Merteuil

[truepenny]

It's been a while since I posted anything with actual thought-content, so I thought as a start to my Tuesday, I'd talk about what happens to the Marquise de Merteuil when she becomes Kathryn Merteuil in Cruel Intentions.


Both Glenn Close and Sarah Michelle Gellar are brilliant as Merteuil, and one thing Cruel Intentions does very well is updating the intricate, vice-ridden, Machiavellian world of C18 French nobles to the equally intricate, vice-ridden, Machiavellian world of Manhattanite teenagers. Conspicuous consumption is all over both movies, and very rightly so.

I love the updating of Valmont's valet to Sebastian's friend Blaine, and only wish Blaine had been given more to do. Ditto in both respects for the reshaping of the Chevalier Danceny into Ronald. I like very much the fact that Madame de Tourvel has been updated as Annette Hargrove, given a spine and a brain and a chance to survive.

I dislike intensely the fact that by so doing the movie replicates the Bad Girls Get Punished dynamic, as Annette gets the Jaguar for which Kathryn made her bet with Sebastian while Kathryn goes down in flames.

In a nutshell, what Cruel Intentions does is turn Dangerous Liaisons into a standard and unproblematic love story. DL is also a love story, but it's a deeply dysfunctional and destructive love story, between Valmont and Merteuil. CI plays the Redemptive Love card and focuses on the relationship between Sebastian and Annette. Tourvel is really only a counter in the game between Valmont and Merteuil, and while, as I said, I like the fact that Annette has her own subject-position and her own agency, she got them at Kathryn's expense. Because she has them, Kathryn is denied Merteuil's interiority--and it's Merteuil's interiority that gives the end of DL its incredible punch.

Because apparently we can't have two heroines. Even if one of them is an anti-heroine. The end of the movie reduces Kathryn to a cardboard villainess (although Gellar goes down fighting, I have to say), and does not allow either her or us that horrifying moment when all the façades crack. Annette revenges Sebastian; Kathryn is unmasked, and there's nothing behind the mask worth discovering. We're back to the old stupid story. Good girls wait for love; bad girls sleep around and do coke and get punished.

This is a trite caving-in to patriarchy that completely undercuts the force of the earlier moment of truth which CI does preserve. The Marquise de Merteuil's outburst:

When I came out into society I was 15. I already knew then that the role I was condemned to, namely to keep quiet and do what I was told, gave me the perfect opportunity to listen and observe. Not to what people told me, which naturally was of no interest to me, but to whatever it was they were trying to hide. I practiced detachment. I learn how to look cheerful while under the table I stuck a fork onto the back of my hand. I became a virtuoso of deceit. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think, and novelists to see what I could get away with, and in the end it all came down to one wonderfully simple principle: win or die.

is beautifully if vulgarly condensed into Kathryn's response to Sebastian's disdain:

Eat me, Sebastian. It's okay for guys like you and Court to fuck everyone but when I do it, I get dumped for innocent little twits like Cecile. Do you think I relish the fact that I have to act like Mary Sunshine 24/7 to be considered a lady? I am the Marcia fucking Brady of the Upper East Side, and sometimes I want to kill myself. So there's your psychoanalysis, Dr. Freud. Now are you in, or are you out?

At that moment, CI is keeping the psychological complexity that makes DL fascinating. But that speech is only the first fence of a combination. The second fence is the Marquise breaking everything on her vanity, shrieking her grief and rage. CI doesn't even admit that fence is there. By denying Kathryn that, they deny the validity of her earlier outburst, reduce her to something simple and unambiguous--just as Sebastian has been made simple and unambiguous by his redemptive sacrifice of himself to appease the ironic gods of taxicabs.

Nutshell: CI flubs the ending. But it does so because it wants to uncomplicate its antiheroes: one becomes the Hero and one becomes the Villain. Whereas in DL they both remain antiheroes, unflinching, to the end.

Comments

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

Awesome.

This explains everything to me about I reacted to both these movies. :) What about Valmont, though?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Haven't seen Valmont yet, so can't say.

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

Well, I kind of thought you hadn't, since you didn't address it, so I think what I meant to say was, "Please watch Valmont, and explain to me why I didn't like Annette Benning's Merteuil."

