The King: Agincourt

Tags

Agincourt, Medieval Europe, Medieval France, Military Stuff, Movies I Hate, The King, Timothée Chalamont

One of the reasons I stopped posting during Covid was I got busy right in the middle of a two-part review of The King (2019, dir. David Michôd), a movie I rather disliked. I did the initial review, but I knew I needed to post a review of its battle scene, but after a couple months had passed, I couldn’t recall the scene clearly enough to review it from memory and the prospect of watching it again discouraged me from doing it; the Covid stress was bad enough without compounding it with a crappy movie. But I finally had the right combination of time and mental health to make myself rewatch it. And hey! It’s exactly as crappy as I remembered it being!

If it’s so crappy, why did I feel I needed to review it? Well, it’s about the battle of Agincourt, which has the distinction new of being one of the very few medieval battles to be depicted in film three times. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of another medieval battle depicted on screen three times, but I’m betting there have been at least three treatments of the battle of Hastings or the battle of Hattin that I haven’t seen. And that just seems to merit a post.

The Historical Agincourt

Since I’ve already discussed this battle in detail, I’ll just let you read it here if you need to. But I’ll summarize. In 1415, Henry V launched an invasion of northern France. After capturing Harfleur, he marked east, encountering a good deal of rain, and his men began to get sick, so he aimed for Calais with the intention of returning to England. But the French, knowing his army was weak, chased him down at Agincourt.

Knowing that he was seriously outnumbered and his men were weak, Henry adopted a very defensive position between two woods, organizing his men into a line in which his men-at-arms (cavalry dismounted to fight on foot) were either flanked by or interspersed with his longbow men. After some initial exchange of arrows (which the French probably were on the losing end of), the French cavalry charged but got repulsed by arrow fire. The French infantry advanced, but took high casualties because of the longbows. They lost formation and got slowed down by the muddy field, the retreating casualties, and the mounting bodies. The nature of the field channeled the French into an increasingly tight zone where they were unable to fight effectively against the English infantry. The English victory was sealed when the longbow men put away their bows and joined the attack using knives and hatchets.

A 15th-century depiction of Agincourt (inaccurately showing both sides using longbows)

The result was one of the most lopsided victories in medieval history. The French suffered something between 4 and 10,000 casualties, while the English suffered only about 110 casualties.

The King‘s take on Agincourt

In the film, Henry (Timothee Chalamet) is advised by one of his nobles to not confront the French because the English forces are sick and outnumbered. But Falstaff (Joel Edgerton) proposes a bold plan. The field at Agincourt will be very muddy once it rains overnight (which he knows it will because his bad knee always aches before rain) and the mud will neutralize the French advantage of numbers. So he suggests that instead of fighting on horseback, the English should dismount and fight on foot (a plan so novel the English have actually been doing exactly that for several generations). But the French won’t just advance onto the field on their own, so he suggests that a small force of men be advanced to draw the French into attacking them. Then, when the mud fouls their charge, the rest of the English forces, which have been hidden in the forests on either side of the field, will charge in at their flanks.

Chalamet as Henry V

Henry agrees to this gamble and, as predicted, it rains overnight. Because the men who are first advanced will essentially be making a suicide maneuver, Falstaff declares his intention to lead them, which Henry dislikes, but Falstaff persuades him that it’s the best option, and makes Henry promise not to make the follow-up attack until the French troops are fully committed. Henry meets with the Dauphin (Robert Pattinson) and offers to fight in single combat rather than a full pitched battle, obviously trying to keep Falstaff alive. The Dauphin rather strangely suggests this means Henry is a coward and as a result the battle goes ahead.

And it plays out roughly as Falstaff had planned. Falstaff leads a force on foot into the muddy field. The French make a very slow charge on horseback, not using lances but swords, and the English arrow-fire forces them to speed up. They slam into Falstaff’s unit, who, despite being substantially armed with pikes, make no effort to use the pikes to break the cavalry charge, even though that’s one of the main reasons to use pikes. As predicted, the mud bogs everyone down and the fight completely loses its organization (because cinematic soldiers can’t ever keep their ranks tight).

The English advancing onto the field

The French advance their reserves into the fight and the Dauphin gets into the battle as well. The English continue firing their arrows, mostly at the advancing cavalry, and then Henry launches his flanking maneuver. Then there is a long battle montage that focuses a lot on how muddy and vicious the fighting is.

Then the Dauphin shows up and offers Henry single combat. Even though the Dauphin is fresh to the fight and Henry is exhausted, Henry accepts, but the Dauphin embarrasses himself by slipping in the mud so much Henry just lets his men swarm the Dauphin. Logically the thing to do would be to either let his men kill the French prince or take him captive, but it’s unclear what finally becomes of the prince. Henry finds Falstaff dead and has a brief cry, and then walks off the field as men kneel before him. He’s asked what to do with the captives and orders them killed, a detail that is historically accurate, except that Henry made the decision during the battle, not after it; it’s also in Shakespeare, but almost always cut because it makes Henry look bad).

Robert Pattinson as some strung-out French hippie

The first thing to note is that this bears only a casual resemblance to the historical Battle of Agincourt. The French did indeed make a charge into a muddy field and get bogged down and they did indeed lose the battle. Henry did fight in the battle. Beyond that, however, it’s mostly fantasy. Falstaff wasn’t a real person and therefore couldn’t lead anyone into battle, and the English did not advance their forces first; the French changed and got bogged down and then eventually the English advanced. The French forces seem to be entirely cavalry; there’s no crossbowmen and while there are some infantry, they don’t seem to fight. The Dauphin was not present at the battle and Henry never made any offer to fight a single combat. There was no English flanking maneuver, unless you count the longbow men getting involved after they couldn’t continue arrow fire because the English troops were in the melee.

Additionally, this version of Agincourt is rather improbable for a couple reasons. First, if the English had advanced a force on foot, the French would probably have done the logical thing and used crossbows to cut them down, rather than charging into battle. So this battle requires the French to be too impatient to do the obvious thing. A second problem is that in order to flank the battlefield, Henry would have to get his men fairly close to the French position without being spotted, which requires the French to have not sent out any scouts into the forests to watch for such maneuvers. That’s a pretty basic mistake, again not impossible, but unlikely. Falstaff’s proposal is basically a suicide mission, and that sort of thing seems to have been generally uncommon in medieval warfare. So while the King‘s version of Agincourt is a battle that could have happened in the 15th century, it’s a pretty unlikely one, since it requires the French to be fairly stupid about one of the things they were famous for.

The French charging onto the field

How does it compare to the other two screen version of Agincourt?

The King‘s Agincourt bears virtually no resemblance to Olivier’s 1944 version. Olivier’s version very heavily emphasizes the French cavalry charge, turning the charge into a truly great moment of cinema in which the pace of the music beautifully mirrors the pace of the charge. The emphasis is on the gallantry of the charge and the actual fighting is reduced to a crowd of knights milling around in a mass and some English archers leaping out of trees onto cavalry that is inexplicably riding through the woods.

Michôd’s scene draws more heavily off on Branagh’s 1988 version. The field is muddy, and the extended melee scene has the same tone, with lots of slow footage of men fighting brutally, punching each other, falling in the mud, and so on. Both convey a very strong “war is hell” feeling, and neither tries to glorify the fighting at all, in contrast to Olivier’s version which was filmed at the end of World War II and made for audiences who already understood how horrible war could be and therefore wanted to see something glorious and uplifting. While Michôd certainly isn’t copying Branagh, I think Branagh’s influence is still there. Frankly, Branagh’s version is far superior, both in terms of its plausibility and as cinema; the music hauntingly underscores the mayhem in a way that still affects me when I think of the film. It’s a far more emotional scene, in part because Branagh took the time to develop the secondary characters enough that we care when we see them die, whereas The King is almost entirely focused first on Falstaff and then on Henry. (Michôd also admits that he ripped off a scene from Game of Thrones, supposedly unintentionally.)

So if I had to rank the three scenes in terms of accuracy, it would be Branagh on top, Michôd second, and Olivier third. Michôd’s battle does at least make sense even if it’s improbable, whereas Olivier’s just looks silly today ((but, in fairness to Olivier, stunt work was a much less developed and most of his extras were amateurs hired because they owned a horse). Ranked in terms of cinema, it would be Branagh, Olivier, then Michôd.

Overall, Michôd’s film is, in my opinion, just a fairly all-around miss. There is nothing I like about it at all, and I disliked watching it enough that it made me put this blog on hiatus for 18 months (well, ok, Covid was a factor too, but still…). For me, the battle is actually the highpoint of The King, and that’s saying something. If you want to see the story of Henry V well-told, rent Branagh’s brilliant film and savor its wonderful cast, masterful interpretation of the play, and Shakespeare’s glorious language.

Want to Know More?

Henry V has been the subject of a lot of popular biographies. One of my rules is that I won’t read historical works by journalists or ‘popular’ historians like Desmond Seward or Alison Weir because they tend to really irritate me with their superficial readings of the documents and facts. I haven’t seen a bio of Henry that I thought was really excellent yet, but John Matusiak’s Henry V (Routledge Historical Biographies)is fairly solid.

There are a variety of books on the battle of Agincourt, some of rather dubious value. It’s such a famous battle that it attracts a lot of writing by military enthusiasts, who are often former soldiers who think that because they know what modern warfare is like, they automatically can generalize to medieval warfare. Probably the best recent book is Anne Curry’s Agincourt: A New History. Curry is arguably the world’s expert on Agincourt and she makes good use of administrative records as well as the traditional narratives of the battle.

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Benedetta: Naked Lust in Sinful Italy

Tags

17th Century Europe, 17th Century Italy, Benedetta Carlini, Charlotte Rampling, Daphne Patakia, Homosexuality, Interesting Women, Monks and Nuns, Paul Verhoeven, Religious Stuff, Virginie Efira

Sorry for my very long absence. Covid completely up-ended my work load in ways that have made doing any writing for pleasure nearly impossible. But this weekend my husband dragged me out of the house to go see a movie, and I felt I simply had to blog about it.

(And my subtitle is a riff on an old Benny Hill skit that reimagines Little Bo Peep as a 70s porn film. For some reason, that skit impressed me way too much as a kid.)

Spoiler Alert: If you plan on seeing this film in the theater, you may want to wait to read this until you have done so, since my review discusses major plot points.

Benedetta (2021, dir. Paul Verhoeven, French with English subtitles) tells the story of a lesbian nun in 17th century Tuscany. She is dedicated to a convent in the small town of Pescia when she is ten. Already at this age she feels a special connection to the Virgin Mary; the night after joining the convent, she kneels in prayer before a statue of the Virgin; the pedestal holding the statue breaks and the statue topples over onto her, pressing its exposed breast close to Benedetta’s face.

A decade later, Benedetta (Virginie Efira) is content with her life as a nun, although she doesn’t get along well with Sister Christina (Louise Chevillotte), who seems to be the biological daughter of the Mother Superior Felicita (Charlotte Rampling in a great performance). But she begins having visions in which Jesus appears to her, often defending her from bandits or snakes. She also begins to discover her sexual attraction to the rather coarse novice nun, Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia), when she accidentally sees the novice naked while bathing.

Benedetta’s visions are often accompanied by seizures, and so Felicita decides that Bartolomea should share a cell (or more properly just a curtained-off enclosure) with Benedetta to help her if she has a fit. During one vision, in which Benedetta sees Jesus on the cross and realizes he has a vagina instead of a penis, she receives the stigmata, the wounds of Christ.

Although the convent’s priest believes what Benedetta is experiencing, Felicita is more skeptical, pointing out that genuine stigmata are always accompanied with the wounds of the crown of thorns, which Benedetta does not have. Benedetta leaves the chamber but is soon found collapsed on the floor, bleeding from wounds to her scalp. In an unearthly voice that seems to represent Jesus, she declares that Benedetta is being persecuted. That resolves the question of authenticity for most of the nuns, and word begins to spread through Pescia that she is a saint. The priest pulls some strings and gets Benedetta appointed abbess, relegating Felicita to the status of a mere nun, which she accepts with equanimity.

One of the benefits of being mother superior is that Benedetta and Bartolomea now have a private room, and Bartolomea wastes no time in introducing Benedetta to lesbian sex. Unable to pleasure her deeply enough, Bartolomea carves a statue of the Virgin Mary into a dildo and the two carry on, not realizing that Felicita can spy on them though a hole in the wall.

Although Felicita can accept her demotion, Christina can’t. She tries to denounce Benedetta to the priest in the confessional, falsely claiming that she saw Benedetta cut the stigmata into herself with a piece of broken glass. The priest persuades her to make the accusation in front of the other nuns, but Felicita refuses to support Christina’s version of events and the priest orders Christina to flog herself. The whole incident traumatizes her so much she soon commits suicide by throwing herself off the convent roof.

That persuades Felicita to take action. Even though the Plague has broken out in Tuscany, she travels to Florence and denounces Benedetta to the Papal Nuncio (Lambert Wilson), who arrives and conducts an investigation. He tortures Bartolomea, who eventually reveals everything to him and gives him the dildo as proof. He orders Benedetta to be burned in the town square. But the local populace are not willing to see their saint die, especially since she had promised that Pescia would be spared from the Plague as long as she was alive. Benedetta displays the stigmata and denounces the Nuncio as her persecutor, and the townspeople riot and free her and kill the Nuncio while Felicita, infected with the Plague, throws herself on the flames.

