Hapsburg Melancholy: Hauntology in Corsage
Ghosts of the Hapsburg dynasty haunt the 21st century.
Recently, two heirs of the Hapsburgs have been in the news. The younger — Ferdinand Hapsburg — is a race car driver, and the elder — Eduard Karl Joseph Michael Marcus Koloman Volkhold Maria Habsburg-Lothringen — is an influencer for Viktor Orban’s Hungarian government. Eduard has published a self-help book, The Habsburg Way: 7 Rules for Turbulent Times, outlining the virtues his family allegedly espoused during their centuries-long reign.
In a review of The Hapsburg Way for Slate, Chapo Trap House and Hell on Earth podcast host Matt Christman mocked the heir for his “aw-shucks baroque kitsch” and skewered him for his appeal to a return to a more virtuous time when his family was in power. Christman poignantly wrote: “The [Hapsburgs] fought the tide of modernity and were resoundingly defeated by it, and we live in the aftermath of that defeat.”
Hapsburgs haunt our culture through their depictions in film. Particularly Empress Elisabeth of Austria (1837–98), the famed monarch who helped negotiate the creation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1898, she was assassinated by Luigi Lucheni, an Italian anarchist, and her life has been the subject of several films as a tragic figure of the late empire. From 2021–2022, there have been numerous films and shows about her life, including the German miniseries Sisi (2021) and the Netflix series Empress (2022).
We will look at Marie Kreutzer’s 2022 film Corsage; In this instance, Elisabeth’s image has been revived again, but with a twist. The film uses a series of anachronisms and historical revisionism to turn the late Empress into a feminist hero. At times, this offers insight into how to rethink Elisabeth’s role as monarch, but often, this becomes a way to disavow the class violence critical to the empire. In this analysis, I relate the film to hauntology, post-colonial melancholia, and its conscious, liberal feminism.
hauntology
In Corsage, the Hapsburg rule is in a state of decline. Set mostly in 1877, Vicky Krieps portrays the 40-year-old Empress Elisabeth as a repressed sovereign. Stuck in an unhappy marriage and plagued by unshakeable depression, she stops eating, lashes out at her family, and escapes the oppressive Vienna to the countryside. As the film progresses, historical revisionism vaults the characters into surrealist fantasy. As mentioned previously, the ‘real’ Elisabeth was assassinated in Geneva on a boat in 1898, but in Corsage, Elisabeth throws herself off the boat in defiance. Revisionism with death puts the film in a peculiar spot politically, historically, and ontologically. The film is haunted by the Hapsburg past and the future that Elisabeth couldn’t bear. The time is out of joint.
Hauntology describes Corsage’s precarious position. The neologism, invented by French philosopher Jacques Derrida and then used by Mark Fisher and others, is an attempt to describe the challenges that time and speculative futures pose to theorizing the material and ideological conditions of postmodernity. Unlike nostalgia, hauntology does not romanticize the past but mourns futures never realized. In this case, Corsage uses the collapsing Austro-Hungarian empire as an analog for neoliberalism and promises never realized in 21st-century liberal capitalism following the erosion of welfare programs.
Elisabeth is unstuck from time, a figure dealing with the spectacle imposed by modernity while upholding imperial sovereignty. The imperial decline coincides with Elisabeth’s deteriorating family life. She neglects and harms her daughter, Marie Valerie, as she tries to escape Vienna by going off on riding adventures. Her son, the ill-fated Rudolf, judges her for appearing to have an affair with her riding instructor, George “Bay” Middleton. Her cousin, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, rejects her sporadic sexual advances, and Franz Josef is having an affair. He uses Elisabeth as a symbol of the duel-empire’s peace and unity. Elisabeth’s inner life of desire is met with an oppressive superstructure of control.
Elisabeth both fights and embraces modernity. Her alienation forces her into a precarious position in the contemporary world. On the one hand, she is subject to alienating scrutiny in tabloids, and on the other hand, she actively pursues the newly-invented moving pictures. She enjoys the newness of modern life but is tied to the trappings of old-world aristocracy. She gives up the jouissance of life, and yet, all she can pursue is jouissance.
Corsage has also been haunted by comparisons to Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film Marie Antoinette. This comparison is superficial — both films use modern tropes and anachronisms to tell the story of a doomed female monarch — but the comparison doesn’t add up. Where Marie Antoinette is plasticine and indulgently over-stimulating, Corsage is melancholic and depressing.
Additionally, Krieps’ Elisabeth resembles Kirsten Dunst, less like Antoinette, and more like Dunst in Lars van Trier’s Melancholia (2011). According to Fisher, anhedonia and the endless pursuit of pleasure is endemic in capitalist culture under neoliberalism (Capitalist Realism, 22). Like late capitalism, the late empire is depicted as a territory devoid of any lasting pleasures, even at, and possibly because of, class domination.
