Marie A: Big blade on a tiny neck

[chris]

I'm moving this tangent from the "Developing an Aesthetic for Pop Music" because I've got quite a bit to say about Miss Antoinette. Posted below are the comments up to this point. I'm licking my lips at what some of you might have to say about this spoiled aristocrat and her demise. But I will post at length sometime today... when I have a break at work.

In the meantime, have a cupcake.

[chris]

JEFF:

Last Slate link for the day:

www.slate.com/id/2141093/?nav=navoa
Better Than Prozac: Listening to New Order

[chris]

CHRIS:

Slight deviation based on that last link -- I disagree with his take on the Marie Antoinette trailer; I think the asynchronous aspect of it does not work at all. Oh, look, crazy, sexed-up teens are the same in any age -- happy on the outside, sad on the inside. Uh, no. Versailles + New Order = a ridiculous thing. There may have been other rock or pop songs that could have had the desired effect, but this wasn't it. If not for the possibility of seeing Kristen Dunst naked, I'd eschew this movie altogether just out of principle!

[chris]

JEFF:

"Versailles + New Order = a ridiculous thing."

O M G. I had not actually watched the trailer, but you are quite right. This looks like pretentious crap. I don’t really care for Dunst—though I did like her Mary in ESotSM. I don’t care for Ms. Coppola, either. I think Lost in Translation was wonderful, lightyears beyond Virgin Suicides. But her treatment of women bothers me. She seems to fetishize her female characters. They are too mysterious or too easily known, instead of being the authentic kind of muddle that we humans really are. If Coppola can deliver another film like LiT, then I will relent. But right now that one looks like a lucky fluke to me.


On to something stranger: Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna von Habsburg-Lorraine was the first historical figure that I really loathed. I was young--about 4th grade—but for a week or so, I remember just being filled with hatred toward her. Seems silly now, but it was quite vexing at the time. Now, of course, she seems like a victim of history. Her brand of frivolity and stupidity was just not suited to a time of bread shortages. Besides, most of the evil in the world has been done by right-handed men of at least 5'5''.

Still I remember staring at that picture in my parents' old Comptons. You know the one…



I knew she was rich, and that bothered me a little. But it was the way her hand sat upon the globe that really made me hate her. Here was an epitome of 18th century European beauty, and for about a week I dreamed of the mob chanting around the little cart as she went along to meet her fate. These dreams were frightening because I did not commonly wish death on anyone. I drew pictures of the guillotine at school, carefully tracing the slant of the blade.

I remember being angry with the way the encyclopedia defended her famous remark about baked goods: She was young. She never said it. Or if she did, “cake” meant something different back then. There was something monstrous and self-defeating in this defense.

Still, my little 4th grade mind wondered whether she really deserved to die. Marie never really cared about politics, which meant that she was more than a little oblivious to suffering. And that is the deepest definition of youth isn’t it: a life as yet untouched by tragedy.

What she became for me, though I’ve only just now realized it, was a symbol of the tragedy of prolonged youth, sort of an anti-Peter Pan. In her death was my own secret wish to grow up, to be recognized as the kind of person whose caring means something to others.

There is still that kind of luck. An unlucky person might be condemned to care for only a few cats. But others are blessed with opportunities to show their quality. May we ever.

Jeff

PS I learned my hatred of Andrew Jackson the same year (1979-1980), but that is an entirely different story, one that involves a puppet and a treasure map.

[chris]

Well, I had made this thread with the intention of writing about Marie, and I never got around to it. Here I go.

Jeff’s longish post about the most famous victim of the Reign of Terror really struck a chord with me, mainly because it reflected a very similar fascination I had when I was young. I read a lot about the French Revolution when I was in middle school, and I also read “A Tale of Two Cities,” and the act of executing the aristocracy in such a grisly manner just appealed to me in a primal way.

In thinking back on it and trying to figure out why, I can’t really offer a good explanation. What sticks out in my mind is the idea of these pristine people being thrown into dungeons, dragged through a gauntlet of angry, dirty peasants, mounted on a bloody chopping block, and then decapitated. The sullying of the pristine… The fact that it actually occurred and wasn’t just some fictional story makes it all the more appealing.

That’s pretty much in line with what Jeff describes, though the basis he describes seems to be more in the lower-class vengeance category. But my fascination starts to diverge from that point into something that was a little more disturbing, and still informs my general sexual fascinations today.

First off, it was only the women I got a kick out of imagining meeting their fate with the guillotine. Sure, sure, it fun to imagine Louis XVI losing his powdered head, but the real moment of fantastic ecstasy came when I imagined Marie and her innocent courtesans being dragged up and murdered. A lot of this, I’m sure, comes from an extrapolation of the “sullying of the pristine,” I just mentioned… the fact that these were the most beautiful women in the country, with tiny, lily-white necks… but if you break it down to Freudian brass tacks, what is getting my middle-school brain off is the violation of the feminine.

But it’s even worse than that. What was really doing it was not the dragging of these women through the streets, not the shaming and humiliation per se, but the actual brutal fact of their deaths. When I first read about how guillotines and executioner’s axes were never quite as sharp as they should have been, and how many executions required multiple passes of the blade… ooh boy, that fed many a sadistic fantasy. In my idealized version of the executions of French royalty, it took at least three goes to kill Marie Antoinette – the first one just lodges in her vertebrae, causing her tremendous dying agony as the guillotine is not-so-hurriedly reset; the second severs the spinal column, but stops at the throat, sending her body into horrific reflex spasms; and the third sending her head into the basket.

Oh yeah, it’s not nice, and pretty much as misogynistic as you can be. But that’s the mind of a pre-masturbatory boy for you. And Marie was hardly the only ill-fated female historical figure to be a part of my fantasies (Joan of Arc, Felicity and Perpetua, etc.)

