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The common thread that ties Agamemnon to the more feminized antagonists is that their aberrant, and especially selfish, masculinity has far-reaching consequences, resulting in acts of tyranny and despotism. Their desire for personal power and gain thus comes at the expense of the collective, and inherently democratic, good, requiring a man exhibiting proper masculinity to restore the political and social balance.16 According to these movies, it is not inherently wrong for a man to strive for power and glory, so long as his goals fall within the proscribed realm of appropriate, consensual leadership. Violations of this masculine code abound in terms of both deeds and goals. Commodus usurps his father’s authority and plans for succession by murdering the emperor and ordering the death of Maximus, the proper and more suitable heir, thereby inaugurating a hedonistic reign supported by the murderous consumption of real men in the arena. Agamemnon similarly wastes the lives of countless good men, and causes the complete destruction of one of the greatest kingdoms of the Aegean through his selfish quest for land and power. Paris’ self-centered desires clearly resist the will of his father, who had sought peace between Greece and Troy, threatening not only his own family members, but also his country as a whole. Finally, Xerxes’ desire to dominate the ancient world is clearly presented as despotic, not only because his empire is built on the backs of slaves, which apparently are expendable by the tens of thousands, but also because his tyranny threatens the democratic republics of Greece, cast as the hope for a free world and the bastion of liberty, justice, and the benevolent rule of law and reason.
Resistance to this tyranny is expected on the part of the true representatives of masculinity. For example, even though Commodus is emperor, he does not hold the position of rightful ruler, and thus Maximus’ resistance, originally
“To do or die manfully” (Pierce) 55
nothing more than vengeance, is transformed into a struggle for political freedom and the restoration of the power of the republican Senate.17 Even as he is dying, Maximus resists the temptation to enter Elysium and rejoin his family so that he can first see that his men are freed, the Senate restored, the last wishes of Marcus Aurelius fulfilled, and that Lucilla’s heir, Lucius, is safe. He has thus reaffirmed “the ideals of family and simplicity” (Cyrino 142). Likewise, Achilles’
resistance to Agamemnon’s rule, seemingly self-interested, is permissible precisely because of Agamemnon’s characterization as a tyrant. Despite his initial feminization, Paris’ nature is actually redeemed through a process of re-masculinization, by fighting for Troy during its final moments and “rescuing” Briseis when he kills the great Achilles (something his masculine brother Hector could not accomplish). He also helps Trojan citizens escape, including Aeneas, to whom he gives the phallic sword of Troy and thus ensures a Trojan future.
Finally, Leonidas declines Xerxes’ offer of peace that would allow him to be warlord of all Greece because such a settlement would entail Spartan subjugation to the effeminate Persians, with their anti–Western mysticism and tyranny.
Ultimately, these masculine and often fatal struggles for freedom successfully eliminate the threat posed by the feminized imposters, restoring and reaffirming democratic (or at least consensual) rule and by extension both proper patriarchal authority and traditional gender roles. Although referring to the Spartans under Leonidas, Gideon Nisbet’s observation that such determined resistance to despotism creates “icons of democratic machismo” is in fact applicable to all these male heroes (77).
Gladiator, Troy, and 300 each display remarkably similar constructions of proper, heterosexual masculinity. Their heroic protagonists exhibit common traits such as physical strength and prowess, a paternal concern for the security of their families and countrymen, and an unstoppable desire to thwart tyranny. They are, in short, both martial and marital. By contrast, their antagonists are presented as the antithesis of appropriate masculinity in every way: physically, sexually, morally, and especially in terms of their improper exercise of authority. These feminized, degenerate usurpers help to define heteroperformative masculinity by exemplifying everything that it is not. Therefore, in opposing them, men like Maximus, Hector, and Leonidas prove that they themselves are the true embodiment of masculinity, and that they are willing to die “manfully” to prove it.
NOTES
1. Due to its significant departure from the tropes of masculinity discussed here, my analysis of sexuality and masculinity in Oliver Stone’s Alexander (2004) can be found in a separate work, “Great Ambiguity: How Oliver Stone’s Alexander was Defeated by its More Masculine Cinematic Rivals,” Journal of the Indiana Academy of Social Sciences 12 (2008): 46 –65.
2. See Dixon’s argument that normative heterosexuality is often defined through contrast with homosexual “deviance” (100).
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3. See Joshel for a brief discussion of the standard cinematic tropes of masculinity and effeminacy in Roman-themed films (16 –18).
4. The following discussion of heteroperformance is based, in part, on my earlier work on Alexander the Great. See Pierce, “Great Ambiguity.”
5. For further discussion of the negative portrayal of homosexuals, see Russo (122–
23, 178).
6. For the connection between masculine identity and performance, see Chopra-Gant (96).
7. See Neale for a discussion of the “pleasure” derived from viewing this type of masculine violence (13).
8. For a discussion of the fawning and at times homoerotic press surrounding Maximus/Crowe’s body, see Fradley (243 –244).
