To be sure, the best time to watch Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge (2001) for not the first
time is at 2:45 in the morning on a summer Monday while the rain is stamping
its feet on the overhang. And, to be sure, the best time to write about Moulin Rouge is in the early evening of
a summer Monday, while the rain is still stamping its feet and Tchaikovsky is
stamping his feet. Of course, Tchaikovsky’s strings are strained through the
vinyl of a second hand complete symphonies box set, so the afternoon is not
nearly as melodic as the early morning on the back of an Indian elephant statue
in motley lights. And the Little Russian in speakers from an older address is
not as minimal as, say, Elton John singing “This is Your Song” over and over to
the Parisian moon on the tip of a windmill. But, it has been rumored that Ewan
McGregor’s front teeth are the distant relatives of Pyotr Ilich’s old piano
keys, and so the connections seem favorable to write the modern musical’s sexual
motifs into my newly placed corner desk. By the window of rain and familiar
bird.
In the year of our Lord, Two Thousand and One, every
hometown high school girl had a notebook inside cover with “the greatest thing
you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return” in glittery gel pen. These
young women also had scraps of the Eifel Tower pasted inside and sang a
soundtrack to their showerheads. Now, as current data makes clear, these same
late-twenties women who were once hometown high school girls have the referenced
quotation on their list of favorite quotations section of their Facebook pages.
For the record, in 2001 I could not drive an automobile and trusted Nat King
Cole as much as I could get a comb through his processed hair (I did, however,
dig his throat and listened to him talk me down when I was in a holding cell of
a fellowship room before the commencement of my older sister’s wedding [in
which I played the role of a wobbly groomsmen.])
I never got the then-girls-now-women’s love of the quotation
and still kind of don’t. Even back in 2001, when I wore oversized white Nike
tennis shoes and played badminton like whoa, Christian (McGregor’s romantic
idealist writer character) and his pop song poetry seemed like the easy way
out. Maybe it’s the way “just” works in the quotation to make the acts of
loving and being loved sound no-brainery. I felt like the hometown high school
girls heard the quote in the film and were like, “It all (i.e., the constant
decision making and position taking that make up human interaction as we know
it) seems so simple now! I just have to love and be loved in return like the
handsome man says with his dreamy voice!” Not ever really stopping to floss
between their braces brackets and consider how difficult it can be to love
people (even [especially?] the ones you love), and how it’s damn near
impossible to be a loveable person (let alone to be a loveable person who is
loved by someone, since the two are not the same thing, that is, one does not
necessarily lead to or imply the other.) Maybe I was just salty that I couldn’t
sing any of the songs in the right key or that I had adolescent acne and a
belly that doubled for, as a kind classmate once informed me, a “big bowl of
jelly.”
But enough about the quote. I was watching MTV’s teen-misfit
dramedy series Awkward yesterday and
it brought up some issues I saw in Moulin
Rouge and have beef with (maybe the beef is seeing played-out tropes twelve
years apart in the same day or whatever. Basically, my beef begins thusly :
THE FOLLOWING BEEF FEATURES POTENTIAL ROMANTIC SPOILER
ALERTS
In Awkward,
16-year-old badass-nerd-writer Jenna finally has the boyfriend she wants in
clean-cut class president Jake. Except shit gets weird when Jake finds out that
Jenna is not a virgin (the previous summer at [of course] summer camp, she had
sex with her first love, Matty [the sporty one who would never go for the unpopular girl but did for a night after a camp
party because he finally saw how much of a badass Jenna was.]) Jake doesn’t
know that Jenna slept with Matty (he actually doesn’t know who she slept with
at all because he doesn’t ask and she doesn’t tell), he just knows this: his
new girlfriend is not a virgin and he wants her to be one and he is jealous
that she could ever be sexually attracted to anyone but him. None of this
pissiness is helping Jenna become a virgin again, of course, but it does allow
Jake to guilt Jenna out about her previous relationship and show off his best
puppy dog eyes (they are, I must admit, advanced puppy dog eyes for an actor his age. The kid's going places.) Because, in the end, his feelings about his
girlfriend’s previous sex life are more important than her feelings about them.
Fast-forward (or rather, rewind in production time) to Moulin Rouge, where Christian falls in
love with porcelain-skinned and diamond-tonsilled courtesan Satine (played by a
top-hatted Nicole Kidman) only to get wrapped up in some patronage drama that ends
in a gross Duke wanting to sleep with the object (emphasis on “object”) of
Christian’s affection. Satine’s all like “But the owner of the Moulin Rouge
signed a contract that said if I don’t sleep with the Duke the show won’t go on
and the Moulin Rouge will close down and the Duke and his scarfaced crony will
kill your ass. So I should probably sleep with him and stuff.” And Christian’s
all like “No, no please don’t sleep with the Duke. I really want the show
cancelled and your place of employment burned to the ground and you to be
unemployed and homeless and for me to be killed by moustached thugs. Let’s have
all that stuff happen instead because I can’t bear the thought of you sleeping
with someone besides me and the countless men you slept with in your long
career as a courtesan that no one brings up.” In the end, Christian (name
implications) sweats out a long night of Satine not sleeping with the Duke,
dodges a botched assassination attempt, and freaks when Satine dies in his arms
while he does not talk about his own sexual history or anything about that.
So we can have these themes of undying class
president/outcast love and loving and being loved in return and stuff, but when
push comes to shove, our lead male Awkward
and Moulin Rouge characters, to
varying degrees, buy into the tired female purity tropes that plague so many
American romance narratives (e.g., the woman is looked on as less-than [not
attractive, potentially not worthy of a relationship, not respectable] if she
is not a virgin, the woman’s reproductive organs [and sexual feelings] become the property of a man
the moment she enters into a relationship with him, the woman’s sexual history
is the business of the man and fodder for testosterone-filled temper tantrums,
etc.) All of this goes on, of course, while the man’s sexual history is either
applauded or kept silent (implying that the man’s sexual choices were
undoubtedly appropriate and, thus, not worthy of conversation or dispute. It is
the woman’s sexuality that must be examined, scrutinized, and judged, so as to
make sure the woman is acceptably “pure” and “good.” Vom.)
Narratives where heterosexual male “love” towards a woman is
not-so-subtly acted out in his dominance over her sexuality lead me to make
connections between conceptions of romantic love as a means of possession. In
these narratives, Awkward and Moulin Rouge offering prime examples, it
is not enough for a man to respect and desire to share lifespace with a woman;
he must “have” her. More than this, when he sufficiently “has” her, he must
make sure no other man has “had” her (this will lower her value, and thus, make
her a less desirable thing to have), and he must guarantee to himself and the
world that no other man besides him will ever “have” her. I wonder how many of
these sexual power plays were untangled and considered when the famous Moulin Rouge quotation was scribbled in glittery gel pen or on Facebook by the hometown high school girls I knew and didn’t
know. I wonder how many past and current young men and women grow up with possession/purity tropes playing in their minds as they navigate the challenges of real romantic relationships.
In the end, I worry about a world where young (and old)
people think “the greatest thing [they’ll] ever learn is just (for men) to
have and (for women) be had in return.”
‘Cause that ain’t love, no matter how well you sing it.
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