Screening Love and Sex in the Ancient World

Screening Love and Sex

in the Ancient World

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Edited by

Monica S. Cyrino

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SCREENING LOVE AND SEX IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

Copyright © Monica Cyrino, 2013.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the

United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth

Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of

the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan

Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998,

of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above

companies and has companies and representatives throughout the

world.

Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United

States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN: 978- 1- 137- 29959- 8

Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available from

the Library of Congress.

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Scribe Inc.

First edition: February 2013

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Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Screening Love and Sex in the Ancient World 1

Monica S. Cyrino

Part 1: Screening Love and Sex in Ancient Myth and Literature

1 G. W. Pabst’s Hesiodic Myth of Sex in

Die Büchse der Pandora (1929) 11

Lorenzo F. Garcia Jr.

2 Kiss Me Deadly (1955): Pandora and Prometheus in

Robert Aldrich’s Cinematic Subversion of Spillane 25

Paula James

3 Perversions of the Phaeacians: The Gothic Odyssey of

Angels & Insects (1996) 39

Meredith Safran

4 Woman Trouble: True Love and Homecoming in

Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver (2006) 55

Corinne Pache

5 Sappho and Pocahontas in Terrence Malick’s

The New World (2005) 69

Seán Easton

6 Soul Fuck: Possession and the Female Body in

Antiquity and in Cinema 85

Kirsten Day

7 Ancient Allusions and Modern Anxieties in

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) 99

Christopher M. McDonough

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contentsvi

Part 2: Screening Love and Sex in Ancient History

8 Gorgo at the Limits of Liberation in

Zack Snyder’s 300 (2007) 113

Vincent Tomasso

9 Oliver Stone’s Unmanning of Alexander the

Great in Alexander (2004) 127

Jerry B. Pierce

10 The Order of Orgies: Sex and the Cinematic Roman 143

Stacie Raucci

11 Partnership and Love in Spartacus: Blood and Sand (2010) 157

Antony Augoustakis

12 Objects of Desire: Female Gazes and Male Bodies

in Spartacus: Blood and Sand (2010) 167

Anise K. Strong

13 Glenn Close Channels Theda Bara in Maxie (1985):

A Chapter in the Social History of the Snake Bra 183

Gregory N. Daugherty

14 Virility and Licentiousness in

Rome’s Mark Antony (2005– 7) 195

Rachael Kelly

15 Love, Rebellion, and Cleavage: Boadicea’s Hammered

Breastplate in The Viking Queen (1967) 211

Alison Futrell

16 Subverting Sex and Love in

Alejandro Amenábar’s Agora (2009) 227

Joanna Paul

Filmography 243

Bibliography 247

List of Contributors 263

Index 267

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Illustrations

1.1 A blackmail note written on a newspaper photograph

of Lulu (Louise Brooks) in Die Büchse der Pandora

(1929). Süd- Film. 14

2.1 Christina (Cloris Leachman) strikes an arresting Pandora

pose in the headlamps of an oncoming car in Kiss Me Deadly (1955). United Artists. 29

3.1 Eugenia (Patsy Kensit) channels Aphrodite to seduce

William (Mark Rylance) in Angels & Insects (1996).

Samuel Goldwyn Company. 45

4.1 Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) sings a song of homecoming

in Volver (2006). Sony Pictures Classics. 65

5.1 Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher) considers the nature

of love in The New World (2005). New Line Cinema. 74

6.1 The Oracle (Kelly Craig) in an ecstatic frenzy in Zack

Snyder’s 300 (2007). Warner Bros. 90

7.1 Adam Pontipee (Howard Keel) uses Plutarch to explain

gender relations in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954).

Metro- Goldwyn- Mayer. 101

8.1 Gorgo (Lena Headey) penetrates Theron (Dominic

West) in 300 (2007). Warner Bros. 120

9.1 Alexander (Colin Farrell) receives a shoulder massage

from Hephaestion (Jared Leto) in Alexander (2004).

Warner Bros. 134

10.1 Agrippa (Allen Leech) lectures Maecenas (Alex Wyndham)

on the impropriety of attending an orgy in Rome (2007).

HBO- BBC. 151

11.1 Pietros (Eka Darville) and Barca (Antonio Te Maioha)

enjoy an intimate moment in Spartacus: Blood and Sand

(2010). Starz. 161

12.1 Ilithyia (Viva Bianca) takes possession of Crixus (Manu

Bennett) in Spartacus: Blood and Sand (2010). Starz. 174

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illustrationsviii

13.1 “Maxie” (Glenn Close) wears Cleopatra’s snake bra in

Maxie (1985), as an uncredited Harry Hamlin watches.

Orion Pictures. 188

14.1 Antony (James Purefoy) ignores his twin children by

Cleopatra (Lyndsey Marshal) in Rome (2007).

HBO- BBC. 206

15.1 Salina (Carita) takes on the breastplate of Boadicean

destiny in The Viking Queen (1967). Twentieth

Century Fox. 222

16.1 Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) attempts to save the Library’s

scrolls in Agora (2009). Focus Features/Newmarket

Films. 235

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Acknowledgments

My sincerest thanks to Cynthia Miller for her inspiration and support

at the outset of this adventure. I’d like to thank the organizers and

participants of the November 2010 Film and History Conference in

Milwaukee, Wisconsin, sponsored by the Center for Film and His-

tory at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, and the organizers and

participants of the July 2011 Cinema and Antiquity: 2000– 2011 J. P.

Postgate Colloquium in Liverpool, UK, sponsored by the University

of Liverpool, for constructive critical feedback on the papers and pre-

sentations that eventually became chapters of this book.

At Palgrave Macmillan in New York, I’m grateful to my editor,

Robyn Curtis, and her editorial assistant, Desiree Browne, for their

professional expertise and encouragement in seeing this project to

fruition. My gratitude also goes to the anonymous readers whose

comments, insights, and suggestions immeasurably improved the

scholarly work presented herein.

This volume was completed with a generous grant of funding from

Walter Putnam, Chairman of the Department of Foreign Languages

and Literatures at the University of New Mexico, and I thank him for

seeing the importance of supporting this work.

Most of all I’d like to thank my sixteen brilliant and screen- savvy

contributors, whose enthusiastic participation, patience, flexibility,

collegiality, and good humor made this project a joy to complete.

And finally, my heartfelt appreciation goes to Brian, Stevie, Chloe,

and Lucy for always reminding me what is real, and to whom I dedi-

cate this volume with love.

Albuquerque, New Mexico

July 2012

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4

I n t r o d u c t i o n



Monica S. Cyrino

Love and sex attracted the earliest filmmakers to screen the mythol-

ogy, literature, and history of the ancient world. Images and narratives

of torrid romance, provocative sexualities, and erotic excess have been

a mainstay of screen depictions of ancient Greece and Rome since the

beginning of cinema in the early twentieth century. Vibrant scenes

of baths, orgies, and brothels were first borrowed from nineteenth-

century paintings, photographic tableaux vivants, and stage plays, and

given new life in the nascent medium of film, and then they were later

reanimated on ancient- themed television series. By seizing the oppor-

tunity to exhibit scantily clad dancing girls and bare- chested muscle

men mingling with pagan abandon at bacchanals, banquets, and

gladiator games, cinematic entrepreneurs are able to satisfy both their

artistic and commercial senses. Characters, themes, and plots centered

on romance and sexuality continue to appear in the most recent recre-

ations of antiquity in blockbuster movies and on premium cable tele-

vision. Today, filmmakers and television producers regularly return

to classical antiquity as a persistent, powerful source of historical, lit-

erary, and mythological models for representing sexuality— its prob-

lems, pleasures, and intimate link to gender roles— to be celebrated

on the screen, as well as for negative paradigms to be confronted,

censured, or covertly savored.

Screening the history, imagined and “real,” of famous ancient bat-

tles and political intrigues has always been infused with a heavy dose of

pal-cyrino-book.indb 1 1/10/13 10:19 AM

Monica S. Cyrino2

love and sex. Although the notorious— and visually titillating— sexual

debauchery of ancient Rome has especially captivated filmmakers

throughout the first century of cinema and television, the complicated

erotic inclinations of the ancient Greeks have also received screen

time. The artistic preference for screening antiquity as a time of sexual

exploration and excitement— where the lack of erotic inhibition is set

against the rise of powerful warriors, politicians, and femmes fatales, as well as the birth of great empires and their eventual decay and

destruction— has provided the historical framework for literally hun-

dreds of films and television programs set in the ancient Greek and

Roman worlds. From the various cinematic versions of Cleopatra as

a spectacle of sex and power (such as Cecil B. DeMille’s in 1934 and

Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s in 1963), to the eye- popping exposure of

buff male physicality in Zack Snyder’s 300 (2007), to the recent cable

television adaptation of the Spartacus story with its unparalleled dis-

play of graphic nudity, sex, and violence (Spartacus: Blood and Sand

on Starz, 2010), these recreations transport the viewer back to an

imagined ancient world brimming with enormous romantic passions

and sexual appetites. While purporting to offer a morally edifying

illustration of the dangers of overreaching power and erotic license,

the process of screening antiquity has at the same time allowed film-

makers and television producers to exploit the audience’s pervasive

and prurient fascination with the unbridled and alluring sexualities of

the ancient Greeks and Romans. Modern fascination with and anxi-

eties about love and sex are thereby projected back vividly onto the

ancient world onscreen.

Along with ancient historical accounts, the narratives and motifs of

classical mythology and literature have also provided a wide range of

thematic material for filmmakers and television producers to engage

with topics of love and sexuality, gender and power, erotic desire and

jealousy, loss and reunion. In using the archetypal characters and plot

outlines from ancient myth and literature, rather than strict “history,”

writers and directors find themselves more free to adapt stories and

images of romance and sexuality to the screen, often locating them

in a temporal setting far removed from antiquity, or even in the mod-

ern day. For example, the Greek myth of the first woman, Pandora,

together with the erotic danger she brought to mankind, has inspired

the cinematic narratives of numerous films, from the silent film clas-

sic of consuming female sexuality in G. W. Pabst’s Die Büchse der Pandora (1929), to the evocative name of the lush tropical moon,

Pandora, lethal but valuable to humans, in James Cameron’s futuris-

tic adventure Avatar (2009), while the epic tale of Homer’s Odyssey,


Screening Love and Sex in the Ancient World 3

with its exotic, sexually adventurous travel narrative embedded within

a frame of enduring conjugal love, has been reimagined countless

times in films such as Mervyn LeRoy’s romantic drama, Homecom-ing (1948), the Coen brothers’ caper comedy, O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), and Anthony Minghella’s Civil War love story, Cold

Mountain (2003). Films like these allow viewers to enjoy the essence

of an ancient literary work or myth distilled into its most basic narra-

tive and authentic archetypal paradigms of love, sexuality, and gender

that resonate deeply with the contemporary world. Moreover, since

these films are not bound by any obligation to recreate a genuine

ancient setting or a precise historical context, the filmmaker can take a

more direct and innovative approach to the timeless themes and char-

acters, just as the ancient authors and mythographers did.

This volume of essays has the ambitious aim of engaging with these

two reception strands for screening love and sex in the ancient world,

both the mythic/literary approach, and the historical one; in doing

so, the chapters seek to demonstrate the importance of understanding

the many different ways in which filmmakers and television produc-

ers use the past to explore contemporary issues of love and sexuality.

In 16 original and compelling essays, the contributors to this proj-

ect address the question of how love and sex are portrayed in films

that refer to the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, either directly in

the context of ancient history, or indirectly through allusion to clas-

sical mythology and literature. These 16 chapters are organized into

two sections: the first half focuses on films that evoke characters and

themes from ancient myths and literature, and the second half deals

with onscreen representations of subjects rooted (more or less) in his-

torical accounts from antiquity. While the division reveals productive

connections between separate analyses, it is also somewhat arbitrary:

where does the boundary between myth and history break down? The

ancient Romans themselves viewed the foundational legend of the

Rape of the Sabine Women as something close to sacred history, while

the historical Battle of Thermopylae (in 480 B.C.), where three hun-

dred elite Spartan warriors gave their lives to hold off the invading

Persian force, was quickly mythologized in its own time by the ancient

Greeks who saw it as a conflict between Civilization and Barbarism.

Historical figures like Spartacus, the gladiator who led a slave rebel-

lion against Rome (in 73– 71 B.C.), and Boudicca, the warrior queen

of the Britons who fiercely opposed Roman military occupation (in

A.D. 61), have been romanticized by freedom- fighters as iconic sym-

bols of resistance against oppression down through the centuries and

in various cultural contexts up to the present day. Yet, as the essays in


Monica S. Cyrino4

this volume show, the sometimes murky space between mythology

and history can be creatively negotiated by the themes of love and

sexuality when the ancient world is recreated onscreen.

Within the volume, and crossing over between the two sections,

the individual essays offer a great deal of diversity in subject matter—

chronology, genre of production, onscreen medium— just as they

utilize a variety of critical methodologies for analysis. There is a bal-

ance between films dealing with ancient Greece and those involving

ancient Rome, with both cultures of antiquity represented in each

section— myth and history— of the volume. In their essays, the con-

tributors examine a broad array of films and television programs,

starting from the silent film era and going all the way up to the most

recent cable television series, with discussions of numerous films from

several decades in between, while the type of productions they cover

include both art- house and independent films, as well as epics and

blockbusters. Many of the contributors are well- known scholars in the

area of classical receptions on film and television, but the volume also

showcases a number of exciting new voices who add fresh perspectives

to the conversation. The volume should be of great appeal and profes-

sional benefit to a wide range of scholars, teachers, students, and fans

of film and television, and it will be of particular interest to researchers

in the fields of classics, film studies, popular culture and media, and

the history of human sexuality.

Part 1 considers several films that draw their inspiration from

ancient mythological or literary characters, plots, and motifs to explore

the themes of love and sex onscreen. The first two chapters deal with

two early films (1929 and 1955) that allude to the figure of Pandora,

the first female who appears in Greek “myth- time,” and her relation-

ship to the males around her. In Chapter 1, “G. W. Pabst’s Hesiodic

Myth of Sex in Die Büchse der Pandora (1929),” Lorenzo F. Garcia

Jr. establishes the fact that Greek myths about erotic passion and sexu-

ality infiltrated the modern cinema from its beginnings in the silent

film industry. Garcia examines the way Pabst uses the iconic image of

Hesiod’s Pandora to associate female sexuality with economic produc-

tion and fertility; he argues that the character of the femme fatale Lulu

is ultimately exposed, just like Pandora’s emptied box of evils, as a

barren and unproductive commodity. In Chapter 2, “Kiss Me Deadly (1955): Pandora and Prometheus in Robert Aldrich’s Cinematic Sub-

version of Spillane,” Paula James joins Pandora with Prometheus,

the culture hero in the Hesiodic creation myth who brought fire to

humans and punishment on himself, to analyze the classic film noir

based on the mystery novel. James raises important questions about



gender roles and biases evident in the midcentury cinema, as she

explores how Aldrich updates the ancient myth of female duplicity

and male fallibility to reflect contemporary anxieties about nuclear

technologies in the 1950s.

The next two chapters investigate the nature of conjugal love and

fidelity as well as the themes of separation, return, and reunion, as

portrayed in Homer’s epic poem, the Odyssey, and how these par-

ticular motifs manifest themselves in two recent films. In Chapter 3,

“Perversions of the Phaeacians: The Gothic Odyssey of Angels & Insects (1996),” Meredith Safran elucidates how director Philip Haas

distilled Homeric material from the novella on which the film is based

(A. S. Byatt’s “Morpho Eugenia,” 1992) and made these images

and ideas explicit onscreen in his gothic sexual morality tale. Safran’s

analysis juxtaposes the characters of Homer’s Odysseus and the film’s

William Adamson and considers the film’s alternative plot scenario

where the protagonist is enticed to choose a profitable and pleasurable

marriage abroad rather than the delayed gratification of homecom-

ing. In Chapter 4, “Woman Trouble: True Love and Homecoming

in Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver (2006),” Corinne Pache argues that the

film, while perhaps not directly influenced by the Odyssey, is subtly

and ingeniously engaged with the epic’s foremost themes of memory,

identity, and return. Pache introduces another early Greek poem, the

Homeric Hymn to Demeter, to illuminate how Almodóvar’s film offers

a radical feminization of the male heroism implicit in the Odyssey’s journey and homecoming themes— one that privileges female familial

bonds over those of romantic or conjugal love.

The last three chapters of the first section look at films inspired by

classical Greek and Latin literary topics and motifs centered on love,

gender, and sexuality. In Chapter 5, “Sappho and Pocahontas in Ter-

rence Malick’s The New World (2005),” Seán Easton sifts through the

literary allusions underlying the film’s presentation of the legendary

love affair between Pocahontas and John Smith during the found-

ing of the Jamestown colony. While critics have noted that the film

is rooted in the male- centered, classical epic tradition, Easton dem-

onstrates how Malick integrates the verses of the archaic Greek love

poet, Sappho, to develop a model of female erotic consciousness that

serves to foreground Pocahontas as the protagonist of the film. In

Chapter 6, “Soul Fuck: Possession and the Female Body in Antiq-

uity and in Cinema,” Kirsten Day surveys several contemporary films,

from The Exorcist (1973) to Paranormal Activity (2009), that portray

female characters in the throes of supernatural or demonic possession

and links them to ancient Roman literary accounts of the prophetic


Monica S. Cyrino6

possession of female mediums. Describing these scenes as “spiritual

rape,” Day explains how the comparison with ancient depictions of

female possession exposes the sexualized representation of women’s

bodies on film as vessels to be controlled and manipulated for male pur-

poses. Last, in Chapter 7, “Ancient Allusions and Modern Anxieties in

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954),” Christopher M. McDonough

investigates the way Stanley Donen’s colorful film not only follows the

gender and genre conventions of the 1950s Hollywood musical but

also reflects those same conventions in classical literary accounts of the

Rape of the Sabine Women. As a cinematic commentary on gender

relations in midcentury America, McDonough shows how the film

cannily evokes male anxiety and female ambivalence about marriage

using the ancient tale of the early Romans’ abduction of their wives.

Part 2 of this volume presents discussions of films and television

series set, or imagined to take place, in the “real time” of ancient his-

tory; these chapters consider how the themes and images of love and

sexuality manifest themselves against the background of the genuine

(or what is presumed to be) historical record of antiquity. The first

two chapters in the second section focus on films set in the ancient

Greek world. In Chapter 8, “Gorgo at the Limits of Liberation in

Zack Snyder’s 300 (2007),” Vincent Tomasso evaluates the strong,

independent figure of the Spartan queen, Gorgo, as portrayed in the

recent blockbuster film, to outline the challenges of trying to depict

the sexuality and personal autonomy of historical female characters

in screening the ancient world. Tomasso intertwines ancient mate-

rial with modern reception theory to pose the vital question of how

popular representations of the ancient world should deal with the

historical realities of gender relations in antiquity and yet reconcile

them with the more progressive views held by contemporary society.

In Chapter 9, “Oliver Stone’s Unmanning of Alexander the Great in

Alexander (2004),” Jerry B. Pierce describes how the ancient epic

cinema sets up the male lead as a powerful standard of masculinity by

emphasizing tropes such as his moral fortitude and his familial and

sexual bonds, while depicting male antagonists as weak and feminized.

Against this conventional representation, however, Pierce argues that

Stone’s film presents an emotionally and sexually enfeebled Alexan-

der, whose character is drawn more like that of a villain or a tyrant,

thereby undermining the heroism of the historical figure the director

claimed he sought to portray.

The next three chapters deal explicitly with themes and images

of love and sexuality in representations of the ancient Roman world

in film and, especially, on television. In Chapter 10, “The Order of



Orgies: Sex and the Cinematic Roman,” Stacie Raucci presents a

detailed overview of several orgy scenes in films and television series

set in ancient Rome and elucidates how such onscreen depictions

of sex in ancient Roman settings allow modern viewers to examine

their own sexualities. Raucci sets up a distinction between “orderly”

and “chaotic” orgies, which reveals the tension between the narra-

tive purpose of the orgy scene— to indicate the more moral character

with whom the audience should identify— and the audience’s ability

to enjoy without restraint the spectacle of onscreen erotic decadence.

In Chapter 11, “Partnership and Love in Spartacus: Blood and Sand

(2010),” Antony Augoustakis makes the case for the major thematic

significance of love as portrayed in its many permutations during the

first season of the recent original television series on Starz. Joining

the concepts of love and heroism as the driving force of the narrative,

Augoustakis offers a close reading of how the relationships portrayed

on Spartacus influence the characters’ individual development, and

he demonstrates the way the series unites the themes of sex and love,

rather than setting them in opposition. In Chapter 12, “Objects of

Desire: Female Gazes and Male Bodies in Spartacus: Blood and Sand

(2010),” Anise K. Strong employs feminist and queer theory to show

how the Spartacus series develops a female- positive representation

of sexual relations that inverts conventional cinematic and televisual

depictions of erotic relationships and the objectification of women. In

assessing the female characters’ sexual dominance and agency, as well

as the mechanisms at work in the “female gaze,” Strong explains how

Spartacus explores the nature of social hierarchies and the corruption

of slave- owning societies.

The following two chapters look at onscreen appearances of two of

the most familiar celebrities from the annals of ancient history, Cleopatra

and Mark Antony, who were also (notoriously) lovers. In Chapter 13,

“Glenn Close Channels Theda Bara in Maxie (1985): A Chapter in the

Social History of the Snake Bra,” Gregory N. Daugherty takes a film

not usually on the radar screen in studies of Cleopatra receptions and

locates it on a multimedia trajectory of numerous popular Cleopatras.

In a close examination of one noteworthy scene in the film, Daugherty

shows how certain costuming details, and in particular the metallic snake

bra, visually invoke the sexy image of the Egyptian queen to suggest her

silent film heyday as a Vamp rather than her classical past. In Chapter 14,

“Virility and Licentiousness in Rome’s Mark Antony (2005– 7),” Rachael

Kelly situates the onscreen figure of Mark Antony within a long his-

tory of patriarchal anxiety about the depiction of hegemonic maleness.

Using masculinity studies and feminist film theory, Kelly interprets the


Monica S. Cyrino8

character’s sexual availability on the HBO- BBC series Rome as the narra-

tive and visual embodiment of his “deficient masculinity,” as she unpacks

the ambiguities inherent in the terms “licentiousness” and “virility” and

suggests that the concept of fatherhood serves as a signifier of successful

masculine performance in the series.

The last two chapters of this section explore the narratives of two

extraordinary historical women from the ancient world— Boudicca, the

Briton queen, and Hypatia, the Alexandrian teacher and astronomer—

and how the cinematic receptions of their stories engage with themes

of love, gender, and sexuality. In Chapter 15, “Love, Rebellion, and

Cleavage: Boadicea’s Hammered Breastplate in The Viking Queen

(1967),” Alison Futrell surveys the history of the Boudiccan Revolt

against Rome and the various receptions of the figure before turning

to an analysis of the story as portrayed in the lurid screen production

from Hammer Studios. Locating the film in the tradition of “barbarian

queen” portrayals and revisionist Hammer tales of female leadership,

Futrell describes how the film deploys the normative female- gendered

tropes of star- crossed romance, familial loyalty, and feminine sacrifice

to complicate— and ultimately doom— the rebel queen’s author-

ity. Finally, in Chapter 16, “Subverting Sex and Love in Alejandro

Amenábar’s Agora (2009),” Joanna Paul considers the bold innova-

tion of Agora among ancient epic films for its setting in late antiquity,

its nuanced depiction of religion and intellectual culture, and most

significant, its presentation of the scholar Hypatia as a woman who is

not primarily defined by her male romantic or familial relationships.

Paul argues that the film’s originality lies in its use of the central female

character to subvert epic cinematic conventions concerning love and

sex, while it positions her brutal murder by zealots (in A.D. 415) as a

symbol of the demise of the classical world.

When it comes to screening the universal themes of romance and

sexuality, those films and television series based on the history, litera-

ture, and mythology of the ancient world have always succeeded in

arousing audience expectations, anxieties, and desires. The essays in

this volume offer a distinctive focus on the issues of love and sex that

have always been— and will continue to be— so prominent in screen-

ings of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, as they contribute to

the fruitful ongoing dialogue between scholars, critics, and fans of the

films and television series that recreate antiquity onscreen.


4

P a r t 1

Screening Love and Sex in

Ancient Myth and Literature


4

C h a p t e r 1

G. W. Pabst’s Hesiodic Myth of Sex

in D I E B Ü C H S E D E R P A N D O R A ( 1929)

Lorenzo F. Garcia Jr.

G. W. Pabst’s late silent era masterpiece depicts Louise Brooks as

Lulu, a beautiful young woman whose unfettered sexuality leads to

the ruin of those men and women who fall under her erotic sway.1 She

is described as “Pandora” by the prosecutor at her husband’s murder

trial and is condemned by the court, made an outlaw of the legal sys-

tem in all its patriarchic glory. In critical work on Pabst’s film, many

scholars have drawn a connection between Lulu and the Pandora of

Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days2 to elucidate the film’s mytho-

logical background. Karin Littau (1995), Laura Mulvey (1996), and

Maree Macmillan (2010) trace Lulu back to the mythological figure of

Pandora to analyze how a figure associated with agricultural fertility—

Pandora the “all giver”— becomes a femme fatale who takes men’s

goods and in return provides only evils— Pandora the “all given.”3

The precise emphasis on fertility in the Pandora myth, however, has

not been sufficiently read into Pabst’s film or Frank Wedekind’s earlier

play Pandora’s Box, which Pabst drew on.

In this chapter I argue that Pabst and Wedekind’s misogynist

visions of Lulu’s vibrant sexuality echo a tradition first stated in Hes-

iod’s poetry. According to Hesiod’s theory of sexual economy, later

constitutive of Western concepts of gendered power relations, nonpro-

ductive female sexuality is depicted as pure expenditure without profit

(Theogony 592– 602). Only through productive sexual relations does

the female body make a return on male investment of labor. Hesiod’s


Lorenzo F. Garcia Jr.12

“Pandora” symbolizes both the destructive and the valuable poten-

tial of sexual relations, since Pandora is the source of both mortality

itself— namely, labor, old age, disease, and death (Works and Days 42– 48, 90– 105)— and the unborn child “Hope” (Works and Days 93)

that remains within her jar- like uterus. The demise of Pabst’s Lulu,

then, signals a kind of patriarchal punishment of Lulu’s failure to be a

productive investment instead of a wasteful expenditure.

Pabst and Wedekind: The Image of Lulu

G. W. Pabst’s screenplay (cowritten by Ladislaus Vajda) is based on

the five- act “Monstertragedy” (Eine Monstretragödie) by Frank Wede-

kind, written between 1892 and 18954 but later divided into Erdgeist “Earth Spirit” (1895) and Die Büchse der Pandora “Pandora’s Box”

(first published 1902, but continually revised under threat of cen-

sorship until 1913).5 Early performances of the plays featured Wede-

kind himself as Dr. Schön/Jack the Ripper and Tilly Newes, whom

Wedekind would later wed, as Lulu.6 Pabst’s script recombines the

two plays into a single work as Wedekind originally intended, but it

condenses the plot at many points and expands at others. Lulu’s three

marriages in Wedekind’s plays— to Dr. Goll, the painter Schwartz, and

the newspaper editor Dr. Schön— are reduced to a single marriage in

Pabst’s film, though that marriage is made paradigmatic so as to stand

in for others.7 Pabst innovates at several points, such as the courtroom

scene where Lulu is tried for Dr. Schön’s murder, a scene that does

not appear in Wedekind’s plays.

Although Pabst’s Pandora’s Box is well known in cinema studies,

it is less so for those who study classics, so I provide a brief plot sum-

mary. As the film begins, Lulu (Louise Brooks) is visited by Dr. Schön

(Fritz Kortner), her lover and the editor of a widely distributed news-

paper, because he wants to break off their relations so he can maintain

public respectability and marry the daughter of an important govern-

ment official (Daisy D’Ora). Lulu rejects the breakup; “You’ll have to

kill me to get rid of me,” she says,8 and she seduces Schön beneath a

painting of herself.

In the second act, Schön’s son, Alwa (Franz Lederer), is producing

a dance revue with costumes designed by Countess Geschwitz (Alice

Roberts), “who is clearly represented as a woman defined by mas-

culine features.”9 Alwa and Geschwitz look at sketches of costumed

women; Lulu enters and insists Geschwitz design costumes for her;

Alwa and Geschwitz gaze at her with desire.10 Schön and Alwa vie

with one another over Lulu. Schön authorizes Alwa to include Lulu


G. W. Pabst’s Hesiodic Myth of Sex 13

in his revue and promises his paper will make it a success. Father and

son bond over the exchange of Lulu as sexual object and as image fig-

ured in Geschwitz’s drawings, and they part with Schön’s paternalistic

advice: “Beware of that woman!”11

The third act takes place backstage at Alwa’s production. Schön

attends the opening with his fiancée, and they both catch sight of

Lulu; when Lulu spies Schön with his fiancée, she refuses to perform

(“I’ll dance for the world, but not for that woman”).12 Instead, Lulu

stages her own drama in which she seduces Schön in front of his fiancée

and son. When the pair sees Lulu and Schön kissing, Lulu smiles at

her victory and returns onstage.13 The act ends with Schön telling

Alwa that he must now marry Lulu.

Schön marries Lulu only to find she is unfaithful to him, and his

house and bedroom are filled with hidden lovers. Schön reestab-

lishes his authority by the obvious phallic gesture of drawing a pistol

to chase out would- be lovers, and then he tries to force Lulu to

shoot herself, as he claims, “so that she does not make him a mur-

derer as well.”14 In an ensuing struggle, Schön is shot and dies. Lulu

is tried for Schön’s murder. The prosecutor’s argument explicitly

compares Lulu to the mythological figure of Pandora: “Your honors,

and gentlemen of the jury! The Greek gods created a woman— Pandora.

She was beautiful and charming, and versed in the art of flattery . . . But

the gods also gave her a box containing all the evils of the world. The

heedless woman opened the box, and all evil was loosed upon us . . .

Counsel, you portray the accused as a persecuted innocent. I call her

Pandora, for through her all evil was brought upon Dr. Schön! . . .

The arguments of the defense counsel do not sway me in the least. I

demand the death penalty!”15 Lulu is found guilty and flees from the law.

Driven by the consequences of her polyandry from respect-

able society to an illicit gambling boat somewhere in Paris, Lulu

is blackmailed by men who know she is hiding from the police. In

particular, Marquis Casti- Piani (Michael von Newlinsky) recognizes

Lulu from a newspaper photograph; when he learns he can make

more money by selling her into sexual slavery, he speaks with an

Egyptian slaver, showing him photographs of Lulu in various cos-

tumes. Lulu escapes the gambling ship dressed in the outfit of a

young sailor she has seduced, and she flees once again to the red-

light district of London. In London she becomes a streetwalker to

support herself, Alwa, and her pimp/father figure Schigolch (Carl

Goetz); she is murdered on Christmas Eve in a violent encounter

with a “John” who turns out to be Jack the Ripper (Gustav Diessl).

