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Michael Warner stresses the fact that sexual deviance has historically been deemed non–normative to the body politic, and suggests that a queer politics around sex does not have to constitute a form of simple libertarian indulgence (Warner). He proposes instead that we look toward the kind of politics that can be articulated by those who refuse to behave properly.
In an article entitled “Picturing Pasolini,” John Di Stefano discusses Pasolini’s life in the Italian tabloids, including photos taken at the controversial opening of Accatone, at which the filmmaker was physically assaulted. Di Stefano suggests that Pasolini’s status as a sexual deviant was always emphasized in photos at the expense of his intellectual attributes: “Photographs portrayed him as a subversive, a troublemaker, a pervert, a corrupter, a homosexual, all words that overshadowed other terms like poet, filmmaker, critic, novelist, screenwriter, intellectual” (19).9 The absence of discussion of Pasolini’s queer forms of political resistance from interpretations of his life’s work can only point, as some have suggested, to homophobia on the part of some of his most renowned critics. Viano suggests that the homosexual “discourse” in Pasolini’s work complicates the oppressor/oppressed dialectic in such a way as to expose Marxism’s inadequacies in confronting sexual oppression. This idea is especially relevant to Rubin’s argument about kinship systems. Pasolini depicts Medea as a radical agent who implodes her own kinship system. In the process, discourses of homosexuality and colonialism appear necessarily intertwined. Shots of Medea’s escape with Jason are cross-cut with the discovery of Apsyrtus’ body parts strewn along their path, calling to mind the aforementioned triangle of desire. Meanwhile, Medea’s father and his men recover and grieve for each separate body part ceremoniously, as if it were a whole soldier cut down in battle.
In the introduction to his interviews with Pasolini Oswald, Stack suggests that with Pasolini’s turn toward classical mythology he intended to restore a mythological or epic dimension to life. Stack argues that Pasolini saw the Italian peasantry as still sustaining “a sense of awe and reverence to the world” even though it was up against the destructive power of the bourgeoisie (9). He
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suggests that Pasolini’s view of the peasantry is difficult to reconcile with a Marxist political analysis. Stack is particularly interested in the fact that with his classical films, Pasolini seems to make a sudden shift toward sex as the main threat to the bourgeoisie, thus reconciling “the idea of sexual liberation with his attachment to the peasantry” (10).10 In a response to one of Stack’s questions about his political attitudes toward the various classes in Italy, Pasolini discusses the difference that the Friulan peasantry posed to his own class and culture; a difference that was, among other characteristics, a sexual difference: As for the other popular class— the working class— I’ve had a very difficult relationship with them, which was initially romantic, populist and humanitarian. When you are born in a petit bourgeois milieu, you think the whole world is the same as the environment you live in. As soon as I got to see another kind of world, naturally, my own was thrown into crisis. When I realized that the Friulan braccianti [day laborers] existed, and that their psychology, their education, their mentality, their soul, their sexuality were all different, my world broke down [qtd. in Stack 26].
Pasolini’s notion of a “world” in this non-theoretical context is equivalent to the raw materials that become the relations of sexuality (concerning the production of human beings) and the relations of production (concerning the means of existence), both of which are organized socially in any given historical epoch. Thus, in the above comments, Pasolini refrains from making a libera-tionist political statement about the sexuality of the Friulan peasants. Rather, he alludes to a different type of sex/gender systemic organization that stands in contrast to the hegemony of bourgeois heterosexuality, and intersects with several other characteristics of the Friulans’ marginalization, such as cultural and ethnic difference.
Pasolini’s Medea is radically Other, deviant, and unwilling to behave.
Nowhere in the landscape of his adaptation of Euripides’ play will one find an absolute hero. In fact, Pasolini’s heroes fail in a conventional sense, calling to mind his anti–Enlightenment, anti-humanist, queer political stance. His films about the ancient world prompt spectators to rethink political action, masculinity and femininity, culture and history. Time wavers between two parallel yet irreconcilable periods rather than move forward. As such, spectator identification is “dangerously schizoid,” at best. Not only does Pasolini’s Medea offer a critique of enlightened notions of a universal, absolute hero (such as Hercules), but it also interrogates capitalistic notions of progress, not least of which are embraced by the global Hollywood studio system.
