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accordance with American tastes, Petersen’s treatment of the epic material is realistic. In an 2004 German newspaper interview with Kniebe, Petersen suggests that his background as a “humanistically educated European” made him an attractive choice to take over direction of the Warner Brothers project (3, emphasis mine). What Petersen elides in this account are the national dimensions of his affinity with Homer. It is hard to overstate the longstanding importance of Homer and Greek poetry to German elite education and literate culture.
Since the mid-eighteenth century publication of Johann-Joachim Winckelmann’s pathbreaking book, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums ( The History of Art Among the Ancients), in which ancient Greek art is held up as a model of cultural expression, German literati and philosophers have made artistic and intellectual engagement with ancient Greek poetry a priority. Homeric epic and Greek tragedy came to be seen by thinkers as diverse as Goethe, Hölderlin, Hegel, and Nietzsche as antidotes to the fragmentation, division, and alienation of modern life. Engagement with the figures of Greek poetry and myth became a means for imagining new and purportedly more worthy ways of orienting German cultural and social life, especially during and after times of major political upheaval. This philhellenic impulse would come to shape the modern German educational system, particularly the emphasis placed on Greek language training and the Greek classics in Gymnasium, the German equivalent to college prep schools in the United States.
In the same 2004 interview, Petersen enthusiastically relates how his Gymnasium education introduced him to Achilles and Hector. Achilles is “very much oriented to himself. He makes his own rules, refuses to follow the orders of anyone, and stands outside the community. He is the rebel. And he pursues immortal fame through deeds that will outlast time.” Conversely, Hector is the
“exact opposite, a noble soul, who considers the common good more important than his own desires. He would be happy loving his wife, his father, his son, his country. And he fights only because all that is endangered.” For Petersen, as he revealed to Kniebe, these differences were already perceptible “in my student days at the humanistic Gymnasium in Hamburg as we read The Iliad in the original” (2). When pressed to name his personal favorite as a student, Petersen equivocates at first, saying that both heroes are admirable, and that when making Troy he deliberately chose to forego the typical Hollywood approach of telling the audience who is good and who is bad. Yet, Petersen does eventually express a preference for Achilles: “To really appreciate and understand Hector, one needs to be more mature. Achilles is a great rebel. When one is fifteen and pimply and feels ill at ease in life, then he is the attractive figure”
(3).
Even while admitting to a past preference for Achilles, Petersen hedges that preference by attributing it to teenage awkwardness and immaturity. One may well wonder what effect his being a German teenager, living in a country devastated by war, occupation, and partition, and lacking a close relationship
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to a remote father who remained silent on the subject of the war, had on his preference for Achilles over Hector. After all, by his own account, the latter hero stood for love of father and of country, among other things. The Hollywood films on which Petersen built his career — In the Line of Fire, starring Clint Eastwood as a grizzled Secret Service agent trying to make amends for his self-perceived failure in Dallas in 1963, and Air Force One, starring Harrison Ford as a president who single-handedly foils a terrorist hijacking and saves his family in the process— did not lack for patriotic themes or positive father figures, but they were set in the United States where, as Petersen said in a German newspaper interview at the time of Air Force One’s German release, one could feel good about being patriotic: “After the war, we Germans were not allowed to display patriotic feelings.... It was nice for me ... to get my share of good patriotic feelings (through Air Force One), feelings that I have never had before” (Krämer 79). If making American-themed films in Hollywood allowed Petersen to display feelings, and tell stories unburdened by German history and his postwar upbringing, his return to Homer and to the theme of war could well have reactivated emotional affinities and burdens from his past. So, for example, Achilles returns (from Petersen’s reading of him in his Gymnasium days) as the outsider hero or rebel. Revealingly, what he now rebels against is patriotism, specifically the sort of patriotism that enlists men in the cause of someone else’s campaign of empire building or entangles them in the machinations of power politics. During Agamemnon’s map room tirade, the Greek king declaims,
“Achilles is the past! A man who fights for no flag, a man loyal to no country!”