Alwa meets Jack leaving Lulu’s ramshackle London flat, and the



two men walk off separately into the foggy London night, “like

men leaving the cinema . . . the sort of cinema that caters for men

in raincoats.”16

The film revolves around Lulu and her relations with men, or in

the case of the lesbian Geschwitz, a woman in a “masculine” relation

to Lulu. The relationships between Lulu and her masculine others are

specifically coded in terms of an exchange of money for visual plea-

sure.17 From the first shot of Lulu in the film— when Louise Brooks

appears framed in an open doorway— Lulu is marked as “image.”18

As noted in the summary, Lulu appears everywhere as “image”: she

seduces Schön beneath a painting of herself; Geschwitz, Alwa, and

Schön exchange sketches of her in costume; Casti- Piani recognizes

her from a photograph and later barters with a slave- trafficker over

photos of her. Lulu’s image captivates: throughout the film Brooks is

shot in soft- focus, softly lit close- ups, lifted from the background and

set in an imaginary space of pure fantasy.19 Her body is shiny: skin,

eyes, teeth, hair, and costume are highlighted with soft backlighting,

essentially fetishized by tricks of illumination.20 Schön’s name implies

a “would- be Renaissance aesthete,” and the artwork throughout his

home betrays his attraction to images.21 Lulu is captivated by her own

image, especially when she gazes at herself in a large mirror as she

takes off her wedding gown.22 In Wedekind’s play, Lulu and Alwa

speak about her reflection:

Figure 1.1 A blackmail note written on a newspaper photograph of Lulu (Louise

Brooks) in Die Büchse der Pandora (1929). Süd- Film.



Lulu: Looking at myself in the mirror I wished I were a man . . . my

own husband.

Alwa: You envy your husband the happiness you offer him.23

Even in death, Lulu remains image: in an extreme close- up as she

sits on Jack’s lap, Lulu’s face appears like a waning moon;24 the glow

of her face is matched only by that of the knife on the table as Jack

surveys her body.

At a key moment in Pabst’s film, Lulu’s trial, a scene wholly

invented by Pabst, Lulu is once more rendered an image. A defen-

dant dressed all in black, Lulu is the negative image of the veiled

bride she played in the preceding scene. She is gazed on by judges,

news reporters, and a full spectator galley. Photographers snap pic-

tures; artists sketch her. All the while, the prosecutor glares at her,

wearing a monocle that recalls Schön’s eye- piece: this is the paternal-

istic gaze that condemns Lulu.25 It is at this very moment that she is

identified with “Pandora.”

Pandora is the protofemale of Greek thought, created for men by

the gods.26 The economy of the image is a trope particularly at home

in the mythopoetic tradition of Pandora, as I detail in the next section.

The iconic dimension of Pandora has been well noted in scholarship

on Pabst’s film. What has been less noted is a secondary economy

underlying both mythological accounts of Pandora and Lulu: labor

and (re)productivity.

Hesiod’s Pandora: Exchange, Agricultural

Labor, and Sexual (Re)production

In the Theogony and Works and Days, Hesiod associates the creation of

the first woman, Pandora, with mankind’s mortality and need to work

for sustenance. In Hesiod’s works Pandora is created by the craft- god

Hephaestus as a punishment for Prometheus’s transgressions against

the gods on mankind’s behalf: Prometheus first deceives Zeus with

an unfair distribution of sacrificial offerings (Theogony 535– 60; Works and Days 47– 48) and then steals fire from the gods to give to men

(Theogony 561– 69; Works and Days 50– 52).27

Pandora appears in the context of exchange, both the sacrifice

offered to the gods and the price Zeus demands for fire, that marks

a fundamental separation between mankind and the gods; Pandora’s

advent signals the rupture between men and gods.28 According to the

logic of Hesiod’s account, then, before Pandora men lived without

labor, disease, and old age (Works and Days 90– 93):29



For before this, the races of men used to live on earth

far away and apart from evils and apart from hard toil

and painful diseases, which gave death to men.

A wretched life ages men before their time.

In this prelapsarian vision of human life before Pandora and the need

for sexual reproduction,30 the earth once produced of its own accord,

without need for human labor (Works and Days 112– 18):

They [= men] used to live like gods, with a carefree heart,

far away and apart from toil and misery. Nor at all was wretched

old age upon them, but always the same with respect to their feet

and hands

they took pleasure in feasts, outside of all evils.

They died as if overcome by sleep. All good things

were available for them. The life- giving plow land bore fruit

of its own accord— a great deal of it, unstintingly.

Hesiod imagines men living like gods before the anger of Zeus and

the advent of Pandora: their “carefree” life is described in terms of

distance from “evils” (113, 115): care, toil, misery, old age. The earth

was exuberantly fertile without added labor; man had only to gather

and eat what the earth produced of its own accord (118). Now, how-

ever, the procurement of grain requires agricultural labor: the earth

must be ploughed and sown in order to obtain “livelihood.”

Agricultural labor to obtain a “livelihood” is Zeus’s punishment for

mankind’s transgressions against the gods (Works and Days 42– 50):

The gods hid livelihood from men and keep it hidden.

For otherwise you could easily accomplish enough in a single day

so that you could go even a whole year and be free from work.

Then you could quickly set your rudder over the smoke of your

fireplace,

and the works of cattle and of labor- enduring mules could go

to hell.31

But Zeus hid it, since he was angry in his heart,

because the crooked- counselor Prometheus deceived him.

Indeed, that’s why Zeus devised grievous cares for men.

He hid fire.

Zeus hides both the fruit of the earth and fire from mankind (42, 47,

50). The term “livelihood” refers to the grains men eat and live on.32

In exchange for stolen fire (Works and Days 57; Theogony 570), Zeus



has Hephaestus create Pandora like a jar out of clay, and all the gods

contribute to her manufacture. Pandora’s body is itself a deception:

like the sacrificial offering that Prometheus set before Zeus in which

he arranged inedible bones and covered them with shining fat (Theog-ony 540– 41), so too does Pandora’s attractive exterior, tricked out

with a veil and shining clothing (Theogony 574), conceal a worthless

interior. In the Works and Days, Athena decks her out in finery (72);

the Graces and Persuasion give her jewelry (73– 74); the Hours crown

her (74– 75); and Hermes fills her with falsehood, beguiling speech,

and a thieving nature (77– 78). She is delivered to Epimetheus, Pro-

metheus’s brother, who fails to reject Zeus’s evil gift (cf. 57). Once

in Epimetheus’s home, Pandora opens the jar she has with her (Works and Days 93– 101):

But the woman with her hands removed the great lid of the jar

and scattered its contents. She devised grievous cares for men.

Only Hope there in the unbreakable house

remained inside under the lips of the jar and did not

fly outdoors, for before that she put back the lid of the jar

by the plans of cloud- gathering Zeus who bears the aegis.

The others, countless, grievous, wander among men,

since earth and sea are filled with evils.

With Pandora’s appearance, mankind suffers “grievous cares” (95):

these “grievous cares” Pandora brings recall the “grievous cares” (49)

men suffer when Zeus hid their livelihood. The repetition of “griev-

ous cares” in the two contexts— agricultural “labor” and opening

Pandora’s jar— draws a comparison between the earth and the female

body.33 With the appearance of Pandora, the female body, like the

earth, must be ploughed and inseminated to (re)produce. With sex-

ual reproduction comes labor— physical labor for man, child- bearing

labor for women— and here the association between Hesiod’s Pan-

dora and the Biblical Eve becomes clear. Like Adam sent from Para-

dise to work the land for food once given freely (Genesis 3:17– 19),

and like Eve who now must suffer labor pains when she delivers the

fruit of her body (Genesis 3:16), so too Hesiod’s mortal men must

suffer labor pains while they plow and inseminate for both agricultural

and sexual (re)production.

Sexual reproduction is explicitly linked with Pandora’s “jar.” Pan-

dora’s body, made of clay by Hephaestus, is precisely the “jar” that

she opens, as we see both in Hesiod and in the visual representa-

tion of Pandora as a combination of female and jar in the Campanian



red- figure neck- amphora dating to the late fifth century B.C.34 In the

medical tradition, early Hippocratics associated the female reproduc-

tive system with an inverted jar: the anatomy of the womb is likened

to that of a jar, and parts are named accordingly as lips, mouth, neck,

belly.35 Soranus notes that a woman’s body is closed when she is a vir-

gin, but once she has first engaged in sexual intercourse, she becomes

like an unstopped jar and leaks.36 Yet there is a way her body becomes

stopped again: through pregnancy. According to Hippocrates, “In

women who are pregnant, the mouth of the uterus closes” (Aphorisms 5.51). Hippocrates describes productive coitus as the “mouth” of the

female closing around male semen and holding it, like a well- made

jar. Nonproductive sex is indicated by the seepage of the semen from

the woman who fails to “close” her “mouth,” like a leaky jar (Hip-

pocrates, On Generation 5.1):37 “When a woman has intercourse, if

she is not going to conceive, then it is her practice to expel the sperm

from both partners whenever she wishes to do so. If however she is

going to conceive, the sperm is not expelled, but remains in the womb.

For when the womb has received the sperm it closes up and retains

it: this happens because the orifice of the womb contracts under the

influence of moisture. Then both what is provided by the man and

what is provided by the woman is mixed together.” The verb “to take

hold of” is used to indicate the female “conceiving” by “closing” the

“orifice”— literally “the mouth”— of her womb over the semen. When

a woman is not to conceive, she “expels” the semen: more literally, she

“pours it out.” That the womb is conceived as a kind of jar is patent

from this passage. Both true virginity and pending motherhood (i.e.,

during pregnancy) are moments when the female is “closed”: either

because her “jar” has not yet been opened, or because she has closed

her “jar” around male seed. In Hesiod’s account, the “Hope” that

remains inside the jar, then, is none other than the child conceived in

sexual intercourse: “Only Hope . . . remained inside under the lips of

the jar and did not fly outdoors, for before that she put back the lid

of the jar” (Works and Days 96– 98).38 Pandora conceives because she

stops the mouth of her jar and does not allow Epimetheus’s labor to

“fly outdoors.” The “hope” of marriage in Hesiod’s scheme is sexual

(re)production: the very model of agricultural labor.

The female who does not sexually reproduce, then, is like the earth

that does not bear fruit: from a patriarchal perspective (specifically

Hesiod, Wedekind, and Pabst’s), she is a waste of seed and labor.



Wedekind’s Lulu, Pabst’s Brooks: The

Exchange and Control of Fertility

Wedekind and Pabst’s Lulu was created as a Pandora- figure exchanged

by men. In Wedekind’s play her name appears as “from before the

flood” (vorsintflutlich), calling to mind Pandora, Eve, and perhaps

her willful, sexually active doublet, Lilith.39 Indeed, Wedekind’s early

name for his Lulu cycle was “Astarte,” the Greek name for the East-

ern Mediterranean goddess of fertility, sexuality, and warfare,40 and

in Erdgeist (II, ii) Lulu notes she is now called “Eve.”41 As with her

mythical predecessors, Lulu’s “fertility”— or lack thereof— is very

much on stage in Wedekind’s plays. In the Monstertragedy, Lulu talks

to Schwartz about pregnancy (II, i);42 in the same act, Alwa tries to

convince his father to marry Lulu, afraid lest Schön and his fiancée

produce a challenger to his inheritance. Alwa says of Lulu, “For me,

she’s a firm guarantee that the family won’t grow” (II, viii).43 Lulu,

then, is a Pandora whose jar is never closed in the service of sexual

reproduction; she is an investment, but without profit from the male

perspective. In the final scene of the Monstertragedy, Lulu’s lack of

fertility appears in conversation with Jack (V, xiii):44

Jack: Have you ever had a baby?

Lulu: No.

Jack: Thought not.

Lulu: Why?

Jack: Your mouth is so . . . fresh still . . .

The fetishistic displacement of Lulu’s genitals and “mouth” repeats

throughout Wedekind’s text:45

Jack: You have a beautiful mouth when you are speaking. (151)

Jack: Where did you get your beautiful mouth? (152)

Jack: Did you ever have a child?

Lulu: No, Sir. Never. But I was a nice looking woman. (152)

Jack: I judged you after your way of walking. I saw your body is per-

fectly formed. I said to myself she must have a very expressive

mouth.

Lulu: It seems you took a fancy in my mouth.

Jack: Yes. Indeed. (152)

Jack: Goddam! There is no finer mouth within the four seas! (153)

Lulu’s attractiveness for Jack is her very lack of sexual productivity:

her “mouth” is still “fresh.” When Jack kills Lulu in both Wedekind’s



and Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, he is effectively putting a stop to her

unproductive “jar.” Indeed, Wedekind’s play ends with Jack control-

ling Lulu’s “jar” in a literalized metaphor as he cuts out her uterus and

wraps it in newspaper.46 I also suggest that Pabst represents the same

idea of Lulu as a nonproductive Pandora through his very choice of

Louise Brooks to play the lead role in his film.

In their commentary on The Criterion Collection edition of Pan-dora’s Box, Mary Ann Doane and Thomas Elsaesser discuss the image

of Louise Brooks onscreen. Doane notes, “The fascination of Louise

Brooks has been limited to her look, and the question is what produces

that kind of fascination. She has a very smooth face with no wrinkles,

no lines, no really defining features— and it’s this presentation of the

woman as surface which becomes extremely important in the context

of Pandora’s Box, and also within the context of the cinema as an

institution for the representation of a particular image of woman that

circulates. She comes to represent the pure pleasure of cinema itself.”47

The smoothness of Brooks’s image with its undisturbed surface denies

the possibility of depth. Elsaesser notes the “androgyny” of Brooks’s

lithe figure in the film:48 such a figure is not that of the fertile mother,

but of the infertile prostitute whose “magical gift to men [is] that she

never gets pregnant and is not plagued by the mothering instinct.”49

Lulu’s polyandry and the image of the prostitute opens a wholly other

economy, one in which the male is rendered interchangeable and

therefore arbitrary, as Elizabeth Boa notes in her discussion of Wede-

kind’s plays: “The prostitute accessible to all men is contemptible, but

also frightening, for she suggests that men are interchangeable, thus

threatening masculine power and identity. In killing a prostitute, Jack

destroys the threat of being reduced to a cypher, one man who might

as well be another. This is the horror which grips Dr. Schön in his

mad vision of multiplying lovers, echoed also in Kungu Poti’s and

Dr. Hilti’s horror on discovering that they are not alone with Lulu.”50

Instead of a fertile mother who will (re)produce, making a return on

male investment of labor, the prostitute is like Hesiod’s drone that

devours the labor of the busy honeybee but gives nothing in return

(Theogony 593– 602). Within a domestic economy, Pandora is not a

true partner who helps to bear the workload (593); instead, she is

a “conspirator” (595, 601) of hard work by consuming the fruits of

her husband’s labor without providing anything in exchange. Such a

creature, according to the logic of the Hesiodic narrative, cannot be

allowed to circulate endlessly: it must be contained. Thomas Elsaesser

has discussed Lulu’s sexuality in terms of a larger economy in both

Wedekind and Pabst’s representations of her:



The figure of Lulu that Wedekind portrays in Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora superficially belongs to the tradition of the femme fatale, the sexually alluring but remote woman, through whom men expe-

rience the irrational, obsessional and ultimately destructive force of

female sexuality . . . More explicitly than anyone else, he locates the

question of sexuality within an ideological field. The repression of almost all manifestations of female sexuality entails an intense eroticism suffus-ing everything that is a- social, primitive, instinctual, according to a topos that sees nature as devouring whenever its nurturing function has been perverted. At the same time, Wedekind saw very precisely the relation-ship between social productivity and sexual productivity that the bour-

geoisie had fought so hard to establish, and which lay at the heart of

its ‘sexual repression’: it was the energy that had to be subjected to the

labour- process, regulated and accounted for. The bourgeois subject,

for whom sexual passion is nothing but the reverse of all the frustra-

tions that make up his social and moral existence, is contrasted with

the members of the lumpenproletariat— those outside, unassimilable or

scornful when it comes to the bourgeois’ dialectic of renunciation and

productivity.51

In Elsaesser’s reading, Lulu cannot exist within a bourgeois society,

where her unproductive sexuality can only appear as subversive. In this

light, Jack functions as a hero of a father- ruled, heterosexual social

order. He seeks to contain and punish Lulu’s eroticism, which is con-

nected with her “fresh . . . mouth” and unproductive sexuality.

Louise Brooks suffered analogous treatment at the hands of her

male handlers. In an interview in 1979 with Kenneth Tynan, Brooks

noted an explicit connection between herself and Lulu: “As a matter

of fact, I’ve never been in love. And if I had loved a man, could I have

been faithful to him? Could he have trusted me beyond a closed door?

I doubt it. It was clever of Pabst to know even before he met me that I

possessed the tramp essence of Lulu.”52 Pabst also linked Brooks with

Lulu, and, according to Brooks’s memoirs, tried to contain her feisty

sexuality. Brooks explains, “I was less wonderfully surprised when he

also subjected my private life to his direction. His delight in Lulu’s char-acter belonged exclusively to the film. Off the screen, my dancing days

came to an end when George Marshall, with whom I had been inves-

tigating Berlin’s nightlife till three in the morning, left for Paris. On

the set the next day, I had just accepted an invitation to an ‘Artists’

Ball’ when Mr. Pabst’s quiet, penetrating voice sounded behind me:

‘Müller! Loueess does not go out anymore at night.’ ”53 Brooks recalls

that from then on after shooting, she was “bathed, fed, and put to

bed, to be called for the next morning at seven. Cross and restless,



I was left to fall asleep listening to the complaints of the other poor

caged beasts, across Stresemannstrass, in the Zoologischer Garten.”54

Brooks identifies herself with Lulu, only to find herself treated like

“the other poor caged beasts.” Brooks likens Pabst’s treatment of her

to Schön’s treatment of Lulu: “Pabst’s feelings for me . . . were not

unlike those of Schön for Lulu. I think that in the two films Pabst

made with me— Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl— he was

conducting an investigation into his relations with women, with the

object of conquering any passion that interfered with his passion for

his work. He was not aroused by sexual love, which he dismissed as

an enervating myth. It was sexual hate that engrossed his whole being

with its flaming reality.”55 Brooks sees herself reduced to image for

Pabst to control: he wanted her to be “sweetly innocent.”56

Throughout the film, Brooks’s Lulu is image, from her painting in

the opening scenes, to Geschwitz’s drawings admired and circulated

by Schön and Alwa, to her photograph that enables Casti- Piani to

recognize and blackmail her, to the fashion photos used to sell her

into prostitution to an Egyptian businessman. As an image, Lulu is

in constant circulation, a commodity traded between men for their

viewing pleasure. But as an object in constant circulation, Lulu can

never fully be possessed. Within what I have tried to define as a “Hes-

iodic economy” in this study, this is the status not of the wife, nor of

the productive body in which the male can make an investment and

expect a return on his labor, but rather of the prostitute, which, like

Pandora, is an attractive but ultimately unproductive expenditure.

Notes

1. I would like to thank Monica Cyrino, Emily Kratzer, and audiences

at the 2010 Film and History conference and the 2012 Wyoming

Humanities Council Summer Classics Program for comments on ear-

lier drafts of this chapter.

2. Throughout this chapter I cite West’s editions of Hesiod’s Theogony (1966) and Works and Days (1978).

3. On Pandora’s name, see Panofsky (1962) 4, 9– 11, 142– 43; West

(1978) 164– 66. For more on Pandora and Wedekind, see Littau

(1995) 890 n. 15; Boa (1987) 89.

4. Wedekind (1990) 132– 33, 136, 151, 204 traces the development of

the Lulu plays.

5. Gittleman (1969) 66; Boa (1987) 17– 19; Littau (1995) 888 n. 1.

6. Gittleman (1969) x– xi, 22, 26.

7. See Mary Ann Doane and Thomas Elsaesser on the DVD commen-

tary track for Die Büchse der Pandora, restored and distributed by the



Criterion Collection (2006). Likewise, Lulu’s trysts with three lovers

in London are reduced to a single encounter with Jack in Pabst’s film.

8. Title card in Die Büchse der Pandora (1929); see the shooting script in

Pabst (1971) 24.

9. Doane on the DVD commentary track (2006).

10. Pabst’s shot/reverse- shot editing clearly indicates the close- up of Lulu

is Geschwitz’s point of view; see Doane and Elsaesser on the DVD

commentary track (2006).

11. Title card in Die Büchse der Pandora (1929); Pabst (1971) 41.


13. Die Büchse der Pandora (1929); Pabst (1971) 53– 54.


15. Title cards in Die Büchse der Pandora (1929); Pabst (1971) 71– 72.

16. Elsaesser (1983) 32.

17. Elsaesser (1983) 23.

18. Die Büchse der Pandora (1929); see Pabst (1971) 18– 19; Elsaesser

(1983) 18– 19; Burkett (2007) 236– 37.

19. On Lulu’s close- ups, see Doane (1991) 147; on the fantasy space cre-

ated by Pabst’s mismatched shot/reverse- shot editing and violations of

the 180- degree rule, see Doane (1991) 149.

20. Webber (2006) 275.

21. Boa (1987) 79.

22. Doane (1991) 159– 61; Littau (1995) 893– 96.

23. Wedekind (1967) 98.

24. Film critic Lotte Eisner notes, “In the scene with Jack the Ripper, this

face, a smooth mirror- like disc slanting across the screen, is so shaded

out and toned down that the camera seems to be looking down at

some lunar landscape. Is this still a human being— a woman— at all?”

Quoted in Pabst (1971) 15.

25. Elsaesser (1983) 26, 29; Doane (1991) 148.

26. Wedekind presents Lulu as the “Urgestalt des Weibes”; see also Boa

(1987) 113– 14; Littau (1995) 889 n. 7.

27. On the correspondence between the Pandora myths in the Theogony and Works and Days, see Vernant (1980) 174– 77.

28. On the sacrifice (Theogony 535– 36) constituting a separation of men

and gods, see West (1966) 318; Vernant (1989) 24– 25; on Pandora

and the separation between men and gods, see Zeitlin (1996) 62,

71– 74, 83.

29. All translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated.

30. On Pandora and sexual reproduction, see Zeitlin (1996) 84– 86.

31. My translation of this line follows West (1978) 154.

32. Vernant (1980) 176; Vernant (1989) 41– 43.

33. Vernant (1980) 180– 81; Vernant (1989) 42– 43, 73– 78; on the meta-

phorical association between agriculture and the female body, see also

duBois (1988).



34. British Museum, inv. no. F 147, attributed to the Owl- Pillar Group.

Another representation conflating Pandora and her “box” is Paul

Klee’s Die Büchse der Pandora Stilleben (1920), depicting a kantharos- shaped chalice with flanged rim, holding a few flowers, and emitting a

noxious vapor from a vaginal opening at the base of the cup; Panofsky

(1962) 112– 13, fig. 59.

35. Hanson (1990) 317.

36. Hanson (1990) 324– 30.

37. The translation is from Lonie (1981).

38. On this reading, see Zeitlin (1996) 64– 66.

39. Erdgeist II, ii; Wedekind (1980) 36; see also Boa (1987) 61.

40. Wedekind (1990) 165.

41. Wedekind (1980) 36.

42. Bentley (1994) 67– 70.

43. Bentley (1994) 95.

44. Bentley (1994) 201– 2.

45. The following quotes are all from Wedekind (1980).

46. Wedekind (1980) 246; discussion at Littau (1995) 903– 6.

47. Doane on the DVD commentary track (2006).

48. Elsaesser (1983) 10, 13; see also Doane (1991) 153.

49. Boa (1987) 67. Boa argues, “It is clear that motherhood is not for her:

to be a mother would desex her.”

50. Boa (1987) 104.

51. Elsaesser (1983) 10– 11; emphasis added.

52. Quoted at Laschever (1982).

53. Brooks (1982) 102; emphasis added.

54. Brooks (1982) 102.

55. Brooks (1982) 97– 98.

56. Brooks (1982) 94.


4

C h a p t e r 2

Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

Pandora and Prometheus in

Robert Aldrich’s Cinematic

Subversion of Spill ane

Paula James

In this chapter I explore aspects of baneful women, fallible men,

and the mutual manipulation involved in gift giving with the Pro-

metheus paradigm in mind. Elements within the myths of Pandora

and Prometheus will be brought into constant interplay to enrich

an appreciation of Robert Aldrich’s movie, but also to rethink

the attributes of these mythical figures in their classical context.

A. I. Bezzerides produced a culturally allusive screenplay that by

the film’s finale was directly invoking classical and biblical charac-

ters, particularly the direct reference to a destructive Pandora about

to unleash a monstrous power (spoiler warning!), as curious and

acquisitive Gabrielle embraces and then opens the atomic box at

the end of the film.1

The unstable identities in mythical terms of private eye Mike

Hammer and key personae he encounters illuminate the proximity of

Pandora to Prometheus. Kiss Me Deadly modernizes, marries, and

polarizes their attributes and raises questions about heroism and its

gender biases in the ancient and modern contexts. Male heroism and

female duplicity fracture from the beginning of the film as all the main

characters prove to be ambiguous harbingers of good and evil in a

world on the edge of lawlessness and destruction.2


Paula James26

The Myth

In his poem Works and Days and also in the Theogony, Hesiod (writ-

ing ca. 700 B.C.) introduces the figure of Pandora, a specially made

woman commissioned by Zeus, lord of Olympus, and put together

by Hephaestus, who fashioned her from clay. In the Works and Days, Aphrodite, Athena, and Hermes, assisted by the Graces, Peitho (Per-

suasion), and the Hours, endow Pandora with beauty, allure, accom-

plishments, eloquence, and cunning. In Hesiod’s epic narratives,

Pandora is presented as the first woman and a thing of evil for man-

kind: she is escorted to earth by Hermes and once accepted as a wife

by the unwise king, Epimetheus, she opens a jar full of ills. Hope is

trapped under the rim. Thus Pandora and her jar mark the beginning

of man’s toil and trouble.

In both his works, Hesiod relates that Zeus’s motivation is to

balance the blessing of fire, which the human race received from Pro-

metheus (descendant of the Titans, the divine cohort displaced by the

Olympians). Prometheus, whose name means “Forethought,” plays

benefactor to humans and trickster in his dealings with Zeus. He not

only smuggles fire concealed in a fennel stalk out of Olympus but also

deceives the ruler god into choosing the white glistening fat around

the bones of the sacrificial animals, leaving the tasty meat for the

mortal worshippers to enjoy. In turn Zeus is able to fool Epimetheus

(who thinks only after the event in spite of being forewarned by his

brighter brother Prometheus) with an equally attractive and gleaming

gift that is all show and, worse still, an active agent of woe and suffer-

ing: Pandora.

Prometheus, as a courageous adversary of a new and inflexible deity

(Zeus) and a hero for his time, was celebrated in the play Prometheus Bound ascribed to Aeschylus, the fifth- century Athenian tragedian.

The Titan was taken up in Latin poetry and prose as the molder of

man from clay and the bestower of skills and ingenuity upon the mor-

tal race. In this paradigm, Prometheus is portrayed as the champion

of the people, an opponent of tyranny.

However, from classical to modern times his benefaction of creativ-

ity, fire, and freethinking has been viewed as a mixed blessing.3 In his

powerfully bleak and dystopian 1998 film Prometheus the acclaimed

poet Tony Harrison used the Titan as a symbol to highlight the bodily

disintegration of UK miners from industrial disease and the fragmen-

tation of their community under the hammer blows of aggressive

capital. The workers are an expendable labor force in an allegedly out-

moded technology.4 As for the gift of Promethean fire, this partly


Kiss Me Deadly (1955) 27

morphs into the self- destructive habit of smoking, which the tobacco

industry has promoted for profit.

Pandora per se is mostly absent from Latin literature, although

it has been argued that she is present as a signifier in the poetry of

Roman elegists who so loved to wring out every possible permutation

and motif from the myths of the Greek world.5 In postclassical per-

ceptions, Pandora persists as a byword or convenient marker for the

femme fatale whose curiosity has dire consequences; the misogynistic

tradition is reinforced by conflating her with the Christian Eve and

Western models of flawed womanhood. Also, her jar was converted

into a box many centuries ago.6 This is the receptacle she cannot

escape in the refashioning of her story, although both the woman and

her baneful baggage have been given a positive spin in modern mani-

festations of the myth and its main player.7

Prometheus and Pandora’s mythical narrative in its classical context

has inspired many stimulating interpretations, from the structural-

ist school (Vernant 1974, 2006) to the feminist readings of Froma

Zeitlin (1996) and the comprehensive account of Pandora’s psycho-

logical, erotic, and cosmic dimensions by Lev Kenaan (2008). Aspects

of distorted reciprocity and the ambiguous nature of gift exchange

that preoccupied scholars for many years have yielded to an explo-

ration of the characters of Prometheus and Pandora, both variously

reconfigured to represent the radical and the revolutionary.

The Movie

Kiss Me Deadly is a startling film with its backward roll of opening

credits that surely unsettles the viewer from the outset to the final

revelation about the contents of the elusive box that so many people

have died for. The first to die under horrific torture from faceless men

is a girl on the run from the asylum whom Mike Hammer (Ralph

Meeker), private detective, picked up at the beginning of the film and

whose capture and murder he witnesses while he is barely conscious.

Miraculously escaping with his life (the unknown killers send him over

a cliff in his car), Mike, along with his devoted secretary, Velda (Max-

ine Cooper), becomes embroiled in a pursuit of the unknown gang,

the murderers of the girl, Christina (Cloris Leachman). Mike makes

this a personal vendetta and follows a labyrinth of leads, including

clues from his conversation with Christina, until he finds the key she

was hiding and the highly prized box it opens.

In the meantime, Mike has been deceived and manipulated by Gabri-

elle (Gaby Rodgers), the mistress of the “gang” leader, Dr. Soberin


Paula James28

(Albert Dekker)— she masquerades as Christina’s flatmate, Lily Carver—

and rapidly loses the mysterious haul to this ruthless couple. They also

kidnap Velda, but Mike is able to track her down to Soberin’s lair. In an

action- packed finale, Gabrielle shoots Soberin and wounds Mike, taking

total control of the mysterious box. In spite of Soberin’s dramatic dying

warning (with references to Pandora, Cerberus, and Lot’s wife), she lifts

the lid and releases an apocalyptic nuclear fire. Both Velda and Mike

narrowly escape the huge conflagration and in the original ending of the

film they fall at the water’s edge while the beach house is engulfed in the

cataclysmic explosion.

In Spillane’s novel, the sought after box contains a drug haul, but

cinema censorship would not allow drugs to be portrayed onscreen.

The choice of the nuclear vessel no doubt appealed to Aldrich, whose

films tend toward apocalyptic resolution, and both director and

screenplay writer, Bezzerides, consciously tapped into current preoc-

cupations about the destructive power of science and the angst of the

atomic age. At least two postimpressionist artists had anticipated this

concept: that the single destructive energy of an atomic bomb would

replace the multiplicity of ills contained in Pandora’s receptacle.8

As the evils of the box turn out to be the destructive force of mod-

ern fire, the film narrative reverses and telescopes the full compass of

the Hesiodic myth in which Prometheus steals fire for the benefit of

humankind. In Hesiod’s version, Zeus retaliates by visiting a world

of pain on the race Prometheus has championed. What is interesting

about the cinematic narrative is the fact that Christina has already

stolen this fire (trapped in a box) but suffers anguish and death keep-

ing it concealed from humanity (and frustrating the cynical profiteers

who pursue the prize) in order to protect people and preserve their

survival. Christina seems to be a distorted version of Prometheus, but

visually and symbolically— especially as the keeper of the key to the

fatal container— she is simultaneously a troubled Pandora.

