Ryan, Michael, and Douglas Kellner. Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film. Bloomington: Indiana Universtiy Press, 1990. Print.
Sconce, Jeffrey. “‘Trashing’ the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style.” The Cult Film Reader. Eds. Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik. New York: McGraw Hill, 2008. 100 –118. Print.
Scott, James. “The Right Stuff at the Wrong Time: The Space of Nostalgia in the Conservative Ascendancy.” Film & History 40.1 (Spring 2010): 45 –57. Project Muse. Web.
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130. Print.
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5. Print.
Worley, Alec. Empires of the Imagination: A Critical Survey of Fantasy Cinema from Georges Méliès to Lord of the Rings. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005. Print.
Homer’s Lies,
Brad Pitt’s Thighs
Revisiting the Pre-Oedipal Mother and
the German Wartime Father in
Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy
ROBERT C. PIRRO
As Troy was being shot it was rumored ... that my calves were too thin and had to be digitally altered for the film. How idiotic can one actually be to believe that it would be technically possible to alter a body part frame for frame for an entire film. Anyway, we wore knee high boots.
— Brad Pitt (51)
At the beginning of the Fifties, as the German economic miracle began, our life was rather sad and gray. My parents seemed to me to be bitter.
As a result of the Hitler catastrophe, Germany lay more or less in rubble and ashes, in every respect.... To look forward, build a new life, and forget all the horrors — that was the dominant feeling. Then the Americans arrived with their love of life.... At the cinema, there were the Westerns, with those endless landscapes, there was Rock ’n’ Roll and Elvis Presley.
That brought a feeling of enormous release and freedom, the feeling of a wonderful alternative to all that we saw around us. The most seductive, however, were the great heroes of the cinema.
— Wolfgang Peterson (lch liebe die grossen Geschichten 50 –1) In an incisive analysis of the sword-and-sandal epic Spartacus (1960), Ina Rae Hark argues that the Kirk Douglas vehicle both partakes in, and critically thematizes, the scopic nature of cinema. Drawing upon feminist film critic Laura Mulvey’s pathbreaking essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,”
Hark points out, “A male may very well find himself situated in positions analogous to those of the fetish or object of punishing voyeurism Mulvey describes 104
Homer’s Lies, Brad Pitt’s Thighs (Pirro) 105
as women’s in cinema’s classic scopic regime” (151). Women in film tend to end up in that position, according to Mulvey, because men seek to alleviate the castration anxiety provoked by the otherwise pleasurable scopophilic act of making women the object of their gaze. One cinematic response to that anxiety, which for Mulvey is exemplified in film noir classics and the cinematography of Alfred Hitchcock, is to inflict pain on women for provoking male anxiety by constructing film narratives in which female characters are watched, pursued, and punished. The other response is to “disavow castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure into a fetish” (311). For Mulvey, this response is characteristic of Josef von Sternberg’s directorial style, in which,
“the beauty of the woman as object and the screen space coalesce; she is no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product, whose body, stylized and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the film and the direct recipient of the spectator’s look” (311).
Of the many film genres “contain[ing] episodes in which a male protagonist’s enemies make a spectacle of him,” Hark singles out peplum films (151).
Set in cultures open both to “homoerotic practices” and to the elaborate public humiliation and torture of criminals and conquered enemies, peplum films were known for very skimpy styles of dress, especially for male leads (Hark 151). In taking a slave revolt of gladiators against ancient Rome as its subject, Spartacus follows the peplum convention of making an issue of the scopic treatment of the hero. Unlike female characters, whose treatment as objects of the male gaze is coded as natural and unproblematic, “males played by movie stars become spectacularized or commodified, these narratives assert, only because the rightful exercise of masculine power has been perverted by unmanly tyrants”
(Hark 152). Although the makers of Spartacus gesture at transcending this convention, by, for one example, having the hero take a principled stand against his followers’ staging of a gladiatorial combat between captured Roman soldiers or, for another example, allowing the female lead (played by Jean Simmons) to voice her opposition to being made a spectacle for the pleasure of others, Hark finds the film’s promise to “define a human subjectivity independent of another’s subjection” to be unfulfilled (153).1 At film’s end, Spartacus is forced to kill his best friend in an impromptu gladiatorial combat organized for the viewing pleasure of his aristocratic Roman nemesis, Crassus, and is then crucified along the Appian way with the rest of his followers.