( Troy). In another scene, Achilles, brooding in his tent after his withdrawal from the fight at Troy, laments that “soldiers fight for kings they’ve never even met” and tells Patroclus, “Don’t waste your life following some fool’s orders”
( Troy).
Achilles’ critique of the sacrifices that kings (and countries) demand from ordinary soldiers parallels the attitude of the U-Boat captain in Petersen’s 1981
war film. That the anti-patriotic message of Troy recalls Petersen’s postwar West German upbringing is confirmed by the family drama in which that political message is nested, the rivalry between a rebellious son (Achilles) and an overbearing father figure (Agamemnon).
On one level, that rivalry is centered on differing valuations of politics.
The foremost politician on the Greek side, Agamemnon, “has no honor,”
Achilles tells Odysseus, when the latter comes to Phthia to enlist him in Agamemnon’s campaign against Troy ( Troy). What Achilles means by this has already been demonstrated in the Thessaly sequence; Agamemnon does not fight his own battles— he uses other men to do his fighting for him. What makes Agamemnon’s leadership especially dishonorable is that it not only enlists men in wars in which they have no real stake, it also demands of those men that they give the credit and acclaim of their own martial deeds to Agamemnon. In essence, Agamemnon’s politics brings dishonor to all. This corrosive dynamic
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is made plain in a scene set in Agamemnon’s tent on the Trojan beach after Achilles and his Myrmidon warriors successfully spearhead the Greek landing in the face of fierce Trojan resistance. After washing off the blood and gore of battle, Achilles is called to the tent (a luxurious contrivance built over Agamemnon’s beached ship) where he is treated to the spectacle of the various Greek kings— including the king of Thessaly, Agamemnon’s erstwhile battle opponent now turned imperial flunky — effusively praising Agamemnon for “his” great victory and laying lavish gifts at his feet. After another fawning tribute, this one from Nestor, Agamemnon notices Achilles’ disapproving presence and dismisses the other kings so that he and Achilles can “have it out” in private. The significance of the ensuing scene for the film’s overall view of politics is anticipated by a departing Odysseus, who tells Achilles, “War is young men dying and old men talking. You know this. Ignore the politics” ( Troy) The back and forth between Agamemnon and Achilles that follows bears only a distant relation to the scene that dominates the first book of The Iliad, in which Agamemnon takes Briseis, Achilles’ battle prize, and Achilles is stopped from attempting to kill Agamemnon through the intervention of Athena. Troy’s Agamemnon does take Briseis and Achilles does contemplate an attack on Agamemnon, but the centerpiece of the scene is a hostile exchange unique to the film and expressive of the basic conflicts that structure the film’s narrative: ACHILLES: Apparently you won some great victory.
AGAMEMNON: Perhaps you didn’t notice. The Trojan beach belonged to Priam in the morning. It belongs to Agamemnon in the afternoon.
ACHILLES: You can have the beach. I didn’t come here for sand.
AGAMEMNON: No you came here because you want your name to last through the ages. (Pause.) A great victory was won t
oday. But that victory is not yours. Kings did not kneel to Achilles. Kings did not pay homage to Achilles.
ACHILLES: Perhaps the kings were too far behind to see. The soldiers won the battle.
AGAMEMNON: History remembers kings, not soldiers! [ Troy].
This passage makes clear the terms of the conflict between the two. Achilles pursues immortal fame, a reward he believes rightly accrues to those individuals who accomplish great deeds on the battlefield. Agamemnon stakes a claim for the preeminent value of politics based on the capacity of those highly skilled in its uses (i.e., himself ) to achieve all ends of any significance : territory, immortal fame, even sexual access.
