The problem here may be with a different kind of descent. Derived, in part, from Homer’s epics by way of Italian cinema, sword and sandal films elevate warriors, with their metonymic swords, over the citizens in sandals who get positioned as audience. Such spectacles focus on war, hand-to-hand combat, the debasement and revenge of former slaves, the toppling of murderous regimes— not a trans-tribal love story or a girl’s coming-of-age. Content with Helen as narrative catalyst, Homer mentions her “seventeen times in the Iliad—
[but] on eight occasions her name is coupled with the word ktema, ‘treasure’
or ‘possession’” (Hughs 80). He compensates for such a strategy of containment, first, by representing goddesses and women other than Helen in action, and second, by granting women an even more expansive role in the Odyssey. Helen of Troy, for its part, reasserts Helen’s narrative primacy and thereby inverts aspects of the very genre it occupies.
To be sure, there is any number of historical reasons why such an inversion should give viewers’ pause. Few of these, however, pertain to the workings of plot. As Bakhtin shows, speech genres are anonymous forms that may be dialogically altered by anyone who knows the proscribed utterances and can re-imagine them. Propp, for his part, insists that the elements, functions, and characters in wondertales and myth are open to substitution and inversion. A stepdaughter, for instance, may be persecuted by a father, mother, visitor, witch, or other magical figure. Her persecution is a constant; the plot’s structure stays
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the same despite differing villains. By extension, a young man or, through inversion, a young woman might go in search of a lover, friend, magical potion, or lost relative. Here the functions of departure and absentation endure and are more or less gendered as the sought-for person or sought-for object changes.
Like characters in general, women characters resist their object-status and can do so because plot, too, is structurally — if not practically — anonymous. Plots vary, therefore, as a result of how the available, because mythological, functions are used. Narrative is thus more at odds with sociality than studies of ideology often attest.
A Marriage Deferred
With Pollux dead, Helen of Troy expands the role of its heroine, inside and outside of domestic life. As Menelaus, in voice-over, explains, “The great kings of the Aegean were drawn to Sparta like moths to the flame” ( Helen). He, Odysseus, Achilles, Agamemnon, and others arrive to assess the elderly king’s daughter and kingdom. The eligible among them vie for Helen. Tyndareus recognizes their ambitions and stands her before them, even as his son’s funeral bier burns. The scene shows Helen, in a gauzy fabric that reveals her breasts, to the gazing men. “By your actions,” he rages at her in a tightly framed two-shot, “you have left me without love or hope and Sparta without its future king”
( Helen). Here, “actions” is a telling metaphor for gender insubordination as well as a synecdoche for plot — since Aristotle’s Poetics the structural spine of story. The camera then cuts to an over-the-shoulder shot of men’s shields and the bier, occupying the mid-ground, and Helen and Tyndareus, in the background. Spatially, war and parental obligations clash. “It should have been you who died,” Tyndareus exclaims, pulling her roughly. Walking towards the kings and princes, he rages, “Is there any among you who will take this cursed woman?
Is there any among you who wishes their home devastated, his country brought to ruin, his heart broken beyond repair? I leave her to you” ( Helen). His interdiction is a curse; the men then violate it by casting lots for her. The twin functions of interdiction and its violation signal that they do so at considerable risk.
As princess, Helen is the sought-for person in Propp’s taxonomy and is therefore positioned in/as feminine plot-space. Menelaus shows as much by watching her intently, spurning the ritual occasion. Agamemnon, too, is visibly captivated; Achilles, who says he “fears nothing,” is silent before her and thus showcases a double denial. As Helen stands within touching distance of Pollux’s body, Harrison contrasts her grief with the men’s erotic distraction. Breathing in smoke, charcoal, and burning flesh, she mourns, silenced and abandoned.
Observant because he has married well, Odysseus cautions that “Tyndareus is right” about the danger she poses, adding, “The path to her bed is strewn with ash and death” ( Helen). The other men grasp only that they could easily fight
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over her and vow to join forces, rather than compete for a woman, however beautiful. Helen of Troy thus elevates its central character to womanhood by killing the two men, and therefore the two sympathetic authority figures, who know her best. Shortly thereafter, Tyndareus and Atreus die, empowering Menelaus, who wins Helen and Sparta, and Agamemnon, who becomes king of Mycenae.
