Of Muscles and Men
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(Chapman 16).
Equally importantly, a part of this re-negotiation of cultural ideals was deeply concerned with the masculinity of the forzuto, since “the most striking recurring feature is the way the male body is valorized” (Lagny 170). Whatever the hero’s name, one prerequisite which the films demanded was an extraordi-narily built body that would be on permanent display throughout the film. The hero’s musculature extended far beyond the capacity for power through violence, but became a defining characteristic of the films themselves, meaning that “the peplum can take place almost anywhere, but one ingredient of the formula is immutable: the film must have a shirtless, muscular hero” (Chapman 34). The exposed male body works as a perfect example of masculinity as spectacle not action, which explains in part the prevalence of the short skirts which were to give the peplum its name (from the Greek peplos) and ultimately which were to characterize their approach to the body, since they expose the most, or cover the least, amount of flesh on both men and women.
What is particularly striking about these exposed bodies is how little they were eroticized. Despite the vast array of nubile, scantily-clad, lithe bodies of both sexes put on display, and despite the endless series of dancing girls, attempted seductions, and the tendency to clasp the vulnerable young heroine to the hero’s oversized chest, there is almost no overt sexuality — and certainly nothing that would worry an age-advisory board. The same, broadly speaking, can be said for the films’ approach to violence, both explicit and implicit within the films. In general, scant examples exist of either the objective “systemic”
violence which for Slavoj Ž iž ek sustains “relations of domination and exploita-
From Maciste to Maximus and Company (Elliott) 61
tion,” or the more direct, “subjective” battles and confrontations which pervade the pepla (8 –10). For a series of films which promise so much sex and violence in their manly men and delicate nymphs, there is a curious absence of both, an absence which leads Domenico Paoella to term the pepla as “a poor man’s psycho-analysis,” owing to the level to which the violence is only suggested and vicariously purged (qtd. Lagny 172).
Given such restrictions in formula, narrative, and the narrow characterization of gender roles in the persistent appeal to imagined expectations of audiences, it becomes clear that very little variation can be established within the peplum framework, engendering a great deal of resemblance from one film to another. As the peplum phenomenon grew towards the late 1950s, and despite minor variations in location and incidental detail, the limited number of situations which demanded such superhuman strength (coupled with the inex-haustible flow coming from Cinecittà) meant that this simple resemblance began to descend into outright repetition. Nervous producers whose fortunes rode on the success or failure of the latest feature began to fear any divergences from the stock characters and plots, to the extent that, by the early 1960s, the peplum film in many cases became simple variations on a well-worn theme: A majority of these films follow the same basic pattern. Set during some generic period of ancient Roman or Greek history, our hero discovers a “wrong” (usually an evil dictator who has usurped the throne of a kingdom) and in setting out to right it will upset the villain who will sent [sic] waves of cannon fodder soldiers at the hero, all building up to a climactic confrontation with a nice happy ending [Young].
What emerges from this repetition, then, is that regardless of the name, or even the narrative situation, the pattern of the pepla produces an archetypal Maciste, who represents a man of the people, and one who is able to use his strength to right wrongs, fight injustice, and overpower all threats to the law (which in Steve Neale’s terms is largely synonymous with the ruling ideology). It quickly becomes apparent that despite the avowedly “lowbrow” quality of the films, an ideological dimension is added to the light tone of the piece which is most notable when comparing the Pepla to many of the later Euro-cult genres, from the Western to the Giallo, in which nihilism and tragic endings were all too common — the Traditional Peplums [sic] were almost invariably light in tone and although rarely resorting to all-out comedy, comic relief characters were often a feature of the genre ... [Young].