Benedetta (Virginie Efira) displaying her stigmata

Afterwards, Bartolomea confronts Benedetta with a shard of pottery she found when she untied Benedetta from the stake. She accuses Benedetta of being a fraud and faking the stigmata. Benedetta responds that she doesn’t know what she does when she is having visions, and she returns to the convent, with an epilogue text telling us that she lived in solitary confinement for the next 30 years.

I really liked the movie up until the point where the Nuncio got involved, because at that point it degenerated into predictable clichés about tyrannical clergymen torturing and burning people. In particular it dwells at some length on a supposed torture instrument, the Pear of Anguish, which is used on Bartolomea. Supposedly these devices were inserted into an orifice and then cranked open, causing intense pain and damage to bone and tissue. But despite some uncertainty about what ‘pears of anguish’ were used for in the 17th century, they’re not torture devices because the few that aren’t 19th century forgeries aren’t designed to crank open but rather cranked closed; they spring open and don’t generate enough force to do anything more than be vaguely uncomfortable.

A supposed ‘pear of anguish’

But before that, the film offers a nice view of the complexities of convent life: the daily lives of the nuns; some of the work they do; the complex personal politics of the space; and the interplay between faith, skepticism, and politics. The film has a nice running motif of seeing that Verhoeven develops nicely to explore the issue of different kinds of vision.

Benedetta’s visions as they are showed to us are not unlike the visions some medieval nuns reported, and the film consistently refuses to take sides in the question of whether Benedetta’s visions are genuine or whether she suffers from some form of mental illness or epilepsy. Unfortunately, about the time Benedetta becomes mother superior, the film stops showing us her visions, so that element of the film gets somewhat forgotten.

My biggest complaint about the film, which will not be a surprise, is that a film written by two men and directed by one can’t help but indulge the male gaze too much. The nudity slowly becomes more explicit, especially when Bartolomea is stripped naked to be tortured, and in the last conversation between the two nuns both of the women are entirely nude. The two fairly explicit sex scenes feel rather gratuitous. Verhoeven simply can’t resist the lure of the more salacious elements of the story and succumbs to the temptation to treat these ‘lesbians’ with a prurient interest.

Benedetta being taking to the stake

Yeah, But Did It Happen?

A lot of it, yes.

In the early 1980s, historian Judith C. Brown discovered the records of two investigations into the nun Benedetta Carlini in the Florentine archives and was able to reconstruct a substantial amount of information about her. She was born in 1590 to a prosperous silk-worm farmer, Giuliano Carlini. Her birth was a difficult one and Guiliano vowed to dedicate the child to the service of the Virgin Mary if mother and child survived, which they did; ‘Benedetta’ means ‘blessing’. Giuliano, surprisingly, was literate and educated his daughter quite well, emphasizing her spiritual gifts.

As a young girl, she experienced strange things. A black dog mysteriously attacked her and then vanished, and a nightingale seemed to regularly imitate her singing. The family decided that the dog had been the Devil and the nightengale was sent by the Virgin. When she was 9, Giuliano decided that the time had come for Benedetta to enter a convent. She bid farewell to the nightingale and it flew away and was not seen again. She joined the Theatine house in Pescia, a group that were technically not nuns but laywomen living communally and following the Rule of St. Augustine, but Verhoeven can be forgiven for simplifying this detail, and to simplify I’ll just call the inhabitants nuns.

Soon after she joined the Order, Benedetta was praying in front of a statue of the Virgin when it fell over, which scared her but which she interpreted as evidence that the Virgin wished to kiss her. Beyond that, however, she seems to have been a fairly typical if highly obedient nun. Then in 1613, she began to report visions. In her first, she was in a heavenly garden with a beautiful fountain. In other visions, she was attacked by lions and other wild animals, only to be saved by Jesus, who appeared on horseback to defend her. These visions happened when she was praying, and others present reported that she seemed to be in a trance and often gesticulated and spoke incompressible words.

Benedetta and her confessor, Paolo Ricordati, agreed these were real visions, but wrestled with whether they were from God or the Devil. On Ricordati’s advising, she began to pray for struggles, because those would be more likely a gift from God rather than a seducing vision from the Devil. Two years later, her prayers were answered with painful attacks of paralysis. But in 1617, her visions resumed, this time being filled with frightening images of young men pursuing her with weapons; these visions could last for up to 6 to 8 hours. Eventually, she asked for help and it was agreed that a younger nun, Bartolomea Crivelli, was assigned to share her cell and to provide aid when Benedetta requested it.

In 1618, the nuns relocated to a new house, and Benedetta walked the entire route in a trance, seeing angels accompanying her and the Virgin greeting her at the new house. Three months later, she received a trance in which she saw the Crucifixion and received the stigmata, which Bartolomea described as looking like small rosettes.

One of the convents in modern Pescia (not Benedetta’s)

These developments deeply impressed the nuns. They voted to select Benedetta as their new abbess (which didn’t involve demoting their previous abbess). By Lent of 1619, Benedetta was in the habit of preaching sermons to the nuns, a highly irregular thing for an abbess to do. She preached in a trance, encouraging the nuns to scourge themselves as she did so. She spoke not as Benedetta Carlini but as an angel. Ricordati was troubled by this development, but felt that since Benedetta was not preaching per se but rather speaking as a prophetess channelling the words of an angel, it was acceptable.

In March of that year, she had a vision in which Jesus removed her heart. Three days later, he replaced it with his own heart, one that felt much larger. He also ordered her to never eat meat, eggs, or grains and drink only water. He also assigned her a guardian angel, Splenditello, who carried a branch that had flowers on one side to represent the good things she did and thorns on the other to represent her sins; when she erred, Splenditello would strike her with the thorny side, making her feel physical pain.

In May of 1619, Benedetta announced that she was to marry Jesus. (Note that by this time, she was about 30, not about 20 as she is in the film.) After a week of preparations (in which the nuns borrowed numerous items from other religious houses in the area), there was a complex wedding ceremony conducted; this too Father Ricordati was ok with. During the ceremony, Benedetta saw Jesus, the Virgin Mary, numerous saints, and many angels appear, and Jesus put a golden ring on her finger; she narrated all the details to the assembled nuns. Then she preached a sermon speaking as Jesus, declaring that Benedetta was the “empress of all nuns” and that those who did not believe in her would not be saved. The whole ‘marriage with Jesus’ element is something Verhoeven chose to entirely omit from the story, which is a pity because it plays an extremely important role in the actual events.

Benedetta’s behaviors are certainly unusual, but hardly unprecedented. Late Medieval and Early Modern nuns of a more mystical bent frequently had visions; Benedetta’s older contemporary, St Teresa of Avila, is perhaps the most famous example in her period, but Italian nuns such as St Catherine of Siena and St Angela Foligno also had such experiences, and Benedetta and her fellow nuns were highly aware of St Catherine’s example and many of her experiences mirrored Catherine’s, including prolonged fasting, visions, and stigmata. Female mystics frequently spoke of Jesus as the “bridegroom” or “lover” of their soul, and marital imagery was a common way to describe union of the soul with Jesus. And Benedetta was clearly familiar with St Catherine; she was eventually made the house’s patron saint. The two truly unusual elements in the story are the elaborate wedding ceremony, and Jesus and angels speaking directly through Benedetta, but apparently even these elements did not strike Ricordati as automatically problematic, especially since Benedetta had been able to demonstrate some control over the phenomena, thereby conforming to St Paul’s statement that Christians do not receive a spirit of disorder but of order.

St Catherine receiving the stigmata

However, Benedetta’s marriage ceremony coincided with her house’s application to be elevated to a full convent, and that process drew her to the attention of the papal authorities, who had requested that the provost of Pescia, Stefano Cecchi, give them a report. Cecchi was fully aware of the wedding ceremony, and was apparently uncomfortable with it, because he had tried to restrict who could be present at it. Then he forbade anyone to discuss the ceremony, and decided to conduct a formal investigation of the matter.

He examined Benedetta’s stigmata and determined that they produced fresh blood when the dried blood was washed off. He visited her a total of 14 times over the following months, and became more perplexed by her stigmata, because sometimes they seemed to be healing and other times they bled freshly. At one point she exited the examination and then rushed back in with blood pouring down her face and in great pain. Ultimately Cecchi concluded that she was a true visionary. The pope elevated the house to full status as a monastery and Benedetta was confirmed as its abbess. This whole series of events is simplified in the film into a single examination that happens before Benedetta becomes abbess; indeed, it’s really why she becomes abbess.

Two years later, Benedetta died. Ricordati came immediately and commanded Benedetta to live again, and to the nuns’ surprise, she revived and described another vision she had had. Perhaps Ricordati was familiar enough with the symptoms of Carlini’s seizures that he was able to recognize her as being merely unconscious. This incident also happens in the film, but later, during the second formal examination.

The second examination began sometime between August of 1622 and March of 1623. A new papal nuncio, Alfonso Giglioli, became interested in Benedetta for reasons that are unclear. He was far more skeptical of her than Ricordati or Cecchi. During his investigation, Giglioli identified several contradictions in her visions. The ring that she eventually produced as her wedding ring was a shabby one, quite different from what she had described.

The nuns, when questioned, also pointed to some odd behavior. Despite having announced her strict diet, one nun claimed to have seen her furtively eating salami and mortadella. Another said that when she preached and urged the nuns to courage themselves, she never actually struck herself with the scourge she felt but rather seemed to smear it with blood from her hand. Damningly, two nuns claimed they had repeatedly spied on Benedetta through a hole in a door and had witnessed her renewing her wounds with a needle. (There is a hole in the bedroom wall in the film, but Felicita uses it not to spy on Benedetta’s stigmata but on her sexual activities.)

The most startling testimony, however, came from Sister Bartolomea. She said that repeatedly, after she had disrobed, Benedetta would call to her for assistance and when she came over, Benedetta would throw her down on the bed, climb on top of her, and rub their bodies together. When Benedetta did this, she would speak as Splenditello and tell Bartolomea that what they were doing was not a sin because he was doing it, not Benedetta. Benedetta, when question by the investigators, denied having any memory of what she did when Splenditello was controlling her. This is the point where Verhoeven really deviates from the facts. Splenditello never plays any role in the movie at all, and in the film it is Bartolomea and not Benedetta who initiates sex. There was no dildo. The nuncio himself never showed up in Pescia, never tortured Bartolomea, never attempted to burn Benedetta, and was not killed in a riot (he actually died in 1630).

By November of 1623, the investigation had ended and the nuncio had issued a ruling. Benedetta’s stigmata had vanished and she said that she was no longer receiving any visions, although she does not seem to have admitted any imposture. It was concluded that all the apparent miracles were intentionally fabricated by Benedetta. She was removed as abbess. But exactly what the nuncio did beyond that is unclear because she mostly disappears from the records at that point. In 1661, a nun recorded in her diary that Benedetta had died at age 71 of a fever after spending 35 years in prison, by which she likely meant solitary confinement. If that nun was correct, however, that means that Benedetta was not put into solitary confinement in 1623, because that would have been 38 years earlier. Brown speculates that Carlini must have done something in 1626 that merited more harsh treatment than whatever she received in 1623, but we can only speculate about what might have happened. But the townspeople were apparently still quite interested in Carlini, because they sought to get access to her body and the nuns had to bar the monastery doors until she could be buried. Bartolomea died in 1660.

Much of the scholarly debate about Carlini has turned on the question of how to interpret her sexuality. Brown read her as being a lesbian, using the character of Splenditello to express her own lesbian desires, and therefore viewed her through the lens of the history of women’s spirituality and sexuality. But some critics have argued that doing this reads Carlini through a contemporary lens of sexual identities that would have been entirely foreign to Carlini herself; the very concept of ‘lesbians’ did not exist in the 17th century and it’s not even clear that Carlini, Bartolomea, and the investigators recognized Bartolomea’s description as being about sex. For most people of the era, sex required a penis being inserted into some orifice, so in the absence of a penis, they may not have recognized sex as happening. (And it’s worth noting the Verhoeven evidently can’t imagine lesbian sex without a substitute penis.)

Historian Brian Levack has approached Carlini from a very different standpoint. In his work on exorcism in the Early Modern period, he argues that demonic possession provided female ‘victims’ an opportunity to depart from normal social rules about meekness, passivity, and restraint by enacting a wide range of taboo behaviors, including convulsions, blasphemy, vomiting, exhibitionism, and so on. Thus possession was an opportunity for victims to perform a drastically different social role than the one they normally were bound by. (In a previous blog post, I discussed a similar reading of the Salem Witch Trials.) Levack thus views possession as a form of performance, situating Benedetta’s actions not in the history of sexuality but rather in the history of religious theater, and it is worth noting the degree to which Benedetta’s visions and seizures had a literally theatrical element to them; the most obvious example is her wedding ceremony, but also her move from the old house to the new one and a couple of religious processessions she orchestrated.

