The Baby of Mâcon
At a glance...
- Directed by Peter Greenaway
- Released in 1993
- Runtime 122 minutes
- Watched at home
- Final feelings: I feel messed up by this.
I find this movie so hard to write about! I've been putting off this review because like. I did not have fun watching this. I was having fun at first, but there is a thing that happens right at the end that was so hard to watch (and warrants a content warning check if you are the type to not want to watch movies with certain kinds of violence in them) I wasn't sure why I kept the TV on (more on this later). When the movie finally ended I felt like I just bore witness to some human tragedy.
But after the fact, I keep thinking about this movie and it just seems brilliant to me. Brilliant both because it's doing something very clever with the play-within-the-movie idea, and because it's so obviously about the modern construction of violence as entertainment. The Baby of Mâcon is ostensibly about a play. It feels very narrow and strange at the beginning once you realize you are watching a filmed play because like, this is a movie. It's a movie set in a specific historical period, filled with lavish costumes and strange, circus-like performers. The immediate experience is alien and disorienting, what is the movie about if it's about watching a play? Like, you wanted to watch a story about some mythical baby in a town, but actually that story is, in media res, a fictional story taking place in a performance?
And if you're clever you will then go to the next follow-up which is, where is this play being performed? And for whom? When I go to see a play in real life, I am sitting amongst a bunch of people who all paid money to see theater. Where is the audience of this play? And the movie quickly answers this for you by showing you that yes, this play that you think you're watching is actually not for you at all, it's for these people all sitting in these seats over hear, and they are the ones watching the play, and actually therefore it's not really accurate to say that you're watching this play. After all, you never had any intention of watching a play, you were intending on watching a movie, and this movie is about an audience that is watching a play that you also watch since it happens to be there.
Can you see how this is starting to be cool? At least to me, this is so cool. This is blurring the lines that are so essential to the idea of a movie that we normally take them for granted. Add one extra layer in there and suddenly it's real weird. Like, if the movie is about the world of the audience who happen to be watching a made-up play, what happens when something extremely fucked up happens in the play? What happens when the image you see on screen is telling you "the movie is about this thing right here, it's about this horrific and violent birth, it's about this powerful and pathetic little baby being exploited over and over again, it's about the powerlessness of women in society" but it's all happening in a play? This shit isn't happening for real, it's just acting. I mean, it always is just acting, if Julia Ormond is in a normal movie and her character experiences these things, in real life she is acting. But now she is acting as an actor, so the horrible things are happening to this actor, so, how horrible is it?
Have I lost you yet? I hope not, because I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like this. Maybe my favorite play-within-a-play is in A Midsummer Night's Dream, mostly because it's so damn funny and feels like a perfect comedic capstone to a play that is otherwise a lot of typical Shakespearean romantic hijinks. But using a play-with-a-movie like this, to really zoom in on our relationship with violence, made me deeply self-conscious as an audience member. I think other movies have done that on accident, usually by being so bad I feel ashamed to be watching them, but in The Baby of Mâcon it is clear and purposeful.
This is a movie designed to incite reactionary condemnation. That was my response to seeing it! And then I started thinking and wondering like, how do I categorize or understand my reactions to this film? At the beginning I thought the violence was happening to the actor within the play, so it was fine. It was fine that this man got gutted by a bull, it was fine that this baby was having his bodily fluids milked for money. Like, why was that fine? Why am I fixating on this thing that happened at the end as being unforgivable and none of the other violence?
And what's crazy is my initial response to that thought was, well the sexual violence is way more visually graphic, so that's why it's inherently worse. But that's actually not true at all! Like, when I think of literally the images I saw, and try to remove Julia Ormond's screaming from my memory, the images are just as obscured, the violence is just as implied (in fact the most graphic violence is probably the gutting by the bull). And the screaming! Is she screaming because she's an actor? If the character in the play says it's real does that mean it's real? Where does the performance end? I know IMDB says Julia Ormond hates this movie but those facts never have any source but I do wonder how she feels about the movie and what it was like to act in that scene.
Finally, let's talk about the director himself. Speaking of those unverified IMDB claims, I found the actual source of the supposed claim that he was responding to public outrage over an advertisement and it's much different. Here's the actual context, with a quote from the director himself in 1994:
The inspiration for "The Baby of Mâcon" came in 1992, when Mr. Greenaway saw Oliviero Toscani's photograph of a newborn infant -- wrinkled and bloody -- in a Benetton publicity campaign. Like most of Mr. Toscani's work, the poster of the infant produced equal amounts of adoration and outrage. "The photograph reminded me of the many traditional 'Nativity' scenes, the paintings of the Madonna with Child," Mr. Greenaway recalled. "It was as if that photograph was the essence of all those paintings, stripped of their esthetic dimension. It was the Nativity in its purest state. And the use of that photograph for publicity started me thinking about the exploitation of children, and of people."
Reading this, I feel like there's something earnestly challenging about The Baby of Mâcon. These horrible things we see were inspired by an advertisement. My guy saw “Newborn baby” by Oliviero Toscani in an ad for a multinational clothing brand and made this movie. In essence, the two pieces mirror each other, but where one exploits the child for a form of edgy brand activation, the other shows what a world which empowers such things would actually look like. It would be a world filled with exploitation and violence, it would be filled with powerful institutions extracting wealth whenever possible, no matter the costs. It would be a world where those entities with hegemonic dominance over the culture and morals of a community would be able to propogandize their own extractive efforts.
As the director states himself: "My film shows a reality in which the good are not rewarded and the bad are not punished, and in which innocence is always exploited."
So, I think this one is very cool. I love Peter Greenaway, I feel like every film I've seen of his has pushed boundaries and made some really incisive jabs at whatever is the target of his vision. The Baby of Mâcon is not subtle. It's not nice. And it's also not stupid. It's purposeful. It's not trying to make violence cool or exciting. Watching this is maybe a kind of self-harm, so I can't say I recommend it to anyone, and you should make your own best judgement on if you actually want to see this. But also, as someone who went in blind and did watch it and did hate it initially, I have come to appreciate what it was trying to do, and I think it is doing something very unique.
P.S. I forgot to mention this when originally writing this but I just have to add this, this movie is very funny at times and it feels crazy to say that. In particular I have the "These are the fluids of my body" stuck in my head. And the "VALUE" guy.