I've been sitting here alternately delighted with (Marie Antoinette) and grossed out by (Persuasion, Bridgerton) this genre for however many years, and couldn't quite put into words exactly what was separating the wheat from the chaff. But you've done it! I nodded. A lot.
Not yet, but it's on my list. I'll report back when I've seen it. 🫡
Also: My husband kept complaining that the dialog and music in the new Willow series was bothering him, and I was like "yes, yes" and when I sent him this article yesterday he said "THAT'S WHY WILLOW IS BOTHERING ME." Sure it's fantasy and not macaron timeclash, but I think it's related.
Because just like the past, there is—or rather, should be—an otherworldliness about fantasy that takes you out of your time and place and into a different, unique one with its own customs and turns of phrase. That's why something like the Lord of the Rings movies, or most of the Star Wars universe, or even the original Willow movie can contain wry humor but because it's not done in a cringingly trendy way, they avoid breaking the spell of the fantasy world.
Just coming back to this because I think the 'spell-breaking' as you put it is one of the key points in terms of audience enjoyment - it can break either way depending on people's preferences I guess. I try not kid myself that I can ever truly visit a vanished historical period, but I do like to *pretend* that I'm doing that, and dialogue straight from Twitter makes that impossible.
Fascinating piece. I couldn't help but notice that the macaron time clash extends far past period piece movies or tv series slamming into "hard " history. You see it when so many judge someone who lived 150 years ago by todays standards, language and culture norms thus completely missing the point in my opinion. Human beings being human is just rejected by the judgmental. Is it because they can see themselves in those they are judging and don't want to?
Thanks very much John! And yes I think there is something difficult there about empathy (we probably all resist being empathetic in different situations, according to our inclinations). I mean, the horrible truth is that if we'd lived in those times/those places we would probably have been horrifically prejudiced in entirely boring and predictable ways - most of us would ^not^ have been JS Mill or Mary Wollstonecraft or Frederick Douglass., kinda by definition.
"To put it another way, it’s hard to be historically accurate without replicating the suppression of women and minoritised groups."
I think it is possible to be speculative (speculate about certain perspectives on certain topics that went mostly unrecorded) and still be reasonably historically accurate. I'm not sure what "replicating" means here. If by "replicating" you mean "potraying as it was" then I agree, although I'm not sure why that would be something to avoid.
I guess I think accuracy would have to incorporate an account of how unthinkable and horrifying something like a lesbian affair would have been to almost all contemporaries. You wouldn't be able to portray something like this in a way that told a thoroughly affirming story about minority identities. So in the case of Queen Anne and Sarah Churchill, while you could reasonably speculate that they *might* have had some sort of physical relationship behind closed doors, an 'accurate' retelling would also have to portray a certain amount of fear and revulsion. (I'm tip-toeing around the issue of whether their class matters in this case because I'm no expert in 18th century social history, and have no idea whether such a thing might have been more possible if you were two totally obscure women in rural Shropshire or something.)
There's an interesting bit in the Ophelia Field book where she writes about the nature of women's friendship in this period and how it was frequently expressed very passionately - letters full of what we would now think of as highly romantic language (ie we would now interpret it as indicating an ongoing sexual relationship) but that - Field says - at the time was coded as entirely platonic, albeit thoroughly emotional. So again (if Field is right) a really 'accurate' account would maybe dig into that a bit more - what did women get out of this very passionate and overwrought form of platonic female friendship - rather than diving into the possibility of actual sex. But in the contemporary context (ours, I mean) this sort of 'accuracy' might look and feel like a deliberate silencing of LGBTQ histories.
Sorry, long reply - I'm sort of thinking as I write - I think you're right that it *should* be possible, it would just require a lot of nuance and would probably make the story-telling much more complex.
I guess it doesn't strike me as reasonable to expect a story set in the 18th century to "affirm" contemporary minority identities. In fact it strikes me as a bizarre expectation.
