Skip to main content

Moulin Rouge on its 10th Anniversary: Film Platypus

The visually stunning film "Moulin Rouge" was released at the turn of this past century and was set exactly one-hundred years prior.  I was in college at the time of its release and I remember "Moulin Rouge" taking the film majors by storm.  Like the oily Ziedler, it had them all exclaiming "Spectacular! Spectacular!"  Ten years  and a decade of advance in visual effects later, I was curious to see how the film has held up.  Upon viewing it again, "Moulin Rouge" is still the singular sensational cinematic event it was when it first hit the screen.

After being visually blown away and rather embarrassed by all the pseudo-Victorian naughtiness I had forgotten about (PG-13?  Really?  PG 13?!?) I had to sit down and ask what made this eclectic musical and cinematic collage work?  After all, all the costumes are period perfect, but the music is a hodge-podge of contemporary rock songs with a nod to Rodgers and Hammerstein and a few shots at Walt Disney (I've always thought Tinker Bell fit better into the world of absinthe and show girls than in a kids movie).  Well the cliched answer would be that it had a great story.  That's true.  It had a good story: the myth of Orpheus retold (see the nod to the Opera in the song "Spectacular!  Spectacular!").  What really makes the film work is that it finds a way to merge its story perfectly with its eclectic visual and musical style in a way that strikes a deep cord with the modern mind.

In his revolutionary poem "The Wasteland," T.S. Eliot correctly identifies the key component of the modern mind: Fragmentation.  The old world of Europe's Enlightenment Liberalism was blown to pieces on the battlefields of World War I and we've been struggling ever since to pick those bits up and arrange them again into a coherent worldview.  Tennyson foresaw this fragmentation coming in the mid-eighteen century when he hoped that Victorian zeal would help "mind and soul according well make one music as before".  Later, W.B. Yates would prognosticate the failure of that hope claiming "the center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world".  Still, the poets and authors tried to hold our world together with their dreams of "Truth, Beauty, Freedom, and most of all Love."  "Moulin Rouge" is a retrospect on a century of Bohemian effort to put Humpty-Dumpty together again.  The sheer weight of the catastrophe has ground up countless young idealists like the film's focal character, Christian, but we keep trying.  Why?  Why not give in to despair and accept the hollow and vicious pornified world of Ziedler's entertainment empire?  As the diminutive Henri tells Christian in the film:  "Christian, you may see me only as a drunken, vice-ridden gnome whose friends are just pimps and girls from the brothels. But I know about art and love, if only because I long for it with every fiber of my being."  That is the cry of the modern world; we may be broken and empty, but we keep striving because we know that Beauty and Love are out there if only because our need for them.  This follows one of C.S. Lewis' arguments: if there is hunger, there must be food, if there is thirst, there must be drink, if their is a craving in us for something which the world cannot satisfy, there must be something beyond the world which can satisfy it.

"Moulin Rouge" is a film of pieces, little colored bits of glass all patched together, but the picture they form is the soul of Western Man.      

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Jessica Snell said…
Ah, thank you, James. I'm sure I watched it around the same time as you, and it stuck in my head as something both beautiful and disgusting . . . your blog does a great job of explaining both of those impressions.
5:50 PM
Jessica Snell said…
Oh, and you're ABSOLUTELY right about Tinkerbell.
5:53 PM
Emily (Laundry and Lullabies) said…
I loved this film, couldn't explain why, and spent quite awhile feeling profoundly guilty for liking something so obviously filled with depravity. James, your analysis is great, and helps me make sense of my own reaction.
8:35 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Platypus Reads Part XXVII

Thoughts after reading the "Iliad" to prepare a Greece unit for my students: -Hector is a jerk until he's dead. He even advocates the exposure of Achaean corpses and then has the cheek to turn around and ask Achilles to spare his. He rudely ignores Polydamas' prophecies and fights outside the gate to save his pride knowing full well what it will cost his family and city. After he's dead, he becomes a martyr for the cause. -Agamemnon has several moments of true leadership to balance out his pettiness. In this way, he's a haunting foil to Achilles: the two men are more alike than they want to acknowledge. -We see that Achilles is the better man at the funeral games of Patroclos. His lordliness, tact, and generosity there give us a window into Achilles before his fight with Agamemnon and the death of Patroclos consumed him. -Nestor is a boring, rambling, old man who's better days are far behind him, and yet every Achaean treats him with the upmo...
15 comments
Read more

California's Gods: Strange Platypus(es)

We've noticed lately a strange Californian dialectical twist: there, freeways take the definite article.  In other parts of the country one speaks of I 91 or 45 North.  In California, there's The 5, The 405, The 10.  Each of these freeways has its own quirks, a personality of sorts.  They aren't just stretches of pavement but presences, creatures that necessitate the definite article by their very individuality and uniqueness.  They are the angry gods to be worked, placated, feared, for without them life in California as we know it would cease.  Perhaps that's fitting for a land whose cities are named for saints and angels.  Mary may preside over the new pueblo of our lady of the angels, but the freeways slither like gigantic serpents through the waste places, malevolent spirits not yet trampled under foot.
9 comments
Read more

Seeing Beowulf Through Tolkien: The Platypus Reads Part CXCIX

After spending a few weeks wrestling with Tolkien's interpretation of Beowulf , I found myself sitting down and reading Seamus Heaney's translation of the text during a spare moment.  I came to the place where Beowulf presents Hrothgar with the hilt of the ancient sword that slew Grendel's mother.  Hrothgar looks down at the hilt with its ancient runes and carvings depicting the war between the giants and God and meditates on the fortunes of men.  In a flash of insight, I thought: this is the whole poem! Let me explain.  Tolkien believed that the genuine contribution of the Northern peoples to European culture was the theory of courage.  The Northern heroes, at their best, were men who fought for order against chaos -a battle they knew they were doomed to lose.  If they were true heroes, their souls would join the gods and aid them in the final battle against darkness and its monsters and again go down fighting, spitting in the face of the meaninglessness...
3 comments
Read more