But is it really different now? Well… yes and no. I can still relate to the things that made that story so titillating way back when. And depending on what we see in Sofia Coppola’s upcoming film, I’m sure I’ll get a bit of a twang down in the ol’ nether regions remembering past musings.

But this relic of my youth isn’t really a relic at all; it still lives on in strange ways in my adulthood. Whenever a woman is killed in a film (usually not just by a gunshot or car wreck or something quotidian, but something unusual), there’s something in me that gets, dare I say, uncomfortably aroused. Let me give you some examples:

1) The opening scene of “Jaws.” This is no surprise to anyone I’m sure; the scene uses the sexuality of the moment to great advantage.
2) The first scene of “Scream.” Yeah, it’s Drew Barrymore, but still…
3) When Sofie Fatale gets her arm sliced off in “Kill Bill, Vol. I.” And for that matter, when Gogo gets nailed.
4) It pains me to say this, but despite the total suckiness of the movie “Deep Blue Sea,” I will never quite forget the discomfiting rush I got first seeing the main female character get bitten in half, dragged through the water and then swallowed (but only after her disembodied legs jerk reflexively in the water).

I’m sure I’m forgetting something obvious but this isn’t meant to be an exclusive list by any stretch. But you get the idea – bloody, awful deaths of women.

But these are all fictional, and thus, on some level, safe. The historical figures add another element: reality. However, the separation of time makes it almost on the lines of fictional (tragedy + time = fantasy?)

So that begs the questions, what about present-day real-life? And where were you on the night of April 22 at around 1 a.m.? No, fortunately, there is a level of separation that allows me to understand that no, gruesome deaths are not cool in real-life. It’s a level of empathy, I think – the understanding that someone facing a horrible death is a human being not unlike the people that you care about…and not unlike you yourself. But again, the presence of historical fact complicates this… they were real people too…

But even with a healthy wall between fact and fiction, it’s clear that the fascination with the desecration of the feminine is widespread in our culture, even if it’s below the surface, and not just in the fictional. Throwing a dart at a random example: the Natalee Holloway nonsense. Another dart: anything involving Paris Hilton.

Well then, I think I’ve indicted myself enough for one post…

[jtmx1]

Chris,

I’ve been thinking about your Marie A. post for the last day. It was amazingly honest. After reading my post, you can decide whether I am able to reach the same depths. Most likely I'm not.

At first, I wondered whether my secret fascination with Marie's death was disguised hostility toward the feminine. I don’t really think so, though I may be wrong. Rather I think it has most to do with how we are supposed to treat those who are less wise or the even the ignorant parts of ourselves.

Louis XVI’s death didn’t affect me as much as Marie’s not because he was a man and/or king, but because I assumed that he was a conscious and willing participant in his situation.

Today I am not so sure that that makes him much less of a sympathetic figure, but as a child I reasoned that it made his death more deserved. On the other hand, Marie’s life was forced upon her in many ways. She had to eat in public, which she hated. She was surrounded by a way of life that she didn’t want. At the same time her taste for luxury and refinement would have been impossible without her position. She was objectively in a moral bind. My youthful hatred of her really stemmed from the fact that she was pretending this bind did not exist. That or she was simply too dull to realize it. Her femininity entered into this picture as my desire for her NOT to suffer. I identified with her because I, too, was ignorant and young. I was conflicted precisely because she was a woman about whom I felt deeply sympathetic.

As I’ve been mulling this over, I wonder whether this feeling is not also very hostile to women. My youthful idea was basically the chivalrous one: It was my job to be of service to women, to aid them in all ways at all times. This included the thought that I might have to save them from themselves. But, of course, this is to deny a person the freedom of winding up with her head on the block.

I don’t think that my thought is essentially one about women, though. My thoughts are about the moral responsibility that those who have some small wisdom should feel concerning those they would like to help. Marie brought this into focus for me because she was a woman, and I have always identified parts of myself with women, especially powerful women. In my youth, I was more of an activist on this account than I am now. Today, my consciousness is deeply informed by the movie “A River Runs Through It,” my favorite quote from which is:

“Each one of us here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing help, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don't know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them - we can love completely without complete understanding.”

My solution to this problem, the specific form of my love for others—which a close friend recently called inhuman—is to unify my intuitions, feelings, and thoughts as much as possible and then present them as suggestions about how one might live. People can take them or leave them, but I am at least honoring the love I have for people by putting as much of myself into my relations with them as I can. By doing this I am also opening up as much of myself as I can to their opinions and observations. Both parts are necessary I think, the courage to put yourself on the line and the humility to listen to and perhaps learn from others.

Marie didn’t have the second part. For me, she stands for the part of ourselves that needs to be saved. And I am just Christian enough to desire salvation whenever it can be had. In fact, I think I can formulate things more precisely: The Christian desire for salvation is expressed in just this kind of humility, the desire to be changed by something higher, truer, and deeper.

While our redeemable but unredeemed desires must be allowed to follow their own internal logic, they must also allow themselves to be informed by the deeper parts of ourselves. If they aren’t, then they aren’t really fully parts of ourselves. They exist as epiphenomena, like the foam on beer, and thus become so much less meaningful. It is strange to think that all our wanting could be in vain, and I think we could only arrive at such a conclusion after a too rigorous compartmentalization of the self. To a fourth-grader all these things run together like watercolors.

It is altogether strange for me to think that Marie A. plays any role at all in these thoughts. But historical fact says otherwise.

Jeff

PS I love this thread. I wish we had more like them. Perhaps this is what Tyler was after when he asked us to write about our personal stories.