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When Baz Luhrmann's new film musical, Moulin Rouge, opened last year, Twentieth Century-Fox tried ever so hard to pitch it as a feast of skanky perversity, but the film itself is about the triumph of purity, a wild purity that seduces the stiffest of hearts. Indeed it begins by explicitly telling us that it is about love. That may sound safely generic, but in fact the entire story is engaged in distinguishing among different types and levels and transformations of love—vulgar, selfish, kind, and that love which proves so magical it extinguishes the lurid lights of the Moulin.
The historic Moulin Rouge music hall, immortalized in the posters of Toulouse-Lautrec, opened its doors in 1889 as an exotic, multistage dance hall and democratic sex market. (The name means "red mill"; the cabaret's trademark was a windmill painted red.) Royalty, industrialists, ambassadors, and politicians joined lusts with prostitutes, courtesans, Bohemians, and politicians. It was the supreme Parisian eros factory.
In the movie, the Moulin is defined above all by the selling of illusions. Nothing is as it appears on the surface—hence the play with mirrors and tricks of perspective, as if the movie itself were inviting us, almost taunting us, to read beyond its surface claims. The film's symbols won't stay tethered. Its opening, fractured imagery pretends to be postmodern, but the story instead pushes for the most ancient of metaphysical transcendentals—truth, beauty, freedom, and love. The filmmakers explicitly insist that this movie is a retelling of the Orphean myth: "It's Greek. It's about a boy. It's a story about love." Don't buy it.
The Orphean myth is pretty lame and unmotivated by itself. The Greek mind lacks the moral and metaphysical categories to complete a truly good story. In the myth, Orpheus, son of Apollo and Calliope, has the power to enchant every living creature with his music. When his love, Eurydice, is killed and descends to the Underworld, Orpheus goes after her and enchants Hades to permit Eurydice to leave. Hades agrees upon one condition: Orpheus must not look back. Of course, near the end of the journey, Orpheus fears for Eurydice, turns, and she is lost forever.
Moulin Rouge uses many of these elements as protective coloring, but they don't have the power to drive the story to its climax. In the film, a naÏve singing poet named Christian (Ewan McGregor) defies his father by moving to Montmarte, the artists' quarter in Paris, home of the Moulin Rouge. He strives to win the courtesan Satine (Nicole Kidman) and rescue her from this Underworld. Like the music of Orpheus, Christian's songs of love work their magic, and, like Orpheus, he does turn around at the last moment, losing his love. But that is as far as the Orphean tale can reach. Traditional Christian categories have to sneak in for the larger story to work.
Notice the contrasts: instead of a virtuous Eurydice bitten by a snake, Moulin Rouge has a corrupted, used, immoral Satine coughing up blood from her consumptive life in the underworld; the Orphean myth (and the Greek mind) knows nothing of sin. In the tale of Orpheus, Eurydice experiences no conversion, but Satine does. Instead of the music of Orpheus, knowable only by its effects, we have a man of the written word singing specifically about love, a simple but pure and eternal love, a magical message that turns out to be much more powerful than a selfish romanticism can bear. And instead of traipsing along like the passive Eurydice, Satine ends up denying herself, sacrificing romantic attachment to Christian in order to save him from death; the Orphean myth knows nothing of self-sacrifice, only petty death.
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