In effect, she offers her sexual and narrative slavery, re-engendering herself as non-man and object in the deal. He responds that her offer and body and uncharacteristic mobility are “nothing.” “There is no trade,” Agamemnon adds.
“Not you, not Troy, not even my own life will balance the scales” after Iphigenia’s death ( Helen).
The Iliad offers a parallel scene but with quite different characters. The person who absents himself from Troy and attempts to redress Hector’s abduction is Priam. He does so after Iris, mediating for him and his interests on Mount Olympus, arrives to give him the function of a difficult task. He departs for the Greek camp where, initially, his arrival goes unseen and his identity unrecognized. Prostrating himself before Achilles, not Agamemnon, Priam speaks of his advanced age and asks his enemy to recall his own elderly father.
The two men, in a recognition scene informed by tragic pathos, then weep together alone. The ransom delivered, Achilles releases Hector’s body to Priam, who returns to Troy with it, his lack redressed, his difficult task resolved. The Iliad ends on that profound, and temporary, reconciliation.
By transposing the core plot functions of the Priam/Achilles encounter to Helen’s meeting with Agamemnon, Helen of Troy increases one woman’s role in a peplum-hybrid. In the process, however, it risks feminizing a plot-space that is heroic and separate and therefore consummately masculine. The Greek camp is not feminized as such, since Agamemnon refuses Helen’s offer, becomes distracted, and thereby enables her escape. Tellingly, their encounter qua substitution gives the audience a view of how the logic that undergirds plot works and can enable new substitutions. One soon occurs as Clytemnestra, having learned of the fall of Troy, travels there, like Helen before her. Asserting her own mobility at sea — the domain of sailors, not of a woman alone — she arrives as the war prizes are being sorted. Harrison tracks her progress in Priam’s palace by moving from right to left and filming her through cross-hatched window coverings that are analogues to her clothing. Violating the 180-degree rule, he then shows Clytemnestra surprising her husband in his bath with two women who, in their nakedness before authority, recall Homer’s Chryseis and Briseis.
She pauses to greet a naked Helen and, disturbed, sees her sister’s bruises and trauma, both of which occurred during her rape by Agamemnon. Doubly
An Enduring Logic (Shillock) 141
emboldened by the loss of Iphigenia and the signs of Agamemnon’s violence, Helen of Troy’s obedient second sister assumes the defiance of Helen and casts a woven shawl over her husband. Immobilized by her net-like weaving, a sign of scheming traditionally associated with the word metis, he is helpless as she looms over him, pulls a knife from her clothing and, screaming, stabs him repeatedly. Blood disperses through the pool, and Agamemnon floats, face-down, on his stomach. Thus, he is violated both by a woman’s violence and usurption of plot.
Clytemnestra has killed the king whom Helen of Troy called “the mightiest of the Greeks,” a task that no Trojan warrior could accomplish. As re-imagined by Kern and Harrison, her action offers a satisfying — and feminine-induced —
climax to a brutal war story. Few parts of narrative are less gendered, of course, than the climax, since it is often where protagonist and antagonist face off, fight in hand-to-hand combat, and one or the other dies. The marriage-function, associated primarily with women and marriage plots, possesses a later temporality, since it typically comprises the denouement. It follows that Kern and Harrison have done something else remarkable by repurposing the oft-told tale of Agamemnon’s death in the Odyssey. In Homer, it occurs because Clytemnestra, having committed adultery with Aegisthus, sees to her husband’s murder. Thus does Agamemnon’s nostoi-story end with sexual betrayal. Homer uses Clytemnestra’s horrid example at strategic points to elevate Penelope and to counterpoint women and warriors. One would think that removing Clytemnestra’s negative example would compromise Penelope. And yet, the reverse occurs when readers of Homer see Helen of Troy in light of the Odyssey.
Penelope, shining among women, can now be seen as separate from Clytemnestra, as subjectively distinct rather than as a representative of a shared sex-class.
Penelope’s ecphrasis-plot subsequently grows in authority, since her resolute thinking stands on its own without another woman’s illustrative contrast. She will be judged and judge — a fate that her testing of Odysseus underscores. Such an ancillary effect speaks to the power of women’s lives and signifying practices, even in epics devoted to war and homecoming.
An Enduring Logic of Return and Plot Creation
Helen of Troy ends as the legend which enables its story began: with a journey. Bereft, Helen pauses to mourn the death of Paris. Menelaus interrupts her, asking, “What will you do?” His focus on “will” ascribes agency to Helen —
a princess without a brother or king, a once sought-for person who is less a sought-for object than a dishonored war prize. His utterance also recognizes her power to decide. She answers, questioningly, “I will follow,” thereby echoing him. “I accept,” Menelaus says quietly, and they walk single-file into the negative space of the future ( Helen). Their progress dissolves into the mini-series’ closing
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image. It is of Troy, which was discovered by Heinrich Schliemann in the nineteenth century. In this way, the miniseries ends badly for its central figure but not as badly as it might have, as the virtual erasure of Helen from Troy (2004), the Brad Pitt-led sword and sandal film, illustrates. The strategies of containment that arose in response to Helen’s transgressions with Paris succeed in Helen of Troy and, so great are the resulting losses, they cannot but fail. As the double provocation of Helen in Homer’s epics and in epic filmmaking shows, mobility is a master trope for narrative and also a prize that may temporally elude the sexual division of labor.
