The film portrays 18th-century Russian nobility as developmentally arrested and sexually infantile, a disturbed and grotesque portrayal of Sternberg's own childhood experiences, linking eroticism and sadism. The opening sequence examines the young Sophia (later Catherine II) early sexual awareness, conflating eroticism and torture, that serves as a harbinger of the sadism that she will indulge in as an empress. Whereas "Blonde Venus" portrayed Dietrich as a candidate for mother love, the maternal figures in "The Scarlet Empress" make a mockery of any pretense to such idealizations. Dietrich is reduced to a fantastic and helpless clothes horse, bereft of any dramatic function.