On Friday, December 14, I saw The Favourite at the Charles Theatre here in Baltimore. As I noticed on my way to my seat that the
screen on which I was about to see the film was but one of three devoted to it,
and as I have subsequent to my viewing noticed that the film has not received a
single negative review, I somehow feel impelled, partly as a student of the
British eighteenth century and partly as a general moviegoer, to get my negative
two cents—or perhaps, rather, negative 4.8 pence [2% of £1 or 240d.=4.8d.]—in on
The Favourite now, before it becomes one of those Oscar-sweeping monstrosities à
la The English Patient as represented
on Seinfeld, and like Elaine Benes I
am effectively debarred by peer (or, rather, and particularly in the context of
this flick, commoner) pressure from expressing
my view that it really, really sucked
as anything other than a hypothetical alternative to its presupposed
brilliance. It is customary in such-meta
cinematic hatchet jobs as this to begin by grudgingly itemizing the few things
the flick in question got right, and I am not about to break with custom here,
although in all candor and frankness I can’t say that I am entirely qualified
to tender the required catalogue, for although I am, as already stated, a
student of eighteenth-century Britain, I have always been chiefly interested in
its literature and have therefore tended to be aware of other aspects of it
only to the extent that they are manifested in the works and fortunes of its
principal authors, none of whom figured as a regular, visible personage at the
court of Queen Anne. To be sure, Joseph
Addison and Richard Steele were active Whigs and Jonathan Swift active Tories,
but they were active as authorial friends of courtiers and politicians rather
than as courtiers or politicians in their own right, such that I can only be
grateful for Rachel Weisz’s Duchess of Marlborough’s passing mention of Swift
as the potential author of a scurrilous pamphlet on Olivia Colman’s Anne’s
lesbian liaison with Emma Stone’s Abigail Hill—grateful, that is, for the
passing acknowledgment that writers at least indirectly exerted some political
influence in the Annine microepoch. As
for the liaison itself, much as I yearn sternly to affirm with arms firmly
akimbo that there is no evidence whatsoever
that Queen Anne was genitally involved with any other woman, let alone with
Abigail Hill, I cannot do so in good faith, inasmuch as I know next to
nothing about Abigail Hill and indeed knew nothing whatsoever about her before
seeing the film, such that at least for its first half I was much inclined to
believe that she was one of those intrinsically objectionable fictional
characters that the makers of historical novels and movies are unwarrantably
allowed to insinuate into an otherwise literally historically referential
dramaturgy by way of bringing home a sense of how the lives of so-called
ordinary people contrasted with those of the supposedly only-supposedly
high-and-mighty, the so-called bigwigs.
And speaking of bigwigs, from my passing knowledge of the portraiture of
the period, I can in good faith affirm that the Annine microepoch was
undoubtedly a microepoch in which men’s wigs were both extraordinarily long and
especially refulgently curly; and the film most certainly cinches this aspect
of the period, albeit to the seemingly deliberate detriment of its
meta-political seriousness (q.v. below).
About the numerous flagrant anachronisms it is perhaps petulant to
complain—but only perhaps inasmuch as
one often has a hard time figuring out whether they have been deliberately
inserted in a nudge-nudge wink-winkish spirit or are merely a manifestation of
the screenwriters’ ignorance or laziness.
Nicholas Hoult’s Robert Harley’s No
pressure is evidently knowingly anachronistic, as is Abigail Hill’s For fuck’s sake, but Hill’s use of fuck as a bare expletive might simply be
an instance of the usual post-Hays-code-revocation-al tendency to make the old
style-hat-and coat set talk dirty on the assumption that in uncensored everyday
life people at all times and places have always used the naughtiest words in
the general lexicon as often as possible.
