Moulin Rouge, La Boheme, and the Portrayal of Inequality

1. Intro
2. The Musical
3. Assessment
4. Love in Times of Cholera
5. Notes

Intro

Yesterday, I attended the Moulin Rouge musical adaptation, in Utrecht’s Beatrixtheater. I have some thoughts on the execution of the plot, but also think the interest in La Bohème-like stories tells us something interesting about inequality and what dimensions of it are salient.

The Musical

Moulin Rouge is set in fin-de-siècle Paris, where a strapping but poor American “singer-songwriter” named Christian arrives in the city, meets fellow artists/bohemièns, who persuade him to audition one of his songs for star performer Satine in the Moulin Rouge nightclub, in the hopes that will lead to a commission for a full show. Satine, meanwhile, has used her charm and iron determination to move from the gutter to become the “sparkling diamond” of Parisian nightlife. As such, Moulin Rouge’s owner uses her to seduce a wealthy Duke, in order to secure his financial backing for the struggling theater.

The stage is set for the love triangle to emerge: Satine mistakes Christian for the Duke, seduces him, falls in love, only to discover that she has to be the Duke’s mistress. Christian manages the Duke’s backing for the bohemian show, but grows frustrated with being Satine’s secret lover. Satine is torn between love for Christian, sense of duty for saving the theater, and the genuine hope of escaping her destitute background.

The show ends when Satine’s cough develops into full-blown tuberculosis (very La Bohème-like), and Satine dies during the premiere in Christian’s arms. The Duke, so menacing before, vanishes from the plot, and we end with some final dance routines.

Assessment

Visually, I found the musical very striking. The choreography is strong, most of the decors are very effective, and the lighting is well-done. I found the Duke well-performed, as were Satine, the nightclub owner, and the bohemian sidekicks. I was less happy with Christian, who both doesn’t act very well and didn’t sing in tune (particularly the top notes). However, all in all, the production and performer sides of the show were fine.

Not so fine was the music. Instead of writing an original score for the musical (or apparently for the film on which it is based), the music consists of a bizarre medley of pop songs from all over the place. Some of these songs worked, many didn’t. Christian singing a corny rendition of Adele’s Rolling in the Deep after Satine rejected him near the end of Act II was a case in point; all the emotional poignancy is immediately lost, the ambiance of the setting completely forgotten, to the extent that it becomes ridiculous. Also, the variation of songs was not good at all; played at a too-loud volume, the aggressive beats become physically tiresome very quickly. Such a wasted opportunity.

I was struck with parallels to famous operas, like La Bohème (very obviously, given the many “borrowed” plot elements) and La Traviata. There are many operas and musicals with flimsy love triangles masquerading as plot. What saves those works is the quality of the setting, and most of all the music. Here, we saw what happens if the music falls short; the whole product is diminished.¹

Love in Times of Cholera

There are interesting aspects to the love story, even if the execution in this rendition wasn’t first-rate. One of Piketty’s most insightful observations in Capital in the Twenty-First Century is to use 19th-century literature as evidence for entrenched wealth inequality; and indeed, the entire plot of Moulin Rouge revolves around the startling gap in resources between the Duke on the one hand and everyone else on the other.

The nature of the class gap, however, deserves some further deliberation. Many critics to Piketty’s thesis have argued that we shouldn’t ultimately care about wealth, but about consumption; for this is what enters agents’ utility functions.² And you can make a good case that what motivates Satine and her fellow poverty-escapers isn’t so much the Duke’s wealth, but rather his consumption pattern: the fancy dresses, the chateau overlooking the Champs-Elysees, the champagne. Certainly, the musical – a visual medium – drives home the gap in backgrounds by visual aspects of inequality, which almost inevitably reflect consumption inequality rather than wealth inequality per se.

This is in contrast to an operetta like Die lustige Witwe, which revolves (rather incredibly) around the widow’s wealth, since her late husband left her almost the entire stock of the fictional Balkan country Pontevedro’s government debt. Expenditures are not the primary concern here; rather, control over the country’s public finances. But in most cases I can think of, the line between pure wealth inequality and pure consumption inequality is more blurry. Sure, the Duke wears fancier clothes, but this is not the heart of the class gap; even if the bohemians would dress up exactly the same, the difference in bearing and sense of entitlement would surely be different. This reflects of course Bourdieu’s meaning of social and cultural capital, which is intimately tied up with wealth in a way that consumption or income cannot mimick.

Perhaps the most directly salient dimension of inequality explored in the performance is gender inequality. Satine’s looks and wiles are commodified and bartered, by her employer and herself, reducing her to a trophy to be gained. It is interesting to see the extent to which the Duke is driven by his desire to completely own and dominate her; I think this tells us something about how humans visualize power. Even nowadays, when technology can automate increasing numbers of tasks, what to many is the ultimate sign of luxury? PAs, private drivers, underlings – in other words, humans to order around. Hence, perhaps the ultimate reflection of power – from ancient Pharaohs to the current era – is human labor at your service. For quite a few powerful men, as we learn every day in the news, female human labor at your service is perhaps the greatest prize, and the greatest trophy to show others your status.

Another interesting thread running through these works is the sense of despair wrought by disease – tuberculosis, specifically. Satine is ashamed of her condition, it is inconvenient to her performance and distracting when she desperately wants the premiere of Christian’s show to be a success. The secrecy with which she cloaks her illness seems to imply that there is societal judgment about catching such a disease. It is not, apparently, a fate which can strike any believer, like the Black Death was centuries earlier; or at least, if it does strike you you’re not supposed to own up to it. This might be intertwined with the final component of inequality in this story – that of mobility. Poverty, whether measured in a consumption sense or in a wealth sense, shapes people’s very behavior and attitudes towards others, often in self-fulfilling ways. In Terry Pratchett’s Unseen Academicals, there is the metaphor of the crab bucket: a single crab escaping the bucket is dragged down by the crabs still at the bottom, so none can escape. It is a powerful story for how hard it can be to truly escape poverty.³

Satine’s shame for her illness, much like Mimi’s in La Bohème, shouldn’t therefore be seen as shame for the disease in its own right. Rather, she is ashamed of her weakness; ashamed that she hasn’t the means to treat it, nor the time necessary to recover, for so many depend on her and she cannot let them down. This is the crab bucket; her pride won’t allow her to seek help when she very well could have received it, with tragic consequences. This should remind us, quantitatively trained scientists, how much of the most subtle and pernicious harm inflicted by inequality is in how it shapes human perception and interaction. For this reminder, even if the music fell short, we can be grateful to the performers of Moulin Rouge

Notes