Finally, it is worth at least pondering the gender roles Benedetta maintained. Although she was a nun and underwent a spiritual marriage to become a literal bride of Christ, she occasionally adopted the persona of two male figures, Jesus and Splenditello. When she was Jesus, Benedetta was both bride and groom in one body, and when she had sex with Bartolomea, she played a male role both by initiating sex through seduction/deception and by being on top of Bartolomea. Is it possible that we should view Benedetta not as a lesbian but as an example of what we today would call a trans man or gender-fluid person? Unfortunately, that’s a question we can’t answer because the investigators didn’t ask Benedetta about how she understood her gender. She never engaged in any form of cross-dressing or breast-binding (that we know of), but she did engage in attempts to control her body through fasting and, apparently, through self-mutilation, both practices which some trans individuals today struggle with. Her seizures, the physical pain her body experienced, and her dramatic death and revival might also point to a sense of alienation from her body. And to borrow a point from Levack’s approach, her behavior while having visions and being possessed allowed her to temporarily put off her highly-restricted feminine identity and engage in male-coded behavior such as drawing attention to herself, preaching, taking a leadership role, and initiating sex. Thus it is not unreasonable to consider whether Benedetta was seeking to express a sense that she was male even if her body was not.

Benedetta does a nice job of calling attention to a fascinating and very obscure woman. The film does a very good job of exploring convent life and exploring some of Benedetta’s experiences. But by making Bartolomea the sexual aggressor and excluding the details about Splenditello, I think Verhoeven misrepresents Benedetta in a fairly key way, and the whole third act departs from the most fascinating elements of her story in favor of a clichéd false ending that seriously diminishes my appreciation for the film.

Want to Know More?

The King: Falstaff

Tags

David Michôd, Falstaff, Henry V, John Edgerton, Kings and Queens, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Shakespeare, The King, Timothée Chalamont

Last night I watched The King (2019, dir. David Michôd), which is loosely based on Shakespeare’s Henriad cycle about Henry IV and Henry V. It’s a gloomy, dreary film in which color wasn’t invented until long after Henry V’s reign was over. Even the cloudless sky seems dreary on the rare occasions it appears. In case you can’t tell, I didn’t love it. So let’s get into why.

The Henriad

The King isn’t really based on historical fact. It’s based on the Henriad. Joel Edgerton and David Michôd decided that they wanted to tell a story that was based on Shakespeare but without being Shakespeare. Basically, they wanted to show that they could do Shakespeare better than he did. And they failed.

For those who haven’t seen the plays of the Henriad cycle, Henry IV Part 1 introduces us to Henry IV and his dissolute son Prince Hal, who has a circle of wastrel friends centered on Sir John Falstaff. Henry and Hal have to deal with the revolt of the Earl of Northumberland and his hot-headed son Henry ‘Hotspur’ Percy. The play culminates in a fight in the battlefield between Hal and Hotspur, in which Hal kills his opponent.

Henry IV Part 2 picks up where the previous play ends and follows the revolt against Henry, which gets put down. Falstaff spends the play in various misadventures and dealing with his worsening health. Hal reconciles with his father as his father dies, and when Falstaff comes to Hal, expecting rewards from the now king, Hal disavows him.

Henry V deals with the early phase of Henry’s reign. Falstaff dies off-stage, Henry puts down a conspiracy against him, and then embarks on the conquest of France, culminating in his victory at the battle of Agincourt, after which he ‘woos’ Katherine, the daughter of King Charles VI of France.

The King manages to fit all of this into a single movie, although it sharply compresses the material from Part 2. The result is a movie that tries to be a character study of the young Henry. But it’s not the historical Henry they are studying; it’s the literary Henry, but they’ve made changes, so that the film isn’t really based on either the historical Henry or the literary Hal, but is actually a weird sort of What If scenario. What if Hal had reconciled with Falstaff instead of his father but had still managed to realize his potential as a leader and had managed to rehabilitate Falstaff? Oh, and What If Falstaff had been a real person?

Prince Hal’s Youth

The film starts roughly where Part 1 starts, with Young Henry (Timothée Chalamont) being estranged from his father Henry (Ben Mendelsohn) and close friends with Falstaff (Joel Edgerton). He is first seen lying unconscious in a bed after a wild bender the night before, setting up the idea that Henry was a party guy in his youth.

There is, however, no real factual basis in this; Hal’s wild and dissolute youth is best known from Shakespeare, who was drawing off a slightly earlier anonymous play called The Famous Victories of Henry V, in which Prince Hal is basically depicted as a thug before becoming king. The historical Henry was already playing an important role in government by the time he was 14, when he started acting as the Sheriff of Cornwall, an essentially administrative office in which he would have had underlings to help him. He got the office in 1400, soon after his father deposed Richard II and made himself king. In 1402 young Henry joined the Great Council, one of the most important organs of royal government.

Chalamont as King Henry. At least the haircut is kinda accurate.

In 1403, young Henry led an army into Wales to help put down the revolt of Owain Glyndwr. Shortly after that, he met up with his father’s forces at Shrewsbury and helped put down Hotspur’s Rebellion. Exactly what happened to Hotspur is not clear; he was either killed by an unknown opponent or by an arrow when he opened his visor to get a better view of the battlefield. He was almost certainly not killed by Prince Hal (as the film shows), because Hal had gotten himself horrifically injured; he had been struck in the face by an arrow, the head of which had lodged under the skin below his left eye close to the nose to the depth of 5-6 inches, miraculously without hitting either the brain or any of the arteries. John Bradmore, the court physician, was able to devise a special tool to remove the arrowhead several days later and managed to prevent infection by flushing the wound with alcohol. The result was that Henry survived but with a horrible scar (which no cinematic Henry has ever sported).

Henry spent the next decade fighting Glendwr in Wales, and was recognized as basically being in charge of Wales and the effort to pacify it. Records show that was he very interested in the details of sieges, for example writing letters demanding shipments of wood for siege weapons. By 1408, his father’s illness (which involved skin infections and attacks that left him incapacitated for long periods) was making it harder and harder for him to run the kingdom. As a result, between 1408 and 1411, Young Henry was playing an increasingly central role in government via the Great Council, which was taking on a larger and larger role in decision-making. In 1411, he had a falling-out with his father over policy issues and was dismissed from government. There were rumors that he was trying to depose his father, but the evidence for that is weak, although the matter was serious enough that it provoked a meeting between father and son at which Young Henry handed his father a knife, say that if his father wished to kill him, he would not stop it. But there was never any serious question of him not succeeding his father, which he did in 1413 when the older Henry finally died.

Claims that he had a riotous youth rest on very shaky foundations. His brothers were involved in a brawl in an Eastcheap tavern in this period, but Henry himself was not a party to it. Contemporary chronicles say vaguely that he was devoted to “Mars and Venus” (violence and sex), but give no real specifics. The chronicles also remark that he had a dramatic conversion of personality when he was became king, but medieval chronicles were inclined to exaggerate such things to make better stories, and given the lack of any specific details, it’s unwise to suggest that Henry was a hellion.

Oldcastle and Falstaff

From an historical standpoint, the biggest problem with the film is Falstaff, who plays a much larger role in The King than he does in the Henriad. As I already noted, in Part 2, the new king Henry repudiates Falstaff, whose health is in decline. He dies off-stage very early in Henry V. But in The King, not only does Henry not repudiate Falstaff, he relies on him because he knows that Falstaff is going to be honest with him and not just flatter him. That’s a pretty sharp difference from Shakespeare’s Falstaff, who is absolutely the kind of man who would flatter and suck up to Henry to advance himself.

Edgerton as Falstaff

Henry trusts Falstaff so much that by the end of the film, Falstaff is rising to the occasion. When Henry’s forces encounter the French at Agincourt, it’s Falstaff who councils Henry to fight the battle and lays out a strategy that basically involves suckering the French into an ambush. To make the trick work, Falstaff volunteers to lead a small force of Henry’s knights into battle, tricking the French into thinking that they have a much greater numerical advantage than they do. Falstaff does this knowing that there’s a good chance he will be killed, and in fact he does die in the battle. So rather than an unheroic off-stage death that is merited by Falstaff’s essentially parasitical nature, Edgerton’s Falstaff dies a profoundly heroic death, having been redeemed by Henry’s faith in him.

That obviously differs dramatically from Shakespeare, but an even bigger problem is that Falstaff is a fictitious character and therefore cannot have played any role in the historical battle of Agincourt.

Shakespeare’s Falstaff is very loosely inspired by the historical Sir John Oldcastle. Oldcastle had served Henry IV and eventually became involved in the fight against Glendwr, which brought him into contact with Young Henry. This proved to be a very advantageous connection for Oldcastle; he was brought into the prince’s household and began receiving various marks of royal favor, eventually being able to marry a very wealthy widow of the high nobility.

But by 1410, Oldcastle had become quite sympathetic to the Lollards, a heretical movement that argued against the need for priests (to be very simplistic about it). Archbishop Arundel of Canterbury, who was extremely concerned about the threat of Lollardy, found hard evidence that Oldcastle was a supporter of the movement. Arundel showed the evidence to Young Henry, who summoned Oldcastle to meet with him. Initially Oldcastle was able to persuade Henry that he was innocent, but then he fled and ignored Arundel’s attempts to force him to appear in court. Oldcastle finally appeared, was convicted as a heretic, and sent to the Tower of London.

Oldcastle escaped from the Tower and plotted a coup in which the monarchy would be replaced with some other sort of government, the monasteries would be dissolved, and a few other improbable things were planned. A group of Lollards actually tried to put the plan into motion, but Prince Henry got word of it and they were all arrested, except Oldcastle, who managed to elude capture for four years. He was captured and executed in 1417.

A 16th century illustration of Oldcastle’s execution

Notice that Oldcastle and Falstaff are quite different. They’re both knights and friends of Prince Henry, and they both wind up getting repudiated by him eventually. But Falstaff is not a heretic or a rebel the way Oldcastle was.

However, the scandal around Oldcastle remained famous. In the 1580s, an anonymous London playwright published The Famous Victories of Henry V, in which Henry and ‘Jocky’ Oldcastle are basically robbing people until Henry learns that his father is dying, which causes Henry to mend his ways and banish his old friends, including Jocky. It’s not a great play, but it gave Shakespeare the raw material for the Henriad.

And it’s pretty clear that Shakespeare was thinking of Oldcastle when he wrote the Henriad. In Part 1, Hal refers to Falstaff as “my old lad of the castle,” a pun that would only work if Shakespeare felt the name Oldcastle was still relatively well-known. The epilogue of Part 2, however, contains an explicit statement that Falstaff is not Oldcastle, “for Oldcastle died martyr, and this is not the man.” While all the surviving copies of Part 1 call the character Falstaff, there is reason to think that in its first performances, he was explicitly named Oldcastle. In one of the oldest copies of the text, one of Falstaff’s speeches is accidentally labelled ‘Old.’ rather than ‘Falst.’ and one line of dialog scans improperly with the current reading ‘Falstaff’ but properly if it’s read as ‘Oldcastle’.

It appears that Shakespeare originally used Oldcastle, but then ran into the problem that Oldcastle’s living descendants, the Cobhams, were powerful people who held government office and enjoyed the ear of Queen Elizabeth. So after Henry IV, Part 1 premiered, the Cobhams complained either directly to Shakespeare or to some royal official who made it clear that Shakespeare had to change the play, which he prudently did, and then threw in a disclaimer on Part 2 that any resemblance of Falstaff to anyone living or dead was entirely coincidental. And he capped it by positioning Oldcastle as a Protestant martyr to show he was really serious that Oldcastle was a good guy.

The Worst Part of The King

While the film’s revision of Falstaff as a character is weird and honestly not very interesting, the worst part of the film is the end, because Edgerton or Michôd decided that the film needed a twist ending, because apparently neither history nor Shakespeare got it right the first time. In Henry V, a big part of Henry’s motivation to invade France comes when the king of France insults him by sending him a box of tennis balls, basically suggesting that Henry is just playing a game. In the film, it’s just one tennis ball, but the message is basically the same.

But then his chief justice Gascoigne (Sean Harris) tells Henry that he’s caught an assassin sent by King Charles of France. And then Henry discovers that Lords Cambridge and Grey have been bribed by the French to overthrow Henry. Gascoigne advises Henry to make a show of strength and so Henry executes the two nobles and decides to invade France. In history and in Henry V, the order of events are inverted; the decision to declare war came first.

Harris as Gascoigne

After Agincourt, Henry returned to England with his new bride Princess Catherine (Lily-Rose Depp, demonstrating that nepotism is alive and well in Hollywood). Catherine challenges his motives for invading France and persuades him on no evidence whatsoever that her father would never have sent an insulting gift, or sent an assassin, or orchestrated a coup against him. So Henry questions Gascoigne in a scene that reads like CSI: Eastcheap with Gascoigne proving remarkably inept at covering up his tracks. Gascoigne finally admits that he faked the insult and the assassin and the plot as a way to force Henry to demonstrate his strength, because Gascoigne feels that the only way Henry can achieve unity in England is by proving he can be a strong ruler. Henry stabs him to death and all is well.

This is bad. Way bad. Baaaaad. It views the past like a murder mystery, in which there is a plot to uncover and the story ends once the plot has been revealed and resolved. It positions an entire phase of the Hundred Years’ War as being caused by one man’s decision that Henry needs to show he’s a big boy now. It’s like writing a film in which Octavian tricks Brutus into assassinating Julius Caesar so that Octavian can seize power in Rome. It’s like writing a film in which Ulysses S. Grant tricks the South into seceding as a way to save Grant’s career. It’s like writing a film in which Thomas Cromwell throws Anne Boleyn at Henry VIII in order to trigger the Protestant Reformation (oh, wait, that’s kinda sorta what happened).