The brothers are brutes, ambitious and unfeeling. Menelaus is the false hero in Propp’s list of characters; his brother, the patient villain. They compel Helen to debase herself, naked, before the kings and princes. Shown during the voice-over that begins the film, the full scene foreshadows what she can expect of marriage. In an unexpected reversal, Helen sees Paris, for the first time in person, as she is displayed. He recognizes rather than objectifies her, in defiance of the political economy of the gaze (see, e.g., Mulvey; Doan). Now the film makes two crucial turns in its (proto)feminist reimagining of the Iliad’s back story. It sets them up by showing Helen trying to kill herself, as her mother purportedly did, only to be saved by Paris. He is as endangered as she, since Menelaus and Agamemnon plan to kill him once they learn enough about Troy to make diplomacy unnecessary. The first turn then occurs as Helen saves Paris from assassination, which shows her ability to wield weapons and foil plots even in a culture that powerfully constrains a woman’s mobility. The larger point here is that her reversal is undertaken for love, and against authority, as a way to change the structure of the artistic world she will inhabit.
Earlier, we met a young Helen who resists being someone’s war prize. To Theseus, she explains, hyperbolically, “You must have me confused with my sister. I’m not the daughter of Tyndareus who does what anyone says” ( Helen).
Now we meet a woman whose actions extend from defying fathers to resisting kings whose power extends over life and death. Her decisiveness is modulated by foresight and thought — in a phrase, by the capacity to plot; her disobedience is put in the service of a will that undercuts sociality. The gods do not compel this Helen to love and rescue Paris. She decides to do so, her mind unclouded by romance or lust and cognizant of love’s potential consequences. Together, the two flee on horseback so that Paris and his men may sail for Troy. At the dock, Helen stays behind, justifying her choice until, in a second instance of reciprocal yearning, she turns, runs along the harbor’s edge, and leaps— the camera tracking her all the while — into the water. Characteristically, she chooses mobility, spatial and erotic, rather than the social immobility that the Greeks and marriage require. On the masculine domain of a ship, she transgresses the gendered divides of myth and narrative together.
The energy of the plot cannot continue to be hers, since Helen of Troy, in its second and final segment, shades off into a sword and sandal hybrid that seeks to expand its audience. We see as much as Agamemnon prepares his men for invasion, a time-honored set piece. Aggrieved, Menelaus now asks for his brother’s help in avenging Helen’s flight. He receives it with a caveat: Agamem-
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non will have the war prizes, once Troy falls, and Menelaus receive no tribute.
Only then is the Greek federation recalled. Achilles soon comes to the forefront of the plot, although without his Homeric hatred of Agamemnon. He is eager to fight, not sulk over a woman from a feminized plot-space, and thus he epitomizes the warrior caste’s pursuit of imperishable glory. His armor is cross-hatched, not encompassing, the better to show off his body; and his head is shaven, extending what Maggie Günsberg calls the “body-as-spe
ctacle” focal-izing of peplum (104). Helen of Troy emphasizes his masculine forcefulness by eliding his shield, one of the most powerful instances of ecphrasis in history (18.461–652) and, following Rene Girard, a mimetic object (146). It comes to Achilles from Hephaestus at the behest — unsurprisingly — of Thetis. Like Helen and her weaving, the shield honors the determinate tensions joining war and homeland, glory and domesticity, and thus is too feminine for a film hero. In keeping with the peplum’s model of masculinity, Achilles is also less fleet of foot than muscle-bound. Readying for war, other men like him spar with Agamemnon, their burnished muscles set off by thick loincloths.
Agamemnon must transport the armies he has mustered to Troy in the face of calm seas. Called to account for them, Calchas explains that Artemis will provide a following wind in exchange for his daughter’s life. Agamemnon’s lone humanizing tendency, to this point, has been his fatherly devotion, but he appeases the goddess and has Iphigenia — who resembles Helen and is a sign of innate domesticity — brought through a horrible gauntlet of armored warriors.