One strikingly anachronistic episode did incontestably win the heart of
my goat, albeit not on account of its most strikingly anachronistic feature. This was—and is—the episode in which the
Duchess of Marlborough is shown dancing with a handsome young buck to the obvious
jealous consternation of the queen. The
choreography of this episode is chock-full of ludicrous dance moves that
conjure up less vividly the ghost of 1970s disco-dancing as represented in Saturday Night Fever than the ghost of
the parody of 1970s disco in Airplane. This is all eminently bearable if by no means
quite all well and good, but that such choreography should be dedicatedly
lavished on a single dancing couple was and is abominable for the doubtless
by-now-universally-unintelligible-but-for-all-that-utterly-unimpeachable reason
that the eighteenth century was, inter
multissima alia, the grand age of the assembly, the ball, the rout, etc.—in
a word, an age in which people of the middle and upper social ranks habitually
danced in large choreographic formations.
That not every social gathering of these ranks then centered on dancing
is undeniable; that at some such non-dance-centered gathering an isolated
couple took it upon themselves to cut a rug on their own is highly probable. But
this (or these) is (or are) quite beside the point, inasmuch as any
representation of a given milieu has an obligation to show us not merely what
probably or occasionally but also what typically
happened therein. If Mr. Lanthimos
&co. were simply uninterested in dancing as a diversion at the court of
Queen Anne, they should have gratified that lack of interest by forbearing from
including any representation of court-centered diversion in the film, for then
they would not have given the inescapable false impression that by and large
that court’s denizens frittered away their entire balance of free social time
on boozing, gourmandizing, and thoroughly outrageous pastimes like throwing
oranges at naked men (!). As it very
probably was, Mr. Lanthimos &co., were very interested in dancing indeed
and simply had neither the time nor the financial resources to hire a
sufficiently historically informed choreographer and a sufficient number of
professional dancers accustomed to being instructed to dance in period-specific
ways, and so opted to have a pair of non-dancers dance in the way that comes
most naturally to all non-dancers required to dance on the spur of the moment nowadays--i.e,
à la John Travolta as parodied in Airplane. I say as
it very probably was on the evidence of the film’s puny $15,000,000 budget,
whose shoe-stringiness is likewise evident in the overall mise-en- scène and
montage. The majority of the action
takes place in a large period-appropriate house and its surrounding
grounds. Until about three-fifths of the
way through the film, I assumed the house was standing in for Windsor Castle, the
principal country residence of the pre-Victorian British monarchs, partly because
it more closely resembles that structure than their London residence, St.
James’s Palace, but mostly because nothing that is shown on screen gives the
viewer any reason to gather that the house is supposed to be sited in the
middle of a substantial metropolis.
Round about two-fifths of the way through, there was a representation of
something that I readily inferred was a session of the House of Commons,
because it centered on two bunches of dudes sitting on a pair of terraced
bench-rows separated by a wide aisle (and, no, Mr. Lanthimos &co., I didn’t need you to color-code their
outfits like football-squad kits to make me realize that the two bunches
corresponded to two mutually opposed political factions), and I assumed that this
session was taking place in London because I had never heard of either house of
Parliament’s convening elsewhere during this period, but I continued to assume
that the main action was taking place in the country, that there were various
scenes of people shuttling from Windsor to London and back that we were not
being made privy to for reasons of dramaturgical expediency. It was only at the abovementioned
three-fifths-of-the-way-through point, in the second scene set in an
inn-cum-brothel in which the Duchess of Marlborough wakes up after having been
dragged unconscious through apparent miles of not only parkland but woodland
(i.e., a form of flora immediately evocative of the forest adjoining Windsor
Castle), that I began to suspect that London was the supposed setting of the entire action of the film, thanks to the
Duchess’s order to have herself bailed out of confinement in the inn via a
message sent to a man walking a duck in
Hyde Park, a man who turned out to be her closest non-spousal male ally,
the Earl of Godolphin. While it was not
inconceivable that the Duchess would have been in the country and the Earl in
town at that moment, Ockham’s razor suggested to me that they were then both in
London, for otherwise she presumably would have been seeking help from somebody
closer to hand. Why could not the
proximity of London to the palace and the inn have been indicated at some
earlier point in the film, and by explicitly cinematic means? These means need not have been costly—a few painted
urban matte shots of the kind Eric Rohmer skillfully employed in his comparably
budgeted 2001 Paris-set French-Revolutionary period drama L’Anglaise et le duc would have been more than serviceable. But of course, my accredited cinephile
