3. The social-political context of First Wave peplum was, according to Irmbert
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Schenk, the conditions of Italian society in the throes of early twentieth century economic and political change. In a country deeply divided along class, regional, and cultural lines, and overextended militarily by a political elite with neocolonial ambitions, sword and sandal films, with their mythic images of strength and power, provided Italian moviegoers with an emotionally satisfying alternative to social and political reality (Schenk 183 –4). For a people whose sense of identity was so fractured and whose self image was marked by a national inferiority complex, peplum films’ showcasing of muscle-bound heroes could foster consolatory fantasies of individual and collective power and efficacy (Schenk 185 –6). Scholars of Second Wave peplum tend to relate the popularity of peplum heroes to Italians’ transition in mid-twentieth century from agricultural to industrial work, from rural to city life, from subsistence economies to a consumer society: “The peplum affirmed the worth of male physical strength in a rapidly industrializing society ...” (Nowell-Smith 94). In La Battaglia di Maratona (1960), a film that Lagny considers in many ways characteristic of the genre, the hero Philippides
“tends to prefer the country but is not hostile to the city” (167). Made on the cheap and in assembly-line fashion at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios, Second Wave peplum films often affirmed the values of rural life at the same time that they were themselves the products of processes of standardized mass production and globalized mass consumption (Brunetta 332). Pierre Leprohon also notes Second Wave peplum’s reliance on cutting-edge technologies such as color film and panoramic lenses (173 –4).
4. For more on apologetic films on Vietnam, see Prager 239.
5. In this regard, one might speculate about the significant role that male audience goers of the generation of Italians born during wartime had in giving impulse to the Second Wave peplum revival of the late 1950s. Like their contemporary Petersen, they also experienced national episodes of wartime defeat and postwar scarcity in which issues of masculine crisis coincided with issues of political crisis.
WORKS CITED
Bondanella, Peter. Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the Present. New York: Continuum, 1990.
Brunetta, Gian Piero. Cent’anni di cinema italiano, 2. Bari: Laterza, 1991.
Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Creed, Barbara. “Alien and the Monstrous-Feminine.” Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction. Ed. Annette Kuhn. London: Verso, 1990. 128 –142.
Dalle Vacche, Angela. The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Eakin, Emily. “All Roads Lead to D.C.” New York Times. 31 Mar 2002. Web.
Frayling, Christopher. Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981.
Haase, Christine. When Heimat Meets Hollywood: German Filmmakers and America.
Rochester: Camden House, 2007.
Hake, Sabine. German National Cinema. London: Routledge, 2008.
Hark, Ina Rae. “Animals or Romans? Looking at Masculinity in Spartacus.” Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema. Eds. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark. London: Routledge, 1993. 151–172.
Kosta, Barbara. “Väterliteratur, Masculinity, and History: The Melancholic Texts of the 1980s.” In Conceptions of Postwar German Masculinity. Ed. Roy Gerome. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. 219 –242.
Krämer, Peter. “The Spectre of History in the Age of Globalisation: Notes on German Hit Movies and Hit Makers at Home and in the US.” Shifting Landscapes: Film and
Homer’s Lies, Brad Pitt’s Thighs (Pirro) 123
Media in European Context. Eds. Miyase Christensen and Nezih Erdogan. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008. 69 –85.
Lagny, Michèle. “Popular Taste: The Peplum.” Trans. Peter Graham Popular European Cinema. Eds. Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau. London: Routledge, 1992. 163 –
180.
Lattimore, Richmond. The Iliad of Homer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951.
Leprohon, Pierre. The Italian Cinema. Trans. Roger Greaves and Oliver Stallybrass. New York: Praeger, 1972.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Movies and Methods, Volume II. Ed. Bill Nichols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. 303 –315.
Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. “Peplum.” The Companion to Italian Film. Eds. Nowell- Smith, James Hay, and Gianni Volpi. London: Cassell, 1996. 94 –95.
Petersen, Wolfgang. “Einmal voll zuschlagen.” Interview with Martin Wolf. Der Spiegel (October 5, 2004). 158 –159.
