release of Luigi Maggi’s The Last Days of Pompeii, and its popularity lasted into the early Twenties.
Considered one of the masters of first wave sword and sandal epics, Giovanni Pastrone became world famous after the release of Cabiria (1914), which not only stunned film audiences in Europe and America with the director’s virtuoso staging and camera work but also gave birth to several sequels based on one of the film’s characters, Maciste, a slave “played by a non-professional actor named Bartolomeo Pagano, whose muscular exploits turned him overnight from a Genoa dockworker into a star” (Bondanella 6). Cabiria’s Maciste became the prototype of the muscle-bound heroes of classical myth and antiquity that would figure so prominently in the Fifties and Sixties revival of peplum films, whose plots “centered on the need for muscle-power to resolve almost any problem (including, in one film, the thermonuclear bomb)” (Frayling 73). In an analysis of Second Wave peplum, Michèle Lagny notes that “one of the dominant themes of the genre is that of virile strength” (171). Troy’s adherence to this convention is apparent in the muscularly enhanced body of Brad Pitt, who reportedly worked out six days a week for months as part of his preparation for the role of Achilles. Much of the internet chatter around the film concerned Pitt’s physique, including details of his workout routine and questions about whether his apparently impressive thighs were digitally enhanced or the product of stunt doubles. In an interview, Petersen gave “a ten minute soliloquy on Pitt’s physique,” noting his amazement at “the proportion of Brad Pitt’s pectoral muscles” (Tyrangiel 66).
Just as Second Wave peplum “directors patently linger on their actors’
physique, often highlighting it by drawing a parallel with statues,” so Troy repeatedly offers close-ups of Brad Pitt’s face, arms, and torso, in shots that give him the solidity and presence of a classical bust (Lagny 171). This is particularly true in the sequence leading up to his ship’s landing on the Trojan beach, when, dressed in a toga-like cloak and gesticulating grandiloquently, Achilles calls forth his Myrmidons’ fighting spirit by reminding them of the greatest reward mortal combat promises: immortality through the remem-brance of great deeds. (Petersen: “I ... love [the scene] when Achilles lands on the beach at Troy and calls to his soldiers, ‘Go get your immortality.’ You get this sense that this is maybe a dark kind of crazy guy, right? But he has enormous dreams” [Tyrangiel 72].) An intimation of that reward is forthcoming at the conclusion of the succeeding battle sequence as Achilles, perched on a ridge in a statue-like pose, receives the acclaim of Greek warriors massing on the beach.
By way of reinforcing that link between hero and classical art work, the beach landing sequence includes shots of Achilles standing by a piece of statuary, in this case the golden statue of Apollo at the entrance of a Trojan temple. (Sig-
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nificantly, he decapitates the statue to show his disregard for popular belief in the gods after his lieutenant wonders aloud about the prospects of divine ret-ribution in response to the Myrmidons’ plundering of the temple.) In visualizing Achilles in the form of classical statuary, Troy not only emphasizes his “virile strength” in the tradition of peplum, but the film also gestures to his impending doom. As Angela Dalle Vacche, referring to the operatic qualities of the early peplum tradition in Italian film, has written, “By modeling itself on a motionless sculpture, the body in opera points to a single component of cinema — the still frame of photography — and to the feeling of death that hangs over the arrested image” (6). Applied to the sword and sandal genre, Studlar’s analysis reveals a deeper layer of meaning in generic convention of likening the well-muscled bodies of male leads to statues and suggests that the mark of death that is on Troy’s classically-posed Achilles has very much to do with the masochistic pleasures of cinema.
In simultaneously evoking immortality and death, Troy’s image of Achilles-as-classical-sculpture raises the question whether the hero’s desire for everlasting fame prolongs, in altered form, those childishly unlimited desires for maternal love and acknowledgement, which carry over powerful, inchoate pre-oedipal experiences of the not-altogether-distinguishable infantile ecstasies and tor-ments of fusion with, and separation from, the mother. In this regard, it is interesting that the last person in Phthia Achilles consults before deciding whether to participate in Agamemnon’s expedition to Troy is his mother, Thetis.
