In The Monstrous Feminine, Barbara Creed outlines the horror we associate with images of the interior made exterior. Drawing on Kristeva’s theory of abjection, she argues that “the concept of a border is central to the construction of the monstrous in the horror film; that which crosses or threatens to cross the ‘border’ is abject.”¹ This border is crossed by fluids, those of bodily waste or those associated with the maternal body, which becomes (in horror) abject. As spectators we are attracted and simultaneously repulsed. For Creed, abjection and monstrosity contain the possibility for feminist redefinition by means of their relationship to liminality and transgression.² A messy corporality is used to assert a threat to patriarchy in a tradition of feminist art that continues to the present day. Creed observes, however, that on-screen abjection is predominantly “constructed within/by a patriarchal and phallocentric ideology”.³ The patriarchal circuits through which a film moves curtail the radicality of its use of abjection, especially when this is used by men as an aesthetic tool. Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite (2018) uses the abject status of its central character to cursorily present a challenge to sex and gender categories, but its feminism is superficial. Here abjection is without tenderness; corporality met by patriarchal coldness.
In response to The Favourite, Anna Leszkiewicz notes that Queen Anne’s fatness has become something of a historically memed “objectification” with “her immobility and her infertility” continually highlighted.⁴ In his surreal re-imagining of her 18th century court, Lanthimos draws on similar images. When we meet Queen Anne, she’s in a state of dwindling health, suffering from gout. She’s often shown beside repulsive fluids: blue vomit, crushed cake, thick excremental mud baths, smeared makeup. Leszkiewicz emphasises the ways that Olivia Colman exaggerates her character’s body, so that it is never something we can ignore. Dulling the impact of all this bodily intensity, however, is Lanthimos’s presence by way of a trademark style which overshadows all of the film’s performances, and so it’s worth asking to what extent Anne actually lays claim to her monstrous body. Certain limitations are placed on the realisation of Queen Anne’s character by his directorial outlook. When reading Queen Anne in The Favourite, Creed’s wariness of how abjection is defined (by whom, for whom) is therefore particularly relevant. While abjection can be a compelling strategy with which to disrupt ideas about sex and gender, here it doesn’t quite work. Lanthimos sets the interpersonal compass of the film and although patriarchal matrices are challenged within the narrative, they are never removed from the filmic apparatus. Queen Anne does not want to be repulsive: her anxious desire to be seen as regal and beautiful is expressed throughout the film and treated as a joke. Debriefs after political speeches turn into placation sessions after the Queen overhears fatphobic comments whispered amongst her public. Her body, to Lanthimos, is a site of comedic mining. The now lauded fish-eye shots of The Favourite further distort her. Queen Anne’s association with the abject doesn’t go far enough to function as feminist confrontation. Instead, it shows how Lanthimos’s ideas about the body are cringily predictable.
The Favourite takes place during a period of war with the French. The Queen has largely removed herself from politics, and decision making has been taken over by her right hand woman Sarah Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz). The two are also lovers, though Churchill’s reasons for being close to the queen remain unclear. Does she want to prolong the war and keep her husband away (a running joke in the film) in order to retain the political power that comes from majestic favouritism? Or, rather, is she moved by a genuine interest in keeping the freedom necessary to carry out her sexual relationship with the queen? This interaction is further complicated by the entrance of Abigail Hill (Emma Stone), a woman of former means and status who claims to be a cousin of the Duchess. Any advantage given to Abigail by this familial connection is scrapped when she arrives at court dishevelled and covered in horse dung, swatting at the flies that circle her head while pleading her case to the poised and elegant Duchess. Sarah orders Abigail to work in the scullery where she’s hazed and humiliated by fellow servants. Desperately hoping to elevate her station, Abigail studies her surroundings to see how she might leverage her noble connections. Soon, she is able to gain sympathy from the Duchess and becomes her preferred servant.
The speed of Abigail’s upward social movement is amplified by the frequent use of rapid dialogue and punchline-esque cutting, and so the film never edges into realism. Our perception of The Favourite as highly constructed historical caricature is encouraged: detached from embodied reality (making its interest in viscera more dubious), the film becomes a bizarre landscape of self-reflexive melodrama. The Duchess’ newfound trust in Abigail offers her frequent access to the Queen and Abigail takes advantage of this, quickly becoming Anne’s favourite after soothing her painful flare-up of gout with foraged herbs. The Duchess, however, looks upon Abigail with increasing skepticism. Meanwhile, the spectator is constantly caught up in the process of decoding authentic expressions of jealousy or desire from strategic performances.
Queen Anne is a nightmare ruler, and her erratic moods can be satisfying to watch: she has completely relinquished political responsibility and throws temper tantrums when the Duchess doesn’t shower her with attention. The Queen owns seventeen rabbits, each standing in for a child she has lost. They are lavished with excessive attention and fed cake by hand, functioning as a surreal placeholder, with her miscarriages swapped for their fluffy, shivering forms. While the Duchess is not interested in these pets – her inability to learn their names being a central tension in her romantic life with the Queen – Abigail treats them with the utmost attentiveness. One afternoon as she strokes and cuddles the rabbits with the Queen, comradery quickly melts into flirtation. After overhearing Queen Anne having sex with the Duchess, Abigail begins to make advances towards the Queen (she accidentally ‘falls asleep’ naked in the royal bed), starting a relationship that marks Abigail as the Duchess’s competition for the position of the favourite.
