Filed under: age, art, movies, TV, writing | Tags: Austria, Cake, Corsage, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, German, Greek, movies, nihilism, Sisi, The Empress, TV
After reading a bit about the history of Empress Elisabeth of Austria (because of questions that came up after watching The Empress), I learned of another Empress Elisabeth (AKA Sisi) project in the pipeline. The film, Corsage, was reported to look at the darker side of the empress, dealing with her fatphobia, her tightlacing and obsession with her extremely long hair. After the overly romantic fantasy version of this woman in The Empress, I was ready for a thornier Sisi.
I thought this new film might be a more historically accurate version of events because of the inclusion of these less attractive aspects of her personality but as I watched it, I didn’t need to read more history to notice it was just as made-up as The Empress, if not more. The thing about The Empress was it was clear to me why they made up the fictions that they did. A love story between relative equals is a lot more attractive than the Emperor marrying a young teenage girl. It is a beautiful fantasy to imagine an empress wanting to help the poor so much she would give a factory urchin her shoes. I actually understand these impulses, even though they irked me.
With Corsage, I am struggling to understand why they bent history in this particular direction. Is there a word that means the opposite of romanticize? Like, darkify? Depressify? Simplify to a sadder story? And it’s not that this movie was particularly depressing. It’s more like….they tried to make legible some illegible behaviors, which then turned this woman’s tragic end to an entirely different, (actually less tragic maybe and definitely less complex) end.
But that’s not why I’m mad at it.
Here are some facts I learned after my first encounter with this empress.
- She was assassinated at the age of sixty, while traveling.
- She endured a really awful family tragedy in her fifties, when her son killed his mistress and himself
- She studied Greek during the two hours it took to wash her hair. In addition to her native German, she was also fluent in French and English.
- She studied philosophy and wrote poetry
- She facilitated the uniting of Austria and Hungary – which indicates some political power and interest.
Only one of these things appears in Corsage. (She speaks French and English.)
Corsage is the story of Elisabeth turning forty and having a hard time with aging. We watch her restrict her food, tightlace her corset and throw herself out a window. Two of these are things she actually did. (The food restrictions and the tightlacing.) This movie Elisabeth is clearly a woman going through it. Her interest in the mental health wings of the hospital (the real Sisi did have an interest in mental health care) is clearly a mirror for her own experience of mental distress. In Corsage, we are watching a woman self destruct. I think we are meant to feel that this woman’s constraints and boredom ultimately send her over the edge.
But the real Elisabeth’s life was clearly much fuller than this fictional version. The real Elisabeth was engaged with ideas, with travel, with learning. Yes, she was worried about her hair and her waistline but her inclination to learn Greek while having her hair washed suggests to me a woman who has NOT given up on life but who wants to make the most of every minute. She made an enormous difference in the alliance of Austria and Hungary. She was not a helpless trophy wife for the Emperor.
The Empress TV show reduced Sisi to a romantic modern manic pixie dream girl. The Corsage movie reduced Sisi to a dysfunctional Cosmo girl. It literally had her entourage drinking what looked like cosmopolitans on a ship.
And then there’s the main thing that made me mad at it. This is going to be a spoiler so skip ahead to the last paragraph if you’re planning on watching Corsage and want to be surprised. And yes, I know I already told you about her throwing herself out a window but it’s not a big deal in the story, actually, so that’s not the big spoiler.
SPOILERS follow:
After cutting off her beloved hair, eating forbidden cake and becoming a heroin addict at her doctor’s insistence, Elisabeth formulates a plan to kill herself and have her companion impersonate her. The film ends with her diving off the prow of a ship, presumably to her death. The moral of the story appears to be, when you hit forty and can no longer count on your appearance to win you things, you should just throw yourself into the sea.
What the…
This historical figure had twenty more years to live and thrive than this film gave her. The historical Sisi apparently traveled around Europe, often accompanied by Greek men in their 20s. The actual Sisi’s life did not end at forty. I’m very unclear about why this fictional version of her had to. Turning forty is not a tragedy. It wasn’t for the historical empress either. Her actual tragedies mostly came later and were a lot worse than refusing to eat cake. I don’t know why this movie insists on killing off a woman who had another twenty full years to live and enjoy her life. The film-maker is now forty-five, so one presumes she started making this film when she was on the precipice of forty and maybe she thought, “This sucks. Maybe I should throw myself into the sea after a lifetime of worrying about my hair and my calories.”
And I can sympathize with the pain of realizing that worrying about one’s appearance your whole life coming to naught. But – I’m not sure why she had to bring Empress Elisabeth into it.
I mean, if I’m going to watch a fictionalized Empress, I’d rather watch one decide to cut her hair, start eating cake and then go ahead and enjoy her forties and fifties hanging around beautiful young Greek traveling companions around the world. And she doesn’t even need to do the fiction of cutting her hair and starting to eat cake. I think we need stories of powerful women in their forties and fifties, doing what they want. Would I like for her to have cake? Of course. But I’d rather watch her have her real weirdo eating disorder and twenty more years of her interesting life. Having her need to end her life as soon as she experiences a hint of aging is not only ageist but also dangerously nihilistic. I mean, I suppose the filmmaker is Austrian, maybe there’s some cultural nihilism that is hard to steer clear of – but I find it a disturbing impulse to make historic-ish art more nihilistic than life. I think they think they’re somehow empowering Sisi by having her be in charge of her own death instead of getting murdered twenty years later (after all, she gets cake this way) but the message I got from this story was “better to be dead than a middle aged woman.”
Fuck that.
I’m going to need more stories about middle aged and older women doing cool things. The Green Glove Gang was a good start and Dead to Me scratched an itch but I’m going to need more. How about a look at the last twenty years of Sisi’s life? Instead of showing us her youth or the end of her youth, how about a project where we see her bring Austria and Hungary together or, hell, the drama of dealing with the murder-suicide of her son or her assassination by an Italian anarchist? The woman had an extraordinary life. I’m not sure why we’re reducing her to a romance or an eating disorder. History itself is very interesting and dramatic. I don’t know why we have to simplify it and change it in such weird ways for our TV and movies.
Particularly in ways that make me mad.
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