Acting as a father and king, he kills his daughter and thereby what remains of his femininity as well. In response, the film reverts to its structure of parallel editing; only now, it sets the love of Paris and Helen, near Troy, against the preparations for war in Mycenae. Domesticity recedes even further in importance as it conflicts with imperial ambitions. Peace still abides, but as the federation’s ships appear on the horizon, the plot turns in Homer’s direction.
Helen, so central to the mini-series, moves towards its margins but not, as her Iliad counterpart did, in silence and shame.
At stake is the gender-divide signaled by the space of Troy itself. Prompted by Calchas’ insight, the Greek federation travels far to penetrate its walls. The warriors who will do so embody a primal masculinity, unhampered by women or children. The minimal domesticity they allow in their camps serves only the purposes of war. Troy, by contrast, is a center of trade and wealth. Its well-dressed citizens speak of beauty, compassion, kindness, and mercy which, by comparison to what audiences see at the Greek beachhead, are feminine virtues.
Paris pointedly contrasts the Greek treatment of women with that of the Trojans to rouse the assembly. A woman, Cassandra, is Troy’s seer and so speaks of returning Helen to her husband, not pursuing war. Indeed, the plot of the final installment leaps forward to year ten of the conflict, aided by her very public vision. The structural equivalent of the mini-series’ opening sequence, it is marked by an adroitly cross-hatched set of images. As Cassandra narrates over
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the flash-forward, her words and the images often align. The sequence becomes a visual analogue of a woven fabric — of masculine femininity — and thereby recalls Helen and Penelope’s work at the loom. Addressing the Trojans and film audiences simultaneously, Cassandra predicts that
for ten years the Greeks will pillage our country and attack our gates. For ten years they will raid the southern shores, enslave our neighbors, fatten themselves on their butchered cattle, and become rich with spoils. And our friends will flee here and flee here [and] flee here until these walls are packed with broken people and our city is filled with sorrow, our streets flooded with tears, until there will not be one of us with food to eat, water to drink, or air to breathe [ Helen].
Priam interrupts, demanding that Troy speak with “one voice,” which is his, but Cassandra will not be silenced ( Helen). A story of the future-as-fated cannot be Troy’s, and so her competing vision is repressed when she, now an obstacle to plot, is jailed, a space which qualifies as the most potent affront to agency short of death. Her freedom is doubly gone because its enabling conditions—
narration and mobility — are to be compromised for years.
Helen of Troy cuts to the Greek camp, where Agamemnon decides, paradoxically, that it is time to retreat and attack. If the Greeks, to this point, have fought more with force than tactics, their king now intends to do the reverse.
How they might do that goes unsaid as the film crosscuts to Mycenae, where swans are shown from a slightly high angle. They are the sign of Leda and Zeus and therefore of Helen. The camera tilts up and tracks to the left, showing a member of the royal household walking, before emphasizing a woman’s right hand and arm. The camera tilts again to reveal Clytemnesta, standing alone; to the unidentified man, she says, “When the outcome of Troy is determined, I wish to know it” ( Helen). The moving camera, a sign of emphasis, is itself a mark of mobility. Harrison then cuts back to Troy, as if to imply that Clytemnestra’s presence is an afterthought.