Ugh. I cannot easily describe just how shitty the ending of this movie is.

Want to Know More?

Don’t watch The King on Netflix. It’s really not worth it. Watch Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Henry V, which is a vastly superior film in all respects.

If you want to know more about Henry V, check out Christopher Allmand’s Henry V.

Kenau: Women to the Rescue!

Tags

16th century Europe, 16th Century Netherlands, Haarlem, Kenau Hasselaer, Military Stuff, Monic Hendrickx

Kenau (aka 1572: The Battle for Haarlem, 2014, dir. Maarten Treurniet, Dutch with English subtitles) is a Dutch/Belgian/Hungarian film about the Siege of Haarlem in the Netherlands in 1572 to 1573. The film focuses on the legend of Kenau Hasselaer, a folk hero who helped supposedly helped defend the Dutch city against the Spanish during the early phase of the Eighty Years’ War.

 

The Eighty Years’ War

By the 1550s, the territory we now think of as the Netherlands was part of the sprawling and unwieldy Hapsburg Empire that ruled Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Low Countries, but lacked a clear unifying identity. Philip II of Spain was a devout Catholic who was opposed the Protestant Calvinism that was spreading in the Netherlands and sought to crack down on religious dissent, which took the form of an outbreak of iconoclasm, in which Calvinists smashed the statues of Catholic saints. Philip sent in the Duke of Alva, whose aggressive cracked down, combined with the imposition of taxes to help fund Philip’s war against the Ottoman Empire, triggered a rebelliom by the Calvinists, led by William the Silent, the Prince of Orange.

Alva sent his son, Don Fadrique, into Guelderland and Holland with an army of about 30,000 men to pacify the region. Fadrique sacked Zutphen and massacred the population of Naarden. That alienated the residents of Haarlem, who had mostly managed to avoid the religious tensions of the time and had intended to stay loyal to Philip. The town government sent four representatives to Amsterdam to negotiate with Fadrique, but in their absence, Wigbolt Ripperda, the Calvinist governor of Haarlem, deposed the town government and replaced them with Orangists. When the representatives returned from Haarlem, he arrested them. The local cathedral, dedicated to St Bavo, was stripped of its Catholic symbols the same day, an effective gesture of revolt against Philip.

Haarlem is due west of Amsterdam

A few days later, on December 11^th, Don Fadrique’s forces laid siege to the city. He had every reason to expect a fairly quick siege. Haarlem was not a large city and only had a garrison of about 4,000 men, many of whom were mercenaries. The city was walled, but its walls were in poor condition. But it was impossible to completely surround the city because it was built on a large lake, the Haarlemmermeer, which meant that the defenders were able to supplies into the city.

The city managed to repulse an initial assault, and the result was a prolonged and brutal siege. The Spanish attempted to undermine the walls, but the Haarlemers managed to dig their own counter-tunnels and collapsed the Spanish ones. The Spanish cannons blew down large sections of the walls, including two gates, the Kruispoort and the Janspoort, but the defenders managed to fill in the gaps with earth and rock. When the Spanish attacked the city, the defenders threw ‘tar-wreaths’, rings of flammable material soaked in burning tar, onto them.

In March, after 5 months, an army from Amsterdam was able to occupy the Haarlemmersmeer and complete the encirclement of the city, making it impossible to get more food into the city. The Spanish were able to launch a small fleet on the lake. By May, the food situation had become so desperate that the Haarlemers executed all the Spanish prisoners they had taken. Early in July, William the Silent tried to break the siege by sending an army of 5,000 to Haarlem, but Fadrique’s forces crushed the army.

St Bavo’s Church

At that point, with Haarlem virtually out of food, Ripperda’s government admitted the inevitable and negotiated a surrender. Fadrique permitted the town to buy the city’s freedom from sacking with an enormous ransom. But most of the garrison, along with 40 of the leading citizens were tied up and drowned in the river. Ripperda was beheaded. The occupying army violated the terms of the surrender by looting the town anyway.

Although the Spanish ultimately won the siege of Haarlem, it had a profound effect on the war. It bought William the Silent the time to shore up the defenses of Alkmaar further to the north, and the Dutch were profoundly inspired by the resistance the Haarlemers were putting up. When Fadrique tried to lay siege to Alkmaar, it repulsed a Spanish assault and then opened the dikes around the city, forcing the Spanish to completely withdraw. Unable to push further north, Fadrique and his father Alva were essentially thwarted and not long after that Philip II recalled Alva. As a result, the northern provinces of the Netherlands were able to effectively achieve independence, although the war lasted for another 7 decades before the Spanish threw in the towel.

 

Kenau Hasselaer

Kenau SImonsdochter Hasselaer (1526-1588) was the daughter of a brewer who married a shipbuilder named Nanning Borst, with whom she had four children: Guerte, Margiet, Lubbrich, and Gerbrand. After Nanning’s death around 1562, she continued running his business and made a couple logical expansions; she was importating wood from Norway to build ships, so she began dealing in timber as well and she expanded into Baltic commerce, selling Dutch grain into the region. Several of her brothers were shipbuilders as well, while her sister married a noted scholar.

A later essentially fantasy portrait of Kenau

During the siege, the women of Haarlem participated vigorously in the town’s defense, helping the haul earth and rebuild the damaged walls. This sort of thing was extremely common during sieged, since women as well as men stood to die (or be raped) if a town failed to keep out attackers. A single account of the siege, published only a few months after the siege, mentions Kenau as being tireless and fearless in her efforts to haul earth and keep the walls repaired. This probably also involved contributing wood to fortify the walls and gates; as late as 1585, she was fighting to get the town to repay her for wood she had sold them during the siege, and at least part of what she was owed didn’t get repaid until after her death.

Over time, however, Kenau became an object of many legends. Although all we know about her role in the siege is that she worked to maintain the fortifications, in popular stories, she was the one throwing the tar-wreaths onto the Spanish attackers. In the 1673 and 1773 centenary celebrations, she was described as fighting on the walls. By 1873, her role had grown to leading a troop of 300 women. Her name became a synonym for bravery, although it eventually evolved into a word for a shrewish woman. In 1800, a warship was named for her. She became a favorite subject for patriotic Dutch painters and engravers, and numerous images of her survive, none of which are likely to be an actual likeness of her.

A 1954 Romantic patriotic painting of Kenau leading the fighting

But by the 1872 anniversary, a Haarlem historian was starting to puncture her legend. He pointed out the sources from the time do not mention many female fatalities, which is unlikely if the women were actively fighting on the walls. He also argued that if other women had been fighting so hard, it was likely that there would be more than one refence to a specific woman helping defend the town. Although the Spanish executed 2000 male defenders of the town, they do not seem to have executed any women. It’s also been pointed out that during her efforts to get repaid for the timber, she never claims to have fought, although she does say in one court document “as a good patriot, I have sustained this town against the enemy.” If she was such a great war hero, the town was reluctant to admit it after the fact, and in fact many people in town called her a “witch” in the course of legal disputes with her. After her death, her son admitted that both Kenau and his sisters were “dangerous company for all men.”

After the siege, she left the city, managed to get herself appointed as the Weighing House Master in Arnemuiden. This was an important position, one not generally given to women. This seems to have been imposed on the town by William the Silent, suggesting that he appreciated whatever efforts or sacrifices she had made during the siege. In 1588, the captain of her trading ship was taken hostage in Norway. She set sail to get him released and was never seen again, although her son eventually discovered her ship for sail in another town, suggesting that she was captured by pirates and killed, a sad end for such a formidable woman.

 

Kenau in Kenau

The movie tells the story of the siege of Haarlem mostly through focusing on Kenau (Monic Hendrickx). The film jettisons a lot of what we know about her family. Her husband, incorrectly named Ysbrand, is already dead and she has only two daughters, Gertrude (Lisa Smit) and Kathelijne (Sallie Harmsen). She is correctly presented as a shipbuilder and sells some wood to the town when Wigbold Ripparta (Barry Atsma) presses her for it. She quarrels with a wealthy townsman Duyff (Jaap Spijkers), who is dissatisfied with the work she’s doing on a ship for him, and when his arrogance causes an accident that knocks one of her men into the canal, she leaps in and rescues him. She wears a man’s doublet and shirt throughout the film, the clearly the film wants us to view her as a ‘strong woman’. She wants nothing to do with the rebellion that his broken out elsewhere. She forbids Gertrude to embrace Calvinism, saying that she can do whatever she likes after the rebellion has ended.

Atsma as Wigbold and Hendrickx as Kenau

But Calvinists are agitating in Haarlem, and Wigbold’s son persuades Gertrude to go along with a small group of radicals when they break into St Bavo’s and small all the Catholic statuary. They get busted and are hauled off to Utrecht the very next day, Gertrude included, where the bishop immediately sentences them all to burn as heretics. By the time Kenau arrives, Gertrude is already tied to the stake. Kenau pleads with the priest, insisting that her daughter is a good Catholic, but when the pyre is lit, Kathelijne grabs a pistol and shoots Gertrude to spare her the suffering.

That’s all fairly improbable. The iconoclasm at Haarlem only happened after WIgbold seized power, so the film has to reverse the order of facts in order to give Kenau a motive to support the revolt. Haarlem had its own bishop, so the iconoclasts probably wouldn’t have been sent to Utrecht and would have been tried in Haarlerm. And there would certainly have been a delay of at least several days to allow for an actual trial. Having vaguely established religion as a motive for the rebellion and giving Kenau a motive to rebel, the movie promptly forgets religion entirely for the rest of the film.

During the initial Spanish assault, Kenau finds herself near the ramparts and, recognizing that hostile troops were in danger of scaling the walls, she organizes the women into a rock-hauling brigade so that the men on the ramparts have something to throw at the men on the ladders. Such things were entirely typical of the way women participated in defense of towns during sieges, and while it’s not there’s no evidence that Kenau actually did this, it’s not at all implausible.

But as the film goes on, the film comes up with increasingly unlikely ways for her to fight the Spanish. She stumbles onto some information that suggests that the Spanish will attack the Janspoort, but Wigbold is convinced the attack will come at the Kruispoort and refuses to allocate men to depend the Janspoort. So Kenau organized a group of women to defend the gate by building a second wall inside the gate. When the Spanish troops breach the gate, they find themselves trapped inside the second wall, where the women start pouring tar down on them and then thrown down a barrel of gunpowder and light it with a fire arrow, causing an enormous explosion that kills the invaders (but somehow doesn’t breach the wooden second wall).

The Spaniards about to get blown up

Then the food starts running out and Wigbold insists that the Spanish food convey from Amsterdam is too heavily protected to attack. Kenau organizes her Amazon commandos to attack the convey as it crosses the frozen Haarlemmermeer. They light fires to blind the convey and then attack the convey on skates, killing most of the troops and getting the food to the city. They manage to plant a spy in Don Fadrique’s (Attila Arpa) tent and she reports that the Spanish have undermined the gate and are planning to set off explosive charges to open a permanent breach in the walls. The Amazon commandos distract the Spanish troops by standing naked on the walls of Haarlem, which allows Kenau to get into the gunpowder store long enough to blow it up.

Unfortunately, she doesn’t get the gunpowder in the tunnel, so Faderique is still able to blow up the gate and the Spanish surge in to loot the town. Kenau uses Duyff’s ship to get an engineer (heretofore unseen) out of the town to Alkmaar but stays behind to find Kathelijne, and as a result she’s captured. She gets tied up and thrown into the canal, but because she knows how to swim she apparently gets away. The film ends by framing the heroic resistance of Haarlem as the reason for Dutch independence.

I’m of two minds about Kenau. On the one hand, the film generally distorts the facts. It attributes a whole lot of heroism to her and the other women of Haarlem that there is no evidence for. While the women of Haarlem certainly made an important contribution to the siege, there’s no reason to think that the women single-handedly saved the town over even actually fought at all, which is the impression the film offers. While Kenau’s various feats do bare a vague relationship to the facts (there was a Spanish plan to blow up the walls, getting food into the city was a serious problem, the defenders probably did pour tar or oil down onto the attackers, Kenau did survive the siege), none of those things happened the way the film shows.

Kenau about the blow up the gunpowder store

On the other hand, it’s pretty refreshing to see a war film in which women are the focus of the story, and the film generally explores women’s experiences during wartime much more than men’s. Except for the first fight scene, the male defenders generally take a back seat, doing their fighting in the background while Kenau’s Amazon commandos deal with a variety of problems the men are too beleaguered to address themselves. The film aces the Bechdel Test, and even when Kenau is talking about men with one of her daughters, the emphasis is generally on the relationship between the women.

The film has an interesting sub-plot looking at the fraught relationship Kenau has with Kathelijne. She is angry at Katheljlne for shooting Gertrude, doesn’t want her to risk her life fighting on the front lines, and doesn’t want Kathelijne to hook up with a particular mercenary. But the script makes it clear that their conflict is driven by deeper issues. While the performances in the film are generally mediocre, Hendrickx truly shines as the ferociously strong-willing Kenau and despite the enormous differences, her Kenau reminds me of no one so much as Holly Hunter’s Ada McGrath in The Piano. Both women are so strong-willed they don’t entirely understand their own motives but cannot be other than who they are.

Is Kenau a brilliant film? No. But I’ve seen far worse war movies and the solidly feminist angle makes it a war movie I’ve never seen before.

