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Dangerous Beauty:
Wives vs. Courtesans, Church vs. State By: Meera Tamaya Note: The following essay is not a movie review; rather, it attempts a comparison between the central conflict in the film Dangerous Beauty and the recent impeachment imbroglio.
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movie's stunning cinematography, a visual feast, recreates the hedonistic splendor of sixteenth century Venice with its gilded gondolas, splendid palazzos, paintings, sculptures, opulent clothes and jewels. Venetians worshipped and paid homage to the gods of power and pleasure with an occasional, perfunctory nod to the Christian God of proscriptions. In this world, the true celebrities were the courtesans, who were analogous to Japanese geishas in that they were valued not only for their bodies, but also for their accomplishments. Veronica Franco, the heroine of Dangerous Beauty, has access to libraries from which respectable women are barred, and besides being erudite and well versed in the erotic arts, she is also an expert fencer and a respected poet. Renaissance Venice is comparable to contemporary America on many levels, but especially in its culture of celebrities. At the end of the millennium, America is the undisputed leader of the world, not only in military might, a flourishing artistic and media culture, but also in promoting free, unfettered, capitalism. In our post-modern world, some women achieve celebrity by attaching themselves to sports heroes, movie stars, princes and presidents, and "work" outside the traditional, religiously mandated constraints on sexuality. These so called "groupies" are comparable to old-style courtesans. Two obvious examples are Camilla Parker-Bowles, the mistress for whom Prince Charles considered a wife well lost after she produced an heir and a spare, and Monica Lewinsky. Admittedly Camilla and Monica do not earn their living by selling sexual favors, but the glamour of a prince and a president may be considered payment in kind, if not in cash. Groupies derive their |
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raison d'etre from association with powerful men. Courtesans by profession, like Veronica in Renaissance Venice, or courtesans by inclination, like Camilla and Monica, do not subscribe to bourgeois notions of the sanctity of marriage. Reportedly, when Camilla introduced herself to Charles, she drew his attention to the fact that her great-grandmother, Alice Kepler, was the favorite mistress of his great-grandfather. And in the kind of absurdity the British monarchy, an antediluvian institution, specializes in, Camilla's husband (now an ex) holds the position of Silver Stick in Waiting. Monica's propensity for older, famous men seems to be genetic in origin: her mother has published a book titled Private Lives of The Three Tenors, in which she claims to have had an affair with one of them. The fact that she undertook the safekeeping of Monica's infamous blue dress says a great deal about her system of values, which are obviously not those of your average middle-class mother. The resemblance to Renaissance Venice and its courtesan/celebrities is unmistakable, particularly in the role played by them in the ongoing conflict between the church and state, between law and desire, the extreme right and the liberal factions of England and the United States. First, the movie. Veronica Franco, as played by Catherine McCormack, is a bookish and tomboyish beauty, in love with Marco Venieri, the son and heir of a wealthy and influential nobleman, played by Rufus Sewell. Although Marco is drawn to her, he explains to Veronica that he cannot marry her, as she has no dowry to offer; his father would never countenance such a marriage: "Marriage is not romantic," he explains "It is a contract, it is about politics: that is why God |
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invented poetry." He has to make a dynastic marriage profitable to Venice and his family; indeed, in a bitter moment Marco intones, "What God and country have joined together, let no love put asunder." Before she has time to recover from this blow, another, worse shock is dealt her by her mother, who informs Veronica that since her father has drunk away the family fortunes and died leaving them destitute, she has to support the family by becoming a courtesan. Veronica's brother has to buy a commission in the army, and her body is the only commodity which can finance her brother's future. Courtesans, if they are well trained and accomplished, can become very wealthy and very influential, as they are sought after by the most powerful men in Venice. "I know. I was a courtesan, one of the best, before I married your father," says her mother. When Veronica demurs, her mother concedes that a girl with no dowry has one other alternative to a life of prostitution: becoming a nun. She takes Veronica on a tour of a convent; the chilling visit decides the sensuous, freespirited Veronica: she submits to the rigorous training in the erotic and fine arts required of a courtesan. Beautiful, intelligent and spirited, Veronica embraces the life with gusto and becomes a highly prized courtesan whose freedom and influence is envied by wives who are cloistered in their homes. Before we run away with this highly romanticized concept of courtesans, the film is careful to display the other end of the class structure which existed among them. At the lowest end of the scale, the poorer prostitutes are displayed in cages and have their teeth and bodies prodded and scrutinized before their services are bought. They are also subjected to |
