8 Period Dramas Reveling in the Horror of Fucked-Up White, Wealthy European Culture
A venerable cinematic tradition, explored in dreaded listicle form by T. Bloom
Looking around at the state of things, you may find yourself wondering: “Jesus Christ, how did it come to this?” And regardless of what exactly inspired this question, chances are the answer has roots somewhere in the desperate greed and incalculable vanity of a relatively small number of white, European families over the past 500 years.
Knowing this is kind of like being trapped in a wrecked submarine at the bottom of the ocean: there’s not much you can do about it with the time and resources on hand. Having specific answers to questions like “Jesus Christ, how did it come to this?” doesn’t unwreck things, although it does give us something to write about in our waterproof journals while we’re enjoying the last of our oxygen.
Complicating matters is the prevailing Western insistence on learning the wrong lessons from history, deciding that success and wealth are ultimately, extremely, inherently impressive. Sites like Buckingham Palace and Versailles endure as a sort of advertisement for the outrageous accomplishments of some of the worst and most boringly venal humans on earth; unfortunately the sheer opulence of these carefully-tended treasures imbues them with a sort of “ends justify the means” psychic stain that contaminates everyone who lines up to goggle at them.
For decades filmmakers have sought to hack into these wealth fantasies, luring audiences with the promise of flamboyant spectacle — the architecture, the intrigue, the hats! — and drawing them back to earth by focusing on the rot, the inhumanity, the exploitation, the consequences (foreseeable and otherwise) of grinding up and selling our own species for profit, or even just for amusement.
It recently occurred to me that “You absolutely can’t believe how much these rich white people are fucking everything up” also happens to be one of my favorite subgenres of film. And it’s a complicated love, because one has to share it with all those who are really, truly just in it for the hats and witty remarks, who openly fantasize about living the life of a wealthy French aristocrat (but they’d be one of the good ones!) and probably don’t currently imagine themselves to have the power to oppress anyone, or meaningfully participate in a system that does.
That’s right, these movies are just as much about the present as they are about the past. And that puts filmmakers in a real bind: the inhuman opulence of the period will be used as spectacle to attract viewers, garnering exactly the kind of attention that overshadows one’s message about the dehumanizing and destabilizing effects of extreme wealth. Period films are praised as “sumptuous,” as “ravishing,” and “a feast for the eyes.” Any such movie that keeps social criticism to a minimum is essentially white colonialist propaganda. But the hats!
What follows is a list of films which found novel ways to answer questions like “Jesus Christ, how did it come to this,” reveling in the excesses of white European fucked-upness and flirting with the danger of longing to recreate them. The fact that one can’t properly communicate these risks without indulging in them — literally borrowing millions from studios in order to portray historical displays of wealth — poses a challenge to even the most brilliant artists. What will people ultimately remember about this particular story?
The hats, probably. But hopefully something else as well!
SPENCER (2021)
Perhaps you’ve already guessed that this entire post exists because of Spencer — it’s true, I watched it and felt things… very, very gay things.
And weirdly this does count as a period film, since it’s set in 1991, five years before Diana’s tragic death. The film does cast an eye toward historical oppression and intrigue, as the heroine experiences recurring visions of Anne Boleyn, a tragic figure whom she begins to identify with, to an alarming degree. “Here, there is only one tense,” she confides in her children. “There is no future. The past and the present are the same thing.”
The film’s portrayal of the Royal Family and their home is the stuff of gothic romance, even down to Lady Di stealthily fleeing the mansion on foot, guided only by torchlight.
While the story revolves around Diana’s personal woes, the abject inhumanity of British imperialism suffuses every frame. It’s as if she’s been afflicted by a supernatural evil, and the Queen’s Sandringham House may as well be the Overlook Hotel. One prays that Diana manages to escape (with or without her kids) before the spirits come out to unmask… or at least before they try to weigh her again.
It’s interesting to see how the film addresses Diana’s connection to her own family wealth: she was born and raised in an estate that adjoins Sandringham, which the movie depicts as a crumbling shell, a ghost house serving as an outsized memento mori, whispering to our tragic heroine about the fickleness and surprising limitations of power, wealth, and royal favor.
Anyhow, it’s not like you needed me to tell you, but don’t miss this. Jonny Greenwood’s score is sublimely upsetting, the photography never fails to stun, and Kristen Stewart holds nothing back in a performance that drag queens will be studying for generations to come.
