Moulin Rouge,
the Erasure of History, and the Disneyfication of the Avant Garde
by Lael
Ewy
At best Moulin Rouge is a lot of fun. At worst it represents
the erasure of history. Moulin Rouge is set in the Paris of 1900--at
least ostensibly it is. The actual Paris of 1900 is the Paris of Satie,
the Paris of Ravel, of Debussy. The actual Paris of 1900 is the Paris
of Matisse, and at least for part of the year, the Paris of Picasso.
This is very fertile ground for a love story, a musical, anything,
really. Puccini found it good enough for La boheme, after all.
What we get in Moulin Rouge, though, is a Paris of 1900 filtered
through the myopia of late 20th Century pop culture, especially pop
music. We get an anachronistic melange of Madonna and Elton John, of
Nirvana and Olivia Newton John.
In other words, it isn’t the Paris of 1900. It isn’t even
close.
Granted, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec shows up as a supporting character
and there is, in the film, a nightclub called Moulin Rouge from which
the film cribs its title. But other than that, and the ubiquitous absinthe,
there’s not much Parisy about Moulin Rouge the movie, much
less Paris, 1900. The character of Toulouse-Lautrec speaks vaguely of
the “Bohemian Revolution” but only long enough for the film
to make fun of it, and never in enough detail for either a credible
manifesto or a credible satire. And, of course, it has to be advocated
by Toulouse-Lautrec because Hollywood still thinks dwarves are funny,
especially dwarves with lisps.
So why does so little of the real Paris of 1900 appear in this film?
I have my suspicions that to use, say the music of Erik Satie, would
have been too “challenging” for contemporary audiences. It
may have been deemed out of the target demographic of the film, probably
“indie” movie buffs in the 19-30 range whose introduction
to the avant-garde was Trainspotting. A movie about a writer in Paris
that actually dealt with other writers who were really there, other
artists who didn’t have the luck to be born lisping dwarves, would
never have been made. I mean, who would go to see it? Old people?
The problem, of course, with always making things people can “relate”
to, is that in constantly recycling what we know, we fail to ever learn
or be challenged by anything new, even if that thing, new to our experience,
is past history. We are never able to deal with anything but that which
is most immediately known or knowable to us. So Debussy is substituted
with the Doors. And there is nothing new in Moulin Rouge: the
plot is the standard “hooker with a heart of gold,” the soundtrack,
as has been noted, is almost completely pop songs from the past 40 years,
and many of the scenes themselves are recycled, most obviously from
Singin’ in the Rain and Nirvana’s “Smells Like
Teen Spirit” video.
I suppose we could chalk this up to po-mo video sampling. We could
call this the filmic version of hip-hop. But it follows a trend that
began for many viewers of Moulin Rouge with the Disney films
of the ‘80s and ‘90s: it takes perfectly legitimate literature
and history and washes it with contemporary good feelings to gain a
new audience. Disney has been cleaning up some really Grimm fairy tales
since Snow White. But it went beyond itself with The Little
Mermaid, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and the myth of Hercules,
turning heart-wrenching tales of star-crossed loves, tales, some clearly
aimed at children, all clearly challenging to Romantic notions about
love, into cute little animations embracing just such values. This same
trend is reflected in advertising where Janis Joplin’s song decrying
the materialism of Mercedes Benz ownership is used to sell that very
marque.
Let me be clear: this isn’t “irony,” and it gives cynicism
a bad name. For this sort of thing to be ironic it must be understood
so by its audience, and if it is, it’s self-defeating: to make
fun of materialism while you try to sell Mercedeses with a song that
makes fun of materialism, tells your audience not to buy your car. The
most likely explanation is that the ad makes fun of the song, saying,
in essence, “Remember back when we were idealistic and thought
materialism was bad? How foolish we were!” In other words, this
is advertising critiquing art, advertising embracing, and indeed celebrating,
superficiality and dumbness. It is, in other words, meant to make the
viewer more comfortable in having sold out (No values? Well, at least
you’ve still got a bigass luxury car all your friends will be envious
of!). The ad says it’s ok to be a capitalist pig since the Mercedes
Benz company gave you permission to do so. It makes palatable a difficult
problem in social ethics at the personal level.
In the same way, then, Moulin Rouge glosses over the more difficult
aspects of Paris in 1900, the deep changes in culture, the clash (who
says it doesn’t speak to today?) of high and low art that sent
spasms through painting, sculpture, music, writing, and replaces it
with, well, with just low art. If Ubu Roi made low culture avant
garde, Moulin Rouge makes the avant garde Disney. In the same
way that the millions who grew up with Disney’s version of Grimm,
of Hans Christian Anderson, of Greek mythology will never know the real
things with all their depth and terror, so the millions who know Janis
Joplin’s song only from the ad will never know the real anger and
disappointment at the heart of the satire. They may never even understand
that it is satire, and that’s as great a loss as anything.
In like style, the WB Network has recently begun airing a set of promo
spots in which The Who’s “My Generation” is redone hip-hop
style to promote shows aimed at the so-called “Y” generation--those
born post 1976. Of course, this generation will never know the original,
don’t remember The Who, and will never understand the song not
merely as an anthem of a particular set of people, but as a meaningful
part of history. It will only be a jingle to them, the WB’s song
to sling its own shows, made “relevant” with a sampled beat
and an inner-city rap-type delivery. They will never understand a generation
disillusioned with the powers that were, angry at their war, at their
values, at their lifestyle. They will understand that it’s just
another ad in an endless wash of ads in which they’re virtually
dissolved.
What’s lost here is history. History tells us what is here, what
it means, how it got here, and hints as to what should be done with
it. With every cycling of culture, a little meaning is lost, the sense
of the song falls away, the context of the book is forgotten, the footnotes
removed. With each transvaluation of culture, which is what Daimler
Chrysler has done in its ad, what Disney has done, what Moulin Rouge
does, history is erased, meaning turns in on itself is repolarized and
destroyed. It is worse than the old Soviet practice of writing the unfavored
out of the history books since the persona non grata were obvious in
their absence, since the practice is blatant and bold. What Moulin
Rouge does, however, is much more insidious: it resells you Paris,
1900, gutting it of what was there and replacing it with what wasn’t,
paternalistically, to “reach” you, to “relate.”
It gives you just enough to make you think it’s somehow fantasy,
but fantasy lives on its own terms, uncompromisingly. It does not need
to relate to you. This is why Dada and Surrealism continue to challenge:
they make no attempt to accommodate your experience and are all their
own. Fantasy creates history; Moulin Rouge replaces it. And with
this we get back to the real Paris of 1900, fantastic, challenging,
new.