 

Want to Know More?

Kenau is available on Amazon under the title 1572: The Battle for Haarlem. 

There aren’t, so far as I know, any books about Kenau. If you’re interested in the 80 Years’ War, check out Revolt in the Netherlands: The Eighty Years’ War, 1568-1648.

All is True: Shakespeare’s Women

Tags

17th Century England, 17th Century Europe, All Is True, Judi Dench, Kenneth Branagh, William Shakespeare

(I realized that I had started to write a review of All is True, but neglected to finish it. I’ve forgotten at least one thing I wanted to say about this film, but I figured I’d just post this even though it’s quite brief.)

In 1613, during a performance of William Shakespeare’s play All is True (known today as Henry VIII), a fire started at the Globe Theater where the performance was happening. The fire destroyed the Globe and seems to have had pushed Shakespeare into retirement, since Henry VIII is his last known play. Shakespeare returned home to Stratford-on-Avon and died three years later. Ben Elton’s play and now movie All is True(2018, dir. Kenneth Branagh) looks at Shakespeare’s interactions with his long-neglected family in the  three twilight years of Shakespeare’s life.

When Shakespeare (Kenneth Branagh) comes home, his wife Anne Hathaway (Judi Dench) has a great deal of bottled up resentment over the fact that her husband has largely ignored the family and refuses to share his bed. His daughter Judith (Katherine Wilder) has a simmering anger at him because she feels that he always loved her dead twin brother Hamnet more than her. His daughter Susanna (Lydia Wilson) is married to a Puritan who considers the theater sinful and strains the marriage by making it clear that he has more passion for God than for his wife. The still-unmarried Judith also harbors resentment toward Susanna who has given their father grandchildren.

Hamnet’s Ghost

The family is haunted emotionally by the ghost of Judith’s dead twin Hamnet, who died in 1596 when he was 11. He had written some poems that gave his father a sense that he could inherit William’s mantel as a writer, but then died when an epidemic spread through Stratford while his father was in London. Anne resents William for not returning home to grieve with her, while Judith feels that her father was so taken with Hamnet’s precocious writing skills that he simply ignored her, despite the ample evidence that she was a bright child. Shakespeare too is grieving Hamnet, both as a son and as a male heir to his legacy. Instead of talking about his sorrow, he pours his energy into laying out a new garden.

The basic situation of the Shakespeare family in 1613 is exactly as the film depicts, but almost nothing is known about the emotional life of these characters in this period, so Elton has filled in the blanks by crafting a plausible but slightly too-convenient set of dynamics based around the impact Hamnet’s death might have had on the family. On the one hand, the Shakespeares could easily have been a family torn by their inability to express their various griefs. The fact that Shakespeare was not living with his family in 1596 (because he was in London at the height of his career, earning the money that allowed his family to live in considerable comfort) might plausibly have created a deep rift by making it easy for the family to just not talk about what had happened.

Dench as Anne with Branagh as Shakespeare

On the other hand, the idea that most of the family’s complex issues all stem from Hamnet’s death all feels just a bit too pat. Because as the movie goes on, it slowly comes out that there is much more going on under the surface of the facts than is evident at first. Judith eventually reveals that it was she who wrote the poems that Hamnet gave to their father. All this time that William has been grieving the loss of his son’s talent, that talent has still been there, waiting for him to turn his gaze to Judith. Thus the play draws deeply from Cyreno de Bergerac, with William Shakespeare as Roxanne and Judith playing Cyreno to her dead brother’s Christian. It’s a powerful idea that one of the greatest writers in the English language might have been unable to recognize true talent when it was right under his nose.

But that’s not the only secret waiting to be discovered. As he talks with his family, William begins to suspect that something is rotten in the state of Stratford-on-Avon. As he looks into the details, he realizes that no one else was claimed by the infectious disease that claimed his son, which seems highly suspicious. Eventually he learns the truth that Hamnet committed suicide because he was struggling to learn to read and write, so that Judith’s help in poetry writing has raised their father’s expectations of him too high for him to ever meet. So Judith and Anne have been grieving a double tragedy, unable to share the full truth with anyone.

The film puts gender dynamics at the heart of the story, focusing on the ways in which 17^th century society constrained women by denying them education and agency and placing unreasonable demands on them to have sons. In a more egalitarian period, Judith would have grown up feeling that her father was proud of her talent.

All is True is not a great film by any measure. It’s a bit too aware of its prestige status and star casting, and the story it tells is a little too neat in the way all the plots eventually come back around to Hamnet’s untimely death. But it’s a very pretty film loaded with excellent performance, and it’s a treat to see three such celebrated Shakespearean actors playing the real people in Shakespeare’s life and not just the products of his genius.

 

Want to Know More?

All is True is available on Amazon.

If you want to know more about William Shakespeare, you could start with Jonathan Bate’s Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare.

Rocketman: Inside Elton John

Tags

20th Century America, 20th Century Europe, Elton John, Homosexuality, Rocketman, Taron Edgerton

This past semester has just been exhaustingly busy, so I haven’t watched a lot of historical films, much less had any time to blog about them. But I did get an opportunity to watch Rocketman (2019, dir. Dexter Fletcher) recently and found its approach to historical storytelling interesting. So I wanted to make a quick post about it.

The film focuses on the life of Elton John from his childhood in post-war Britain to his getting sober in the 1980s. Between those two point, he of course became one of the biggest musical artists of the century (he is currently the fourth-best-selling performer, behind the Beatles, Rihanna, and Michael Jackson). The film opens with John (Taron Edgerton), dressed in a devil stage costume, walking into something like an AA meeting (but with a therapist). His conversation (mostly a monologue, really) in the group serves as the frame-tale for his life story, told in roughly chronological order. It doesn’t shy away from either his drug use or his sexuality. (In fact, the film contains the first full-out gay sex scene ever included in a major Hollywood film.)

The film, which John himself worked to bring to screen, does something quite refreshing for an historical biopic. While the film broadly sticks to the fact of John’s life and career, it doesn’t really try to present them in a standard factual narrative. Instead, at key emotional and career moments, John and the characters around him start singing his music, sometimes turning songs into duets, dance numbers, and the like.

The result is a film that tries to convey not precisely the facts so much as what it felt like to be Elton John. John’s childhood is expressed through “I Want Love”, sung by young John (Kit Connor), his rather self-centered mother Shiela (Bryce Dallas Howard), his distant and cold father Stanley (Steven Mackintosh) and his more attentive grandmother Ivy (Gemma Jones), who recognizes his talent and helps him get a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music. His first performance at an English pub when he’s 15 turns into the Bollywood-inspired dance number “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting.” When he gives his first American performance, “Crocodile Rock”, both he and the audience levitate off the ground, giving a sense of the transcendent feeling a great rock performance can create. “Rocketman” is used to convey his sense of profound unhappiness and isolation at the height of his stardom. His eventual sobriety is marked at the end of the film with “I’m Still Standing.” The result is a biopic that is more like a stage musical than a conventional Hollywood biopic.

Although the film roughly follows the facts, it departs from chronology in one very important way. The songs performed bear no chronological relationship to the moments they are used to illustrate in the film. For example, “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” was released in 1973, but is used to depict John’s first public performance in 1962. His first American performance was in 1970, but “Crocodile Rock” wasn’t written until 1972. “I’m Still Standing” was not written while he was in rehab. So the film subordinates the chronology of John’s music to the goal of expressing John’s inner life, which is sometimes larger than life and sometimes deeply lonely.

Some of the people in John’s life have objected to the film’s characterization of key characters. His half-brothers have objected to John’s depiction of Stanley as cold and distant, asserting that Stanley had a much better relationship with John in his teen years than the film offers. The film depicts Sheila as basically too self-centered to appreciate her son’s remarkable musical talents, when in fact she was consistently supportive of him. But if the film is seeking to express John’s inner life rather than the strict objective facts these deviations are less problematic. John may have felt unloved even if his father was more loving than the film presents him as.

The film also does something quite nice during the closing credits. Throughout the film John performs in a range of increasingly outrageous outfits, including as Queen Elizabeth I. The closing credits include side-by-side comparisons of the film’s version of various outfits with photos of the actual outfits they were based on. While the film exaggerates the outfits slightly, in general the costumes hew fairly closely to the facts.

Taron Edgerton in one of the film’s more flamboyant costumes

Overall, Rocketman takes a clever and insightful approach to a work-horse genre and finds something rather new in it. It does a good job conveying the spirit of John’s music and is definitely worth a look.

Want to Know More? 

Elton John’s autobiography is Me: Elton John

The White Princess: Whackadoodle-doo!

Tags

Elizabeth of York, Henry VII, Kings and Queens, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Starz, Tudor England

 The 2017 Starz series The White Princess (based on the Philippa Gregory novels of the same name) is a sequel to The White Queen series, although not completely. None of the earlier series cast returns (with the exception of one supporting character), and a key detail of The White Princess is incompatible with the first series.

The show also feels cheaper than its predecessor. Instead of finding appropriate period locations for domestic scenes, in the earlier episodes they filmed a lot of scenes in churches and just tried to cover up problematic details like tombs behind large banners on free-standing mounts. Henry wears a lot of black leatherette pants and one of his cloaks is just a big sheet of leather with clasps held on with fibulae. It must be a great cloak, because he has it for years. Frock Flicks really hates the costuming. Henry spends a great deal of time just walking around with a crown on for no real reason. But the show did spend more money on its battle scenes (although tactically they make no sense.)

First, Some Background

Henry VII seized control of England in 1485 by defeating and killing the now-infamous Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field. Henry VII had a very weak claim to the throne. He came from the lower nobility, his father (who died before Henry’s birth) having been the 1^stEarl of Richmond and the son of Henry V’s widow Catherine of Valois. His mother Margaret Beaufort was a great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, third son of Edward III via his mistress-turned-wife Katherine Swynford. Since the Beauforts were related to the Lancastrian kings of England whose line had been stamped out by Edward IV, Henry represented one of the last remaining heirs to the Lancastrian claim to the throne. But his claim was a weak one, because in 1407, when the Lancastrian king Henry IV had legitimized the Beauforts, he had specifically excluded them from the line of succession. Additionally, Henry’s family was not particularly wealthy by the standards of the day, and Henry had spent much of his life outside the British Isles, so he didn’t have deep political connections either. His claim was successful partly due to residual loyalty to the Lancastrians and partly due to hostility to Richard III.

The Lancastrians had been displaced by the Yorkist line, in the person of Edward IV, duke of York. The Yorkists arguably had a superior claim to the throne in a legal sense, because they were descended from both Edward III’s second son Lionel and his fourth son Edmund (directly from Edmund and through Lionel’s daughter Philippa). When Henry IV usurped the throne from Richard II in 1399, he not only violated Richard’s right to the throne, he also passed over Lionel’s claims. As long as Henry and his son Henry V were successful, their questionable legal claims were ignored, but Henry VI proved woefully incompetent as well as mentally ill, which opened the door to Edward of York seizing the throne in 1461.

To simplify a complex story (as told in The White Queen), Edward ruled fairly successfully, with the exception of a disruption in 1470 when Henry VI briefly retook the throne. He married Elizabeth Woodville, a women of the lower nobility, which provoked a great deal of political trouble from the more established English nobles, who resented Edward’s efforts to promote the Woodvilles ‘above their station’. Edward and Elizabeth produced a whole passel of children: seven girls and three boys (one of whom died around 2 years old).

When Edward died in 1483, his older son Edward was 13 and the younger, Richard of Shrewsbury, was 10. But Edward IV’s younger brother Duke Richard of Gloucester feared that the Woodvilles, who were his political opponents, would use the young king to strike at him, so he quickly usurped the throne. Richard III took charge of Young Edward and Richard, who were placed into the Tower of London and never seen again. There has been debate about what happened to them ever since, but there is no real scholarly doubt that Richard either ordered their deaths or made it clear that he would accept someone doing the deed proactively. Given how vitally important they were during Richard’s reign, it’s simply inconceivable that they were killed against his will.

When Richard took the throne, Elizabeth Woodville began negotiating with Henry Tudor, who was one of the few credible opponents of her brother-in-law. In 1483, they agreed that Henry would marry Elizabeth of York, the oldest child of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville. Henry went so far as to swear a public oath to that effect. The effect of this marriage would be to join Henry’s rather weak claim to the throne with Elizabeth of York’s rather strong claim. Assuming her two brothers were already dead, Elizabeth was the heir to Edward IV’s claim, meaning that her claim was much stronger than Richard’s, at least legally.

Henry VII

Richard III had only one child with his wife Anne, a boy Edward who died a year after his father took the throne. (He also had two illegitimate children fathered when he was a teenager.) Anne died in March of 1485, leaving Richard in desperate need of a wife and heir. So he immediately began negotiating with King John II of Portugal for the hand of John’s sister Joanna, a nun who was rather disinterested in marrying anyone. To sweeten the deal, Richard also proposed marrying his niece Elizabeth of York to John’s kinsman (and future king) Manuel I.

This was a sound move on Richard’s part. First, it would have helped secure him an ally, had the marriages gone through. Second, it would have weakened Henry’s political position and claim to the throne, thus undercutting his ability to threaten Richard. Third, the Croyland Chronicle claims that there were rumors that Richard had an inappropriate desire for his niece. Given that Richard’s position was already shaky, he may have decided that he didn’t need rumors of incest circulating about him, so he sent her away from court almost immediately after Anne’s death; her marriage would have completely removed any scurrilous gossip about a supposed relationship.

