Tell It Slant: The Rise of the Feminist Anachronistic Costume Drama

There is a heady scene from Sofia Coppola's 2006 film, Marie Antoinette—near the end, when the titular character, played by Kirsten Dunst, is pining for her new lover, Axel von Fersen (Jamie Dornan), a swaggering and libidinous Swedish count. Von Fersen has recently departed Versailles, and in his absence, Marie Antoinette is agitated, chafing against the humdrum quotidian of the palace drawing room.

Retreating to a corner window, she daydreams of von Fersen on horseback: His face is smudged with soot—fetchingly so—and he looks at her with bedroom eyes, like an oversexed eighteenth-century popstar. Before long, the heat of the reverie makes Marie Antoinette impatient, and she asks her husband, the comparably effete Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman), to be excused.

The sequence that follows is exhilarating. Overcome by longing, Marie Antoinette flees to the relative privacy of her bedroom. The soundtrack—the Strokes's "What Ever Happened?"—assumes a quicker, palpitating pace. Its opening bass line flutters with a heartbeat's cadence, as if our ears are pressed against the queen's chest.

Then, as the chorus hollers its arrival, Marie Antoinette collapses on her bed, beatific and steeped in languorous desire (she shouldn't be able to hear this music, but her every movement reacts to it); the song rushes Marie Antoinette into the room and lays her flat, the dogged, aching thrum of guitar urging her, once more, toward fantasy. A royal's wistful boredom never looked so hip and candy coated.

When I first saw Marie Antoinette, in the fall of 2006, this scene left me breathless and giddy, as if a Versailles fireworks display had erupted inside my rib cage. It is not Coppola's only overt anachronism—the film opens clamorously, with Gang of Four's "Natural's Not in It," and draws on a steady diet of new wave and post-punk amid more period-appropriate musical selections. Perhaps, too, you've heard about the blue Converse sneakers that time-travel into Marie Antoinette's sitting room. Blink and you'll miss them: They appear briefly, amid a tumble of satin slippers; against the sonic backdrop of Bow Wow Wow's impish "I Want Candy," they hardly seem out of place. This detail is part of a more general temporal promiscuity. In Marie Antoinette, anachronism flounces, rather than slinks, across the screen. It's a playful wink of a technique, a science experiment: What do you get when you mix the House of Bourbon with a New Order concert? As a multisensory medium, film invites all manner of possibilities for thwarting historical boundaries and imagining new timescapes.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about Marie Antoinette because I've noticed a curious archive building around it. Over the last couple of years, film and television have grown enamored with anachronistic costume dramas centered on the lives of white, royal, or otherwise well-to-do women—among them, Queen Anne of England, Emily Dickinson, and Catherine the Great. Rather than cultivate an illusion of historical authenticity, these films and shows pair raw biographical material with temporal

irreverence. Anachronism is integral to their architectures, to their modes of world-building. They exploit the artificiality of any history we attempt to reconstruct and envision alternate realities in which the women we're focused on are granted more agency than is strictly accurate. Emily Dickinson throws a rager where she, her siblings, and her friends grind like college students at a frat party and dose themselves on opium as if it were a club drug. When she's ordered to fetch water at four in the morning, she mutters, "This is such bullshit." Catherine the Great responds to rumors that she had sex with a horse by joking that the horse rebuffed her, and, you know, "neigh means neigh." She delivers the now-expected crowd-pleaser about the "inhumanity" of corsets. Surely...