The Limits of Feminism in Queen Christina

I’ve been on a Greta Garbo kick the past year. Grand Hotel was an outstanding film all around, but Camille and Mata Hari left me unmoved. Then just the other night, I watched Queen Christina (1933), based loosely on the life of Queen Christina of Sweden. What interested me most on a first viewing was the film’s handling of feminist themes.

The movie begins in a strong feminist current. Queen Christina, who is given to wearing manly clothes, is a forceful and capable ruler who clearly needs no man, either for counsel or romance. Her court wants her to marry the national war hero Karl Gustav, and the scheming Count Magnus is never far away, but she insists, “I shall die a bachelor!” The only person she truly has an interest in is another woman, the dainty and girlish Countess Ebba Sparre. When she finds out that Ebba has a lover whom she wishes to marry, Christina flies into a jealous rage and heads out into the country with only her footman.

Here, the movie abandons its subversive feminist, bisexual and cross-dressing themes and veers toward conventional territory. Posing as a man while on the road, Christina ends up sharing a room and bed with the Spanish envoy Don Antonio. When it’s time to disrobe, her secret is out and the two fall passionately in love. Later, Christina walks around the room, running her hands over and pressing her face against various objects in order to memorize this glorious place where she found a man. Queen Christina has become a man’s woman.

Just when it seems the film has abandoned its more challenging themes--Christina has abdicated her throne in favor of setting up house with Don Antonio--the unexpected happens. Count Magnus mortally wounds Don Antonio in a duel. Christina arrives on the deck of the ship that was to carry them to Spain only to find her lover gasping out his final breaths. Christina declares the ship will set sail despite his death, and the movie ends with Christina at the bow, looking boldly out across the waves, a content smile upon her lips. Now for the first time in her life, she is truly free of men and ready to make her own destiny.

In its unrelenting ending, Queen Christina succeeds where other texts fail. Watching the 1970 movie of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (starring George C. Scott as Mr. Rochester), it occurred to me that in many of these old tales by women writers, the extraordinary female protagonist who supposedly needs no man often ends by marrying a man of wealth. Apparently, every good woman needs recognition as such by a man of considerable means and, in the movies at least, a man who also happens to have brooding good looks.

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is another example. Throughout the whole book, we are told that Elizabeth is intelligent, independent and generally superior to all those frivolous women who only bother their heads with finding a man to marry. But, of course, she ends up marrying Mr. Darcy. In Joe Wright’s 2006 movie, which is otherwise excellent, these two sober heads suddenly, in the final moments of the film, become giggly dipshits!

Queen Christina avoids this betrayal of the ideals at its core.

But there are limits to Queen Christina’s feminism. What are we to make of her penchant for dressing as, and even pretending to be, a man? Is she proving how even a woman should be able to do anything she pleases? Or does she feel that a woman cannot be equal as a woman but only by becoming a man? And what of her obsessive rejection of men early in the film? Can she not realize herself as a woman except through rejection of men? There is an awful lot of man in this formulation of woman.

But perhaps these limitations cannot be avoided. After all, to be human is to be male, female or intersexual, and to exist in matrices of gender identity. The one thing you cannot do is avoid the male/female polarity altogether. Therefore, any feminist message must fall within the broader context of human biology and sexuality.

Finally, we must consider that Queen Christina’s feminism is limited because it is not the whole story--the movie’s stronger push is for individualism. Queen Christina simply wishes, beyond any aspirations of female empowerment, to be herself. Like the historical Queen Christina of Sweden, she refuses to be bound by convention.

Watching Queen Christina, I couldn’t help but feel that this role suited Greta Garbo more than any other I have seen her in--and indeed, the documentary Garbo by Turner Classic Movies draws connections between the themes in Queen Christina and Garbo’s life. Garbo is always so herself that many roles don’t seem to fit her, but she and Christina fit seamlessly, and the result is entertaining and thought-provoking cinema.

Classic Movies: Three Levels of Experience

For some time now, I’ve noticed that I enjoy recent Hollywood movies less and less. Movies I watch because they are in genres or franchises I love--like The Dark Knight Rises, Prometheus or Skyfall--continue to impress, but other movies usually leave me uninterested. Meanwhile, I’ve been increasingly drawn to classic movies. I eventually realized that this was because the experience of older movies is multilayered in a way that new movies can’t provide.