In bringing Mulvey’s psychoanalytic treatment of cinematic scopophilia to bear on Spartacus, Hark offers a way to understand the significance of a distinctive aspect of peplum films, the scopic treatment of the classical or mythic heroes as played by their male leads. Her analysis only goes so far, however. In the first place, the use of Mulvey’s framework, in which the castration anxiety of male filmmakers and audience members is the crucial factor driving the scopic treatment of female (and male) characters, neglects a powerful, alternative psychoanalytical approach to understanding the bases of cinematic pleas-
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ure: Gaylyn Studlar’s “Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema.”
Drawing upon the work of Gilles Deleuze and shifting the psychoanalytic focus from oedipal issues of castration anxiety centered upon the father-son relationship in the genital stage to pre-oedipal issues of maternal care of, and control over, infants in the oral stage, Studlar suggests as a second source of cinematic pleasure a “masochistic fantasy ... in which the subject (male or female) assumes the position of the child who desires to be controlled within the dynamics of the fantasy” (607). The importance for later adult development of experiences in the pre-oedipal stage of infant care originates in the infant’s absolute dependence on, and primary identification with, a caretaker who in most cases is a woman. In this early stage of development, the sense of boundaries between self and environment is, by turns, inchoate and rudimentary and the “infant’s experience is a cycle of fusion, separation and refusion with its mother” (Chodorow 73). In addition to bliss and contentment, this situation is also bound to generate frustration, ambivalence, and anxiety (Chodorow 70). For Studlar, this preoedipal environment of contradictory stimuli forms the basis for a masochistic response:
Both love object and controlling agent for the helpless child, the mother is viewed as an ambivalent figure during the oral period. Whether due to the child’s experience of real trauma ... or to the narcissistic infant’s own insatiability of demand, the pleasure associated with the oral mother is joined in masochism with the need for pain
[606].
Taking issue with Mulvey’s oedipal reading of von Sternberg, Studlar argues that a psychoanalytic approach emphasizing the effects of the preoedipal configuration of helpless infant and all-powerful mother offers more insight into the psychological resonances of the films of von Sternberg featuring Marlene Dietrich, “with their submissive male masochist, the oral mother embodied in the ambivalent, alluring presence of [their female lead] and their ambiguous sexuality” (607). In a similar way, some features of Spartacus singled out
for special consideration by Hark, including the narcissistic Crassus’s evocation of Rome as an overwhelming figure of female power and attraction —“There, boy, is Rome, the might, the majesty, the terror of Rome. No man can withstand Rome.... You must serve her, you must abase yourself before her, you must grovel at her feet, you must love her”— take on a different and clearer aspect when viewed through the prism of Studlar’s masochistic framework (qtd. in Hark 166). That framework can also explain the psychological appeal of the
“material tragedy” embodied in the film’s final scene of the crucified Spartacus as originating in pleasurable identification with the afflicted hero (Hark 169).
Focusing on transplanted West German auteur-turned-Hollywood A-list director Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 sword and sandals epic, Troy, this chapter will contend that the exhibitionist treatment of peplum heroes and the male leads who play them is best appreciated from a psychoanalytical perspective that remains attentive to the legacies both of preoedipal issues of maternal pres-
Homer’s Lies, Brad Pitt’s Thighs (Pirro) 107
ence and power and of oedipal issues of paternal rivalry. In its presentation of Achilles, a male hero whose desire for everlasting fame through exhibition of the self in mortal combat is frustrated by the machinations of a paternal rival, Troy invites a psychoanalytical approach attuned more to the masochistic basis of cinematic pleasure. Such an approach finds that while Achilles begins the film in a situation of oedipal rivalry, he ends by opting for a symbolic return to preoedipal fusion with the maternal.
