Provocations

by Camille Paglia

  Among the major liberties taken with Homer’s plot is the collapsing of Hector’s death with Achilles’, so that Paris’ arrow strikes just as Achilles, who scarcely has time to gloat, begins to drag Hector’s corpse. Ulysses, however, is given a great line at Achilles’ fall: “So dies Greek courage, but not Greek cunning.” As the Greeks mope in their tents, Ulysses pitches his plan to them. They’re skeptical: “What are you dreaming of, Ulysses?” He replies, “I’m dreaming of my wife, the good, constant Penelope, and in my dreams I see myself returning to her with all the treasures of Troy.” Why couldn’t the screenplay maintain this quality of dialogue?

  The Trojan horse is sprightly and snappy-looking, its rear legs thrust back like those of a champion purebred dog. Our trusty sound engineers again deserve kudos for the raspy, creaking sound of its wheels. “Beware the Greeks bearing gifts,” says Helen, looking down from the city wall. This line from the Aeneid belongs to Laocoön, but he didn’t make it into the screenplay. The thought obviously doesn’t go very deep with Helen anyway, since she immediately changes her mind and turns pro-horse. The contrarian Cassandra, of course, wants it burned and lobbies her parents about it. Even though it’s night, Priam orders the thing immediately dragged into the city, which strains credulity.

  The very prolonged shot of the majestically moving horse, spotlit against the dark sky and coming directly at us through the huge metal doors and towering pylon of Troy, must have been overwhelming on the wide screen. This is great cinema, and Steiner’s score here is wonderfully funereal, music for a death march. Now all the Trojans, starved for a party, rush toward the horse, and the orgy begins. We get the usual biblical Golden Calf scene, where girls in short skirts do the hula or are carried around on platters. There’s also body surfing in the mosh pit under the imposingly tall horse and then a rather quickly devised amusement of dangling on vine-covered rope swings attached to its belly. Wine is quaffed from helmets until everyone passes out.

  When the Greek SWAT team rappels down from the horse and opens the gates, the scraping seems like a thunderclap in the heavy silence. The enemy pours in. “Troy is lost,” Priam very simply says. The sack of the city is fairly good, with rope trains of women led along to enslavement with tied hands, and wagons piled with booty rolling out the gates before the fire begins. We see Cassandra brutally seized by Ajax while she is praying at Athena’s shrine, but it’s difficult to understand why Pyrrhus’ gruesome, impious murder of Priam at the palace altar (recited even by the player in Hamlet) is always missing from these films, since a king’s fate symbolizes that of the nation.

  Somehow, in the middle of this mess, the fleeing Paris and Helen manage to run smack into Menelaus. A test of arms occurs, and Paris naturally falls only because he is stabbed from behind by a cowardly Greek. The last image of Troy is of the horse outlined against rising clouds of smoke, as chaos swirls below—another beautifully composed scene that must have been astonishing in the theater. The story ends there, except for a farewell shot that seems borrowed from Queen Christina (1933), where Greta Garbo stares mournfully out to sea. On the stern of a ship taking her back to Greece, the melancholy Helen is clearly thinking of her lost love. But barely a trace of the tragic destruction of an entire civilization seems to have left its mark on her smooth, rosy cheeks.

  * * *

  —

  By odd synchronicity, a month after the NBC Odyssey was broadcast, Jean-Luc Godard’s classic 1963 film, Contempt (Le Mépris), based on an Alberto Moravia novel, was re-released in restored form in the United States, to the ecstatic plaudits of critics. It was the avant-garde director’s first experience with CinemaScope, the eye-seducing medium of the 1950s ancient epics. The producers of Contempt were Joseph E. Levine and Carlo Ponti (who produced Ulysses).

  Like Fellini’s 8½ and Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973), Contempt is a movie about making a movie—in this case, of the Odyssey. Rugged Jack Palance, speaking in English (like Kirk Douglas as Ulysses), plays a pushy American movie producer, Jeremiah Prokosch, who descends on Rome like an angry god to deal with the project’s thorny problems. Asked why he hired a German director (Godard’s idol, the legendary Fritz Lang, playing himself), the producer invokes Heinrich Schliemann by name and declares, “The Odyssey needs a German director because the Germans discovered Troy.”

