Staging division: power, violence, and theatricality in The Baby of Mâcon

ABSTRACT

Peter Greenaway’s The Baby of Mâcon (1993) was highly controversial at the time of its release; its means for critiquing cinematic voyeurism and the exploitability of audiences were received as blasphemous and misanthropic. This essay shows that the politics of this film is more complicated, and more profoundly democratic, than has so far been acknowledged. Drawing on Claude Lefort’s work on the “symbolic dimension” of the political and on Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s work on theatricality and “originary mimesis,” it argues that The Baby of Mâcon is a political-ontological fiction that holds a key to understanding the director’s democratic vision in the post-Thatcherite cultural climate of the early 1990s. In the process, not only does this essay advance a new perspective on the film’s complex structure and on the themes of corporeality and sacrificial violence and their place in Greenaway’s work, it also demonstrates the relevance of an ontologized concept of “staging” for reading this unique cult director’s political films.

KEYWORDS:

• Mimesis
• political ontology
• theatricality
• violence
• Peter Greenaway

Acknowledgments

I should wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback and comments. As well, my thanks go to Rafael Sánchez and Aafke Weller for all their encouragement and support and for many conversations about the subject of this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See Walsh (2006) for discussion of some of Greenaway’s 1980s films, including The Cook, the Thief, as “allegories of Thatcherism.”

2. See also Greenaway’s introduction to the published film script, where he writes that “[the] play performed is deemed by the players to be tailored to entertain Cosimo’s particular religious imagination” (Greenaway 1994, 7).

3. In a 1993 interview for the French film magazine Positif, Greenaway talks about the 17^th century as “a thrilling period of transition, that heralded the era of democracy” (Ciment 2000, 155).

4. E.g., one critic noted in December 1993 how the film was “being viewed in a ‘post James Bulger environment’” (Foley 1993, 12). The Bulger affair, however, in which a two-year old was tortured and killed by two young boys, coincided precisely with the film’s release in the spring of 1993.

5. E.g., in Variety, The Baby’s sumptuous use of period style was dismissed as “all fluff and no filling” (Elley 1993, 45).

6. Cf. Steiner (1995); Mulvey (1996).

7. Italics in the original. Breckman uses “exteriority-effect” elsewhere (Breckman 2012, 30).

8. I borrow my (Aristotelian) term here from Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (Arendt 1958, 200).

9. Greenaway has renewed this argument with vigour in Goltzius and the Pelican Company (2012). For discussion, see my “Peter Greenaway’s Artist-Entrepreneurs” (de Waard 2022).

10. Greenaway (Greenaway 1994, 74). In the script, the child itself replies; in the film its words are spoken by the Prompter.

11. “To-be-looked-at-ness” is of course Laura Mulvey’s term (Mulvey 1975, 11).

12. The quote here is from Mulvey (2006, 79).

13. Lacoue-Labarthe’s discussion of phusis in relation to mimesis will be revisited below.

14. E.g., compare Philip French’s words in The Observer that “The Baby of Mâcon is the most determinedly disgusting film from a major director since Salò” (French 1993, 52; italics added).

15. See, among others, Lacoue-Labarthe (2003). For a lucid discussion of Lacoue-Labarthe’s work on mimesis, see van Peperstraten (2005, 19–45).

16. Greenaway (Greenaway 1993). There are no page numbers in this publication; all quotes are from Greenaway’s opening essay, titled “The Audience of Mâcon: A Suspension of Disbelief.”

17. Derrida quoted in Balsa (2008, 35).

18. “Dissociation” is Dana Polan’s term, quoted in Mulvey (1996, 12).