By way of demonstrating the utility of taking a more comprehensive psychoanalytical approach, the analysis of Troy to follow will also illustrate the importance of political context for understanding the distinctive mix of oedipally-driven sadistic and preoedipally-driven masochistic meanings to be found in a given peplum film. Born in Nazi Germany during World War II, Petersen came to his vocation as a film director and to the sword and sandal genre with a sensibility importantly formed by his experiences of West German life in the early postwar years, a time when issues of masculine crisis and issues of political crisis were conflated in nationally distinctive ways. In such a physically and morally wrecked country, relating to remote fathers who had been away from home for extended periods and who, after their return, were closemouthed about their wartime experiences, was difficult, and this made further investment in the maternal connection with its substratum of preoedipal issues all the more tempting. In taking on Troy, his only peplum film to date, Petersen revisited a key text of his German school days (Homer’s Iliad) and afforded himself the opportunity cinematically to revisit pre-oedipal issues of maternal care and oedipal issues of paternal rivalry reminiscent of his postwar childhood and youth.
The Duel
Troy begins with a duel. On a dusty plain, two armies approach and come to a stop. From each army, a chariot bearing a king rolls slowly forward. The leaders dismount and meet. With a proprietary look, King Agamemnon admires the army of Thessaly and, in response to the Thessalian king’s refusal to place his army at the disposal of Agamemnon’s empire-building ambitions without a battle, Agamemnon makes an offer: let each king send out his champion to fight and thereby settle the larger political dispute. The Thessalian king can hardly believe his good luck. Over his shoulder, he calls out the name of his champion and from behind the first ranks a real brute of a man, standing a head above the rest, heedlessly pushes his comrades aside to await confidently the Greek champion. Yet, the advantage is with Agamemnon (as he knew full well when he made his offer), because the champion of the Greek army is Achilles, the greatest warrior of his time. Achilles does not come forward at Agamemnon’s call, however. He is, as an irritated Agamemnon soon discovers, back in camp.
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The film cuts to the camp and a boy messenger who enters Achilles’ tent to find him (played by a buffed up Brad Pitt) undressed and sleeping in a tangle of naked women. Roused from his slumber, Achilles suits up and mounts his horse before the awed gaze of the boy, who nevertheless has the temerity to offer an assessment of the challenge awaiting Achilles: “That Thessalian you are fighting. He is the biggest man I have ever seen. I wouldn’t want to fight him.” From atop his mount, Achilles, in an earnest tone, tells the boy, “That’s why no one will remember your name” ( Troy). Back at the plain, Achilles arrives on horseback to the cheers of the soldiers of the Greek army, as they part and make way. Reaching the front rank, he makes a quick and unworried estimate of his challenger, dismounts, and strides purposefully forward past Agamemnon. Incensed at having been kept waiting, the Greek king sneeringly broaches the possibility of having Achilles whipped for his impudence. His own pride now injured, Achilles turns around and begins to stalk off the field, inviting Agamemnon to fight the duel himself. Nestor, the king’s advisor, pulls Achilles up short with a plea before the ranks of the army to spare the soldiers a battle that would cost many of them their lives.
