Excess: Then and Now.

I've developed a fascination of the Eighteenth Century, of what was fashionable at the time and what that means then and now. I recently finished a short paper in which comparisons between the Eighteenth Century and today are argued with evidence from text and Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette film. The reviews on the film are undeniably mixed, though I believe there is a sort of genius in her merging of the past and present. The means through which Marie Antoinette deals with commodity through objects and fashion, I think, confuses the natural and unnatural in such a way that poses questions to an audience living in a similar world of blurred lines. How clear are needs and desires when one's environment is a teaching tool?