NOTES
1. Some of the names of these mythological blockbusters include The Vengeance of Hercules, The Love of Hercules, Hercules Challenges Samson, The Challenge of the Giants, The Triumph of Maciste, Maciste in Hell, Maciste Against the Vampires, Maciste Against the Monsters, The Titans Are Coming, Samson Against the Pirates, The Heroes of Babylon, and Goliath and the Rebellious Slave (see Liehm 348).
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2. The bulk of this essay is focused on Pasolini’s adaptation of Euripides’ Medea.
For more on his film version of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, see Foley’s “Bad Women” (in Hall, Macintosh, and Wrigley).
3. Maurizio Viano suggests that Pasolini’s choice of Gentile to play Jason reflects his desire to have the character represent Italy’s “new bourgeoisie, the contemporary spirit of the Enlightenment” (241). He refers to Jason as an iconic translation of the
“fitness is fun” hedonistic ideology so frequently attacked in Pasolini’s criticism.
4. See Viano, A Certain Realism, 237, and Mariniello, 114.
5. See McDonald (19) for the earliest references to the story of Jason. McDonald points out that Jason’s image as an epic hero is comically shattered in Pasolini’s film by his own arrival on a raft as opposed to a “lavish ship” (9). I would add that the men are shown sleeping on the raft, making their arrival even less heroic as they seem to expend little or no effort on rowing.
6. Although, as McDonald points out, the ancient scene of Medea’s homeland is infused with Renaissance aesthetics, further confusing the time and space divisions in the film. In a scene which depicts the royal family standing in front of their subjects in Medea’s village, the family is shot standing still framed by an archway, a composition that suggest a Renaissance painting ( Euripides in Cinema 9). In her analysis of the musical themes in the film, McDonald points out that the different cultural and temporal spaces in which the action takes place are represented aurally by a violent percussive music, associated in the film with Medea, and a form of ancient Japanese music that suggests (bourgeois) refinement and is associated with Jason (5). Jason’s soundtrack is perhaps an ironic comment on the terror that his men have reaped on Medea’s village.
7. Mariniello points out that “even Pasolini refers to himself as nostalgic, often with the rhetorical awareness of one who assumes the opponent’s position in order to dis-mantle their discourse from within” (112). Pasquale Verdicchio also suggests that due to Pasolini’s pessimistic vision of the state of Italian diversity, which he compares to a genocide brought about in part by the Italian educational system and consumerism, his critics accuse him of being romantically enamored with the past. Verdicchio argues that such a “reduced version of his work earned Pasolini the unjustified label of reactionary, idealist, and even fascist” (69).
8. Pasolini’s earliest film, Accatone, was the first film in Italy ever to be restricted to viewers over the age of eighteen due to its “vulgar” depiction of the Roman subproletariat. Its 1961 debut immediately launched the director into what some critics refer to as the “New Italian Cinema” movement, a heterogeneous, rageful response to the “well-being” of consumer society.
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9. Two weeks before his death, Pasolini satirized the notion that his stigmatized gay body was separable from his intellect by commissioning nude photos of himself posing with a book by photographer Dino Pedriali. See Di Stefano, 22.
10. Stack cites Pasolini’s film and novel Teorema as an example of a depiction of the destruction of a bourgeois family via sex. Although I will not argue it here, I will suggest that Teorema has many structural similarities in common with Euripides’ Bacchae and may have been influenced by it, even though Pasolini claims to have invented the mythological character of the Guest himself.
WORKS CITED
Di Stefano, John. “Picturing Pasolini: Notes from a Filmmaker’s Scrapbook.” Art Journal 56.2 (1997): 18 –22. Print.
Edipo Re. Dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini. Arno Films, 1967.
Hall, Edith, Fiona Macintosh, and Amanda Wrigley. Dionysus Since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Print.
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Koestenbaum, Wayne. “Callas and Her Fans.” Yale Review 79.1 (1990): 1–20. Print.
