Despite Cabiria’s centrality to the sword and sandal lineage in question, Maciste in Hell provides a far stranger, more magically-plotted progenitor for the sword and sorcery films of the 1980s. Lucanio relates that this feature even played in New York in 1931, signaling an early American interest in Italian strong-man films (212). Maciste, introduced in a contemporary setting as simply a strong and kindhearted man, is targeted by demons and brought to Hell.
Figures of Roman mythology (Pluto) and the Christian tradition (Nimrod) enliven what is otherwise an excuse to have Maciste fight his way through hordes of demons and devils. The ideological assumptions of the film are populist and overt: Maciste moralistically uses his working class brawn against evil,
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which at times is coded as aristocratic, over-indulgent, and exploitative. For example, man-demons in tuxedos, behaving as upper-crust layabouts, tempt Maciste and question his propriety. Despite the sumptuous visuals and truly inspiring costume and set designs, Maciste in Hell already signals the “primary-process” thinking that Ryan and Kellner pin on Conan the Barbarian. Brawn and moral certitude best trickery and mental skill. Usai calls Maciste in Hell
“the apotheosis of kitsch,” a bold claim perfectly encapsulated by the film’s supernatural ending (129). Seemingly trapped for all eternity in the nether-world, Maciste is brought back to life and his world thanks to the prayer of a child, earnestly delivered on Christmas Eve.
American adventure serials (both earth-bound and fantastic) provide another template for the episodic, thrilling exploits of Italian pepla and the 1980s sword and sorcery cycle. These popular stories— significant examples include The Lost City (1935), Flash Gordon (1936), and Undersea Kingdom (1936)—follow many of the ideological assumptions of the later genres. In addition to an unmistakable binarization of “right” and “wrong,” these serialized stories espouse explicitly colonialist positions (the featured adventurers, scientists, and professors are somewhere between fortune-seekers and agents of Empire engaged in the discovery and plunder of new lands); use Orientalist short-hand to code evil empires and threatening locals as Eastern and non-white; and tend to reduce complex political transactions and questions of moral appeal to perfunctory physical conflicts with predictable endings. Many of the overt schematizations are familiar from the above discussion of the early Italian spectacle, but in this context were likely sourced from the literary inheritance of such authors as Edgar Rice Burroughs (the Tarzan tales) and H. Rider Haggard ( King Solomon’s Mines [1885]).
William C. Cline describes the function of heroes in this era of the American serial as a set of typifications that seem to be directly imported into the Italian peplum film of the 1950s and 1960s:
The Hero (with whom the audience was to identify) had to be immediately recognizable as a stalwart of Truth and Right. There could be no questionable aspects to the character. Knowing in the first chapter that they had a long way to go together, the audience expected a hero to be trustworthy and dependable. They had to be able to believe that he was smart enough and daring enough to undertake what they knew was going to be a rough job. His bravery and courage had to be —from the opening scene on — a matter of accepted fact [5].
The primary villains in these serials have a similarly proscriptive function.
Cline relates that the figure of the villain “was the ‘threat’— to the hero, to the heroine, to national security, to society at large,” and that “brute strength was part of his total armory, but the real danger lay in his ability to conjure up plots that would unquestionably draw the hero and his forces into dangerous situations” (5). Like many melodramatic forms of stage and screen, the villain is often characterized through an hysterically Orientalist point of view. In the
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lineage that I am tracing from serial, to peplum, to American sword and sorcery epic — excluding differences in available technology, access to magic, and superficial appearance — there is an evident similarity between the monoma-niacal villainy of Ming the Merciless (from Flash Gordon), Queen Fazira (from Samson in King Solomon’s Mines [1964, Piero Regnoli]), and Thulsa Doom (from Conan the Barbarian).
As with the Italian spectacles already discussed, the points of ideological identification in American serials are delineated for an audience even before the film begins. In addition to sporting frequently recurring character types, these serials inhabit a narrowly defined set of plots, situations, and settings.