_____. “Homer ist, wenn man trotzdem lacht.” Interview with Tobias Kniebe. sued-deutsche.de (October 5, 2004).
_____. Ich liebe die grossen Geschichten. Ulrich Griewe. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1997.
Pitt, Brad. “Ich bin ein alter Knacker.” Interview with Roland Huschke. tip (May 6 –19, 2004): 50 –52.
Prager, Brad. “Beleaguered Under the Sea: Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot (1981) as a German Hollywood Film.” Light Motives: German Film in Perspective. Eds. Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy. Detroit: Wayne State University, 2003.
Schenk, Irmbert. “Von Cabiria zu Mussolini: Zur Geburt des monumentalen Histo-rienfilms in Italien.” Die Spur durch den Spiegel. Eds. Malte Hagener, Johann N.
Schmidt, and Michael Wedel. Berlin: Bertz und Fischer, 2004. 179 –192.
Studlar, Gaylyn. “Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema.” Movies and Methods, Volume II. Ed. Bill Nichols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
602–621.
Tyrangiel, Josh. “Troy Story.” Time 163:19 (October 5, 2004): 66 –72.
An Enduring Logic
Homer, Helen of Troy , and
Narrative Mobility
LARRY T. SHILLOCK
Interpretation is not an isolated act, but takes place within a Homeric battlefield, on which a host of interpretive options are either openly or implicitly in conflict.
— Fredric Jameson
It is a curious fact that narrative has long been the province of men. In the Iliad and Odyssey— the precursors of today’s sword and sandal films— it is men who go on journeys and, as strangers, wash up on familiar shores. It is the men of classical literature who travel to war, sail for commerce or piracy, encounter unknown peoples, pilgrimage to sacred sites, and narrate their adventures. And thus it is men whose mobility, as paradigmatically represented in myth, initiates and complicates plot. As the narratologist Jurij M. Lotman observes, “Characters can be divided into those who are mobile, who enjoy freedom with regard to plot-space, who can change their place in the structure of the artistic world and cross the frontier ... and those who are immobile, who represent, in fact, a function of this space” (167). Mobility is at base gendered, since characters and readers are “constrained and defined within two positions of a sexual difference thus conceived: male-hero-human, on the side of the subject; and female-obstacle-boundary-space, on the other” (de Lauretis 121). Famously, Helen of Sparta contests such foundational constraints when, as wife to Menelaus, she leaves her married homeland and travels to Troy with Paris. In the process, she enacts a spatial imagination at odds with those who control women’s bodies and thereby provokes, to borrow a phrase from Fredric Jameson, “strategies of containment” relating to honor and gender (53 –54). Her mobility — personal and erotic — does more, of course, than set in motion the Trojan War, since Helen’s actions provide the occasion for the Iliad and Odyssey 124
An Enduring Logic (Shillock) 125
as well as for the many plots which treat Homer as a narrative exemplar. It follows that Helen’s uncharacteristic migration speaks to the potential of different plots that lie latent in Homer’s epics and therefore in narrative more generally.
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At issue here is not the primary role of myth in plotting, a role that classicists and narratologists alike emphasize, so much as how Helen’s example returns through the master trope of mobility to provoke recent sword and sandal films on Troy and thereby contest the character types and plot functions available to women in them.
Evoking a Tradition
It has become a scholarly commonplace to note that the Iliad and Odyssey begin the literary canon and yet are near endpoints of an existing oral genre.
Homer’s works, Seth L. Schein explains, are “product[s] of a Greek poetic tradition that may have been as much as a thousand years old by the time the epics were composed, [emerging] probably in the final quarter of the eighth century B.C., and that had roots in a still older Indo-European poetic tradition” (3).
Scholars first inferred the presence of this pre–Homeric tradition by noting the recurrent elements— the words, epithets, phrases, types of description, rituals, subjects, themes, mythological references, and so on — that serve as formulae which singers and, later, rhapsodes perform (see, e.g., Parry; Lord). Following Mikhail Bakhtin, we might say that Indo-European life in common was made possible by the utterances of its everyday speech genres. These, in turn, got absorbed into the secondary speech genre of oral poetry that the Greeks for-malized through performance and discipleship. In this model, individual utterances, speech genres (be they simple or complex), and the literary and extra-literary strata of national languages weave and are rewoven through song (Bakhtin 65 –66). The resulting catalog is available to speakers, whether sanctioned or not, which ensures that speech can be put to emergent purposes and plots.