Ah, selfishness. :)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

We're kind of intending to rent Valmont at that point, so maybe I'll get back to you on that one. *g*

[heresluck]

...it wants to uncomplicate its antiheroes: one becomes the Hero and one becomes the Villain.

As we talked about before, I think that this is at least partly a fuction of the fact that the two antiheroes are never as balanced in CI as in DL. DL signals the balance between its two leads from the very beginning with those long parallel scenes of Merteuil and Valmont being dressed, powdered, prepared to face the world. CI opens with the impossibly fast pan across the cemetary and moves to Sebastian in his Jaguar; Kathryn doesn't appear onscreen for quite a while. Gellar's a wonder, and the characters are still very well matched, but structurally Kathryn gets short shrift from the get-go.

In retrospect, I also have major issues with the coke addiction thing. I'm having trouble articulating why, exactly, but I think it has to do with the fact that the Marquise has no equivalent vices -- no habits that are unambiguously Bad in the way that coke is Bad. I love the joke of K keeping her coke in the cross, but ultimately the whole thing is too... simple. I think the coke thing is deployed partly because the movie wants to show Kathryn condemned by adults as well as by her peers -- something DL doesn't have to manage, and which I think CI might as well have skipped given that adults are so utterly tangential to what's going on.

I continue to wonder how CI might have been different with another 20 minutes to play with.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen CI since its theatrical relase, and DL for longer yet, so you may want to take my opinions with a grain of salt. But my views do intersect with h.l.'s in some ways.

My first big issue with CI is that I don't agree with you (T.) that it does a good job of updating the story. The *concept* is brilliant, and in the opening I quite liked the twist on psychiatry and the Internet, but in a lot of places the plot seemed haphazard (i.e., death by taxicab) or ludicrously implausible (i.e., a high school girl passing out a diary that detailed her ignorance, bisexual seductions, and deflowering) because the writer couldn't think of good 20th-C. analogues for DL events. I thought the film would have been better served by less fidelity to the source.

My second big issue is that I think CI, ultimately, becomes Sebastian's story -- it's he who's the Antihero become Hero, rather than either Annette or Kathryn truly filling either role. DL can be similarly seen as Valmont's movie -- but I think it does a much better job of balancing its threefold protagonists than CI, which is much simpler, structurally.

It's also much simpler sexually, despite the addition of bisexuality and incest -- there really isn't anything in the film to argue against Annette or (Selma Blair's character)'s naive and idealistic vision of monogamous heterosexuality as the only healthy sexuality. Kathryn's outburst struck me as odd because I couldn't figure out what social pressures *were* forcing her to assume the Little Mary Sunshine persona, because it really didn't map onto my (admittedly strange and admittedly not in a rich private school) experience in any meaningful way. There are lots of pressures on high school girls to conform and to be asexual or sexual in only accepted ways -- but this is not the same kind of sexual conformity of the French court.

Y'know, it suddenly occurs to me if the whole thing had been centered around competing to get into Ivy League colleges rather than preserving sexual reputation, the film would have clicked for me much better.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, I seem to have been unintentionally confusing. I agree with you: Sebastian is turned into the hero of the film. Annette is its heroine only because she gets carried along in Sebastian's wake. And Kathryn gets demonized at least as much to beatify Sebastian as to serve as a foil to Annette. (The one moment of the ending I thought was brilliant was the meeting between Kathryn and Annette in the girls' bathroom, viewed almost entirely via the mirror. That was perfect and could have gone somewhere really interesting.)

I also notice that your plot objections fall in the same part of the story that mine do: the ending. Sebastian's death and the circulation of his journal are all part of the same essential inability to face up to DL's ultimate resolution.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

*sigh* We agree on too much. The discussion will have to die.

Actually, the beginning and ending are just what I remember best -- well, that and that SMG looked really good as a redhead. I think that my problems with plot started immediately after the opening.

