Purposeful Pastiche

Jordan Carter

Is it possible to engage in purposeful pastiche? If so, Sophia Coppola does it in her 2006 film, Marie Antoinette. Well it isn’t exactly purposeful pastiche as much as it is an inversion of the postmodern model of the nostalgia film. Instead of deliberately conveying a sense of “pastness” by submersing the film in the aesthetics of the past and “blurr[ing] its official contemporaneity,” she plays on what Jameson calls our “collective objective spirit” (21-25). Indeed, Marie Antoinette presents the viewer with aesthetic elements of the past that are thoroughly interwoven with those of the present. She actually explodes the “contemporaneity” of the past; allowing pop culture and history to converge. This temporal twister not arbitrary for lack of a stable referent, but rather intentional—perhaps to illustrate our own tarnished “ideas and stereotypes” of the iconic young queen who was persecuted for her self-indulgence and lack of affect in a time of general melancholy. We know the dark history of Versailles not through first-hand sources, but through images and a mental understanding of the era’s aesthetic. As such, people generally characterize Marie Antoinette as the selfish pop star of her time—dolled up to the max with an over-the-top hairdo. The first thing that comes to most of our minds when we hear the name ‘Marie Antoinette’ is the misattributed quote, “Let Them Eat Cake.” Irrespective of whether or not the late queen uttered these words, they stand as a perfect example of a random signifier detached permanently from its referent.

By filling the soundtrack with post-punk and contemporary music, mimicking the lighting and dialogue of a current romantic comedy, and even putting the female protagonist in a pair of Chucks (Converse All-Stars), Sophia Coppola gives us a thematic representation of the “waning of historicity.” She intertwines past and present to the point where the historic narrative is lost—the viewer is given no choice but to enjoy the movie purely as an aesthetic object, skeptical of any factual information that is conveyed.

Marie Antoinette is dead, both physically and historically. All that remains is her image and the collective stereotypes we hold about that image. Instead of attempting to give us some jaded representation of a “real” historic past, Coppola harps on our insatiable appetite to consume the past through images in order to expose the tainted “pop history” that thrives in our postmodern brains. Ironically, this movie is the closest representation of our true relationship with history: “we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach” (25).