Cline relates that, as entertainments more widely cast as action and adventure cliff hangers, these serials tended to be organized as Westerns, mysteries, jungle stories, historical costume adaptations ( The Three Musketeer s, for example) and science-fiction/fantasy tales (28). Despite certain cosmetic differences, serials can be understood as a territorializable genre in their obvious fulfillment of one of Rick Altman’s hypothetical claims that details how genres come to be.
He writes, “In order to be recognized as a genre, films must have both a common topic ... and a common structure, a common way of configuring that topic”
(23). Moreover, the American serial — as with the somewhat posthumously understood historical Italian spectacle/epic —conforms to another of Altman’s hypothetical precepts, namely that “before they are fully constituted through the junction of persistent material and consistent use of that material, nascent genres traverse a period when their only unity derives from shared surface characteristics deployed within other generic contexts perceived as dominant” (36).
We can ascribe recurrent ideological and narrative assumptions to the serial even as its images vary.
The primary, and seemingly obvious, point of unity in the Italian peplum cycle of the 1950s and 1960s is iconographic. Swords, sandals, and approxima-tions of the peplum tunic are the common accoutrements featured in these films, from Pietro Francisci’s popular Hercules (1958) to Knives of the Avenger (1965, Mario Bava). As such, a preliminary understanding of these movies as a similar set of texts might be sourced in the above observations by Steve Neale, or in Colin McArthur’s observations about recurring visual icons in the American gangster film in his book Underworld USA (1972). A mutual emphasis on less generalizablely recurrent elements— mythological and historical source material (as mainly relates to the Mediterranean world); narratives that focus on heroism and moral righteousness; value ascribed to physical strength and sacrifice for one’s people —cuts closer to the heart of the films. In fact, the sword becomes the dominant figuration: while Lucanio urges viewers to think of peplum more in terms of their obsession with a sense of moral certitude and their almost comic sincerity or insistence on goodness, physical skirmishes and a pervasive reliance on the logic of “might makes right” are still hallmarks of the genre (5 –6). Thus, a preliminary and schematic reading of sword and sandal
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films finds in them an inherit conservatism, consistent with earlier Italian spectacles and American cliff hangers.3
Lucanio usefully sketches the prototypical “mythologem,” the melodramatic form that essentially characterizes all pepla, whether they be what he has termed “Mytho-history” (appealing primarily to an appearance of, or lip-service to, actual historical events) or “Mytho-fantasy” (situating their genre cre-dentials firmly outside any historical sphere in favor of fantastic invention) (34; 38):
An evil force comes to power through treachery and oppresses an innocent group that remains powerless against the oppressor until one man — although a few films use a woman — leads the group in righteous rebellion against the oppressive power.
A final head-to-head confrontation wherein the hero slays the villain assures victory and freedom for the oppressed people, and the narrative then ends with marriage
[29].
There are a few implicit conditions of setting, mise-en-scène, and narrative that help further tie these claims to ideological as
sumptions. In order for the evil antagonist to loom as a threat, there has to be some condition of order (a kind of civic or social harmony) present at the beginning of the tale. Further, as the general reliance on the marriage plot attests, the defeat of the oppressor or interloper and the restitution of virtuous leaders serves not only to reassert the idealized status quo from earlier in the tale, but also put to rest any sense of a legitimacy crisis. For example, Hercules Unchained (1959) contains contests between brothers Eteocles and Polynices over their claims to the throne of Thebes. In this instance, neither would properly restore tranquility to the body politic. The brothers die in their conflict with one another and the priest Creon assumes control by popular means. The new leader suggests a nascent paradise regained.