9. See Wyke (70) and Fitzgerald (38).
10. For the homosocial relationship of the gladiators, see Fradley (246).
11. Though some scholars of the Iliad contend that the epic itself lacks a conclusive statement of the Achilles/Patroclus relationship as homosexual, many of the ancient traditions surrounding the epic, as well as many modern scholars, contend that the relationship was more than simply Platonically heterosexual. An in-depth discussion of the history of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus can be found in Crompton (3 –6). See also Nisbet (78).
12. See Nisbet for a discussion of the “fetishistic leather gear” worn by the Spartans and the unabashed homoeroticism evident in Frank Miller’s graphic novel, 300, the basis of Snyder’s film (73).
13. For a survey of Greek/Spartan homosexuality, see Crompton (6 –10).
14. See also Clum, who notes that “one of Hollywood’s most important functions has been to market conventional patriarchal heterosexuality expressed through marriage as the only means to true happiness” (23).
15. The political context of Agamemnon’s lust for power is discussed in more detail by Rabel (186 –201).
16. As Hark explains, “The narrative trajectory in such films most often traces the male star-protagonist’s liberation from his subjugated position to effect the restoration of appropriate patriarchal authority and the removal of the male-impersonator from power” (152).
17. Winkler explains that in films about ancient Rome, the protagonists’ struggle against oppressive emperors “become quests for political independence and spiritual freedom or both” styled on “Americans’ perception of themselves as champions of liberty” (53 –54). Maximus can then be seen as a classical version and a predecessor of male American freedom fighters in the Revolutionary War. For a discussion of Maximus’
farmer-hero persona and its resonance with American audiences, see Cyrino (140 –144).
In the same vein, in a bit of fanciful reinterpretation, Gladiator presents the Roman Senate in its opposition to Commodus as the democratic voice of the Roman “people,”
despite its oligarchic and aristocratic nature.
WORKS CITED
Chopra-Gant, Mike. Hollywood Genres and Postwar America: Masculinity, Family and Nation in Popular Movies and Film Noir. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006.
Clum, John M. “He’s All Man”: Learning Masculinity, Gayness, and Lo
ve from American Movies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Crompton, Louis. Homosexuality and Civilization. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.
“To do or die manfully” (Pierce) 57
Cyrino, Monica S. “Gladiator and Contemporary American Society.” Gladiator: Film and History. Ed. Martin M. Winkler. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. 124 –129.
Dixon, Wheeler Winston. Straight: Constructions of Heterosexuality in the Cinema.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003.
Fitzgerald, William. “Oppositions, Anxieties, and Ambiguities in the Toga Movie.”
Imperial Projections: Ancient Rome in Modern Popular Culture. Eds. Sandra R. Joshel, Margaret Malamund, and Donald T. McGuire, Jr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. 23 –49.
Fradley, Martin. “Maximus Melodramaticus: Masculinity, Masochism and White Male Paranoia in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema.” Action and Adventure Cinema. Ed.
Yvonne Tasker. New York: Routledge, 2004. 235 –251.
Fredrick, David. “Titus Androgynous: Foul Mouths and Troubled Masculinity.”
Arethusa 41 (2008): 205 –233.
Gladiator. Dir. Ridley Scott. Dreamworks, 2000.
Hark, Ina Rae. “Animals or Romans: Looking at Masculinity in Spartacus.” In Screening the Male. Eds. Steve Cohan and Ina Rae Hark. New York: Routledge, 1993. 151–172.
Herodotus. Histories. Trans. George Rawlinson. New York: D. Appleton, 1875.
Ingraham, Chrys. “The Heterosexual Imaginary: Feminist Sociology and Theories of Gender.” Sociological Theory 12.2 (1994): 203 –219.
Joshel, Sandra R., Margaret Malamund, and Maria Wyke. “Introduction.” Imperial Projections: Ancient Rome in Modern Popular Culture. Eds. Sandra R. Joshel, Margaret Malamund, and Donald T. McGuire, Jr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. 1–22.
Neale, Steve. “Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema.”
Screening the Male. Eds. Steve Cohan and Ina Rae Hark. New York: Routledge, 1993.
9 –19.
Nisbet, Gideon. Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture. Exeter, UK: Bristol Phoenix Press, 2006.
Rabel, Robert J. “The Realist Politics of Troy.” Troy: From Homer’s Iliad to Hollywood Epic. Ed. Martin M. Winkler. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. 186 –201.
Russo, Vito. The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies. Rev. ed. New York: Harper and Row, 1987.
Segal, Lynne. Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men. 3d ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
300. Dir. Zach Snyder. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2006.
Troy. Dir. Wolfgang Petersen. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2004.
Turner, Susanne. “‘Only Spartan Women Give Birth to Real Men’: Zach Snyder’s 300
and the Male Nude.” Classics for All: Reworking Antiquity in Mass Culture. Eds. Dun-stan Lowe and Kim Shahabudin. Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2009. 128 –149.
Winkler, Martin M. “The Roman Empire in American Cinema After 1945.” Imperial Projections: Ancient Rome in Modern Popular Culture. Eds. Sandra R. Joshel, Margaret Malamund, and Donald T. McGuire, Jr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. 50 –76.
Wyke, Mariae. Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema and History. New York: Routledge, 1997.