However, it’s unclear how reliable the Croyland Chronicle’s claim is. The author of this part of the Chronicle is anonymous, and historians disagree about who he was, although he clearly had access to the Yorkist court. This section was written around 1486, after Henry had become king, so it’s quite likely that the author was a former Yorkist hoping to curry favor with Henry by making Richard look as bad as possible. So the Chronicle’s claim that there were rumors about Richard’s incestuous interest in his niece cannot be assumed to be true, although it can’t actually be totally discounted either. But it’s worth noting that the claim is that Richard was attracted to Elizabeth, nothing more. There’s no evidence that he actually wanted to marry her, which would have been wildly unacceptable, or ever tried to do anything with her.

Elizabeth of York

Henry defeated Richard on August 22, 1485. He retroactively dated his accession to August 21^st, meaning that anyone who fought in support of Richard was by that fact guilty of treason against Henry. He had himself crowned king in October of the same year, pointedly not marrying Elizabeth of York until January 18^thof 1486, which means that he was king of England not because of his wife’s legal claim but by his own right of conquest. He even made a point of claiming the throne by right of conquest in some of his proclamations. His first son, Prince Arthur, was born on the 19^thor 20^thof September of that year. Elizabeth was crowned queen in November of 1487.

The White Princess           

At the start of the series, Elizabeth of York (Jodie Cromer) is in love with Richard and has had sex with him. Consequently, she passionately hates Henry (Jacob Collins-Levy) as the man who killed her lover. Her relationship with Richard seems to be widely known, because both Henry and his mother Margaret (Michelle Fairley, striving mightily to bring some semblance of plausibility to a religious maniac) refer to her as a whore and Richard’s lover.

I cannot emphasize enough how totally whackadoodle this is. Not only does it depend on the thinnest of evidence, it goes far beyond the claims of the Croyland Chronicle. The idea that a royal princess would have been openly having premarital sex is ludicrous, because it would have severely undermined her value as marriage partner. Elite women of this era were essentially required to be virgins on their wedding day. It also completely ignores the fact that uncle-niece incest was as unacceptable then as it is today, arguably more so, given the very complex rules about consanguinity that medieval society dealt with. No one at any point bothers to comment on the fact that not only is Elizabeth having premarital sex, she’s breaking one of the biggest taboos of all. Since Elizabeth of York is the audience identification character, it’s clear that the show wants to avoid making viewers queasy by reminding them that her first great love is her uncle.

And despite all this, Henry insists on putting blood on the bedsheets the night they are married. The whole point of doing that is offer evidence that the bride is a virgin, but if everyone knows she’s not a virgin, it’s pointless.

In the show, Elizabeth and Henry hate each other from the moment they meet. Henry doesn’t like the idea of marrying his enemy’s lover and she doesn’t like the idea of marrying her lover’s enemy. He openly suggests marrying someone else, including Elizabeth’s jealous younger sister Cecily (Suki Waterhouse), but his council includes former Yorkists who insist that he keep his promise to marry Elizabeth.

It’s a little-known fact that Margaret Beaufort could spit venom up to six feet when threatened

So Henry decides that he can’t marry her until he knows for certain that she’s fertile. So he essentially rapes her to see if he can knock her up quickly. When it becomes clear that she has gotten pregnant, he marries her. There’s no virtually no evidence to support this. They did reside in the same household before their marriage, so it’s possible they could have had sex before their marriage, but the only reason to think they did so is that Prince Arthur was born 8 months and 1-2 days after their marriage. So either he was conceived in late December or he was born a month premature. But there was no practice of ‘testing’ a woman’s fertility with premarital sex, and given that Henry needed to build his claim to the throne, it would have been risky for his heir to be an obvious product of premarital sex, because it would have opened the door to claims that Arthur was a bastard, the last thing Henry would have wanted. (This is another reason why the idea of Elizabeth having an affair with Richard is so crazy. If Elizabeth were known to have not been a virgin on her wedding day, the legitimacy of all her children would have been suspect.)

Also, as an aside, can I just point out that the trajectory of the show has Elizabeth fall in love with Henry gradually, after he’s raped her? There’s something really fucked up about Philippa Gregory here.

Finally, the show’s timeline presumes that not only did Elizabeth get pregnant from that first, very quick, act of intercourse but also that it was clear to her that she was pregnant just a couple weeks later and that a very hurried marriage could be arranged without anyone noticing the rush. Remember, for Arthur to be born after nine months, there’s only room for a month between his conception and his parents’ wedding. While it’s possible that Elizabeth might have realized she was pregnant just a week or two after conceiving, it’s more likely for a woman to take 5-6 weeks to realize she’s pregnant. Elizabeth lived in an age when women were discouraged from having a clear understanding of such matters and even physicians and midwives weren’t always clear on the relationship between a missed period and conception. Would Elizabeth have understood what a single missed or very late period meant? It’s hard to know, but the show is relying on much more recent ideas about pregnancy than were common in the 15^thcentury.

Henry’s coat here comes from the Late Biker Age

In general, the show wants us to see Elizabeth as a sincere yet politically-engaged woman who often fought with her mother-in-law. She frequently participates in the royal council and writes letters to rally support for Henry against Perkin Warbeck. She successfully rallies English troops that don’t want to fight for Henry. In one remarkably absurd scene, she conducts a marriage negotiation with Isabella of Castile because Elizabeth speaks Spanish and Henry does not, and then lies to Henry about the fact that Isabella has refused the marriage, as if there is no one else in the room who understands both English and Spanish and could tell Henry what was actually being said. (In fact, although Elizabeth was a very well-educated woman by the standards of her day, she never learned a second language beyond some not very good French. Also, the marriage was proposed by the Spanish, not the English. And the idea that Henry would have personally gone to Spain and taken his wife with him as his translator at a time when he was fearful of a rebellion against him in support of Perkin Warbeck is rather silly.)

There’s no real evidence that Elizabeth was very involved in the politics of her day. Her mother-in-law was far more influential at court and Henry appears to have made it very clear that Elizabeth was the mother of his children and not one of his key counselors. Although it is possible that she influenced him during their private (and therefore unrecorded) conversations, there’s no particular evidence that he trusted her except in matters of marriage, where it was traditional for the queen to play an important role. She focused her life on her children and charitable works, which he gave her a substantial income to pursue.

More Whackadoodle

One continuity between The White Queen and The White Princess is that Elizabeth Woodville (Essie Davis) is a witch. And by that, I mean she actually has magic powers. Over the course of the show, she sends a nightmare to trouble Margaret Beaufort, ensures that a stable boy finds a message she has thrown out a window, kills Mary of Burgundy by breaking a statue of the Virgin Mary, keeps Perkin Warbeck from being captured by Henry, and generally miraculously knows things like that Warbeck is landing in England.

As I’ve discussed in a previous post, this is nonsense. There’s literally no evidence at all that Elizabeth Woodville knew or attempted to practice magic of any sort. And one wonders why, if Elizabeth actually could work magic, she didn’t bother to, oh say, kill Henry. Why didn’t she send nightmares against Henry or otherwise curse him? Why didn’t she kill Prince Arthur? Gregory wrote her novel to give Elizabeth power to cause a variety of things that actually happened historically, but the fact that Elizabeth wasn’t able to do the sort of things that would actually have benefitted her cause in a material way shows how silly this idea is.

And as we’ll see in the next post, there’s a lot more whackadoodle stuff around Perkin Warbeck’s rebellion against Edward.

Want to Know More?

The White Princess  is available on Amazon, as is the novel it’s based on. But if you’re looking for something historically reliable about Henry and Elizabeth, skip Philippa Gregory. For Henry VII, take a look at Sean Cunningham’s Henry VII or Thomas Penn’s Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England. For Elizabeth of York, try Arlene Okerlund’s Elizabeth of York: Queenship and Power.  

Tales of the City: the Next Generation

Tags

1970s, 20th Century America, Anna Madrigal, Armistead Maupin, Charlie Barnett, Homosexuality, Laura Linney, Mary Ann SIngleton, Michael Tolliver, Murray Bartlett, Olympia Dukakis, San Francisco, Tales of the City

Netflix has released its first (and perhaps only) season of Tales of the City. Confusingly, it’s the first Netflix season, but the fourth season of the series based on the novels of the same name by Armistead Maupin that chronicle the lives of the residents of 28 Barbary Coast in San Francisco. The first three seasons were set in the late 1970s and early 1980s, before the AIDS crisis took hold and carved its way through the city’s gay community. The current season, however, is set in the present day (although it’s only been 20 years for the characters, allowing the series to bring back four of the six actors who led the show in its first season, which was filmed in 1993).

Spoiler Alert: This post will discuss major plot twists in the Netflix season, so if you haven’t watched it yet, you might want to put off reading this post.

 

The First Three Seasons

The original series focused on the naïve Midwesterner Mary Ann Singleton (Laura Linney, in her breakout role); the young straight lothario waiter Brian Hawkins (Paul Gross); Michael “Mouse” Tolliver (Marcus D’Amico), the young gay man who craves romance; Mona Ramsey (Chloe Webb), a carefree bisexual woman; and their landlady Anna Madrigal (Olympia Dukakis), who is eventually revealed to be a post-operative transwoman and Mona’s father. Edgar Halycon (Donald Moffat), Mary Ann and Mona’s boss, and DeDe Halcyon Day (Barbara Garrick), Edgar’s daughter who is in an unhappy marriage, also have major parts.

The show focuses on the characters’ sexual adventures and search for meaningful relationships. The show was ground-breaking in its day in the frankness of its depiction of the sexual milieu of San Francisco. Michael’s sexual liaisons and dreams of marriage are treated with the same respect that Anna and Edgar’s romance receives, and his relationship in the second season is presented as entirely normal and appropriate. Brian visits a hetero bath house and two of the secondary characters go to a gay one. DeDe contemplates having an abortion after an adulterous fling. Most of the characters smoke pot freely and Mona and Mouse use cocaine and Quaaludes in a casual fashion. The characters are simultaneously decadent and innocent, enjoying the pre-AIDS hedonism of the 70s.

In many ways, Anna Madrigal was the first sensitive depiction of a trans person on television. Throughout the first season, it’s clear she has a secret and the revelation of that secret to the audience is a big part of the conclusion of the season, but the show doesn’t really sensationalize her identity, especially as the second season goes on. As Anna tells first Brian and then Mona and finally Michael and Mary Ann, none of them react badly; they just listen and discuss what she’s said. Mona in particular quickly begins to call out another character for misgendering Anna, long before misgendering was common idea or even a term. The only people who react poorly are characters already presented in negative terms, such as Mona’s mother, who is bitter about how Anna abandoned her two decades before. The only sour note in the whole series is that Anna presents her secret as “a lie” she’s been perpetrating on the people around her, instead of merely a facet of her personal life she has no obligation to disclose. While the choice to cast Olympia Dukakis as a trans woman feels regressive today, it’s worth pointing out that in the 1990s, it was standard practice to cast men to play trans women, so the casting of Dukakis was by the standards of the day moderately progressive.

Dukakis as Madrigal

The Current Season

The Netflix series showrunner, Lauren Morelli, has consciously sought to update the show’s depiction of San Francisco, introducing a crop of new main characters who capture the city’s diversity better than the original show, which has no non-white characters other than a maid, a fashion model who is eventually revealed to be a white woman using a drug to darken the pigment of her skin for career reasons, and a television reporter (in the third season). Michael (now played by Murray Bartlett) is dating the 28-year old African-American Ben (Charlie Barnett). Margot Park (May Hong) and Jake Rodriguez (Garcia) are a queer couple; Margot is a young lesbian whose lesbian partner has transitioned to male and who is now struggling with what his transition means for his sexuality. The bisexual Shawna Hawkins (Ellen Page) is Brian and Mary Ann’s adoptive daughter, but thinks she is their biological child. Mary Ann’s decision to leave Brian and Shawna for career reasons has estranged her from both of them. Shawna is casually involved with Claire (Zosia Mamet), a film-maker who is chronicling the decline of San Francisco’s queer spaces. Most of these characters are new creations, not drawn from any of Maupin’s books.

The result is a show divided between its strangely-young Boomers and its earnest Millennials/iGens and over which a certain tension between past and present hovers. The show presents three spaces of importance to the queer community: Compton’s Cafeteria, a now long-closed late-night gathering place for the trans community in the 1960s; 28 Barbary Lane, which is now a “legendary” place at which the LGBT community gathers for occasional parties; and the Body Politic, a queer feminist co-op Burlesque bar which is only the most recent incarnation of a string of lesbian bars and clubs stretching back decades.

The three spaces are strung together mostly by Claire, who is making a documentary about the loss of these spaces. The history of Compton’s Cafeteria plays a major role in episode 8 (I’ll deal with that in a later post) and Claire laments that all that’s left of it is a shuttered building and an historical marker. She interviews women at Body Politic who tell her about the importance of that space, including an unnamed lesbian (played by Fortune Feimster) who emphasizes that queer spaces like the Body Politic can literally save people’s lives. The main plot of the season involves a mysterious blackmailer who forces Anna to give them the title to 28 Barbary Lane so that it can be torn down. This is presented as not merely a threat to the residents’ living situation, but also as an existential threat to the San Francisco queer community, which rallies to stage a sit-in when the wrecking crew comes to tear the building down. So a central theme of the season is the historical value of spaces where LGBT people are dominant.

