Marie Antoinette is not there…

“Identities are mobile, a becoming rather than a being” (Patricia Pisters, 175)

“Most of the stories we know about her come from other people’s perceptions of her. I was much less interested in the political and historical views of her and more in her personal experience. ” – Sophia Coppola, interview by Emanuel Levy

In high school, I spent some time in France on exchange. Forgive me, I went to a private school. Our French teacher took us on a day trip to Versailles and while we were wandering the gardens, she told us the story of Marie Antoinette: Spoilt, snobbish, so disdainful of the plight of her people that she would spend days in her pretend village at Versailles pretending to be a commoner. When confronted with the truth that her subjects had no bread to eat, she said, “Let them eat cake”.

That stayed with me and that narrative still persists today.

From Wikipedia:

Even during her life, she was both a popular icon of goodness and a symbol of everything wrong with the French monarchy, the latter being a view that has persisted to this day far stronger than the former. Some contemporary sources, such as Mary Wollstonecraft^[99] and Thomas Jefferson^[100] place the blame of the French Revolution and the subsequent Reign of Terror squarely on Marie Antoinette’s shoulders… Immediately after her death, the picture painted by the libelles of the queen was general held as the “correct” view of Marie Antoinette for many years, as the news of her execution was received with joy by the French populace, and the libelles themselves did not stop circulating even after her death.^[102]

Marie Antoinette has been described as a “prison film” by J Hoberman at Village Voice, while Felicity similarly titled her blog post on Marie Antoinette, “A Girl in a Cage“. The cage/prison they are referring to may be the social constraints Marie Antoinette found herself under at Versailles but it might also refer to history. History has pinned down the historical figure, Marie Antoinette, as a symbol of bourgeois decadence. Typical that his-tory would pin that weight onto a woman. (Have I scored points with the feminists? Thank you very much). Marie Antoinette is, or was, trapped by history’s patriarchal narrative.

But why bring patriarchy into it? Bob Dylan is/has suffered from the same problem as Marie Antoinette (i.e. pin him down as being, not becoming) as is evident in Martin Scorsese’s doco, No Direction Home, and these trailers for the awesome looking biopic from Todd Haynes, I’m Not There:

Quoted from the trailer (and presumably Bob Dylan. Oh I’m sorry, “Bob Dylan”):

People are always talking about freedom. Freedom to live a certain way. Of course, the more you live a certain way, the less it feels like freedom. Me, I can change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else.

ON PATRICIA PISTERS’ (DE)TERRITORIALIZING FORCES…

Pisters argues that music “offers a key to identity” not because it reflects them but because it forms them (175). She then borrows from Deleuze and Guattari (at page 188):

They consider sound in its potential force to engender all kinds of molecular becomings. Furthermore, an important aspect of music is its power to create territories and, by the same token, its power to deterritorialize… Deterritorializing forces allow music and sound to become great lines of flight, but the equally great territorializing force also allows sound easily to become fascistic.

The territorializing force has 3 aspects: Forces of chaos, terrestrial forces, and cosmic forces.

• Forces of chaos relates to the lulling function of film sound.
• Terrestrial forces relates to the creating of a “home” or at least a recognizable environment.
• Cosmic forces relates to the opening of the home, the image, to something beyond.

The trailer for I’m Not There is interesting because the main Bob Dylan tune they use is Like a Rolling Stone, a song that marked a defining change in Dylan’s career. It deterritorialised “Bob Dylan music”. People were so resistant that a crowd booed his first performance with a rock band at the Newport Music Festival because they felt it to be a betrayal to the protest folk music he had become famous for, become a messiah for, become a symbol for.

Link: DYLAN GOES ELECTRIC

What were people booing for? Because they had a preconceived idea of Bob Dylan. They didn’t want to see Bob Dylan whose identity was mobile and who strived for the freedom to be anyway he wanted. They wanted to see their idea of “Bob Dylan”. And the sound of folk music had a territorializing force too. It situated the figure of Bob Dylan in an identity that the fans were comfortable with and identified with: the political, folk-singer hero. The electric guitars, the drums, and Bob Dylan’s body in the midst of it all – this all served to break down Dylan’s established persona, or if we use Pisters’ terms, it provided a great line of flight. Not only Dylan changed, but the audience’s perception of him changed, so in a way they were changed too.

This is allows me to make a neat analogy to the reception of Marie Antoinette at the Cannes film festival.

From the New York Times:

CANNES, France, May 24 — The first sounds you hear in “Marie Antoinette” are the abrasive guitar chords of the great British post-punk band Gang of Four. The effect may be jarring; this is not the kind of thing you normally associate with the 18th century. But the song turns out to be bracingly apt.

The applause after the press screening Wednesday morning — there was some! — was mingled with boos, perhaps from die-hard republicans (in the French rather than the American sense) offended by Sofia Coppola’s insufficiently critical view of the ancien régime in its terminal decadence.