The most obvious level of experiencing an old movie is the immediate experience based on its content, the way you would experience any movie. You follow the story, identify with characters, marvel at special effects, get swept up in the score, admire the performances, and so on.

One old movie that captivated me recently was Gaslight (1944). The fragile Paula, played by Ingrid Bergman, marries a devilishly tall-dark-and-handsome smoothy and the two move into her childhood home. However, she soon begins--so it would seem--to misplace items, forget appointments, and notice strange phenomena that no one else does, such as the lights dimming. Her husband, increasingly exasperated with her hysteria, suggests she is going crazy. But is she? Isn’t there something suspicious about her husband’s behavior? Isn’t it almost as if he is orchestrating her episodes for some purpose we cannot yet guess?

The movie provides plenty of excitement simply through its content. You are drawn deeper and deeper into Paula’s emotional unraveling, you are engrossed by Bergman’s performance (for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress), you come to loathe the villain for his villainy, you wonder if the young detective will figure it all out in time, and you are on the edge of your seat until the denouement. At this level of experience, this old movie provides nothing more than and just as much as a good thriller from recent years.

But we experience the classics on another level that we cannot experience recent movies: From our standpoint today, we experience them as representatives of the past.

One need go no further back than the 1980s--say The Breakfast Club (1985) or Pretty in Pink (1986)--to begin feeling out-of-time, but then to watch Saturday Night Fever (1977) or The Hustler (1961) or The Seven Year Itch (1955) is to feel increasingly as if you are in a foreign land. By the time you reach the 1940s and 30s, you are like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (1939), only in reverse, moving from Technicolor to a bizarre and magical world of black and white. Watching silent films is like peering at another planet through the grainy and flickering lens of some queer, lighted telescope. Can these people up there on the screen really be members of the same human race I am used to? They look and behave so differently!

Every time I watch The Wizard of Oz, I wonder why no one talks like Judy Garland anymore. Women with that particular accent are common in older movies, but I’ve never heard anyone talk like that in my lifetime. To take another example, I always find it odd in the MGM Marx Brothers’ movies how they’re a weird mish-mash of genres--like vaudeville--with slapstick next to musical numbers next to drama and so on, as if film was viewed as an omniverse of previously existing art forms. In Anatomy of a Murder (1959), the prosecution raises as an example of Laura’s moral laxity how she moves when she plays pinball. Anatomy of a Murder is a gritty movie even today, but how quaint that pinball and how one plays it could be seen as dangerous and sinful! These are all examples of how a movie can stand out for characteristics that have passed into the past.

Seen across the gulf of time, the classics are very strange.

The third level of experience is where it gets really interesting. No longer are we simply experiencing a classic movie for its content, or viewing it as a curious relic from times gone by. Instead, we now see it through the eyes of its contemporaries. We assume, as best we can, the standpoint of movie-goers in the early to mid 20th Century and experience the movie as they would have at the time, as if viewing the past from the past.

A good example is Morocco (1930), which I watched just a couple days ago for the first time. In an early scene, Marlene Dietrich performs in a nightclub. She’s dressed in a men’s tuxedo. The quiet that descends over her audience immediately casts over you the viewer a sense for the gender roles being toyed with. When she flirts with a lady in the audience and even plants one on her lips, its thrilling and shocking today just as it would have been back in 1930 when the movie first screened. It doesn’t matter that I’ve seen James Franco and Sean Penn kiss in Milk (2008) or Scarlett Johansonn and Penelope Cruz kiss in Vicki Cristina Barcelona (2008). By then, the old dominant ideas of gender and sexuality, while still not entirely gone today, had long been played with in the public arena, sometimes to the point of boredom. The scene in Morocco is exciting now because it was exciting then.

This isn’t to say that Hollywood movies today are somehow inferior, only that because they are recent they lack levels of experience that movies acquire after having aged for a while. Next on my list is Notorious (1946). More Ingrid Berman, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. I expect it will be engaging on all three levels of experience.