The Modern Prometheus and his

Twentieth- Century Pandoras

Christina, a gasping desperate character, precedes the credits. As

she fails to flag down the cars, she invites the viewer into her des-

peration. The choice of actress Leachman (in her first screen role)

transformed the Viking- like Berga of the Spillane novel into a more

fragile figure. Like Berga, Christina also launches herself into Mike’s

headlights desperately using her whole body to hitch a ride. The fol-

lowing extract from the novel sets the scene and gives some sense of



Spillane’s vigorous narrative. The appearance of the larger- than- life

Berga is startling and uncanny. “All I saw was the dame standing there

in the glare of the headlights, waving her arms like a huge puppet and

the curse I spit out filled the car and my own ears. I wrenched the

wheel over, felt the rear end start to slide, brought it out with a splash

of power and almost ran it up the side of the cliff as the car fishtailed.

The brakes bit in, gouging a furrow in the shoulder, then jumped to

the pavement and held.”9

In the movie, when the running, panting escapee raises her arms

in desperation in front of Mike’s car headlamps, she strikes the arrest-

ing pose of a goddess but also of a supplicant. Spillane and Aldrich

were surely conscious of the gothic elements of the scene. The cin-

ematic visualization of the almost phantom- like Berga/Christina on

the highway evokes a famously tragic figure from Victorian fiction,

namely Anne Catherick in The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins,

father of the English detective novel: “There in the middle of the

broad, bright high- road— there, as if it had that moment sprung out

of the earth or dropped from the heaven— stood the solitary figure of

a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments, her

face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to a dark cloud

over London, as I faced her. I was far too seriously startled by the sud-

denness with which this extraordinary apparition stood before me, in

the dead of night and in that lonely place, to ask what she wanted.”10

Collins was inspired by an actual encounter with a distraught and

almost spectral female, and he generally relished introducing similar

epiphanic scenes in his fiction. Collins’s hero, Walter, has a gentle and

delicate way of questioning the apparition, as if he is experiencing a

divine encounter. But Mike is irritated and intrigued in equal parts

by his damsel in distress. In the film the girl is given a ghostly and

Figure 2.1 Christina (Cloris Leachman) strikes an arresting Pandora pose in the

headlamps of an oncoming car in Kiss Me Deadly (1955). United Artists.


Paula James30

ethereal quality, and a refinement, a cultural sensuality, which suggests

that if she is less goddess- like in stature than the novel’s Viking figure,

Berga, she fits the supernatural stereotype by virtue of her other-

worldly quality. Berga is ungainly by comparison, while Christina is

less overtly sexual than Spillane’s creation. For censorship reasons the

mystery girl’s nakedness under the raincoat is only suggested in the

movie and her sexual advances to Mike are toned down. She takes

his hand in a pleading gesture as they approach the roadblock. Mike

goes against his survival instincts in protecting Christina. In spite of

the warning signs, within moments of their meeting Mike makes the

spontaneous decision to pass off this unknown and unstable woman

as his wife at the police cordon.

Hammer continues to exhibit Promethean qualities in his flout-

ing of orthodoxy and authority. The act of helping the distraught

Christina in her escape from the asylum has echoes of Prometheus’s

sympathy for the victimized and crazed character of Io in Aeschylus’s

play.11 However, Mike also displays cavalier and Epimethean qualities

in his curiosity about this enigmatic creature. A second look at the

cinematic composition of this opening scene brings Christina closer to

a Pandora figure. In flagging down the car so dramatically, Christina

seem to be mimicking a Pandora pose found on the classical volute

krater related to the Group of Polygnotos.12

Aspects of Christina’s accoutrements and attributes— the belt, the

seductive voice, her arresting presence— all evoke both the ancient lit-

erary and visual (especially vase) depictions of Pandora’s preparations

as a baneful bride for Epimetheus. Christina also has a whimsical qual-

ity to her speech patterns and demonstrates a resigned but knowing

air once she has recovered her equanimity. She very quickly has the

measure of Mike, the narcissism and self- centeredness that character-

izes him. Her astuteness and insight connect her with the wisdom of

Prometheus as well with the alluring speech of a Pandora.13

Aldrich prolongs the episode in the film by introducing a prob-

lem with the car. Mike stops at a garage, which proves to be a fatal

delay. The skewed steering has been caused by a branch caught up

in the spokes of the wheel. In a calyx krater by the Niobid painter,

Pandora is depicted carrying a wreath or leafy branch, perhaps an indi-

cation of wedding ritual.14 Another marriage motif is the belt that

must be loosened and relinquished to the bridegroom as a prelude to

the surrender of her virginity. Christina speaks the lines, “Ah woman,

the incomplete sex— and what does she need to complete her? Why,

man of course, a wonderful man.” Christina is the Pandora bride, but



something very brutal replaces the deflowering that should follow the

ceremony of marriage.

Mike and Christina are pursued and captured. The torture scene—

nothing really shown but the screaming is traumatic— ends with the

biblical reference uttered by Soberin, “You might as well try and res-

urrect Lazarus,” as Christina dies. Internet discussions (a plethora of

chatter and critique on the film) agree that the name Christina puts her

character very much in the martyr mold.15 The faceless torturers— we

see instruments for only a split second and the dangling legs of the

screaming girl— are like the figures of Violence and Strength at the

opening of Prometheus Bound, and the suffering they inflict is of equally

horrific proportions. In the novel Berga is described as making mewing

noises of pain tied to a chair. Aldrich’s decision to suspend Christina

and to view her from upper shots sets her above her male tormenters,

thus elevating her to crucifix height. Mike is knocked out and sent over

a cliff in his car, but he survives a Promethean- style suspension from the

rock. Prometheus’s punishment is rerouted to Pandora.

Willfully ignoring the warnings uttered by detective Pat Murphy

(Wesley Addey), Mike pursues the torturers and murderers of Chris-

tina. This crusade signifies that Mike (made into a “bedroom dick” in

Aldrich’s version) has some spark of decency. Aldrich also introduces

the character of Nick, the Greek car mechanic— and Mike’s earthly

but helpful Hephaestus— who is obsessed with the powerful va va

voom16 of the fast car. He is just one casualty of Mike’s quest. Nick

is brutally crushed beneath the object of his affection, his beloved

motor; his murder drives Mike to further avenging zeal.

It is while on the trail that Mike finds and protects Lily, Christina’s

flatmate. The listless Lily gives Mike a second chance to save an inno-

cent female. He realizes too late that the real Lily has already been

disposed of and he has become the dupe of Gabrielle, her impersonator.

Gabrielle is in partnership with and a pleasure plaything of the villain,

Dr. Soberin, who had Christina tortured to death. False Lily mimics

Christina in the way she dresses (a white robe, then a white overcoat)

and in a certain riddling style of speech that enhances the enigma.17

The specter of Christina continues to haunt the narrative. Her

body contains the key to the narrative as well as to the box. The fact

that Christina has swallowed the key to the prize and that Mike needs

to probe her corpse to find it makes this Los Angeles Pandora both

maiden and repository. It is fitting that the Rossetti poem Christina

quotes with her poignant “Remember Me” and its reference to dark

and secret places gives literal- minded Mike (the hero is no aesthete!)

the vital clue to the key’s whereabouts.18


Paula James32

In stealing and concealing the fire to save the world, Christina

could be seen as a modern Prometheus, back tracking on the original

heroic gesture of bestowing the flame and reversing the role such a

hero needs to play in the modern world. The Pandora persona then

emerges as a protector of humanity, a brave, antiauthoritarian pres-

ence, undergoing torment and a martyr’s death. When Gabrielle, as

both the false and the true Pandora, takes possession of the prize, the

box with its atomic bomb realizes and releases its full potential, with

woman as a demonic harbinger of chaos and destruction.19

Mike’s individualism and willfulness put him somewhat in the

Promethean mold, as he is antiauthoritarian throughout and will

not accept the status quo or hierarchy. Detective Murphy turns up

at Mike’s apartment after Mike has found and lost the mysterious

box and reveals that its contents, which have already scorched Mike’s

hands, have something to do with Los Alamos, Trinity, and the Man-

hattan project. Upon hearing from the detective toward the final

scenes of the film that Lily is a fraud, Mike has his moment of contri-

tion. When the revelations about the false Lily and the hugeness and

horror of the “prize” have sunk in, he says, “I didn’t know, I didn’t

understand.” But the detective gives the wearily exasperated reply, “If

you had known, Mike, would you have acted any different?”

This is the clearest characterization of Mike as Epimetheus or a

failed Prometheus and casts the detective, the knowing authority

figure, as a rival claimant to the Promethean and prophetic role. Seek-

ing out fatal knowledge is Mike’s particular tragedy. Mike blunders

blindly into conflicts and dangers, never heeding advice, but as a self-

styled vengeful vigilante, he is only ever superficially and temporarily

in control and never aware of the larger picture. When Mike rushes to

rescue Velda, the exasperated detective says to his colleague that they

should let Mike go to Hell.

Mike saves Velda, but they do witness a fiery furnace. Gabrielle

shoots Soberin and wounds Mike so that she can take total posses-

sion of the box. As Gabrielle bends over it, Soberin’s words to her are

steeped in myth: “The head of Medusa, that’s what’s in the box, and

who looks upon her will not be changed into stone, but into brim-

stone and ashes. But of course you wouldn’t believe me: you’d have to

see for yourself, wouldn’t you?” Gabrielle goes up in flames, thereby

releasing the hellish demon from the container and precipitating a

nuclear reaction. Thus the cerebral Soberin, who accepted Gabrielle

for the physical comforts she offered him, refers to the myth of Pan-

dora in the final scene: he begs her not to open the box. Gabrielle’s

role as the false and baneful female is hardly debatable, as Soberin now



becomes Epimetheus. Mike’s own lack of foresight has taken another

vertiginous turn. Together he and Soberin have foolishly protected

and united a destructive Pandora with the deadly container.

Seizing the Fire

Both film and book narratives end in flames, but in the novel the pri-

vate eye Mike Hammer, shot by the duplicitous female, takes a terrible

revenge by setting light to her highly flammable flesh. In Spillane, the

lovely Lily with her constant alcohol baths is a monstrously disfigured

fire- damaged creature whose true appearance is only revealed at the

very end. Her body repulses Spillane’s hero and his revenge reflects his

revulsion. Both in the novel and the movie, Spillane’s hero is defined

by the burning cigarette butt; he smokes “Luckies,” a popular brand of

the day. In thumbing his cigarette lighter at the combustible Lily, Mike

is punishing her for hiding her deformity under surface sexuality, for

breaking the illusion of a delightful, alluring, white, and unblemished

body covered and concealed beneath the white robe. Mike is like Zeus

enraged by the deception of the glistening white fat. He wields a mod-

ern Promethean fire to destroy Gabrielle’s deceitful Pandora persona.

Although there are no Pandora references in the novel, this moment

of revelation could well have inspired Aldrich and Bezzerides to

work a motif of mythic proportions into the film: their baneful Lily/

Gabrielle will burn to death as the result of opening the atomic box.

The moods of darkness are accentuated by “the roaring light ready to

spill into your lap.”20 Symbolic white reflects the false purity of Lily;

the whiteness of her name and her dress disguise her true provenance:

an avaricious seductress from a criminal and shadowy world. Yet Lev

Kenaan views Pandora as the embodiment of the blinding, dazzling,

and epiphanic property of celestial fire itself.21 Lily is a masquerade of

womanhood in the corporeal sense, imitating the specious, surface

beauty of the Hesiodic Pandora. She keeps her scarred body hidden

from Mike in the Spillane narrative and her pitiless soul secret in both

novel and movie. Gabrielle’s final words to Mike, who is dubbed the

dissembler, are a teasing turn of the tables: “Give me the liar’s kiss,

Mike. You are good at giving such kisses”; but in the novel’s finale she

says, “deadly . . . deadly, kiss me,” before she shoots.

Readings of the Film

Aldrich’s film was dubbed “a frozen tragedy” by Raymond Durgnat.

“Formal yet Dionysiac, cerebral yet vulgar, it has the cold atrocity


Paula James34

of a Greek tragic myth— lacking only the chorus,” and he compared

“the terrible beauty of its bleak nihilism” with Hitchcock’s Psycho

(1960).22 Carol Flinn discusses the particular contribution Aldrich

made with this “monolithically male” film, but sets it in the context

of anxiety about the female as alien. For Flinn, fear of the empowered

female came to fruition in the postwar period and relates to US sol-

diers’ desire and suspicion toward the women they left behind. Tell-

ingly, Flinn observes that Kiss Me Deadly shares features of the film

noir genre in uncovering a visually enticing woman and determin-

ing the reliability of her (often) deceptive image. In terms of seduc-

tive and enigmatic articulateness, the female characters of the film are

strong focalizing forces and their voices provide many of the clues to

the mystery.23

Hesiod’s Pandora is the archetype for wheedling, unstable, and

seemingly sexually voracious womanhood. The Pandora model can be

readily related to celluloid constructs because, while not always being

bearers of evil, the women of film noir do combine characteristics

of self- interested and available, vulnerable and deceitful, beneficent

and baneful. Even minor characters like Friday (the “nympho” figure,

played by Marion Carr) seem to mimic the easy intimacy that identi-

fies Aphrodite’s manner and speech and that Pandora also displays in

her snaring of Epimetheus. The women in Kiss Me Deadly are both

deified and demonized, and the figure of Pandora, accompanied by

her Hesiodic narrative, shadows them thematically.24

Condemning Hammer as “so hard he’s impotent,” Thomson

believes that both Christina “with her real abused delicacy in a sin-

gle abashed glance and Lily/Gaby with her sinuous body stretched

over the box” have immediate insight into “the blunt phallic upright

which is Mike Hammer.”25 It could be said that both the book and

the film abound in sensual and yielding female bodies and hard but

frigid males. Indeed, Alison Sharrock’s analysis of rigor and molli-tia as deceptive attributes in Ovid’s Pygmalion could be applied

to the heroes and heroines of such films.26 However pliant Lily/

Gabrielle seems to be, she is the stonehearted villain, the ruthless killer,

while the hardness of the alpha male (Mike) proves to be a Narcissistic

celibacy. Thomson describes Mike as “too tight for fucking.” Thus

Gabrielle’s unleashing of the Great Whatsit is a metaphor for releasing

the final male inhibition in an orgasmic as well as cataclysmic finish.

From the perspective of a mythical mnemonic, Kiss Me Deadly deals

in the topos of human fallibility when a powerful and destructive gift

comes into the possession of venal, ignorant, and even heroic mortals.

The film plays with the shared and contradictory characteristics of



Pandora, Prometheus, and Epimetheus. It takes Spillane’s motif of

fire in the novel to the level of nuclear annihilation.27 Aldrich makes

Kiss Me Deadly a moody tone poem about a Los Angeles belying its

name, a metaphor of corruption and despair, desire and temptation, a

universe of diminishing values and destructive power.

In Hesiodic terms— following the myth of deteriorating races in

Works and Days— we are invited into a world where the race of iron is

represented by the criminal underworld where everyone is going to be

sucked into the chthonic regions.28 At the end of the film something

bright but hellish erupts from the box, the horror of a modern Hades

breaking through the fissures. Lily is consumed in the conflagration,

and it is questionable whether Mike and Velda who are on the scene

can survive what she has unleashed.29 Kiss Me Deadly is ambiguous

about the fate of its “hero” and “heroine.” The escape of Mike and

Velda and the parting shot of them in a fearful embrace on the shore

could almost be a reenactment of Pyrrha and Deucalion emerging

from the flood (as described by Ovid in the Metamorphoses), super-

natural survivors indeed, mirroring the descendants of the Titans who

were destined to repopulate the world.

Kiss Me Deadly has the atomic angst of the Cold War decade, but it

also has an emphasis on the va va voom of a Vulcanized world. From

explosive fast cars to guns that spray the screen, this is a film where

technology, as Hephaestus, forges the way.30 In terms of characteriza-

tion, the polarity between Prometheus and Epimetheus is implicit in

the portrayal of the film’s hero/antihero, Mike Hammer. Even more

telling is the ambiguity the film reveals in the figures of Pandora and

Prometheus. Mike masquerades in a mistaken sense of strength and

knowledge as the antiauthority Prometheus, while he is in reality a

reflection of the manipulated Epimetheus, especially in his lack of

foresight and his acceptance of the illusions around him. Christina, the

“first woman” of the film, is a complex construct who plays Pandora

to his Promethean and Epimethean identities but whose attributes

reveal her own Promethean qualities.

When Mike as the fallible heroic figure fails, the world falls apart as

it seems to do in the finale of Prometheus Bound.31 Mike’s Promethean

heroism is no more resolved as a motif than in the Greek play. Instead,

the rebellious Titan is transported into 1950s Los Angeles and frag-

mented across both male and female figures on the relatively lawless

landscape. The film’s ethical gloom evokes ancient perspectives of

supernatural strength and knowledge contrasted with limited human

understanding. Aldrich’s focus on the stealing and concealing of fire

in a modern technological form by a succession of Pandora- like and


Paula James36

Promethean figures brings the conundrums of the ancient myth into

the nuclear age.32

Notes

1. Aldrich acknowledged that his screenwriter was the arty one, and Bez-

zerides may well have been behind such changes as the hero’s girl-

friend, Velda, practicing ballet; one of the gangsters collecting abstract

art; and the presence of classical music interludes. When quizzed

about his literate screenplay, Bezzerides commented, “People ask me

about the hidden meanings in the script, about the A- bomb, about

McCarthyism, what does the poetry mean, and so on. And I can only

say that I didn’t think about it when I wrote it.” See Gorman, Green-

berg, and Server (1998) 115– 22.

2. I recognize there are pitfalls in privileging this kind of direct dialogue

between ancient motifs and cinematic texts when so many cultural lay-

ers and filters have been acquired by the classical sources. Add to this

the fact that movie directors and screenwriters might deny that they

had any myth in mind; see Goldhill (2007) 261; Paul (2010a) 144– 45.

3. See Adams (2010) for the Titan as an inspiration for Victorian think-

ers, writers, scientists, as well as John Martin’s art of the apocalyptic

sublime.

4. See Hall (2002) for a detailed critique of the Harrison film. She

describes the Promethean Old Man who “ruminates on the extraor-

dinary pleasure and sexual allure cigarettes, at least as represented

onscreen, used to offer” (130). It would seem as if Prometheus’s gift

has morphed into an icon of Pandora.

5. Lev Kenaan (2008) 10.

6. See Panofsky (1962) 14– 26.

7. See Potter (2010) on positive Pandoras.

8. The Dutch cartoonist, L. J. Jordaan, published in 1955 a picture of

a huge square box with winged bombs, clearly designated as Pan-

dora’s gift; Panofsky (1962) 113 n. 43. See the thought- provoking

article by Calame (2005) on the legacy of anthropopoieisis and its real-

ization when finance capital and the profit imperative drive scientific

development.

9. Spillane, in Kiss Me, Deadly (2006) 647.

10. Collins, in The Woman in White (1998) 20.

11. Alison Sharrock pointed out to me that Christina resembles Io

“on the run” in Prometheus Bound with her frantic and breathless

inarticulateness.

12. In the Oxford Ashmoleum Museum, inv. no. G.275 (V.575.); I simply

note that Epimetheus is carrying a hammer (Hammer?!), which con-

tinues to puzzle classicists. See too the “goddess with raised hands” in



the clay figures of the sub Minoan period, especially “The Goddess of

Karphi.”

13. Her fatalistic exhortation to “Remember me” directly quotes the poet

Christina Rossetti, for whom the character is named. This is Nausicaa’s

exhortation to Odysseus (Odyssey 8.460) and the lament of Purcell’s

Dido. It is also the pressing plea uttered by the ghost of Hamlet’s

father.

14. In the British Museum, inv. no. GR.1856 (E.467). For an impressive

range of vases illustrating Pandora’s bridal and virginal accoutrements,

see Reeder (1995) 277– 86.

15. Websites featuring critiques of Kiss Me Deadly include Grost (2006).

See also Silver and Ursini (1996).

16. The actor, Nick Dennis, was keen to define his character by this passion

for the fast car so he imported the “va va voom” catchphrase from the

1950s Art Carney American television series.

17. Described by Thomson (1997) 1 as “sensationally listless and

depraved.” See Jayamanne (1995) 3 on modifying the image of the

femme fatale and promoting B actresses in roles as toxic teenagers.

“Buzz” (Bezzerides) clearly enjoyed creating women of whimsical sex-

uality and fulfilling the male fantasy along the way.

18. Zeitlin (1996) 60– 62 argues persuasively that Pandora is anatomi-

cally (womb and belly) bound up with her jar as well as figuratively

symmetrical as a repository of evils for the curious to probe. Mulvey

(1996) 56– 58 makes great play of the metaphor of the female body as

container onscreen.

19. See the discussion by Anthony (2004) on powerful and destructive

artificial women as phobic fantasies on sexuality and technology. For

Prometheus and Pandora as reflections, see Austin (2001) 6, who views

modern technologized Pandoras as over- reachers, like Eve: “Pandora is

Prometheus.”

20. Thomson (1997).

21. Lev Kenaan (2008) 44.

22. Durgnat (1966) 84.

23. Flinn (1986) 121– 23 explores the role of dissonant and distracting

sounds in the film and the significance of the central song as well as the

function of the film score.

24. Mulvey (1996) 62– 64 analyses Hitchcock’s 1947 film Notorious through the interpretative lens of the Pandora paradigm, accessing

Kristeva’s theories of abjection and the metaphor of secret spaces: “The

female body’s topography presents a façade of fascination and surface

that distracts the male psyche from the wound concealed beneath, cre-

ating an inside and outside of binary opposition” (63).

25. Thomson (1997).

26. Sharrock (1991).


Paula James38

27. For an excellent appraisal of the film’s relationship to the Spillane novel

and the motivations behind its form and content, see Robson (2005)

184– 97. Kiss Me Deadly postdates the Noir era, but its influence on

French New Wave cinema is well known.

28. See Holtsmark (2001) 23– 50 for the katabasis theme on film, and

Grost (2006) on Aldrich’s use of downward and spiraling camera

angles.

29. In Spielberg’s 1981 film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, the fiery nemesis in

the sacred container cascades out in a similar pyrotechnic glow.

30. Bezzerides’s technological background was an influence here: “I’m a

big car nut, so I put in all that stuff with the cars and the mechanic.

I was an engineer, and I gave the detective the first phone answering

machine in that picture,” quoted in Vallance (2007). Thus Bezzerides

comes across as both a Hephaestus and a Prometheus.

31. Aldrich’s vision is bleaker than that of Aeschylus. See Dodds (1973)

30– 44 on the reconciliation between Zeus and Prometheus, but also

the return of the Age of Violence.

32. I am grateful to John Penwill for his observation that the term ura-nium suggests fiery material from heaven, and plutonium the techno-

logical substance from hell.


4

C h a p t e r 3

Perversions of the Phaeacians

The Gothic Odyssey of Angels & Insects (1996)

Meredith Safran

As a traveler’s yarn of adventure and tale of yearning for home,

Homer’s Odyssey has inspired artists for three thousand years.1 In

Books 6 through 13, Odysseus stands at a crossroads: one path con-

tinues homeward to Ithaca, the other to settlement abroad with the

Phaeacians, a wealthy but isolated people of divine descent. After

many brushes with captivity and death since departing Troy, Odysseus

could abort his perilous journey by marrying the princess Nausicaa

and receiving a share of island paradise from her father. In choos-

ing homecoming, Odysseus avoids the moral failure of abandoning

return and— even more problematic— perverting the cultural tradi-

tion underlying Homeric epic, which requires his homecoming.2 If

this man does not return to Ithaca, he would not be Odysseus— but

what man would not have been tempted?

This notion that Odysseus might have chosen pleasure and security

abroad over the deferred gratification of homecoming stands behind

A. S. Byatt’s 1992 novella “Morpho Eugenia,” the basis of Philip

and Belinda Haas’s 1996 film, Angels & Insects.3 As the Phaeacian

episode becomes a gothic morality tale, the warrior- king Odysseus,

ship wrecked after ten years of post– Trojan War wandering, becomes

naturalist William Adamson, shipwrecked while returning from ten

years exploring the Amazon. Odysseus finds refuge as the guest of

King Alcinous and Queen Arete; William receives hospitality from Sir

Harald and Lady Alabaster of Bredely Hall, where he meets Eugenia,


Meredith Safran40

the “princess” of this isolated palatial estate. Here the parallels diverge,

temporarily: William marries his Nausicaa, joining her wealthy, closed

society. But, true to the gothic genre, Bredely’s aristocratic idyll does

not simply differ from William’s prior experience; its bucolic appear-

ance conceals the sociosexual perversion that ultimately drives him

away and back onto the path of his Homeric model.

As a narratologist, Byatt regularly plays intertextual games by reshap-

ing traditional material to explore latent tensions in her sources and to

highlight peculiarities of an adaptation’s historical setting.4 In fact, this

treatment of the Odyssey in “Morpho Eugenia” resembles the Homeric

tradition of posing counterfactuals: Adamson’s temporary divergence

from Odysseus’s path generates suspense by making a character con-

sider an action that would deform the traditional, ergo necessary, course

of the story. For example, in Book 1 of the Iliad, Achilles considers

killing Agamemnon; in Book 2, the Greek army almost abandons the

war. Similarly, Odysseus tarried with the sorceress Circe for a year, until

his crew begged to leave; after seven years on Calypso’s island, the god-

dess offered Odysseus immortality if he would consent to stay forever.5

While the novella and film eschew heavy- handed gestures toward the

epic, cumulative points of contact and echoes highlight the significance

of the Odyssey as “narrative template,” in Judith Fletcher’s words.6 The

audience need not apprehend the Homeric source to enjoy the novella

and film, but recognition of the story’s indebtedness to the Odyssey enhances an appreciation of how this adaptation engages in a cultural

tradition that traces its roots back to the ancient Greeks.

In adapting Byatt’s cerebral novella for the screen, the Haases nec-

essarily emphasize the visual aspects of the narrative in counterpoint

to the scientific, philosophical, and theological debates for which

Byatt’s work is distinguished. By translating characters’ inner lives

into images and focalizations, their screenplay transforms moments

that marred Odysseus’s stay with the Phaeacians into symptoms of the

dysfunction latent in Victorian aristocratic ideology. The viewer both

empathizes with William’s romanticized image of Eugenia in their

strange courtship and perceives dark William’s incompatibility with

the golden Alabasters even before the marriage falters. The viewer

shares William’s shock in discovering that the Alabasters’ perversions,

not his difference, are the cause of his unhappiness, driving him to

resume the voyage that reunites him with his epic model. Ironically,

the ideology of sexual relations at Bredely, which privileges traditional

aristocratic rules over new Darwinian ones, would have been logical

to Homer’s ancient Greek audience, reinforcing the power of adapta-

tion to illuminate and question its sources.


Perversions of the Phaeacians 41

Courtship, Accidentally

Both Odysseus’s and William’s Phaeacian encounters begin with per-

verted courtships that, as guests in strange and potentially hostile

societies, neither can gracefully avoid. In order to pursue his journey,

each must navigate the rules that distinguish the “civilized” from the

“savage,” according to each society, including offers of hospitality.7

Yet when a local woman initiates an unsought courtship, entwined

with hospitality, permanent membership through marriage might trap

the traveler abroad. Both Odysseus and William field such overtures

from high- status women that diverge from the norms of their own

patriarchal societies, which use marriage to transmit lineage and prop-

erty and to express social validation and partnership— that is, among

men. Courtship protocols allow male guardians to regulate interac-

tion between marriageable girls and prospective husbands, lest erotic

impulses destroy social order.8 When women take control of the pro-

cess and, further, exert the power of a host on a resourceless guest, the

logic of courtship is perverted.

Courtship is far from Odysseus’s mind after he shipwrecks on an

unknown shore (Odyssey 5.499– 501).9 When he wakes to nearby cries,

his first concern is security: “What kind of land have I come to now? /

Are the natives wild and lawless savages, or godfearing men who wel-

come strangers?” (6.118– 20). Espying unchaperoned girls washing

clothes, and unaware that his divine patron Athena has engineered this

situation, the naked Odysseus ponders whether to approach; simply

revealing himself could be tantamount to sexual assault.10 When his

desperation outweighs propriety, Nausicaa stands her ground while

her maids flee the approach of this filthy, naked stranger. Since Athena

has primed her to consider marriage, Nausicaa listens to the stranger’s

praise, pleas, and wishes that she enjoy a successful marriage. When

Athena magically renders Odysseus beautiful, Nausicaa hands over

her brother’s clothing, directions to her house, and instructions to

bypass her father and supplicate her mother, Queen Arete.11 She can’t

convey him in her wagon, she explains, lest Phaeacians make imper-

tinent remarks about her fancying a stranger when she already has

many suitors among her own people: “I myself would blame . . . /

a girl who . . . / kept the company of men before her wedding day”

(6.294– 96). By indicating her availability, desirability, and respect for

propriety, Nausicaa skillfully counters Odysseus’s appeal for aid with

an invitation to courtship.

Nausicaa’s oblique proposition puts Odysseus in a delicate position,

especially once her parents become involved. The civilized Phaeacians


Meredith Safran42

will provide hospitality to a stranger, but Homeric courtship involves

sex segregation, which his encounter with Nausicaa has already vio-

lated: he, merely by approaching her unsupervised; she, by engaging

in negotiations. Indeed, Alcinous’s awkward welcome to Odysseus is

complicated by Arete’s suspicion: recognizing the stranger’s cloth-

ing as her son’s, she probes Odysseus’s story for some impropriety

(7.163– 256). After he allays such anxieties and recounts his captiv-

ity on Calypso’s island, Alcinous offers this anonymous stranger his

daughter’s hand in marriage and a share of his kingdom or convey-

ance home after the next day’s festival (7.332– 50). As this is the third

such offer that Odysseus has fielded on his voyage, he politely chooses

homecoming; after all, he already has a perverted marital scenario

waiting at home, where young aristocrats have been consuming his

wealth while courting his wife, Penelope. William, by contrast, will

accept the princess’s oblique advances, generating his own perverted

martial scenario among these Phaeacians.

Where the Odyssey’s Phaeacian episode begins with perverse court-

ship abroad, Angels & Insects opens with two contrasting courtship

scenes among “others”: in the clearly alien Amazon, and at the more

insidiously alien Bredely. As whoops and percussion sound out, the

opening titles scroll across torch- lit darkness, revealing glimpses of

bodies dancing in a jungle clearing: brown- skinned men, naked save

for thong loincloths, body paint, and brightly colored feathers and

beads. The camera follows a lone female moving confidently through

the men and dancing with one. Suddenly a pale white man in Euro-

pean shirt and trousers is carried, protesting, into the dance: William,

whom the woman draws into her sinuous embrace, and kisses. As

the music accelerates, the scene fades to a splendid, bright ballroom

where tuxedoed youths whirl elaborately attired women as a string

quartet scores the remaining credits. The camera lingers on the only

graphically sexual image: a sculpture of amoretti embracing in a niche,

naked save loincloths. Despite the contrast between “savage” jungle

and “civilized” ballroom, the juxtaposition of images suggests that

dancing as courtship ritual forecasts sexual encounters in both soci-

eties. But female centrality and control, so open in the Amazonian

ritual, emerge as subtle perversions of this Victorian English scenario.