The encounter, which has no precedent in The Iliad, takes place in a setting whose features evoke maternal plenitude and fusion. Thetis stands knee deep in a tidal pool, an intermediate zone between earth and sea, blurring the features of both. Rising conspicuously behind her in the rock face is a jagged vertical crack. Gathering sea shells, she tells Achilles that she is going to make him a bracelet, like the ones she made for him when he was a boy. He raises the question of whether he should go to Troy and she answers by starkly posing the alternatives: remain in Phthia, marry, have children, die peacefully in old age, and be forgotten or go to Troy, fight heroically, die young, and be remembered.
(In The Iliad, the doom of Achilles is considered more or less a settled matter by Achilles’ mother: “Since indeed your lifetime is to be short, of no length”
[Lattimore 70].)
Psychoanalytically-speaking, the alternatives posed by Thetis can be framed as, on the one hand, a post-oedipal option, in which the son gives up his rivalry with the father and takes a mother substitute as wife, and, on the other, a pre-oedipal option, in which the son opts for infantile re-fusion with the maternal. (How regression to a state akin to pre-oedipal relations can marry immortality and death is perhaps best seen on consideration of the pre-oedipal mother in one her negative guises: the “archaic mother.” Her “monstrous desire”
is to “reincorporate and destroy all life” (Creed 139].) Much more than The Iliad, Troy frames Achilles within an oedipal rivalry. Examination of the political
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context of Petersen’s early life reveals why this might be so and who the father of this oedipal rivalry might be.
The Early Postwar German Context
If Achilles is implicated in an oedipal rivalry with a father figure, it is not with his biological father, Peleus, who makes no appearance in film (or poem) and to whom scant reference is made. As it turns out, the paternal rival in question is Agamemnon, who, of all the characters of The Iliad, undergoes the greatest metamorphosis in the adaptation of his role to Troy. To be sure, there is much overlap with the Homeric source material. As in the epic poem, Troy’s Agamemnon is anxious about his authority as leader of the Greek army and extremely hostile toward Achilles for his refusal to show him proper deference.
In both film and epic poem, Achilles nearly comes to fatal blows with Agamemnon over the latter’s decision to claim Achilles’ war captive, Briseis, as his own.
As in the epic poem, Troy’s Achilles sits out the fight between Greeks and Trojans until Patroclus is killed by Hector, then engages and kills Hector, refuses the body the proper rites, and only relents in response to the supplications of King Priam.
Among the film’s most obvious departures from The Iliad is its portrayal of Agamemnon. In the first place, Troy’s Agamemnon is old enough to be Achilles’ father, a generational divide that is missing from The Iliad. (The only reference in that poem to the age difference between Achilles and Agamemnon is Agamemnon’s off-handed statement, “And let him yield place to me, inasmuch as I am the kinglier and inasmuch as I can call myself born the elder”
[Lattimore 202].) Secondly, Troy’s Agamemnon is cast as a modern power politician —“a really modern type ... a politician who wants to establish a world empire and destroy everything that stands in his way,” Petersen said in an interview with Martin Wolf (158). At every turn in the film, he seems a coldly calculating leader, willing to break agreements to extend his empire (as when he agrees to his brother Menelaus fighting a duel with Paris while fully intending to
violate the terms of the duel), huddling with his chief advisor, Nestor, in his map room savoring the prospects of conquering Troy (“I always thought my brother’s wife [Helen] was a foolish woman but she’s proved to be very useful”) or recognizing what Patroclus’ death at the hands of Hector means for Greek prospects in the war (“That boy just saved the war for us”) ( Troy). The epic poem’s thin-skinned and impulsive paramount war chief, insecure about his command over the Greek kings but solicitous of his army’s well-being, only distantly resembles the Agamemnon in the map room sequence, who sweeps his horse hair crop across the map, saying, “If Troy falls, I control the Aegean!”
or who fulminates, “Before me, Greece was nothing! I brought all the Greek kings together. I created a nation out of fire-worshippers and snake eaters! I
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build the future, Nestor, me!” ( Troy). Petersen would later note in an interview with Tobias Kniebe that the biggest deviation of the film from The Iliad involved Agamemnon: “Our worse crime against the original poem was in how we killed him off ” (4).