From Maciste to
Maximus and Company
The Fragmented Hero
in the New Epic
ANDREW B.R. ELLIOTT
There is an old and well-worn adage that a given society will get the heroes it deserves. A society based on a culture of violence and iniquity, it suggests, will in turn see the rise to power of appropriately violent and iniquitous heroes; conversely, a culture based on fairness and justice will produce heroes of valor, righteousness, and what T. H. White famously refers to as “might for right.”
Though — as with many such adages— there is undoubtedly a great deal of sim-plification, assumption, and normalization at work here, the recent spate of sword and sandal epics seem to confirm the rule far more regularly than they refute it. Despite the truisms on which the adage relies, an interesting further proposition presents itself, that reading backwards, “getting the hero we deserve” means that an examination of the heroes of a given culture ought to reveal some of the ideological constructs at work in the background. Over the course of the last decade epic heroes have been placed (with varying degrees of success) into an often vague, loosely-defined or wholly mythical Classical Antiquity, but this essay will argue that from Gladiator to Centurion one trend seems to hold true: among the heroes represented, the kind of hero which the New Epic presents to us is one which embodies a complex range of traits. The heroes provided for a twenty-first century audience must balance and assuage complicated gender debates, while simultaneously reconciling a fundamentally ambivalent attitude to violence and combining an uneasy sense of spectacle with a level of agency unknown to many of cinema’s earliest epic heroes.
I will begin this chapter by examining the role and function of the Italian forzuto, or muscleman, arguing that his representation in Italian pepla of the late 1950s (itself a reworking of earlier, often silent, epics from the 1914 version 58
From Maciste to Maximus and Company (Elliott) 59
of Cabiria onwards) was dependent on his physical strength which asserted his authority on the level of the body and which overtly rejected any wider political and ideological influence. This will lead in the second section of the paper to a consideration of the more complex range of heroic attributes on offer in the Hollywood epics of the same decade, which seek to present a sort of “tamed”
forzuto figure, and one whose power lies not in his purely physical strength (though cases can of course be found which draw influence from these muscular forzuti) but on their authority and capacity to wield power on the politico-ideological level. Drawing these two disparate trends together, in my final section I propose that these various (and often mutually exclusive) demands have brought about a renegotiation of the nature and value of the epic hero, one who— rather than embodying all of these heroic virtues— has become fragmented into a heroic group.
Given the enormous scope which this hypothesis represents, however, this chapter will focus on one or two cases in particular — deemed symptomatic of the wider trends at work in each “genre cycle”— in order to bring to the surface a more general pattern in the construction of heroes in the New Epic.1 This will lead me to propose a new understanding of the function of the hero which is drawn as much from reception theory and contemporary thought about gender and masculinity as it is from genre theory proper. While such an essay can only ever scratch the surface of what is patently a complex and multifaceted issue, my main hope is to at least open this area up to the sort of measured debate which recent scholarship in hero culture and reception theory has inaugurated.
The Forzuto in Italian Pepla
The first hurdle, perhaps, in understanding the role of the peplum hero, is to understand what precisely is meant by the term peplum (and its plural pepla), since over time the terms have acquired a range of possible meanings, and even within single works it is possible to see it used in very different ways.
Though a great deal of scholarship has rendered this term in and of itself problematic, the most precise and succinct definition for my purposes here is one which “restrict[s] the use of peplum to the group of films depicting the ancient world made in Italy by Italian directors in the period 1958 –65” (Pomeroy 48).2
Given that I am relying on the reception of a specific body of films rather than a genre, the benefit of this definition is that (in contrast to many other defini-tions which are reliant on costuming, time-frame, or even narrative intent) Pomeroy’s classification uses a specific time and place of production, allowing us to treat them relatively unproblematically as a filone, a loose strand of films made consciously and deliberately according to a common pattern.
Throughout this cycle of pepla,
one of the most dominant features is the evolution of a stock character in the muscular hero, a character type which is
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drawn whole-cloth from the earlier epics of the silent era. Despite a range of appearances and settings, from Le Fatiche di Ercole / Hercules (1958) through to the later Ercole, Sansone, Maciste e Ursus gli invincibili / Samson and the Mighty Challenge (1964), it is fair to say that the forzuto hero varies very little other than in name. The ubiquity of the hero as a character type rather than an individual is demonstrated ab initio by the lack of distinction between individual heroes both within the filone and in their translation to other cultures.
For example, what begins as a Maciste film to an Italian audience (such as Maciste, l’eroe più grande del mondo, 1964) might end up as a film about Goliath for an American audience ( Goliath and the Sins of Babylon). Similarly, where Maciste becomes Hercules in Maciste e la regina di Samar (U.S. title: Hercules against the Moon Men, 1964), in the same year Hercules in Ercole l’invincibile (1964) becomes his own son in the translated title ( Son of Hercules in the Land of Darkness). Countless other examples could easily be adduced here, but suffice to say that this interchangeability indicates perhaps more than anything else that the only stable element underpinning the peplum films of this period was the space which the ubiquitous hero filled in the cultural imagination: “Whether he was called Goliath, Ursus, Samson, Hercules or even Maciste, the hero is the same beefy warrior who fights injustice, villains and gruesome monsters”