As Nausicaa and Arete exerted unusual influence over Odysseus’s

fortunes, in Bredely’s ballroom William must follow the social cues of

the Alabaster women. If the Amazonian sequence suggested Odys-

seus and Nausicaa’s disorienting meeting in the wild, the ballroom

scene picks up from Odysseus’s interview with Arete. As the ranking

member of the house at the ball, Lady Alabaster, who presides seated



over her adult children, engages the standing William in a conversa-

tion that establishes his accidental presence and lack of resources, both

social and economic. Yet the matriarch’s interview threatens to col-

lapse back into the initial encounter scene, as Lady Alabaster’s affect

suggests that she is attempting to elicit courtship. Her simpering flir-

tations parody those of a young girl, as her frilly white dress, golden

ringlets, sinuous head movements, and nasal, high- pitched voice enact

an out- of- season coquetry. Furthermore, she— not Eugenia— has out-

fitted the stranger in her son Edgar’s suit. This substitution should

be more proper than if her unmarried daughter had done so, but the

erotic undertones of Nausicaa’s commerce with Odysseus in the epic

model, combined with Lady Alabaster’s unsettling affect, amplify the

perversity of the switch.

When Lady Alabaster eventually maneuvers William into asking

the demure Eugenia to dance, this interaction too goes awry. Their

polite conversation about William’s “surprise,” an exotic butterfly

specimen, abruptly sends Eugenia running from the ballroom, an

ominous reversal of Nausicaa’s improper courage. Eugenia’s previous

“surprise,” William presently learns, was her fiancé’s suicide, which

has cast doubt on her marriageability. Although her behavior and this

report should deter William, he is enchanted by her fragile beauty

and pines for Eugenia during his stay at Bredely. Their interactions

occur in the simulated wild: out on the grounds, or in the plant- filled

solarium, where Eugenia eventually indicates to a surprised William

that she is receptive to marriage.

Although marriage is the proper end to courtship, the union of

the daughter of landed gentry with this butcher’s son is a misalliance,

a violation of the social order. Nevertheless, William anticipates the

wedding night as the beginning of conjugal bliss. Signaling his formal

integration into this alien society, a maid ushers William into a bed-

room, where virginal white draperies and bedclothes frame the primly

dressed Eugenia. When he hesitates at the threshold, she playfully

invites him into bed, and he symbolically takes his wife by snapping

the daisy chain around her wrists, marking his sanctioned role as pos-

sessor of her blooming sexuality.

Marriage as Misalliance

The Homeric tradition required that Odysseus depart for wife and

home, rather than marry the princess and remain with her people;

the unmarried William has no such reason to leave Bredely. Yet the

consequences of his choice expose the moral necessity of hewing to


Meredith Safran44

one’s path: by accepting incorporation into Bredely’s society, William

exchanges exploration for domesticity, a bargain more disconcerting

still due to the diminution of his masculinity.12 Aristocratic marriage

in both men’s patriarchal societies conventionally entailed the wife’s

subordination to her husband and his household, but William must

accommodate himself to the Alabasters at Bredely.13 Whereas Odys-

seus returns to political supremacy and idealized marital reciprocity

with Penelope at home, William’s marriage produces neither conjugal

intimacy nor social acceptance, due to his persistent outsider status.14

William’s subordination is soon evident through his wife’s control

over sexual access. Eugenia possesses the conjugal bed in her own

bedroom, which his chamber merely adjoins, and she decides when

intercourse occurs. On one occasion, Eugenia leaves the door open

and reclines nude in her white bower, a tableau of sexual invitation.

But on most nights William finds the door locked. Conversely, Euge-

nia intrudes on his spaces. Midday she descends to the riverside, where

William has been drafted into educating his wife’s younger sisters, and

wordlessly summons him back to her bedroom for sex. Another day,

after snubbing him to ride on the hunt with her brother Edgar, Euge-

nia enters William’s room and seduces him into hers. Thus Eugenia

subordinates William into a consort, indicating his dependent status

at Bredely.

This use of female sexuality to dominate a man through erotic

desire is both titillating and disturbing— the more so because patri-

archal society works to contain this phenomenon. The novella signals

Eugenia’s effect on William by reference to Aphrodite.15 Like the

Greek goddess of sexuality, Eugenia transcends the status of desirable

object through her disruptive manipulation of this power, primar-

ily through her visual affect.16 So too Penelope exerts her greatest

personal influence over the unruly suitors when Athena pours onto

her “the pure, distilled Beauty that Aphrodite anoints herself with”;

on seeing her, the suitors become so desirous of Penelope that they

reverse their consumption of her husband’s wealth by heaping rich

gifts at her feet (18.200– 331). In fact, sexual intercourse with a god-

dess is forbidden to mortal men in Greek mythology, resulting in

disability or death.17 Odysseus’s divine lover, Calypso, lists all the god-

desses whose mortal paramours were destroyed by gods, even as she

claims that, should Odysseus consent to stay, she would make him the

exception by granting him immortality (5.118– 43). As her captive, he

has been as good as dead to human society for seven years; there is

no reason to believe that she could succeed in preserving him literally

when the superior goddesses she enumerated have failed.18



While no laws of marriage defined such goddess- mortal relation-

ships, and no society witnessed and sanctioned the union, like William

and Eugenia such a couple would be mismatched.19 Inevitably, the

man was the subordinate partner, whatever his standing among his

own kind. He might join the divine household, but he could never

possess it, or her, or be fully counted a “man.” Even Odysseus, despite

his past deeds and lineage, would have suffered a diminution of status

among the Phaeacians as a dependent son- in- law and an outsider to

the royal bloodline. William, who lacks many of Odysseus’s advan-

tages, faces this problem magnified. Despite possessing one kind of

worldliness, William could not foresee the insurmountable divide that

his nonaristocratic background opened between himself and his wife.

Breeding: Nature vs. Culture

The birth of children, instead of securing their father’s tenuous posi-

tion at Bredely, only reinforces that William was mistaken in choosing

to diverge from the Odyssean path. Rather than bridging their parents’

difference, the babies’ pallor suggests only Alabaster inheritance: as

William observes ruefully to his wife, “They do not seem to resemble

me at all.” By contrast, the resemblance of Telemachus to his absent

father is frequently observed (1.224– 26, 3.134– 37, 4.146– 56). The

birth of a son, so important in a patriarchal society, initiates conflict

when Eugenia declares his name as Edgar, for “there is an Edgar in

every generation of Alabasters.” When William objects that his son is

Figure 3.1 Eugenia (Patsy Kensit) channels Aphrodite to seduce William (Mark

Rylance) in Angels & Insects (1996). Samuel Goldwyn Company.


Meredith Safran46

an Adamson, Eugenia pointedly contradicts him: “We do not see your

family, or speak, or seem likely to do so . . . We are your family, and I

think you must own we have been good to you.” When William insists,

Eugenia suggests compromising, with “William Edgar.” William pre-

fers his father’s name, asserting “Robert’s a good English name.” But

by mimicking the aristocratic custom, William underlines the lack of

continuity in his working- class family.

This dysfunctional outcome was anticipated by the one person who

objected to the marriage: Eugenia’s brother, Edgar. He is already

antagonistic in the opening scene, impetuously assaulting William after

Eugenia runs from the ballroom. Although satisfied that William has

not wronged Eugenia (substituting for Queen Arete’s concern that

Odysseus had wronged Nausicaa), Edgar’s stilted apology forecasts

the men’s incompatibility. Edgar’s commanding physicality, white and

gold coloring, and arrogant personality contrast with William’s slight

build, dark features, and modest manner: a comparative physiognomy

of social class. Indeed, the unmarried Edgar takes great pride in brash,

class- coded equestrian activities; beyond riding with the hunt in his fine

redcoat, he races trains and drives carriages through hedges and par-

lor windows with impunity. He views William as an interloper, bluntly

warning him, “Don’t get too comfortable. You’re not one of us.”

The basis of Edgar’s palpable contempt emerges when he expounds

on horse- breeding. “Give me a purebred Arab stallion like Sultan any

day,” Edgar opines at a family dinner. “Keep the breeds separate and

you can’t go far wrong. That is the cardinal rule. God made crea-

tures distinct; it is our job to keep them that way.” When William

advances the Darwinian position that “the evidence is that all horses

are descended from the same animal,” Edgar vehemently defends

appearance as evidence of intrinsic difference: “Don’t be absurd. A

dray horse has nothing in common with an Arab. There is no blood

shared there. They are different— quite different. And if you knew

anything about horses, you’d see that.” Edgar’s conflation of biologi-

cal and social rules, especially viewing purity as a moral imperative,

leads him to attack William over drinks: “You are underbred, sir, and

you are no good match for my sister. There is bad blood in you,

vulgar blood . . . You are a miserable creature, without breeding or

courage . . . She is not for such as you!”

This ideologically charged conflict between William and Edgar

echoes the clash between Odysseus and the Phaeacian aristocrat,

Euryalus. When Odysseus declines Prince Laodamas’s invitation to

participate in athletic competitions due to his suffering at sea, Eury-

alus, the wrestling champion and “a match for the War God” (8.126),



insults the stranger as unfit to participate based on physiognomy:

“I’ve seen a lot of sportsmen, / and you don’t look like one to me at

all. / You look more like the captain of a merchant ship, / . . . greedy

for profit. No, you’re no athlete” (8.174– 79). Although the seagoing

Phaeacians’ wealth must derive from commerce, this young aristocrat

judges social worth only by an aristocratic warrior code. Odysseus,

although both aristocrat and warrior, is withholding his identity while

fleeing the wrath of the sea- god Poseidon (1.76– 86, 9.475– 529), and

so he starts with the retort (8.185– 95):

“One man might not have good looks,

But the gods crown his words with beauty,

And men look at him with delight . . .

Another man might look like an immortal,

But his words are not crowned with beauty.

That’s how it is with you. Your looks

Are outstanding . . .

But your mind is crippled.”

To support his rhetoric, Odysseus throws a discus so far that no one

could best him. William similarly retorts in the film, “As for breed-

ing, I count my father as a kind man, an honest man, and I know no

other good reason for respect. As for courage, I think I may claim that

to have lived for ten years on the Amazons, to have survived murder

plots, poisonous snakes, shipwreck, fifteen days on a lifeboat in the

mid- Atlantic, may reasonably compare with driving a poor horse into

a house through a window. I think I know what true courage is. It

does not consist in fisticuffs as a response to an insult.” Unlike Odys-

seus, however, William is unable to compete with Edgar’s sporting

displays of manliness and does not change Edgar’s views.

The Homeric episode exemplifies how the intrusion of an outsider

not only offends one man’s sensibilities but threatens the logic of a

conservative system. As the prince’s friend and “handsomest of the

Phaeacians” after Laodamas (8.127– 8), Euryalus’s rudeness may have

stemmed from this “nobody” sweeping in and capturing the marriage

many young aristocrats were pursuing.20 Thus an intrusive element

threatens the closed- group mentality that polices the boundaries of

a birthright aristocracy, including through marriage practices. Where

martial success, and analogous athletic ability, is fundamental to

Homeric masculinity, a merchant is “other” and lesser in the typology

of men.21 However, economic historian David Tandy has identified

the century in which Homeric poetry crystallized as the period in


Meredith Safran48

which the warrior aristocracy became widely engaged in commercial

activities: instead of status attracting wealth, wealth began to attract

status, a major cultural shift attested in archaic Greek poetry like the

Odyssey.22 Euryalus’s taunt cuts Odysseus, himself a warrior- aristocrat,

to the quick, yet he is also concerned with gifts and material gain

throughout the epic (e.g., 9.192– 220, 10.41– 51, 13.208– 28).

A similar epochal shift in assigning honor structures the conflict

in Angels & Insects. Edgar, who was born into his social position,

performs his aristocratic status through his equestrian exploits. The

redcoat worn to hunt foxes not only marks a sporting gentleman but

projects quasimilitary authority.23 By Edgar’s standards, William is

hopelessly deficient: the butcher’s son lacks noble lineage and partakes

of no sport. Even the light brogue that actor Mark Rylance affects

marks William as “other.” Moreover, William engages in both material

trade in exotic flora and fauna and intellectual commerce in new scien-

tific principles inherently hostile to the ideology rooted in God- given

order and the aristocracy’s concomitant right to police the boundaries

of rank. If such as William gains admittance and mixes his blood with

that of aristocrats, of what value is being to the manor born?

Homeric society largely shared the view that status was inherited

and aristocracy resulted from connection to the gods, but with an

important qualification. While Odysseus’s family claims descent from

Zeus through Hermes, and Zeus’s patronage of kings underwrites his

right to rule and judge his subjects, aristocrats must uphold the moral

standards that structure the universal order to maintain their earthly

prerogatives. This order is therefore not natural, but a naturalized

cultural construct that must be validated by exhibiting moral qualities

befitting descendants of the gods and arbiters of their justice.24

The misbehavior of young aristocrats compared to better- behaved

“outsiders” is common to the Odyssey and Angels & Insects.25 Aris-

tocratic immorality is at issue in Ithaca: Penelope’s suitors may be

well- born, but their impropriety in besieging her home and con-

suming her husband’s property, rather than approaching her father,

is public knowledge (2.1– 282). Euryalus, by contrast, both apolo-

gizes to Odysseus and offers a gift (8.418– 51). At Bredely, Edgar,

despite the occasional conciliatory word, confirms his true character

when William finds him raping a dark- haired young servant girl in the

stables, his personal domain. Breeding may matter to Edgar where

marriage is concerned; below stairs, the “Arab stallion” may satiate his

sexual appetite even with the “dray horse.”



Cuckoldry and Cultural Norms

From William’s Darwinian perspective, Edgar’s obsession with pure-

breeding and categorical exclusion of difference is perverse. Regulat-

ing sexual intercourse for breeding should privilege biological over

social reproduction. Still, William is about to accept the naturalized

order at Bredely by donning the redcoat for his first hunt, similar to

Odysseus throwing the discus. But when a servant urgently calls him

back to “Miss Eugenia,” William discovers the full implications of the

dysfunctional ideology at the potently named Bredely Hall. A jarring

series of handheld shots dog William’s progress from the front door

to his wife’s bedroom, where William witnesses Edgar in the midst of

sexual intercourse with Eugenia, in the marriage bed, an event that

strongly echoes a key issue in the Odyssey.Throughout the Odyssey, a wife’s infidelity is a huge source of

anxiety, as a fatal perversion of patriarchal order. The story of Penel-

ope’s cousin Clytemnestra, whose infidelity resulted in her husband

Agamemnon’s death at his homecoming, repeatedly serves as a cau-

tionary tale (1.37– 48, 3.290– 347, 4.95– 96, 11.415– 50).26 Her

own husband’s long absence puts Penelope under similar suspicion;

all doubt of her fidelity is dispelled when she and Odysseus reunite

through shared secret knowledge of their marriage bed, a key symbolic

object (23.189– 237).27 At the Phaeacian court, the bard Demodocus

sings of the god Hephaestus discovering his wife Aphrodite in their

bed with her lover Ares (8.287– 395). This song combines anxiety

about infidelity with misalliance: the most sexually desirable goddess

is married to a god who is skilled, but physically disabled, a sign of

emasculation in a warrior culture— certainly compared to the War

God himself. Informed of the affair by a witness, Hephaestus trapped

the lovers in flagrante with a magical net, allowing him to display

the adulterous pair to the divine community and demand restitution.

Most gods who witness the ensnared adulterers laugh at the irony of

the crippled god trapping his swift foe, and once their uncle Poseidon

promises restitution, the adulterers flee, and divine society resumes

the status quo.

Comparing these illicit couples’ respective exposures instructively

highlights the differences between epic model and adaptation, and

god and human. While the servants know of Edgar and Eugenia’s

incestuous affair, “upstairs” William alone witnesses it— though Euge-

nia later admits her former fiancé committed suicide rather than live

with his suspicions. William simulates the effect of Hephaestus’s magi-

cal net through seeing and being seen: the combination of accusation,


Meredith Safran50

shame, and the authority projected by his own redcoat, compared

to Edgar’s nudity, similarly reverses their power dynamic. Unlike the

gods, the erotic triangle at Bredely now suffers real consequences.

William abandons the hollow marriage to resume his journey, while

Edgar and Eugenia remain to an uncertain fate— including the pos-

sibility of utter ruin, should William disclose their secret.

Beyond the personal betrayal, Edgar and Eugenia’s incest troubles

William as a man of science who understands the biological impli-

cations of such pure- breeding. Yet this most shocking aspect of the

Victorian scenario would not have so troubled Homer’s audience:

Ares, Hephaestus, and Aphrodite are half- siblings in Homeric epic,

fathered by Zeus.28 Among the gods, this liaison is not considered

unnatural: gods are concerned with the conservation of political power

in Zeus’s patriline through endogamy. Greek mythology consistently

represents Zeus as married to his sister Hera, with whom he has sev-

eral children; with another sister Demeter he fathers Persephone, who

marries her uncle Hades. The Olympians’ parents Cronus and Rhea

also were siblings, and grandparents Gaia and Ouranos were mother

and son. Odysseus even encounters this extreme “in- group marriage”

on his voyage, in isolated mortal societies. The sons and daughters

of Aeolus, keeper of the winds, marry each other and reside in their

father’s house (10.1– 17). Nausicaa’s own parents are uncle and niece,

their marriage arranged to conserve an unbroken inheritance of king-

ship through Arete’s side of the family (7.57– 84). In historical ancient

Greek societies like Athens, an epikleros, or heiress without brothers,

was liable to marry an uncle to preserve patrilineal inheritance.29

While acceptable in classical antiquity, this ideology of power rankles

with an audience versed in Darwinian evolution.30 Through William,

we see the Alabaster siblings acting with inappropriately divine dis-

regard for biological laws, let alone human morality, in naturalizing

their aristocratic beliefs. Finally understanding why none of his wife’s

children resemble him, William’s moral repulsion at Eugenia’s infi-

delity is strengthened by his recognition that her sexual activity also

contravenes the laws of nature. When he later announces his decision

to abandon the marriage, he lays down the Darwinian law: “Breed-

ers know that even first- cousin marriages produce inherited defects,

increase the likelihood of deformity.” Thus William asserts the distinc-

tion between difference and perversion, the limit of even a kind and

worldly man’s tolerance.



Resuming the Journey:

Fidelity and License

The film concludes with William leaving Eugenia and Bredely, closing

off the counterfactual scenario and returning to the course prescribed

by Homeric tradition. Yet two further variations on the Odyssey dem-

onstrate how an adaptation may illuminate its source through artistic

license. Unlike Odysseus, who resumes his journey to Ithaca, William

has no such home; yet his destination, the Amazon, is where William

is most fully himself. In fact, even Odysseus will not remain at home:

the prophet Teiresias informed him that he must subsequently jour-

ney inland, until he finds men “who know nothing of the sea” and

perform propitiatory sacrifice to Poseidon (11.120). Ultimately, the

journey defines each man, as much as the destination itself.

Furthermore, each man travels with a female champion who

orchestrates safe passage to her protégé’s destination. The goddess

Athena repeatedly intervenes to advance Odysseus’s homecoming,

by advocating for him with Zeus, manipulating humans in Phaeacia

and Ithaca, appearing in numerous disguises, and assisting Odysseus

directly. Athena favors Odysseus because they are like- minded—

the key to a good marriage, as Odysseus told Nausicaa.31 However,

Athena is sexually off- limits, both as a goddess and a sworn virgin,

forbidden even to gods. For William, Matilda Crompton plays a varia-

tion on Athena’s role. She is, like William, a dependent who is neither

aristocrat nor servant. She shares his interest in the natural world

and new ideas, although she disguises her intellect as effectively as

drab clothing hides her body. Matilda aids the despondent natural-

ist in recovering his identity by persuading him to publish a book

about local insect societies. With the proceeds from her own book,

she purchases him a berth on a ship bound for the Amazon— and

one for herself. Unlike Athena, Matilda is no sworn virgin; she and

William consummate their intellectual passion following his shock-

ing discovery— a discovery that William suspects Matilda of having

enabled. Matilda also cannot travel unaccompanied, despite having

funded and orchestrated the venture, and her own wish to pursue

exploration requires a shift in the power dynamic: William becomes

the guide and protector, and Matilda the protégé. This more benevo-

lent expression of patriarchy nevertheless restores the “proper” order

of the sexes— precisely Athena’s role throughout the Odyssey.32

As Odysseus’s return to Ithaca restores order at the Odyssey’s end,

the closing credits roll over the well- matched William and Matilda’s

departure for the Amazon and their proper Homeric course. Through


Meredith Safran52

a sophisticated engagement with the plot, symbols, themes, and even

ideology of the Odyssey, Angels & Insects provides an example of how

adaptation can both affirm and question the narrative and even moral

continuity of a cultural tradition. Some lessons transcend the evident

historical differences: for example, deceptive allure provides no true

basis for happiness, and security is not worth captivity. Thus the nar-

rative twists that seemed a daring departure become an affirmation of

cultural tradition’s validity, even more neatly in the Haases’ film than

in Byatt’s novella.

Notes

1. Thanks to Monica Cyrino for organizing the 2010 Film and History

conference panels, and to Nicholas Rynearson for comments on drafts

of this revised chapter.

2. On origins versus originality in Homeric epic, see Foley (1999).

3. Fletcher (1999) has demonstrated Byatt’s use of the Odyssey as a “nar-

rative template”; there is necessary overlap between novella and film.

Discussions of the film focus on William’s study of insect society as

parallel to Bredely’s: see e.g. Cardullo (1997); Kline (1996). On

gothic and Homeric material in “Morpho Eugenia,” see Byatt (2001)

114– 22.

4. Explicitly in Byatt (1997) 39– 71; similarly, classicists have questioned

whether Phaeacian society is deceptively hostile: see Reece (1993)

101– 21.

5. On temptation in the Odyssey, see Hogan (1976).

6. Fletcher (1999) 217.

7. On hospitality in Homeric epic, see Reece (1993).

8. For Homeric courtship in the Odyssey, see Perysinakis (1991).

9. All references are to the translation of Lombardo (2000).

10. See Shapiro (1995).

11. On Nausicaa’s preparation for marriage, see Ingalls (2000).

12. On gender inversion in the Odyssey, see Foley (1987).

13. On archaic Greek marriage, see Foley (1994), esp. 79– 84; Ormand

(2004).

14. On marriage in the Odyssey, see Bolmarcich (2001).

15. Byatt (1992) 7, 20.

16. On Aphrodite, see now Cyrino (2010a).

17. On mortal/goddess relationships, see Lefkowitz (2002).

18. In Greek myth goddesses never succeed at this task; given the opacity of

female characters in the Odyssey, Calypso’s offer may be disingenuous.

19. The marriage of mortal king Peleus and goddess Thetis, parents of

Achilles, is the exception that proves the rule: after her forced nuptials,



Thetis abandoned her husband, despite a marriage sanctioned by Zeus

himself.

20. So too Fletcher (1999) 220; see also Murnaghan (1987) 97.

21. On Homeric masculinity, see Graziosi and Haubold (2003).

22. Tandy (1997).

23. Thanks to Gregory N. Daugherty, who pointed out the importance of

the redcoat in response to my talk in Milwaukee.

24. On class in the Odyssey, see Thalmann (1998).

25. For a discussion of Homeric morality, see Yamagata (1994).

26. For Clytemnestra as Penelope’s foil, see Felson- Rubin (1993).

27. On the marriage bed as symbol, see Zeitlin (1996).

28. In Greek mythology, Ares is always Zeus and Hera’s son; only in

Homeric epic are Aphrodite and Hephaestus children of Zeus.

29. For discussion of recent bibliography on the epikleros, see Cohn- Haft

(1995) 9 n. 33.

30. Campbell (2004) 148 notes that the incest taboo, “while horrifying

Victorians, [was] at the same time invited by the period’s social struc-

tures.” On late twentieth- century British literature’s concern with the

impact of Darwinism, see Byatt (1995).

31. On like- mindedness, see Bolmarcich (2001).

32. See Murnaghan (1995) on Athena’s championing of patriarchy.


4

C h a p t e r 4

Woman Trouble

True Love and Homecoming in

Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver (2006)

Corinne Pache

A meditation on the notion of return, Pedro Almodóvar’s 2006

Volver focuses on the modern experience of love, memory, and iden-

tity in a manner that is at once indebted to the past and resolutely

contemporary. Some films represent the ancient world directly, draw-

ing on historical or literary sources, but many that focus on contem-

porary narratives can be shown to be inspired— directly or not— by

ancient myths whose history is so influential that they pervade many

of our notions about the human experience. In particular, insofar as

Homer’s poem is the foundational text in Western culture of the very

idea of homecoming— or nostos, to use the ancient Greek term— the

treatment of the homecoming theme in Almodóvar’s film parallels,

and significantly diverges from, that of the Odyssey. Like the Odyssey, Volver places love and family at the center of its narrative, but, unlike

its ancient predecessor, which tells the story of a husband’s return

to his wife after a long separation, Almodóvar’s vision of nostos privi-

leges family ties over romantic love and presents the bond between

husbands and wives as an obstacle to the characters’ homecoming.

Volver thus offers a resolutely original and feminist perspective on love

and homecoming that centers on the relationships between mothers,

daughters, sisters, and friends.1

To raise the phenomenon of return is to start a conversation with

Homer’s Odyssey, which is, in our tradition, the home to which all


Corinne Pache56

narratives of homecoming must themselves return.2 The story of Odys-

seus’s twenty- year absence and his adventures on his long way back to

Ithaca thus exerts a powerful and abiding intertextual influence on the

film. There are, as I will show, many thematic and structural parallels

between Volver and the Odyssey. But first, let us consider the Spanish

volver, which has several connotations: to return, to turn, to do again,

and, in the phrase volver en si, “to come back to oneself, to regain con-

sciousness,” a connotation also central to the Greek concept of nostos, whose semantic range includes “homecoming,” “return from dark-

ness,” and “return from death.”3 Odysseus, the homecoming hero of

the Odyssey, is also described as the man “of many turns” in the first

line of the poem with the epithet polytropos, which alludes to both the

many turns taken on his journey home and the twists and turns of his

clever mind that are so crucial to his nostos.4

Volver, like the Odyssey, explores nostos in many of its forms:

homecoming, return of the past, return of the dead, the repetitive

patterns that define human lives, and the link between homecoming

and self- knowledge. Several characters experience an emotional and

psychological form of nostos in Volver, the most important being the

return of the mother, Irene, who may or may not be a ghost, and the

return of her daughter, Raimunda. Irene comes back from the dead,

while Raimunda’s homecoming has to do with coming to terms with

her own past. The film, like the Odyssey, is also highly attentive to the

power of art in our lives: songs, stories, old photographs, and movies

shape the characters’ lives and their self- understanding. Where Volver

differs the most from the ancient poem is in its emphasis on home-

coming as a female experience.5 In the world of the Odyssey, women

are confined to the domestic realm and their perspectives are second-

ary to the narrative of the hero’s return. Although Penelope’s loyalty

is crucially important to Odysseus’s homecoming, the poet’s focus is

always on the male protagonist.

Like the Odyssey, Volver begins in medias res, with an adolescent

whose imminent adulthood upsets the status quo. The plot revolves

around the lives of women: Raimunda (Penélope Cruz), a cleaner; her

14- year- old daughter, Paula (Yohana Cobo); and Raimunda’s sister,

Sole (Lola Dueña). Both sisters live in Madrid but often return to the

village where they grew up, Alcanfor de las Infantas, to visit an elderly

aunt, Paula (Chus Lampreave), and to take care of their parents’

tomb. A close friend of the sisters, Agustina (Blanca Portillo), helps to

care for their aunt. The friends’ close bond is reinforced by a shared

experience of loss: Agustina’s mother disappeared on the same day

Raimunda’s and Sole’s parents died in a mysterious fire. Almodóvar’s


Woman Trouble 57

film shifts its attention between Raimunda, Sole, Agustina, and the

past that unites and later threatens to separate them.

Two events precipitate the action: one evening, Raimunda comes

home to find that her husband, Paco, has tried to rape her daughter,

Paula, who killed him in self- defense. At the same time, Raimunda’s

and Sole’s aunt has died in Alcanfor. Because Raimunda is busy trying

to hide Paco’s body, Sole (unaware of the true reason for Raimunda’s

refusal to accompany her) is forced to go to the village alone, where she

hears about sightings of the ghost of her mother. After she goes back

to Madrid, Sole discovers Irene (Carmen Maura), very much alive, in

the trunk of her car. Meanwhile, Raimunda’s neighbor has given her

the key to his restaurant so she can show it to potential buyers while

he is away, a serendipitous event that allows Raimunda to temporarily

hide Paco’s body in the restaurant’s freezer. When a film crew arrives

in the area looking for someone to provide meals, Raimunda sees a

good opportunity and opens the restaurant with the help of neighbors.

While Sole reconnects with her mother in secret, hiding her from Rai-

munda, Raimunda reconnects with her past: she admits to Paula that

Paco was in fact not her father, and in one crucial scene discussed in

more detail below, she reconnects with her love of singing. By the end

of the film, mysteries are solved, and the women— mothers, daughters,

sisters, friends— are all reunited once more in Alcanfor.

The film is a return for Almodóvar in several respects. It is an

opportunity to come together with two actresses, Carmen Maura and

Penélope Cruz, with whom he has collaborated throughout his career

and who in many ways have come to personify his idiosyncratic vision.

The brittle Carmen Maura of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Break-down (1988) here reappears as a remorseful ghostly mother, while

the young Penélope Cruz who was pregnant and died in childbirth in

All About My Mother (1999) becomes the embodiment of flourishing

motherhood.

There is yet another return in the film on the level of plot, which

refers obliquely to The Flower of My Secret (1995). In the earlier film,

a successful writer of romance novels, Leo Macías, becomes disen-

chanted with her life and yearns, among other things, to write in a

different genre. She delivers a manuscript to her editor, Alicia, for a

series entitled “True Love,” but instead of the expected romance, she

has written a gory tale of incest and murder. Leo’s new book, The Cold

Storage Room, to her editor’s dismay, is about a woman who has the

abject job of emptying hospital bedpans. Her son is a junkie, and her

daughter, as in Volver, kills her father after he attempts to rape her. To

prevent discovery, the mother hides the body in the cold storage room


Corinne Pache58

of a neighbor’s restaurant. When her editor points out the absence of

a love story, Leo answers that there is romance in the subplot, based

on a true story of a man who finds himself so desperately in love with

his ex- wife that he hires a hit man to kill her mother so he can go the

funeral and convince her to come back to him.