Liehm, Mira. Passion and Defiance: Film in Italy from 1942 to the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Print.
Mariniello, Silvestra. “Temporality and the Culture of Invention.” Boundary 2 22.3
(1995): 111–139. Print.
McDonald, Marianne. Euripides in Cinema: The Heart Made Visible. Philadelphia: Cen-trum, 1983. Print.
Medea. Dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini. Perf. Maria Callas, Giuseppe Gentile. San Marco, 1969.
Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” Feminist Anthropology: A Reader. Ed. Ellen Lewin. Boston: Blackwell, 2006. Print.
Stack, Oswald, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Pasolini on Pasolini: Interviews with Oswald Stack. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969. Print.
Van Watson, William. “(B)Oinking with Pier Paolo: Pasolini’s Pigsty and the Death of Dialectic.” Romance Languages Annual 9 (1998): 383 –89. Print.
Verdicchio, Pasquale. “Reclaiming Gramsci: A Brief Survey of Current and Potential Uses of the Work of Antonio Gramsci.” Symposium 49.2 (1995): 169 –176. Print.
Viano, Maurizio. S. A Certain Realism: Making Use of Pasolini’s Film Theory and Practice.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Print.
Warner, Michael. “The Politics of Sexual Shame.” University of California Summer Research Institute with Judith Butler. Berkeley: University of California, 1999.
“To do or die manfully”
Performing Heteronormativity
in Recent Epic Films
JERRY B. PIERCE
After obliterating the first attack of mighty Xerxes’ army, the Spartan king Leonidas stood defiantly before the Persian ruler as Xerxes encouraged him to surrender in the face of certain death. The two men were clearly the antithesis of the other: bearded, strong and sporting a battle-hardened physique, Leonidas arrived alone and unarmed while Xerxes, pierced and bejeweled, his smooth, hairless body covered in gold makeup and heavy eyeliner, literally arrived on the backs of his slaves. “Consider your women,” he suggests. “You don’t know our women,” Leonidas retorts. “I might as well have marched them here, judg-ing by what I’ve seen today. You have many men, Xerxes— but few soldiers.
And it won’t be long before they fear my spears more than your whips” ( 300).
This brief exchange from Zack Snyder’s 300 (2006) offers the clearest representation of positive and negative masculinity found in recent epic movies about the ancient world. Leonidas (stern, toned, and manly) is a solider ready, as the Greek historian Herodotus noted, “to do or die manfully,” fighting to save Sparta and the rest of Greece from Persian tyranny, while Xerxes (arrogant, decadent, and femininized) wishes to see the world kneel in submission before his whip (Herodotus 7.209). Ironically, Herodotus’ assessment of Spartan manliness comes from Xerxes’ supposed misunderstanding of a scene at Thermopylae where the Persians witnessed the Spartans grooming and otherwise pampering their bodies. Xerxes interpreted these actions as frivolous, when in fact, according to Herodotus, the Spartans apparently engaged in such actions as they prepared “to do or die manfully” in battle. In the modern cinematic interpretation, however, it is Xerxes who appears to be pampered and frivolous.
Leonidas’ suggestion that Spartan women could just as easily defeat the Persian soldiers further reinforces the notion that the tyrannical Persians are 40
“To do or die manfully” (Pierce) 41
not “real” men, Xerxes above all. In short, this movie continues a long tradition of pairing “proper,” heterosexual, masculine, and just heroes with “improper,”
homosexual or otherwise “deviant” and tyrannical antagonists. In doing so, 300, as well as two other recent epic motion pictures about the Greek and Roman worlds, Gladiator (dir. Ridley Scott, 2000) and Troy (dir. Wolfgang Petersen, 2004), promotes a heteronormative masculinity by linking heterosexuality with heroism and democracy. These three epic movies each present their male heroes as strong, determined warriors who are ready to safeguard their people (whether Romans, Trojans, or Greeks) from a menacing despot.1
In all three of these movies, the heroism of the male protagonists is made apparent to the viewer though the use of standard tropes of “positive” masculinity demonstrated by the “safe” display of the male body, a physically active struggle against tyrants, a strong moral compass and, perhaps most importantly, a seemingly unambiguous affirmation of his heterosexuality.
