Jeffs, perspective. She represents Sylvia’s love, Ted, turbulent mood, and feminist literature. Plath’s contribution to American literature is undeniable because she breaks dominant male figures.  Plath’s poetry marks an important turning point in American literature because she used her powerful voice for all men. Therefore, Sylvia is a biopic of an important person, Sylvia Plath who is an American feminist poet.

Works Cited

Alvarez, Al. “Ted, Sylvia and Me”. The Guardian, 2004. Web.

Banita, Georgiana.  The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association: "The Same,

              Identical Woman": Sylvia Plath in the Media. Vol. 40, No. 2, Special Convention

              Issue: High & Low / Culture   Midwest Modern Language Association,2007. pp. 38-

             60. Jstor.

Bingham, Dennis. Whose  Lives Are They Anyway? , “A Respectable Genre of Very Low

             Repute”.  Rutgers University, 2010.  Pp. 3-28. ProQuest Ebook  Central.

Hibbett, Ryan. Twentieth Century Literature: Imagining Ted Hughes: Authorship,   

             Authenticity, and the Symbolic Work of "Collected Poems".  Vol. 51, No. 4. Hofstra

             University, 2005.  pp. 414-436 .. Jstor.

Kehoe, John. Biography Magazine: “ Young, Talented, and Doomed: The Life of Sylvia”.  

             May 1999, pp. 90-119.  Jstor.

Polaschek, Bronwyn. The Postfeminist Biopic: Narrating the Lives of Plath, Kahlo, Woolf and

             Austen. “The Postfeminist Historical Woman in Sylvia”.  St. Martin’s Press LLC,

             2013. Pp. 60-80. Web.

Sylvia. Directed by Christine Jeffs, performances by Gwenyth Patrow and Daniel Craig, 2003.