Like Marie Antoinette, Corsage uses modern music to create an ambiguous relationship to time. Kreutzer, unsurprisingly, doesn’t like the comparison: “During the financing process, I was asked several times, ‘Do you really want to use modern music? You mean like Sofia Coppola in Marie Antoinette?’ And I was always like, ‘No!’ I mean, I don’t like that film; I don’t want people to think of that film,” Kreutzer said to The Upcoming.
While Coppola uses New Order and the Arctic Monkies as bombastic modern terror, Kreutzer’s modern anachronisms drip with aching sorrow. In one scene, a servant sings Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night” as Elisabeth hobbles around with a leg brace received after an attempted suicide, reinforcing, once again, that modernity and technology are paired with imperial decline and depression.
Finally, the most famous portrayal of Elisabeth, the 1950s trilogy of Sissi films, haunts Corsage because it turned Elisabeth into a modern political icon. Loaded with romanticism for the late empire, Romy Schneider’s version set a precedent for Elisabeth. Due partly because of this portrayal, ‘Sissi’ is now part of Vienna in the museumification of the city’s history. As Kreutzer said in an interview with RobertEbert.com:
I started researching without knowing if [Elisabeth] was interesting. I felt like I should read something about her and go to the museums, which are all very close to my home because I live right in the middle of Vienna, just to get to know her better. Because I knew her only as a cliché for tourists and this souvenir shop image. I wanted to see if there was something in the material that would interest me enough to tell a story about her. So I was reading and meeting historians and going to museums.
For Corsage, Kreutzer drops the Sissi moniker. This film is not an infantilization of the empire’s beloved figure but an attempt at a mature reckoning with its decline. It is an exorcism of its ghosts.
post-colonial melancholia
Corsage is aware of the historical position of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1877. The Empire’s dissolution is spoken about freely in the halls of power. At one point, Rudolf, whose historical counterpart would later die by suicide, turns to Elisabeth and declares the Empire in decline before she hushes him out of Franz Joseph’s earshot. Joseph is the Big Other that maintains the Empire’s security, and the family is part of the symbolic exchange similar to the public relations typical in late capitalism.
Even with the decline of the Empire acknowledged, the repression of political power is critical. Elisabeth is portrayed in the film as being constrained, depressive, and excluded from power. The historical Elisabeth wielded extraordinary political power. She was a key architect and diplomatic negotiator in bringing the Hungarian state into the fold of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The film conveniently looks at the latter part of her life, where she is relegated to performative duties.
Repression of political power is endemic to liberal depictions of royalty. The political power in Corsage’s radical “realism” gives way to fantasy. Elisabeth could neither be the most powerful woman in the world nor the most vulnerable. Her sovereignty was under erasure. Her power caught in time, like an object in a museum painted over.
The depiction of late-feudal Hapsburgs is what Paul Gilroy identifies as “post-colonial melancholia.” While the Austro-Hungarian Empire had few colonies, the depiction of foreign wars and mental illness are similar to how neoliberalism addresses them in post-colonial states. Elisabeth, unable to structurally change the conditions, visits the sanitariums and army hospitals, impotent, only passingly suggesting to her husband that more hospitals should have the horrifying bathtub technique.
Countering Coppola’s triumphal sympathies, Kreutzer’s Empress is on a full-on Freudian death drive, subject to the patriarchal disadvantages which control her every move. Symptoms of decline in late capitalist society are present, yet, the ruling classes are cast as its universalized victims.
specters of feminism
In The Rolling Stones article — Corsage is One Big Middle Finger to the Patriarchy — the film is promoted as a feminist film. However, this does little to explain what is feminist about the film. The movie highlights female empowerment, oppressive patriarchy, and solidarity between women as issues to tackle by modern feminists. Still, much like the film’s approach to post-colonialism, there is class violence behind every instance of empathy and identification with an Other.
In a revealing moment, Elisabeth entreats the historically fictionalized George “Bay” Middleton (played by Colin Morgan) into seduction, only to tell him that she “wants him to see her.” Feeling used and coerced, Middletown leaves disgusted, and Elisabeth is shown masturbating in a bathtub. To continue the theme of a patriarchal eye being the site of the political heart of the Empire, Rudolf, noticing the affair, blames his mother for making such public displays of her affections. Her symbolic affair (never consummated) is met with the Oedipal-triad — her doomed son between doomed mother-lover and doomed father-empire.
Throughout the film, there is a lot of attention on how patriarchal forces mediate her pleasure. Her eating habits are monitored. Her waist is commented upon. Her beauty is mythologized. However, her true “Self” is always deferred through its various mediations. As her servant comments when writing about her, “I can never really know Elisabeth; her mind is a mystery.” She is operating in the realm of the spectacle and is put in the uncomfortable position of being seen by the world.