  Palance’s character wants new scenes invented for the Odyssey screenplay and hires a serious, intellectual writer, Paul (Michel Piccoli), to do them. The men’s first, tense encounter, mediated by an attractive female translator, occurs as Prokosch impatiently prowls the deserted Cinecittà lot. Surreal, intercut classical images flash before us: chalky white plaster casts, with garishly painted details (red eyes, blue lips, gold hair), of a kouros, Athena, Poseidon, the Apollo Belvedere, the Capitoline Venus, and Homer himself, presiding forlornly in a sunny meadow. Whether Godard is suggesting that the classics are dead and that, for better or worse, we have lost our link with the past, or whether he is portraying modern individuals as emotionally frozen and petrified, as in Alain Resnais’ sculpture-filled Last Year at Marienbad (1961), the effect of Contempt’s kitschy statuary is somewhat ridiculous. Compare, in contrast, Truffaut’s stunningly successful use of a statue evoking a Greek Cycladic idol in the garden of Jules and Jim (1961) to mirror the weathered beauty and sexual mystery of Jeanne Moreau.

  Attractions and rivalries among the characters of Contempt begin to parallel those of the Odyssey. The writer’s young wife, Camille (Brigitte Bardot), becomes the central point of an erotic triangle: feeling that Paul has in effect prostituted her by forcing her into the producer’s sports car, she turns against her husband and eventually abandons him. As their marriage chills, Paul muses about Homer: “Maybe Ulysses is really fed up with Penelope, and that’s why he goes to war.” There are scattered rereadings of the poem throughout the film: the Odyssey is about “a wife not loving her husband,” or Ulysses is gone for so long because “he doesn’t want to get home.” Even the producer tries his hand: “I rewrote the Odyssey last night,” announces Prokosch at one point. The poem becomes a prism through which the film’s shifting relationships are examined. The cynical director Lang has his own, more impersonal take on the material. He remarks, “The world of Homer was a real world that developed in harmony with nature. Homer’s reality is what it is. Take it or leave it.”

  While the principal characters dance and squabble, the actual filming of the Odyssey is under way. A rather limply unathletic Ulysses, wearing a sad-looking, off-the-shoulder, plaid smock, is seen padding around at the periphery of things; sometimes he has a bow and arrow and sometimes a sword, which in Contempt’s final shot he lifts skyward as he gazes, paralyzed, across the flat sea. Far more dynamic is the saucy script girl in short shorts and a striped halter top. “Act one, scene one!” she barks, whacking the clapper-board labeled “ODYSSEY” in front of the camera lens. Casting is still in flux: Laugh-In-like auditions for a floozy-type Nausikaä go on in an empty theater (interesting but not nearly as well done as the scene in Fellini’s 8½ where Marcello Mastroianni as the philandering director auditions actresses for the roles of his wife and mistress, as his real wife steams nearby).

  Contempt is full of ironic play with classical minutiae. Having a fit in a screening room, the producer kicks a stack of film cans and pretends to hurl one like a discus—like Myron’s statue but also like Odysseus on Phaeacia. Later, he hands Paul a book of Roman paintings—“to help with the Odyssey”—that Camille will listlessly leaf through. In their chicly furnished apartment, Paul slouches around in a white towel wrapped like a Roman toga (another borrowing from 8½), while Camille, announcing her future plans to sleep alone on the Italian-moderne red couch, perversely covers her blonde mane with a helmet-like black wig that critics see as an allusion to Godard’s estranged wife, actress Anna Karina, but that could also evoke the “thinking,” untouchable virgin goddess, Athena. The plucky, multilingual woman translator also has
Minervan mental qualities.

  As a rewriter, Paul the reluctant script doctor resembles Homer the bard, who reshaped the heroic lays of the Bronze Age Aegean. Contempt opens with a massive CinemaScope camera sliding down its track on a Mediterranean village street and turning to loom over us like one-eyed Polyphemus, a monstrous invader from infernal Hollywood. “The Cyclops scene” is explicitly announced on set later in the film, but what we actually see is a glum Camille in sunglasses (self-blinded?) moving away in a rowboat with Prokosch, anxiously watched by Paul from a cliff. Is she the Cyclops’ stolen sheep? Helen eloping with Paris? Or an impatient Penelope who sails for adventure while, in a modern sex reversal, her husband waits? The producer who kicks things about and aggressively guns his red sports car around corners is like Antinous, the cock-of-the-walk suitor who finally wins his unfaithful Penelope.

