"Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy/animation?" Music, Mimicry and Multitudes in Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) and Rocketman (2019)

Fig. 1 - Bohemian Rhapsody (Bryan Singer, 2018) and Rocketman (Dexter Fletcher, 2019).

Two recent big screen biopics released within a few months of each other between October 2018 and May 2019 offered notably contrasting portrayals of popular musical icons. But if the lukewarm critical reception surrounding recent Freddie Mercury/Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody (Bryan Singer, 2018) put the genre under scrutiny for its questionable re-appropriation of real-life, then Rocketman (Dexter Fletcher, 2019) seemed remarkably immune to such criticisms. Dexter Fletcher’s tale of the life of Reginald Dwight and his journey from child prodigy - via the Royal Academy of Music - to Las Vegas showstopper Elton John was favourably heralded as “a sucrose-enriched biopic-slash-jukebox-musical hybrid which sometimes feels like it should be on the Broadway or London West End stage” (Bradshaw 2019). By comparison, the Academy Award winning-Bohemian Rhapsody was criticised for its “unforgivable” treatment of homosexual relationships and expression, with Sheila O’Malley pointing to the film as “bad in the way a lot of biopics are bad: it’s superficial, it avoids complexity, and the narrative has a connect-the-dots quality” (O’Malley 2018). Despite their wildly variant critical responses (of which much could - and should - be said), there are certain similarities in narrative structure between the two features, perhaps unsurprising given Fletcher’s creative role on both (famously replacing Bohemian Rhapsody’s director Bryan Singer in December 2017 just four months into production). The framing role played by Live Aid in the Queen story is mirrored in by Rocketman’s use of the addiction rehabilitation centre, while other key factors germane to the biopic (notably the disdainful parental figures that patrol the creative boundaries of the genius) also find a home in each story. Fletcher has, of course, also got form when it comes to the jukebox musical format and even the biopic too, directing Sunshine on Leith (2013) based on the music of Scottish band The Proclaimers, and British biographical sports comedy-drama film Eddie the Eagle (2016), which starred Rocketman’s own Taron Egerton. Although in strictly generic terms, then, Bohemian Rhapsody might ultimately be a better musical and Rocketman a better biopic, what I am particularly interested in here is how both feature films mine the possibilities of digital technology to recreate live concerts, large-scale musical events and performances that have gone down in pop culture history for their size and spectacle. Queen’s iconic Live Aid set in July 1985 and Elton John’s performance across two shows at the Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles in October 1975 - events that also featured heavily in the promotional material for the films (Fig. 1) - are here reconjured through digital visual effects in ways that exploit computer animation’s longstanding ability to represent masses and multitudes.

Queen - Live Aid (1985).

Bohemian Rhapsody both begins and ends at Wembley Stadium. The film’s opening sequence - set to the refrain of Queen’s 1976 song “Somebody to Love” from their album A Day at the Races - takes in the bustling crowds both inside and outside the Sir John William Simpson and Maxwell Ayrton-designed stadium in the lead-up to the band’s momentous 22-minute set (see left). Cross-cutting between Mercury’s personal preparations (crucially, his moustache trimming), the rigging of the stage, and the throng of crowds that descend up Wembley way, Bohemian Rhapsody stakes its claims for the power, pressures and preparations of a live performance. This supposed ‘liveness’ of the event is playfully signalled even before these opening images, firstly in the rerecording of the Twentieth-Century Fox logo now heard via electric guitar and bombastic drums by Brian May and Roger Taylor, and then again through the humming sound of crowds and Mercury’s signature vocal play that runs over the Regency logo soon after. Yet when the film proper starts and as the curtain is pulled back so that Queen can finally enter the Wembley stage, it is the camera that is left to make a solo appearance, moving forward to receive the acclaim of the crowd while Freddie, Brian, Roger and bassist John Deacon stay out of shot. Taking to the stage, the camera slowly tracks forward to capture the waiting audience, then tilts up almost imperceptibly to allow a lens flare to creep into the top left of the shot (Fig. 2). A similar visual effect occurs in the more recent Rocketman. Two-thirds into the film, a disoriented Elton (Egerton) attempts suicide during a party, consuming a cocktail of drugs and alcohol before throwing himself into his swimming pool. Reeling from the physical and emotional abuse inflicted by his manager John Reid (Richard Madden), Elton floats down into the depths of the pool (confronted by a piano-playing hallucination of his child self). He is then rescued by medical staff, his stomach pumped on the move, and given a (literal) shot of something in the arm, ready to be thrust onstage at the Dodger Stadium (Fig. 3). Vulture’s Chris Lee notes that the power of this “visually sumptuous” scene in Rocketman is that it transforms Elton John “from unclothed hospital patient to sequined stadium megastar” (2019). Once again, the liveness of Elton’s standout performance is formally registered through the small detail of a lens flare, as stage lights refract and bisect the screen upon Elton’s appearance and immediate playing up to the crowd. As Elton gestures to the excitable mob, he moves atop his piano, before hitting a baseball out of the stadium to rapturous applause. Staying seated for only a few moments, Elton’s drug-induced delirium seems to take hold, and he unexpectedly begins to smoke from the feet, suddenly taking off into the skies above. He is, afterall, a rocket man.