Marie Antoinette happens to be my favorite movie! It is the perfect portrait of excess (which would become her downfall and something of ours as well). The historicity of it is almost entirely irrelevant in this context, it is decadence and indulgence and how that feels frivolous to the rich, who are blissfully unaware of the consequences those luxuries inflict on the poor. The Revolution came for that excess, but familiar rebellions live on in “tax the rich” or “climate criminals” sentiments. Jeff Bezos was unable to remove his superyacht from a Rotterdam harbor after residents were incensed that he would disassemble a local bridge (and reassemble it afterward) for the sake of his own excess.
And I suppose that’s the point of the macaron time clash, to make history relatable today (even though in the case of Bridgeton I think it’s more about the romance novel trope of the “forbidden love” which is harder to make the case for today 😝). To your point, the fact that these films relate to us at all in the modern era is maybe the only way to share them! A strict period drama would be un-understandable to anyone but a scholar of those time periods who could interpret the context of every sexual innuendo that, though made explicit for us today, would have been entirely implicit to them then. Long live the time clash? 😆
Thanks for reading Elle - I will check out The Novelleist! And yes, timeclash is definitely very effective in telling these stories to a new audience. I think I slightly disagree that the historicity is mostly irrelevant though - in that opening sequence Coppola makes a very important point, which is that M-A was a very young, very privileged teenager (she was actually almost functionally illiterate at this age) send hundreds of miles from home and expected to uphold what was a very unpopular alliance by producing an heir. And then her husband refused to sleep with her for seven years. All of that played in to a) how she behaved and b) what happened - I love that Coppola shows us all of that in such an economic way right at the start. It's perfectly possible to enjoy the film without taking those points on board, but personally I'm glad that they're there because they are relevant to the story, I think, in quite an important way.
After one season of Bridgerton I was annoyed and have not watched another episode. I loved Marie Antoinette to the point of owning the DVD back when you did such things with films you obsessed upon. It holds up beautifully for me. I have not seen The Favourite and hadn’t been keen to see it until reading this and now I will just to put this article to the test.
I had exactly the same response to Bridgerton (watched the first series to see what it was like and then never went near it again) and loved M-A so I will be interested to see what you think of The Favourite!
such a great piece!
I've been sitting here alternately delighted with (Marie Antoinette) and grossed out by (Persuasion, Bridgerton) this genre for however many years, and couldn't quite put into words exactly what was separating the wheat from the chaff. But you've done it! I nodded. A lot.
Ha. Have you seen The Favourite? Would be interested to hear which category you think it falls into!
Not yet, but it's on my list. I'll report back when I've seen it. 🫡
Also: My husband kept complaining that the dialog and music in the new Willow series was bothering him, and I was like "yes, yes" and when I sent him this article yesterday he said "THAT'S WHY WILLOW IS BOTHERING ME." Sure it's fantasy and not macaron timeclash, but I think it's related.
Because just like the past, there is—or rather, should be—an otherworldliness about fantasy that takes you out of your time and place and into a different, unique one with its own customs and turns of phrase. That's why something like the Lord of the Rings movies, or most of the Star Wars universe, or even the original Willow movie can contain wry humor but because it's not done in a cringingly trendy way, they avoid breaking the spell of the fantasy world.
Just coming back to this because I think the 'spell-breaking' as you put it is one of the key points in terms of audience enjoyment - it can break either way depending on people's preferences I guess. I try not kid myself that I can ever truly visit a vanished historical period, but I do like to *pretend* that I'm doing that, and dialogue straight from Twitter makes that impossible.
Fascinating piece. I couldn't help but notice that the macaron time clash extends far past period piece movies or tv series slamming into "hard " history. You see it when so many judge someone who lived 150 years ago by todays standards, language and culture norms thus completely missing the point in my opinion. Human beings being human is just rejected by the judgmental. Is it because they can see themselves in those they are judging and don't want to?
Again, great piece.
Thanks very much John! And yes I think there is something difficult there about empathy (we probably all resist being empathetic in different situations, according to our inclinations). I mean, the horrible truth is that if we'd lived in those times/those places we would probably have been horrifically prejudiced in entirely boring and predictable ways - most of us would ^not^ have been JS Mill or Mary Wollstonecraft or Frederick Douglass., kinda by definition.
"To put it another way, it’s hard to be historically accurate without replicating the suppression of women and minoritised groups."