In making Briseis the last in a series of prizes claimed by Agamemnon, the scene feminizes the other prizes— territory and everlasting fame — and frames the conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles as one fought on the grounds of masculinity. It isn’t the first time territory is feminized in the film. As the Trojan troops assemble to repel the beach landing, Hector calls to them: “Troy is mother to us all. Fight for her” ( Troy). To the extent that the conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles can be envisioned as a masculine struggle over a fem-
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inized prize, it invites analysis in terms of the classic oedipal struggle between a father (or father figure) and son. This would mean that Briseis is a mother figure for Achilles. When Achilles decides, after recovering Briseis, to leave the war and take Briseis home as his consort, she does enact the role of mother figure or substitute, which, according to Freud, is the role every wife plays to some extent. However, the death of Patroclus forecloses this post-oedipal resolution for Achilles. What remains for Achilles is the other option outlined by his mother back in the tidal pool of Phthia before his departure for Troy: early death and immortal fame. Or, to put this option in psychoanalytical terms, Achilles chooses pre-oedipal fusion with the maternal which manifests itself in his masochistic yearning for fame through self destruction.
Significantly enough, Achilles’ masochism finds clearest expression when he is in the company of Briseis. After rescuing her from an attempt by Agamemnon’s henchmen to torture and rape her, Achilles brings her back to his tent where she angrily rejects his attempts to minister to her wounds. Challenging her religious beliefs, he points out a contradiction in her pious aversion to the warrior ethos. He then offers an alternative “theology” based on the provocative notion that the gods masochistically envy humans for the fragility of their lives:
“The gods envy us because we’re mortal. Because any moment might be our last. Everything is lovelier because we are doomed” ( Troy). Looking at her bat-tered and bloodied face, he attempts to sway her to this masochistic perspective when he says, “You will never be lovelier than you are now” ( Troy).
The camera cuts to a shot of the Greek beach encampment at night, under a bright moon and with the ocean surf sounding in the background. Intended as part of a montage sequence to signify the passage of time, the shot carries symbolic weight in and of itself with its prominent references to traditional symbols of maternal infinitude and plenitude: the eternally cycling phases of the moon and the expansiveness of the ocean (Creed 135). The next shot frames Achilles’ sleeping face in close-up as a hand slowly presses a knife against his throat. “Do it!” Achilles says, inviting his own death. “Nothing is easier.” Surprised, the knife wielder Briseis asks, “Aren’t you afraid?” Achilles responds,
“Everyone dies. Today or fifty years from now. What does it matter?” ( Troy) He grips her shoulders and urges her again to slit his throat. Then, with her knife still at her throat, he maneuvers her downward and pulls her gown from her legs. Only after he kisses her does Briseis relax her grip on the knife. The mix of sadistic and masochistic gestures not only endows the sex scene with a certain frisson, but it also gestures to the desire for pre-oedipal regression that, according to some scholars, forms one of the bases for adult sexual pleasure:
“People come out of the earliest mother-infant relationship with the memory of a unique intimacy which they want to recreate” (Chodorow 194).
Achilles’ masochistic pursuit of a condition akin to pre-oedipal fusion with the maternal finds its final expression in his death scene, at which, significantly, Briseis is again present. After Briseis kills Agamemnon (thereby
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attesting, one might argue, to her symbolic enactment of the role of archaic mother whose preoedipal presence completely overshadows the father) and is rescued from the retaliation of Agamemnon’s guards by Achilles, the two embrace. Paris appears and sends an arrow through Achilles’ heel. A close-up shot of Achilles’ face in agony is followed by slower motion shots, cutting back and forth between Paris and Achilles, the former sending arrows on their way, the latter responding with expressive grunts of pains as each arrow finds its mark. After taking a third arrow in his torso, Achilles seems less pained, more accepting. As a panicked Briseis reaches him, he calmly says, “It’s alright. It’s alright.” He grasps a lock of her hair, smells it, and looks content: “You gave me peace” ( Troy). Sending her away, he topples over, just as Greek soldiers enter the temple. In a crane shot pulling up and away, the audience sees Achilles sprawled on a long, narrow rectangular swath of grass as soldiers approach from all directions to stand before the body and gaze upon the fallen hero. The rectangular patch in which he lies, recalling as it does the vertical crack in the rock face of his mother’s tidal pool, symbolically returns Achilles to the life-giving and death-dealing body of the archaic mother. The struggle between Achilles and Agamemnon over the sympathy of the army, over sexual access to Briseis, and over the more lasting place in human memory is finished, at last.