detractors will argue that all such pointers would have been effectively
superfluous inasmuch as virtually every present-day cinemagoer simply assumes
by default that any drama centered on the British royal family of any period
takes place in London; and that in any case, the larger-scale setting of the
film’s dramaturgy is fundamentally irrelevant, inasmuch as its avowed intention
is to investigate and illuminate the love-hate triangle of Anne, Sarah, and
Abigail, a triangle whose sole site of triangulation was after all the monarch’s
court. But in thus arguing, these
detractors will merely be exposing the film’s incapacity to realize that very
intention. To be sure, Sarah, the
Duchess of Marlborough, is one of the most criminally underrepresented figures
in historical drama, cinematic or otherwise, and a cinematic treatment of her
life is long overdue to the admittedly debatable extent that any dramatic
treatment (cinematic or otherwise) of the life of any historical figure is due
at all, and her relations with Queen Anne, along, presumably with Abigail Masham,
née Hill (remember: the present writer’s knowledge of the life-history of
Abigail Masham is as yet very scant indeed), constitute an important part of
the Duchess’s biography. But the
Duchess’s energies, ambitions, and accomplishments were by no means exhausted
by her personal relations with these two women, and even these relations are
largely unintelligible in the absence of at least a schematic understanding of
the political lie of the land of late-Stuart Britain—this because despite their
longstanding mutual personal intimacy the Queen and the Duchess stood firmly on
opposite sides of the kingdom’s most significant political divide, the divide
between the Tories and the Whigs. The
Queen was a Tory—a person who in Samuel
Johnson’s definition of the word in his Dictionary
of two reigns and nearly fifty years later, “adhere[d] to the ancient
constitution of the state, and the apostolical hierarchy of the church of
England,” in other words, a believer in making
the political system as close as possible to that in place before the revolution
of the 1640s that ended in the execution of the king and a de facto temporary
abolition of the monarchy; in keeping both the monarch and the church strong
and limiting opportunities for political and religious dissent. Less philosophically centrally, Tories also
tended to be hostile towards commerce and fairly conciliatory towards Britain’s
principal enemy, France. The Whigs believed in retaining as many of the
liberties that Britons unaffiliated with the church or the crown had acquired
thanks to the abovementioned revolution (along with the later, less bloody one
of 1688 that brought Anne’s elder sister Mary to the throne as co-monarch with
William III)—principal among these being a strong Parliament and freedom of
worship for most non-Anglicans—at least most Protestant non-Anglicans, for by and large Whigs loathed and
dreaded Roman Catholics, and loathed and dreaded France as the most powerful
Roman Catholic nation.
This moment in British history, the moment of the induration
of the Whig-Tory schism, is especially significant for two reasons. First, it established the bipartisan model of
official political life that has been in place (yes, despite the efforts of
umpteen-hundred third parties to disrupt it) throughout the English-speaking
world ever since, as well as the dichotomy that has every since defined the
difference between any two principal parties in any Anglosopheric polity—the
dichotomy between a desire for a strong national government with a strong head
of State and a weak legislature, and a desire for a weak national government
with a weak head of State and a strong legislature. Second, it marked the end of the last era in Britain
in which religion as such—perhaps theology
is a better word here—was a political mainspring, in which a significant
proportion of Britons chose a political side principally on the basis of their own religious beliefs and their
opposition to the religious beliefs of others.
Whether this religion-driven form of politics was actually doomed to die
out and be replaced by the secularly orientated form that succeeded it, as
received bienpensant opinion now
holds, or whether it might not actually have lasted much longer in the absence
of certain intrinsically non-inevitable contingencies, as I suspect, is quite
beside the point in the present context: what matters here is that the Whigs
and Tories hated each other not merely because they were envious of each
other’s political influence but also because each party believed that the
members of the other one tended to entertain erroneous opinions about such
things as the nature of God and Jesus Christ, the correct manner of religious
observance, and the means of attaining eternal salvation—opinions so erroneous,
indeed, that they could land their entertainer in Hell for all time. Any dramatic representation of the court of
Queen Anne that strives to be faithful even in spirit to the historical record must take the religious aspect of that
court’s politics into consideration because in the absence of such
consideration the machinations of its monarch, courtiers, and parliamentarians simply
do not make any sense. These people were
not merely jockeying for power, not
merely striving for nationwide political hegemony as an end in itself; they
were also striving to realize what they believed to be God’s plan for Britain and
for themselves as individual Christians.