Colman emphasises a particular childishness in Queen Anne, who can’t resist hot chocolate or blue cake even though they make her violently ill, and whose efforts at ‘dramatic’ makeup makes her look distinctly like, as the Duchess snidely remarks, “a badger”. “Look at me!” the Queen screams at her servants before, in her next breath, demanding they look away. Although she is unpredictable and entitled, it is hard not to sympathise with Queen Anne and to read her vulnerability along gendered lines. This pathos emerges in scenes where she describes the importance of her rabbits (and we’re asked to consider the magnitude of her loss) or more profoundly in moments that show her loneliness and sickness. In Queen Anne’s outlandish displays we are forced to confront a desperation for validation that is familiar to any spectator, but which The Favourite pushes to extremes and makes repellant. Neediness is also a quality often associated with and pathologised in queer characters. Recall, for example, Dickie Greenleaf’s horrible, accusatory rejection of Tom Ripley – “You can be a leech!” – snarled moments before his death in The Talented Mr. Ripley. This being said, just as Tom Ripley’s complicated, murderous personal ethics prevent our easy identification with him, Queen Anne’s position as a monarchic ruler complicates our understanding of the dynamics of consent between her and the Duchess. How can one say ‘no’ to a queen, especially a ruler as erratic yet powerful as Anne?
Yet while the monstrosity of Ripley’s character is used to threaten the privileged heteronormativity that surrounds him, Lanthimos’s abjection of Anne is simple and humiliating. Anne uses both statuses – royal and abject – to achieve her desires, demanding leg rubs, hot chocolates, and carnal pleasures. What’s disappointing here is that these demands could be seen as representing Anne’s assertive command over her body (and the bodies of others), but within the film this reading is overridden in favour of neediness. As The Favourite progresses, desire and repulsion increasingly comingle, with repulsiveness winning out. Lanthimos insistently reminds the viewer that the Queen is pathetic, as not quite smart enough to realise that her lovers are also her manipulators until the very last scene. Once Abigail’s noble status is re-attained, she tires of appeasing the queen and her affections become drunken, detached, or disgruntled. Was her attraction to Queen Anne ever genuine? The suggestion is that without her royal status, Anne would never be desired by the women who she’s sleeping with. Moments of erotic assertion that are snarkily performed by Colman—“I love it when she puts her tongue inside of me”—are eclipsed by the Queen’s childish behavior or humiliation. She is never given as much erotic legitimacy as the younger and more normatively beautiful Duchess or Abigail. The audience is presented with two options: to feel sorry for or to be grossed out by Queen Anne. Both defang her. Abjection functions here not as queer filth (à la John Waters and Divine) but as mere accessory to the comedic coldness that is Lanthimos’s signature style. This is the problem with most of his films: despite the empathy that actors have for their characters, the hyper ironic and self-aware stylisation gives Lanthimos a smug authoritative ‘smartness’ over everything depicted onscreen.
Though it is not as explicit or controversial, there are echoes of Pasolini’s Salò in The Favourite. Themes of power, authority, control and desire are explored through an absurd aesthetic. However, the political justification for Lanthimos’s project is less coherently thought out. While Sapphic love features largely into the plot, the extent to which The Favourite is actually about lesbians, or even gender, is questionable. This is fine – Lanthimos sidesteps the compulsion of cis-male directors to foreground lesbians in predictably fetishistic ways. But does this warrant the extent to which he’s been rewarded for crafting a feminist film? Ironically, the film loses its strength through the shallowness of a Surrealist aesthetic that exposes his limitations in conceptualising queer subjectivity. In contrast to the female characters of the film who wear relatively simple outfits and naturalistic makeup, the male actors are placed in exaggerated period drag that combines pompous wigs, stylised make-up and campy performances (especially from Nicholas Holt). In doing this, Lanthimos reveals how little he understands the politics of drag or expressions of masculinity that run counter to dominant paradigms. At worst, The Favourite ends up perpetuating essentialising (and perhaps homophobic) binaries between ‘strong women’ and men whose weakness is conflated with their overt feminisation. This is especially troubling when Lanthimos incorporates voguing (a dance started by Black, as well as Latinx and POC, LGBTQ in Harlem ballrooms) into an 18th century ballroom dance sequence between the Duchess and Masham. It often feels as though Lanthimos’s interest in queer representation is purely aesthetic. Through its self-reflexivity and irony The Favourite separates queer characters from their bodies: lesbians become vehicles for the expression of ideas that are unclear and incoherent.
Since the film’s release it’s been the job of feminist and queer critics to flesh out and legitimise The Favourite’s flaky artistic project. But we should not be too quick to conflate strong performances by Colman, Stone, and Weisz with well conceived feminist politics. When all is said and done, is Lanthimos simply a mediocre surrealist? His interest in conceiving visual worlds often exceeds his thinking through the references deployed in realising them. For instance, The Lobster’s critique of heteronormative coupledom would have had more impact had its dystopic world building been richer in detail. It’s not that Lanthimos’s films are ‘too deep’ for spectators to ‘get’. Rather, so much is withheld that the kind of story he is trying to tell becomes troublingly ambiguous. Despite The Favourite’s seeming interest in representing bawdy, rebellious, and insubordinate women, the real ruler of the film is not Queen Anne but Lanthimos. This is ultimately where the film falls short of its potential. The Favourite instead ends up reducing women’s bodies to counters in an intellectual and artistic game that is enjoyable to play – and to watch – but not complex enough to warrant lasting satisfaction.
1 Barbara Creed. “The Monstrous Feminine.” Screen, vol. 27, no.1, 1986. pp. 44-71. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Anna Leszkiewicz. “‘Ugly, gouty, fat’: the problem of Queen Anne’s body.” New Statesman. 18 January 2019
Katherine Connell is a PhD candidate at York University, Toronto
