Let them eat cake!

Next week the movie "Marie Antoinette" by Sophia Coppola will be released on DVD. I want to quickly point out that DVD release is for me the true release of a film because it is the only way I can ever see them thanks to having 2 young children. I am very excited to see this. Coppola, the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola (as well as the cousin of Jason Schwartzman who portrays King Louis XVI) seems to be a great choice to take on this misunderstood woman. Her last film, "Lost in Translation" was an excellent study in ambiguity. Pop culture suffers from the disease of melodrama. Life and the experiences that accompany it are continually over-simplified in order to please a mass-audience and make a profit. Often in reality it is not quite so easy to delineate between right/wrong, good/bad etc...Marie Antoinette is an excellent case in point. She is a woman who was vilified during her life, vilified in order to justify her death, and vilified since the end of her short time on earth. She has frequently been portrayed as a conniving, narcissistic, hedonistic traitor who profited from the sufferings of the French people and then plotted their overthrow with their bitter enemy Austria (her home-country). She is particularly well known for something she probably never said. The story goes that when confronted with the widespread hunger of her people due to a shortage of bread, she said "Qu'ils mangent de brioche" or "let them eat cake." There is no credible evidence to support this claim, but it has been used for a long time to help characterize her. Certainly she was ignorant of the needs of her people. There is probably good reason for this. But she was also a sad, lonely woman, a devoted wife and mother, and an innocent victim of a tragic revolution. When Marie was a teenager in Austria, she was betrothed to the heir to the Bourbon throne of France in order to bring peace between the two nations. She left her home weeping, never to see her family or her homeland again. At the border of France, she was met by an entourage representing the French monarch. As she was now to become the property of the French people, she was to leave her Austrian identity behind. As a symbol of this transition, the young girl was stripped at the border of her Austrian clothes. In view of everyone there, she was then dressed in French clothes as she took on a new identity. The people of France never forgave her of her ethnic identity as they would identify her for the duration of her life as "L'Autrichienne" or "The Austrian." The majority of her time as a princess and queen was spent within the sheltering confines of Versailles, where she had little opportunity to encounter the harsh deteriorating realities of life in France in the years prior to the Revolution. When she was first married, she did not immediately get pregnant. Apparently one of the two rulers had a medical condition that made sex very painful. Her sex life became the national joke (everything about her life was very public). When the Revolution broke out, she began to worry about the fate of her children. This was furthered upon the execution of her husband, her arrest, and the subsequent separation from her children. She suffered intense agony over her children's' safety. She even went before the Revolutionary government to beg to no avail for the lives of her children. Her hair began to turn white and even fall out. She experienced a medical condition that caused her continual bleeding. Eventually, she also was led to the guillotine and executed. Marie Antoinette possibly could have done more for her people. She probably was not very likable. But she was a devoted wife and mother. Her life and death are a great example of how melodrama often fails to capture reality. The arts should be able to invite us to navigate reality by portraying it as it is. The historic response to her is a good example of how our love for melodrama often bleeds into the way we view reality. I would argue this also happens in other areas, such as politics. Watch closely the way political parties market their candidates compared to others at political conventions. The major parties set up the electoral process as a melodrama. The same also goes for family life, sports, friendships, etc... In a movie, the creators of a film sculpt a fictitious world and the characters who inhabit it. Good guys and bad guys might make sense in those situations. But I don't see many of them in real life. What I see are people who are complicated mixtures of both good and bad, and are not too different from myself. I wish that we had more filmmakers such as Sophia Coppola, Wes Anderson, P.T. Andersen, or Quentin Tarrentino; artists who are willing to examine people as they really are through their medium. Perhaps if we the audience were willing to view people as they are then filmmakers could begin to portray them as such.