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corporal punishment in public, providing entertainment for sadistic onlookers. At the highest level inhabited by Veronica, she is prized not only for her physical beauty, her expertise at giving pleasure, but also for her erudition, her ability to win improvisatory poetry and fencing contests. Veronica's accomplishments add to the glory of Venice, and she is called upon during negotiations with neighboring powers in times of emergency. For example, when a Turkish invasion is imminent and the Venetians need the help of the King of France to repel the invaders, it is Veronica's brave management of the French King's sado/masochist proclivities which persuades the king to send a fleet of ships to aid Venice in its war effort. The Doge of Venice declares her a National Treasure. The class structure among prostitutes and courtesans, which mimicked the established social hierarchy in Venice, is comparable to the classes of women who are, in the parlance of sociology, "sex-workers" in contemporary America. The Monicas and Camillas offer services which wives may or may not provide, and perhaps, more important, without the emotional strings and social obligations attached to the institution of marriage. Like Veronica, Monica and Camilla are not sex workers who walk the streets and are controlled by pimps. Monica is upper middle-class, her father is an oncologist, while Camilla's family is upper-class landed gentry. In her grand-jury testimony Monica stated that she fell in love with Clinton, although she never expected to, but she often referred to him as The Big Creep in her tape-recorded conversations with Linda Tripp. However ambivalent her feelings for Clinton were, the precise nature of the services she offered |
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was undeniably a large part of her attractiveness to him, if Clinton's past history is anything to go by. Cut to Dangerous Beauty. When the wives of the leading citizens of Venice send for Veronica to ask her if they have had news of their husbands from the war front, they follow up their questions with a more important query: "What keeps our husbands coming back to you, again and again, like pigs to a trough?" Veronica replies by picking up a banana, and declaiming its Latin name, peels it, and swallows it whole in one smooth, scarcely perceptible movement of her deep throat. There is an audible gasp of outrage from the wives. The Latin term hardly dignifies the obscene act, they inform her. However, a more pragmatic wife asks Veronica to train her own teenage daughter in the arts of a courtesan because, the wife says sadly, "Courtesans enjoy more freedom and influence than wives." By way of answer, Veronica takes the wife to the red-light streets where the poor, disfigured, and destitute prostitutes are left out to die and shows her what happens to most courtesans. As a courtesan she may occupy a larger cage than a wife, but it is still a cage, Veronica points out. Here we come inevitably to the cage as a perfect metaphor for the limitations of the roles prescribed for women by society both in Renaissance Venice and present day America. There are many cages of differing sizes, comfort, even luxury, but for the purposes of this paper, I will consider just one: the cage of celebrity which imprisons both Hillary and Monica, a cage not all that different from the institutional cage of marriage. According to Clinton biographers, his primary motive for marrying the plain and brilliant Hillary was her suitability as a wife for a politician with the |
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highest ambitions. In Clinton's highly compartmentalized life, the likes of Monica can cater to his satyriasis. Both Hillary and Monica are photographed by Vogue and Vanity Fair: celebrity and notoriety are interchangeable and often indistinguishable in the free market. In Catholic Renaissance Venice, marriage provides a cage structured by church and state which assures a certain security for respectable women, who are transferred from the custody of fathers to that of husbands. In the comfortable prison of marriage, duty, property, and status are often substituted for pleasure, love, and personal autonomy. In the larger cage occupied by the likesof Veronica and Monica, desire unregulated by church and state can have free play, governed, however, by the cash and power nexus. Indeed, Veronica's satisfied customers include bishops, senators, kings. The Doge of Venice has cannily managed to keep the city state relatively free of church control by negotiating and catering to the church's own venality. In other words, Renaissance Venice, in its glorious celebration of carnal and artistic pleasures, has managed to retain the earmarks of a secular state, with a marked similarity to Clinton's America before Kenneth Starr began his investigation of the goings on in the White House. Indeed, the reign of pleasure in Renaissance Venice comes to an abrupt and horrifying end when, in the wake of the war against Turkey, plague replaces pleasure with the wages of sin: death. Indeed the Black Death is used by the Inquisition to reassert its control over renegade, hedonistic Venice. It is tempting to speculate that millennial anxieties have played a part in the recent resurgence of the extreme right in America. Of this I shall say more later. In |