  The luxurious, Olympian hilltop house on Capri where jealousies simmer recalls both the emperor Tiberius’ dissolute villa on that island and, in its broad steps and bare platform roof, the ruined temple of Apollo at oracular Delphi. The pistol which Paul secretly begins to carry but which the plot stops him from using is like Odysseus’ bow, held in reserve for future vengeance. Fate or the gods intervene instead: Prokosch and Camille, bound for Rome in the sports car, collide with a gasoline truck and are killed. (Another gasoline truck as deus ex machina saves the hero from airborne destruction in North by Northwest [1959], directed by the New Wave’s ultimate auteur, Alfred Hitchcock.) As in the traffic-clogged Week-End (1967), Godard presents highway accidents as modern shipwrecks, like those barely survived by tenacious Odysseus.

  Brigitte Bardot has been a persistent presence in our Homeric tour. A bubbly ingenue in Helen of Troy, she is in full, sulky flower in Contempt, where she has become the archetypal sex bomb still imitated by Claudia Schiffer and Pamela Anderson Lee. But Bardot also has an unexpected connection to Ulysses. In Venice on a break from shooting that film, Kirk Douglas saw “the most gorgeous creature—long, silky blond hair, beautiful breasts, never-ending legs—running toward me in a bikini, a sight I will remember long after my eyes fail me.”2

  The then-obscure, seventeen-year-old Bardot had met Douglas when she was playing a bit part in Act of Love, the film he completed in France before leaving for Rome to do Ulysses. Seeing her for that visionary moment in Venice, he sensed her future stardom. In the gratuitous seminude scenes demanded by the producers of Contempt, the camera caresses Bardot’s glossy curves as if she were an Arcadian landscape. Fusing Penelope with Circe and Calypso, she ultimately embodies immortal Aphrodite, the great goddess of love herself.

  1. The Ragman’s Son: An Autobiography (New York, 1988), p. 210.

  2. Ibid., p. 211, n. 1.

  * [The Odyssey, directed by Andrei Konchalovsky. Miniseries produced by American Zoetrope and Hallmark Entertainment for NBC (May 18 and 19, 1997).

  Review commissioned by editor-in-chief Herbert Golder for Arion, Fall 1997.]

  SEX, GENDER, WOMEN

  19

  SEX QUEST IN TOM OF FINLAND*

  A typical Tom of Finland drawing of a flirtatious hitchhiker flagging an interested motorcyclist. Tom’s dashing, glamorously leather-clad muscle men had an enormous influence on the style and sexual personae of gay men in the 1970s, following the birth of the gay liberation movement.

  The swaggering sexual personae of Tom of Finland’s world demonstrate the intimate intertwining of art and pornography, which moralists of both the Right and the Left have tried to drive apart. Tom’s sculptured physiques descend, via modern muscle magazines, from Michelangelo’s homoerotic dreams, where the male chest and biceps were extravagantly enlarged and complicated. Michelangelo in turn was inspired by Greco-Roman nudes, marble fragments like the massive, twisting Belvedere Torso then being excavated in Rome. Thus Tom’s erotic designs have an ancient lineage: he is meditating on one of the great themes of Western culture, the pagan glorification of the ideal male body, imagined as a sharp-contoured glyph of heroic human will.

  Tom’s images are usually all foreground, with background minimal or missing. His assertive, theatrical figures fill the page and threaten to escape it. We are plunged into a mental landscape where the sex impulse represents pure energy and eternal youth. There is no fatigue or hesitation; resistance is merely a game to inflame desire. Subordination is never degradation, as it so often is in the Marquis de Sade, whose passive victims become non-persons, like meat fed through a grinder. In Tom of Finland, in contrast, the bottom partner retains his monumentality and explosive charge. Surrender is not annihilation but exhilarating play.