BARRY LYNDON (1975)
Kubrick set the stage for Eyes Wide Shut‘s read on the superwealthy with this deceptively acidic tale that follows one foolish man’s twisted path to completely unearned glory. A series of breaks, both lucky and unlucky, set young Barry Lyndon (played by real life fool Ryan O’Neal) on a trajectory that’s described nowadays as “failing upwards.”
There’s a decided bell curve to this kind of success, but even those who live long enough to suffer their own diminishing returns tend to become so embedded among the wealthy and successful, they never truly return to their lowly original status, no matter how much ruin and waste they’ve left in their wake.
Kubrick’s retelling of this story is just as much about toxic masculinity as it is about wealth, showing how the appetites that seem “natural” or harmless enough in young men will wreak unintended consequences as they set out into a world that will only further empower and aggrandize them, eventually damaging every person and institution they come into contact with. And whether the titular hero realizes it or not, virtually everyone he encounters is running their own private scam, and this mentality that excuses exploitation as a survival tactic is still insidiously at work in liberal institutions to this day.
There’s virtually no period film that conjures a sense of historical reenactment quite like Barry Lyndon, largely due to the filmmaker’s reliance on natural light sources, captured through super-fast lenses developed for NASA. And notably, the production was interrupted as a result of violent upheaval over the reunification of Ireland — the past dictating the constraints of the present, the present interfering with attempts to revisit and understand the past.
MARIE ANTOINETTE (2006)
The ads sold Sofia Coppola’s magnum opus (fight me!) as an all-you-can eat dessert buffet, but she was a canny enough director to anticipate the nausea and unease that creeps in when someone has stuffed themselves with too many sweets. That’s what makes this an especially sly example of the sub-genre: Marie Antoinette is a direct appeal to those who would prefer to indulge in mindless consumption of glamour and elegance, inconveniently (for them) attached to a tragedy about someone who both fears and longs for the bursting of that bubble.
Kirsten Dunst is always oddly at home in a period film, a streak which continues through this year’s “The Power of the Dog,” in which she plays an unhappy widow struggling to withstand the cruelty of life in Montana’s badlands circa 1925. As France’s most misquoted monarch, she is tasked with finding the youthful optimism in a figure whose end is much more memorable than her beginning, left with fewer and fewer options as historical events contrive to slam the door on her pretty neck.
In Coppola’s hands, even Marie Antoinette’s most decadent moments become impossible to envy. For young women in positions of power, the costs of maintaining innocence and virtue can turn out to be quite high, whereas corruption tends to be rewarded. Same as it ever was!
DANGEROUS LIAISONS (1988)
I could write an entire feature comparing the various iterations of this story, but the ‘88 film version remains its own towering accomplishment in terms of balancing opulence and acrimony. Even the opening scene — a glimpse of skilled servants tending to the morning beauty regimens of two kaiju-caliber rivals, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont (played by Glenn Close and John Malkovich) — comments on the sheer absurdity of excess.
This film functions almost like a personality test, introducing characters who seem interesting and admirable at first — in their intelligence, and their ability to hack the flawed system that produced them, expertly manipulating the rules associated with their social status — but who ultimately use those superpowers in inhumanly selfish and destructive ways. Dangerous Liaisons is not unlike Heathers in that it has attracted a cult audience of those who openly long to emulate the worst characters, imagining they’d somehow fare better.
As ahead of the curve as Merteuil and Valmont may pride themselves on being, their appetites for destruction reveal them to be quite conventional. Valmont convinces himself that the seduction of a devout woman will be a moral victory against religious hypocrisy, oblivious to his own motives — which in turn makes him a vulnerable target for his rival. Meanwhile, Merteuil has grown so surefooted as an apex predator hiding in plain sight that she becomes blinded by her own vanity, inspiring Valmont to chide her: “It is always the best swimmers who drown.”
Only occasionally does Dangerous Liaisons offer viewers a glimpse of the world outside this miserable fantasia of wealth, and these are presented so cynically that it would be easy to mistake that sensibility for the filmmaker’s own, but director Stephen Frears is simply biding his time, reeling out enough rope for his characters to hang themselves (and each other) with, ultimately exacting a form of moral vengeance upon them — which ought to serve as a warning to anyone who might fantasize about emulating their wicked ways. If the meek shall indeed inherit the earth, it is only because of the bold’s tendency to exhaust and destroy themselves.
