I was really intrigued by the question brought up in tute about whether Sofia Coppola is ignoring or misrepresenting or insulting the cultures she is supposedly filming in Marie Antoinette (and Lost in Translation). I agreed with people in class who said that she was not trying in the first place to give an accurate representation of the French Revolution or Marie Antoinette. Oddly enough this reminds me of another subject I’m taking, “Development and the Third World”. Chandra Mohanty, a feminist development theorist, once gave a “bias alert” of sorts before going on to explain her interpretation of studies of third world women (in Feminism Without Borders): “The maps I draw are necessarily anchored in my own discontinuous locations.” So are Coppola’s maps, so are everyone’s. That, after all, is why it’s called an aesthetic. It’s illogical to assume that filmmakers don’t have them too.
Of course, no one doubts that films are born with their own aesthetics. But what I like about Coppola is that she is so conscious of hers. She deliberately places sneakers and current music into Marie Antoinette, as if to say, “here, look, we are in the present day, don’t forget that we are in the present day” – she actually defines sneakers as modern (and defines us as modern) simply by putting them in the shot. Coppola makes no attempt to disguise Marie Antoinette as a period piece, because a period piece is impossible.
A continuous debate in “Development and the Third World” is whether tourism destroys local cultures. The whole argument is actually nil, because it assumes that culture is a static thing preserved in an amber jar, precious and defenseless – when this is so far from the actual case. Culture is constantly changing – culture is alive. Of course the presence of tourists alters the environment, but the environment was never pure to begin with. As Cohen and Kennedy state in Global Sociology, “there can be no such thing as ‘authenticity’, only ideas which always need to be reinterpreted in the present”. The same goes for Marie Antoinette. It would be ludicrous to assume that a movie set in the past is completely free of modern influences, and it’s more pretentious to attempt a movie that is so clean. Every time we look at history, we interpret it – and it functionally changes. Thus we’re better of looking this present-day prejudice head on rather than trying to claim that we are objectively looking at history. One way of doing this, of course, is to start from the present and work backwards – but when a teacher in my high school tried to teach his history class this way, he was fired. And it’s clear why – doing so breaks the mystique of The Glorified Past, reveals it as a construction of the present, bars it from ever justifying anything again.
In my personal experience growing up in Indonesia – and then moving to the U.S. – I’ve always found it more irritating, more insulting, when people who are clearly not Indonesian make statements or stories about Indonesia that they present as completely true, or when tourists really try to “assimilate” and then come home all tanned and supposedly Indonesian, as if one two-week vacation means they get bragging rights, means they “understand”. I’m less insulted by people who don’t try to hide that they do not understand the culture, do not know the history or the language, and are of a different culture – but go anyway. I like photo shoots of very white models in very un-white settings, wearing very white clothing. I don’t like photo shoots of supposedly “ethnic” models in supposedly “ethnic” settings, wearing supposedly “ethnic” clothing – everyone on the production team is white, the model is American, and yet they try to sell an authentic exoticism. I much prefer when everyone on the production team realizes and does not try to hide that they are not of the culture they are photographing.
That was a little haphazard – sorry. Basically, I support Coppola’s vision. I’m not a fan of Marie Antoinette the historical figure or of French history in general, and I came into the movie expecting to be annoyed and bored with a sort of quasi-BBC hoighty-toighty piece of French melodrama. When I liked the music being played, when it struck a chord in me, I started to like the movie, because it was taken out of the French context. It’s not French – it never could be – and I’m glad it doesn’t try. That’s Coppola’s right as an interpreter of the past: as she told one historical-accuracy-enthusiast, she put sneakers in “because she could”.
As for my own interpretation of Coppola’s interpretation of Antonia Fraser’s book of Marie Antoinette? The title of the post, that reminds me so much of the movie, is from a song called “Doll Parts”, by the band Hole: ” I am doll parts, dead skin, doll heart/ let’s dance all night for the rest of my life/… I want to be the girl with the most cake/ he only loves those things because he loves to see them break”. A ’90s song about grungy rock stars in L.A., but it fits with the movie, and why not? It even touches on the idea of the “imprisoned girl” as the theme of Coppola’s movies. I reinterpret Marie Antoinette, both the movie and the figure, as I watch Coppola’s movie, and I reinterpret it according to my own aesthetic. This is all a given anyway. I’m just saying it out loud.
