|Olga Tchepikova-Treon|

Moulin Rouge! plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, January 24th through Sunday, January 26th. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information.
I saw the “Lady Marmalade” music video before I saw Moulin Rouge!. Performed by a hot quintet of pop-singing ladies (Missy Elliot, who I admired for smooth dance moves; Christina Aguilera, entering her exciting dirty grrrl phase; P!nk, a tomboy role model; Maya, of “Ghetto Superstar” fame to me, which, though maybe questionable in title today, was a fine song with its own awesome music video; Lil Kim, who wasn’t really marketed in Germany, where I was growing up, but still made an impression with her absolutely top-notch lounging choreography), there was no way anyone could not be enchanted by this video in my mind. Did I know “Lady Marmalade” was a cover/reappropriation of Labelle’s 1975 song of the same name? No. Knowledge of pop culture history was not something I was actively pursuing. Also, my resources for research were limited, with only sporadic access to the early internet and no older siblings to show me the way. The lyrics were mostly obscure to me—I had started learning English about two or three years prior but really didn’t like my English teacher. With this video, then, all I had was the visual spectacle “Creole Lady Marmalade” was throwing at me.

I was thirteen when I watched “Lady Marmalade” for the first time, and immediately started considering a career in sex work. No comprehension of lyrics was necessary to understand how fun and exciting this job seemed to be according to the video. It also seemed like the coolest, most feminist thing to do, even if I didn’t have the words to describe it. To me, this song inaugurated a sexier version of the Spice Girls’ “girl power” era. In the video, there are no johns or other dudes in sight; this is strictly about “the girls” and, in retrospect, probably also amazing lyrical additions like “playing these cats out like Atari” (thanks, Lil Kim) and “Misdemeanor here,” subtly delivered by Missy Elliot at the end—what?! Well, you could say, what about the male gaze, for which they are clearly performing? Sure, like most things in popular culture, this video, too, is guilty of turning erotic transgression into a marketing strategy by way of over-(hetero)sexualizing its female subjects. But again, I was in 7th grade, and the gaze with which I was watching this was not male—neither necessarily was the gaze with which I imagined being looked at as a Lady Marmalade-inspired wannabe teen courtesan. My girl friends and I awkwardly tried to replicate those dance moves for our very own giggles when we felt sure enough that no one was looking (no parents, anyway… maybe we did have an underlying desire to be gazed at by males, or boys, more specifically, given the heteronormative pressures of the time, but I am not sure). Female singers doing an elegant version of the crotch grab on mainstream music television seemed provocative and liberating since most popular performers doing that were (somewhat gender-fluid, perhaps, but to us then still mostly male-coded) stars like Michael Jackson or Prince—Madonna was doing strange things with cowboy hats at that time. We had a lot of fun with this cotton candy fantasy of prostitution, and didn’t take most of it too seriously—though barely teens, we were well aware of the fanciful qualities of entertainment.
When we saw Moulin Rouge! proper, however, it was a completely different story. The video and the film, turns out, have very little in common. Disappointing at first, since the video had been hyping up the glamour of courtesanship to us in so many ways (you get to have tattoos, piercings, and hair made up in weird colors and shapes; you get to spank people; lounge on elegant furniture; diamonds in your drinks), Moulin Rouge! proper was about more than touching crotches and seductively wiggling asses while wearing high heels and fishnet tights—though it is always fun when the film goes to these parts. Satine (Nicole Kidman), the film’s Sparkling Diamond, was not like the characters in the video. She was radiating a different kind of confidence and vulnerability—less an infantile caricature of brothel aesthetics, more of a woman who has mastered the ways of ravishing stage entertainment. I’m pretty sure Satine’s character is one of the main subliminal reasons I’ve been dying my hair in ginger/strawberry blonde for decades. Ultimately, I pivoted away from a career in sex work once I discovered that I can write, read, and talk about how movies shape and respond to the world with college students for a living. Still, I do think that imagining sex work as something other than morally corrupt and dangerous—even though the latter certainly is an undeniable reality of the profession, especially in places where it is legally prohibited—was a useful philosophical exercise at thirteen.

