Reverent and Irreverent Violence (Elia) 85
when they do), but to identify and perhaps even to celebrate the great leveling power of being a human, whether hero or villain, slave or king.4
A final concern is that the sword and sandal films depict violence as a necessary means of making whole what has been damaged or as the sole means of restoring moral balance and identity. Conan the Barbarian offers an easy example, since his aim is to avenge the deaths of his mother and father, not to mention his own enslavement. Conan’s quest will not cease until the moral order is restored through violence. Spartacus and the Spartans of 300 bear this out as well. In each case, heroic violence will bring additional violence back upon them as a consequence. Spartacus and Leonidas will never get a chance to “make glad” their wives and children. Muscular Conan seeks to have his love, Valeria, returned to him from the dead in Conan the Destroyer, but this return is never fulfilled. Yet much the same was true of the Homeric heroes. Odysseus was not able to rest at Ithaca even after he had slaughtered the suitors, for he was commanded by the blind seer, Tiresias, to leave Ithaca again to make appropriate sacrifices. The quest ends only in the hero’s death. He is restless in his pursuits, and never allowed to grow old in peace.
This, finally, is what reverence ought to expect. Going back to Woodruff and MacIntyre, one can see that in the Greek models of these stories, there is no going home again, for even controlled, justified violence will only temporarily set things right, and often it does not do that. As MacIntyre puts it, “For what Homer puts in question, as his characters do not, is what it is to win and what it is to lose.... What the poet ... sees ... is that winning too may be a form of losing” (128). One is rewarded with glimpses of this truth in the sword and sandal film genre as well, reminded by characters such as Spartacus, Conan, and Leonidas of the hero’s glory and also his suffering, and of the importance of reverence to a person’s sense of place in the world. These films are by no means substitutes for the great works of Greek epic poetry and tragedy; but, like their Greek predecessors, they can both deepen and complicate one’s understanding of heroes and of violence, and, as such, they are worth taking seriously.
NOTES
1. Similarly, Seth Schein writes about the Iliad: “Through parallels, contrasts, and juxtapositions of characters and actions, a dramatic structure is created that forces us to consider critically the traditional heroic world depicted in the poem and the contradictions inherent in this kind of heroism. The overwhelming fact of life for the heroes of the Iliad is their mortality, which stands in contrast to the immortality of the gods”
(1).
2. Less sophisticated peplum films tend to focus on the upside of fate, or, in other words, victory; more sophisticated films in the genre recognize that fate can mean victory and, at the same time, loss. Spartacus most consistently manifests the qualities of complexity; Conan the Barbarian and 300 are, though in different ways, weaker on complexity and open to other worries regarding their depictions of violence and reverence.
86
Of Muscles and Men
3. There may be an implicit critique of institutionalized religion in these films, though more broadly they identify the threats of empty ritualized behavior, especially among religious, moral, or political leaders.
4. Of course, it is rare that these films open up their hero roles to women, and when they do, as in Red Sonja (1985), for example, we find further evidence of masculine violence and control, though arguably not evidence unique to the sword and sandal film genre. Sonja, often clad in a metal bikini, is clearly intended to satisfy the male gaze (because of the history and power of the male gaze, Sonja must be treated differently than Conan and his codpiece, even though in each case the hero is objectified and reduced).
WORKS CITED
Atwood, Margaret. The Penelopiad. New York: Canongate, 2006.
Bondanella, Peter. A History of Italian Cinema. New York: Continuum, 2009.
Conan the Barbarian. Dir. John Milius. Perf. Arnold Schwarzengger, Sandhal Bergman, James Earl Jones. Universal, 1982.
Homer. Iliad. Trans. Stanley Lombardo. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.
Lord, Albert. The Singer of Tales. 2d ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. 2d ed. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984.
Schein, Seth. The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
Spartacus. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Universal Pictures, 1960.
Spartacus: Blood and Sand. Dirs. Michael Warn, Rick Hurst, Jesse Jacobson. Starz Productions, 2010.