Fig. 2 - The camera takes to the stage in Bohemian Rhapsody, complete with lens flare.

Fig. 3 - Elton John (Taron Egerton) performs to the digital crowd in Rocketman (Dexter Fletcher, 2019).

Both Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman make clear use of photorealist digital aesthetics in their concert scenes as part of their feats of impersonation. Firstly, the use of lens flare at the start of these live performances is a crucial detail that visually (if erroneously) marks out the frustrating fallability of live recording whilst at the same time maintaining the illusion of photographic reality. As Lisa Purse explains, “digitally generated” lens flares are a staple of contemporary cinema often “included as an homage to particular eras of celluloid cinema” (2013: 41). This creative treatment and reproduction of analogue or lens-based media in Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman via digital lens flares makes a spectacle out of indexicality, crafting “photoreal” digital images that behave as if they were filmed, when in reality they were not. William Brown explains that “Digital images are made not to look like reality, but like photographs of reality. We can read photorealism, then, as being firstly an affirmation of the simulacral nature of digital images: they look not like original reality, or real life, but like copies of that reality, i.e. like photographs, which makes digital images like copies of copies” (2013: 27). The turn to VFX allows for a further doubling of graphic authenticity in these sequences, a pictorial imitation that moves beyond the simulation of human performance by Rami Malek and Egerton and into the replication of the camera apparatus itself, including its fragility as recording equipment.

Each film’s adoption of photorealist credentials in their concert scenes allow the flaws of live-action cinema to be co-opted as a flourish, which in turn preserve the digital illusion. But the impact of these lens flares is equally in service of veiling, insofar as “the impression [is created] that the digital elements of the frame are profilmic events occurring in the space in front of the camera” (Purse, 2013: 7). This borrowing of one medium by another in Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman is part of a deception that allows their extensive computer-generated crowd scenes to pass themselves off as pro-filmically real. The lens flare thus authorises and qualifies virtual (and in this case, ‘historical’) imagery as nonetheless present and ready to be captured. In the case of Rocketman, the Cinesite Studios utilised digital compositing and 3D modelling to augment the fantasy of Elton John’s many live shows, including the dizzying “Pinball Wizard” performance in the film in which a camera rapidly rotates around an ever-changing Elton, and the Dodger Stadium sequence (see below). As the Cinesite website explains of the Dodger Stadium effects, “Because minimal perspective shifts were required, the crowd was created using a sprite system and people were layered on multiple cards placed into the shots. There were two shoots for the audience. The first included about 60 people wearing a single costume and the second 40 people in two costumes each, so Cinesite’s visual effects team had a good number of people to populate the cards.” The faithful recreation of the Dodger Stadium in Rocketman was, however, not the first time an Elton John crowd was digitally-simulated. The sequence in Fletcher’s 2019 film finds a parallel in the Christmas John Lewis advert, which served as an official teaser trailer for Rocketman in charting backwards the life of Elton John using sophisticated digital de-aging effects. Yet the advert also reproduced another of the singer’s concerts as part of the spectacle of immersive live music (Fig. 4).

Cinesite's visual effects - Rocketman.

Fig. 4 - Elton John performs for the crowd in the 2018 John Lewis Christmas television advert “The Boy and The Piano.”

Fig. 5 - The spectacle of Live Aid in Bohemian Rhapsody.

Fig. 6 - Greenscreen technology builds the digital crowd in Bohemian Rhapsody.

Fig. 7 - Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek) not quite in the virtual Wembley Stadium.

In Bohemian Rhapsody too, crowds play a prominent role in determining the spectacle and celebrity of its protagonist. Following the film’s opening sequence that tantalisingly presents the Live Aid audience (only to transport the action back to seventies London), the climax of the film once again returns us to Wembley Stadium. Here Farrokh Bulsara is Freddie Mercury (as played by Malek), with Queen’s quickfire performance of Bohemian Rhapsody, Radio Ga Ga, Hammer To Fall, Crazy Little Thing Called Love, We Will Rock You and We Are The Champions a greatest hits package set against the backdrop of an enthusiastic and emotional crowd (Fig. 5). In reality, however, the effect was created using scaled sets and greenscreen technology. Variety’s Iain Blair notes that while an “identical replica” of the Live Aid stage was built at Bovingdon Airfield outside London (replete with musical equipment and banners appropriate to the mid-1980s period), digital animation was utilised to essentially fill in the CG world (2018). The copying and pasting of real (if smaller) human crowds again via digital compositing awards the Live Aid sequence its monumentality by replicating the image of 70,000 concertgoers (see Figs. 6 and 7). Created by Double Negative studio, the virtual crowd control in Bohemian Rhapsody offer a counterpoint the highly individualistic journey of Farrokh to his ascension (and climactic coronation) as Freddie, emphasising personal triumph through the gathering of this most spectacular of crowds.