After her death, Helen was worshiped by Greek women, young and old, and I cannot help but think that her mobility, every bit as much as her beauty, was its basis. Homer’s warrior-heroes, Achilles’ rage, Odysseus nostoi-story, sword and sandal spectaculars— all subtend women’s stories and the masculine-feminine actions represented in them incompletely. Different plots, however repressed, linger like the archeological fragments of Troy, awaiting excavation and reuse. Patiently, they signal that other stories endure in the very logic of narrative, in myth as it is passed to us orally, since it is through the dialogical functions of substitution, extension, and inversion that the next stories— perhaps even the next women’s stories— are to be sung and heard.
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Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Vintage, 1985. Print.
Cresswell, Tim. On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.
de Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana Universtiy Press, 1984. Print.
Doane, Mary Ann. Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1991. Print.
Felson-Rubin, Nancy. Regarding Penelope: From Character to Poetics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Universtoy Press, 1994. Print.
Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980. Print.
Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. Print.
Helen of Troy. Dir. John Kent Harrison. Perf. Sienna Guillory, Matthew Marsden, and John Rhys-Davies. USA Cable Entertainment, 2003.
Helen of Troy. Dir. Robert Wise. Perf. Rossana Podesta, Jack Sernas, a
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_____. Odyssey. Trans. Lombardo. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000. Print.
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Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981. Print.
Lattimore, Richmond. “Introduction.” The Iliad of Homer. Trans. Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951. 11–55. Print.
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Poetics Today 1.1–2 (1979): 161–84. Print.
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Adam Parry. London: Oxford Universtiy Press, 1971. Print.
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Schein. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. 3 –32. Print.
Slatkin, Laura M. “Composition by Theme and Metis of the Odyssey.” Reading the Odyssey: Selected Interpretive Essays. Ed. Seth L. Schein. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. 223 –37. Print.
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Troy. Dir. Wolfgang Petersen. Perf. Brad Pitt, Eric Bana, Orlando Bloom, and Diane Kruger. Warner, 2004.
“By Jupiter’s Cock!”
Spartacus: Blood and Sand ,
Video Games, and Camp Excess
DAVID SIMMONS
Spartacus: Blood and Sand began airing in January 2010 and quickly gained notoriety for its often explicit visual content. Barry Garron’s piece on the season for The Hollywood Reporter reflects the views of many critics when he suggests that while the graphic depiction of sex and violence might be an increasingly acceptable means “to shore up a story” on film, television requires greater narrative depth, something Garron believes Spartacus: Blood and Sand lacks: “With such thin stories each week, it’s small wonder that sex and violence are used to take up the slack” (Garron). Garron and his fellow critics may be missing the cue, however; Spartacus: Blood and Sand’s emphatic use of visual excess is intentional, allowing the series to operate as a vehicle for the pleasurable extremes that certain pop cultural texts often offer. Concomitant to this notion is the impression that while criticism concerning contemporary television has undoubtedly embraced a range of shows that combine genre elements with sophisticated and “adult” narratives (science-fiction in Battlestar Galactica, comic books in Heroes), there still exists an inability to engage with those shows that operate in a predominantly camp mode, those that place an emphasis on a type of excess that often revels in its own lack of seriousness. This limited range of critical approaches to a given show may be detrimental, as Susan Sontag suggests in her influential essay “Notes on Camp”: “One cheats oneself, as a human being, if one has respect only for the style of high culture” (49). While lines such as “not if Jupiter himself were to open the heavens and dangle his cock from the skies” (Season 1: Episode 3) and the interjection noted in this essay’s title suggest that Spartacus: Blood and Sand distinctly embodies a camp
“love of the exaggerated,” the construction becomes problematic when considering Sontag’s declaration that “camp is either completely naive or else wholly conscious” (278, 280). Spartacus: Blood and Sand would seem to fall somewhere 144
“By Jupiter’s Cock!” (Simmons) 145
in between these two poles, refusing an interpretation that might imply the show’s creators are oblivious to the extravagance of the actors’ characterizations or the stylization of the mise en scène, but also stopping short of the kind of self-knowingness that might allow for a reading of the show as wholly ironic and distanced in tone. Bearing in mind the nebulous nature of Sontag’s use of the term, a more accurate way of understanding the show’s camp elements might be found by referring to Sontag’s writing on the particular dual nature of some camp artifacts:
The Camp sensibility is one that is alive to a double sense in which some things can be taken. But this is not the familiar split-level construction of a literal meaning, on the one hand, and a symbolic meaning, on the other. It is the difference, rather, between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice
[281].