300. Dir. Zach Snyder. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2006.
Woodruff, Paul. Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
“Civilization ... ancient
and wicked”
Historicizing the Ideological Field of
1980s Sword and Sorcery Films
KEVIN M. FLANAGAN
In their pioneering book Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film, Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner chart the modulations in the dominant ideological values of mainstream cinema from the rise of the “New Hollywood” generation of young auteurs through the Reagan-era and the ascendancy of the blockbuster-event movie. Although the word is often used to connote a monolithic and unashamedly profit-driven corporate version of motion picture production, what is generally called “Hollywood” is not wholly absorbed in a single-minded, politically united, and merely reflective mode of film practice (2). On the contrary, Ryan and Kellner write, “In our view, ideology needs to be seen as an attempt to placate social tensions and to respond to social forces in such a way that they cease to be dangerous to the social system of inequality” (14). The political readings that come from popular cinema serve a necessarily correlative function to the daily experiences of spectators, and are tempered by larger indicators like class, race, and sex, funneled through personal taste and experience. Despite their concession that in a large and heterogeneous film culture there will always be movies to serve different political interests, and beyond their recognition of the importance of individual response to the eventual ideological work of a given narrative, Ryan and Kellner maintain that the general set of interests served by American films from the late 1960s until the mid–1980s is marked by a thunderous shift from left-liberal
“independent” films concerned with the possibility of collective social action to a conservative-libertarian set that privilege heroic individualism in the face of decaying governmental institutions and social formations. The collective action portended by Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969)— with its documen-87
88
Of Muscles and Men
tary-like confrontation of the coalescing forces of social inequality — might be seen as typical of several countercultural and political trends of the late 1960s.
Yet, by the early 1980s, this collective impulse had symbolically given way to the disenchanted heroics of John Rambo, who in First Blood (1982) takes up arms against the society that rejected him, not in the service of a social agenda as such, but rather against the pervasive malaise of an increasingly meek culture disenchanted by the tainted legacy of the Vietnam War (Ryan and Kellner 35).
Ryan and Kellner try to balance their readings of film-texts by taking into account not only individual creative forces, such as the tendencies of writers and directors across a large body of work, but also institutional signposts such as genre. However, their historical methodology mainly identifies genres as they emerged in contemporaneously relevant circumstances: thus, their analysis of such major films of the early-to-mid 1970s as Airport (1970), The Godfather (1972), The Exorcist (1973), and Jaws (1975) is not along purely reductive and traditional genre lines (which would likely situate these films as important examples of disaster, gangster, horror, and “when animals attack” thrillers, respectively), but rather first-and-fore
most as “crisis” films which variously responded to the legitimacy crisis, in highly metaphorical ways, between the people and the institutionalized power of federal government (Ryan and Kellner 51; Muir 17–20).
Not surprisingly, one of the films which comes to be central to their larger observation about the rightward turn in cinematic production is Conan the Barbarian (1982), an origin-story for Robert E. Howard’s most famous pulp creation, filtered through the transparent ideological positions of director and co-writer John Milius. Characteristically unable to mince words, Ryan and Kellner describe the film as “a conservative fantasy projection,” visualizing a milieu in which “no one can be trusted and where one must fight to survive” (225).1
The film is significant for the authors because it encapsulates many of the trends which they see as typifying the mainstream cinema of the 1980s. Though they recognize the film’s roots in screen fantasy, Ryan and Kellner analyze Conan the Barbarian in a chapter called “The Return of the Hero: Entrepreneur, Patriarch, Warrior” (Conan is all three, but so, as they quickly point out, was Ronald Reagan) and focus not on the film’s genre pedigree so much as on the film’s savagery, its airing of sexual grievance by way of castration anxiety and overbearing phallic imagery, and its lame Oedipal quest structure (225 –226; Scott 45). On the whole, Conan the Barbarian is seen to most closely align with a larger trend toward “primary-process” thinking in hero-centric movies:
This vision of society is clearly very primitivistic; it attempts to reduce social life to primary process thinking, that is, to the assertion of the power of natural instinct over rational arrangements. In many of the new hero films, metaphors of nature and primitivism abound, and the great enemy is often an image of extreme rationality, science, intellect, or technology. Nature is the primary metaphor in the hero films because the ideal of the free individualist which the hero seems to promote
“Civilization ... ancient and wicked” (Flanagan) 89
is itself based on the assumption that individualism is more “natural” than something like rational state planning, which is too distant from nature [Ryan and Kellner 222].