Reluctantly, and with a contemptuous aside to Agamemnon —“Imagine a king who fights his own battles”— Achilles reverses direction to bring the duel to its foregone conclusion ( Troy). The pace of events quickens. A medium close-up shot frames, against the backdrop of the Greek ranks, the torso and head of Achilles as he determinedly draws a sword and rushes forward. A close-up head shot of the Thessalian champion’s scarred face follows as he turns around to the army of Thessaly and impatiently elicits a cheer of support from his comrades. Turning back to his adversary, he gamely and accurately throws one spear, then another, but Achilles with his powerfully compact body and swift-ness of step stops one with his shield and avoids the other with a graceful torquing of his torso. Just as the Thessalian champion frees his own sword, Achilles is upon him with a quickness that is enhanced by the slow motion pacing of the shot. In a final leap, Achilles launches himself upward on a trajectory that has him rising above and to the flank of the giant and then plunging his sword downward into the Thessalian’s vitals. The giant body collapses to its knees and then flops lifelessly forward. The Greeks cheer offscreen and then onscreen, in the background of a shot of Nestor and a grim-looking Agamemnon in near close-up. A close-up of Achilles follows and then a shot of the front ranks of the army of Thessaly, abashed and silent, as Achilles (his back to the camera) contemptuously struts before them, calling out a further challenge:
“Is there no one else?!” ( Troy). A suitably impressed Thessalian king appears at his side to ask his name —“Achilles, son of Peleus” is the reply — and to direct him to bring Thessaly’s royal scepter to Agamemnon, his king. Achilles ignores the proffered scepter and turns on his heels, dismissively saying, “He’s not my king” ( Troy).
The film’s opening is a virtuoso shot sequence, perhaps the best shot
Homer’s Lies, Brad Pitt’s Thighs (Pirro) 109
sequence of the film and worth describing in detail for two reasons. First, it illustrates Petersen’s skill at working within the conventions of the peplum or sword and sandal genre. In particular, the Thessaly sequence features such conventions as the prominent display of well-muscled male bodies, the staging of a contest of strength and skill, the mass choreography of lavishly-costumed extras, and the spectacle of a noble hero putting himself at risk for the good of the people. It also invites the kind of scopic analysis Hark applies to Spartacus.
With the exception of the naked female companions in Achilles’ tent, male bodies are the ones that are fetishized (Achilles) or phallicly punished (the Thessalian champion).
Secondly, the sequence is worth describing because the duel agreed upon by Agamemnon and the king of Thessaly and fought by Achilles and the Thessalian champion establishes a relational dynamic between king, champion, and army/people that infuses the rest of the film narrative with distinctive psychological and political meanings. (Of no small relevance, in this regard, is the fact that the opening Thessaly sequence is a pure invention of Petersen and his screenwriter; there is no basis for i
t in the text of The Iliad or, for that matter, in any of the ancient references to Achilles.)2 In this dynamic, an older, ugly, power-hungry politician comes into conflict with a younger, beautiful, glory-seeking hero whose deeds rouse the admiration of the army and threaten the politician’s sense of control. Here, an instructive contrast can be drawn with the key dynamic of Spartacus as analyzed by Hark. In that film, single (gladiatorial) combat is a punishment scopically visited upon the male hero for the sadistic viewing pleasure of the villainous Romans (within the film narrative) and the moral disapprobation of members of the film-going audience. In Troy, by contrast, single combat is not a sadistically-imposed punishment. It is, rather, a duty enjoined by the hero’s nemesis (who nevertheless gets no viewing pleasure from it) and accepted (masochistically) by the male hero for the purpose of gaining the admiration of his fellow warriors and their posterity (within the film narrative). As this chapter will argue, this difference correlates with the latter film’s presentation of its hero not primarily as a victim (or perpetrator) of scopic sadism but as a masochist, for whom “only death can hold the final mystical solution to the expiation of the father and symbiotic reunion with the idealized maternal rule” (Studlar 609).
The Muscle-Bound Male Body and Death
Troy’s release formed part of a third wave of sword and sandal cinema, which arguably first took impulse with the rousing popular and critical reception of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000), starring Russell Crowe as Maximus, the virtuous Roman general who is unwillingly drawn into a bloody imperial power struggle. Scott’s film revisited the plot of Anthony Mann’s 1964 Hollywood
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epic, The Fall of the Roman Empire, whose poor performance at the box office helped to bring to an end the genre’s second wave. The peplum phenomenon initially appeared in the Italian cinema of the silent age, on the heels of the 1908
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