| Dan McCabe |

Moulin Rouge! plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, January 24th through Sunday, January 26th. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information.
Baz Luhrmann isn’t your typical “great” filmmaker. His style hits audiences like a jackhammer. Moulin Rouge! (2001) is technically a period drama, but you could be forgiven for thinking the period was the 1990s and not the 1890s. For example, it bombards the viewer with the popular music of the twentieth Century rather than the classics of the French can-can. That’s the main point of Luhrmann’s work. He does not obey the conventions of theater and literature as closely as many other filmmakers, drawing influence from modern art at a higher degree than most of his peers. Still, his stylized films can be surprisingly subtle.
Luhrmann often splits his time with various other creative endeavors such as producing music, so in his over thirty-year career he has only directed six feature films: Strictly Ballroom (1992), Romeo + Juliet (1996), Moulin Rouge! (2001), Australia (2008), The Great Gatsby (2013), and Elvis (2022). I’ve seen all six. His most conventional film is Australia, an epic in the style of Old Hollywood with little of the visual stylization and modern pop music common to Luhrmann’s other films. It still has its “Baz” moments, but it has more in common with Ben-Hur (1959) than say, Romeo + Juliet.
His most unconventional, and in my view his best film, is Moulin Rouge!.
NOTE: This article may describe plot points from Moulin Rouge!. If you haven’t seen the movie and are, say, waiting for it to play at the Trylon, please stop reading unless you don’t mind some light spoilers.

One of the hallmarks of the Pop Art movement of the mid-twentieth Century included artists repurposing existing art to create a unique work with a different impact. Examples include Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup paintings and Roy Lichtenstein’s works based on comic art. The latter actually treads very closely to plagiarism if you ask the comic art community, but that’s a topic for another day. The point is that there is a power and language in existing art that a new artist can use to create a different reaction from the audience.

There’s a scene early in Moulin Rouge! where the main character, writer Christian (Ewen McGregor) regales his colleagues by writing “The hills are alive with the sound of music,” about six decades before Oscar Hammerstein wrote those words. Luhrmann does not want the viewer to think that Christian (Ewan McGregor) wrote The Sound of Music. Instead, he uses those existing lyrics, well known to audiences, to demonstrate Christian’s genius as a writer. It signifies that if Christian can create what the audience knows is an acclaimed song on a whim, then he is brilliant.
Of course, this is far from the only time in Moulin Rouge! that Luhrmann uses existing, familiar music to tell his story. Near the opening, he uses Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s classic “Your Song” to show Christian falling in love with Satine. The song is referenced several times later in the film as shorthand for the feelings the two characters have for one another.
Luhrmann’s team could have written original songs in both these instances, like later in the film when David Baerwald’s song Come What May becomes the showstopper. Instead, he uses familiar music to create emotional signifiers for the audience to quickly understand, a familiar element of Pop Art.

Luhrmann also uses color as a language to draw the audience toward intended emotional responses. The opening scene where Christian laments Satine’s (Nicole Kidman) death contains a drab grey color, in stark contrast to the vibrant reds in the Moulin Rouge itself when Christian first arrives there. This might seem like an obvious choice, and perhaps in some respects it is, but that’s also the point. Luhrmann uses immediately understandable visual language to provoke a desired response from the audience, showing Christian’s depression without being heavy-handed.

The visual language of red and grey color that Luhrmann uses is an homage to La Boheme, an opera that Luhrmann himself produced on Broadway a year after Moulin Rouge! hit theaters. In fact, much of the plot of Moulin Rouge! follows the Puccini opera. While an homage to La Boheme does not necessarily signify a work as following the traditions of Pop Art (e.g. the Broadway show Rent), when taking in the totality of Luhrmann’s film, the homage adds to the aesthetic. It is another tool in Luhrmann’s toolbox.

The other way that we can see Luhrmann reference existing works and ideas to tell his story is in the antagonist of the piece, the Duke (Richard Roxburgh). The Duke is a somewhat one-dimensional villain. One would be forgiven for dismissing him as a stereotypical mustache-twirler, but that’s Luhrmann’s point. He’s using an existing archetype of the buffoonish villain, who at one point becomes truly terrifying.
A good example of the silly villain who becomes a monster when pushed too far comes from Chuck Jones’ 1957’s What’s Opera, Doc?, one of the few animated shorts archived in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. Elmer Fudd is a classic comic foil, and the audience of the 1950s would have immediately seen him as the silly little hunter constantly outsmarted by Bugs Bunny. The Duke is a similar bumbler when we first meet him. When the Moulin Rouge’s acting troupe covers for Christian’s presence in Satine’s room by coming up with an obvious ruse, the Duke is tricked into believing it. This establishes him as a man easily fooled.
Baz Luhrmann is accomplished in the field of opera but I have no idea if he’s ever seen Jones’s cartoon, one of the best-known parodies of that genre.1 But the way Jones’s short and Luhrmann’s film use a familiar archetype are similar. Both villains are quickly established as easily tricked, comic figures. By the end, however, the Duke is ready to murder Christian via his hired goon, and Fudd uses the power of his “spear and magic helmet” to take down Bugs Bunny.2 Even if Luhrmann is not referencing What’s Opera, Doc? directly, his use of familiar archetypes creates another element of Moulin Rouge!’s Pop Art milieu.

Moulin Rouge! is not merely a reworking of existing art. Memorable, unique images abound. A green fairy arises from a glass of absinthe. A handgun flies through the air from the window of the Moulin Rouge and hits the Eiffel Tower, which is roughly ten kilometers from Montmartre. These visuals are otherworldly and strange, but Luhrmann’s Pop Art-esque use of existing art to create a language the audience can understand gives him leeway to toy with the absurd. The existing signifiers are a powerful tool, keeping the audience engaged, even when Luhrmann challenges the audience’s suspension of disbelief. It is all part of what makes Moulin Rouge! an exceptional film.
- See the Australian Opera’s profile of Luhrmann’s opera accomplishments. ↩︎
- The cartoon ends with Bugs’ laying limp in Fudd’s arms. Bugs turns to the camera, breaks the fourth wall, and says “what did you expect in an opera, a happy ending?” ↩︎
Edited by Finn Odum