Tea at Trianon: Freedom’s Flaw in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, February 26, 2019

Freedom’s Flaw in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”

I watched one episode of "Mrs. Maisel" and found it vulgar and crude with anti-Semitic overtones. From The Imaginative Conservative:

But: the comic, as comic, cannot be afraid to say or to joke about anything. Of particular delight and constantly in the comedian’s crosshairs is the Sacred. The family and its secrets, from the noises your mother makes in bed to the mundanity of your father’s prized career, as well as religion, marriage, and even one’s own children are where the true booty of comics is buried—waiting to be dug up and paraded for the world to see. “She’s a comedian: they humiliate their families on stage, that’s their job,” her father tries to explain to a mock tribunal in defense of his cushy and obviously trivial, but nonetheless covert government research position after Miriam reveals harmless but ludicrously classified information on stage. What begins as a cathartic opportunity for Miriam to aim a well-deserved snowball at the eye of the overbearing and often oppressive society around her at the outset has, by the end of the show’s second season, steadily built into an avalanche that threatens to devastate everyone and everything in Miriam’s path, not pausing even for her mother’s sanity, her father’s career, her children’s upbringing, or Joel’s newfound commitment to salvaging what is left of a teetering relationship. In the final moments of the finale of the second season Miriam is finally confronted with the possibility that the consequence of being The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel—with her insatiable desire for the spotlight, the liberating power of the microphone, and the wild adoration of the audience—threatens to send Miriam into unconstrained freefall and bring about freedom’s furthest extreme—the tyrant’s freedom of being totally and utterly alone. (Read more.)