The Iliad’s back story begins when Paris, the prince of Troy and son of Priam, travels to Sparta where, in a grave breach of hospitality, he seduces Helen, the wife of Menelaus. Together, Paris and orea Eleni depart for Troy to live as husband and wife. Menelaus and his elder brother, King Agamemnon, raise an army in response and sail, with perhaps one thousand ships, to Troy, where they intend to claim Helen, if not also the walled city’s wealth. Rebuffed, they begin a war. The Odyssey’s back story commences a decade later as the victorious Greek federation leaves Troy ablaze and seeks its home-coming, now enriched by plunder, its men now aroused and distracted by slave-wives.
Homer’s interdependent works represent the two faces of ancient epic.
One face — that of the gods— is distant and proximate. From their sanctuary on Olympus, the gods observe humans. So too do they shape-shift and move
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among the mortals. In both cases, the gods use men as pawns in their quarrels and for entertainment. Tactically, the gods disrupt the Trojan War, adding to its body count. They complicate as well the nostoi-story of Odysseus and his men, testing their endurance with hardship and loss. Throughout, the gods play favorites, betraying and disturbing at will. Odysseus, for his part, is fated by them to spend almost as long getting home as he spent warring at Troy.
Goddesses contend for his affections, becoming obstacles to his mobility before either releasing or being overcome by him. Calypso, for instance, plots to have him for her husband and only reluctantly allows him to leave her island; Circe enthralls his men only to become enthralled in turn. Athena, so deadly in the Iliad, travels repeatedly to aid Odysseus so that his journey home — its own masterplot —can occur and the suitors get killed. Understandably, the ancient Greeks respond to the gods’ interventions with fear that takes the form of worship. Their rituals propitiate the gods and goddesses, earning their care and perhaps even forestalling fate.
The second face of ancient epic belongs to warriors, those men who endure a trial ( peira) in battle and strive, alongside their compatriots, for imperishable glory ( kleos aphthiton). Living and fighting heroically bring honor, provided that both occur under maximum duress and are met courageously. The greatest renown occurs when a warrior is affirmed by enemies and friends alike and granted immortality by a singer, typically as part of dying on the battlefield.
Odysseus is semi-divine, a hero, and therefore atypical. Ever resourceful, he contributes the idea of the Trojan horse, leaves the enclosure-gift to sack the city, and survives the fighting, unlike others that Homer dotes on. Later, in the Odyssey, he is surprised to hear the story of Troy sung by Demodocus, the famous singer, a meta-commentary which suggests how quickly history is refashioned as myth. Marking the penultimate point in his travels, the song causes him to relive his suffering. King Alcinous observes Odysseus’ anguish and asks why he mourns when “hear[ing] of the fate of the Greeks and Trojans.
/ This was the gods’ doing. They spun that fate / So that in later times it would turn into song” (8.624 –26). Here Homer’s Odyssey is unequivocal: oral song, a kind of weaving, results from and compensates for the suffering induced by the gods.
Like Odysseus, Helen of Argos is one of the few characters to span the Iliad and the Odyssey. She too is semi-divine, having been born of the violent union of Zeus and Leda, a figure aptly named as Nemesis. Helen is the daughter of King Tyndareus and sister to Castor, Pollux, and Clytemnestra. As a young woman, she marries Menelaus and gives birth to Hermione. Thus she deserts her husband, daughter, and married homeland by leaving Sparta with Paris for Troy. Conflicting accounts explain her motivation but concur that Helen chooses a younger not an older man, mobility over stasis, travel rather than domesticity. Importantly, Helen journeys across the Mediterranean, a domain traversed by classical gods and men, not women, a time-space where ill winds
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bring tragedy. As Tim Cresswell observes, mobility “operate[s] within fields of power and meaning” (10). Helen’s leaving is thus a double affront — to her husband and to her social station. “For nearly three thousand years,” Bettany Hughes observes, “she has been upheld as an exquisite agent of extermination”
(2).