[heresluck]

Well, we're all just a big pile-on of agreement, since my remarks were intended as amplification rather than quibbling. Truepenny and I did note, in our immediate post-movie discussion, that CI really becomes Sebastian's story, which is perhaps another reason it falls apart once he's gone. Both of us forgot to say that, but then you did it for us, so it's okay. *g*

The death-by-taxi is another thing I'm still mulling over. On the one hand, I like it better than I would have liked an attempt to follow DL to the letter -- more plausible. Not *really* plausible, but remotely plausible. On the other hand, it's jarring, because it's an interruption of CI's love story as oppposed to the logical conclusion of DL's not-exactly-a-love-story.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

It's because I still have that brain cell of yours.

The taxi is probably less implausible than the violin instructor strangling him, but ... ending your story with random acts of violence is just never a good idea. Starting, or even in the middle, fine -- but the further in the story you get, the less random the events should be.

I think that CI needed to come up with some events that were equivalent to death and ostracism, instead of sticking with them -- Sebastian could get busted for date rape, Kathryn for drug possession -- something more sensible and less literal than what we got.

[heresluck]

...the further in the story you get, the less random the events should be.

You are very smart. I couldn't even have thought this, let alone said it so well. Just don't get it too close to your affection for Laura Kinsale, or something might blow up. Though in fairness her plots are not so much random as a carefully orchestrated insanity that only *looks* like monkeys on bad crack stole the keyboard.

And hey, give that brain cell back! No wonder I've been making such slow progress on this damn vid.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Right. Laura Kinsale plots aren't random. Being ON CRACK is a different flaw than random. Fortunately, my affection for Laura Kinsale depends on her ability to make me fall in love with her characters and not on her plotting.

I'm taking very good care of the braincell. I water it daily. It may be the only one I have left.

[heresluck]

Well, waterlogged I can deal with. Although if it's mine, it probably wants milk. Unless it's the one I stole from renenet, in which case it needs a LOT of Diet Coke or it's going to get cranky.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Ah, that explains why I'm so tired lately. Not enough Diet Coke.

(Milk? Like, without coffee? Yichh.)

[http://users.livejournal.com/_swallow/]

... You are cool.

[harriet-spy.livejournal.com]

It's worth noting that in the novel, the Marquise gets no defiant anti-heroine ending. She loses all her money in her endless lawsuit and smallpox disfigures her. I'd say she's punished even more comprehensively than Katherine, and it all happens off-stage, with her end as object lesson rather than opportunity for flourishes of subjectivity.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Not having read Les Liaisons Dangereuses, I did not know that, although I'm not at all surprised. That's the sort of thing that happens to villainesses in eighteenth-century novels.

Makes the play/movie even more of a stand-out though.

[libskrat]

Yeah, sometimes adaptations can improve on originals.

*whistles innocently*

just desserts?

[(Anonymous)]

i feel compelled to point out the fact that volanges, who regularly gives distorted accounts of events, is the one who reports merteuil's alleged fate at the end of the novel. as a result, the reader is unable to trust volanges's last bit of gossip is any more credible than the rest of her misinterpretations. it has been suspected that merteuil herself is likely to have initiated the smallpox rumor through her servants to avoid any harassment before she can flee town.

part of the brilliance of the novel's epistolary format is the impossibility to determine the difference between facts, opinions, (mis)interpretations, hearsay, and lies. it is not unlikely that valmont tells even merteuil a few lies to enhance his image. tourvel constantly misinterprets what she reads. cecile, having just emerged from years of seclusion in a convent, is too overwhelmed to fully understand the confusing situations she continues to find herself in. danceny proves to be less than loyal when he enters into unexpected affair with merteuil. volanges is oblivious to nearly everything that takes place, able to rely solely on the (mis)information she is limited to by the other characters, and even then, she is inclined to make her own alterations. and rosemonde is left with nothing to go on except an abrupt correspondence with a grief-stricken tourvel, whom rosemonde attempts to console using only her available wisdom and intuition. perhaps the only trustworthy accounts are given by merteuil. it is her admission of deceitfulness that ironically leads the reader to believe what she says, accompanied by the fact that it is most often her letters that tend to agree with those of the other letter writers. furthermore, at no point does anyone have power over merteuil that she does not grant until the very end.

even if volanges's final letter somehow happens to be astonishingly valid, we must remember merteuil explained indicated earlier in the novel her plan b she had prepared in case she was no longer able to depend on her physical appearance to seduce men.