It is a measure of Harrison and Kern’s resolve that Helen’s own mobility is not sacrificed to the exigencies of the sword and sandal film. Because the mini-series subsists on the principle of imaginative substitution, it can refine the Homeric tradition so that Helen is an active presence in its traditionally masculine plot. It does so, most easily, by using gaps in Homer’s timeline to embellish her character and that of other women. Given how minor a diegetic role Helen plays in the two epics, it is easy to insert a new love scene, for instance, after a day’s battle or as part of her back story. Crucially, the miniseries also changes the characters who once acted in myth or Homer’s epic while retaining their actions and plot functions. For example, when Menelaus and Paris fight over Helen in the Iliad, their battle occurs early in the epic, if late in the war. The idea for doing so is Paris.’ In the mini-series, by contrast, the idea is Agamemnon’s. From a plot perspective, the person who proposes the function of a difficult task and thereby compels the hero and villain to struggle — another such function — is of little importance. What matters is that a
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fight occurs and is represented. The outcome of their battle in the Iliad looks to be tragic for Paris, as Menelaus drags him back to the Greek lines by his helmet. However, Aphrodite snaps the strap holding the headgear, covers Paris
“in mist, and loft[s] him into / The incensed air of his vaulted bedroom,” where he will entice Helen into having sex (3.408 –09). The broken strap returns, as does the covering mist, in Helen of Troy, but Agamemnon’s poisoning of Paris—
a plot invention — now dominates the sequence. The function of trickery, rather than Paris’ receipt of a magical agent, is its focus. Paris escapes the combat because he and Menelaus recognize that his branding — another such function — is significant only because the blade that cut him was poisoned dishonorably. Hector, not Aphrodite, pulls Paris to safety. Thus is Agamemnon exposed as the character-villain, not the peplum hero.
The two episodes also end differently. In the Iliad, Helen upbraids Paris, wishing for his death at the hands of “a real hero”; her allegiance is clearly to Menelaus. The filmic Helen supports her beloved, cheering his unanticipated survival (3.457). Matters then worsen for Troy when Hector steps in, with Paris incapacitated, and challenges Agamemnon, in effect substituting himself for his brother. Achilles, seeking glory, then takes up the challenge for Agamemnon, becoming a substitution for a substitution. Helen taunts Achilles from Troy’s western wall, telling Hector, “He hungers only for glory; if you do not feed him, he will starve”— strong words coming from the catalyst of a ten-year war ( Helen). Priam and Hecuba also tell Hector not to fight, but he dies at spear point before the assembled armies. In the Iliad, by contrast, Hector and Achilles meet in book twenty-two, and only after Hector runs from his foe three times around the city. Athena comes from Olympus and interrupts his flight, assuming the form of Deiphobus, Hector’s favorite brother. S/he persuades Hector to stand his ground, promising to fight with him. Again, Priam and Hecuba plead with Hector to come into the city and avoid Achilles, but he refuses. Suddenly realizing that he is alone, Hector proposes to Achilles that they agree to return the loser’s body for a ritual burial rather than treat it as spoils. Achilles rejects the offer, too angry at Hector for killing Patroclus, who was wearing his armor at the time. Dressed
as Achilles, Hector suffers a fatal wound to his throat that enables him to narrate pathetically. Beyond the death of Hector, then, Homer directs our attention to the multiple substitutions— Breseis for Chryseis, Patroclus for Achilles, Athena for Deiphobus— informing his story. Helen of Troy borrows Homer’s logic so that, at the level of plot, it may expand the role of Helen in particular and women more generally. Such women borrow actions from the domain of masculinity and make them their own. These are risky but exhilarating moves in an epic-peplum hybrid.
The most important plot substitution, from Helen’s perspective, occurs after Hector dies but before the Trojan horse arrives in Helen of Troy. Helen grieves for him by mobilizing decisively. First, she goes to Cassandra, who is still in jail. “I will do anything to save him,” she says of Paris, “anything. Tell
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me what to do” ( Helen). Emboldened by Cassandra’s ambiguous response, she leaves under cover of night for the Greek camp — a foolhardy action — to offer herself to Agamemnon and so end the war. In the process, Helen does what the Greeks cannot: breach the walls of Troy, changing both her plot-space and plot-function. Once outside the walls, she watches as Achilles drags Hector’s body with his chariot; he is motivated to do so not out of rage over Briseis and Patroclus, as in the Iliad, but as part of a brutal strategy to debase the Trojans and inspire the Greeks. Helen then kneels before Agamemnon and offers him “a trade: the daughter of Zeus for the body of Hector.” “You think that’s enough?”
he asks, unmoved. “You think my daughter’s death was for nothing?” ( Helen).
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