Ryan and Kellner read Conan as a pioneering, trend-setting motion picture of the time, one to be aligned with Stallone’s Rocky and Rambo films, the notorious Chuck Norris movies made with Cannon Films— especially Invasion U.S.A.
(1985), in which Norris’s Matt Hunter, roused from his idyllic home in the Everglades by invading guerrillas, singlehandedly stops a communist invasion of the United States— and even the original Star Wars trilogy, especially as it pertains to Luke Skywalker’s trajectory of personal discovery.
While this analytical approach certainly does given recent movies a sense of contemporary urgency, Ryan and Kellner’s relative dismissal of the traditional parameters of genre classification does not help place movies like Conan the Barbarian in a long view, one sensitive to similar productions over the course of film history (some of which long predate the late 1960s, the start of the period under consideration in Ryan and Kellner’s study). Understanding Conan the Barbarian as indicative of a new brand of heroism is one thing, but generally ignoring older modes of heroic characterization displaces the novelty of the newer tendency. What I propose, then, is to outline the structural, iconographic, and ideological characteristics of genres and genre productions that directly prefigure Conan’s once-groundbreaking blend of sword and sandal and sorcery, a formula which dominated the “heroic fantasy” films of the early-to-mid 1980s (Worley 198 –212). While I still side with Ryan and Kellner in viewing Conan’s screen heroics as espousing a distinctively conservative ideology, I propose to test this pedigree against the longer heritage of strong-man films (the Italian Maciste films of the silent era), early (American) superhero serials, and Italian pepla (the genre and production cycle that most directly anticipates Conan the Barbarian). One could even go so far as to claim that Conan the Barbarian—
and its wave of sword and sorcery epics such as The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982, Albert Pyun), The Beastmaster (1982, Don Coscarelli), Deathstalker (1983, James Sbardellati), Hundra (1983, Matt Cimber), Red Sonja (1985, Richard Fleischer), and Conan the Destroyer (1987, Richard Fleischer)— are period-sensitive revitalizations of the seemingly moribund sword and sandal moment.
More to the point, the earlier sword and sandal movies, especially the Italian pepla of the 1950s and 1960s, can be characterized as something more nuanced than merely or reductively “conservative.” In their figuration of the preservation and/or restoration of order, their general narrative subservience to the marriage plot, and their various attention to the positive aspects of civilization, these films can be understood as working through a largely liberalist political posture. That is, beyond their generic tendency toward exceptional heroism and battles of good against evil, these films implicitly endorse a set of values that translates to a “good” version of citizenship for the postwar liberalist state.
90
Of Muscles and Men
Tellingly, the 1980s sword and sorcery films embody many of the neoliberalist contradictions that emerged over the course of the 1970s but solidified during the Reagan years: the privileging of unregulated, mercenary agents in search of personal profit (remember that the Conan of the two 1980s films is a sword-for-hire); the structural overvaluation of the individual and the small heroic band over any form of widely collective enterprise; and an insistence on showing how deregulation and a reduction of socially dictated laws aides powerful, motivated individuals (a rough explanation of why these sword and sorcery films largely operate out of frontier towns, where relative lawlessness suggests the possibility of personal advancement) (Bourdieu).2 Put bluntly, these sword and sorcery movies (for the sake of clarity, my label for the 1980s generic make-over of the sword and sandal films of the 1950s and 1960s) offer conflicted layers of social and ideological representation: on the one hand, they are explicitly about dead political systems (monarchy, empire, the nation-state polis, the nomadic barbarian kingdom), yet their plots cannot help but trace the contemporaneously important ideological values of postwar Western cinema.