As either vaguely historical (usually set in pre-modern, proto-European milieus) or blatantly fantastic stories, these sword and sandal films outwardly feature older formations of social order. Monarchical kingdoms, empires, and thoroughly militarized nation-states are common. How, then, might we theorize the political worlds presented in these films as being directly applicable to the contemporary moments of their initial release or exhibition? One way is through the sort of projection that Ryan and Kellner do, but with a slightly modified set of terms.4 Therefore, rather than view pepla as straight-forwardly conservative, perhaps the somewhat counter-intuitive “liberalist” label will help further explicate the sorts of assumptive political work that these films tacitly support.
Susan Braedley and Meg Luxton note that the classic definition of liberalism, as derived from eighteenth and nineteenth century European thinkers like Hume and Locke, values an individual’s freedom from oppression, servitude, and coercive (tyrannical) political power above all else (7). This freedom can be upheld through the capitalist marketplace — although this belief is nowa-
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days tied more closely to the more recent phenomenon of neoliberalism — but it is often upheld through the vigorous efforts of a centralized governmental sovereignty: the nation-state, polis, the leadership tacitly endured by the people.
After an initial recovery from the damaging legacy of World War II in the 1950s, Western economies used Keynesian economic principles privileging full employment and welfare polities: this was a time of “embedded liberalism,”
under which “a social and moral economy (sometimes supported by a strong sense of national identity) was fostered through the activities of an interven-tionist state” (Harvey 11). F. A. Hayek speaks of “self-generating” or “sponta-neous order” in social affairs, of “an order which made it possible to utilize the knowledge and skill of all members of society” (43). This is a way of thinking that supports an abstract sense of a common good, but one which refuses to bow to directed coercion. In many pepla, one gets the sense that the forces of good have an implicit faith in the value of a strong nation-state or kingdom.
Of course, there are strongly hierarchical relationships embedded in pepla: the heroic strong-man becomes more valuable to the maintenance of order than the lowly foot-soldier, while the heir to the throne can still be imagined to live a life of central importance. The point is that the values that are central to sword and sandal films—civic virtue, good and desirable forces positioned as inevitably triumphant over bad, and a sense of renewal after periods of dise-quilibrium — are values that also inform good citizenship in postwar Western economies. A notoriously simple-minded set of movies like these Italian sword and sandal pictures can come to be read as obsessively insisting on the continued importance of behaviors that are essential to statist and patriotic democracies, even though they embed them in ancient and mythical worlds populated by cartoonish heroism.
The thread of similarity between sword and sandal and “sword and sorcery” movies is clear, at least on a visual level. Sword and sorcery movies, like their progenitors, generally enact epic adventure stories through sword-bearing, sandal-wearing, and tunic-donning heroes. Visual cues signal constructions of good (white tunics, physical beauty, athletic grace, strength) and evil (dark colors, physical deformity, Oriental, decadence). There remains a strong delineation between, on the one hand, the exceptional hero and his/her small cohort and, on the other, the disposable herd of common soldiers and townspeople on the narrative’s periphery. Heightened moral certitude, restoration narratives, and clearly demarcated (though, in the case of films like Conan the Barbarian and Paul Verhooven’s visceral Flesh and Blood [1985], slightly less schematic) conceptions of good and evil remain essential. In this way, they already inherit an inherently conservative ideological tradition. Additionally, as with Italian spectacles, American cliff hangers, and Italian pepla, sword and sorcery texts can be considered an already-hybridized genre. They are more widely ordered as “fantasy” films. Like pepla, they can be given a qualified generic position, such as “heroic fantasy” (Worley 162).5 Such distinctions are also necessary
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given the somewhat tenuous set of films that could be culled under the rubric of “fantasy,” a loaded label that David Butler comes to use as representing “an impulse rather than a single coherent genre” (43). A provisional checklist of fantasy titles from the period suggests the heterogeneity of the genre by the early 1980s. As points on a spectrum, Warren Beatty and Buck Henry’s Heaven Can Wait (1978), Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings (1978), Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1981), and Frank Oz and Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal (1982) could scarcely be ideologically and iconographically farther apart. Overall, sword and sorcery films can be seen as indicative of a widespread American revitalization of screen fantasy more generally, but the strand of Italian sword and sandal films in particular.