Scarcely any trace of the Whig-Tory let schism, let alone any
of its peri-political substrates, finds its way into the dramaturgy of The Favourite. At the very beginning of the film, we see the
Duchess’s husband, the Duke of Marlborough (Mark Gaitiss), heading out to fight
a war in France, but we are not told why he is fighting it, nor do we hear
subsequently hear much of anything about that war except as a succession of
personal triumphs and setbacks for the Duke and Duchess. Once in the midst of a session of her
favo(u)rite sport, non-clay pigeon shooting, the Duchess is guilelessly asked
by Abigail why it is necessary to go to war with France and savagely rejoins
something to the effect of, “Because if we don’t, the bastards will eat each
and every one of us alive,” but she does not explain why she believes the
French have developed such a keen appetite for human British flesh, and in the
absence of such an explanation she simply comes across (doubtless in complete
conformity with Mr. Lanthimos &co.’s intentions) as an anachronistic Guardian-esque caricature of a Blimpish Brexiteer. The parliamentary heads of the Tories and
Whigs, Harley and Godolphin, are shown fairly often and given a fair amount of
dialogue, but this dialogue contains nothing of any genuinely political import
and is prevailingly devoted to snarky if uniformly witless repartee about the
speaker’s adversaries’ personal shortcomings.
The religious aspect of the political divide is, I believe, not even so
much as hinted at in scripting, setting, or costuming: as near as I can recall,
there is not a single moment in which a character performs a religious act, a
single scene set in a church (even if the room standing in for the session
chamber of the House of Commons does incongruously look exactly like the
interior of one [presumably it was the chapel of the main manor house, lazily misappropriated]),
or a single actor attired as any sort of clergyman.
If The Favourite
were a very different sort of period film, a sort of live-action kinetic
Watteau painting in which the wills of the principal characters were at most of
secondary consideration, a film in which the desires and ambitions of those
characters served merely as a background to the exhibition of their manners and
idiosyncrasies, its utter disregard of politics with a capital P would not
necessarily be fatal to a decent and intelligent viewer’s admiration or
enjoyment of it. If it were that sort of
film, this disregard would still render its plot nonsensical, but a decent and
intelligent viewer would not much care because he or she would realize that
that plot was not actuated by or aiming towards anything of supposed metaphysical
heft. But because The Favourite is to the contrary a film in which the wills of the principal
characters, Anne, Sarah, and Abigail, are always very much in the foreground, a
film in which not a single scene does not show one or more of the three of them
trying to get what she or they want(s), the absence of a broader political
scheme or canvas for these wills’ exercise cannot help conferring on them a
grotesquely nominalistic, monomaniacal quality that is not merely savage but
downright bestial. Anne’s will is
actuated wholly by a desire for love,
a desire that effectively boils down to a craving for a competent practitioner
of cunnilingus; Sarah’s by a desire for power
as reduced to brute physical control over man, woman, and beast—the power to
twist an arm or throttle a throat, to knee a crotch, to kill a bird; and
Abigail’s by a desire for status, in
its most humdrum escutcheal form: as a kinswoman of the Duchess, she believes
she is owed a title, which she eventually obtains when she marries the Baron
Masham. Accordingly, while the principal
men in these women’s orbit—Harley, Godolphin, and Masham—are unquestionably
their tools (at least in the sense
that a hammer is a tool for opening a wine bottle), they are by no means their pawns, because a pawn can only be used
in a game with a strategy, which in
turn entails a complex system of interrelated aims, and each of these women has
merely a single, simple aim. Accordingly,
further, the gazillion pseudo-feminist panegyrics to The Favourite’s supposedly compelling representation of so-called
strong women (not that I have read any of these panegyrics, but I am as certain
of their existence as I am certain that I
am over five feet tall, as David Hume [b. 1711] says somewhere) are deplorably
misplaced: a strong woman in the strong sense—as the Duchess of Marlborough
