What Am I Watching? Black Feminine Spectatorship and the Seduction of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette

Opening credits. Video from original film captured by the author.

I purchased Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006) on DVD in 2007, shortly after its theatrical release. I was twenty-six years old, active-duty military, stationed in Italy, and living alone in a two-story townhouse in a small town where I didn’t speak the language. To self-soothe, I spent much of my time reading and watching films, often contending with my own fear of feeling and being out of place. My growth has always been shaped by spectatorship—watching closely, waiting for something to reveal itself. What has lingered for me, and continues to demand examination, is what it means to be a Black woman, deeply invested in film and history, watching Marie Antoinette.

I watched the DVD while sitting in the middle of my bed, clutching a pillow, trying to understand what I was seeing. Although I had seen Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999) and Lost in Translation (2003) by then, I had not yet engaged deeply with her cinematic style. My understanding of Marie Antoinette and the French Revolution was rudimentary, at best, but firm: she was emblematic of excess and indifference; a monarch so detached from her people that they eventually took her head. In an undergraduate history course, a professor described her as one of the first casualties of tabloid propaganda and emphasized that she never said, “Let them eat cake.” Still, her reputation persists over two centuries later as that of a deplorable figure whose decadence symbolized the moral rot of the monarchy.

Coppola’s images disrupted an impression I held for some time. The film is visually sumptuous—soft pinks and blues, diffused light filling the real spaces of Versailles (Coppola was permitted to film in Marie Antoinette’s actual home). The abundance of artful cakes, champagne, silk, and satin felt almost tactile. I wanted to reach through the screen and touch the fabric at the hems and sleeves. I found myself asking whether Marie Antoinette’s world was truly as beautiful, or whether Coppola was inviting me into a fantasy of beauty untethered from reality and consequence.

Coppola worked with Kirsten Dunst on The Virgin Suicides, so her casting as the ill-fated queen did not surprise me. By that point, Dunst had become a familiar vessel for portraying white feminine disillusionment within systems of wealth and privilege; see Mona Lisa Smile (2003). Her ability to convey melancholy was so persuasive that I spent years expressing sympathy for Marie Antoinette, questioning the inevitability of her execution, while also knowing that had we lived at the same time, the queen would have had no concern for me or my survival. “She was a victim of her circumstances,” I said after repeated viewings. Really, Latoya? Wow. Just…wow. Even now, I cringe at how easily the film drew me into that conclusion.

I have watched Marie Antoinette repeatedly since 2007—sometimes attentively, sometimes passively, sometimes purely for pleasure. What continues to trouble and compel me is Coppola’s insistence on presenting the queen as a young woman shaped by expectation, isolated within an insular world, trained to embody white French femininity without the political education and social power afforded to the men around her. Coppola’s Marie Antoinette performs that expected role flawlessly until she is required to possess the political and social awareness the role never prepared her for. The film conveys her humanity while largely avoiding the implications of her indifference to France’s suffering. Coppola ends the film not with the queen’s execution, but with her departure. The viewer watches the royal family leave Versailles for the final time, followed by a scene of the queen’s ransacked chambers. The violence is deferred. The reckoning remains offscreen.

And then there’s the film’s soundtrack. Coppola’s use of twenty-first-century punk and new wave music is the film’s most aggressive anachronism. The characters are unaware of the music shaping their interior lives, yet it drives the film forward more than dialogue. When Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not In It” plays as Marie Antoinette lounges while a lady’s maid fits her shoe, the scene reads as rebellion, though it remains unclear whether that defiance belongs to the queen, Coppola, or both. The music communicates a “fuck you!” that exhilarates and unsettles me simultaneously.

The truth is I am intrigued by my own fascination with the film, which has a lot to do with how the film invites leniency. Through lush cinematography, Dunst’s acting choices, and anachronistic sound, it seems the filmmaker asks the viewer to empathize with the queen, even to, well, forgive her. Yet this empathy depends on narrowing the world in the film to Versailles alone—to its excess, extravagance, and avoidance. There are two Black characters—a spectator at the royal wedding and a little boy attending Madame du Barry. Their presence is fleeting and ornamental. Blink, and you will miss the wedding attendant. Had the little boy not stepped on du Barry’s dress, causing an aggravated reaction, the viewer would not know he was there. And it is odd because Africans and their descendants lived in eighteenth-century France. Yet Coppola renders them invisible much as they would have been to Marie Antoinette. The queen’s famous balcony appearance, where she bows before hungry, angry citizens, underscores her limitation: from high in her ivory tower, she offers vulnerability, but nothing beyond it. The gesture ends where real responsibility should have begun.

Audience at Marie Antoinette and Louis Auguste's wedding. Screenshot captured by the author.

Madame du Barry and her young attendant. Screenshot captured by the author.

And so, I return again and again to my own spectatorship. I never finish this film without asking, “What am I watching? What is Coppola asking of me?” I own the film now in both physical and digital form, and with each viewing, I see something different; something shaped not only by Coppola’s perceived intentions but by my own position as spectator. Though I sometimes feel uncertain about my curiosity and interpretation, I know they matter. Watching Marie Antoinette has pushed me to question how history is aestheticized, how fantasy around our heroes shapes empathy, and how cinematic authorship determines whose interior lives are made visible.

I want to be clear: Coppola is not wrong in her preferred portrayal. I admire her artistic freedom and do not seek to correct her vision. My spectatorship, my refusal to simply disappear into the film’s fantasy, has compelled me to counter what I am seeing creatively and critically. There is space for both her vision and my examination. Nearly twenty years after the film’s release, I continue to ask whether Marie Antoinette has clarified or further mythologized its subject and what it means that this question remains unresolved for me—a Black woman watching, thinking, and writing.