I think it is possible to be speculative (speculate about certain perspectives on certain topics that went mostly unrecorded) and still be reasonably historically accurate. I'm not sure what "replicating" means here. If by "replicating" you mean "potraying as it was" then I agree, although I'm not sure why that would be something to avoid.
I guess I think accuracy would have to incorporate an account of how unthinkable and horrifying something like a lesbian affair would have been to almost all contemporaries. You wouldn't be able to portray something like this in a way that told a thoroughly affirming story about minority identities. So in the case of Queen Anne and Sarah Churchill, while you could reasonably speculate that they *might* have had some sort of physical relationship behind closed doors, an 'accurate' retelling would also have to portray a certain amount of fear and revulsion. (I'm tip-toeing around the issue of whether their class matters in this case because I'm no expert in 18th century social history, and have no idea whether such a thing might have been more possible if you were two totally obscure women in rural Shropshire or something.)
There's an interesting bit in the Ophelia Field book where she writes about the nature of women's friendship in this period and how it was frequently expressed very passionately - letters full of what we would now think of as highly romantic language (ie we would now interpret it as indicating an ongoing sexual relationship) but that - Field says - at the time was coded as entirely platonic, albeit thoroughly emotional. So again (if Field is right) a really 'accurate' account would maybe dig into that a bit more - what did women get out of this very passionate and overwrought form of platonic female friendship - rather than diving into the possibility of actual sex. But in the contemporary context (ours, I mean) this sort of 'accuracy' might look and feel like a deliberate silencing of LGBTQ histories.
Sorry, long reply - I'm sort of thinking as I write - I think you're right that it *should* be possible, it would just require a lot of nuance and would probably make the story-telling much more complex.
I guess it doesn't strike me as reasonable to expect a story set in the 18th century to "affirm" contemporary minority identities. In fact it strikes me as a bizarre expectation.
Marie Antoinette happens to be my favorite movie! It is the perfect portrait of excess (which would become her downfall and something of ours as well). The historicity of it is almost entirely irrelevant in this context, it is decadence and indulgence and how that feels frivolous to the rich, who are blissfully unaware of the consequences those luxuries inflict on the poor. The Revolution came for that excess, but familiar rebellions live on in “tax the rich” or “climate criminals” sentiments. Jeff Bezos was unable to remove his superyacht from a Rotterdam harbor after residents were incensed that he would disassemble a local bridge (and reassemble it afterward) for the sake of his own excess.
And I suppose that’s the point of the macaron time clash, to make history relatable today (even though in the case of Bridgeton I think it’s more about the romance novel trope of the “forbidden love” which is harder to make the case for today 😝). To your point, the fact that these films relate to us at all in the modern era is maybe the only way to share them! A strict period drama would be un-understandable to anyone but a scholar of those time periods who could interpret the context of every sexual innuendo that, though made explicit for us today, would have been entirely implicit to them then. Long live the time clash? 😆
Thanks for reading Elle - I will check out The Novelleist! And yes, timeclash is definitely very effective in telling these stories to a new audience. I think I slightly disagree that the historicity is mostly irrelevant though - in that opening sequence Coppola makes a very important point, which is that M-A was a very young, very privileged teenager (she was actually almost functionally illiterate at this age) send hundreds of miles from home and expected to uphold what was a very unpopular alliance by producing an heir. And then her husband refused to sleep with her for seven years. All of that played in to a) how she behaved and b) what happened - I love that Coppola shows us all of that in such an economic way right at the start. It's perfectly possible to enjoy the film without taking those points on board, but personally I'm glad that they're there because they are relevant to the story, I think, in quite an important way.
After one season of Bridgerton I was annoyed and have not watched another episode. I loved Marie Antoinette to the point of owning the DVD back when you did such things with films you obsessed upon. It holds up beautifully for me. I have not seen The Favourite and hadn’t been keen to see it until reading this and now I will just to put this article to the test.
I had exactly the same response to Bridgerton (watched the first series to see what it was like and then never went near it again) and loved M-A so I will be interested to see what you think of The Favourite!
Thanks Mitchell! The genre definitely needs a name IMO.