When Leo defends her novel as being about reality, Alicia responds,

“reality should be banned.” For Alicia, novels should “give the illusion

of living” to people who lead despairing lives. Leo instead rejects the

formulaic romances she is supposed to write and looks for true love in

the experience of more realistic characters. In the end, The Cold Stor-age Room is about a mother who is ready to do anything to save her

daughter. Leo and Alicia’s argument about the role of novels is also

an argument about the nature of art: should it reflect the truth of our

daily lives or embellish reality with the veneer of fantasy? This question

is reflected in Almodóvar’s own evolution as a director, from his early

rocambolesque films of the 1980s to the more emotionally complex

narratives he started directing in the 1990s. The fantasy flavor of the

earlier films, such as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, gives

place to affecting meditations on the nature of love between friends,

parents, and children, as in All About My Mother, and between couples,

as in Talk to Her (2002) and Broken Embraces (2009).6

There is also a homecoming in The Flower of My Secret that fore-

shadows Volver. After her husband leaves her, Leo takes refuge in her

mother’s village, Almagro (the village where Almodóvar grew up).

Her mother explains that the village is the place where women go

when they lose a husband “because he’s died or left with another

woman, it’s the same. We have to return to the place where we were

born.” In Almagro, Leo spends her time sitting with the village’s

elderly women who gather to embroider lace while telling stories and

singing. Homecoming for Leo thus involves a literal return to the

maternal village where women gather together to weave their lives.

In Volver, Almodóvar revisits the plot imagined by one of his own

characters in the earlier film and makes female homecoming the center

of his narrative. Like Leo in The Flower of My Secret, Almodóvar exper-

iments with genre: the film veers between melodrama and comedy,

without completely yielding to either one. But Volver retains little of

the darkness of Leo’s plot. Despite the bleak circumstances, the colors

are bright and cheerful; the tone is lively and full of humor. The film

is nevertheless deeply serious about the humanity of its characters and

their emotions. There is sadness to be sure (illness, loss, death), and

there is violence (rape, incest, murder), but the focus is always on the

characters’ resilience and, especially, the bond between mothers and


Woman Trouble 59

daughters. Almodóvar’s playful blend of different genres is in itself

epic: Volver describes the world in different modes— tragedy, comedy,

lyric, romance— that can be found in the narrative of the Odyssey.Like the Odyssey, Volver has much to say about homecoming as a

process of memory and loss. In the publicity materials accompanying

the film’s release, Almodóvar explains that “[Volver] is a movie about

the culture of death in my native region, La Mancha. My folks there

live it in astonishing simplicity. The way in which the dead are still

present in their lives, the richness and humanity of their rites makes it

possible for the dead to never really die.”7 In the interview accompa-

nying the DVD of Volver, Almodóvar comes back to the notion that

the film deals with death, more precisely with “[t]he female universe

in relation with death.” In La Mancha, as in ancient Greece, women

take care of the bodies of the dead and the rituals of mourning that

follow death.8 The opening scene makes clear the intricate connec-

tion between past and present and establishes death, and women’s

relation with death’s rituals, as central themes. The film begins with

music over a black screen. Joyful women’s voices soon join the music

in an old- fashioned song, simultaneously with a tracking shot of a

cemetery filled with women who fight against strong winds to clean

tombs. The title, Volver, suddenly appears in bright red letters on a

grey background, as if inscribed on one of the tombstones we were

just watching.

The contrast between the solemn task at hand and the joyful sing-

ing in the background is striking. The song, “Las Espigadoras” (“the

Gleaners”), is drawn from a 1930 zarzuela (a Spanish form of popular

opera), La Rosa del Azafrán. Almodóvar describes how he remem-

bered this song from his own childhood. Accompanying his mother

to the river to do the laundry, he heard the women sing “a song about

gleaners who welcomed the dawn as they worked in the fields and

sang as if they were merry little birds.”9 In the song, the gleaners cel-

ebrate their work, “standing and stooping all day long in the wind and

the sun,” picking up whatever grain the male harvesters leave behind.

At the end of the song, not included in Volver, a male chorus joins in

and the harvesters reassure the women that they will not pick up all

the grain and “wait till you come to hear talk of love.” The song thus

celebrates women’s work in the traditional framework of a harvest

festival, with its potential for romance.10

By juxtaposing the beginning of “Las Espigadoras” with the open-

ing of Volver, Almodóvar highlights important themes: women’s work,

the mixing of high and low art, and the ways in which art, and more

particularly songs, inform our lives. The women of “Las Espigadoras,”


Corinne Pache60

like Raimunda, lead difficult lives centering on hard work, yet they find

beauty and happiness in their humble surroundings. Almodóvar’s use

of the gleaners’ song is also reminiscent of the Odyssey’s fondness for

depicting singers and songs.11 Such embedded songs— and there will

be another very important song in Volver— add layers of meaning by

interacting with the outer narrative.

The next shot shows a close up of a grave decorated with two pho-

tographs, a woman and a man. The camera then zooms out to include

Raimunda, Sole, and Paula in the frame as they dust and polish their

parents’ grave. When Paula wonders about the number of widows in

the village, Sole explains that women live longer than men in the vil-

lage, with the painful exception of her and Raimunda’s own mother. As

they brush off pine needles from the gravestone, Raimunda and Sole

reminisce about the death of their parents. The wind blowing dead pine

needles recalls Glaucon’s famous simile in the Iliad comparing the gen-

erations of human lives to autumnal leaves that fall each season as they

leave their place for new ones (Homer, Iliad 6.146– 49). The brown

pine needles also suggest that the dead keep intruding in the lives of the

living, and the ever- present wind is depicted as a quasisupernatural force

that, according to Raimunda, drives the village’s inhabitants insane.

The cemetery scene thus looks both back and forward to death.

The cleaning ritual centers on the memory of the dead, but it also

brings to mind the mortality of the villagers. Raimunda explains to

Paula that villagers all buy a plot for themselves and take care of it

during their lifetime, preparing for their own death and treating their

grave as “a second home.” Widows and orphans remember and care

for their dead, though it soon becomes obvious that Raimunda herself

has ambivalent feelings toward her dead mother. There is anger in

her strong gestures and in her remark to Sole that their mother was

“lucky” because “she died in Dad’s arms, and she loved him more

than anyone in the world.”

The film continues to move back and forth between the two worlds

of the village of Alcanfor and the city of Madrid. Almodóvar shot the

film in his childhood village, Almagro, but gave it the fictional name

of Alcanfor de las Infantas. Translated literally, the name means the

“camphor of the princesses” and evokes the embalming qualities of

camphor and the dream state of the village, a fairy tale place outside

of the everyday world, where stories are told and the dead are remem-

bered. The area between Madrid and Alcanfor is shown as a no man’s

land filled with the wind turbines that have succeeded the famous

windmills of Don Quixote. The modern machines take advantage of

the winds that wreak havoc on the region and its inhabitants’ psyches


Woman Trouble 61

and signify the transitions between the modern world of Madrid and

the village steeped in the past and tradition.

All heroic journeys include a journey to the world of the dead, and

Alcanfor is portrayed as a kind of Underworld: the village is full of

ghosts, and all activities revolve around death. Elderly women, dressed

in black, spend their time caring for the dead: washing their bodies,

mourning them at home and in funeral processions, and taking care of

their graves. The only young person in the village is Agustina, who is

dying of cancer. Alcanfor also becomes the final resting place for Rai-

munda’s dead husband, Paco, whose body she buries by the river near

the village. The film begins and ends with Alcanfor, and each trip to

Alcanfor, like Odysseus’s descent to the Underworld, is accompanied

by an encounter with death.

One striking image in Volver stresses the porous boundary between

the living and the dead. When Raimunda finds Paco dead in her kitchen,

her first instinct is to wipe the blood off the floor. The camera next

zooms in on a paper towel as it slowly absorbs Paco’s blood. The

image becomes almost abstract as red slowly overcomes white, high-

lighting the lacelike pattern of the towel, which Almodóvar describes in

his DVD commentary as “bloody embroidery.” The blood- drenched

towel becomes fluidly metaphorical: death overpowers life, but life in

turn overpowers death. When Raimunda’s cleaning is interrupted by a

neighbor, she goes to open the door with some of Paco’s blood smeared

on her neck. After Emilio points to the stain and asks her if she’s hurt,

Raimunda without hesitation reassures him with the phrase “women’s

troubles.” The phrase evokes blood as menstruation, but also every-

thing that menstruation entails: puberty, sex, children, and death. Paco’s

blood thus becomes a symbol of women’s troubles writ large.

The motif of lace also goes back to The Flower of My Secret. I have

already mentioned the importance of women gathering in their village

to embroider and tell stories. Almodóvar shoots one scene through

hanging lace, starting with a close- up of the delicate flowery motifs

and slowly shifting the focus so we can see, through the lace, Leo’s

mother entering the room where Leo is recovering when she returns

home. The traditional lacy flowers literally shape the scene and under-

line the beauty of the village’s traditions, handed down from mother

to daughter. Women’s work transforms women’s troubles into beau-

tiful patterns. The “bloody embroidery” of Volver is just another

variation on the motif of traditional lace that also evokes the weaving

of Penelope in the Odyssey as a way of controlling events in her life.

In contrast with the Homeric world in which men play the active

role while women weave inside the house, in Almodóvar’s odyssey,


Corinne Pache62

the Homeric paradigm becomes inverted, and women take center

stage. Men become obstacles that must yield in the face of the female-

defined trajectory of the narrative. And as the film proceeds to get

rid of men entirely (those who do not die get out of town), women

start to thrive. The men we encounter, with a few exceptions, are

repulsive. Raimunda’s husband, Paco, is a beer- swilling brute who

is only interested in satisfying his own desires. He cares little for his

wife’s feelings, and when she declines sex because she is upset about

the state in which she found her aunt Paula, he masturbates at her side

rather than comfort her. The next day, lust overcomes him and he tries

to rape his 14- year old daughter, arguing that he is not her biological

father, a fact that hardly justifies assaulting her in the kitchen. Another

man who plays an important role in Raimunda’s past is her father,

whose photograph is seen briefly on the grave in the first scene. Agus-

tina’s observation that Paula has her grand- father’s eyes hints at the

identity of Paula’s real father, and in time we learn that Raimunda’s

father, like Paco, was unable to resist the urge to rape his daughter,

and that young Paula is both Raimunda’s daughter and sister.

While sex precipitates major turning points, Volver gives a dark per-

spective on the relations between women and men. In the Odyssey, the

Homeric nostos finds both its source and culmination in the deep and

long- lasting connection between Odysseus and Penelope. Penelope

weaves and unweaves her tapestry, deceiving her suitors in order to

remain loyal to Odysseus. In the Homeric perspective, Odysseus’s

infidelities during his long voyage back are of little account, and his

love for Penelope is never in question. As he describes it to the Phae-

acian princess, Nausicaa, a good marriage consists of two individuals

who share “a similar way of thinking” (Odyssey 6.683). Husband and

wife also have a secret sign, centering on the rooted bed that symbol-

izes their marriage and their common- mindedness, which allows them

to recognize and to reconnect with one another after a twenty- year

separation.

The perfect harmony between Odysseus and Penelope is nowhere

to be found in Volver, where marital love is absent, and sex is always

depicted as perverted. Husbands are faithless, and fathers rape (or

attempt to rape) their daughters. Husbands and wives in Volver are

closer to the paradigm of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, the couple

Odysseus and Penelope are constantly contrasted with in the Odyssey. When Agamemnon returns home from Troy, he is murdered by his

wife’s lover.12 In Volver, there is love to be sure, but never between

husbands and wives. Raimunda ultimately seems untroubled by

Paco’s death at her daughter’s hand, while Irene, enraged when she


Woman Trouble 63

realizes that her husband raped their daughter, decides to kill him and

his lover. Husbands, in Volver, are by definition bad— and fathers are

even worse.

It is between women that love and like- mindedness thrive: mothers,

daughters, sisters, and friends love and nurture one another. Home-

coming thus takes place in the realm of women. To nurture means to

feed or nourish, and food features prominently in Volver as a means

of creating a home and expressing love. This connects the narrative to

the Odyssey, where food is a symbol of civilization, and feeding guests

is a crucial component of the institutionalized friendships formed

through hospitality known as xenia (“guest- host friendship”). Food

in ancient epics helps to form multigenerational bonds, establishes

and nurtures civilization, and is also a way of communicating between

the dead and the living. When Odysseus goes to the Underworld,

he feeds blood to the ghosts of the dead to give them momentary

consciousness. In Volver, Irene secretly makes her daughters’ favorite

foods while she is hiding at Aunt Paula’s. Raimunda and Sole are puz-

zled by the abundance of plastic containers they find, carefully labeled

with their names, that contain complicated delights that are far too

work- intensive for the elderly and frail Paula to have prepared. The

mystery food is a way for Irene to be in contact with her daughters

and to continue nourishing them from beyond, as it were, the grave.

Just as good hospitality in the Odyssey is a symbol of civilization, inap-

propriate eating, such as cannibalism, signals barbarism and figures as

a recurrent danger that threatens to impede or terminate Odysseus’s

homecoming. In the first half hour of Volver, Almodóvar hints at the

possibility that Raimunda might get rid of Paco’s body by turning him

into food, and the film gently threatens to descend into a gory, Swee-ney Todd– style horror story. The next day, after she hides Paco’s corpse

in the large freezer of her neighbor’s restaurant, Raimunda agrees to

provide lunch for a film crew of 30 people and proceeds to go grocery

shopping. Each of Raimunda’s moves encourages the viewer to think of

Paco’s body as potential food. And there is nothing reassuring about the

meat- heavy menu inscribed on the blackboard when Raimunda begins

to serve lunch: “omelet and blood sausage, pork salad.” Raimunda’s

repeated questions, as she moves swiftly among her customers replenish-

ing their plates, take on an ominous tenor: “Who’d like some pork? It’s

delicious.” Is the film crew unwittingly devouring Paco the pig? But the

joke is on us. Raimunda would never feed her customers human meat, as

befits a heroine who, like Odysseus, is always civilized about food.

Food and sex also link Volver with another ancient Greek text that

focuses on the story of a mother and her daughter. The Homeric


Corinne Pache64

Hymn to Demeter tells the story of the goddess Demeter’s despair

when her daughter is abducted by the god of the Underworld, Hades.

Demeter mourns the loss of Persephone and withdraws, with disas-

trous consequences for both men and gods, who are deprived of the

fruit of agriculture and the means of sacrifice. Demeter ultimately

obtains her daughter’s return, but because Persephone has tasted of

the pomegranate given to her by Hades (a fruit with sexual and fertil-

ity connections), she has to stay in the Underworld for a part of each

year. Persephone’s annual return thus signals the return of vegetation

and life each spring. The Hymn to Demeter ends with Demeter order-

ing the inhabitants of Eleusis to establish mysteries in her honor.

Mary- Louise Lord has shown how the Hymn to Demeter shares the

same narrative pattern of withdrawal and return also found in both

the Iliad and the Odyssey, in which the hero’s or heroine’s withdrawal

has dire consequences for the community until order is restored on

his or her return. These same elements— withdrawal, long absence,

hospitality, disguise, return, and reunion— are found in all three

narratives, though they can vary in their emphasis and order.13 The

Hymn to Demeter thus provides a feminine alternative to the male-

dominated Homeric nostos and is unique in ancient Greek literature

in privileging a female perspective and in focusing on the relationship

between mother and daughter. Like Volver, the Hymn begins with a

girl who is on the cusp of becoming an adult, and the narrative can be

understood as a feminized nostos. But while the Hymn exists within

the confines of a patriarchal and divine world, Volver upends gender

conventions and comes to a very different resolution.

In the Hymn to Demeter, Demeter and Persephone are periodically

reunited, but only because they both accept the terms given to them

by Zeus, the ruler of the gods, and Hades, the ruler of the dead. The

pomegranate eaten by Persephone signals her transition to woman-

hood and her union with Hades.14 Demeter accepts the separation

and, implicitly, the rules of the patriarchal game: daughters get mar-

ried and leave their mothers. In Volver, there are two mother- daughter

pairs. Some 14 years before the action of the film, Raimunda was

raped by her father and withdrew from her mother. Paula, like Perse-

phone and Raimunda, becomes the object of desire of an older male

and almost becomes a rape victim, but she kills her attacker and does

not separate from her mother. In both instances, mothers are ready

to do anything to help their daughters: Irene avenges her daughter’s

rape by killing her husband, while Raimunda takes on the burden of

hiding Paco’s body.


Woman Trouble 65

The radical feminization of the nostos narrative can be seen most

dramatically through the lens of a defining moment, about halfway

through the film, when Raimunda sings the song “Volver” while,

unbeknownst to her, her mother has returned— literally from the

dead— and is listening to her from inside Sole’s car. The scene takes

place at the restaurant Raimunda has opened for the film crew,

when she hears a guitar’s melody during a festive evening and starts

humming:

I can see the twinkling of the lights in the distance

That are marking my return.

Raimunda suddenly realizes that her daughter, Paula, has never

heard her sing, and decides to sing for her. Longing and sorrow over-

take Raimunda as she sings of the fear of “the encounter with the

past” and memory as a way of returning:

Coming back

With a wrinkled forehead

And the snow of time

Silvering my brow

Feeling that life is an instant

That twenty years is nothing

The lyrics express the bittersweetness of years gone by and the grief

of returning to one’s first love. “Volver” is a love song, but Raimunda

Figure 4.1 Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) sings a song of homecoming in Volver

(2006). Sony Pictures Classics.


Corinne Pache66

sings it in a context that contrasts with the lyrics and complicates their

meaning. At the song’s center is the idea that time escapes us and that

“twenty years is nothing,” but for Raimunda of course the last twenty

years are everything. She learned the song long ago for a children’s

singing contest, yet it is only now that she can genuinely understand

it. As a tearful Raimunda sings “but the fleeing traveler sooner or later

must come to a halt,” the camera switches over to Irene weeping in

the car. While Raimunda is not yet aware that her mother is back,

she seems to sense her presence, and the song affects daughter and

mother in similar ways.

The twenty- year absence in “Volver” echoes the twenty- year

absence of Odysseus. This extraordinary moment is in fact a nostos for both mother and daughter. Irene has returned “with a wrinkled

brow,” and, like Odysseus listening to Demodocus singing about his

role in the Trojan War in Odyssey 8, she completely breaks down when

she hears Raimunda singing. At the precise moment Raimunda sings

that “twenty years is nothing,” we see her coming fully into herself

as daughter, sister, and mother of a grown daughter. The women’s

homecoming has not literally lasted twenty years as in the Odyssey, but

Raimunda completes her nostos at the same moment when her mother

returns and her daughter reaches adulthood. The mother figure

returns— as if from the dead in the case of Irene— and the fundamen-

tal reunion is not between a father and his wife and son, but between

mothers and daughters. Like Odysseus who tells his own story to the

Phaeacians, Raimunda sings her own song. In Almodóvar’s revision

of the epic, the mother returns, not as a hero but— explicitly— as a

heroine, and insofar as she succeeds in finding what is beautiful and

orderly in the messiness of family life, the mother emerges as a hero-

ine who nods toward her ancient male predecessors but looks as well

toward the future.

Modern works of art, whether consciously or not, must repeat

(volver) the same gestures as ancient works. This to some degree is a

consequence of our limited repertoire as human beings: we have par-

ents and a home, we are born, we grow, we suffer, we love, we die; and

at some point in our lives, we return, in imagination or in actuality, to

our origin. But the source of this pattern, in imagination and in fact,

is also a matter of literary history: like all tales of return, Volver must

reckon with Homer’s precedent. When we analyze the film in terms

of its Homeric precursor, we see the radical novelty of Almodóvar’s

feminization of the nostos narrative. The Odyssey, to the dismay of some

modern readers, ends not with the loving reunion of Odysseus and

Penelope in Book 23, but with the reunion of Odysseus and his father,


Woman Trouble 67

Laertes. Book 24 emphasizes the close relationship between fathers

and sons, and Odysseus reconnects with his father by remembering

the names of the trees Laertes gave him when he was still a child.

The epic ends with three generations of men— Laertes, Odysseus, and

Telemachus— back in control of the palace and island. Volver by con-

trast presents homecoming as women’s work. The film ends, fittingly

for a narrative of return, where it started, in the small village in Alcan-

for where the living encounter the dead, and where three generations

of women— mothers, sisters, daughters— safeguard each other’s nostos and tell the stories that keep the dead alive.

Notes

1. This chapter is a development of my ideas in Pache (2010). I want to

thank Madeleine Goh, Adele Haft, Justin Isenhart, Tom Jenkins, and

Jordan Zinovich for their comments on this essay.

2. For the deep affinities between ancient literature and the cinema, see

Winkler (2009b). On the modern reception of the Odyssey, see Hall

(2008), and Graziosi and Greenwood (2007).

3. For nostos as “return from death and darkness,” and the connections

between nostos (return) and noos (mind), see Frame (2009) 28, 38– 39.

4. On polytropos, see Pucci (1987) 16– 17.

5. For other versions of the Odyssey that privilege the female perspective,

see e.g. Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad (2005); see also Pache (2008)

on Louise Glück’s Meadowlands (1996).

6. See Mendelsohn (2007) on how The Flower of My Secret represents an

important turning point in the director’s career.

7. Almodóvar (2006).

8. On ancient and modern mourning in Greece, see Alexiou (2002).

9. Almodóvar (2006).

10. La Rosa del Azafrán, music by Jacinto Guerrero, libretto by G. F. Shaw

and F. Romero. The lyrics are quoted from the English subtitles of the

production by the Jarvis Conservatory in Napa, California.

11. See Segal (1994), especially 113– 83.

12. For the different versions of the story, see Olson (1990).

13. See Lord (1994) 181– 82.

14. See Foley (1994) 130.


4

C h a p t e r 5

Sappho and Pocahontas

in Terrence Malick’s

T H E N E W W O R L D (2005)

Seán Easton

The New World (2005), Terrence Malick’s fourth film, retells the story of

the seventeenth century Powhatan woman, Pocahontas, and her involve-

ment with the Jamestown colony.1 It features prominently the ahistorical

love affair with John Smith that has become a staple of the Pocahontas

myth tradition.2 Although viewers have found allusions to the epic poetry

of Homer and Vergil in The New World, the presence and purpose of Sap-

pho’s erotic verse remains unexplored.3 As we shall see, The New World is

very much rooted in a male- centered, classical epic tradition, yet in two

scenes central to her relationship with Smith, Pocahontas delivers lines

from Sappho in her own voice and as her own sentiment.4 The normative

reflex of epic is to relegate a woman in Pocahontas’s position either to the

role of victim, however sympathetic, or possession. Malick uses Sappho

to develop a model of female amatory consciousness that is necessary for

Pocahontas’s evolution into the protagonist.

Malick’s allusions to Sappho in characterizing Pocahontas cor-

respond to four aspects of her poetry. First, Sappho depicts the

contingencies of desire from a female perspective both in and out of

the context of marriage. Second, Sappho explores the relationship of

desire to loss, abandonment, and despair. This resonates with a major

priority of the film: to represent Pocahontas’s experience of desire as

a good thing in and of itself, rather than a lapse for which she must

suffer punishment. Instead, she survives, matures, and loves again.


Seán Easton70

Third, Sappho (in fragment 16) makes Helen the model of a woman

who acts according to her own desire, in contrast to her representa-

tion in Homeric epic and male- authored lyric. Although Malick does

not directly allude to the poem in which this portrait appears, it none-

theless offers in miniature a template for connecting female desire to

agency. The Homeric Helen possesses a distinctive voice and attributes

agency to herself, but Homeric males as a whole treat her simply as an

object of desire, albeit an incomparable one. They do not blame her

for the war, but in not doing so they deprive her of agency.5 Among

male lyric poets, Ibycus treats Helen after the fashion of Iliadic males.

He objectifies her as a prize to be won without responsibility for her

presence in Troy.6 The poet Alcaeus does blame Helen for her conduct

while ignoring her beauty and, in the process, the basis for her fame.

She becomes simply a female transgressor.7

Sappho’s Helen proves more complex. Though by no means an

uncomplicatedly positive figure, she retains her agency, beauty, and

fame.8 She becomes, as one scholar has put it, “the hero of her own

story.”9 Likewise, The New World centers on the evolution of Poca-

hontas as a desiring subject.

Last, Sappho’s poetry depicts a mentoring relationship between

a female deity and a mortal woman, which is characterized by both

intimacy and a religious sensibility. In Sappho’s poetry and The New

World, this relationship overlaps with that of Muse to poet. Yet it also

serves as an index of the mortal woman’s narrative stature. The film

unfolds in the context of a dialogue between Pocahontas and a deity,

whom she addresses as her divine Mother. She knows that this divine

spirit is omnipresent, but she wishes her to become directly manifest.

She associates the Mother at first with John Smith, and then finally

locates her in Thomas, her son with John Rolfe.

Desire In and Out of Marriage

Sappho is particularly associated with a type of poem called the epi-thalamium, which celebrates a young woman’s passage from girlhood

to womanhood through the institution of marriage. This association

is especially suited to The New World, in which the marriage motif

explores the possibility— ultimately to be lost— of reconciliation

between the Old World and the New.10 Which of Sappho’s poetic

fragments belong to the genre of epithalamium is itself a matter of

scholarly debate. Two of the three Sapphic fragments to which Malick

alludes (51 and 130) are definitely not marriage poems, and the third

(fragment 31) is likely not either. Yet in The New World, all three


Sappho and Pocahontas 71

reinforce an epithalamic theme. As the film moves from opening

credits to main narrative, viewers hear Pocahontas speak in voice- over

addressing the divine Mother:

Dear Mother . . .

You fill the land with your beauty

You reach to the end of the world.

How shall I seek you?

Show me your face.

You, the great river that never runs dry.

As we hear these words, we see a trio of female swimmers enjoying

themselves in the waters. They are young, nude, and joyful. The erotic

character of the scene is undeniable, though the context of the scene

is not directly sexual. A low angle shot from below the water’s surface

shows Pocahontas greet the swimmers on shore. Then we see her

again, partially nude, perhaps suggesting that she had joined them.11

At this moment the English ships appear in the bay, one of which car-

ries her future lover, John Smith.

The music accompanying this scene is the prelude to Wagner’s

Rheingold, in which three Rhine maidens swim happily together, just

before the Nibelung dwarf, Alberich, discovers them. When they

realize he desires them, they each in turn mock him. Embittered,

Alberich steals the Rhine gold that the maidens are charged to pro-

tect and forswears love, which— he has learned from them— is the

price he must pay for using the gold to rule the world.12 Similarly,

the Jamestown colonists will search obsessively for gold and Smith

will give up the love of Pocahontas in exchange for the opportunity

to win fame through further voyages of discovery. Malick’s musical

analogy of the swimmers to the Rhine maidens and, by implication,

the hardly less beautiful John Smith (Colin Farrell) to Wagner’s

lustful dwarf, highlights first the sufficiency of the three female

characters among themselves, neither needing nor wishing for male

attention; and second, the formal entry of the (European) male gaze

and, with it, anticipation of the terrible historical outcome of the

encounter.13

What viewers see, however, in the swimmers montage, is beauty and

freshly present sexual maturity, all amid an atmosphere of innocence.

The divine Mother, to whom Pocahontas prays, infuses the world—

and the film as well, in her Muse- like capacity— with the beauty

that the swimmers embody in human form. As viewers watch from

their underwater perspective, the swimmers spin, dive, and describe


Seán Easton72

arcs and lines with their bodies. Two of them hold hands as they

move beneath the water’s surface. If the fact that the swimmers are all

female is neither a simple replication of Wagner’s scenario, nor a mere

multiplication of bodies, what is to be made of this moment? There is

nothing to imply a sexual relationship between the two swimmers, yet

the context in which they take pleasure in their bodies and surround-

ings is certainly eroticized.

The tension between innocence, experience, invasive lust, and the

moral choices of the viewer’s eye is all the more keenly felt due to the

age of the actor Q’Orianka Kilcher, who plays Pocahontas and who

was 14 years old at the time of filming. Her age appears to be a com-

promise between that of the real Pocahontas— 11 years old, though

the historical Smith reports her as 10— and the nearest plausible age

for a romantic relationship.14 This is also the age at which a young

Greek woman would marry, a detail that makes Sappho’s poetry all

the more important to the characterization of Malick’s Pocahontas.

It contributes a language concerned with the development of female

amatory consciousness in a premodern, patriarchal context whose

norms parallel— for the purposes of the movie— those of her own time

and place.

In this way, the swimmers montage suggests the air of erotic ten-

sion and sexual innocence in epithalamic poetry that marks the young

Greek girl about to depart from the company of her age and gender

peers and make the transition through marriage into adulthood. It

also recalls a challenge that Sappho’s poetry poses to her readers. The

collection of her surviving fragments includes poems of desire as well

as celebrations of marriage, but which is which? Since almost all her

poetry survives in incomplete form, how do we decide when she offers

praise to a bride or to a woman she herself desires?15

To press the point still further, what are the potential satisfactions

implied in Sappho’s expressions of same- sex desire, if that is what one

takes them to be? Do we understand Sappho to refer to a fully realized

emotional and physical relationship with another woman? The swim-

mers montage offers a powerful portrait of the sensual. The joined

hands of the swimmers express a form of sensual pleasure between two

members of the same sex. Yet, rather than indicate a relationship that

either involves or excludes genital contact, it presents a moment of

undefined sensuality. The scene as a whole challenges viewers to parse

further what the erotic means for Pocahontas, while hinting that to do

so is to impose foreign categories and distinctions.

As if to underscore the power of one’s cultural context to limit

perspective, Malick’s Smith arrives as a prisoner in the ship’s hold,



blinking through a hatch at the sky. The expedition’s first communal

act on shore is to be his execution, but he receives pardon at the last

moment. A low angle shot lingers on the empty noose as the reprieved

Smith walks away from what was to be the scene of his death. Soon

thereafter, Smith, an experienced military man, is entrusted with the

task of making contact with a powerful monarch— Powhatan, ruler of

the Powhatan people— who can assist the colony.

Powhatan’s warriors capture Smith en route and bring him to their

capital, Werewocomoco, where he is granted an interview with the

king and his brother and advisor Opechancanough. At a certain point,

Smith is seized and warriors rush in with their clubs upraised. Yet

no sooner does he brace himself for death (again) than Powhatan’s

daughter, Pocahontas, intervenes and Smith’s life is spared once more.

The community now welcomes him and, although he is not permitted

to leave for a period of some weeks, Smith is otherwise free to roam

about the town. During this time he and Pocahontas become close

and, shortly before he is returned to Jamestown, they acknowledge

their love for each other.

The final scene of Smith’s stay at Werewocomoco is one of the most

beautiful moments in the film. Pocahontas addresses her divine Mother

in voice- over, seeking after her and describing the transformation she

feels in herself and her relationship to all about her. This sequence

echoes the swimmers montage in its repetition of Wagner’s Rhein-gold prelude. In this sequence Pocahontas delivers a line of Sappho

and concludes the epithalamium that she began in the film’s opening

sequence:

Mother . . .

Where do you live? In the sky? The clouds? The sea?

Show me your face.

Give me a sign.

We rise, we rise.

Afraid of myself.

A god, he seems to me.

What else is life but being near you?

Do they suspect?

Oh, to be given to you . . . you to me.

I will be faithful to you. True.

Two no more.

One.

One.

I am.

I am.


