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Moulin Rouge! and the Undoing of Opera
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 January 2010
Abstract
While Moulin Rouge! (2001) riffs on and even exaggerates conventions from classic Hollywood backstage musicals, it owes a clear debt to an even earlier musico-dramatic genre – the opera. Combining operatic and film musical elements with those of pop videos, contemporary cinema and the rave scene, Baz Luhrmann's film engages with many of the thorny issues that have concerned opera critics of late, such as power, gender, exoticism, authorship, and identity construction and performance. The spotlight on the central love triangle of a consumptive courtesan, a writer and a wealthy patron makes possible a deeper scrutiny of traditional gender roles in the production and reception of Western art. The film's formulaic plot and the backstage musical format render transparent the commercial impetus behind the creative process and demystify the role of the Romantic artist-genius. Finally, the transnational and transhistorical elements of the film – a mostly Australian production team and crew, American and British pop songs, a Parisian backdrop, the Bollywood-inspired show-within-a-show, numerous anachronisms that refuse to stay confined within the specified time setting of the late nineteenth century – disrupt the Classical ideals of artistic unity and integrity and suggest new postmodern geographies and temporalities. This article considers how Luhrmann, by simultaneously paying homage to and critiquing operatic practices in Moulin Rouge!, deconstructs and reinvents opera for the postmodern age.
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References
1 Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington, 1989), 5.
2 See Altman; Richard Dyer, ‘Entertainment and Utopia’, in Only Entertainment (London, 1992), 17–34; and Jane Feuer, ‘The Self-reflective Musical and the Myth of Entertainment’, Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 2 (1977), 313–26.
3 For insightful critiques of how Moulin Rouge! expands the generic scope of the film musical, see Marsha Kinder, ‘Moulin Rouge’, Film Quarterly, 55 (2002), 52–9; and Grace Kehler, ‘Still for Sale: Love Songs and Prostitutes from La Traviata to Moulin Rouge’, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 38 (2005), 145–63.
4 See Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (Princeton, 2005).
5 For an excellent overview of opera criticism in decades past, see Ellen Rosand, ‘Criticism and the Undoing of Opera’, Nineteenth-Century Music, 14 (1990), 75–83.
6 Jeremy Tambling, Opera, Ideology and Film (Manchester, 1987), 14.
For an example of a conservative reaction against the new wave of avant-garde productions, see Heather MacDonald, ‘The Abduction of Opera’, The City Journal (Summer 2007).
7 See, for example, Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing, foreword by Susan McClary (Minneapolis, 1988 [1979]); Ralph P. Locke, ‘Constructing the Oriental “Other”: Saint-Saëns's Samson et Dalila’, this journal, 3 (1991), 261–302; Susan McClary, Georges Bizet: Carmen, Cambridge Opera Handbooks (Cambridge, 1992); Michel Poizat, The Angel's Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera, trans. Arthur Denner (Ithaca, 1992 [1986]); Carolyn Abbate, ‘Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women’, in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth Solie (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993), 225–58; Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (New York, 1993); Philip Brett, ‘Eros and Orientalism in Britten's Operas’, in Queering the Pitch, ed. Philip Brett and Elizabeth Wood (New York, 1994), 235–56; and Mary Ann Smart, ed., Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera (Princeton, 2000).
8 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in her Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington, 1989), 14–26.
9 Abbate, ‘Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women’.
10 Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis, 2002 [1991]), 152.
11 Abbate, ‘Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women’, 255. Catherine Clément, who coined the phrase ‘undoing of women’ in her 1979 book, bemoans that in opera ‘there is always this constant: death by a man’ (47).
12 See his Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (London, 2004 [1986]).
13 For a fuller discussion of this film, and especially Monroe's problematic role, see Maureen Turim, ‘Gentlemen Consume Blondes’, in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Patricia Erens (Bloomington, 1990), 101–25.
14 For other examples of Madonna's subversive tactics, see McClary, Feminine Endings, 148–66.
15 Dyer, Heavenly Bodies, 3.
16 Raymond Knapp sees the significance accorded to music in this scene, as well as in other key scenes in the film, as a re-enactment of another historically important operatic theme, that of Orpheus and his ability to tap into the transcendent powers of music. In The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (Princeton, 2006), 102–10.
17 See, for example, Altman, The American Film Musical, 178–89.
18 Luhrmann reveals in a DVD special feature interview that his films are conceived in a similar fashion, with Luhrmann and his partner Craig Pearce acting, improvising and writing together, helped along by the contributions from Luhrmann's wife Catherine Martin (the set and costume designer) and others in the cast and crew.
19 See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1979) and Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1994), as well as the studies by Locke, McClary and Brett mentioned above.
Clare Parfitt's discussion of dance in Moulin Rouge! (‘The Spectator's Dancing Gaze in Moulin Rouge!’, Research in Dance Education, 6 [2005], 97–110) offers some interesting observations of colonialist and neocolonialist relationships in the film, although she reaches conclusions very different from my own.
20 For more on theories of cultural flows, see Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1996); Mike Featherstone, ed., Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization, and Modernity (London and Newbury Park, 1990).
21 See, for example, Brian Larkin, ‘Itineraries of Indian Cinema: African Videos, Bollywood, and Global Media’, in Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, ed. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (London, 1994), 170–92; Nandini Bhattacharya, ‘A “Basement” Cinephilia: Indian Diaspora Women Watch Bollywood’, South Asian Popular Culture, 2 (2004), 161–83; and Adrian Athique, ‘Watching Indian Movies in Australia: Media, Community and Consumption’, South Asian Popular Culture, 3 (2005), 117–33.
22 As Susan Sontag writes of popular perceptions of consumption, ‘the tubercular is someone “consumed” by ardor, that ardor leading to the dissolution of the body’; Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York, 1990 [1977, 1988]), 20. Linda and Michael Hutcheon discuss consumption, sexuality and opera heroines in their Opera: Desire, Disease, Death (Lincoln, NB, 1996).
23 The widely divergent reception of Luhrmann's 2002 production of La bohème on Broadway is exemplified by two very different reviews in The New York Times: Anthony Tommasini, ‘Look What They're Doing to Opera’, 22 December 2002; and Ben Brantley, ‘Sudden Streak of Red Warms a Cold Garret’, 2 December 2002. Not surprisingly, the negative review was written by a music critic, and the positive one by a theatre critic.
24 See, for example, Claudia Gorbman's seminal study of film music, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington, 1987), which repeatedly calls film music ‘invisible’.
25 See Jim Collins, Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Post-Modernism (London, 1989).
26 Jan Breslauer, ‘Opera Houses Open their Doors to Change’, Los Angeles Times, 29 April 2007.
For more on the relationship between film and opera, see Tambling, Opera, Ideology and Film; Marcia J. Citron, Opera on Screen (New Haven, 2000); and Jeongwon Joe and Rose Theresa, eds., Between Opera and Cinema (London, 2002).
27 Collins, Uncommon Cultures, 145.
28 W. B. Worthen, ‘Drama, Performativity, and Performance’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, 113 (1998), 1097.
29 See, for example, queer readings of classic musicals, Stacy Wolf, A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (Ann Arbor, 2002); and John M. Clum, Something for the Boys: Musical Theater and Gay Cutlture (New York, 1991). On oppositional viewing, see bell hooks, ‘The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators’, in Film and Theory: An Anthology, ed. Toby Miller and Robert Stam (Malden and Oxford, 2000), 510–23; and for an alternative and woman-friendly reading of Monroe's film, see Lucie Arbuthnot and Gail Seneca, ‘Pre-text and Text in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’, Film Reader, 5 (1982), 13–23.