While representing a cheery affront to all enemies of freedom, the ur-Maciste nevertheless takes it upon himself, however unwittingly, to uphold the law, which requires a clear conception of right and wrong, and an unblinking acceptance of the prevalent ruling ideology. Simultaneously, and more problematically, the violence of the films begins to adopt a more sinister dimension in order to avoid becoming pure spectacle with no meaning. Given that “violence becomes spectacle when there is no narrative function,” the films’ insistence on Maciste’s physical strength condemns them to concoct plot points
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which require a highly visual display of power while avoiding violence wherever possible, because “a display of the male body needs to be compensated for by the suggestion of action” (Hark 154 –5, Tasker 75). As Claude Aziza comments,
“These exposed bodies, in order to be valued, must deliver tours-de-force which the actors struggle to achieve: to lift up blocks of stone, break down doors or walls” (39). Consequently, while the hero’s muscles are there to be admired as synonymous with “real” masculinity, they must not be simply ornamental: they must instead be put to work to avoid becoming pure spectacle. Fusing these two strands together, we see that the forzuto is required to use his muscles to fight against “enemies of freedom” and uphold the law, precisely to avoid spectacle, and to show that his strength is being placed in the service of a higher power.
Underpinning the heroic redemption narrative, then, the forzuto’s heroics come to represent a confluence of two distinct trends; on the one hand, his muscles and intertextual reputation reinforce his unique position as one who is able to uphold the law, while on the other his support of the law constructs him as an ideologically charged hero (but one without political agency)— what Louis Althusser might otherwise term a function of the Ideological State Apparatus. In other words, because he is in a position to subjugate others with violence, yet he only uses that violence in the service of the status quo without actually playing a part in the political process of governance, the muscleman hero is liable to be harnessed as an agent of the ruling state ideology.
A useful example of this seeming paradox occurs in one of the more able offerings from the peplum cycle, La Battaglia di Maratona (directed by Jacques Tourneur and an uncredited Mario Bava, 1959). The opening credits use a montage of various well-built, male athletes engaged in suitably ancient Greek sports to introduce our hero, Philippides (played by Steve Reeves, the Hercules per antonomasia of the peplum cycle), as a muscular, dashing, and powerful hero of the Olympic Games (it is no coincidence that the film was made the year before the Olympic Games were to be held in Rome) who is offered as a prize the position of Commander of the Sacred Guard of Athens. Thus, within only a few minutes of the film’s opening, and with a bare minimum of dialogue, a democratic drive is put in place; the winner of the games (that is, the strongest) becomes in turn the visible symbol of state strength. His role as Commander, however, is somewhat paradoxically not a political one, but rather reflects a desire by the Athenian Senate to harness the power of the “strongest man in the world” in support of the political elite — despite his elevation, the film takes great pains to stress his roots as a man of the people, showing him working in the fields as the archetypal hero of popular extraction.
With Philippides safely bound to the soil, the politico-ideological level of the film is confined wholly to the Senate, a world deprived of the exposed male body (wrapped in the ubiquitous— and, in the world of Hollywood, androgynous— toga). The politico-ideological sphere is a world characterized by a power
From Maciste to Maximus and Company (Elliott) 63
struggle between Callimaco and Teocrito (Philippe Hersent and Sergio Fantoni), representing the weakness of the law and traito
r to the law respectively. Callimaco embodies the familiar trope of a weak figure of authority being led astray by an ambitious and ruthless villain (Teocrito), placing him in direct opposition to Philippides, who emerges as an unequivocal hero and whose strength and unshakable moral compass align the fortune of the state with the strength of the common man. Having thus polarized the characters along two axes (defined unambiguously as hero and villain), the remaining chips are left to fall as they may, with the various plot twists and complications serving only to underscore this central opposition. Philippides meets and falls in love with Callimaco’s beautiful daughter Andromeda (Mylène Demongeot), who fills the stock role of the meek, innocent love interest (the pure), and who is in turn contrasted with “the seemingly perverse yet maternal seductiveness of the courtesan Charis
[Daniela Rocca], who has been told by the evil Theocritus to betray Philippides”
(Lagny 165). By the end of the first act of the film, the principal characters have been reduced to players along two groups arranged around the central figure of Callimaco, with those seeking to pervert the law on one side, and those seeking to uphold it on the other.