undoubtedly was, Baroness Masham may very well have been, and Queen Anne very
probably was not—does not merely insistently obtrude her will on a single
object like a one-fingered lady pianist; rather, like her male counterpart,
whom the idiomatic tradition of our language regrettably prohibits me from
terming the strong man, she thinks
big and acts small; she starts out by conceiving a grand scheme and
subsequently exerts her will only in the manner in which, and to the extent to
which, such exertion seems necessary to make the constituents of the scheme fit
together adequately. When
pseudo-feminists praise the likes of The
Favourite for supposedly finally
(i.e., actually for the umpteen-thousandth time) presenting a female version of a male character that we have always
admired by default, they are merely betraying their incorrigible amnesiac
loutishness, inasmuch as only an incorrigible amnesiac lout could ever regard
the sort of male character who has dominated Anglophone cinema of the past
two-fifths of a century (i.e., more or less since the first Godfather movie) with anything more charitable
than pesticidal contempt.
But of course in anticipation of
my railing against The Favourite’s
bestial dramaturgy-cum-ethics these louts will doubtless have had what they
regard as a t**p card up their shirtysleeve, and they will doubtless point out
to my supposed cluelessness that the greatest satirist of the age of Queen
Anne, Jonathan Swift, was likewise intent on drawing attention to the
bestiality of human nature, such that despite his abovementioned near-total absence
from the film, The Favourite bears
all the earmarks—or hallmarks or what have you—of being a Swiftian take on the
late-Stuart court, indeed on being the satire that JS himself would doubtless have
produced had he had access to [specification here preempted by farting noises
signifying contempt for virtually the entire technical side of the history of cinema]. But these louts will have forgotten—or, more
likely, failed ever to notice—that even in Swift’s satire, which is admittedly
the most vituperatively misanthropic satire the world has yet seen, the bestial
is never presented as normative, is never
presented as either an acceptable point of view or an acceptable state of
affairs. However ruthlessly Swift
pillories the incorrigibly bestial quality of the present human system of life,
he always makes it clear that there at least ought to be a better human system of life, that this bestial
quality is something to be ashamed
of. Thus, for example, in Gulliver’s Travels, Swift’s
representation of Britain’s political institutions as incorrigibly corrupt is
counterpoised by the wise and benevolent king of Brobdingnag’s critique of
those institutions, the perverse applied hyperpedantry of the Laputans by the
prudential applied rationality of Lord Munodi, and the revolting sensuality of
the Yahoos by the edifying spirituality of the Houyhnhnms. To be sure, Gulliver’s attempt to put into
everyday British practice what he has learned from the norms and ideals he has
encountered in his globe-spanning sea-voyages ultimately drives him to despair
and madness; and these fictional norms and ideals cannot inspire us after the manner of a so-called true story because they
are after all utterly fictional, but
the aspirational impulse contained in them is by no means thereby invalidated. In even the bitterest and most despairing genuine satire, there must be a sense
that there is a genuinely good fight to be fought, even if the fighters of that
fight are seen to be irretrievably doomed to lose it. In what is termed, and merely termed, satire
nowadays, the could-be would-be good are absolutely invariably represented as unregenerate
chumps, sissies, or hypocrites—as people who are simply too stupid, cowardly,
or sanctimonious (or all three, as in the case of The Favourite’s Queen Anne) to comport themselves with bestially
monomaniacal ruthlessness, now itself become the sole norm and ideal. The utter disappearance of genuine, good
fight-centered satire from the present cinematic landscape is brought home most
forcefully and repellently in The Favourite
by the scene of Abigail and Baron Masham’s wedding night, wherein in lieu of
coiting with her new husband the new Baroness absent-mindedly jacks him off
while furiously ruminating aloud about the Duchess’s whereabouts and
intentions. The scene is vividly
evocative of one from a much earlier movie, Network
(1976), perhaps the last great genuine cinematic satire, the scene wherein