It is certainly possible to read Spartacus: Blood and Sand as pure artifice; as an
“apolitical” show that, while possessing pretensions of offering serious commentary on the entrenched class system in operation within Roman society, operates more successfully as a visually pleasurable if excessive simulacra of a mass media-inspired version of Ancient Rome (Sontag 279). Conversely, it is likewise possible to read the series as wholly literal, in its intent, in its depiction of violence, in its characterizations, and even in the construction of its fantastic, soap opera-like plots. This dualistic, serio-artificial nature hallmarks Spartacus: Blood and Sand and its relationship to its own camp tendencies and sensibilities.
Though most critics were universally condemnatory of the quality of Spartacus: Blood and Sand, a slightly more ambivalent view of the show’s successes and failures could be found in the acerbic Guardian television critic Charlie Brooker’s review. While Brooker similarly notes the show’s formulaic and repetitive narrative, which “consists of weekly kill-or-be-killed hack-and-slash encounters in the coliseum,” the writer is able to appreciate the show’s more intentionally lurid excesses on their own, pulp-influenced terms: Spartacus starts to improve exponentially until somewhere round episode five, where you stop enjoying it ironically and start to enjoy it outright. Yes, it may be the kind of show in which a tattooed warrior gets his face hacked off by a man armed with a hook; it may feature lines like “your wife has been fucked to madness by a thousand vermin cocks”; it may toss in pointless cameos for one-armed topless transsexuals— and all three of these things genuinely happen in the early episodes— but it’s also not half bad. In fact I’d go as far as to say it actually gets quite good [Brooker].
In reading such a commentary one is brought back to Sontag’s theory of camp, particularly its demarcation as an interpretative reading strategy. Writing in their preface to Sontag’s essay in The Cult Film Reader, Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik note that Sontag suggests that camp prizes “travesty, double entendre [and] unintentional badness” (41). Indeed, Sontag’s essay develops this assertion, with the author going on to propose that such an aesthetic prac-
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tice inherently liberates the individual’s approach to cultural artifacts: “The experiences of Camp are based on the great discovery that the sensibility of high culture has no monopoly upon refinement. Camp asserts that good taste is not simply good taste; that there exists, indeed, a good taste of bad taste”
(50).
For Sontag this recognition of the operating practices of “bad taste” is integral to any understanding of the camp artifact, chief amongst the characteristics of which are a reliance on visual excess, often as a means of bringing attention to said artifact’s constructed nature: “To perceive Camp in objects and person is to understand Bein
g-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theatre” (41). Indeed, if there is one aspect of Spartacus: Blood and Sand that immediately differentiates it from other contemporary television shows, it is its excessive nature. As Brooker notes, the show’s depiction of explicit content is frequent, running throughout most episodes: “Roughly every 30 seconds someone gets an axe or sword in the face.
Roughly every 20 seconds a woman bares her breasts. Roughly every 10 seconds someone grunts a four-letter word starting with either ‘f ’ or ‘c’” (Brooker). An early highlight in this respect is the episode “The Thing in the Pit” (1:4), in which a disgraced Spartacus must fight in the illegal underground pits of Capua and beat the infamous Ixion, a grotesque giant of a man who wields a club and has a tendency to cut off the faces of his fallen victims and wear them as a mask.
Before encountering Ixion, Spartacus must defeat a range of lower-level fighters, which he proceeds to do in increasingly brutal ways, including skewering one with a large metal hook and bloodily puncturing the eyes of another. The extent to which this violence is warranted by the concerns of the narrative is a matter of subjective opinion, but it should not be forgotten that HBO’s Rome was critically lauded, in part, for its authentic depiction of life in the ancient city, an authenticity, which as Jerome De Groot suggests, was achieved by
“emphasis[ing] the dirt, squalor, and violence of the city, particularly shown in the explicit language, sex and violence” (199).
Whereas Rome may have managed to negotiate its often violent depiction of ancient civilization through claims to historical authenticity, this chapter argues that Spartacus: Blood and Sand takes a different route, portraying the acts of the violence between the show’s often hyper-masculine central characters in such an exaggerated fashion that a television viewing audience is encouraged to read them as overtly fantastical. Indeed, I would argue that an appreciation of the penchant for excess integral to the pulp genre is crucial to an understanding of Spartacus: Blood and Sand as a “successful” text. Thusly, in this chapter I will read the show as effectively borrowing both the Manichean storytelling techniques and visual extravagance that are often found in many video games as one of the most prevalent and popular instances of pulp in the early twenty first century. Of course, many contemporary video games are themselves often indebted to the sort of pulp fiction created by writers like Robert E.
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