THE FAVOURITE (2019)
It’s almost like The Favourite was created by a random movie generator to appeal to my specific interests, and in fact I resisted watching it for quite a while purely because of how strongly it was recommended. Oh well! Everyone was right, I love the shit out of this movie. Give me tragic depictions of adversarial lesbian relationships, yanked directly from the pages of history! I deserve nothing less.
This project is on par with Barry Lyndon in terms of marveling at the highs, lows, and sudden swerves that may toss someone violently betwixt social stations, while also paying homage to the bitter arch-frenemy rivalries of Dangerous Liaisons. Overall the film is extremely effective at portraying 18th century England as a world in which there’s no safe position to occupy: as a servant you’re likely to be burned with lye and get chewed by parasites, and as a consort to the Queen you’ll become target practice for everyone who aspires to replace you. Even Queen Anne herself is miserable, wracked with gout and anxious about committing her country to any particular course of action, retreating to the company of her pet rabbits — stand-ins for her seventeen lost pregnancies.
Like those other films, this one shares the distinction of being labeled a black comedy as well as a historical drama, the combo of which might as well be its own category called “Haha, Life is a Fucking Nightmare.”
THE NEW WORLD (2005)
It’s fine to pick nits with historical accuracy of Terrence Malick’s fanciful take on the Pocahontas story. It’s also fine to question the casting of Q'orianka Kilcher in that key role — her Indigenous heritage is Peruvian, and it wouldn’t have been difficult to cast someone who could more accurately represent North American Indigenous populations in this dreamy culture-clash drama.
But these shouldn’t deter one from the unusual pleasures and torments of The New World. Especially since Kilcher is an extraordinary presence who steals the film right out from under Colin Farrell, and her character’s gradual transformation is portrayed as an inescapable consequence of this blurring of worlds — one she could never have foreseen, since it’s the cumulative product of so many first exposures.
Is her fate meant to be a tragic one, or is it simply where she ended up? As usual, Malick resists easy answers to these kinds of questions, focusing instead on the beauty, irony, and monumental awe contained in every moment of existence. That’s still miles from an “objective” portrayal of a historically controversial subject, but it does grant Kilcher enough room to present the allegorical Pocahontas with the humanity and sincerity she deserves — just don’t mistake that for “authenticity.”
Malick also lingers over the desperation and disease (both physical and spiritual) of the settlers washing up on America’s shores, showing how determined they are to propagate the social inequality that contributed to their own wretched conditions, even at the expense of their own survival. The reality of this new continent and its people is far more majestic than their fantasies of it, and the “John Smith” character stands alone as one with the potential to appreciate the wonder of this world, and what stands to be lost if the Jamestown nitwits have their way.
There’s almost a sci-fi feel to this story, especially when the plot wanders back to Europe toward the end: it’s like a voyage to the aliens’ home-world, the Harkonnen hive. While I’d prefer more variations on this theme which are actually told from an Indigenous perspective, there’s an element of atonement in examples like The New World that still fascinates me. “We were fucked from the beginning” could be an artistic cry of defeat, a way to merely feint at accountability, but in skilled hands it can also inspire viewers to lean in and consider how the current state of things may one day be viewed (accurately or otherwise) by those looking back from the distant future.
Honorable Mention:
Interview With the Vampire (1994)
Is the movie “about” the decadence and decline of wealthy, white Europeans who live in a delicate balance with the lower creatures upon whom they prey? Ehh…. sometimes. Especially if you read more deeply into everything vampirism symbolically implies, and how Louis is gradually seduced from being conscientious objector to a resigned participant in his new “culture.” It’s not not about that!
Melancholia (2011)
Not technically a period film, since it’s set in a sort of ten-minutes-from-now future that still uses laserjet printers. [Could this just have easily been framed as a Kirsten Dunst listicle? Wow, clearly! Absolutely!] Anyhow, disgraced Danish filmmaker Baron Von Baloneyface truly tapped a gusher in terms of the super-wealthy’s hubris and cowardice in the face of imminent global catastrophe. Even those of us who feel unqualified or unable to rise to unthinkable challenges may still end up summoning the nerve to meet such an occasion with the dignity and respect befitting an “advanced” species dangling from the end of its rope. Hurrah!
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