Moulin Rouge!, despite the bias that I inherently carry for having caught that movie at an extremely impressionable age, is without question Baz Luhrmann’s most impressive work. It is maximalism in costume, set design, special effects, music, and melodrama at its best, combining the pastiche-rooted innovation of Romeo + Juliet with a Busby Berkeley take on a setting borne from early twenty-first century pop culture’s imagination of early twentieth century French bohemia, and a soundtrack that ping-pongs all over the place. As far as I’m concerned, all musicals should be directed by Luhrmann (or John Waters, as a close second)—he has the right priorities and ambitions when it comes to really squeezing the medium of film for all that it can give to the magical world of sound and image entertainment.
Moulin Rouge! plays fast and loose with a lot of narrative and aesthetic elements. There is silliness—the whole persona of Ziedler (Jim Broadbent); the narcoleptic Argentinian (Jacek Koman), or really, all the “children of the revolution”; the cow bell foley sound that plays when Ziedler pretends to squeeze Satine’s buttocks during “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend;” and Satine’s little squeaks and howls all throughout her performances. There is also melodrama—a love story tainted by class division and tuberculosis. There are many showcases of elaborate dance choreography. And then, there is Ewan McGregor as Christian—a major can of exciting worms for me at the time, more on that in a minute. A subtle but invigorating aspect of the film is also its patchworked image of the “underworld” of Paris—a world that Christian, the penniless artist, and Satine, the courtesan, share because all her glamour and status only stretches as far as her pimp, or subsequent highest bidder, will let it. The underworld, as many stories tell us, is a space where all the transgressors, undesirables, and rejects can make a home for themselves, united by their exclusion from “normal” society, however it is defined at any given time or in any given story logic. Satine belongs there too—she’s a whore according to some of the characters, after all. And here, the interesting thing about Moulin Rouge!—something I had just enough knowledge of pop- and subcultural history to recognize—is the multiple ways in which this underworld is mediated to twenty-first century audiences.
For me, the vibes and aesthetics of the underworld were injected into the film through its casting of Ewan McGregor. Inappropriately perhaps, I had already seen him in prior films like Trainspotting (1995) and The Pillow Book (1996)—both firmly situated in their own kinds of underworlds. I couldn’t help but think of Christian as a character that was, in part at least, played by Renton, the messy junkie McGregor embodies in the first of these two films, and Jerome, the latter film’s male lead and possibly the first nude performance I had seen in a movie. Though Christian himself is quite tame and awkward, McGregor’s presence brought a sense of secret transgression to the role. It felt like there was always a possibility Christian would bust out a heroin kit or drop his clothes. Besides this casting choice, the flavor of bohemia was magnified by the inclusion of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s character (played by John Leguizamo)—a late nineteenth century artist I wasn’t particularly familiar with, but one that my mom pointed out to me, when discussing Moulin Rouge!, as an authentic persona who, despite his aristocratic origins, was both pushed into the artistic French underground due to his short stature, which qualified him as a ”freak,” and chose it for its free spirits and raw authenticity. Toulouse is a sidekick in the film, with not too much screen time dedicated to his own creative pursuits. He still delivers what is probably one of the sickest burns in film musical history when he calls the story’s nemesis, the Duke (Richard Roxburgh), a “bourgeois pig” and makes a few oink sounds to emphasize his point. His presence grounds the film’s historical setting.

There is, of course, also the soundtrack—a hodgepodge of cover songs, remixes, original tracks, and something in between from what feels like all corners of music history. At thirteen, I didn’t recognize all of the adapted songs, but I sure was able to isolate parts from Nirvana’s “Smells like Teen Spirit” and T. Rex’s “Children of the Revolution” because they were so obviously out of place (even though the same could be said about “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend,” with its 1950s big band brass hits and pulsating drum beats). Nirvana and T. Rex were coming from a distinctly different neighborhood of the music universe than the other appropriated songs—grunge and rock, subsequently, stood out in a film that takes place in an entertainment setting where money bills are being waved in front of the dancers’ faces. My priority at thirteen, however, was to recognize the songs, not perform a deep analysis of the contradictions underlying their use or the overall status of grunge and rock as subgenres of popular music. For me, these songs’ use was still a sign of the film’s subversive qualities. A lot more has been said about the postmodern pastiche of Moulin Rouge!’s soundtrack, and there’s no point in repeating it here. The point is that their placement in the setting of an erotic cabaret show made the film’s performance sequences seem that more edgy.
Judging by how worn out my prized VHS tape of Moulin Rouge! is, particularly in those spots where musical numbers occur, I must have actively sought out those scenes over everything else during the many years that this film stayed in my mind. Maybe the courtesan glamour was not that important after all.1 I’m not entirely sure where exactly my fondness for musicals comes from—I’ve never been a theater kid or involved in any other type of performance-related activity in a manner that was not mildly traumatic in retrospect. I have a lot of appreciation for talents and skills that I lack, I guess—acting, singing, dancing, and set design. But this film, I think, also ignited a nascent fondness for alternative spaces, cultures, and communities that live on the razor-thin line between the underworld and the mainstream. Perhaps it also taught me about the frustrating and complicated relationship between art, commerce, and sacrifice. In any case, Moulin Rouge! is a film that has a lot more to give than you would expect, no matter what age you’re watching it at. So go, strap in, and enjoy the show—because you can-can-can, this weekend, at the Trylon.
- Fun fact, my first time seeing that film in its original English was actually not that long ago. The theater release in 2001 was dubbed in German, which is standard practice, and the VHS that I watched mercilessly was professionally dubbed in Russian (a rare occurrence for the then almost entirely pirated single-voice dubbings that my dad was able to obtain when visiting “the home country”). As a result, Moulin Rouge! is also a thoroughly multi-lingual film in my memory. ↩︎
Edited by Finn Odum