Seán Easton74

We witness a flow of images accompanying her words— a temple to

the divine Mother, Pocahontas worshipping with other Powhatans,

her mortal mother, birds in flight, a sky illuminated by lightning. Her

voice transforms these images into the visual record of her inner expe-

rience, adding an aura of erotic desire to the relationships of com-

munity, nature, and spirit that the imagery symbolizes. The joyful

sufficiency manifest in the swimmers montage reappears now in Poca-

hontas’s relationship to Smith.

The seventh line of this address— “A god, he seems to me”—

delivered in an erotic context is an unmistakable allusion to the

opening of Sappho, fragment 31. This poem is especially famous;

most notably, the Roman poet Catullus adapted it as an expression of

his own (male) desire. As we shall see, Malick’s allusion represents a

different form of appropriation insofar as he, by implanting these lines

into Pocahontas’s inner dialogue with her divine Mother, replicates

the relation of Sappho to the female addressee.

The allusion, taken alone, deepens the power and resonance of

Pocahontas’s declaration of love, while enhancing its sense of the

timeless and mythic. Yet the resemblance to Sappho’s poem goes fur-

ther. Here is the first stanza and a half of Sappho’s poem:16

He seems to me equal to the gods

That man who sits across from you

Figure 5.1 Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher) considers the nature of love in The New

World (2005). New Line Cinema.



And listens closeby

To your sweet speaking

And lovely laughing— truly it

Sets my heart fluttering in my breast.

Fragment 31 contains the speaker, a female addressee, and, sitting

near her, a male third party. Pocahontas’s speech likewise contains

three figures, though here, they consist of a speaker and, seemingly,

two addressees. The first is the divine Mother and the second is Smith,

though it is significant that he is never named as such.

The cinematic montage emphasizes Pocahontas, Smith, and the

Mother deity, reinforcing the sense of a triangle of desire. It depicts

Smith smiling and laughing with Pocahontas, offering visual, rather than

verbal, recollection of Sappho’s reference to “your sweet speaking / And

lovely laughing.” Its effect on Pocahontas, akin to that of the addressee’s

laughter on Sappho’s speaker, is the transport of joy that registers in her

voice- over and the exuberant imagery that accompanies it.

The speaker in Sappho’s poem appears, in the first line, to desire this

man who is like a god, but it is quickly revealed that her appreciation

is reserved for the young woman with whom he sits. Furthermore,

the man resembles a god exactly because he is so fortunate as to sit

with the woman whom the speaker desires. Pocahontas’s response to

Smith in combination with her desire for the Mother deity creates

its own triangle. She begins the voice- over with an address to her

divine Mother. After asking her where she lives, she proposes several

likely places, then says, “A god, he seems to me.” After this point, the

address seems to shift toward Smith, but she has in fact not ceased

her prayer to the Mother. Rather, the scene suggests that Pocahontas

believes that this deity is to be found in John Smith and, for this rea-

son, he seems godlike to her.17

This is both like and unlike Sappho. She does not suggest that

there is any desire for the man in her poem, only for the woman.

Where the desire of Sappho’s speaker for the woman is erotic or, at

least, eroticizing, Pocahontas’s for Smith is also a longing for union

with her Mother, the embodiment of all the world’s beauty and gen-

erative power. For her, the erotic represents a path to this union. The

blending of her address to this Mother and to Smith does not suggest

the subordination of her erotic feelings for Smith to a higher love for

the goddess, but that the two loves share the same space. To be near

him, she feels, is to be near Her.

At this stage of the story, however, Pocahontas feels herself draw

nearer to the Mother as her relationship to Smith moves from the


Seán Easton76

emotional to the physical. At this moment, she articulates her feel-

ings and the nature of her union with Smith and, through him, to the

Mother: “I am, I am.” This also recalls Walt Whitman’s poem One Hour to Madness and Joy (line 15):18 “O to have the feeling, today or

any day, I am sufficient as I am!”

Yet, in Malick’s adaptation, it is a feeling accomplished, rather than

merely desired. Further, these words evoke the name of the Hebrew

deity— Yahweh, or “I Am Who Am”— and make for a significant close

to a speech addressed to a goddess on the subject of divinity. The full-

ness and joy that Pocahontas feels in her oneness with Smith and her

Mother find expression in the same words. When Smith leaves her,

she says, “You have killed the god in me.” Not only is the god ulti-

mately not in him; he destroys it in her, however temporarily.

Pocahontas’s declaration of Smith’s resemblance to the divine

unites her relationship to the goddess and the erotic context of the

prayer accompanying the swimmers montage with the speech in

which she quotes from Sappho 31. Together, these scenes form an

ode reminiscent of a marriage hymn. In its first half, the swimmers

montage introduces the viewer to a young girl in the society of her

gender peers, after which moment the groom arrives. In its second

half, Malick’s allusion to fragment 31 explores the complex nature of

Pocahontas’s desire for Smith.

As an epithalamium embedded in the film, it celebrates what is,

in Pocahontas’s view, a marriage— Smith does not take it as such, or

if he does, it proves the lesser of his concerns. Pocahontas’s words in

the previous speech also recall Whitman (One Hour, line 7): “O to

be yielded to you, whoever you are, and you to be yielded to / me in

defiance of the world!”19 In Whitman’s poem, the lines that precede

these support an epithalamic theme (One Hour, lines 5– 6): “O savage

and tender achings! . . . I tell them to you, for reasons, O bridegroom

and bride.”

Desire and Loss

The film moves next to the English fort and Smith’s return. The fort is

bleak and full of starving colonists. The transition could not be starker.

Smith learns that he has been tried in absentia and sentenced to death

yet again, but as the president of the colony attempts to carry out the

sentence with his pistol, he is killed and Smith is made his successor. The

chain of office he receives evokes the earlier image of the empty noose.

Overwhelmed by its wretchedness, Smith flees the fort on the pre-

text of seeking new trading partners for the colony and soon reunites



with Pocahontas. His inner dialogue recalls Pocahontas’s thoughts in

her Sapphic speech: “What else is life but living there.” For Pocahon-

tas, the issue is proximity to her beloved, and so her question is “What

else is life, but being near you?” For Smith, the issue is place. He can

live one way in one place, but not in another. It is in this that we see

how Malick’s Sapphic template redefines the film’s epic identity. The

heroic trial to be endured in this story is the quest to become and

remain, both in spite of and through desire, a whole person who lives

in a community despite the sufferings that differences of place can

impose. At Smith’s departure for the fort, Pocahontas again meditates

on her desire in voice- over. Her words are addressed, as before, to the

divine Mother: “My mouth is dry. My body trembles. My skin burns.

I have two minds.”

There are three poems of Sappho in play here. Pocahontas resumes

the narrative of fragment 31. Sappho goes on to enumerate the places

on her body that love has afflicted, as she looks at the young woman

whom she desires and the man next to her: “tongue breaks and thin /

Fire is racing under skin.” And “shaking grips me.”20 Desire afflicts

Pocahontas in like fashion: mouth, fire on the skin, and trembling body.

Pocahontas then sums up her experience: “Love has unbound my

limbs. This love is like pain.” The line “Love has unbound my limbs”

is C. M. Bowra’s translation of the first line of fragment 130.21 The

next, “This love is like pain,” appears to be a variation on the second

line of the same fragment, where Sappho describes eros as, in Bowra’s

translation, “a monster bittersweet and my unmaking.” Malick has

arranged his allusions so that the evocation of joy comes in the first

Sapphic voice- over (her “god” speech) and the disorienting physical

and mental effects in the second. We have seen in the former the sweet

side of this love. Now comes the bitter— “like pain.” Last, “I have two

minds” is a translation of fragment 51: “I do not know what to do; I

have two minds.”22

Summoning the Goddess

While the swimmers montage alludes to the context of the epitha-lamium, there remains another Sapphic mode in which to consider

this scene. Scholars have already identified the first words of The New

World as reminiscent of a Homeric invocation of the Muse: “Come,

Spirit. Help us sing the story of our land. / You are our mother. We,

your field of corn.”23 Although much remains to be said about this

aspect of the film’s classical coordinates, it is also important to keep in

mind the invocation’s nonepic dimensions.


Seán Easton78

To seek the divinity’s help in narration is consistent with epic practice,

but to ask that it leave its place and come to one’s side is the province

of kletic, or “summoning” song. Sappho’s collection of poems begins

with a kletic hymn (fragment 1). As does Pocahontas, Sappho addresses

the deity, inviting her, then explaining how and why she should come:

“Intricate, undying Aphrodite, snare- weaver, child of Zeus, I pray thee, /

do not tame my spirit, great lady, with pain and sorrow. But / come

to me.”24 Sappho articulates her own privileged relationship to a god-

dess. She does not address her as mother, but in fragment 1 she calls

her “comrade- in- arms” (line 28) and in fragment 2 invites Aphrodite

to join her celebratory troupe of young women pouring nectar at a

religious festival (lines 13– 16).

A divinity addressed in this way may still play the Muse’s role, as

Marilyn Skinner argues that Aphrodite does in Sappho’s first poem.25

Yet the goddess does not act here as the authoritative arbiter of mem-

ory, after the fashion of the Muse of epic. Rather, she joins in the

audience, infusing both it and the poet with inspiration for the song at

hand. When she arrives, Aphrodite asks a question, as though part of

the audience: “Sappho, who wrongs you?”26 The answer to this ques-

tion explains the reason both for the summons and the poem itself.

Pocahontas speaks intimately to her Mother, but the answer is not

given in easy conversational fashion. It falls to Pocahontas to recog-

nize for herself, at the conclusion of her brief life’s many experiences,

the answer to her question, “Where are you?” Not until then does she

find the divine Mother in Thomas, her son with John Rolfe.

The Hero of Her Own Story

Epic is the political genre of the Greco- Roman world par excellence and also the category to which one intuitively assigns movies about

culture heroes and wars of foundation. One may envision The New

World as an Odyssey in which John Smith comes to Virginia as an

Odysseus figure, yet passes that mantle to Pocahontas who makes her

own great journey, not only into the life of the English settlers in Vir-

ginia, but to England itself.27 Still more, it resembles Vergil’s Aeneid,

in which Smith, a would- be Aeneas, misses his opportunity to become

the symbolic founder- ancestor of a new Roman nation born, like the

old, of two peoples. In his stead, Pocahontas emerges as a very dif-

ferent progenitor. In support of this conception of her character is

the comment of Russell Schwartz, president for marketing at New

Line Cinema: “Terrence said to me very early on, ‘This is our original

mother,’ meaning that her journey is that of America itself.”28



The epic dimension of the film makes Sappho’s voice necessary,

for she offers a broader horizon of gender possibilities than does any

other Greek or Roman author, while remaining within the confines

of premodern patriarchy. Furthermore, the adaptation of her voice

from classical antiquity establishes a sense of cultural consistency in

the dialogue between the film’s approach to gender and that of the

epic tradition on which it draws. The result is that Pocahontas grows

within and, eventually, beyond a traditional epic role to develop a per-

spective that envisions, evaluates, and selects from possible destinies.

In the course of these experiences, she rejects self- destruction and loss

of original identity.

It is Pocahontas’s navigation both of her desires for John Smith and

John Rolfe and of the consequences of each relationship that enables

her to play the protagonist’s part. Smith is the obvious competitor

for this position, but he loses it through his refusal to acknowledge

his desires or to confront their consequences. Instead, by making the

traditional epic hero’s choice to continue his quest, he forfeits his role

as protagonist.

For his characterization of John Smith, Malick draws on Ver-

gil’s Aeneid, the signature epic of the Roman tradition, much as he

employs Sappho’s verse for Pocahontas. The first words heard from

Malick’s John Smith in the film are these, delivered in voice- over:

“How many lands behind me? How many seas? . . . What blows and

dangers? Fortune ever my friend.” These lines draw on Robert Fitzger-

ald’s translation of Vergil’s Aeneid. They come not from Aeneas, but

from his deceased father, Anchises, who awaits his son’s visit to the

Underworld. At his approach, Anchises utters this address: “I greet

you now, how many lands behind you, / How many seas, what

blows and dangers, son! / How much I feared the land of Libya /

Might do you harm.”29

Anchises worried about Libya, because Aeneas was in love with

Dido, its queen, and seemed ready to abandon his quest. By making

these lines part of Smith’s internal dialogue, Malick implants in him an

intuition that plays the part of an epic father figure concerned for his

son’s glory. This connection is unsurprising. There has been a Vergil-

ian presence in the Pocahontas tradition since 1801, when John Davis

published his romanticizing version of the tale, comparing Pocahontas

to Dido. When Aeneas and his followers, fleeing the Greek destruc-

tion of Troy, are washed up on the shores of Libya, Dido gives them

refuge. The goddess Venus, Aeneas’s mother, seeks to protect her son

by making Dido fall in love with him. She also arranges for Jupiter to

insist that he leave Carthage to pursue his destiny of founding a new


Seán Easton80

people in Italy, which later on down the generations will become the

Roman nation.

When Aeneas leaves, Dido despairs and commits suicide. Aeneas’s

quest leads him to the Underworld to seek counsel from his deceased

father. There he encounters the ghost of Dido in the company of her

first husband, whose murder originally drove her to Libya where she

founded the city of Carthage. Aeneas greets her, expressing shock

and sadness at finding her there. Years after Smith leaves Virginia,

Pocahontas— now Rebecca Rolfe— visits England in the company

of her husband, John Rolfe. While there, she encounters John

Smith, whom she had thought dead. Davis characterizes Pocahon-

tas’s reaction to seeing him by repeating Dido’s response to Aeneas

in the Underworld: “Turned away, she kept her eyes fixed upon the

ground.”30 Malick accepts Smith as an Aeneas figure, but empha-

sizes Pocahontas’s difference from Dido through her resilience in the

face of loss and duplicity, whereas Davis’s quotation from the Aeneid

reduces her to silence.

Pocahontas’s declaration, “A god he seems to me,” offers a use-

ful point of departure for appreciating Malick’s film as a Sapphic

epic. “God- like” is a standard epithet in Homeric epic, marking the

superiority of one mortal over others.31 In both fragment 31 and The New World, resemblance to a god characterizes an attractive male,

for whom another, more compelling object of desire is substituted.

The Homeric echo in fragment 31’s “like a god” resounds still more

strongly in fragment 16.

This poem is important to the broader significance of Sappho for

The New World. It offers a model for approaching the content and

concerns of the Iliadic tradition while keeping Helen at its center. The

speaker of the poem finds in Helen an analogy for her own experience

of desire (fragment 16, lines 1– 8):32

Some say a host of horsemen, others of foot soldiers,

And others of ships, is the most beautiful thing

Upon the black earth, but I say it is

Whatever one loves.

It is entirely easy to make this understood

By everyone: for she who by far surpassed

All humankind in beauty, Helen,

Left her very noble husband,

And went sailing off to Troy

With no thought at all for child or dear parents

But she was led astray by . . .



Although Malick does not quote from this poem directly, it merits

attention insofar as it draws together the ideas broached in his allu-

sions to Sappho’s godlike man, her characterizations of desire, and

the relationship of both to the context of Pocahontas’s story. The frag-

ment’s brief narrative of Helen offers parallels to the film in that both

women abandon their communities for a foreign visitor. Unlike Helen,

Pocahontas does not provide the occasion for her people to go to war.

Nevertheless, in the film’s version, the help she gives Smith prevents

the Powhatan from eliminating the English colony before the arrival

of the personnel, weaponry, and supplies that allow its preservation.

For Sappho’s Helen and Malick’s Pocahontas, desire informs their

decisions. Force may swirl about them, but they choose where they

go. In neither case, however, does this attribution of agency serve as

a basis for their condemnation or removal to supporting roles in the

stories of male lovers. Pocahontas’s father exiles her for her actions,

and she confesses to her uncle, late in the film, to having made “many

mistakes.” Even here, she is allowed to address the issue. Most impor-

tant, the man who resembles a god does not have final authority to

determine what Pocahontas does with her desire. Likewise, to look at

the film through the lens of fragment 16, Smith’s epic world with its

troops and ships does not command her attention. What, or whom,

one loves and why are the questions on which the film turns. Accord-

ingly, when Smith abandons love, he drops from the film. When he

returns briefly, it is to comment on that abandonment.

Film scholar Lloyd Michaels identifies four types of story in The New

World: epic, creation myth, love story, and personal story.33 Malick’s

Sapphic voice unites these four dimensions, combining allusions to

a male- centered epic tradition and Sappho’s woman- centered erotic

lyric. These allusions open narrative directions that enable Pocahon-

tas to experience the passion and loss characteristic of the abandoned

women of epic, yet to emerge, without any sense of anachronis-

tic gender identity, as the protagonist of a revisionist epic of desire

and discovery.

Notes

1. I would like to thank Monica Cyrino, as well as Yurie Hong, Sean

Cobb, Owen Goslin, Robert Kendrick, Laura Maki, and Kjerstin

Moody for their valuable comments on this chapter.

2. On the historical Pocahontas’s names, see Rountree (2006) 37– 38. No

name for her character is mentioned in the film until she is baptized

and takes the name Rebecca.


Seán Easton82

3. Sappho is a female poet of love, desire, and marriage, who composed

on the Greek island of Lesbos around 600 B.C. On possible allu-

sions to Homer in The New World, see MacDonald (2009) 91– 92

and Walden (2011) 197, 209 n. 2. On allusions to Vergil and other

authors, see autochthonous88 (2008a). Although this video does not

mention Sappho, another on the same channel (2008b) features an

episode with the phrase “Eros the Bittersweet” in its title, which is a

direct quotation from Sappho (fragment 130).

4. The version of The New World released in theaters (135 minutes) was

issued on DVD in 2006. All references in this chapter, however, are to

the 2008 extended edition (172 minutes). This version restores much

that was cut from the theatrical release. The second of the two scenes

in which direct allusions to Sappho appear is featured only in the 2008

extended edition.

5. Blondell (2010) 351– 52.

6. Blondell (2010) 364.

7. Blondell (2010) 354.

8. On the figure of Helen in Sappho’s poetry, see Blondell (2010)

373– 87.

9. duBois (1996) 88.

10. Sinnerbrink (2011) 190.

11. On the composition of the scene, see Sinnerbrink (2011) 187.

12. Sinnerbrink (2011) 195– 96, n. 22.

13. Morrison (2007) 200 argues that the issue of colonial conquest is pres-

ent throughout, even “underlying the film’s most radiant idylls.”

14. On Pocahontas’s age, see Rountree (2006) 36.

15. For an introduction to Sappho, see Ormand (2009) 37– 45. On the

issue of sexuality in Sappho’s poetry, see Hallett (1996) and Stehle

(1996).

16. All texts of Sappho are from Campbell (1982). The translation here is

by Monica Cyrino.

17. Wall (2011) 74.

18. autochthonous88 (2008a). See Blodgett and Bradley (1965) 106.

19. autochthonous88 (2008a). See Blodgett and Bradley (1965) 106.

20. Translated by Carson (2002) 63.

21. Higham and Bowra (1938) 211.

22. The translation is mine.

23. MacDonald (2009) 91– 92.

24. Translated by Winkler (1990) 167.

25. Skinner (2002) 64.

26. The translation is mine.

27. Bleasdale (2011) 50. Bleasdale observes that Pocahontas is presented

as the successful explorer, and Smith the failed one.

28. James (2005).



29. autochthonous88 (2008a); Fitzgerald (1981) 184. In Fitzgerald’s

translation the passage occurs at 6.927–30, while in Vergil’s Latin text

it is 6.692–94 (Mynors 1969).

30. Aeneid 6.469. The translation is mine. See Davis (1909) 292– 93.

31. Page (1955) 21 n. 1.

32. The translation is by Monica Cyrino.

33. Michaels (2009) 85.


4

C h a p t e r 6

Soul Fuck

Possession and the Female Body

in Antiquity and in Cinema

Kirsten Day

The genesis for this chapter came about while I was watching Para-normal Activity (2009), a film that focuses on Katie, a woman tor-

mented since childhood by an evil spirit.1 When Katie moves in with

her boyfriend, Micah, he enthusiastically sets up a video camera to

record the supernatural activity. Later, while doing some research on

the Internet, Micah comes across the case of Diane, a woman whose

circumstances from childhood eerily mirror Katie’s. While showing

her the graphic footage, Micah explains to Katie that after the evil

spirit took full possession of Diane’s body, an attempted exorcism

failed, and Diane ultimately died from blood loss after gnawing off

her own arm. As the film progresses, Katie too is gradually possessed

by the demon, which takes more and more control until in the end,

she stabs Micah to death off- camera.

As I watched, it struck me that this sort of possession,2 which is

regularly engendered as feminine, finds a parallel in the ancient world

in the usurpation of women’s bodies by deities for the purposes of

prophecy. Although this connection has been broadly recognized,3 to

my knowledge it has not been examined in depth. In this chapter,

therefore, I propose first to look at how ancient possession is presented

in literature and then turn to depictions of possession in film in order

to show that in both cases, the violent overpowering of women’s bod-

ies and the scopophilic nature of these episodes enacts a sort of spiritual


Kirsten Day86

rape. Ultimately, this connection demonstrates the persistence of the

ancient view of the female body as more “possessable” than the male,4

even in our supposedly enlightened postfeminist world.

Possession in the Ancient World

In the Phaedrus, Plato discusses two main kinds of divination: the one

a sane, rational process, as in augury, and the other an ecstatic state

where the soul is possessed by a deity.5 In literature, the former is

illustrated by prophets like Calchas in the Iliad and Teiresias in both

the Odyssey and in tragedy— men who deliver their prophecies calmly,

rationally, and in their own voices. The ecstatic variety, on the other

hand, is most commonly associated with the Pythia, who prophesies

for Apollo at Delphi, and with other oracular priestesses known as

Sibyls. While allusions to this sort of prophetic ecstasy date back to

the fifth century B.C.,6 perhaps the most famous description is found

in Vergil’s first century B.C. poem, the Aeneid. Vergil begins with the

god’s violent appropriation of the Cumaean Sibyl’s body as she pre-

pares to prophesy to the hero Aeneas (Aeneid 6.47– 51):7

Her face flushes and contorts,

her hair bristles wildly, while her breast heaves

and her stormy heart swells with frenzy; she seems to loom

and her voice is otherworldly, as the power of the god,

coming closer, has filled her.

Despite her desexualization at the human level— her position as Apol-

lo’s priestess and her advanced age make her both sexually unavailable

to mortal men and relatively unappealing— the grotesque description

of the god “entering” the priestess positions her prophecy as a kind

of rape by Apollo,8 and her resulting lack of bodily control while in

the throes of his power suggests some sort of orgasmic ecstasy. The

characterization of this episode as spiritual rape is reinforced as Vergil

lingers over his description while emphasizing the Sibyl’s resistance

and compulsion (6.77– 80 and 99– 100):

But not yet succumbing to the god, the priestess, monstrous,

rages in her cave, struggling to shake the great god

from her breast; but all the more he wears out her raving mouth,

subduing her wild heart; he bears down and molds her to his will . . .

Apollo shakes the reins

as she rages and twists the goad in her breast.


Soul Fuck 87

Spread out over more than fifty lines, this prolonged emphasis

on the Sibyl’s frenzy not only sexualizes her but fetishizes her as

well, removing her from the subject position and making her into

an object of erotic fascination.9 The fact that this spectacle is subject

to the male gaze— that of Aeneas and his comrades— strengthens

this notion, as voyeurism in itself is read by gaze theorists as a meta-

phorical act of sexual penetration or assault. Thus the dominant

narrative voice uses the Sibyl’s ecstasy as a “tragic instrument”

directed at male sensibilities, since its aim, as Ruth Padel puts it,

is “to find a useful image of suffering: not so much imaginative

sympathy with, as literary exploitation of women’s victimised posi-

tion.”10 Ultimately, this victimization and objectification effectively

undercut any authority and power the Sibyl otherwise seems to

exert through her position as priestess and prophet,11 reducing her

to a sacrificial spectacle of suffering offered up for the benefit of the

male gaze.

Vergil’s description was enormously influential, with echoes

appearing in representations of the Sibyl in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and

Statius’s Silvae, as well as in Lucan’s description of the Pythia in his

Pharsalia. In the latter, Appius Claudius Pulcher compels a reluctant

Pythia to prophesy for him long after the oracle at Delphi had fallen

into disuse. Here, Lucan goes Vergil one better in positioning this

sort of “soul fuck” as rape by noting up front in his description of

the oracle’s suspension the coerced nature of the priestesses’ partici-

pation, along with the violent, destructive nature of these episodes

(Pharsalia 5.114– 20):

With the oracular voice silenced,

the Delphic priestesses do not mourn, but rejoice at the

reprieve. For any whose breast the god penetrates

earns an early death as punishment— or reward—

for allowing the god in. For indeed, the mortal frame gives way

under the prick and surge of frenzy, and the divine assault

crushes the fragile spirit.

The Pythia’s compulsion in this episode in particular is made clear

when Lucan describes her failed attempt to avoid surrendering her-

self to the god by making a pretense of possession; Appius, however,

is not fooled, and she is eventually compelled to submit through

fear of his rage. The scene that follows unambiguously positions

Apollo as assailant and the Pythia as victim (Pharsalia 5.161– 77

and 190– 93):


Kirsten Day88

Finally, the terrified maiden

fled toward the vast chasm and sat tight, clinging

to the tripods . . .

At last Apollo masters

her breast; he bursts in, filling the body

of the priestess as never before, and he expels

her right mind, compelling her heart to yield to him

completely. Senseless, she rages through the cave,

her neck enslaved, and, flinging aside the fillets and garlands

of the god from her bristling hair, she sends them whirling

through the temple, her head thrashing; she scatters the tripods

in her frenzied path and seethes with blazing fire,

as she endures your anger, Apollo. And not only do you

abuse her with the lash and drive flaming goads through her guts,

but she also submits to the bridle . . .

Then her mouth, foaming with madness, spews through the vast

cavern

groans and howls, along with panting breath,

and a mournful wailing, until at last, with the maiden now

mastered, the voice of the god sounds forth . . .

Here, Lucan underscores the sense of erotic fascination by drawing

this scene out even longer than Vergil does, by making his description

of her frenzy even more vivid, and by the presence of male spectators—

Appius himself along with the temple priests. At the same time, the

implication of rape is sharpened by the Pythia’s characterization as

doubly victimized— first by Appius, then by Apollo. Thus Lucan, even

more explicitly than Vergil, presents the ecstatic prophecies of these

priestesses as divine rape conducted on a reluctant or resisting woman

who is fetishized and her struggles rendered orgasmic in that they are

presented through the lens of the male gaze.

Influenced by literary descriptions such as these, scholars up

through the mid- twentieth century assumed not only that real- life

oracular priestesses were subject to these sorts of violent ecstasies12 but

also, as a corollary, that they spewed only gibberish, which had to be

converted to comprehensible prose or verse by male priests. In 1907,

for instance, Lewis Richard Farnell argued that the Pythia’s ecstasy

was a product of the combination of the power of her belief in it and

the “neurotic effect” produced by the rituals and stimulants to which

she was subject beforehand.13 In 1950, however, Pierre Amandry

called these assumptions into question, noting among other evidence

that literary sources such as Herodotus represent the Pythia speak-

ing directly and articulately to the consultant, even if her message is


Soul Fuck 89

ambiguous, and that scenes on vase paintings depict the Pythia sitting

calmly and serenely on her tripod.14 Nonetheless, the image of the

frenzied priestess spewing nonsense remains so ingrained in the mod-

ern imagination that it not only appears in the ninth edition of Lonely Planet’s guide to Greece15 but is even reiterated on an informational

placard placed at Apollo’s Temple at Delphi.16 Thus the prevailing

modern misconception replicates the bias found in literature, depriv-

ing historical oracular priestesses of rationality and voice altogether.

My concern here, however, is less with the historical situation

than with the ideological notions behind such misconceptions. As

Anne Carson has shown, women in the ancient world were viewed

as wet beings with leaky boundaries who were therefore unable to

keep themselves adequately under control, sexually or otherwise;17 as

a result, women’s bodies were seen as more “possessable” than men’s,

as is suggested by the regular appearance in literature of descriptions

of priestesses’ orgasmic ecstasies and by their opposition to compa-

rable passages involving males. As noted earlier, male prophets like

Calchas and Teiresias deliver their prophecies calmly, rationally, and

in their own voices rather than being positioned as literal “mouth-

pieces” of the god. Even Theoklymenos in Homer’s Odyssey, despite

the more mystical nature of his vision, manages to deliver his warnings

without the violent usurpation of his body.18 Where women are con-

cerned, however, examples of frenzy resulting from divine possession

abound: Cassandra in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon19 comes to mind, as

well as Agave in Euripides’s Bacchae20 and Amata in Vergil’s Aeneid.21

The persistence of this prejudice even into the modern world accounts

at least in part for the widespread acceptance of the prophetic ecstasy

of the historical Pythia and Sibyl through the mid- twentieth century:

indeed, Farnell supports his argument about the genuineness of the

Pythia’s ecstasy by noting that because “the female is more responsive

than the male, and the uncultured than the cultured intellect, to cer-

tain influences of religious mesmerism, the rulers of the oracle were

well advised in generally selecting for the prophetic seat a virtuous

woman of the lower classes.”22

Possession in Film

Because of the persistent notion of the female body as susceptible to

possession, it is not surprising that a similar dynamic manifests itself

in modern film. A striking illustration directly related to the ancient

examples is found in Zack Snyder’s 2007 film 300, where, while

consulting the Ephors— here, priests who oversee the temple— the


Kirsten Day90

Spartan king, Leonidas, is treated to a drawn- out spectacle of an

attractive young “Oracle” writhing about in a divinely inspired (and

drug- enabled) ecstasy wearing only a transparent garment that has

fallen loose to expose one breast. Here again, the girl’s frenzy is clearly

presented as orgasmic, her participation coerced, and her subjection

to the male gaze— not just of Leonidas but also of the group of lech-

erous Ephors— highlighted, all of which contribute to the character-

ization of this scene as a spiritual rape. This idea is reinforced when a

grotesque Ephor licks the spent and helpless girl’s neck at the end of

the scene, while the voice- over informs us, “The Ephors choose only

the most beautiful Spartan girls to live among them as Oracles. Their

beauty is their curse, for the old wretches have the needs of men.”

As suggested previously, this trend also finds notable parallels in a

seemingly unrelated genre, the horror film, where women’s bodies are

regularly possessed in a violently sexualized manner, rendering them

disempowered victims subject to the male gaze, much as we have seen

with oracular possession scenes.23 One early example is found in the

1973 film The Exorcist, where the body of a 12- year old girl named

Regan is violently possessed by an evil spirit. Significantly, this film

was purportedly based on the true story of a young boy’s posses-

sion in 1940s Maryland, but screenwriter William Peter Blatty, who

initially dramatized the story in his 1971 novel, changed the gender

of the child in both book and film.24 Despite the grotesque disfigura-

tion Regan undergoes onscreen, the sexual nature of her possession is

made clear both linguistically— in the voice of the demon, she utters

such phrases as “Lick me, lick me” and “Stick your cock up her ass”—

and visually, most strikingly in the famous scene where she violently

masturbates with a crucifix and then forces her own mother’s head

Figure 6.1 The Oracle (Kelly Craig) in an ecstatic frenzy in Zack Snyder’s 300

(2007). Warner Bros.