The show understands the importance of history, but it avoids directly addressing the biggest facet of queer history in San Francisco, namely the AIDS Crisis. The third season ends in 1981 with only the most subtle hint of the tidal wave that was about to hit; one of Michael’s lovers mentions having what he takes to be a hickey on his neck. The fourth season begins in the present, after AIDS has been brought under control, thus leap-frogging two decades of staggering death. In a series that aims for gentle humor, that’s an understandable choice.

But it’s strange that the show only addresses AIDS in indirect ways. Michael is HIV+, as is a former lover of his. They are both seen with a bottle of pills for treating HIV, but if the viewer doesn’t know what Truvada is, the significance of it will go over their head. Michael visits a doctor who confirms that it’s safe for him to have sex without a condom, but he frets about asking Ben to do that. At one point, Ben finds Michael’s ‘little black book’ and sees that many of the names are crossed out of it, but the viewer is left to intuit that this means that Michael has lost an enormous number of friends to AIDS. The only time we see the psychological weight of the AIDS Crisis is a passing comment, made after Anna dies, that mourning gets easier with time. For those familiar with the AIDS Crisis, this is reasonable storytelling, but for the younger generation of gay men, many of whom are unaware of the scope of the mortality, I’m not sure the show makes its point as clearly as it thinks it does.

The show does depict a generational clash taking place in the LGBT community. In the sharpest scene in the season, Michael and Ben attend a dinner party of gay men in their 50s and 60s. Ben, the youngest person in the room by about two decades, takes offense when one of the other men jokes about “Mexican trannies”. Another guest then lambasts Ben for not understanding how much of a struggle gay men had in the 80s and 90s, living under a government that literally didn’t care if they lived or died and suggests that Ben should recognize that his privileges as a gay man in the 2010s were won with the struggles of that older generation. In a different scene, when the unnamed lesbian tells Claire about her life history for the documentary, Claire asks to redo the interview and avoid what she considers problematic language; the lesbian essentially tells her to fuck off and walks away. Mary Ann challenges Shawna’s assertion that burlesque can be a feminist act, explaining that in the 70s, her generation was fighting to not be treated as sex objects.

Ben and Michael

But while the show is willing to depict this clash, its sympathies seem to be with the younger generation’s view of things. After the dinner party, Michael apologizes for not coming to Ben’s defense and Ben points out that as a black man, he knows very well what it feels like to have the government not care about his welfare. Shawna responds to Mary Ann’s challenge by persuading her to get up and perform a song, which Mary Ann finds a liberating experience. The unnamed lesbian doesn’t offer any persuasive response to Claire, just a rude one.

It’s hard for me to shake the sense that the show doesn’t really like its older characters. Their past choices are shown to be largely bad ones. In the books, Mary Ann and Brian part amicably, but in the show Mary Ann essentially abandoned Brian and Shawna, a decision that has left Brian unable to date for 20 years and which has left Shawna with a powerful sense that she is unworthy of love. The career Mary Ann left to chase never truly materialized and instead she’s wound up in a marriage that has soured on her. Brian and Anna have compounded Mary Ann’s bad decision by failing to tell Shawna that she is actually the biological child of one of Mary Ann’s friends who died soon after childbirth, as if being adopted was a shameful secret that Shawna needs to be protected from. The last three episodes excoriate Anna by revealing that she has lived for half a century with a terrible secret, namely that the money she used to purchase Barbary Lane and pay for her gender confirmation surgery was given to her by a police officer who had been extorting it from trans prostitutes. When Anna dies, she wills Barbary Lane to an old trans friend, with a note that it should have been hers a long time ago. Only Michael has nothing to apologize for in his past.

In my opinion, the scenarios the show creates are too complex for the easy answers it offers. Ben’s lack of racial privilege doesn’t automatically trump the lack of privilege gay men encountered in the 1980s during the AIDS Crisis; both groups suffered the indifference and hostility of the government in different ways. Anna’s choice to take the money has to be set against the potential life-or-death context of her decision (since it’s explicitly said that trans women don’t usually survive to Anna’s age), and the show never considers that, had she not taken the money, Barbary Lane wouldn’t have become the vital queer space that the show positions it as. Mary Ann’s second-wave feminism isn’t wrong; it’s just a different perspective on how women should relate to sex. The debate over terms such as “tranny” is still playing out in the LGBT community and hasn’t yet been resolved; it’s worth pointing out that for many older gay men, the word ‘queer’ is profoundly insulting while for the younger generation, it’s a reclaimed identity.

What the show offers as a clash of generations feels (at least to this cynical Gen Xer) rather more like the younger generation repudiating the choices made by the older one. It seems fitting that the season’s villain is an angry 20-something seeking to simultaneously chronicle and destroy 28 Barbary Lane.

Want to Know More?

The current season of Tales of the Cityis available on Netflix. The first season (the 1993) is available through Amazon. The second and third seasons can be found on Youtube. The novels are delightful and justly loved by many readers. You can get the first three collected as 28 Barbary Lane.

Queen of the Desert: Getting It All Right and All Wrong

Tags

20th century Middle East, Damian Lewis, Gertrude Bell, Interesting Women, Iraq, James Franco, Lawrence of Arabia, Middle East, Nicole Kidman, Queen of the Desert, Robert Pattinson, Werner Herzog

You might be forgiven for not realizing that Werner Herzog released a movie in which Nicole Kidman plays Gertrude Bell a couple of years ago. Queen of the Desert (2015, dir. Werner Herzog) got panned by the critics when it was given a showing and as a result it got shelved until 2017, when Letters from Baghdad, a documentary about Bell was released. Even then, it was released to only two American theaters and had no PR campaign to support it. Needless to say, it sank like a stone.

But you might also be forgiven for not knowing who Gertrude Bell was. She only played a major role in shaping 20^thcentury international events in the Middle East.

Gertrude Bell

Gertrude Bell was born in 1868 to a British industrialist and minor noble. She studied modern history at Oxford, being one of the first women to graduate with a first class honors degree. In her mid-20s, she began to travel the world, visiting her uncle in Tehran, where she acquired an abiding love of the Middle East. She had a talent for languages, ultimately becoming fluent in Persian, Arabic, French, and German and able to hold a conversation in Turkish and Italian. This linguistic skill proved enormously useful as she traveled through Ottoman Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Arabia. She became interested in archaeology and did work in Mesopotamia and southern Asia Minor, where she met T.E. Lawrence, the famous ‘Lawrence of Arabia’.

Gertrude Bell

When the Great War broke out in 1914, the British, who controlled Egypt, realized that they had very little real intelligence on much of the Middle East. So they summoned both her and Lawrence to Cairo and eventually appointed her as a Liaison Officer to the Arab Bureau in Cairo, making her the first female intelligence officer in the British military. (She was called “Major Miss Bell”.) She used her extensive knowledge of the geography and peoples of the region to draw maps and offer guidance on how to navigate the political conflicts particularly of Mesopotamia.

Bell possessed extensive knowledge of the various tribal groups, arguably superior to even Lawrence. The British didn’t have the forces to conduct a full-scale invasion of the Ottoman Empire, so instead they focused on persuading native peoples in the region to revolt against the Turks. In that project, Bell and Lawrence made a major contribution to the war effort, eventually helping to foment the Arab Revolt.

After the British occupied Baghdad, she was sent there and appointed as Oriental Secretary. As a result, when the Ottoman Empire was broken up in 1919, she emerged as one of the most important figures in the discussion of how to redraw the map of the Middle East. Her report “Self Determination in Mesopotamia” argued that Iraq should be established as an independent state and is considered a masterpiece of the genre. The British Commissioner for Mesopotamia disagreed, pushing for an Arab government under British control, but in 1921, Winston Churchill, the new Colonial Secretary, agreed with Bell. As a result, Bell’s views on the region were to a considerable extent decisive for the establishment of Iraq and Jordan as independent states.

Bell and Lawrence understood that the British had over-promised. British officials had basically told everyone, including the Arabs and the Zionists, that they could have independent territory. That was bound to make some people unhappy at some point. Lawrence mostly gave up in disgust, but Bell was determined to find a way to satisfy at least some of the people she had dealt with.

The Hashemites and the Al-Sauds

One thing Bell’s adventures in Arabia had taught her was that there were two dominant clans in the region, the Hashemites and the Al-Sauds. The Hashemites were the clan of the Prophet Muhammad. Hussein ibn Ali, one of the leaders of the Hashemites, was a sharif, a direct descendant of the Prophet, and the Emir of Mecca, the holiest city for Muslims. He represented a very traditional form of Islam, open, tolerant, and not very dogmatic.

In contrast, Abdulaziz ibn Abdul Rahman ibn Faisal ibn Turki ibn Muhammad al-Saud came from a family that had ruled Arabia by right of conquest off and on for two centuries. The Al-Sauds (or just Saudis, as they are called in the West) had built an alliance with the followers of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (d.1792), a Puritanical Muslim imam who had developed a movement aimed at purging Islam of what Abd al-Wahhab saw as unIslamic innovations that had crept into the faith in the generations after the Prophet. Despite their traditionalist rhetoric, the Wahhabis represented a radical new branch of Islam—strict, dogmatic, and intolerant of anything that did not fit into their vision of what Islam ought to be. In their minds, Wahhabism represented the only genuine form of Islam and anyone who did not accept it could be conquered and forced to obey Wahhabi principles. For example, when the Wahhabis first got control of Mecca in the early 19th century, they destroyed the tombs of all of the Prophet’s wives and other members of his family because they felt that honoring anyone other than Allah was immoral; only an enormous outcry kept them from destroying the Prophet’s tomb. (A few years ago, archaeologists found what they believed was the grave of the Prophet’s mother Amina. The Saudi government promptly destroyed it.)

To simplify a complex set of issues, the alliance was based on the principle that the Al-Sauds would impose Wahhabist practices on Arabia in return for the Wahhabis aggressively supporting the Al-Sauds. Both the Wahhabis and the Al-Sauds wanted to control Mecca and Medina because it strengthened their claim to represent true Islam, while Hussein wanted to control the Hejaz (roughly, western Arabia, where Mecca and Medina are located). Bell is probably the first Westerner to realize that al-Saud and Hussein were on a collision course, and she favored Hussein. The British promised Hussein a wider Arab state (roughly everything between Egypt and Persia with a few small exceptions), but then turned around and agreed to give Syria and Lebanon to France and agreed in theory to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.

Hussein helped lead the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans. But after the war, he was angry at the British for not giving him everything he felt he had been promised, so he simply declared himself the king of the Hejaz and king of all Arabs to boot. When al-Saud attacked the Hejaz in 1924, the British provided no help to Hussein, and he was quickly driven out and effectively lost his kingdom. Al-Saud established the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, an officially Wahhabist state whose current ruler, Salman ibn Abdulaziz, is his son. The Saudis have been promoting their intolerant strand of Islam ever since, using their oil dollars to spread Wahhabi Islam across the planet.

The British were in a much better position to dictate what was going to happen further north, in Mesopotamia. They had already agreed to give what would become Syria and Lebanon to the French, but the territories between there and Persia were more or less theirs to organize. Bell was determined to put the sons of Hussein, Faisal and Abdullah, on their own thrones. Ultimately, with her aid, Faisal wound up ruling Iraq and Abdullah became the king of Transjordan (now generally just called Jordan). Thanks to Bell, both of these countries became independent Arab states rather that puppet-states of the British.

But in one respect, Bell badly mis-stepped in the arrangements she fought for. The region of Iraq is essentially three highly distinct zones. The northernmost zone is dominated by the Kurds, a Sunni Muslim ethnic group whose population is spread across modern Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran, with the strongest concentration being in northern Iraq. The middle zone is dominated by Sunni Arabs, who share a religious sect with the Kurds but who are ethnically distinct from them (the Arabs are a Semitic people, while the Kurds see themselves as Medes, a branch of the Persian peoples). The southern zone is dominated by Shiite Arabs, ethnically the same people as the Sunni Arabs but belonging to a rival sect of Islam. In other words, Iraq is like a slice of Neapolitan ice cream where the three flavors dislike and distrust each other and would all rather be in their own sundaes. Oh, and the hot fudge on top of that sundae is oil.

The British didn’t want to have to deal with three separate states producing the oil they wanted, so they wanted all three states to be one country. Bell considered the Kurds to be too turbulent and unreliable to govern an independent state, so including Kurdistan in Iraq made some sense to her. Perhaps even more fatefully, most of Bell’s contacts in the Arab world were Sunnis like the Hashemites. Although she had spent some time in Shiite Persia, she never really made any close contacts with Shiite leaders in southern Iraq. As a result, she saw the Middle East very much through the Sunni lens and she trusted the Sunni Arabs far more than the Shiite Arabs. The British authorities seem have had little comprehension of the difference between the two sects and Bell doesn’t seem to have done very much to correct their ignorance (or failed in her efforts, perhaps). In her view, it made sense for the Sunni Arab middle zone of Iraq to control the Shiite Arab south and she accepted the idea that they would also control the Sunni Kurdish north. So the Iraq that she helped create gave most of the political power to the Sunni Arabs, who were numerically the smallest of three groups.