Faye Dunaway as an ambitious young television executive embiggens her big plans
for her network’s programming schedule while riding herself to orgasm atop the
membrum virile of a disillusioned old-school quinquagenarian TV newsman played
by William Holden. The gaping difference
in tone and significance between these two scenes is owing entirely to the
presence of a credible representation of the good fight elsewhere in the
earlier film and the utter absence of such a representation anywhere else in
the later one. In Network, Dunaway’s character’s monomaniacal yearning and striving
for higher ratings even in coito unequivocally stamps her as a force of
evil. But they stamp her thus only in
the context of Holden’s character’s de facto embodiment of an ethos that values
higher goods than higher ratings, very much not only notwithstanding but even by
dint of the fact that he has sorely compromised this embodiment by committing
both professional and matrimonial adultery, by supporting Dunaway’s
dumbing-down and sensationalizing of the network’s content and deserting his
loyal longstanding fellow-fiftysomething wife for this younger woman who is a
dedicated champion of everything he despises.
To be sure, we know for certain that Dunaway’s banausic ethos triumphs
in the end, inasmuch as the film concludes with the assassination of a
television presenter for lousy ratings, but thanks to Holden’s repudiation of
her just before this assassination, a repudiation that firmly reestablishes his
commitment to his original loftier ethos, we know for equally certain that this
banausic ethos shouldn’t have
triumphed. By flagrant contrast, the
off-jacking scene of The Favourite cannot
but be read as a wholehearted endorsement of Abigail’s yearning and striving to
steal on the Duchess each and every march up the staircase of status, inasmuch
as the other party in the scene, Lord Mascham, has never stood for or been
involved in anything more redeeming than this staircase-ascent: he has never
been anything but a booby lordling who wants a certain bit of tail and is
willing to go along with any move that allows him to continue hoping to obtain
that selfsame CBoT.
While as a student of the British
eighteenth century I cannot but be especially dismayed by the universal
popularity of such a pseudo-satirical shitslinging-fest as The Favourite on account of its historical setting, as a charter
resident of the early twenty-first century Anglosphere, I cannot pretend that The Favourite instantiates anything
groundbreakingly abominable, inasmuch as I am aware that such pseudo-satirical
shitslinging fests have been regarded as the ne plus ultra of high
cinematic-cum-televisual art since at least as far back as the first season of Mad Men, and that since only slightly
more recently—namely, since the antepenultimate season of Breaking Bad or the first season of Dexter—they have reached an ethical nadir or rock bottom from which
it is more than figuratively impossible to descend any lower; namely, a nadir
or rock bottom whereupon a person who simply voids the ethical field by treating
other human beings as pure, dedicated means is posited as a hero. As to the reason why such P-SSFs have become
so wildly popular since the dawn of the millennium, I am afraid it is no less
prosaic than appalling–viz., that in a scenario chillingly reminiscent of that
mid-twentieth century cinematic non-satire
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the
comparatively virtuous antemillennials have to a man, woman, and child (sic on the anachronistic mere trio of human types), been replaced by
creatures as abhorrent and reprehensible as the creatures presented as mere
caricatures of humanity in the genuine satires of yore—creatures for whom shit-slinging
is a mere matter of course, a de facto means of engaging with other creatures
still (albeit factitiously and with any luck transiently) styled human beings. The present writer is unembarrassed to
confess that he is heartily ashamed of sharing air with such creatures, such Yahoos (how sad, incidentally, it is
that a certain company’s by-now-too-ancient-to-be-notorious piss-poor showing
in the war of proprietary names has entirely stripped Yahoo of its polemical
force!), and his shame is compounded by his bitter realization that unlike
Gulliver he cannot seek consolation in the company of horses, inasmuch as he is
far too impecunious to purchase, let alone feed and stable, the cheapest Lilliputian
Shetland pony.
THE END