The heroic adventure movies under consideration retain trace elements of venerable modes of storytelling, from oral-epic formations such as Homer’s Odyssey (eighth century B.C.), or even slightly more contemporary swashbuck-lers like Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers (1844). Providing a full account of the transmutation of these sorts of narratives, across national and generic boundaries, is far outside of the scope of this essay. Instead, what was to become the mature sword and sorcery film of the 1980s can be narratively and iconographically situated within a few prescient moments in the social history of cinema.
My emphasis on visual representations deals, in part, with the very aggre-gate nature of such labels as “sword and sandal” and “sword and sorcery”: these labels do not ascribe an abstract psychological term (horror), or suggest an experience delivered through a specific mode of performance (the musical), but instead provide a group identity through the material accoutrements— the props, costumes, and types of supernatural possibilities which achieve magical visualization on screen (Neale 16). For example, a lineage which dates back to the kind of “pre-historic” mode of heroic strong-man films inclusive of the Italian Maciste cycle from the 1910s and 1920s, resuming with the 1930s and 1940s American super-heroic serials, and settling at the “boom” decade (late 1950s through mid-to-late 1960s) of the Italian pepla provides a general representational framework for the sword and sorcery epics. What emerges is not a strict story of a genre evolving, or finally assuming a stable form after a long process of combination and re-combination, but rather a case where the realities of production cycle success at the box office meet a set of abstract ideological assumptions that temper a set of dominant messages.
The early Italian film industry excelled at crafting large-scale historical
“Civilization ... ancient and wicked” (Flanagan) 91
spectacles. Titles
such as the Last Days of Pompeii (1908, Luigi Maggi), The Fall of Troy (1910, Giovanni Pastrone), and Quo Vadis? (1913, Enrico Giozzoni) featured massive sets, lush costumes, and established a successful cinematic showcase for acts of physical heroism (Worley 169). Given Italy’s relatively recent unification in 1871 (after a series of wars and revolutions over the course of the nineteenth century), these epics of an idealized Roman past served as points of idealistic nationalist projection: the greatness of the contemporary Italian state could be exported as a screened idealization of a storied past (Roberts 722–724, 727). Of course, epic historical visualizations of the early silent feature era were not the sole provenance of Italy. D.W. Griffith’s celebrated Intolerance (1916), although an American production, proposes an equally ambitious and spectacular frame for the ancient world. Yet Italy excelled at a version of heroic spectacle that, in its earliest iteration, reaches a zenith with Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914) (Usai 125, 127).
Cabiria is an historical drama set during the Punic Wars. Scripted by nationalist poet Gabrielle D’Annunzio, it principally concerns the kidnapping of a young girl at the hands of Carthaginian pirates. Cabiria operates on a strictly defined logic of good versus evil, with the Carthaginian interlopers very obviously caricatured as insidious, an odious threat to the Roman people.
According to Paolo Cherchi Usai, “The success of Cabiria was due to the character of the slave Maciste [Bartolomeo Pagano], whose athletic prowess made him a favourite with audiences” (129). The character of Maciste is constructed as a loyal, morally righteous strong-man with a soft-spot for beauty and a knack for restoring order. His popularity yielded many sequels, including Maciste (1915, Vincenzo C. Dénizot), The Testament of Maciste (1920, Carlo Campogalliani) and Maciste in Hell (1925, Guido Brignone), making them “the first in a tradition of ‘strong-man’ films, an athletic variant on the adventure film, whose protagonists are endowed with extraordinary physical strength and untarnished simplicity of emotion” (Usai 129). Moreover, Cabiria provided a veritable blueprint for the Italian pepla that were to thrive in later decades. According to Patrick Lucanio, “It remains for Cabiria, more than any other Italian spectacle, to serve as the mold from which the renaissance of Italian spectacles in the 1960s— which included a revival of the Maciste character — was formed” (8).
Of Muscles and Men Page 15