Telling Her Story

Read in the context of the recent U.S. presidential election, Jackie (Pablo Larraín, 2016) and Christine (Antonio Campos, 2016) inspire important questions about how women are remembered and valued in political and media culture. Jackie explores Jacqueline Kennedy's orchestration of President Kennedy's funeral and legacy, and in so doing provides an inauspicious reminder of how long and how easily Americans have conflated celebrity and politics, how willingly that national audience has embraced national images over national substance. Christine , also organized around one woman's mediation of a violent death (in this case her own), recreates Christine Chubbuck's world in the weeks leading up to her on-Air suicide not to explain her actions but to frame the questions that suicide leaves behind. Both films revisit and revise the biopic genre and its inherent limits while also illustrating its political potential. While Jacqueline Kennedy was already part of the U.S. cultural pantheon and Christine Chubbuck was not, both of their biopics use violence, death, and the questions they leave to help viewers think about the ways that women are and are not remembered, let alone mythologized, in an enduring patriarchy.