Contemporary political circumstances may have had a role in Petersen’s reshaping of Agamemnon. In public interviews, such as the one he gave to Wolf, he implicitly draws a parallel between Agamemnon’s imperial ambitions and the Bush administration’s foreign policy: “Actually, although Homer composed it almost 3,000 years ago, The Iliad says a lot about our world. Agamemnon, for example ... is, for me, a really modern type. I don’t want to name any names but politicians still exist today who want to establish world empires and destroy anything that stands in their way” (158). Brad Pitt, who, one imagines, had ample opportunity on the set to discover Petersen’s political take on the film he was shooting, responded in May 2004 to Tobias Kniebe’s suggestion that Troy might offer lessons to the contemporary world by saying, “I’m sure of it.
Just look at our current war of aggression. That war shows that we as a society have made no progress over the last thousand years” (51). The Bush administration’s foreign policy is also the backdrop against which film historian Christine Haase reads Troy as an antiwar film. The film “reflects Petersen’s ideological convictions which seem ... acutely aligned with postwar German attitudes ... in sharp contrast to the belligerent rhetoric and actions of the Bush administration around the time of Troy’s production” (91).
The Bush and Iraqi invasion references point to a larger political context plausibly explaining the genre’s reemergence in the first decade of the new millennium: the post–Cold War rise of the United States as unchallenged world superpower with military bases across the world and military spending far, far in excess of any potential rival.3 It was no great imaginative leap to analogize the status of the United States to the Roman Empire. Thus, for example, a May 2002 New York Times Ideas and Trends column entitled “All Roads Lead to D.C.” reported a growing consensus among historians and foreign policy experts that the United States was an empire and should act like one on the world stage (Eakin). Revealingly, the image that accompanied the article was a still photo from the reputed breakthrough film of peplum’s Third Wave, Gladiator, showing Emperor Commodus (played by Joaquin Phoenix) receiving the acclamation of the Roman masses.
While the newfound popularity of imperial analogies, especially among the sort of foreign policy elites who might have had the ear of Bush Administration officials, is a plausible context for understanding the timing of the most recent peplum revival, it is not the most important context for understanding the form and meaning of the discourses on masculinity and politics presented in Troy. The more relevant context is suggested by the World War II references in the map room sequence. The use of the map as prop and the boilerplate dialogue evokes classic World War II film epics like Battle of the Bulge (1965) or
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The Battle of Britain (1969). And filmgoers might easily read the sequence’s strutting empire builder Agamemnon as a Hitler dressed up in archaic robes.
This latter parallel is further suggested by Nestor’s declaration that “Hector commands the finest army in the East” as he tries to temper Agamemnon’s east-ward-looking imperial ambitions ( Troy, emphasis mine).
One of the major effects of Hitler’s war of aggression was the physical destruction and moral collapse of Germany, a degradation that decisively shaped the conditions of Petersen’s childhood and school years. Born in 1941, Petersen was a member of a postwar generation, many of whose members wondered about the nature of their fathers’ complicity with the criminal policies of the Nazi regime and found it difficult, if not impossible, to ask, or get answers to, painful questions. This was no less an issue for Petersen. When asked what he had heard from his parents about the Hitler years and the war, he said: “My father was uncommunicative. My mother, by contrast, was frank, which I appreciated” (1997 165). Further complicating relations with his father was his father’s pattern of infidelity, which, Petersen attests, cast a shadow over family life (lch liebe die grossen Geschichten 47). It also probably intensified his mother’s adoration of her only son: “Yes, it’s true, I always got whatever I wanted from her. She threw her educational principles to the winds in order to make me happy” (Petersen 62). In school, which he attended until 1960, “there was no serious coming to terms with the Third Reich” (1997 166).