Soul Fuck 91

down into her crotch when she tries to intervene. Indeed, this scene

makes the idea of supernatural rape quite explicit: as Regan drives the

crucifix into her vagina, the demon voice chants, “Let Jesus fuck you,

let Jesus fuck you,” while at the same time we hear the girl’s voice

protesting, “No, no!” Later, Regan’s lack of consent is further high-

lighted when the words “Help me” appear on the skin of her stomach

like scar tissue. Moreover, as in the ancient world, the film situates

Regan’s struggles and writhing as for the benefit of the male gaze:

the title of the film, for instance, focuses on the priest who eventually

exorcizes the demon, subtly framing the spectacle from the perspec-

tive of the authoritative male.

A similar dynamic is seen in the 1982 film Poltergeist, in which a

suburban family home is disturbed by the activity of malevolent spir-

its. The pretty, very young Carol Anne serves as the initial conduit

of communication for the spirits, and she is eventually abducted and

taken into their dimension. Parapsychologists are called in, and Diane,

the girl’s mother, is chosen as the most appropriate agent for retriev-

ing the girl from the spirit world. While the use of females as “portals”

for supernatural activity is unsurprising, most relevant to our purposes

here is a possession scene that takes place after the house has mistak-

enly been declared “clean.” In the setup to this scene, a relieved Diane

indulges in a sensual, relaxing bath, emphasizing her attractiveness

and sexuality. Afterwards, she has just reclined on her bed when she

is suddenly attacked by the poltergeist: half- dressed, she writhes and

resists as the demon takes over her body, subjecting her to convulsions

of an orgasmic quality. The sexual nature of this possession is implied

by her recent emergence from the bath, her placement on the bed,

and her half- dressed state, while her terror, her resistance, and her

violent, unnatural movements characterize the episode as a rape scene.

While no male viewer is present onscreen, I would argue that the cam-

era’s emphasis on the presence of the dog watching as Diane bathes

alerts us to the scopophilic nature of this sequence; in addition, since

she is alone in the room when the demon attacks, Diane’s repeated,

futile attempts to keep her T- shirt pulled down can only be for the

benefit of the cinematic audience— whose gaze, as Laura Mulvey has

demonstrated, is engendered as male25— thus alerting us to our own

complicity in the voyeurism inherent in the scene.

While these two examples are now fairly dated, this dynamic persists:

films like Carrie (1976), Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986) and Pol-tergeist III (1988), Witchboard (1986) and Witchboard 2: The Devil’s Doorway (1993), The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), and Paranormal Activity 2 (2010) and Paranormal Activity 3 (2011) all feature young,


Kirsten Day92

sexually attractive women whose possession carries an implication of

rape. As noted earlier, in the original Paranormal Activity, not only

is the spiritual rape of Diane put on display and that of Katie at least

implied, the voyeuristic element is highlighted when Katie’s boyfriend

Micah repeatedly sets up the camera, often over Katie’s protests. The

audience’s awareness of the camera in turn underscores their own role

as scopophilic viewers, while Micah’s charge of it helps to engender

this gaze as male. Indeed, in the scene noted previously where Micah

shows footage of Diane to Katie, the camera at several points lingers

not on the image of Diane but on Katie as she reacts in horror to the

information, again positioning Katie’s suffering as spectacle.

The Last Exorcism (2010) is another recent film that illustrates

some of these same principles. Once again, a young innocent girl, here

named Nell, is the victim of demonic possession, the sexual nature

of which is suggested by a promotional poster for the film that fea-

tures Nell in a suggestive position, hair in disarray, and clad in only a

nightgown that rides up her legs as if to invite a peek.26 The use of a

faux- documentary format helps to focus attention on the role of the

viewer, emphasizing the nature of Nell’s victimization as spectacle,

while the presentation of the events securely from the viewpoint of the

Reverend Cotton Marcus, who is called in to do the exorcism, again

engenders the gaze as male.

As a counterpoint, men in these films are generally not subject to

the same treatment; rather, like male prophets in the ancient world,

their characterization as more rational and self- possessed serves as

a contrast to the vulnerability of women. In Paranormal Activity, Micah’s zest in chronicling the paranormal events renders his interest

virtually scientific, and he is constantly playing the role of minor hero,

fearlessly investigating strange activities in the attic and rescuing Katie

from the clutches of the spirit. In The Last Exorcism, the skeptical

and worldly Reverend Marcus serves as a foil to the naïve and suscep-

tible Nell. In Poltergeist, the father maintains a relative emotional and

physical distance from the events throughout, but in the end, he man-

ages to whisk his family away to safety just before their house is sucked

down into a vortex. And in The Exorcist, Father Karras, the priest who

is called to assist the exorcism, is cast as a relatively detached observer

in opposition to Regan’s more emotional, “irrational” mother. In the

end, Karras succeeds in freeing the girl of her torment by first inviting

the demon into his own body and then jumping out the window to

his death rather than allowing himself to be subjected to this sort of

“soul fuck.” Significantly, despite its spelling, Karras’s name and his


Soul Fuck 93

Greek origins also emphasize his more positive, active, and heroic role

by associating him with the notion of grace, or charis, in Greek.

Furthermore, when men are the focus of some kind of mind or

body possession in the horror genre, we generally see a very different

dynamic: in films like The Wolfman (1941 and 2010), Psycho (1960

and 1998), The Omen (1976 and 2006), and The Shining (1980),

the focus is not on the victimization of the male whose body or mind

has been usurped; instead, these men are presented as predatory, and

again, it is generally the women who are their prey whose victimiza-

tion is held up for the viewer’s pleasure.

This juxtaposition between male and female roles suggests that the

female body is being used in these episodes as a locus for male con-

cerns: Lisa Maurizio has argued that “male rhetoric about women

is motivated by anxiety and the need to dominate women,”27 while

Carol Clover says of the occult film in particular that “behind the

female ‘cover’ is always the story of a man in crisis.”28 In addition,

in her groundbreaking 1975 article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative

Cinema,” Laura Mulvey demonstrated that the pleasure of looking

in cinema results from sexual stimulation that relies on separation of

self- identity from the image and the simultaneous identification with

the object on the screen, so that the women discussed here can work

both as fetish objects and as loci for male anxieties surrounding loss

of power and control.29 Following Freud, Mulvey positions this con-

cern as castration anxiety in particular,30 a dynamic suggested in The Exorcist when a statue of the Virgin Mary in a local church is des-

ecrated by the addition of a penis and elongated breasts. Clover, on

the other hand, sees possession films in particular as concerned not

with women’s lack, but with interiority as their primary difference,31

and the prevailing male anxiety being that of “slippage and fungibil-

ity,”32 which the nature of the statue’s desecration in The Exorcist can

alternately be seen to suggest. In both readings, however, the over-

riding dynamic is clear: woman serves not as subject but as a sign for

male concerns.33

Connections

I would like to acknowledge briefly an important difference in the com-

parison I am making: spiritual possession of priestesses in the ancient

world was conducted by Apollo, a god with generally positive func-

tions, and these incidences resulted in a constructive outcome— the

production of a prophecy. In the modern horror film, where spiritual

possession is predominantly found today, it is regularly carried out by


Kirsten Day94

a malevolent spirit and outcomes are generally destructive. The most

obvious explanation for this discrepancy is the replacement of the

pagan system and its deities, who regularly conducted even literal rapes

on women without incurring a moral stain, with a Christian god who is

characterized as morally good. There are, of course, examples in mod-

ern cinema of ecstatic mystical possession by a benign, Christian spirit,

where the spiritual “rape” of a female body is likewise offered up as a

spectacle for the male gaze, as in Mariette in Ecstasy (1996)34 and Stig-mata (1999). Perhaps because Western audiences are uncomfortable

associating the notion of rape, or even sex, with a Christian deity, how-

ever, such narratives are far more popular and prevalent in the horror

genre, where possession can be assigned to devils and demons, allow-

ing the viewer to deny any affinity with the perpetrator. The Western,

Christianized audience of the horror film can thus see themselves as

repulsed by, rather than complicit in, the spectacle.

As a result, it is the horror film in general and the paranormal genre

more particularly that engage in pervasive and specific ways with

ancient depictions of prophetic possession. As Mulvey has shown,

the act of looking in cinema is intensified by the multiple layers: the

audience, which is gendered as male, watches the film recorded by

the camera while the (usually male) characters onscreen watch the

woman.35 I would argue that the ancient descriptions discussed above

have a similar dynamic with their presumption of male readership,

their emphasis on the internal male audience, and their positioning

of the female as a fetish object. In other words, as in cinema where

the look with its multiple layers is exposed, as Teresa de Lauretis puts

it, “to integrate voyeurism into the conventions of storytelling, and

thus combine visual and narrative pleasure,”36 ancient depictions of

possession achieve a similar goal by highlighting the presence of the

male viewer.

Moreover, ancient depictions of oracular possession are compara-

ble to possession scenes in the horror genre in particular through their

interest in the spectacle of the resisting female body out- of- control,

a display regularly subject to the male gaze and depicted as orgasmic.

Linda Williams hinted at this connection when she linked the hor-

ror film and pornography through their interest in “the spectacle of

a body caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion,” which

is “featured most sensationally in pornography’s portrayal of orgasm

[and] in horror’s portrayal of violence and terror”; she then connects

these to “ecstasy,” which in antiquity referred more to an altered state

of consciousness, but in modern contexts means something more

akin to “sexual excitement and rapture.” Despite the evolution in the


Soul Fuck 95

meaning of this term, Williams notes that each of these excesses is

marked visually by “uncontrollable convulsion or spasm” and aurally

by inarticulate cries.37 Thus, despite the shift in the nature of the pos-

sessing spirit, Williams implies that the pornographic presentation

of these ecstasies and their reception as such by the (primarily male)

audience is the same.

In addition, like ancient depictions of oracular possession, posses-

sion scenes in horror films represent the gaze as a sadistic, one- way

process in that its object is incapacitated not only by pain and fear but

also by loss of self and compromised faculties and is thus incapable

of reciprocity. Also like ancient epic, the horror genre with its pre-

dominantly male audience38 is able to disregard to a large extent the

problem of the female spectator— that for her, identification with male

viewer/subject or female viewed/object cannot be simple.39 Thus the

privileging of the male gaze and disregard of female problems of iden-

tification that are found in ancient epic are more overt in horror than

in other film genres, which assume a more gender- balanced audience.

Conclusion

It is not surprising to find examples of ecstatic possession of women

in fifth- century B.C. Athenian drama, since in this highly patriarchal

culture, women were seen not only as more vulnerable with regard to

their boundaries but also as possessions in a literal sense, a notion that

corresponds with the idea of feminine “possessability” quite well.40 In

the early Roman empire, the intensification of these literary descrip-

tions and their transformation into scenes more explicitly evocative

of spiritual rape in authors like Vergil and Lucan likely reflects the

anxieties felt by elite male authors who suddenly found themselves

disempowered, subject to the agenda and whims of the emperor.41

That a parallel dynamic crops up in American cinema in the late 1960s

and early 1970s may likewise be seen to reflect male anxiety at the loss

of power felt or perceived by elite white males in an era of emerging

feminism.42 The resurgence of such displays once again in the past

few years, one could speculate, is perhaps attributable to similar white

male anxiety provoked both by the increasingly insecure position of

Americans in a post- 9/11 world and by the current political climate,

where the run- up to the 2008 presidential election featured the first

woman and the first black male considered electable to the nation’s

highest office. The parallels I have examined here thus suggest that

despite huge advancements in gender dynamics, the use of women’s

bodies as a locus for projections of male anxieties still persists. While


Kirsten Day96

we are often eager to recognize sexist strategies in ancient narrative,

we should not presume to look on these with a sense of superiority or

detachment. The acknowledgement that such dynamics endure not

only gives us a better lens with which to view the past but also offers

us insight into our own unexamined preconceptions as well.

Notes

1. This chapter was first presented at the 2010 Film and History con-

ference. Thanks are due to Lindsey Haines for research assistance; to

Sean Chapman and Kelvin Mason for technological support; to Mischa

Hooker and Augustana’s Faculty Research Forum for comments; to

Monica Cyrino for organizing both the original conference panels and

this volume; and to Augustana College for funding.

2. I use the term possession to refer to the appropriation of a mortal body

by a divine (whether benign or malevolent) spirit; the term ecstasy to

refer to the altered state that results; and frenzy to refer to the involun-

tary movements and utterances that constitute evidence of this state.

For a discussion of these terms as used by anthropologists interested in

spirit possession, see Maurizio (1995) 72– 76.

3. Clover (1992) 70 has noted that women in films about possession

“stand in a long line of female portals,” which include the Sibyls and

prophetesses of antiquity. See also Williams (1999) 269– 70.

4. Padel (1993) 3, 11– 14; Maurizio (1995) 75; Fowler (2002) 149.

5. Phaedrus 244a– 45c.

6. Heraclitus, fragment 92.

7. All translations from the Greek and Latin are mine.

8. See Skulsky (1987) 57– 63; Sissa (1990) 53– 70; and Padel (1993) 12.

While some would argue that other forms of inspiration, such as poetic,

can also be viewed as “an invasive process, like being the ‘passive’ and

‘penetrated’ partner in intercourse” (Fowler 2002, 150), prophetic

inspiration visited on women is the only form that is regularly depicted

as painful, violent, and subject to the male gaze.

9. Mulvey (1975) 7: “Woman . . . stands in patriarchal culture as signi-

fier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can

live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by

imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as

bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.” Maurizio (1995) 80– 83

argues one of the purposes of divine ecstasy was to serve as a ran-

domizing device— much like using lots, birds, or bones— in order to

ensure the authenticity of the divine message, further illustrating this

objectification.

10. Padel (1993) 16. Although Padel is discussing Greek tragedy, her

observations apply here as well.


Soul Fuck 97

11. At the same time, Maurizio (1995) 75 suggests that historical women

who otherwise would not have a political or religious voice may have

capitalized on societal notions of ecstatic prophetic possession in order

to exert authority.

12. The Sibyl has fared slightly better: for instance, Parke, who had

explained the Pythia’s ecstasy as “self- induced hypnosis” in Parke and

Wormell (1956) 39, later took pains to distinguish the Pythia’s frenzy,

where her personality was completely suppressed by the god, from the

Sibyl’s, whom he saw as prophesying without “los[ing] her personality”

in Parke (1988) 9. For a discussion of the influence of literary presen-

tations of the Pythia’s oracular pronouncements on modern scholarly

notions of the historical situation, see Maurizio (1993) 69– 72.

13. Farnell (1907) 189.

14. See Fontenrose (1952). For further discussion, see Fontenrose (1978)

204; Price (1985) 128– 42; and Maurizio (1993).

15. Lonely Planet: Greece (2010) 243.

16. According to the placard, “vapours . . . were inhaled by the Pythia,

who entered a state of delirium uttering inarticulate cries, which

were then turned into equivocal oracles by the priests” (noted in situ

August 2011).

17. Carson (1990).

18. Odyssey 20.351– 57, 364– 70.

19. Clytemnestra first implies that Cassandra is speaking gibberish

(Agamemnon 1050– 52), then characterizes her as “mad,” saying that

she “heeds a sick passion” (1064). Cassandra herself demonstrates the

suffering her prophetic visions entail when she laments, “Alas! Alas!

Oh, oh, what evil! Once again the dreadful pain of true prophecy whirls

me around, driving me mad at its ominous onset” (1214– 16) and later,

“Alas, what fire! It comes upon me! Woe, woe! Lycian Apollo! Ah me,

ah me!” (1256– 57).

20. See Dodds (1960) for Bacchae 1088– 147, 1165– 329. Agave and her

sisters are “maddened by the breath of the god” (1094).

21. Aeneid 7.341– 405.

22. Farnell (1907) 189. While less relevant to this particular study, the

ancient notion (to which Farnell apparently subscribes) attributing sus-

ceptibility to this sort of possession to women of the lower classes in

particular is also of interest.

23. Perhaps the most explicit of these “divine rape” films, and one of the

earliest, is Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968), where a young

housewife’s body is appropriated, with the cooperation of her hus-

band, as a vessel for producing the devil’s spawn. Because this rape is

more literal than spiritual, however, I have not included it here.

24. Blatty’s explanation for this change is that he was attempting to ease

the anxiety of “Robbie’s” exorcist; see Opsasnick (2000). Clover

(1992) 101– 2, however, suggests that Blatty’s subconscious reasoning


Kirsten Day98

has more to do with the idea that being emotionally open is regularly

gendered as feminine.

25. Mulvey (1975) 11– 13.

26. Available through IMDb.

27. Maurizio (1995) 71.

28. Clover (1992) 65, see also 85– 97.

29. Mulvey (1975) 10.

30. Mulvey (1975) 6, 13– 14.

31. Clover (1992) 13– 14, 108– 9.

32. Clover (1992) 14.

33. This tendency is made explicit in Blatty’s novel by the demon’s state-

ment to Father Merrin, “You have made her a contest between us!”

and later when Merrin tells Karras, “I think the demon’s target is not

the possessed: it is us . . . the observers . . . every person in this house,”

as noted in Clover (1992) 88. As Clover (1992) 88 puts it, “The acces-

sory nature of Regan’s story could hardly be clearer.”

34. Significantly, Mariette in Ecstasy was not released in the United States,

ostensibly due to Savoy Pictures’s financial problems and eventual clo-

sure, but perhaps also as a result of a poor reaction by audiences at a

prerelease screening, according to IMDb.

35. Mulvey (1975) 11– 12, 17.

36. de Lauretis (1999) 87.

37. Williams (1999) 269– 70.

38. Clover (1992) 6.

39. See de Lauretis (1999) 88– 91.

40. See Padel (1993) 4.

41. This strong sense of disempowerment is indicated in authors like

Tacitus, who says that in Augustus’s reign, the means to success was

“through servitude” (Ann. 1.1.25), and that in the reign of Tiberius,

even the greatest men “fell into servitude” (Ann. 1.7.1). This resulted

in a sort of “feminization” of the elite male, a concern that manifested

itself in Roman literature in general. Wyke (1994) demonstrates that

the genre of elegy as a whole developed an overriding concern with

male alienation from positions of power.

42. This development was also likely enabled by the post- 1950s shifts in

the Hollywood system and technological advances noted by Mulvey

(1975) 7.


4

C h a p t e r 7

Ancient Allusions and

Modern Anxieties in S E V E N B R I D E S

F O R S E V E N B R OT H E R S ( 1954)

Christopher M. McDonough

While there is a rich literary and pictorial tradition of the Rape of

the Sabine Women, the only song about it may be “Those Sobbin’

Women” from MGM’s 1954 musical comedy, Seven Brides for Seven

Brothers. For Hollywood in the 1950s, movies about Rome were gen-

erally either quasireligious epics set in and against the ancient city,

such as Quo Vadis (1951) or Ben Hur (1959), or romances employ-

ing the modern city as a charming backdrop, such as Roman Holiday (1953) or Three Coins in a Fountain (1954). Seven Brides, on the

other hand, involves neither ancient Christians nor postwar jetsetters

but rather a group of lonesome homesteaders living nowhere near

Italy but instead in the “God- fearing territory” of 1850s Oregon.

Some of the preconceptions in the film, and particularly this song,

in fact, may be brought into sharper focus by a consideration of the

times of the Pax Romana under the emperor Augustus. Behind the

invocation of the ancient Roman story can be found deeper insecuri-

ties about the genders in the period of the Pax Americana.

The film’s plot centers on the Pontipee brothers, backwoodsmen

encouraged by their eldest brother, Adam, to remedy their lack of

spousal companionship by taking a page from the second century

A.D. ancient Greek author, Plutarch (apparently the only time that

Plutarch has ever been invoked in a musical).1 The opening lyrics of

the song he breaks into go like this:


Christopher M. McDonough100

Tell ya ’bout them sobbin’ women

Who lived in the Roman days.

It seems that they all went swimmin’

While their men was off to graze.

Well, a Roman troop was ridin’ by

And saw them in their “me oh my,”

So they took ’em all back home to dry.

Least that’s what Plutarch says.

Oh yes!

Them women was sobbin’ sobbin’ sobbin’

Fit to be tied.

Ev’ry muscle was throbbin’ throbbin’

From that riotous ride.

Oh they cried and kissed and kissed and cried

All over that Roman countryside

So don’t forget that when you’re takin’ a bride.

Sobbin’ fit to be tied

From that riotous ride!

They never did return their plunder

The victor gets all the loot.

They carried them home, by thunder,

To rotundas small but cute.

And you’ve never seen, so they tell me,

Such downright domesticity.

With a Roman baby on each knee

Named Claudius and Brute.

The tune, by Gene de Paul, is an irresistibly catchy “ear- worm”—

while I was working on this essay, in fact, I whistled it so incessantly

that my wife threatened to divorce me— but it is the lyrics by Johnny

Mercer (who also composed the words to “Moon River,” “Jeepers

Creepers!” and “Ac- Cent- Tchu- Ate the Positive”) and the ideas they

express that are of special interest.2

Although the film will go on to undercut the blunt image presented

in the song, what “The Sobbin’ Women” offers is a picture of an arche-

typal relationship between men and women sanctioned by classical

authority. Adam tells one of his brothers, “Why, this is history! This

really happened!” as he holds up his copy of the book, later singing,

“Now, let this be because it’s true / A lesson to the likes of you.”

The story, as found in Plutarch’s original text, runs as follows:3

In the fourth month, after the city was built, as Fabius writes, the

adventure of stealing the women was attempted . . . [Romulus] took

in hand this exploit after this manner. First, he gave it out as if he had


Ancient Allusions and Modern Anxieties 101

found an altar of a certain god hid under ground . . . Upon discovery

of this altar, Romulus, by proclamation, appointed a day for a splendid

sacrifice, and for public games and shows, to entertain all sorts of peo-

ple: many flocked thither, and he himself sat in front, amidst his nobles

clad in purple. Now the signal for their falling on was to be whenever

he rose and gathered up his robe and threw it over his body; his men

stood all ready armed, with their eyes intent upon him, and when the

sign was given, drawing their swords and falling on with a great shout

they ravished away the daughters of the Sabines, they themselves fly-

ing without any let or hindrance . . . [T]hey had taken no married

woman, save one only, Hersilia by name, and her too unknowingly;

which showed that they did not commit this rape wantonly, but with a

design purely of forming alliance with their neighbours by the greatest

and surest bonds.

Adam (or rather Johnny Mercer) has embellished some of the

details— in the original, none of the Sabine women has gone swim-

min’, for instance, nor are they caught in their “me oh my”— but the

essential elements of Plutarch’s story are intact.

But if the particulars of the Sabine tale in Adam’s recitation are

imprecise, the point of his telling could not be clearer. Holding up his

copy of Plutarch, he sings, “Now, let this be because it’s true / A les-

son to the likes of you.” Certainly Adam is not alone in citing Plutarch

as a faithful guide to human nature. Harry Truman was reported to

have said once, “When I was in politics, there would be times when I

tried to figure somebody out, and I could always turn to Plutarch, and

nine times out of ten I’d be able to find a parallel in there.”4 Beneath

the appeal to the Roman past, however, can be sensed an anxiety about

the American present and the place of traditional marriage within that

Figure 7.1 Adam Pontipee (Howard Keel) uses Plutarch to explain gender relations

in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954). Metro- Goldwyn- Mayer.



present. It is as a matter of consolation to his lovesick brothers that

Adam trots out his parallel from Plutarch in the first place:

Adam: If you’re sweet on them, why don’t you do something about it?

Why don’t you go marry them?

First Brother: Sure, “Go marry them,” as easy as that!

Second Brother: They wouldn’t marry us in a thousand years.

Adam: Do as the Romans did with the “Sobbing Women” or “Sabine

Women” or whatever they called them.

In the brothers’ diffidence, their certainty that no women will want

them “in a thousand years,” we can hear what Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

was to call in 1958 “the crisis of American masculinity.”5 It is this loss

of male nerve that Adam seeks to remedy with an appeal to classical

antiquity via a Tin Pan Alley tune. According to this line of thinking,

the solution to the ailments of the modern world (whether it is the

1850s or the 1950s) can be found in a foundational text of the West-

ern tradition, if only we know how to listen for it.

To be sure, the song offers an intentionally ridiculous and regres-

sive portrait of relations between men and women not much advanced

beyond “Me Tarzan, You Jane.” As eldest brother, Adam, played by

Howard Keel, goes on to assure his brothers, their quintessential

machismo will not in any way be compromised should they follow this

classical example and take wives:

Oh, yes, them a- women was sobbing

Sobbing, sobbing, passing them nights

While the Romans was going out

Hobnobbing, starting up fights.

The proper spheres of the sexes are thus defined for antiquity and, by

extension, for all times after. While Roman men went out to hobnob

and start fights, their wives stayed home to sob, and, as we hear in the

next verse:

They kept occupied by sewing lots

of little old togas for them tots

and sayin’ “Someday women folk’ll have rights.”

While he sings the last line, Keel lifts a hammer he has grabbed from

one of his brothers and, now striking a pose of protest, stands for a

moment as a mock Communist agitator before returning to the chorus



of Mercer’s song. Women’s rights, after all, concern neither the Pon-

tipees of Oregon nor the ancients in Plutarch, but are a matter to be

dealt with “someday,” far off in a distant future that is in fact the audi-

ence’s present day. For his own present day, Adam is attempting to

establish some “downright domesticity”— a frontier version, by way of

Rome and Hollywood, of Kinder, Küche, und (“this being Oregon, and

God- fearing territory”) Kirche. In introducing his historical parable,

Adam drives home its relevance for his siblings by a final challenge

to their manhood: “Now, if you can’t do as good as a bunch of old

Romans, you’re no brothers of mine.”That the movie presents a reductive picture of gender relations is

in itself not a new insight, of course. In a collection of essays from

1991 called The Movie That Changed My Life, novelist Francine Prose

noted that, although she had loved the movie as a girl, she now had a

very different reaction to it: “Not to put too fine a point on it, Seven

Brides for Seven Brothers is, it seems to me, one of the most repulsive

movies about men and women and sexual relations that has ever been

made.”6 Prose goes on to observe that “it is still, as far as I know, the

only extant musical about rape,” although this requires some stip-

ulation. Roman legal historian Judith Evans- Grubbs notes that the

“crime of raptus . . . is not rape. Rather, [it is] . . . the abduction of

an unmarried girl by a man who has not made a formal betrothal

agreement with her but who hopes to force her parents’ consent to

what is essentially a de facto marriage.”7 Plutarch tells the story of the

Sabine Women’s raptus, strictly speaking, and it is this that the Ponti-

pee brothers are emulating. That there is a connection, both socially

and etymologically, between the concepts of rape and raptus is not to

be denied, yet the distinction is worth noting.

Anthropological considerations notwithstanding, however, there is

much to consider in Prose’s further contentions about the movie as an

expression of its political period: “What’s chilling about Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is its innocence, its fifties naiveté, its unexamined

goodheartedness: what an insidious, sinister piece of fluff it has come

to seem over time.”8 Prose is absolutely right when she compares the

opening half of the movie, with Jane Powell as the sole woman in the

brothers’ house, to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937), add-

ing the provision that “this Snow White has rewarding monogamous

sex with the eldest dwarf.”9 Still, it is my sense that her criticism, witty

as it is, is motivated more by the embarrassment felt later in life for

youthful obsessions than by any sustained examination of the film.

Seven Brides, seen in a context fuller than that of “fifties naiveté,” can

easily be understood to be taking part in the formation of what Betty



Friedan only a few years later was to call the “feminine mystique,”

that counterrevolutionary tendency to reestablish women’s roles along

more domestic, traditional lines following the end of the Second World

War.10 As an example of this deliberate redefinition, Friedan quotes a

commencement speech given by Adlai Stevenson at Smith College in

1955, less than a year after Seven Brides’s release. Stevenson notes that

a woman’s role now is to withdraw from public life, and instead “to

inspire in her home a vision of the meaning of life and freedom.” As he

continues, “This assignment for you, as wives and mothers, has great

advantages. In the first place, it is home— you can do it in the living

room with a baby in your lap or in the kitchen with a can opener in

your hand. If you’re really clever, maybe you can even practice your

saving arts on that unsuspecting man while he’s watching television.

I think there is much you can do about our crisis in the humble role

of housewife. I could wish you no better vocation than that.”11 So

stated Stevenson, the decade’s leading liberal, to a graduating class that

included some of America’s most intelligent young women, among

them Sylvia Plath, who would later write in The Bell Jar, “I began to

think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children

it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb

as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.”12

Without engaging the various criticisms that have been made of The Feminine Mystique, let me note that there is still some broad accep-

tance of its characterization of the 1950s as the era in which women

were encouraged to leave the workplace to return to home and hearth,

the period in which Rosie the Riveter had to be reformed as a happy

homemaker.13 But for many working women of the period, the genie

was not so easily coaxed back into the bottle. “A Woman’s Bureau

survey of ten areas showed that three out of four women who had

taken jobs in the midst of the war wanted to continue working,” writes

historian William Chafe, who goes on to quote one female steelworker,

interviewed at the time, as saying, “The old theory that a woman’s

place is in the home no longer exists. Those days are gone forever.”14

Viewed against this background, the image of the Pontipee brothers

rushing into town and carrying the women back to their homes seems

like a genuine document of the Zeitgeist or, perhaps more accurately,

the expression of a male fantasy. In any event, the political application

of the ancient legend to the 1950s is perhaps more apt than the silly

musical number set in the 1850s might initially suggest.

Yet, to dismiss the schmaltz of the song as being somehow super-

fluous is to miss a part of the movie’s context that also bears heavily

on the depiction of gender. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is, after all,



a Hollywood musical, a genre with rigid laws of its own. Indeed, Seven

Brides was made by MGM, under the auspices of the famous “Arthur

Freed Unit,” and was directed by the genre’s great master, Stanley

Donen, who also made On the Town (1949), The Pajama Game (1957), Funny Face (1957), Damn Yankees (1958), and of course,

perhaps his most famous film, Singin’ in the Rain (1952).15 Historians

of the genre often speak of his work as representing its “golden years,”

and, as it is stated on the Turner Classic Movies website, “between

1949 and 1959, Stanley Donen was either the key creative force

behind or an essential element in the production of some of the most

critically acclaimed musicals in Hollywood history.”16 When Donen

was awarded a special Lifetime Achievement award by the Academy of

Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1998, instead of giving a speech,

he danced by the podium with his Oscar cheek- to- cheek.

In so strictly formulaic a genre as the musical, there are no creators,

only re- creators, whose success is judged not by how original their

work is but by how well it conforms to predetermined (if shifting)

expectations. What makes Seven Brides so choice a specimen of the

genre is the fact that it is so contrived: let us remember in this con-

nection that MGM’s motto was Ars Gratia Artis: “art for art’s sake.”

