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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Filed under: podcasting | Tags: 100th episode, Cake, celebration, milestone, podcast
This blog will mark a milestone in my podcasting experience. When I record this blogcast, it will be my 100th episode. One of my favorite podcasts just celebrated their 100th episode and while I definitely won’t be renting the Palladium in London for the show the way they did and I can tell you right up front that Emma Thompson won’t be making a surprise appearances as she did there at the Palladium, it does feel important to acknowledge that a milestone has been reached.
It seems that a little podcasting reflection is in order (and maybe some cake. This might call for cake.) A number of factors contributed to the beginning of this particular arm of my artistic life. The first was that it occurred to me that the blog I was writing might be inaccessible to some who would want to read it. That is, I initially thought of the podcast as a way to bring the blog to those who might not be able to access it. (This is a little example of how making things more accessible can be creatively stimulating.)
The other factor was hearing Manoush Zomorodi’s story about her journey into podcasting. Hearing how she felt that podcasting allowed her to more authentically use her voice and become part of feminist podcasting revolution was the push I needed to get my podcasting idea off the ground. When I started, it was a total experiment and I wasn’t convinced it was a great idea. It’s not as if tons of people turned up to listen to it. Sometimes it seemed like only my boyfriend was listening. But his enthusiasm for the project was sufficient to keep me going. (Also the fancy podcasting mic he got me.)
And even 100 episodes in, I still don’t have a lot of listeners. Anchor tells me I average five listens per episode. That’s not a lot of people, really.
So I can’t really measure the success of this enterprise in numbers. (I mean I could but it would be depressing.) What I can track are the little impacts the podcast has had on me.
1) It generated four albums worth of songs last year. Every single song I recorded, I recorded for the podcast. And those songs were also what got me through the year of shock following the election of 2016.
2) I’ve developed a lot more facility with sound and editing and recording and such over the last 100 episodes. That facility made it so much easier, smoother and quieter to create a voice-over reel recently. Without all those episodes behind me, a project that might have taken weeks or months, took me a few days.
3) 100 episodes of the Songs for the Struggling Artist Podcast has given me the confidence to start an entirely different podcast – one that may have an even broader appeal. Weirdly, Struggling Artists are not a great target market! So stay tuned for my podcast for children. (Okay, technically, I’ve already launched it. I’ll tell you more about it later – but meanwhile, you can check it out on my website.)
But I’m not stopping at 100 episodes. I’m not sure why I’m not stopping. I guess I like it. And I like being able to make the blog accessible to those who can’t (or don’t) read it.
So I will continue for as long as it continues to please me. And I’m going to have some cake in my podcast’s honor.
You can find the blogcast on iTunes. If you’d like to listen to me read a previous blog on Anchor, click here.
Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are now an album of Resistance Songs, an album of Love Songs and More. You can find them on Spotify, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer and iTunes
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Filed under: art, feminism, Shakespeare, theatre | Tags: achievement, Angela Merkel, attraction, Cake, desire, Elizabeth Warren, Gender, hetero-normative, Old 97s, Rhett Miller, sexism, sexy, Shakespeare, swords, talent, talent crush, Thank You for Typing, Theresa May
When I was in my twenties and touring the country doing Shakespeare, I was struck by a curious phenomenon. Everywhere we went, women threw themselves at the men in our company. Girls everywhere became besotted with our boys, especially the ones with swords.
But the reverse never happened. Boys in our audiences didn’t chase after the women in our company, we didn’t have groupies. We didn’t have admirers. One of the women got a secret admirer message once but it turned out to have been from one of our fellow actors in the company.
In my years as a performer, I saw this happen over and over. Men onstage inspired desire while women onstage did not.
I started to think about this again recently while I listened to an interview with Rhett Miller and found myself thinking how intelligent, curious and committed he is. We’re about the same age. He even went to the same college as me, briefly, right before I got there. He’s a dynamo onstage and a sensitive thinker. Ever since I saw his band open for Cake in 1999, I’d see him perform and sigh. This time, though, I heard him and thought, “Oh, I’m actually LIKE him in a lot of ways.” I mean, he’s prettier than me but otherwise, we have things in common.
I thought, “Why not only be the change you wish to see in the world? Why don’t you also be the man you once wished to be with in the world?” This is a thought I’ve had before but somehow this was the first time I felt it viscerally.
There are some philosophers and psychologists who frame desire for others as a calling to some part of ourselves. They theorize that we are attracted to things that mirror and amplify our own qualities. Me? I have discovered that I am a sucker for anyone who takes their art incredibly seriously. And I take my own art incredibly seriously. So. Of course. But until I met my current partner, I’d never met a man who was as interested and invested in my artistic journey as I was in his.
Throughout history, women have found men doing things/making things attractive and slipped into the supporting role in partnerships, to play help-meet to the “real” genius in the family. The Thank You for Typing phenomenon is a great example of this (this is where “great” men thank the women in their lives for typing their work and you realize that the women did much more than type. Like, they actually wrote the book, for example.) Or even Albert Einstein’s wife, who was, some theorize, more of a partner in his work, if not a dominant voice, than anyone realized.
I think there is something in the water that encourages women to find achievement attractive and that same thing (very possibly) socializes men to find achievement unattractive in women. I have only very rarely heard of a man developing a crush on a woman because of her book or her play or her leadership or even her acting prowess. The trope is that he will fall for her in spite of those skills. If she’s pretty enough, a man can overlook her accomplishments but because of the accomplishments? Not so much. Is this true of every man? Of course not. But it is the dominant cultural impulse.
And, of course, I am mostly talking about hetero-normative behaviors here. I know it is infinitely more complex than this. But it does seem important to identify this undercurrent that flows through our dominant culture.
Women develop talent crushes. Men (generally) do not. This is a hugely damaging pattern that hinders many women’s achievements. In the interest of attracting a man or even to just seem attractive, women may downplay their intelligence, hold back at their jobs. It happens. I’ve seen it happen so many times. Case in point: Hillary Clinton. She is the epitome of a high achieving woman and the dominant response to her is distaste. Women across the world developed crushes on Obama. And I don’t want to think about it, but there those who find our current men in government attractive. Is there a man out there with an achievement crush on Hillary Rodham Clinton? I’ve never heard of one. I’m going to guess not. Is there some dude out there who finds Elizabeth Warren impossibly hot due to her political prowess? Is there an Angela Merkel fan club? Or a dude who finds Theresa May’s rise to political power irresistible? I doubt it.
I think real progress in creating spaces for women’s achievement will happen when men start to find women’s achievement as attractive as women find men’s achievements or talents or skills. The moment when women are seen as sexy, just for making something or achieving something, for expressing something or leading something, for being funny, or talented, or smart, or brave, or for their expert sword skills – that is the moment we will have finally turned the corner on equality.
I’ve seen ladies get talent crushes on Falstaff, y’all. Falstaff.
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This blog is also a Podcast. You can find it on iTunes. If you’d like to listen to me read a previous blog on Soundcloud, click here.
Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are now an album of Resistance Songs and an album of Love Songs. You can find them on Spotify, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer and iTunes
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Writing on the internet is a little bit like busking on the street. This is the part where I pass the hat. If you liked the blog and would like to give a dollar (or more!) put it in the PayPal digital hat. https://www.paypal.me/strugglingartist
Songs for the Struggling Artist 