The Hollywood Epic Hero
On a purely narrative level, the above outline of La Battaglia di Maratona may sound suspiciously familiar to viewers of The Fall of the Roman Empire, made five years later in 1964. In the absence of a just and wise representative of the Law (here Marcus Aurelius), a treacherous and power-hungry young usurper (Commodus) tries to seize control of the state. The only barrier to his ambitions comes in the form of a Commander of his army (Livius), whose official function draws him, albeit reluctantly, into the political and dynastic power-struggle, and whose involvement with the innocent daughter of the ruler (Lucilla) unites his desires— both on the political and the emotional level — to create one single objective: to use his power to overthrow the usurper and restore the Law.
This is not to say that they are essentially the same film, of course; far from it. Nor does it imply that there is a level of influence, intertextuality, or borrowing from one film to another, since it is clear that there is a great deal more to a film than can be gleamed from the reduction of its plot to a series of key structures, and in any case there is no evidence to suggest that the makers of the later film had ever even heard of Battaglia. Rather, my point here is that, for one reason or another, The Fall of the Roman Empire expounds a very similar narrative situation which calls for a very similar kind of hero; one who would —
in Neale’s terms— negotiate the contradiction “between narcissism and the Law, between an image of narcissistic authority on the one hand and an image of
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social authority on the other” (9). This is achieved, according to Ina Rae Hark, through a process as a result of which “the narcissistic ego-ideal, given more to action than words, undermines the tyrant’s hold on political power through physical rebellion until a proper enunciator of the law of the father can replace him” (163).
Nevertheless, despite the various plot similarities, even a cursory glance at the film in relation to the Hollywood epics which dominated the 1950s and early 1960s is sufficient to demonstrate that the heroes on display differ markedly from those of the Italian pepla. In The Fall of the Roman Empire, for example, the hero Livius is played neither by Victor Mature nor Kirk Douglas, two of the most prominent muscular heroes, nor even by Richard Egan, whose earlier The 300 Spartans had demonstrated a grandeur and leadership which went far beyond his shirtless role in Demetrius and the Gladiators (discussed below); instead the role went to Stephen Boyd, the powerful (but neither muscular nor exposed) Marcellus of Ben-Hur, just as the role of Judah Ben-Hur had itself gone to Charlton Heston, a chiseled and imposing — but not overly burly —
leading man. What this suggests, then, is that even in a similar narrative situation to that of La Battaglia di Maratona, it was no longer sufficient for a hero of the Hollywood epic to wield a purely physical power, but that he must also play an active role on the politico-ideological level, too. Boyd, then, must possess not simply muscular power to confront an oppressive regime, but the sort of dignity and rectitude of characters like Ben-Hur, Spartacus, and his Biblico-Greco-Roman forebears. A similar case occurs in a film made two years earlier, Rudolph Maté’s 1962 The 300 Spartans, in which the characterization of King Leonidas must negotiate this fine balance between power and spectacle, all the while satisfying stringent censorship requirements. Like Stephen Boyd in his role as Livius, The 300 Spartans conceives of the epic hero as a similarly powerful hero, but one which is conceived as a man of valor, not of brawn. Egan’s heroic exploits as King Leonidas place him in direct contrast to his role in Demetrius and the Gladiators, in which he is exposed as pure spectacle, driving the plot along — as so many later pepla would do— by simply lifting, carrying, and throwing things while flexing his pectorals in a display of to-be-looked-atness.4
Taking two revealing scenes from Maté’s film in particular, the implica-tions of this form of heroic representation become clear: where Egan’s power is foregrounded in his initial construction as a beefy warrior in Demetrius and the Gladiators, his transmutation into epic hero in The 300 Spartans adds a second ideological layer to the characterization. In the first film, Egan appears as the ruthless gladiator Dardanius who, in an effort to provoke Demetrius, seizes the latter’s beloved Lucia and tries to force himself on her in full view of our hero. Holding her aloft in his arms, a low camera angle coupled with harsh key lighting paints Dardanius in a strikingly similar pose to that of the peplum heroes discussed above. His exposed, muscular torso, coupled with the sub-
From Maciste to Maximus and Company (Elliott) 65
missive position of the female lead, serves to underscore the simplified gender roles characteristic of the peplum, transforming the scene into an archetypal snapshot which could just as easily be taken from a Sergio Corbucci film as from Hollywood’s pageantry. What is particularly interesting about Egan’s role in Demetrius and the Gladiators is that the shot which would later be synonymous with buff heroism in the peplum genre is in fact designed to show the polar opposite: that Dardanius is a barely civilized bully whose overly masculine display of power is symptomatic of precisely the kind of barbarism which the state sought to contain, as his later violence both in and out of the arena would reveal.
