This paper examines Kevin Spacey’s 2004 biopic Beyond the Sea in the context of academic discourses concerning the self-reflexive musical. While musical biopics of the same era (Ray and Walk the Line), and many biopics of similar subjects made in earlier eras (The Buddy Holly Story and La Bamba) offer more or less conventional narratives of their subjects, Beyond the Sea presents its audience with an overtly self-conscious and ultimately fragmented subject matter, literally splitting Bobby Darin by having two actors play him – the child Bobby and the adult Darin – and having them interact with one another. Ostensibly framed around the device of Darin playing himself in a movie of his life, Beyond the Sea jumbles spatial and temporal contexts, interrupting its narrative flow to have the two “Bobbys” discuss that narrative’s meaning and purpose. The formal splits – between film set and reality, between sound and image – reflect the splitting of Darin’s character. Referring to Cynthia Hanson’s Wide Angle essay on the “regressive” performer in the musical biopics from the late seventies and eighties, and Jesse Schlotterbeck’s more recent essay in Journal of Popular Film and Television on the threads of the classical-era musical’s narrative functions in Beyond the Sea and its contemporaries, I will argue that Spacey’s film encourages its audience to reject those narratives in favor of a “flattened-out” vision of Darin as a multi-faceted entertainer whose talent supersedes the drive toward narrative coherence. While most other biopics stake some claim to truth (even when they are undeniably fabricating stories about their subjects), Beyond the Sea’s postmodern form willfully acknowledges its status as myth-making, much like self-reflexive musicals that are not biopics (as per Jane Feuer’s writing on the myth of entertainment in the musical genre). The film subtly mocks the biopic clichés even as it at times seems to wallow in them (unlike the overt parodic biopic Walk Hard). I will further argue that Spacey’s multiple roles — as lead, but also as star, co-writer, co-producer, and director – make Beyond the Sea an allegory about Spacey-as-Darin, revealing to the audience as much about its creator as it does about its subject. The film can thus be read (to paraphrase James Naremore) as postmodern in the sense that it show’s both creator’s and subject’s narcissism.
About the presenterThomas Grochowski
Tom Grochowski has published on topics ranging from Woody Allen, Sex and the City, the Marx Brothers, and web sites devoted to the O.J. Simpson murder trial. He currently teaches American Literature, film, and media studies at St. Joseph’s College, where he Associate Chair of the Department of English. He is currently on the MAPACA advisory board. He earned his PhD from New York University’s Department of Cinema Studies; he also holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College, where he studied with Allen Ginsberg. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife two daughters, and dog.