We just started this AstroMovie review series of Youtube videos for beginners, where we analyze iconic movies that have clear astrological themes. It’s a fun way for you to learn the astrological vocabulary associated with the planets, signs and houses. [The link in the title below takes you to the film's video review.]
Today, we’re going to be looking at the 1998 film Dangerous Beauty, which was released in Europe with the English title A Destiny of her Own. The film stars Catherine McCormick, which you might recognize as Mel Gibson’s childhood sweetheart in Braveheart. If you are brand new to astrology or have been told you need to work experientially on the planet Venus in your chart, then you’ll definitely want to see this movie. Watching films is an excellent way to get in touch with an archetype, and can be very therapeutic as well. I’ve divided up this analysis into six Venus themes so you can see the different ways in which the planet interacts with other archetypes.
Theme 1: Venus as Veronica and as Venice
Openings are always important because they often tell you what the film is about. As we can see in this opening sequence, this film about beauty, desire, lust, and sex, all of the things governed by the planet Venus. Although Dangerous Beauty is not literally about the Roman goddess, make no mistake that her archetypal influence weaves itself throughout this film. This is a story that depicts all of the facets that Venus embodies, specifically: love, marriage, lust, sex, but also role in fulfilling the more Taurean needs for wealth and money. Based upon the book by Margaret Rosenthal, titled the Honest Courtesan, the film chronicles the true story of a Renaissance courtesan named Veronica Franco, It’s Veronica who introduces herself in the opening narration as a courtesan, but also makes it clear that it is these vestals who represented the face of the city of Venice. In fact, in this brilliant adaptation, it’s the city of Venice itself that is cast as the true STAR of the movie.
…which is why we open up with these images that allow us to imagine that the goddess of courtesans and vestal virgins has set up shop in one of the most beautiful and prosperous cities of 1500s Europe. Venice was selected as a backdrop not only because it happens to be the place where the real life poetess Veronica Franco lived, but also because Venice was named after the Roman deity Venus herself. So if this were a Babylonian story, Ishtar would have been the patron deity of this city. But here, the catholic city is given to the Roman goddess.
But since every good story needs some conflict to keep things interesting, the film is also a tale of the paradoxical and restrictive existence within which the women of Venice lived during the late 1500s, But it’s told through the eyes of a woman who invoked the traits of the planet Venus in order to rise above those same restrictions.
Theme 2: Venus, the River and Cleanliness
We first encounter Venice through its most iconic feature, its canals. The image of the courtesans wading in seductively through the canals of Venice is far more fitting the planet’s history than you might imagine. In Babylon, where astrology was born, Venus was known as Ishtar or Inanna in her Sumerian incarnation. Ishtar was closely linked to the constellation Eridu, known in Mesopotamia as a River. This is because during the 6th month of the Sumerian and Babylonian calendars, that constellation rose with the Sun alongside Virgo, which happens to be the sign where Venus has its fall. There’s a long cultural explanation for why Venus has its fall in Virgo that I won’t get into here. But if you’re interested, you can read about it in a future blog post on my website. I’ll link to it from the video notes. So it was during the 6th month, when the priestesses of Inanna or Ishtar would come out to ceremoniously bathe in the River washing away their impurities.
This cultural connection between cleanliness and purity, while not well-known today, appears in the work of a Hellenistic astrologer named Vettius Valens, who describes Venus as a “the planet of cleanliness”. This of course goes back to Inanna’s bathing in the river and is the reason why in the Epic of Gilgamesh, she proposes marriage to him while he’s bathing in the River. Whether accidentally or not, Dangerous Beauty also captures this cleanliness aspect of Venus in a wonderful montage in which Veronica is bathed and cleaned up in order to begin her training as a courtesan. So just like the wealthy citizens of Venice, she is given proper hygiene and glamorized so as to be worthy of her city’s namesake.
Theme 3 – Venus and Mercury
But Veronica’s character is archetypally very rich because she not only embodies the beauty, and open lustiness of the goddess of love, she also embodies the wit, youth, charm, freedom and intellectual capacity of Mercury. And just like a good mercurial psychopomp, Veronica is not only allowed to frequent the plutonic pleasure domes of a city known for its courtesans, but she also brings that world to open light by writing and speaking publicly about that world. It is the Mercurial part of her character that in fact draws her to the life of a prostitute because, as her mother informs her, “courtesans are the most educated women in the world.” Later in a more poignant mercurial scene, Veronica is brought to give news of the war to the orthodox women of Venice and lets them know that “a woman’s greatest and hard won asset is an education” and that “promiscuity of the mind leads to promiscuity of the body.” Veronica sees herself not as “Venus come to bless the Venetians”, but as “Poetess to Kings”. In fact the issue of education as guarantor of freedom was paramount to the real Veronica Franco who suggested that “the most wretched level of experience is achieved when an individual is not only made subject to the desires of another, but left without the freedom of choice.” Echoing the frustration derived from a lack of significance, Marco’s sister says in one of the films’ best lines that: “No Biblical hell could ever be worse than the state of perpetual inconsequence.”