What is left is True Liberation. Like my previous article on the film Don’t Worry Darling, liberation in Corsage is reflected through the fantasy of an imagined world. True Liberation is found in jouissance. She attains it by becoming a double — forcing her servant to take her place as a test of loyalty. She feels pleasure only after being loosed from the duties her sovereignty requires. She cuts her hair, finds power in her enjoyment, and prepares for death. True Liberation represses the violence of her historical life — her assassination — and untethers her from reality.
#MeToo
The untethering of reality is most pronounced at the level of public relations. To this point, Corsage is haunted by the most famous feminist movement of the 21st century — the #MeToo movement. For all its sloganeering and performative public firing squad, #MeToo was, at least to some degree, an acknowledgment of a lack of structural accountability by (mostly) men who used positions in power and proximity to capitalist industries to leverage violence against those that were more vulnerable than them, typically women, other men, and in some cases, children.
First, the accusations and subsequent indictment against Austrian actor Florian Teichtmeister, who played Emperor Franz Josef in the film. Teichtmeister was arrested and charged with possessing over 58,000 photos of child pornography after his partner discovered them. His character — the conservative Emperor Joseph — was the Empire’s patriarch. His performance was muted and ineffectual, and with his heinous actions haunting the film, it’s hard not to see his actions in the film as somehow symptomatic of more significant sexual issues.
Second, an unnamed actor was accused in the Austrian tabloid Exxpress in January 2023 of being a serial abuser. During the Vienna premiere, director and screenwriter Katharina Mückstein wrote cryptically on Instagram: “Tonight, a perpetrator will be on stage and applauded. And there is nothing we can do to counter that.” At the time, it was presumed to be Teichtmeister, but later, confirmed to be an unnamed second actor.
As more information came out, it was revealed that Kreutzer had known about the accusations and had spoken to the actor. After denying any abusive behavior, she continued to keep him on. Later, the actor entered into the No Excuses program for abusers. Kreutzer responded in profil:
There are neither concrete allegations nor those affected who have contacted authorities to articulate something concrete there. That’s what makes the case so problematic. Even though I’ve worked very well with him and I like him, I can’t put my hand on the fire for him. I do not check the reputation of my performers or my team…I appreciate Katharina Mückstein extremely for her attitude and her commitment to film politics, we are definitely on the same side. But I would definitely have chosen a different path.”
Krieps, whose father, Bob Krieps, was once the President of the Luxembourg Film Fund, and holds influence over the Ministry of Culture in Austria which ultimately gets to choose which films are chosen to be made, responded on Instagram:
So, a feminist film made by two women should be discarded because of the misconduct of a male colleague? (Second question) Who exactly is being harmed by this?”
Here, we have the liberal contradiction of universalized notions of acceptance and exclusion. A feminist film made by feminists, which stands up for women and gives the middle finger to the patriarchy, transcends the violence by men working within the film who harmed others.
This spectrality of responsibility is not so easy to pin down. The children photographed and disseminated to Florian Teichtmeister were harmed. The women allegedly abused by the unnamed actor were harmed. The actions of Kreutzer and the apparatuses of capitalist industries were harmed. The film is out-of-joint. On one hand, stuck in the past, pointing to its present, and on the other hand, ill-equipped to grapple with the contradictions of liberal capitalism and the patriarchy it critiques.
conclusion
Just as the contradictions of modernity defeated the Hapsburg monarchy, Corsage falls short of a critique of the patriarchy by negotiating with the individualist ideology of neoliberalism. Elisabeth’s raw political power is inverted as the victim. Her undemocratic bloodline is reframed into untapped potential. Imperialism is the source of her melancholy.
Instead of a resilient reflection of the destructive Hapsburg dynasty, Elisabeth in Corsage becomes a sober reflection on how the decline is reflected on the body of monarchs. She is a suicide, not the assassinated. She is a woman fighting the patriarchy, not a monarch upholding it. She is Elisabeth, not Sissi. She is a product of the world, not the sovereign ruling it.
What Corsage fails to represent is that the rot of the empire is the consequence of all those in power. We see this problem with our modern-day disavowal of power found in the dead rot of neoliberalism.
Liberal democracy has a complicated relationship with the feudalistic monarchies. On the one hand, they act as authoritarian ghosts buried by constitutional parliaments and replaced by a capitalist class— that was then; this is now. On the other hand, bourgeois society inherited the same inequalities. Capitalists yearn to be loved by the exploited working classes but are resentingly targeted. This conflicts with the classless stratifications liberal capitalists qualify with false altruism. These falsities should be challenged and resisted at every turn.
When depicting monarchy in a modern era, it is vital to acknowledge the ghosts in the mirror and formulate an alternative. Only then will we loose ourselves of the ghosts of aristocracy and be truly liberated from the chains that keep us constantly retracing and rewriting the past as a fictional object. Only then can we move past the trappings of liberal monarchist revanchism. Only then can we stop mourning the lost feminist futures.