If sword and sandal films were noteworthy for having cobbled together narratives through a fantastic combination of ancient myth, popular history, and pure imaginative speculation, then sword and sorcery films likewise owe a debt to an established body of literature. Robert E. Howard and later followers L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter provide a varied literary template from which films like Conan the Barbarian and Red Sonja molded mixed-source screen narratives. Howard’s interest in composite world-building is illustrated by his mythological history “The Hyborian Age,” which assembles elements of vanished civilizations, verified ancient history, and pure fabrication into a time and place suitable for his brand of heroic adventure (Howard). In this instance, authorial originality comes from a selective reading of history, streamlined through a set of political and ethical assumptions that accentuate certain elements of an invented past at the expense of others. The world that could accommodate Conan needed to be filled with danger, had to be only tenuously civilized, and, in order to inspire superhuman heroism, had to belie a permanently Hobbesian state of conflict and distrust. Although films like Red Sonja, Fire & Ice (1983, Ralph Bakshi), and The Sword and the Sorcerer are borne of similar circumstances, Howard’s overtly political template for the mode of fantasy that comes to be understood as sword and sorcery is best illustrated through the film of Conan the Barbarian.
Critics have reacted virulently to Howard’s politics (which are partially determined through his historical selectivity) as represented on page and, through the lens of John Milius, on the screen. For Hans Joachim Alpers, this sort of reductive heroic fantasy looks alarmingly like fascism. He lists overlap-ping structural parallels:
The ideologies thereby propagated [in heroic fantasy] are: magic-mystic understanding of the world, i.e. mystification of relationships that could be grasped by the intellect; right of the stronger as the principle of societal organization; glorification of violence, particularly killing; oppression of women; emphasis on the racial superiority of the Nordic (Aryan) type; fatalism toward hierarchic structures and their consequences, such as wars; the fuehrer principle; the greatest butcher of them all shall determine our fate; imperialistic policy; and anti-intellectualism [31].
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Writing on the film version of Conan the Barbarian for Film Comment, Carlos Clarens muses, “You would think that if Conan had not already existed in print and drawing, Milius would have invented him,” after which he proceeds to list the director’s debts to the myth of Siegfried, Nietzschian will-to-power, and Wagner (27).6 These sympathies come as no surprise for Milius, who as Richard Combs relates, mentioned how his vision of Conan would have been popularly and enthusiastically received in 1930s Germany (167).
According to Ryan and Kellner’s methodology, certain latent political formations surface (or are submerged) by the dominant ideological tenor of the day. Along with Andrew Britton and Robin Wood, Ryan and Kellner read the social circumstances and dominant ideological attitude of the United States under Reagan as enabling an otherwise fringe attitude like Milius’s to prosper (Ryan and Kellner 217–219). In the wake of economic stagnation and botched military operations under Jimmy Carter, the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan to the presidency gestured to an iconic shift in representations of American dominance: individualist and militaristic free-market ideology came to rule the day.
Andrew Britton’s characterization of this “New Right” attitude speaks to the genuinely utopian dimension of Reaganite thought, some valences of which find a home in the brutally ahistorical fantasy of Conan the Barbarian: The utopianism of the new radical right has two dimensions. On the one hand, it looks back from a position of geriatric post-imperial decrepitude (Great Britain) or of recently humiliated and increasingly embattled hegemony (the United States) to a vanished golden age in which the nation was great and the patriarchal family flourished in happy ignorance of the scourges of abortion and a soaring divorce rate, gay rights and the woman’s movement. On the other hand, it anticipates a gorgeous re-flowering of capitalism in which the good things will be born again under the aegis of the microchip once a flabby body politic has been slimmed down and its cancerous growths excised [9].
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