Theme 4: Passion between Venus and Mars
Marco Venier, played by the smoldering Rufus Sewell, is Veronica’s unobtainable love interest. Some aspects of Marco are archetypally somewhat solar in that he ends up being a hero in the story and because he has a certain stature as a leader, since he’s a senator of the city-state of Venice. But the relationship between he and Veronica is much more reminiscent of the mythical dynamic between Venus and Mars. Mars, in the mythology, you’ll recall was the virile god of war, who had an illicit affair with Venus, who was married to Vulcan, another fiery god, but this one less attractive and unkind. Venus and Mars’ relationship was likewise characterized by a high degree of passion made all the more explosive by the fact that they were not allowed to be together. Although Ares, the Greek version of Mars was not well-liked, Mars, was patriarch of Rome and held in high esteem by his people, much like Marco is in looked upon by the Venetians. We even have a similarity between their names: Mars and Marco. But there are other similarities between them: 1) Marco, like the god of war, has an actual war to go to with the Turks. 2) Marco, also engages in conflicts and has his own personal anger and jealousies to dominate when he learns that his beloved sleeps with other men for money; and lastly, he returns from war abroad to fight another battle in court with the Inquisition when the Church threatens to execute Veronica. So while not making Marco a one-dimensional angry version of Mars, this film does establish within him the connection between desire and passion, which is very characteristic of the Mars – Venus symbolism.
But while in the mythology Venus ends up taming Mars’ aggressive nature, in the film, Veronica instead demands that Marco use his assertiveness early on in the film to defend his love for her and to stand up to social expectations and pressure from tradition. He doesn’t do this until the end of the movie, when the stakes become so high that to NOT defend his truth would have tragic repercussions for her.
Theme 5: Venus meets Hades (Pluto)
Notwithstanding such seemingly fertile ground for desire, Veronica also nevertheless gracefully represents the repressed sexual atmosphere of Venice. Much like Venus’ recognition of Pluto’s loneliness in the underworld, Veronica also publicly acknowledges the repressed side of the women of Venice when she sarcastically raps in a poetic duel: “Venice, her wisdom shines bright as day/Her wives like booty are locked away.”
In that lighthearted scene we’re introduced to another of the film’s themes: that of a seemingly progressive tolerant city that recognizes its inherent desire nature, but only insofar as it can hide and keep it buried in the underworld. Venus is allowed to operate and be perceived only underground, within Pluto’s realms of hidden power, secrecy, revenge, obsessive love and even witchcraft. As the film’s American title makes clear, Venus’ Dangerous Beauty abounds. In one scene, after her unobtainable lover is forced by tradition and status to reject her as a marriage candidate, Veronica taunts him with her illicit promiscuity by asking if her beauty is cruel”. Marco, has agreed to marry a very pious but dispassionate woman by arrangement to further his aspirations. But having noticed the absence of the Plutonic passion he feels for Veronica, he attempts to reconnect with it by asking his very proper wife what her most “secret, deep desire” is. Of course, Giulia’s religious propriety (played wonderfully by Naomi Watts), keeps her from understanding what Marco means. The Venus – Pluto archetype also reaches a dangerous crescendo for Veronica toward the end of the movie when she’s forced to confront the sexually sadistic King Henry of France, played by Jake Weber. In a scene that underplays the dangers that prostitutes actually often face, we cut away from the King’s implied perversions, and are left only with the unrealistic indication that our lovely heroine manages to tame his weird menace with her charms. She truly is a goddess! And of course, this is 1998 Hollywood, which is a far cry from 2024 Hollywood. The last shadowy and sinister Pluto-Venus combination comes to comes to Veronica when her beauty is purported to bewitch men, leading the Inquisition to arrest her on the charges that “she’s a witch -- the devil in our midst”.
Theme 6: Venus is judged by Zeus (Jupiter)
lastly, let’s look at Jupiter’s interactions with Venus-made-flesh in the form of Veronica and the city of Venice. Jupiter governs religion, morality and revelations of truth, among other things. In the film, the matter of truth is significantly embodied by the dark Jovian character, Maffio Venier, who is Marco’s jealous cousin. His moralistic Jupiter looks upon Venus and sees only the inappropriate shadow that he himself carries of the aforementioned goddess. So this shadow side of Venus that Maffio holds, is projected onto Veronica, who is held accountable through his Jupiter. This is represented by his desire for literary success and his envy of Veronica’s patronage (patronage being one of the Jupiter words we work with), which we see when HER poetry book is published by his uncle, but not HIS own book. He then turns his envy and hatred toward Veronica into a larger more sinister moralistic condemnation of all the sexual promiscuity of Venice and its women. Because of this, the courtesans become the religious scapegoats for the devastating Plague that strikes the city. So Veronica is arrested and accused of the witchcraft that has condemned the city in the eyes of god.
Like Aphrodite being brought before the judgment of Zeus and the rest of the Olympians, when she’s caught in the throes of passion with Ares, so too the very integrity of the city is called into question in its courtroom. In a wonderfully allegorical scene, Marco urges Veronica’s lovers to stand up for her while equating her to Venice: “If Venice does not stand up now and acknowledge who she is, than we are all damned — not before this court, before eternity.” It is through Veronica, that Venus is brought out of the dungeons of Hades and asked to assume her rightful place as patroness of Venice.
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