(Marquis)ette: When the people can read, they will be ashamed to understand
The versatility of a marquisette could be truly astonishing. It billows in the breeze that blows through a narrow window in a Bastille turret. It interweaves itself, covering the surface of a mock-table, a depository of food that flirts with rottenness. It is here where the aristocracy confronts their jailer.
In one of the cells of that legendary Parisian prison, the divine marquis chatters with his only companion: Colin, the sharpest cerebral pinnacle provided to his body. Un critique insidieux du style. Despite this disagreement, perhaps minor, the glans-Colin is the embodiment of cuteness in a twisted universe of abject faces (this is a great bestiomorphic merit of Topor). Phallunasal, chintesticular: every priest always needs details, thereby domesticates and master prey animals (Nietzsche dixit); for this, the sacrament of confession was invented.
Jenny Saville, The Bride, oil on canvas, 1992.
That prison, however, cannot be reduced to an animal farm. It is the theater of the world that celebrates the erection of the most despotic protagonist in history. Under the stage, in the dunghill, the homunculus-offspring of Manzoni and Serrano exhales its first breath of life. In a way, as we all know, an unexpected ejaculation is a confession of urgency. In fact, that is why the prison chaplain conspires against his highness: the libertine-litterateur, the lycaon.
In the same family of mammals, we could find Lupino. An unscrupulous revolutionary who does not notice the magnanimous size of the noble prisoner who is complicit in his escape project. The meritocracy of bargaining had to be recognized, the mastery of trading sodomy for freedom. In the dog-marquis there is a consciousness of the body that escapes the self-consciousness of the spirit, from which follows the solemn deference of consulting Colin about his desires. This is how we learned, even despite the cuts and scratches, that the cracks in a prison cell can turn into a dawning snack.
Woe to you, my Colin! Why didn't you heed my pleas for abstinence? Now your brilliant intellect has been reduced to bruises. While you regain the spirit of yesteryear, silence! The libertine has to know herself as such, before setting off. Silence! Your suffocation was to precipitate the death of the lycaon. He tied a knot over you himself, and compressed —marquisette, marquisette— your neck! In his cowardice, perhaps mediated by a gentle kiss of a golden fleece (or les Malheurs de la vertu), he homologated you to the Patriarch. I know I don't deserve you, my Colin!
The blood of Christ, milk it now! What if the Agnus Dei was just an innocent calf?
Between peg-leg-pigs and the utopian stubbornness of that legendary proclamation: Français, encore un effort si vous voulez être républicains; the real dispute to death is not over the Bastille, or the blood of the dame de la brioche, or the Louvre’s canvases, but over the senses of the individual. The triumph of imagination over sensuality (or another of Rousseau's dreams) is the birth of erotica. Your body, lycaon? What your body imagines emanates from the body itself, but it is transformed.
From the Bastille one only escapes with the head of the King or with a ladder of crucifixes. Of course there are certain shortcuts, pleas from a rat (come on my woof, woof!), neprophids that comfort those constricted; or chintesticular-chickens that best portray humanity, stupid, drunk.
We are all chained to another’s jail-crotch. For this reason, despite the stony coldness of the French prison cell, the most voluptuous of the Divine is his quill and imagination. His body, so tiny compared to his genius, is capable of distilling a reddish ink that floods the scrolls. Even when being the horizon, it behaves —from time to time— like a crude tool. Freedom, before deterministic debauchery, can be traced in a Cycladic mausoleum, a gonadal forest.
Did I say before that every priest has perfected the art of lying? I was lying! I'm so sorry! I have lied because I omitted that they, being untrue, steal as well. And they rape… and kill. For a child, as Ambert exclaimed angrily, is easy to let the Bastille succumb to ashes. The wardens of this earthly prison, tiny, diminute clerics, have not been able to resolve themselves with the fiery destinies of our un-worldly latrine, on the outskirts of the Kingdom of Heaven. Their hands have been burned and, surprise, another impossible!, the waste has been wasted. Thus, all the watchdogs of this world enjoy an inordinate hypoxyphilia, on a tightrope between Carradine and Sada Abe.
Nature is always the ultimate victimizer. With the first silk marquisette brought from the East, she draws an exquisite nœud de pendu, a short drop, naturally, poor creatures! Celebrate the deposition of that inverted cross, not that of the hypocritical fisherman from Bethsaida, an obsessive cockfighting fanatic, but that of the silver kisses’ author. She resurrects before the indomitable fury of the fractious winged-horse. Goodbye, Colin, adieu! Je prendrai soin de mon style. Pardonnez-moi pour le verbiage!
Notes:
I’d like to thank my colleague, Daniel Fallas, for the the suggestion to watch Marquis (1989). I do not omit to reiterate to you, Daniel, my apologies for the style and, shamelessly, for the delay.
The full feature film subtitled in english can be found below. In this link you can watch a version in its original language without subtitles.
In case you want to penetrate further into the debased and ignominious world that surrounded the making of this film, please visit the BTS here.