Despite being a catalyst of the war, Helen is offstage as the Iliad begins.
Nine years have passed, and she is now much-spurned. Homer’s invocation begins in medias res and, by so doing, signals her importance even as it effaces her history. Like the modern scholars who follow Homer, it focuses on the actions of men, asserting that “Achilles’ rage” has “cost the Greeks / Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls / Of heroes into Hades’ dark” (1.1–4). Homer’s proleptic invocation is more complex than it appears, since it confers responsibility on Achilles and Zeus, shifts temporal registers, and confuses consequence and cause (Genette 36 –37). After the fact, readers learn that Chryses, Apollo’s priest, has come to Troy to beg Agamemnon to accept ransom for his kidnapped daughter. Despite the bounteous offer, Agamemnon rebukes Chryses, who prays to Apollo for revenge. A nine-day plague of arrows then routs the Greeks.
Homer is interested in more than godlike rage or heroes’ fates, for the epic’s first book turns on the tension between story and narrative, mobility and immobility. Because Helen’s flight dishonors Menelaus, it must be righted with a compensating, and more powerful, display of force. Yet that response fails. Now, much later, the Greeks cower, under attack : “death-fires crowd the beach” (1.60). True to form(ula), Achilles calls an assembly to determine what is to be done. There, following Calchas’ prophetic reading, he and Agamemnon taunt each other unforgivably. A flurry of movement then begins around them. Chryses returns to Chryse. Athena, roused to action by Achilles’
desire to murder Agamemnon, arrives from Olympus. Satisfied that Achilles will not kill his fellow king, she returns to the hall of the gods. Agamemnon sends heralds to take “fair-cheeked Briseis” from Achilles, who was his war prize in the fight for Thebes (1.336). Briseis leaves for Agamemnon’s tent to warm a rival’s bed. Twice dishonored, Achilles prays to Thetis, the daughter of the Old Man of the Sea. She arrives and promises to speak to Zeus. Simultaneously, Odysseus sails with Chryses’ daughter and one hundred oxen that will be sacrificed to appease Apollo. Thetis arrives on Olympus and
persuades Zeus to risk Hera’s wrath and “Give the Trojans the upper hand until the Greeks /
Grant my son the honor he deserves” (1.540 –41). Thus do rage and loss bequeath betrayal.
With fine economy, Homer’s exposition represents the characters and conflicts around which the narrative turns, confident that listeners know their bases in myth. To develop, his narrative must then define its plot-spaces: the Greek beachhead, the plain where much of the fighting occurs, and Troy.
At stake are two questions. Will the Trojans drive the Greeks into the sea or
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home? Will the walls of Troy hold? The central issues are thus movement and, as an index of plot, succession. Unpredictably, Homer chooses delay, working against the propulsive force of the invocation. In effect, rage must wait rather than be expressed in violence. Even as Agamemnon’s forces anticipate Odysseus’ return, Achilles “the great runner [stands] idle by his fleet’s fast hulls”
(1.517). How the Greeks will breach the frontier plot-space of Troy without he and his fifty ships of men is unclear. Responding to the structural conflict between motion and stasis, the epic shifts to representing battles that gain little ground.
In terms of plot, the Achaean Greeks camp on the beaches and fight on the plain of Troy because Helen left Sparta. She might have loved Paris, been seduced by him, or even responded to a god’s erotic incitement without causing war; but by enacting the determinative plot function of absentation, to borrow from Vladimir Propp’s taxonomy, she spurs Menelaus, Agamemnon, and the federation to treat her leaving as an abduction and depart in response.
Upon arrival, Menelaus asks about Helen (the function of reconnaissance), gains information (delivery), and demands her return (a counter-action).
Spurned, he must fight to regain what he lacks or return dishonored, outcomes which are two sides of a dilemma and function as well. What energizes this emergent doubleplot is thus more than a desire to redress lost honor, for the Iliad reflexively foregrounds the dynamic of narrative and modulates its progress.
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