Sophia Coppola on MSNBC in response to the booing:

“We always knew that the French are protective of their history, and that’s one of the challenges,” Coppola, 35, told The Associated Press. “But I wanted to show it in France first, because we made it here and it takes place here.”

Also see USA Today’s story: Coppola’s movie booed at Cannes: Was something lost in translation?

From Dave Calhoun at TimeOut:

Coppola’s film may give fashion fans and music video heads cause to celebrate, but it will leave anyone looking for a strong perspective on the life of Marie Antoinette severely disappointed. She’s not interested in looking beyond the walls of the palace, in considering this queen in any critical depth. Ultimately, considering Coppola’s attempt to shoe-horn the French revolution into the film’s last ten minutes, her disengagement is more than lazy; it’s a little offensive. It may be hip, but it ain’t history.

From James Rocchi at Cinematical:

Imagine that you are a 14-year-old girl, part of a wealthy and powerful family, and you’re sent to a foreign land, to marry a man you’ve never met in the name of peace and power. Everything is foreign to you: The codes, the rituals, the etiquette. And you’re saddled with a single expectation: Produce a son who will be the heir to the throne; everything else you might do or might want is irrelevant. This is Marie Antoinette’s story.

Unfortunately, it’s not the story in Marie Antoinette – or, rather, while those elements are in Sofia Coppola’s new film about the historic French Queen, they’re not its focus. Actually, the question of what, exactly, is Coppola’s focus is a good one

The mistake that all these writers make is to assume that there is a “point” to any one person’s life, that there is a “true history” with a “strong perspective”. They assume that Marie Antoinette is the story of the French Revolution or that Marie Antoinette is the  story of a girl under the strictures of court life feeling the pressure of having to bear an heir. In Coppola’s film, Marie Antoinette avoids being either of these things. Or, she is all of these things and at the same time, she is none of these things. In fact, when Rocchi asks, what is Coppola’s focus?, the answer is that Marie Antoinette’s lack of focus is the film’s focus. Marie Antoinette is many things: captured princess, party animal, despairing, rapturous, devoted wife, adulterer, shallow, philosophical, materialistic, generous…

(great scene in the movie: Marie Antoinette’s friends are bickering. One calls the other a “prude”. The other responds with “slut”. Marie Antoinette gazes on the hot Swedish army dude she has just bedded…)

So what part does the music play in all this? Let’s consider the following scene:

The crashing beat of Siouxsie and the Banshees’s Hong Kong Garden has a territorial force. The use of modern pop music (rock, post-punk, new romantic, shoegazer) is creating a “home” for the youth. The music marks the young person’s territory as a hedonistic place free of protocol and in doing so creates a collective identity (that is extremely attractive to me). As a young, pop-savvy spectator (I guess the target demographic for this kind of film), I became swept up in the music as it has personal relevance to me and I became more involved, identified with, the action on the screen. My identity was being subtly formed (I say “subtly” because I don’t want it to sound like the movie was life-changing) by the music in conjunction with image so that I became involved in the lives of historical teenagers from 18th-Century France. (For me, the success of the film is that I was emotionally affected by the anachronistic nature, unlike in A Knight’s Tale.)

Of course, the soundtrack also has a de-territorializing affect. It de-territorialises the “historic drama”, “Marie Antoinette” and on a larger scale, “history”. But I have addressed this above.

Also, what the aesthetic of Marie Antoinette’s soundtrack achieves is to provide a modern filter on history. It’s an acknowledgement that what we are seeing isn’t factual reality, as history often pertains to be.

On the subject of history, from Ranciere’s “Thinking between disciplines: an aesthetics of knowledge”:

We know how the historical discipline, for more than a century, has declared itself in revolution. It has thus proclaimed its separation from chronicle-history which attached itself to facts about great men and to the documents written by their chroniclers, secretaries and ambassadors, and by this to devote themselves to material facts and long periods of the time in the life of common people. They have thus related its scientific status to a certain democracy. However, it is clear that this democracy is also one democracy opposed to another. It opposes the material reality of long cycles of life to the agitations which disturb the surface

It confirms that the true time of the builder is the long time of life which reproduces itself, and not the suspended time of aesthetic experience, and that towards which it makes time deviate: the ‘short’ time, the ‘ephemeral’ time of actors in the public sphere. It functions as an ethical principle of adherence, defining what can be felt and thought by the occupants of a space and a time.

The feelings and thoughts of Marie Antoinette have often been defined in relation to the French Revolution, so much so that Coppola’s attempts to explore other aspects of her were deemed “offensive”. Marie Antoinette’s avoids the trappings of history to engage an immersive, dream-like aesthetic certainly personal to Coppola, that creates an awareness of the Queen’s fluid and mutable identity. She refuses to be defined.