  Uniforms, a bequest of Tom’s army service in wartime Europe, symbolize social hierarchies melted and subverted by mischievous biology. They represent laws and limits undone or mastered by the greater tyranny of lust. When Nazi regalia are shockingly evoked, we are forced to weigh basic ethics and tragic historical memory against the brute seduction of absolute power. Tom’s Aryan projections (including his somewhat Europeanized blacks) draw on the thunder-and-lightning Nordic myths that the Nazis mixed with Rosicrucian mysticism. His half-clad hitchhikers or bully motorcyclists are like roadside hallucinations, impish divinities suddenly springing up from woods and streams.

  But there is no Sturm und Drang or Michelangelesque angst in Tom’s emotional atmosphere. On the contrary, we are charmed and disarmed by his infectious wry humor. His prankish predators and their transient playthings are joyous and ebullient, as they rollick in a privileged zone that is marvelously free of the censoring superego of parents or God and where even policemen forget their mission and join the fun. As if by merciless revolution, the elders, with their sluggish prudence, have been swept from the earth. At first glance, Tom’s tangled, orgiastic tableaux sometimes look like nostalgic memories of schoolyard wrestling, with murky desires brazenly externalized.

  A case could be made from a conservative viewpoint that Tom’s work is illustration, not art; that his draftsmanship, often based on photos, can be fussy or pat; and that his faces are generic, even sentimental, and lack subtext. Critical appreciation of Tom’s totally figurative work—which first broke into major museum status in the U.S. through tributes by his gifted admirer, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe—was retarded not simply because of Tom’s extreme gay content but because his creative maturation coincided with the hegemony of radical abstraction in art. I would strongly argue, in Tom’s defense, that photorealism is central to the twentieth-century era of cinema and advertising and that his fantastic action figures, recalling the superheroes of comic books, belong to the graphic tradition of animation—an ever-expanding genre that may be currently eclipsing the fine arts in prestige and influence.

  Tom’s square-jawed faces, with their glinting eyes and fixed smiles, are masks, denoting a class or clan rather than an individual. Early Greek kouroi (sculptures of nude young athletes and warriors) also sported an unvarying and ambiguous “Archaic” smile, shared by female figures. The Archaic smile can be interpreted (as I have done elsewhere) as a motif of springtime freshness, of nature’s new beginnings. Tom’s dashing ephebi, with their ripening pectorals and swollen buttocks, have internalized the fertility principle which is normally the province of women, who rarely appear in Tom’s pictures save as waspish soubrettes or crones.

  Tom of Finland was crucial in the development of my own thinking about art and gender. He armed me as a dissident feminist for my long war against the puritan ideologues and philistines who co-opted American feminism in the 1970s and who perversely turned against the 1960s sexual revolution: their reactionary movement would reach its peak in the 1980s in the fanatical anti-pornography crusades of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. Anyone familiar with Tom’s exuberant gay wonderland would have found as patently ridiculous as I did the feminist mantra that pornography is nothing but an instrument of political intimidation by which men threaten women with rape or, even more ab
surd, that pornography actually causes rape.

  There is no doubt, however, that in Tom’s work, the penis is power. Stunningly exaggerated (as in Aubrey Beardsley’s witty rococo drawings), it is less a political weapon or club than a primitive totem, the ecstatic focus of a ritual cult. Tom’s flaunted, mammoth phalli, thick and fibrous, are like serpentine vines or trees, brimming with sap. They are Dionysian maypoles around which his sparring characters collect and carouse. Everything bursts with vitality, including Tom’s impossibly wedge-shaped torsos, where brawny shoulders broaden like oaks from slim hips. Gloved in super-tight clothing, the body itself is tumescent.

  Tom’s taunting sexual marauders are like Vikings or Goths, opportunistic adventurers who still roam or work in the open, while most men are hopelessly chained to office and home. His leathermen, draped in living, breathing animal skins, are wed to nature. Tom’s typical scenarios of hunt and capture have atavistic analogies in ancient and tribal ritual—particularly his bondage, flagellation, and crucifixion scenes, where nipples are wrenched or the teeming scrotum gripped and stretched. And his stockade-like panoramas of trampling boots recall Minoan murals of ritual bull-dancing, where the celebrant risked mutilation or death beneath the hooves of a beast worshipped for its pugnacious virility. But in Tom’s utopia, every wound is magically healed, and no scars remain.