Central to the VFX armoury of both Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman, then, is ultimately what Kristen Whissel (2010) has termed the “digital multitude,” one of digital technology’s many “calling cards” and a staple of popular Hollywood cinema’s application of CGI. Whissel explains that Blockbuster film has increasingly combined with new forms of image-making to generate the reproduction of sweeping formations of digital figures, whose visual pleasure as an expansive group resides in their panoramic reach and recession far seemingly into the horizon. She notes:

Using motion capture, 3D animation simulation programs such as MASSIVE (Multiple Agent Simulation System in Virtual Environment), digital split-screen techniques, crowd simulation engines, motion trees and motion libraries, and particle animation programs such as Dynamation, visual effects houses including Weta Digital, London’s Moving Picture Company, Industrial Light and Magic, and Tippett Studio have created massive CG armies, swarms, armadas, and hordes composed of as many as hundreds of thousands of digital beings—what we might call the “digital multitude” (2010: 91).

From Troy (Wolfgang Petersen, 2004) to 300 (Zach Snyder, 2006), “the grand scale of digital multitudes (numbering in the tens and even hundreds of thousands) and the overwhelming force they imply, […] often emblematize the epic themes at work in contemporary visual effects films” (2010: 91). Moving beyond historical epics and into the realm of the biopic, the “digital multitude” in Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman provides the “overwhelming force” that fully supports Freddie and Elton’s narrative ‘resistance’ following their fall (literalised, of course, in Elton’s swimming pool descent). In an Photoshop era where Presidential inauguration crowds can be edited and cropped, the digital simulation and enhancement of multitudes provides each film with “astonishing visual and spatial articulations of temporal/historical concepts” (Whissel 2010: 102). The multitude in these scenes also enforces the historical specificity of the period, providing a moment of collective euphoria at a time and place no longer present. Indeed, the images of Wembley and the Dodger Stadium presented in the film occur prior to their more recent renovations, thereby offering the biopic an authenticity of place that plays out through the persuasive digital construction of its fictional world. It is clear, then, that the spectatorial impact of Bohemian Rhapsody’s “simulacral” Live Aid sequence, or even Rocketman’s digital simulation of the Dodger Stadium crowd, extends further beyond the mimicry, authenticity and question of fidelity that traditionally accompanies those films that dip their toe into the biopic genre (Vidal and Brown 2013). There is also something to be said for “photorealism” whose visual style is (for Brown) a “copy of a copy”, and the ways in which the biopic is likewise an imaginary history of a constructed figure, or a conceptual articulation of a ‘star’ themselves detached from the real. Yet it is the use of computer-generated imagery that is striking here. Computer graphics disclose a strongly technological dimension to the biopic as a genre of representation, with the digital serving to nuance its repeating narrative formula of miracle and tragedy by formally providing - in the case of its crowds - real strength in numbers.

**Article published: March 27, 2020**

References

Blair, Iain. 2018. “How Bohemian Rhapsody Recreated 1985’s Live Aid,” Variety (November 2, 2018), available at: https://variety.com/2018/film/news/how-bohemian-rhapsody-recreated-live-aid-1203015841/.

Bradshaw, Peter. 2019. “Rocketman review – Elton John biopic is better at the tiaras than the tantrums,” The Guardian (May 16, 2019), available at: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/may/16/rocketman-review-elton-john-biopic-thats-better-at-the-tiaras-than-the-tantrums.

Brown, William.2013. Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age. New York: Bergahn Books.

Lee, Chris. 2019. “Rocketman’s Wildest Scene Ends at Dodger Stadium. Here’s How Director Fletcher Made It Work,” Vulture (June 1, 2019), available at: https://www.vulture.com/2019/06/inside-rocketmans-absolutely-wild-dodgers-stadium-scene.html.

O’Malley, Sheila. 2018. “Bohemian Rhapsody,” RogerEbert.com (November 2, 2018), available at: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/bohemian-rhapsody-2018.

Purse, Lisa. 2013. Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Vidal, Belén and Tom Brown (eds.). 2013. The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture. London: Routledge.

Whissel, Kristen. 2010. “The Digital Multitude,” Cinema Journal 49, no. 4: 90-110.