Each movie goes to great lengths to make their depictions of ancient masculinity safe and heteronormative by emphasizing the heterosexual performance of the leading men. For example, Maximus (Russell Crowe, Gladiator), Hector (Eric Bana, Troy) and Leonidas (Gerard Butler, 300) all are identified, in part, by their role as husbands and fathers. These three, as well as Achilles (Brad Pitt), are also equally adept as warriors, and frequently are seen in little-to-no clothing in carefully constructed heterosexual settings. The masculinity of these heroes is further reinforced by the representation of other males in the movies, predominantly their antagonists, who appear as the opposite of these strong males in every way: physically weaker, less active, morally degenerate, or feminized. These antagonists are also depicted as engaging in (or at least plotting) some form of “deviant” sexual behavior that ranges from incestuous desire, to adultery, to cross-dressing, to (implied) homosexuality which, by relying on age-old cinematic stereotypes, are designed to reinforce their role as the antithesis to the positive masculinity of the hero.2 Ultimately, by presenting the masculinity and heterosexuality of the heroes as normative, the narrative arc of these movies also implies that it is this very type of masculinity that will save their families and their societies from the threat posed by unmanly men.3
The tropes of masculinity in these recent motion pictures about the classical era depend on a presentation of male identity that is heteronormative in nature, or based on the notion that heterosexuality is the default orientation of individuals. These movies enhance the concept of heteronormativity by implying that heterosexuality is also the only acceptable identification and, as Chrys Ingraham notes, is considered “natural, universal, and monolithic”
(207).4 Anything that deviates from this “straight” norm, as Wheeler Winston Dixon points out, “is seen as something that is not part of the supposedly normative system of values, something that is a potential threat to the family, to the dominant social system, something that needs to be erased” (2). By holding heterosexuality as the norm, and thus as positive, anything that transgresses
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those rigid lines of sexuality is therefore “suspect” (Dixon 1–2). Moreover, as Dixon argues,“being straight is, as in the dictionary, equated with decency”
(6). As such, many villains in movies tend to be portrayed as openly homosexual or, if they are not, often exhibit cha
racteristics stereotypically associated with stereotypes of on-screen homosexuality, such as an effeminate demeanor, excessive emotionality, or even weak or thin body types. The threat posed by these antagonists (even if “straight”) is thus augmented by a reliance on visual tropes indicating deviance and rejection of heteronormative society. This threat of transgression also manifests itself in the roles ascribed to non-straight characters: “violent serial killers, drug dealers, hit men, sadistic siblings or parents, traitors— in other words, every form of human wreckage” (Dixon 12). Significantly, Vito Russo, in his work on the portrayal of gays and lesbians in film as negative and villainous, notes that “symbols for a decadent destruction of moral values become homosexual in nature,” part of a “decision to link the destructive characters with homosexual iconography” (252).5
To counter this challenge, and to provide a clear example of proper masculine heterosexuality, the male heroes engage in heteroperformance. These examples can occur through direct action taken by a character (wedding ceremony or consensual sexual encounter), via appropriately masculine attire (rugged clothing), or even indirectly, through the staging of certain scenes (the display of a baby’s crib next to the matrimonial bed).6 The most common demonstration of male heteroperformativity involves the use of the male figure as a literal embodiment of normative masculinity. Typically, the heroic male body has physically conformed to certain oft-repeated standards termed “performative body tropes” because they evoke both strength and heterosexuality (Dixon 20, 49). Thus, male protagonists are physically fit and toned, indicating their bodies’ preparedness for immediate action. The power of the hero’s body is then demonstrated through some form of violence, either as his body endures punishment (usually instigated/ordered at the behest of his less masculine rival), allowing for the gratuitous display of the male form, or exhibited by physical prowess as he defeats his feminized adversary. These examples of heteroperformance then become linked with the movie’s narrative regarding positive displays of proper masculinity and power, all of which are portrayed as supportive of traditionally patriarchal roles with the male father/protector providing security and stability as a direct result of these heteroperformative acts.