The Mesopotamia Commission, with Bell second row, second from the left

Although many people consider Bell a shrewd diplomat, she badly misjudged the situation on this issue. Lawrence seems to have seen things more clearly. He once said “That Irak [sic] state is a fine monument; even if it only lasts a few more years, as I often fear and sometimes hope. It seems such a very doubtful benefit—government—to give a people who have long done without.” Leaving aside the rather condescending view of Arab self-governance, Lawrence seems to have sensed that Bell’s Iraq was something of a Frankenstein monster that would probably not last very long.

And the predictable gradually happened. The Hashemite monarchy of Iraq was overthrown in 1958 (after having been briefly deposed and reinstated by British intervention in 1941) by the Ba’athist party. The Ba’athists eventually gave rise to Saddam Hussein, a brutal thug who courted his Sunni Arab base by aggressively persecuting and subordinating both the Kurds and the Shiites. Hussein, of course, was overthrown by the American invasion of Iraq under George W. Bush, and the country has been struggling to hold itself together ever since, because the US wants it to stay one country while the Kurds want to separate and the Shiite Arabs long to punish the Sunni Arabs for what the Ba’athists did to them. As a result the Sunni Arabs don’t trust the majority Shiites, and that’s turned into fertile recruiting grounds for Wahhabist groups like Al-Qaeda and Daesh (commonly known as ISIS or the so-called Islamic State).

It would be unfair to lay all of that at Bell’s door, but political violence between these three groups was certainly a predictable consequence of forcing them into the same state together. Bell was a remarkable woman, but she wasn’t able to truly escape the colonial mindset and recognize that these three people needed to make their own choices and not simply have the British impose a choice on them. The British government was heavily dependent on her understanding of the region when it was making that decision, and she allowed her personal relationships with Sunni leaders to blind her to the dynamics of the situation she was helping to create.

So while we can celebrate her as a bold woman who accomplished a lot in an era when women were often kept from accomplishing much at all, and while we can acknowledge that she powerfully shaped the Middle East as it exists today, we also have to admit that she made a disastrous set of choices that are partly responsible for the violence and instability of the region to this day.

 

Queen of the Desert

Now that you have some idea who Gertrude Bell was, let’s get on to Herzog’s film, which he wrote as well as directed. The first thing I have to say is that it’s one of the most accurate films I’ve ever seen. It’s certainly the most accurate biopic I’ve reviewed. Virtually every incident and major development in the film is grounded in fact, so far as I can see, or a reasonable extrapolation of fact. The film fiddles a few chronological issues, but not in ways that drastically change things. For example, she’s shown already being the Oriental Secretary in Cairo around 1915, when in fact she didn’t get that office until after she arrived in Baghdad in 1917. She is shown meeting Lawrence (Robert Pattinson) at Petra rather than Carchemish, presumably because Petra is a more impressive site to film at than Carchemish. Small points like that I can generally overlook because they don’t seriously affect how we understand the events of Bell’s life.

Kidman as Bell with Pattinson as Lawrence

In a really nice touch, the film quotes her letters, diary, and poetry repeatedly, and even goes so far as to have Sir Mark Sykes say about her, “Confound the silly chattering windbag of conceited, gushing, flat-chested, man-woman, globe-trotting, rump-wagging, blethering ass!”, which is actually a quote from a letter he wrote. So it’s clear that Herzog took real pains to be accurate. My hat’s off to Herzog in that respect.

And yet I just can’t help but think that he got everything wrong.

Kidman’s Bell is very much a Herzogian protagonist in the sense that she’s an individual pursuing her own goals despite what the world thinks of her and despite the obstacles she encounters, none of which are honestly that big. With the exception of her father’s refusal to allow her to marry Henry Cadogan (James Franco), a minor British diplomat who commits suicide as a result, every problem she encounters she effectively surmounts by the end of the next scene, leaving very little dramatic tension in the film. (As a side note, Kidman’s performance is quite good, although it’s a bit jarring to see a woman in her 50s playing a woman in her 20s for the first third of the film, the same way it is jarring to see Harrison Ford playing action roles in his mid 60s. As a result, I never once forgot I was watching an actress at work. But with a performer of Kidman’s skill, that’s not always a bad thing.)

Kidman as a 25-year old Bell with James Franco as the doomed Cadogan

Herzog builds the film around two failed and unconsummated love affairs, with Cadogan, whom she can’t marry because he’s badly in debt, and with Charles Doughty-Wylie (Damien Lewis), whom she can’t marry because he’s trapped in an unhappy marriage with a woman who is threatening to commit suicide if he leaves her. To escape his bind, he enlists when the War comes and probably intentionally gets himself killed at Gallipoli (which might be a bit of a distortion, but it’s speculation by the character who tells Bell of his death). To find solace from Cadogan’s death, she turns to exploring Syria, and to find solace from Doughty-Wylie’s death, she seems to focus on getting thrones for the Hashemite princes. So the film essentially uses her failed relationships as an explanation for why she becomes an explorer, which seems both to oversimplify and distort Bell’s wanderlust. She was an explorer because she wanted to explore and learn, not because she was a sad spinster.

And at the same time, although the film accurately captures major moments in her travels, it utterly fails to convey a sense of who this woman was, why she traveled, and what people made of her. On two separate occasions, she is captured, first by Druze tribesmen in Lebanon and then by Arab tribesmen in Arabia. But in the very next scene, the tribal chieftain is so charmed by her that he lets her go, and at no point is it clear what they find so charming about her. It’s not a failure in Kidman’s performance. It’s just that Herzog can’t convey either what Bell found so compelling about Arab society or what Arab leaders found so interesting about her. Her ability to learn about Arab culture and build relationships with Arab leaders is never explored in anything but the most superficial way, merely taken as a given, the same way that her remarkable gift for languages is condensed to a single scene in which Cadogan gives her a lesson in reading Farsi and a later comment that her Arabic pronunciation is very good. So the movie just sort of hand-waves what ought to have been a core part of her story.

Most frustratingly for me, the film focuses on the superficial story of her wanderings and almost entirely leaves out the complex political issues that Bell became so deeply involved while she was stationed in Cairo and Baghdad. She meanders around the Middle East, has men fall in love with her (or fall in like with her, in Lawrence’s case), charms Arab leaders, and get sad when Cadogan and Doughty-Wylie die. The end. There are two scenes of British leaders debating what to do with the Middle East, but the deliberations can be mostly summarized as “we’ll let the French have Syria and Lebanon, and good riddance”. The actual issues aren’t explained at all, and it’s never very clear why Bell’s contribution matters, because she’s not even in those scenes. Then right at the end, she tells Faisal and Abdullah (both of whom are seen for the first time in this scene without any real exploration of who they are) that they will both be rulers. She gets on a camel and rides off into the desert as they watch and marvel at this prediction, and we get an epilogue text. It kind of feels like a movie about Teddy Roosevelt where they forget to mention that he became president. Bell deserves a movie like Fitzcarraldo, not Queen of the Desert.

Oops, wrong Queen of the Desert

You might be forgiven for leaving this movie with absolutely no idea that she basically drew the map for the region the United States has been entangled with since the 1990s, because if you don’t come into the movie knowing it, the movie will never tell you. Herzog got all the facts right but told the wrong story and told it surprisingly poorly.

If you want to support this blog, please think about donating to my PayPal account. Those who make a generous donation can request that I review a particular film or tv show and if I think it’s suitable for the blog, I’ll write at least one review of it.

 

Want to Know More?

Queen of the Desert is available through Amazon. Honestly, though, unless you are a fan of Nicole Kidman, you can probably skip this and watch the PBS documentary Letters from Baghdad instead.

If you want to read up on Bell, you might try Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations. Or read her own words in A Woman in Arabia: The Writings of Gertrude Bell. It’s the basis for the PBS documentary.

The Favourite: Random Thoughts

Tags

17th Century England, 17th Century Europe, Early Modern England, Early Modern Europe, Emma Stone, Interesting Women, Olivia Colman, Queen Anne, Rachel Weisz, Sarah Churchill, The Favourite, Yorgos Lanthimos

I am very sorry for the long delay in posting. This semester has been hellishly busy with seemingly endless rounds of exam grading and other work that have left no time or energy to do more enjoyable things like blogging. But I finally have a spare moment, so I figured I should finish up my thoughts about The Favourite (2018, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos). Sadly, I’ve forgotten a number of the things I wanted to say about it, so this post is going to be rather bullet-pointy.

 

• At the start of the film, Anne (Olivia Colman) is thinking about building a palace for Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz) and her husband. This is quite problematic. The film must be set after 1711, because Anne’s husband Prince George is dead (the film never touches on the fact that she must be grieving for him). But work started on Blenheim Palace in 1705 and by 1711 it was already quite advanced, although when Anne and Sarah had their final break in 1712 the building was still unfinished and Parliamentary funding for it got shut off until after Anne’s death.
• The same scene presents Anne as thinking that the battle of Blenheim meant that the war with the French was basically over. Sarah has to correct her, and the scene serves to establish that Anne is basically incapable of running the government and that Sarah is functionally Anne’s prime minister. This is simply untrue. Anne was not an intellectually-gifted woman, but she took her duties as sovereign very seriously and was actively involved in the day-to-day affairs of state. Her stubborn insistence on particular courses of action occasionally frustrated her ministers and advisors because they had no way to over-rule her when she put her foot down.
• Similarly, Sarah was not the driving force behind Anne’s government. The film suggests that she basically lived in Anne’s palace and ran the government consistently for a decade. Sarah certainly spent a good deal of time in Anne’s household, but she also spent an enormous amount of time at the Churchill family estates because, among other things, she produced seven children with her husband, all but two of whom survived into their late teen years or beyond. That means that a good deal of Sarah’s time was spent at home tending her family like any good early 18^thcentury woman was expected to do. She was also an astute manager of the family estates, which would also have occupied a good deal of her time and attention. And she was also occupied with the construction of Blenheim Palace. One of the reasons we know so much about these two women’s relationship is that they wrote each other letters constantly precisely because they weren’t always together. Anne certainly listened to Sarah’s ideas, but she often disagreed with them.
• One scene shows Sarah basically writing Anne’s parliamentary speech for her. This is certainly untrue. Royal speeches were written by the queen’s ministers. Drafts might go back and forth between the queen and her officials with revisions, insertions, and so on, but Sarah Churchill would have had only a minimal role in that process.
• The phrase “prime minister” gets used several times in the film, which two factions competing for the office. That office wouldn’t exist for about a decade at the time of the film. It evolved during the reign of George I (1715-1727), in part because George was also the ruler of Hanover and therefore did not reside full-time in England, thus making it necessary for him to have an official who exercised a greater degree of governmental oversight that had been traditional in previous reigns. The first Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, held three offices that had traditionally been separate—First Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Leader of the House of the Commons. This collection of offices made him the most powerful man in government. So the film is being anachronistic here, but only by about a decade or so.
• The last act turns on Abigail’s (Emma Stone) scheming. She drugs Sarah’s tea, so that when Sarah goes riding, she passes out, injures herself, and awakens in a brothel with a horrible scar on her cheek that she spends the rest of the film covering up with a lace veil. That is entirely invented. There is absolutely no basis for it at all.
• While Sarah Churchill was convinced that her fall from grace was caused by Abigail Hill displacing her as Anne’s favorite, there is little evidence that Anne considered Abigail anything more than a servant she liked. There is no evidence that Abigail had any meaningful influence with Anne over political matters or anything else substantive. Sarah’s fall was much more deeply rooted in Sarah’s own overbearing personality, which Anne slowly tired of as time went by, especially given Sarah’s tendency to bully Anne about political decisions that she disagreed with. When Prince George died, Sarah refused to wear mourning clothes, implying that Anne’s dramatic gestures of grief were faked, and Sarah ordered George’s portrait taken out of the queen’s bedroom, which Anne found profoundly cruel. The final precipitant for the break was an incident in which Sarah and Anne were riding to church in a carriage and got into a disagreement. As they reached the church, Sarah told Anne to be quiet lest the crowds hear them quarreling. Anne found Sarah’s shushing of her to be insulting and presumptuous.
• The whole “rabbits as substitute children” thing is made up.

I like The Favourite, but the longer I sit with it, the more I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something misogynistic about it. None of the women in it come across well: Anne is petulant, weak, and stubborn. Sarah is arrogant and presumptuous, although she insists she just loves the queen. Abigail is a liar and schemer who at the end of the film literally tortures a rabbit just because she can. The film punishes all three women with its conclusion: Anne has swapped lovers but she knows Abigail doesn’t really love her. Abigail has gotten power, but the price is sexually servicing a queen who despises and torments her. Sarah has fallen from grace, lost her best friend, been forced to go into exile because of an unjust legal charge, and lost her beauty.

Although in theory these women are struggling about political power, none of the political issues matter to the viewer at all, so it’s really just a three-sided cat-fight in which the weapons are sex, lies, and drugs, all traditionally weapons attributed to women. So while nominally feminist in its approach, the film falls back on traditional ideas about women as schemers, poisoners, and seducers. It’s great that Lanthimos made a film with three female leads, all of whom are richly complex characters. I just wish he could have made a film that actually liked its characters.

 

Want to Know More?

The Favourite is available on Amazon now.

Although it’s close to 40 years old now, Edward Gregg’s Queen Anne is still probably the essential historical take on her.