In response to the gap in generational memory and the burdens it placed on familial relationships, some members of the generation born before or during the war chose to explore their families’ wartime past imaginatively. “What emerged was a genre of Väterliteratur in the early 1980s in West Germany, in which sons and daughters probed their fathers’ involvement in the Third Reich”
(Kosta 220). If any work of Petersen’s can be assimilated to this genre it is his 1981 adaptation of Das Boot, Lothar-Günther Bucheim’s fictionalized account of his wartime service in the German U-Boat fleet. The film, which Petersen wrote and directed, recounts how a U-Boat captain (played by Jürgen Prochnow) shepherds his mostly young and untested crew through a dangerous 1941 North Atlantic tour that is punctuated by several depth charge attacks.
The last of these attacks, in the Strait of Gibraltar, nearly sinks the sub, but under the calm and determined leadership of their captain, the crew members keep their nerves, pull together, and get their ship operating again. At film’s end, the now seasoned crew and their stoic captain steam into port to a somewhat ragtag hero’s welcome, only to be decimated by an Allied air raid.
A huge box office hit in Germany and abroad (six Oscar nominations and the record U.S. gross for a German-language feature film), Das Boot met with harsh criticism from some prominent film reviewers in Germany (Haase 75 –
6; Petersen 1997, 173 –4). Among the most serious charges to be lodged against the film was that its portrayal of a mostly apolitical crew led by a captain openly disdainful of Germany’s Nazi leadership served to obfuscate the criminal nature
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of Nazi Germany’s war aims and conduct as well as the co-responsibility of German soldiers in supporting the war. In the words of one film scholar, Petersen’s desire “to represent the horror of war but not the horror of Nazi ideology” formed part of a “process of exonerating the soldiers, and, by extension, the public themselves” in both Germany and the United States (where inconvenient questions about responsibility for American military involvement and conduct in Vietnam were already being elided in such war films as The Deer Hunter [1978], Apocalypse Now [1979], and First Blood [1982]) (Prager 244, 255).4
While Brad Prager does not reference Väterliteratur in his critique of Das Boot, he does interpret the U-Boat captain as a “father-protagonist” with whom viewers are invited “to identify” and for whom they are invited to “mourn”
(247). In the scene showing the U-Boat’s departure for the North Atlantic, the captain says of his new crew, “They’re just kids, nurslings who belong at thei
r mothers’ breasts” ( Das Boot). This “radically gendered discourse,” Prager writes,
“is no surprise, as the film is in many respects about turning the boy soldiers into responsible men, primarily in the image of the captain, who appears as the submarine’s father figure” (249).
For his part, Petersen, who remembered his father’s silence about the war and his mother’s confession to being “enraptured” by Hitler and being taken in by the “glamour” of the propaganda and entertainment films of the early years of Nazism, believed that he had written and directed an anti-war film, whose gritty realism exposed the negative consequences of the fascist glorification of war through appeals to young men’s sense of honor and toughness (1997 165 –166). In the context of this article’s topic, Das Boot is important as a point of comparison with Troy, Petersen’s only other war film and a vehicle for his indirect, if perhaps also inadvertent, return to concerns about family relationships and the strains placed on those relationships by German history.
On this view, Troy constitutes, broadly speaking, a kind of time-delayed peplum variant of Väterliteratur. That Petersen chose Greek myth rather than Roman history as material for his one foray into the peplum genre further suggests the significance of his personal biography and his native country’s history.
During the 1950s’ and 1960s’ peplum revival, “the Italians preferred Greek mythology, or comic-strip mythologies of their own making,” while Hollywood producers were drawn to a more historically-based (or, in the case of biblical epics, text-based) peplum films focused on the politics of empire (Frayling 73).
In both of its national variants, peplum film was known for its ambition both to entertain and (however clumsily) to teach lessons of moral or political value (Lagny 170; Brunetta 332–3). Among the themes taken up in Hollywood’s Rome-centric films of the time were the hubristic tendencies of “totalitarian”
leaders, the clash of raison d’état with the divine will, and the vindication of egalitarian values (Lagny 174). As a Hollywood production, and in comparison with Gladiator, Troy is an outlier for its focus on Greek myth, although, in
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