On the surface, however, Egan’s later characterization in The 300 Spartans works hard to reverse the outward signs so as to remove any question of legitimacy or unchecked power. As the noble King Leonidas, he must be seen to embody the nobility and civilization of an urbane, restrained, and ideologically-neutral hero. Accordingly, he is loaded with the outward signs which would come to be familiar to all fans of the sword and sandal genre; gone is the exposed, muscular torso and bare-chested aggression of Dardanius. Instead Leonidas becomes a dignified soldier, decked in the “the red war cloaks [which]
are so becoming to men,” as one character defines the Spartan uniform ( The 300 Spartans). Clad in the helmet and breastplate which belong to Hollywood’s ancient worlds (if not the historical Sparta), Egan as Leonidas, through a direct reversal of his earlier characterization, comes to represent the sort of ideologically-approved, just warrior who would be infinitely more palatable to a middle–American audience in the wake of a series of external threats. It is of course not enough simply to deck the warrior in the signs and regalia of state-sanctioned violence; yet the visual construction of the character clearly speaks volumes about what kind of hero is being imagined here. Equally at home on the senate floor as on the battlefield, both Egan and Boyd embody a wholly new kind of hero who reflects— in terms of both narrative construction and of visual attributes— the kind of righteousness and legitimacy which the peplum hero’s spectacular masculinity never quite managed to attain. Nevertheless, even this construction of heroism is subject to a range of audience expectations which are tied far more to the period of production than to the p
eriod being represented.
The New Epic Hero
So far, then, what emerges is that the typology of the epic hero is not developed necessarily as a response to narrative requirements, nor even according to the socio-demographic gradations of the audiences sought, but according to perceived audience expectations. On the one hand, the sculpted muscle of the peplum’s forzuto courted a gaze which celebrated the male body’s potential as
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a means of upholding the law but without interference in the political sphere, serving as a vindication of manual labor in the face of rapid industrialization in post-war Italy. On the other hand, the Hollywood epics of the 1950s saw the evolution of a very different kind of hero, one whose strength was more ideologically rooted in his moral courage and integrity, feeding audiences’ preoc-cupations with freedom and the extirpation of the “enemy within.”5 In the latter group of films, far more important than the physical strength of the hero was his political power, which demanded the courage to stand up and fight against a corrupt state, against the threat of hostile regimes (be they Communist infiltrations in The Robe or a denunciation of McCarthyite witch hunts in Spartacus). In this regard, a greater importance comes to be attached to the mastery of the weapon rather than to physical, muscular force, a borrowing from the Western genre (see Cawelti 58 –60) which functions both as a visual demonstration of controlled, “pure” violence as well as an exculpation of the hero’s moral guilt by placing him at a distance from the villain. Where both use their power to protect against clear, identifiable threats (gender equality and industrialization, political enemies/Cold War), it was the nature of those threats which dictated to some extent what kind of hero was required.