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Article Excerpt
This essay challenges the prevailing notion of popular culture as debased by interrogating the fraught relationship with commodity culture Baz Luhrmann's 2001 Moulin Rouge shares with its reviewers.
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Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge, hailed by its supporters as the triumphant remake of the movie musical (Wilmington; Talen), has also drawn extensive criticism for a number of its musical choices, particularly its use of a pastiche of popular songs from the 1890s to the present. The litany of complaints regarding the songs includes charges that they are borrowed and consequently unoriginal (Rudolph); composite and as such fragmented and incomplete; already popular and therefore commercial panders; MTV-edited and thus all of the above (Leydon; Noh; Keough). In one form of trivializing Moulin Rouge, critics took delight in compiling lists of the film's musical predecessors of far superior quality, citing Giuseppe Verdi and Francesco Piave's 1853 La Traviata as well as Giacomo Puccini's 1896 La Boheme as authentic examples of song fusing with drama (see for example, French; Leydon; Burns; McCarthy; Gioia; Sweitek; Andersson). Quite apart from the twin, prosaic objections to this line of reasoning--that both operas involve generic departure from the highly successful literature that they adapted for the operatic stage, and that Moulin Rouge follows in this tradition of reforming the familiar--the reviews of Luhrmann's film troubled me for two reasons: their insinuations of the movie's commercial appeal as a form of prostitution and their relative indifference to the ideologies at work in this 2001 re-presentation of the Victorian prostitute, alluring and fatally diseased, and her English, middle-class lover who has come to a bohemian section of Paris hoping for creative inspiration and passion. (Rudolph's and Andersson's reviews constitute two notable exceptions.)
The fin-de-siecle setting of Moulin Rouge borrows extensively from La Boheme (itself derived from Henri Murger's novel Scenes de la vie de Boheme) with its antiestablishment, penurious artists, sexually uninhibited women, and conflicted love affairs. Blazoning the centrality of La Boheme-inspired passion that "resist[s] bourgeois respectability" (Hutcheon and Hutcheon 49), Luhrmann literally places his protagonist Christian under "a huge, lipstick-red, neon sign announcing L'Amour" (Gioia). Affixed to the facade of Christian's Parisian boardinghouse, this sign is a recreation of one that Luhrmann used when he directed a Sydney opera production of La Boheme (Gioia). Yet his cinematic tribute to the vitality and the difficulties of bohemian existence becomes increasingly vexed as it merges with and, at points, becomes subsumed by plot entanglements and ideologies derived from Verdi and Piave's La Traviata. Unlike La Boheme, La Traviata, its source play La dame aux camellias (by Alexandre Dumas, fils), and Moulin Rouge complicate their doomed romances with class tensions between the principals, a middle-class man and a courtesan. While La Boheme's Mime and Musetta become involved with wealthy, upper-class men, neither the women nor their artist lovers classify these relationships as a form of prostitution. By contrast, Moulin Rouge repeats La Traviata's intent scrutiny of a woman whose sexual employment and cultural identity have been conflated, focussing on the prostitute as a means to interrogate contemporary society's fraught treatment of the commercial.
Like La Traviata, Moulin Rouge sets to affecting music the tale of a courtesan, Satine, who is at once too available and elusive--a problem designated by the multiple meanings of "consumption," which suggests her disease and profession. The middle- and upper-class men who invest in her affirm her social and economic worth, while her diseased state simultaneously allows for moral qualifications that stymie her entrance to the "respectable" classes and for temporal limits to the period in which she may be consumed: following the traditional prostitute narrative, Satine's concludes with her death. Recently, critics such as Lynda Nead and Charles Bernheimer have commented insightfully on the misogynistic tendencies inherent in Victorian representations of the common prostitute or courtesan and our continued devaluation of her precisely because she remains useful to a patriarchal structure. Yet these vicious repetitions also call attention to the problematic position of the spectator. The musical, though at several points it inadvertently models Western culture's conflicted engagement with the commercial, does not simply endorse Victorian or twenty-first century readings of the prostitute as abject; instead it employs the singing prostitute as a metaphor of a culture of consuming in part to evaluate current uses of the commercial. In Moulin Rouge, the diseased prostitute who sings affecting music references the very seductiveness and trap of consumer culture, which paradoxically attempts to purchase that which lies outside of symbolic exchange: "truth, beauty, freedom, and, above all, love" (to cite the credo of Moulin Rouge's bohemians). Satirical and self-conscious of its own placement in commodity culture, Moulin Rouge recycles the plot of La Traviata along with twentieth-century popular tunes as a challenge to contemporary perceptions and practices: that is, to the current perpetuation of nineteenth-century ideological fictions of the commercial in which it figures alternately and inconsistently as either the debased or the transcendent. The Romantics (among others) have left us a critical legacy targeting commercial culture as a prime ill of modern society, while middle-class success stories have virtually conflated material success and moral superiority (Armstrong 10; Gilmour 9; McKeon 155). Both approaches prove insufficient when treating Luhrmann's pastiche of popular love songs and his represented courtesan, for Moulin Rouge strives--if not always successfully--to move beyond unproductive binaries.
The film's music, largely songs of desire, and its overt focus on the prostitute who longs for legitimacy--first as an actress and then as an emotionally rather than economically motivated lover--call attention to troubling forms of commodification. This interconnection dominates from the initial appearance of Satine, the so-called "Sparkling Diamond" whose loss of her most private jewel has enhanced her value in the demi-monde and enabled her to petition openly for the sponsorship of wealthy men in her rendition of "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend." That she does so in a plot that references the "high" culture of opera and through song already marked by the seductiveness and controversy of Marilyn Monroe (in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) and Madonna (in the "Material Girl" video) effectively places Satine's portrayed audience, composed entirely of rapt men, in the context of the twenty-first-century audience who may recognize the song's--and singers'--hotly debated histories. These predecessors have figured in popular and critical writing as everything from savvy entrepreneurs who coolly manipulate their own postmodern images to first-class sluts whose careers rely on the relentlessly displayed body as a "paragon of [...] sexual availability" (Cohen 262-63; see also Faith; Tezlaff; Bordo; Schwichtenberg). These are the Material Girls who croon, "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend," or "the boy with the cold hard cash / Is always Mister Right." Their self-conscious performances in a visual economy at once identify them as players in the capitalist market place, as the commodities on offer, as the labour necessary to commodity production, and as highly fashionable consumers (Nead 99; Bernheimer 90-96). According to Lynda Nead, such performances have excited social unease since the nineteenth century as much for their economic transgressions as for their purported ethical deviancy. Specifically addressing the (Victorian) prostitute, Nead asserts:
She offers for sale a commodity which can never be completely possessed by...
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