Power is a difficult thing to quantify. Everybody has some, even those on the bottom rung of society; if we can't dominate in the public sphere, we can go home and do it in private, and vice versa. If we can't have the power we want, there is an endless array of poor substitutes for us to sate ourselves with, from bullying our spouses and children to terrorizing those who work under us. Some people want more, some less; some make a game out of the desire to have or be released from responsibility, and some make a life out of it, leading to all sorts of ugly implications.
Does the bottom who dictates his/her fantasies to his/her top seek less power or merely assert it further through giving the orders? Does the top seek more power over his/her charge or abdicate it through assuming responsibility? This isn't just philosophy in the boudoir, this is real life, and the choices we make--personal, social and political--are often dictated by our psychological attitude towards power and its uses. Getting it is important for survival, but how much is enough? And what happens if you have too much, or not enough?
These thoughts were prompted by the new Philip Kaufman movie Quills, which is deeply embroiled in the very subject of power. Not, I hasten to add, in any coherent or fruitful way. In fact it lives to deny the social templates that lie buried beneath its faux-bohemian exterior. But its failure is instructive in how the matter of who pulls the strings can be obscured in the name of both serious art and mindless frivolity. As the film tries to do double duty as both defense of artistic expression and sexy period romp, it reveals how the practitioner of both forms can reduce complex power relationships into either-or oppositions and thus limit the frame of reference available. By shutting down the debate on what the Marquis de Sade actually stood for, Quills reveals its own allegiance to the status quo that it pretends to flout; it pits the black hats against the white hats in a battle for moral supremacy over a great crowd of subjects that it has no interest in liberating.
In its first images, Quills threatens to make an interesting point. In close-up, we see a buxom lass menaced by a leather-masked sadist, who ties her hands and rips her dress in preparation for... something. Is it an S&M scenario? No, it's just The Terror, 1792, and the girl in question is being prepared for the guillotine. An attempt to draw a parallel between the private sphere of bedroom bondage and the public power that ruins lives, it raises all sorts of questions about the relationship between the two that the film, naturally, is totally unequipped to deal with.
This ambiguity is dropped the minute we cut to "many years later" and are introduced to the routine at the Charenton asylum, where the darling Marquis de Sade (Geoffrey Rush) is sequestered. While Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix), the deluded abbe who runs the place, is trying to cure his charges through art therapy and a gentle hand, de Sade is smuggling his twisted writings out with the help of chambermaid Madeline (Kate Winslet). It seems that simply everyone--or everyone we see on screen, anyway--is mad about the Marquis, with the exception of Napoleon and his lackeys; they are sufficiently embarrassed by the publication of his latest that they feel obliged to take action.
Enter Dr. Royer-Collard (Michael Caine), and with him, the irony that drives the film. Appointed to bring the Marquis under a tight rein, it becomes glaringly obvious that his methods are that of the most brutal sadist. Not only has he invented numerous treatments that are indistinguishable from torture, but he demands total submission from his charges, including his orphaned teenaged bride, whom he abuses in bed and keeps on a tight leash. This ice-cold hypocrite is contrasted with the lively, frolicsome Marquis, who, it turns out, is on the side of free expression and sexual release; his nasty thoughts never follow through into deeds, which might disqualify him for audience sympathy, and his works are seen as merely the racy result of a healthy sexual appetite that must be defended against the Royer-Collards of the world. And so the stage is set for a battle royale between the bad doctor and the good Marquis, the former of which may well lose in body but will almost certainly score a moral victory over his adversity.
This terrible irony might seem harmless at first, but it serves to obscure the fact that de Sade was once free to roam the streets, and thus indulge his own power games. The film both forces you to forget the existence of its hero anywhere beyond the gates of Charenton and pretend that he didn't really mean the things that he wrote. The truth is that de Sade was completely sincere about his peccadilloes, and regularly went to the trouble of staging them for his own benefit.
This is not to say that such S&M desires are wrong or that the Marquis was unambiguously evil, but it does suggest that the film's Marquis and his arch-nemesis might be as much colleagues as they are enemies. One has to take into account that de Sade was an aristocrat, and thus possessing a power that the film is ill-prepared to deal with; when he assails a porter with the fact that the rug he's carrying is worth more that he'll ever make in his life, the slip makes clear the innocence (or the cunning) of the whole enterprise. Instead of a particular person with a particular place in the world, we have a cuddly lech who's mostly harmless.
But if the film is content to avoid the implications of its historical subject's relationship to power, it also has its own control games to play. The Freudian slip of the rug remark has its roots in an age-old archetype of the artist-intellectual as de facto aristocrat, automatically elevated above a mob which must either submit to his pronouncements or serve as a hostile ballast to his status as a singular martyr. It's important to note that while we are witness to the most of the machinations of the asylum's upkeep, from Royer-Collard's finances to Madeline's family, we are never really asked to identify with the heroic Marquis. He is the prime mover of Quills, and we watch as his untrammeled imagination inspires the actions of the rest of the its characters. While the main characters fall into separate camps, the rest of the asylum's maniacs and cretins are there to either carry out his artistic orders or, near the end, to provide a climactic uprising and have no dignity beyond their plot utility. This extends to the audience: far from empowered, we sit in thrall to the star attraction, ready to spread his gospel of watered-down naughtiness.
The point is not that possessing power is necessarily good or evil, but that it creates relationships based on how much you have and how you choose to use it. A more intelligent film about de Sade would surely elicit a reflection on our own relationship to power, and the responsibility involved in its use. It saddens me that in lieu of that film we are left with nothing but Quills, because we have evolved to the point that we should take stock of such matters. But instead of treating us as active viewers, who can be counted on to wrestle with the two (or more) positions, we are simply expected to take our serving of dogma and go home a better person. As true masochists, we suspend our judgement and do what we're told, leaving unexamined the premise that both master and servant could somehow be released from the bondage of certainty that cements their positions.-Travis Hoover
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