Deleuze and Guattari talk about the power of music to create territories. 188 Perhaps in Marie Antoinette a territory is created at the beginning of the film in Austria. The scenes in Austria are layered with more classical music that is consistent with our expectations of a period piece. When MA travels to France, the music immediately becomes more contemporary and acts as a deterritorialising force. It is not stable and doesn’t depict a territorial sense of “home.”
In getting my head around this idea of a “deterritorializing force,” I found the example of Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing really helpful. Patricia Pisters (190) describes how Spike Lee uses Public Enemy’s Fight the Power as a territorial force to create a “home.” I tend to think of “home” more in the sense of the audiences’ perception, kind of like the concept of the refrain. Also, this song may be so successful as a territorial force because it was created in the black urban environment in which the film is set. There is such as sense that the music belongs to the image, the setting and the politics of the film. Conversely, Gang of Four, New Order, Bow Wow Wow, Adam and the Ants etc… were created 200 years after the time of MA in response to different circumstances and politics. Yet, as I described in an earlier post, there are still similarities to be drawn and their sentiments can be conceived as the same.