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Venice the first casualty in this war between church and state, between proscription and pleasure, are the courtesans who are brought to trial, summarily condemned, and hanged. Veronica is tried not only as a courtesan, but far more serious, as a witch who has a supernatural hold on men. Veronica's chief accuser and prosecutor is a former poet whom Veronica had publicly humiliated by her own superior gift for instant improvisation of bawdy verse. Worse still, she had trounced him in a duel. This former rival of Veronica is now a self-righteous priest and prosecutor played by Oliver Platt (whose plump cheeks and dimples recall those of Kenneth Starr), who admits that his hatred of courtesans, particularly of Veronica, is in direct proportion to his former frustrated desire for her, because as a poor courtier, he could not afford her services. When Veronica makes a spirited, eloquent defense of the human need and right to give and receive pleasure, she is told that her very articulateness proves her wickedness: long tongues in women are a sign of their promiscuity; the church conflates verbal eloquence with sexual profligacy. We need hardly remind ourselves that Shakespeare's women are praised for their silence: Coriolanus addresses his wife as "My gracious silence" and King Lear praises Cordelia for her soft voice: "Her voice was ever soft, / Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman." In Renaissance Venice and contemporary America the tongue, the instrument of speech and sensuality, also becomes the sword of rebellion raised against the church's tyranny. The French theorist Michel Foucault has argued that the body becomes the site of control, a visible arena for public discipline and punishment, in |
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the subjugation of its citizens by church and state. Pleasure is inherently anarchic, and Veronica's tongue, with its expertise in pleasure and poetry, is the ultimate symbol of anarchy, a sort of female phallus, which appropriates to itself what is traditionally male: the prerogatives of power and pleasure, the exercise of which makes men godlike, but for which women are condemned as witches. When the Inquisition is on the point of forcing Veronica to admit she is a witch, her male patrons (the entire assembly of dignitaries), egged on by her lover Marco, now a Senator, rise up in her defense. At this the Doge diplomatically points out that since Veronica is not a witch with supernatural powers, but only a common whore, such base matters need not be the concern of the church, but may be left to the state. With this piece of brilliant casuistry, he saves both Veronica's life and the status of Venice as a secular state. In an article in the New York Times Magazine, Andrew Sullivan, former editor of The New Republic, (an openly gay Republican, a sort of living oxymoron), argues that the extreme right is actually subverting the vaunted credo of mainstream Republicans: less government, more freedom. Sullivan makes the point that Kenneth Starr, an avowed fundamentalist, who reputedly reads the Bible every day, has actually managed to put the government in the bedroom. Surely, it is more than a coincidence that Starr and his cohorts' voyeuristic moral fervor coincides with all the other fears rife at the end of the millennium: the breakdown of computers, proliferation of terrorism and, according to blockbuster movies, invasions by aliens, annihilation by comets and dinosaurs. Witch hunts are notoriously triggered by paranoia and |
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exploited by politicians--Senator McCarthy's infamous blacklisting and Congressional hearings against the perceived communist threat, are just two obvious examples. Tolerant and secular, Renaissance Venice becomes prey to the inquisitorial Church precisely when the Black Death nearly decimates its population. Historically, fear and paranoia have proved efficient triggers for assorted forms of individual and mass insanity. Time magazine, ever quick to trumpet the zeitgeist, put both Starr and Clinton on its January 4, 1999, cover and named them Men of the Year. It is not hard to imagine Janet Reno in drag, playing the wily Doge of Venice, keeping a representative of the religious right and a head of state apart. But as we all know, she signally failed to do so when she gave the prosecutor free rein to run amok. The amusing irony is that the vengeful, self-righteous inquisitor sports a cherubic smile: his is the face of a fulfilled voyeur. Clinton, the usually smiling, doughy President, looks grim, mouth curved downward, eyes glinting, a thwarted satyr, perhaps contemplating bombing the hell out of Iraq as an efficient means of sublimating his frustrations and distracting his critics. Every country deserves its leader, but alas, in a century named The American Century by Harold Evans, the American Men of the Year, Starr and Clinton, can engage in a danse macabre over a global battlefield. In our postmodern world where difference is obliterated by the undiscriminating and greedy maw of a free market, the accuser and accused appear Janus faced, two sides of the same coin. |