Achilles has finally gotten what he (masochistically) wanted from the start: immortal fame at the cost of his life. Or, to put it another way, he has been
“incorporated” into the immortal memory of the people, as his mother promised.
Conclusion
I noticed that my mother would have walked through fire for her children.
She really would have. By contrast, my father was more caught up in his own world.... My father considered my ambition to be a film director to be nonsense, a delusion. He wasn’t acquainted with the world of cinema.
My mother took my ambitions seriously because she knew me and paid careful attention to me.
— Wolfgang Petersen (lch liebe die grossen Geschichten 45 –46) Wolfgang Petersen has long presented German film scholars and critics with something of a puzzle. His work in 1970s West German television and cinema fell squarely within the conventions of New German Cinema — topical films that engaged pressing issues of social relevance such as the “brutality of public life” or “the alienation of urban youth” (Hake 174). After the box office success of Das Boot (1981) and The Never Ending Story (1984), he moved to Hollywood and became an A-list director making high budget, slickly produced, commercially-oriented genre films that bore no apparent relation to his prior
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work. Had Petersen, in the American tradition, completely remade himself?
Haase argues that Petersen did not shed his native film training and culture and that even his most popular and commercial Hollywood films retain a progressive and critical political edge. She characterizes his Hollywood style as exemplifying an “aesthetic of hybridity,” part of whose basis is the continuing influence of a German past that he never explicitly references (95). As with his other Hollywood productions, Troy exemplifies this aesthetic. Unlike his other Hollywood films, however, Troy offers relatively more direct access to his German past; in particular, to the educational culture and dynamics of family relations in a country that had been ruined by its embrace of Nazism.
Buoyed by the attention and encouragement he received from an adoring mother, whose own susceptibility to the attractions of cinema he apparently inherited, Petersen came
early to appreciate the power of film, especially Hollywood film, to fascinate and enchant audiences. It was, after all, Hollywood cinema that allowed him to escape for hours at a time from the physically drab and morally compromised world his father’s generation had inadvertently helped to fashion. Taking his mother’s and cinema’s side did not mean escaping the burdens of his father and national history, however. Highly skilled in the techniques of cinematic enchantment and covetous of box office success, Petersen has nevertheless found ways to integrate moral and political critique into the entertaining stories he tells. In choosing to work on a peplum film, Petersen found a genre congenial to marrying entertainment values with didac-tic purposes. In taking on a peplum film based on The Iliad, Petersen found the perfect vehicle for infusing that cinematic marriage with the memories and passions of his own upbringing.
To be sure, Petersen’s path to Troy is an unusual one when considered beside the paths other directors have taken to working in the peplum genre.
His path, with its distinctively German aspect, nevertheless remains a convenient point of departure for understanding not only how issues of masochistic pleasure find potent expression in the generic conventions of the peplum but also how national histories differently condition the receptivity of directors and audiences to the masochistic appeal of peplum films.5
NOTES
1. For more on these scenes, see Hark 159 and 156.
2. Petersen refers to his relationship with the film’s screenwriter David Benioff as a
“partnership” in a discussion concerning changes made to the Homeric source material (Kniebe interview 4). As “one of just a handful of Hollywood directors who have earned the right to final cut,” Petersen would have had unlimited leeway in shaping the film plot (Haase 64). Further evidence that the Thessaly sequence was mainly his invention is the fact that scenarios in which two characters engage in a duel are common in his films (Haase 85; Kniebe interview 1). All translations from the German are mine unless otherwise noted.
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