As a matter of art, film historian Rick Altman points out, the central

trait of the American film musical is its concentration on the behavior

of a pair of lovers rather than the lot of a single protagonist; this “dual

focus,” as he terms it, produces not a straightforward linear narra-

tive but one that tells its story by skipping back and forth between

roughly balanced episodes about a pair of lovers- to- be.17 Since the

audience is well aware of what will happen, the focus of the musical

is not on how it will end but on how it will get there. Consequently,

the goal is to find a way within this predetermined structure to avoid

tedium. Embedded in every musical’s plot, then, is the conflict that

exists solely to provide a happy resolution— the coup de théâtre for

Donen in Seven Brides is to pull this off not once, not twice, but seven

times, and this he does in nearly one fell swoop, when the brothers are

encouraged to follow the example set out by Plutarch.18

If we glance back to the tradition out of which Seven Brides grows,

we can see that many of the same concerns about gender and genre

that are evident in the Hollywood film are also to be found in the

works of classical authors recording the Rape of the Sabine women.

In particular, we might profitably think about not the fairly straight-

forward version of the legend given to us by the Greek biographer

Plutarch (whose work dates to the late first century A.D.) but rather

the more ironic account by the Roman poet Ovid (who wrote eight



decades earlier).19 In his Ars Amatoria— “The Art of Love,” an ancient

guidebook to seduction written in elegiac couplets— Ovid presents

what might be called a burlesque of the Sabine legend. The work’s

narrator calls himself praeceptor amoris, “the professor of love,”

and it is unsurprising that, as presented by this would- be Casanova,

the legend is rendered in a stylized fashion that alternates between

enchanting and offensive:20

You, Romulus, first made the games scandalous

when the rape of the Sabine women delighted your

wifeless men.

At that time no awnings hung over a marble theater,

no spraying saffron drenched the platformed stage.

The woods of the Palatine provided foliage; arranged in simple design

it adorned the artless stage.

The people sat on steps created from the sod,

shading their foreheads and shaggy hair with leaves.

They scanned with their eyes, and each one marked for himself

the girl he wanted; in his silent heart stirred many feelings;

And while the Etruscan flute was sounding a crude melody,

and an actor stamped the level ground three times,

Amid the applause— even cheering applause was natural—

Romulus, the king, gave the sign to the men waiting for

the booty.

Up they leapt, their shouts attested to their intention;

they grabbed the women in their lustful hands:

As frightened flocks of doves flee the eagle,

and the youngest lamb flees the sight of wolves,

So these girls feared the men as they rushed about helter- skelter.

Not one of them maintained her color.

The fright was the same, but each expression of fear was different:

some tore their hair, others sat bewildered.

One is silent in grief, another calls uselessly for her mother;

one moans, another is in shock, one stays, another flees.

The girls were seized and led away, the prize for marriage,

and fear made many of them more attractive.

If one struggled too much or refused her captor,

he lifted her up and held her to his lustful breast

And said: “Why do you spoil your tender eyes with tears?

What your father is to your mother, I will be to you.”

If Seven Brides is a “sinister piece of fluff,” as Prose put it earlier,

how much more is there to be offended by in this ancient rendition

of the legend? And yet moviegoers of the mid- 1950s did not react



strongly to the reductive gender politics of the film, and it is only in

the past few decades that scholars have begun to tackle similar issues

at work in The Art of Love. In her discussion of rape in Ovid’s work,

classical scholar Amy Richlin has noted how the content of this epi-

sode is overshadowed by the charm of its artistry, and she alludes to

Hollywood to make her point: “We have this myth, too, in comedies

and action romances (squeaky voice: ‘Put me down!’).”21 The dis-

tinct image of the Pontipee brothers comes to mind here, as does

Rock Hudson carrying off Doris Day in Pillow Talk (1959) or Prin-

cess Fiona similarly treated in Shrek (2001); countless other examples

could be adduced. In Richlin’s words, “There are indeed quotation

marks around the text, the marks that tell the reader ‘this is amus-

ing’; but they act not to attack the content but to palm it off.”22 A

similar sense of self- ironizing is at work in Seven Brides, and perhaps

the entire musical tradition, which, eager to cover itself in “camp,”

reminds us that this is not Life but Art, and Art for Art’s Sake at that.

Still, underlying the artificiality of Seven Brides, as noted previously,

is an authentic preoccupation with matters of gender in the period of

the film’s making. Similar issues are in effect in Ovid’s work, as clas-

sicist Alison Sharrock has recently discussed, with specific reference to

the political conditions of the poet’s day. “The entire Ovidian corpus

is in dialogue with the most powerful contemporary signifiers of the

masculine order,”23 in particular, the emperor Augustus, whose con-

trol over both the army and the arts was nearly absolute in this period.

It would seem Mercer’s characterization of proper Roman male

behavior as involving “hobnobbin’, startin’ up fights” is not without

some ancient support, after all. For poets of the Augustan era, the

portrait of the amator or “lover” ironically counters the messages of

imperial propaganda, a matter Sharrock discusses further:

The images for love which help to construct [Ovid’s] elegiac world

both oppose and partake in the norms of Roman masculinity. The well-

known figure militia amoris (the soldiery of love) is the most obvi-

ous example. [In one important poem, Ovid] ‘outrageously’ compares

the lover and the soldier down to the finest detail: it is outrageous

because conventionally the lover is the exact opposite of the soldier, as

the effeminate is of the super- masculine. But on the other hand Ovid is

exactly right: his poetry is constantly showing us both the violence and

the vis of love and also the vulnerability of violence.24

If one were looking for a cinematic equivalent to the Ovidian conceit

that militat omnis amans (“every lover is a soldier”), a good example



might be Robert Altman’s boisterous antiwar satire M*A*S*H. Released

in 1970— the same year as Patton, which would go on to sweep the

Academy Awards— Altman’s antimilitary heroes were depicted as

charming Lotharios, whose amatory prowess precluded any question

about their masculinity. That the manhood of M*A*S*H’s male charac-

ters was established for the audience by humiliating its female characters

was a criticism disregarded at the time as “women’s lib” extremism but

that now seems all too obvious. Likewise, Ovid’s preceptor strikes a wry

pose of detachment from the shocking sexual behavior he describes in

order to seem “manly” and, significantly, to sidestep more serious issues

connected with masculinity in the culture of Augustan Rome.

To return, however, from ancient apprehensions to modern ones,

we might take these insights about Ovid into account in reassessing

how both gender and genre shape the story of Seven Brides. Since it is

clear from the start that the lovers are “fated to be mated,” the point

is to keep the lovers apart for as long as the audience’s patience will

allow. As in every musical, the bigger the obstacle the lovers must

overcome, the further the personal distance they must travel to come

together, the greater the entertainment value of the resolution. So

perhaps he is an uptight Austrian officer with a large family and she is

a free- spirited singing nun, or maybe he is a very proper professor of

phonetics and she a Cockney flower girl. Seven Brides is an exagger-

ated version of this same basic trope, but one that dispenses with the

elaborately spelled- out differences that are found in either The Sound

of Music (1959) or My Fair Lady (1964). For Plutarch and Ovid, the

hindrance to be surmounted in the Sabine legend was the refusal of

the parents to allow intermarriage with the Romans; in Seven Brides the obstacle is the simple fact that the women do not wish to be wives.

In its own way, Seven Brides is the most perfect of social commentar-

ies for midcentury American gender relations because its adherence to

the musical genre is so perfunctory. The manner of courtship is what

strikes us now as outrageous, because it happens against the women’s

will, but the real issue the film was exploring had to do with marriage

itself— was it being married at all that women really objected to? With

this question in mind, it is worth returning to Friedan’s observation

that the feminine mystique was an ideology accepted by women to

some degree voluntarily. After the war, she writes, “women went home

again just as men shrugged off the bomb, forgot the concentration

camps, condoned corruption, and fell into helpless conformity . . . it

was easier, safer to think about love and sex than about communism,

McCarthyism, and the uncontrolled bomb . . . There was a kind of

personal retreat, even on the part of the most far- sighted, the most



spirited; we lowered our eyes from the horizon, and steadily contem-

plated our own navels.”25

Friedan identifies here a not entirely reluctant acquiescence to

traditional gender roles that, despite deep ambivalence, was also

something of a relief. It may be that the uneasy arrangement between

these male anxieties and female ambivalences is best captured in the

poster for Seven Brides’s theatrical release. It features at the center one

of the brothers transporting his intended home in a classic “fireman’s

carry.” Over his shoulder, we can see the woman’s face; she is look-

ing back at us, gently waving, and smiling, as if to indicate her own

consent to the events at hand. While this may not accord exactly with

youngest Pontipee brother’s observation that “They acted angry and

annoyed / But secretly they was overjoyed,” perhaps it is not so far off,

either. Musicals, after all, do not traffic in ambiguities or anxieties, but

instead paint romantic absolutes in the brightest of Technicolor hues.

The genre demands that the man and the woman get together against

all odds, with the cultural weight of Augustan Rome, the American

frontier, and the Eisenhower era thrown in for good measure.

Notes

1. The movie had been based on a rather bookish short story from 1938

by Stephen Vincent Benét, “The Sobbin’ Women,” on which see Fen-

ton (1958) 173.

2. On the collaboration of de Paul and Mercer for this movie, see discus-

sion by Furia (2003) 192– 93.

3. Plutarch, Life of Romulus, chapter 15, translated by Dryden (2008)

50– 52.

4. Miller (1974) 68; although see Heller (1995) on the authenticity of

Miller’s interviews with Truman.

5. Schlesinger (1962). See Cuordileone (2005) 140, who puts this anxi-

ety into social context.

6. Prose (1991) 244.

7. Evans- Grubbs (1989) 60– 61.

8. Prose (1991) 244.

9. Prose (1991) 247.

10. See Eldridge (2006) 121.

11. Friedan (2001) 113.

12. Plath (1972) 69.

13. See in general the discussion by Coontz (2011).

14. Chafe (1991) 157– 58.

15. See Silverman (1996), esp. 185– 98 on Seven Brides.



16. Turner Classic Movies, http:// www .tcm .com/ tcmdb/ person/ 51745

|141911/ Stanley -Donen.

17. Altman (1989) 19.

18. Altman (1989) 32.

19. The comparison has also occurred to Labate (2006) 204.

20. Ovid, Art of Love I.101– 34, translated by Alessi (2003) 296– 97.

21. Richlin (1992) 168.

22. Richlin (1992) 168.

23. Sharrock (2002) 102.

24. Sharrock (2002) 102.

25. Friedan (2001) 274.


4

P a r t 2


in Ancient History


4

C h a p t e r 8

Gorgo at the Limits of Liberation

in Zack Snyder’s 300 (2007)

Vincent Tomasso

The ancient Greek city- state of Sparta has been and continues to be

notorious for the position of women in its society.1 Ancient accounts

state that Spartan women were treated and acted differently than

Greek women in neighboring areas. In Athens, for instance, women

were expected to stay in their homes, away from the public sphere

their husbands would encounter daily.2 By contrast, young Spartan

women had to be outdoors, since they were required to be educated

in dancing, music, and athletics, among other pursuits.3 The modern

West has often regarded Spartan women as protofeminists, unusual in

the ancient world for their “freedom” and shining exceptions to wide-

spread Greek misogyny. Zack Snyder’s 300 (2007), a film that depicts

the battle of Thermopylae and the Spartans’ role in it, is no exception

to this, but it portrays Gorgo, the Spartan queen, in ways that make

her liberation problematic.

In a film dominated by the male physique and masculine martial

identities of the Spartan warriors, women’s roles are few and mostly

inconspicuous. The only women with spoken lines are Gorgo and

the Spartan oracle; the latter appears in only a single scene with a

handful of lines and is completely controlled by male priests. A few

female extras are present in the scenes at Sparta, and Xerxes’s orgy

tent is frequented by women, but all these figures appear onscreen

only briefly without spoken lines. Thus, by means of her considerable

presence throughout the film, Gorgo plays a major role in articulating


Vincent Tomasso114

the female in 300, especially in contradistinction to the disempowered

women and general impression of misogyny in the rest of the film.

This chapter seeks to interrogate how the film constructs feminin-

ity through the Spartan queen and how that construction is in turn

predicated on modern ideas about womanhood. This depiction of

Gorgo challenges traditional gender boundaries, but the very scene

that evokes female empowerment, Gorgo’s murder of Theron, also

undermines her as a strong woman. This problematic scene and the

depiction of Gorgo in the film represent an issue in modern percep-

tions of the ancient world: when and how should ancient women be

depicted as emancipated?

Snyder’s film is based on a graphic novel of the same name by

Frank Miller, which adapts the story of the battle of Thermopylae,

an important episode in the Persian Wars of the fifth century B.C. In

480 B.C., Greeks from a variety of city- states, including Sparta, took a

stand at Thermopylae, a pass in northern Greece, and held it for three

days against the invading troops of the Persian king, Xerxes. Although

the Greeks were eventually killed, their sacrifice allowed their coun-

trymen enough time to prepare for the Persian onslaught, and a year

later the Greeks were victorious in the battle of Plataea. The story of

Thermopylae is told in a number of ancient sources, but it receives

its most expansive treatment in the Histories by the fifth century B.C.

Greek historian Herodotus. It is not clear whether Miller consulted

this text directly, though he speaks of “an intense period of research”

for 300, using “old texts” and reading a lot of “Greek history”;4 on

the “recommended reading” page of the 300 hardback edition, in

which all four issues of the graphic novel are collected together, he

lists Herodotus’s Histories second.5 Still, Miller could have acquired

his knowledge of Herodotus’s account from a secondary source, and

the same is true of the Sayings of Spartan Women by the late- first- /

early- second- century A.D. Greek writer Plutarch; one quotation from

this work appears in Miller. The sources of Snyder’s 300 are even more

difficult to tease out. The director has consistently stated that Miller

was his main source and that his primary aim was to reproduce Miller’s

work as a film.6 He has said that “about 90 percent” of his film is

Miller; the rest consists of his additions to Gorgo’s role.7 For the lat-

ter, he did some original research into the historical nature of the

Spartan queen, though he never explicitly names his sources.8 Sny-

der’s Gorgo speaks the same line from Plutarch as Miller’s Gorgo,

and she also uses another quotation, implying that Snyder either read

Plutarch or a secondary source that repeated the information. Ulti-

mately, the precise dimensions of Snyder’s research and knowledge of


Gorgo at the Limits of Liberation in Zack Snyder’s 300 (2007) 115

the ancient sources are unknown, but in any case, his comments about

the historical nature of particular elements in the film demonstrate

that his 300 engages with antiquity.

Debates about the merits of films on historical subjects have often

centered on whether or not the filmmakers have created “authentic”

accounts of history.9 This is not an issue for 300, since both Miller and

Snyder have stated that their work is not realistic, and so it is neither

sensible nor productive to criticize them for their departures from

the ancient evidence. In the supplemental feature “The Frank Miller

Tapes,” Miller characterizes his 300 and Snyder’s film as “historical

evocation,” and in the feature “300: Fact or Fiction?” Snyder draws

attention to the fact that the film is narrated by the Spartan soldier,

Dilios, who mixes fact with fiction.10 Instead of attacking the fictional

nature of these texts, I want to use their differences with their source

materials to contextualize their depictions of women and, in turn,

to understand how this process reveals an aspect of our relationship

with the ancient world. In doing this, I am adopting the position that

modern films about the past are about both past and present in that

they negotiate relationships between the two.11

Gorgo’s appearances in Herodotus’s Histories are little more than

cameos; nevertheless, in these brief episodes she plays important roles

in Spartan society and in the outcome of the Persian Wars. When

another Greek ruler tried to bribe the Spartan king, Cleomenes,

to help him in a revolt against Persia, Gorgo, Cleomenes’s daugh-

ter, intervened: “Father, the stranger will corrupt you, if you don’t

leave.”12 Here Gorgo gives voice to the antiluxury values of Spartan

society and its fear of foreign influence, a common role played by

women in the Histories.13 Herodotus notes that she was “eight or

nine years old,” a precocious age for anyone, much less a female, to

intervene in delicate political proceedings that were the exclusive pre-

rogative of males in the ancient world. For modern audiences, this

episode is not particularly striking as an example of female liberation,

but for ancient Greeks the young Gorgo’s behavior would have been

viewed as very much outside of the norm for her gender.

Many years later, after the start of Greek hostilities with Persia,

Demaratus, an exiled Spartan king, found out about the Persians’ plan

to invade Greece. He sent a warning to the Spartans, and, because

he feared that the Persians would discover his treachery, he devised

a clever ruse. Instead of inscribing his message in wax on a tablet

as was the usual practice, Demaratus carved it into the wooden tab-

let itself and then covered it with wax so that the courier would not

discover the message. The Spartans were puzzled at this apparently


Vincent Tomasso116

blank missive, but Gorgo had an idea: “The daughter of Cleomenes

and wife of Leonidas, Gorgo, suggested to them that they would find

letters on the wood, since she herself recognized it, urging them to

burn off the wax.”14 Herodotus’s words here, particularly the phrase

I have italicized, emphasize Gorgo’s active and unusual role in com-

parison with other characters, male and female, in the Histories.15 Her

decipherment of Demaratus’s message allows the Spartans to make a

stand at Thermopylae, since they were unaware of the invasion at this

early stage. Herodotus thus depicts Gorgo as an enabler of mascu-

line heroic glory; without her quick thinking, Sparta and the rest of

Greece might have been defeated by the Persians. This episode, while

clearly signaled by Herodotus as portraying the cleverness of Gorgo,

is not very dramatic in cinematic terms, even though one of Miller’s

influences, the earlier film The 300 Spartans (1962), depicts a version

of this. Women in epic films of the early twenty- first century, like Sny-

der’s 300, must be action heroines more than intellectual ones.

In the Sayings of Spartan Women, Plutarch attributes six quotes to

Gorgo, four to other named Spartan women, and thirty to anonymous

Spartan women. The Gorgo of Snyder’s film uses one of the quotes

attributed to her historical counterpart: “When asked by a woman

from Attica, ‘Why do you Spartan women alone rule the men?’ she

said, ‘Because we alone give birth to them.’ ”16 In both Miller and Sny-

der, Gorgo speaks one of the anonymous quotes: “Another woman,

in handing over a shield to her son, said to him in admonishment,

‘Child, either with this or on it.’ ”17 Some commentators argue that

these quotes show that Spartan women could voice their opinions

in public and had much control over how Spartan men were viewed

by society.18 Others feel that these quotes demonstrate that Spartan

women were given more freedom than other Greek women, but this

freedom was directed toward supporting masculine heroic (i.e., patri-

archal) values.19 The balanced view of Sarah Pomeroy that Spartan

women, while not liberated in the sense of modern women, had better

lives than women in other Greek city- states, is preferable.20

When the ancient depictions of Gorgo are taken out of context by

modern representations, they give audiences the impression that she

was liberated. Whether or not Gorgo was in reality emancipated is a

different and much- debated question that is not cogent to the current

argument.21 What is of interest here is how Snyder viewed the issue

and consequently shaped the film’s Gorgo to fit his perceptions. His

view is revealed in the DVD supplement by the comments of Bettany

Hughes, a historian and producer of several documentaries about the

ancient world: “Spartan women were special anyway . . . they had a



real sense of themselves. I mean, unusually in the ancient world, Spar-

tan women were not repressed.”22 This position is reflected in many

popular reviews and publications in the wake of 300’s release.23

Snyder’s Gorgo is based on the Gorgo depicted in Miller’s 300, but

in the graphic novel she appears on only two pages, while in the film

she has a substantial role. Gorgo (Lena Headey) first appears about

eight minutes after the start of the film with her husband, the Spartan

king, Leonidas (Gerard Butler), and their son. Leonidas concludes

the day’s lesson in combat techniques by proclaiming, “First you

fight with your head,” to which Gorgo adds, “Then you fight with

your heart.” Dan Hassler- Forest argues that this scene, which does

not appear in Miller, contradicts the earlier Spartan agoge, or tradi-

tional training, sequence:24 Leonidas’s son is exempt from that brutal

method of training, which Snyder does to humanize Leonidas in the

context of his loving relationship with his son. Whereas the young

Leonidas was led away to the training while his distraught mother was

restrained, Gorgo uniquely becomes part of her son’s training pro-

cess. Even though the intellectual (“head”) vs. emotional (“heart”)

dichotomy is a stereotypical masculine- feminine division of labor, the

film suggests that men and women are equally important in the train-

ing of some Spartans. In fact, in ancient Spartan society, women had

no part in the training of warriors.

Gorgo curtly warns the leader of the Persian messengers against

asking for Sparta’s submission to Xerxes, and he, shocked, asks Leoni-

das why a woman is able to speak so boldly. Gorgo replies with a

quote from Plutarch that Miller does not use: “Because only Spar-

tan women give birth to real men.” On the face of it, this statement

validates Gorgo’s assertive and independent character, since it clearly

establishes that her outlook and attitude are different from the norms

of other contemporary societies. It encourages Western audiences

to identify with the Spartans as a “liberal” (for the ancient world)

society and to be distanced from the Persians as backward- thinking

barbarians. Gorgo’s quip also establishes that her society produces

warriors (“real men”), implying that the Persians produce cowards,

and it mirrors Leonidas’s later statement that Spartan women would

make better fighters than the Persian army. Thus the initial scenes

of Spartan- Persian interaction establish their differences in male and

female terms, and Gorgo is put on equal footing with her husband.

But this first scene also demotes Gorgo and Spartan women to sup-

porting roles, since Gorgo’s ability to enter into the male- dominated

world of discourse is attained only through her reproductive capacity

to produce male warriors. The episode from Plutarch on which this


Vincent Tomasso118

scene is based is commonly interpreted this way by both scholars of

the ancient world and nonspecialists.25 Bella Zweig suggests that this

(mistaken) attitude is due to Western conceptions of motherhood as

well as modern feminist ideas about how women should be emanci-

pated.26 She demonstrates through a cross- cultural comparison with a

Native American society that different cultures have different under-

standings of female power. Just because a Westerner might not see

motherhood as characteristic of a liberated woman does not mean that

other cultures would feel similarly. Moreover, the context for Gorgo’s

statement in the film is different from the same quote’s context in Plu-

tarch.27 Snyder stages the dialogue as if it represented proto- Western

feminism taking on misogynist males, whereas in the Sayings of Spar-tan Women it demonstrates the differences between Athenian society,

in which women were mostly repressed, and Spartan society, where

women were highly valued for their role as mothers. In Plutarch, Gor-

go’s words represent the relative liberation of Spartan women, while

in the film they suggest a reframing of that sentiment in a modern

Western context, in which the statement no longer represents femi-

nist ideals. At the same time, Pomeroy observes that feminism is not

monolithic and embraces a variety of different goals; indeed, some

feminists have embraced motherhood.28

When Leonidas is trying to decide whether to kill the messengers,

he looks at Gorgo, whose nod helps him make the fateful decision.

This scene demonstrates that Leonidas and Gorgo think on the same

level and have a relationship so strong that they can communicate

through facial expressions and gestures. Yet it also depicts Gorgo as

a supporter rather than an actor in her own right. Although Gorgo’s

role in this episode does not appear in ancient accounts, it parallels her

role as an enabler of Spartan glory at the end of Book 7 of Histories. But whereas Herodotus highlights her intelligence in that none of

the (male) Spartans is able to figure out Demaratus’s scheme except

Gorgo, in 300 she is little more than a reflection of her husband.

The first of two explicitly sexual acts that are depicted in 300

occurs between Gorgo and Leonidas before he leaves for Thermo-

pylae. Hassler- Forest describes it as “shot in slow motion, in the

style of high- gloss Hollywood glamour,” and for this reason Monica

Cyrino argues that such an explicit scene is unusual for a film of this

genre, where it is the male action star who is usually fetishized to

the near- exclusion of female figures.29 There are sexual elements in

other scenes, which serve to distinguish the “good” Spartans from the

“evil” Persians, but they are merely suggestive;30 the scene between

Leonidas and Gorgo is emphasized by virtue of its explicit nature and



length. Note too that Gorgo’s upper body is visually fetishized in this

scene, with Headey’s upper torso fully nude; Butler’s nudeness, by

contrast, is shown selectively.

While Leonidas is fighting at Thermopylae, Gorgo seeks the coun-

cil’s support for the conflict, but Theron (Dominic West), a corrupt

politician, makes this difficult. At first she is able to secure the support

of an older councilor, who sponsors her so that she is able to enter the

Spartan council chamber and give a speech. This underscores Gorgo’s

shrewd tactics at the same time as it shows that she is politically depen-

dent on male power. This is in keeping with the ancient world, in

which adult citizen males held almost all the political capital, but it

appears repressive to modern audiences. Later, Gorgo is informed that

she must also secure the support of the younger councilman, Theron.

When they first meet, Gorgo offers Theron a cup of water, which

he suggests is poisoned. Although Gorgo has not used poison, his

accusation gives voice to a stereotypical behavior of female antago-

nists: destroying males not through direct physical confrontation but

through their roles as domestic stewards, as demonstrated in ancient

Greek literature by figures such as Euripides’s Medea and Aeschylus’s

Clytemnestra. Later, Gorgo offers her body in exchange for Theron’s

political support. Theron handles her in a very rough way, and so the

scene becomes Gorgo’s sacrifice for Sparta.31 The film treats the act as

a rape and thereby assimilates Gorgo to the “rape- avenger” character

type. Thus certain aspects of Gorgo’s character draw on cinematic tra-

dition to imply an empowered woman, while the narrative undermines

that implication by having Gorgo willingly enter into a sexual bargain

on the model of ancient Sparta. Hughes claims that Gorgo’s behavior

has historical precedents, but I am unable to determine the accuracy

of this statement.32 In any case, what matters is that Hughes’s “histor-

ical facts” accorded with Snyder’s vision and that Gorgo’s sacrifice is

made parallel to the sacrifice of the male Spartans at Thermopylae: this

is shown visually in the film through a match cut of Gorgo’s pained

face with the wincing of a Spartan hoplite as his wound is cauterized.

But not all sacrifices are created equal. Although Leonidas’s death at

Thermopylae and Gorgo’s sex with Theron are supposed to be equal

gestures, they both trade on stereotypical male and female roles.

Gorgo next addresses the council chamber. The all- male councilors

mutter in misogynistic disgust at the unprecedented event of a woman

speaking to them. Ancient Greek women were not accorded citizen

status along with their male relatives, so they could neither vote nor

participate in political bodies. Thus the actions of Snyder’s Gorgo

here are effective transgressions of normative gender behaviors of


Vincent Tomasso120

antiquity. Victor Davis Hanson, an academic consultant for the film,

argues otherwise: “The idea of emancipated, strong women taking

part in politics is very Greek.”33 Hanson is here apparently referring

to the fifth- century B.C. Athenian comedies Lysistrata and Assembly-women, by the playwright Aristophanes, in which women temporarily

take over Athenian politics. However, these are pure comic fantasies

that at their heart are about male anxieties over the potential power

that women could wield within the city- state; they are not about

female emancipation.

Gorgo’s speech in support of her husband is passionate and rhetori-

cally effective, but Theron derails her plan by calling her a warmonger

and framing their sexual liaison as her licentiousness. Theron orders

her to be restrained and removed, but Gorgo seizes a guard’s sword

and stabs Theron in the torso. Even though this revenge moment is a

common cinematic trope for the “liberated woman,” Gorgo’s behav-

ior in this scene destabilizes her authority as a strong female figure in

two ways. First, her murder of Theron is a mirror as well as a foil to the

Spartan masculine violence occurring simultaneously at Thermopylae.

Whereas Leonidas’s stand against the Persians involves direct assault,

the clashing of two armies in combat with both sides literally facing

death, in a moment of passion Gorgo murders Theron before he can

react: it is the stereotypical “fight with your head/heart” dichotomy

again. On the other hand, she stabs him to his face rather than his

back, the latter being the stereotypical refuge of cowardly assassins.

Yet even this narrative image of a “heroic” Gorgo is destabilized in a

Figure 8.1 Gorgo (Lena Headey) penetrates Theron (Dominic West) in 300

(2007). Warner Bros.



poster advertising the film, in which Gorgo’s back is turned toward the

viewer, with a sword clutched behind her back. By contrast, Leonidas’s

poster depicts the king holding a spear and shield with his body turned

toward the viewer. These images of Leonidas and Gorgo suggest that

direct confrontation is not part of Gorgo’s identity and consequently

that she must resort to treachery to accomplish her goals.34 Second,

it is not Gorgo’s violent act or her speech that ultimately result in the

Spartan councilors’ declaration of war on Persia, but rather the fact

that there is physical evidence that Theron had been paid to get Sparta

to not intervene in the war.35 This climactic scene in the film is also

the greatest departure from the ancient sources: it in effect replaces

Herodotus’s Gorgo discovering the true nature of Demaratus’s mes-

sage. The change from Herodotus’s “master of signs” to Snyder’s

violent avenger is motivated by the semiotics of action cinema that

codes female power through violence. While the film is not required

to be faithful to the ancient sources, Snyder has clearly chosen to pres-

ent Gorgo to a modern audience in ways that allow her character to

respond to the contemporary demands of the action film genre.

The rest of Snyder’s cinematic oeuvre and his comments about

Gorgo suggest that the director, if not a feminist, portrays himself

as an advocate for female empowerment. In his 2011 film Sucker

Punch, for instance, a woman is unjustly committed to an insane asy-

lum and tries to escape with the help of four other female patients.

It has been labeled misogynist by a number of critics, including New

York Times film critic, A. O. Scott: “Mr. Snyder’s pretense [is] that

this fantasia of misogyny is really a feminist fable of empowerment.”36

Snyder, by contrast, argued that the film was about female liberation:

“So hopefully by the end the girls are empowered by their sexual-

ity and not exploited.”37 Snyder’s female empowerment aesthetic is

also revealed through the difference between Gorgo’s appearances in

Miller’s graphic novel and in the film. In Miller, Gorgo appears only

on the seventh and eighth pages of the second chapter. She suggests

that her husband take three hundred “bodyguards” with him, which

helps him to circumvent the Ephors’ forbidding of a Spartan force

being sent north. This suggests her intelligence, but just barely. Then,

Miller depicts Gorgo as her husband leaves, tears streaming down her

face, whereas Leonidas never expresses emotion: this firmly delineates

traditional gender behaviors.

To Miller’s brief cameos, Snyder added the subplot of intrigue on

the home front, giving Gorgo a major supporting role that she enjoyed

neither in the graphic novel nor in the ancient sources. The reasons

for doing this were complex, partly narrative and partly financial. In


Vincent Tomasso122

narrative terms, Snyder said that Gorgo’s subplot was created in order

to remind the audience of what the Spartans are fighting for.38 At the

same time, Gorgo’s prominence in the film translated into a greater

appeal to potential female audience members.39 Thus Gorgo’s beefed- up

role could be read as a cynical marketing ploy to draw in a greater

audience share but also as a genuine attempt to create more imagina-

tive space for female audience members to project themselves into the

narrative world of the film and identify more closely with the film’s

overall ideology. Indeed, Snyder’s comments suggest that he put some

thought into imagining what Gorgo would have been like from a few

quotes in Plutarch: “What kind of character is that? Who is that woman

who said those things? That’s really what we used to sort of build

her and flesh her out.”40 Snyder’s 300 has a different agenda from

Miller’s 300 when it comes to sexuality, as Miller’s reaction to Gorgo’s

larger role demonstrates: “This is a boys’ movie. Let it be that.”41 This

expression of misogyny goes hand- in- hand with Miller’s criticism of

what he sees as a recent tendency “to apply modern civilized standards

to historical figures”; one wonders whether Miller’s conservative ideas

about gender dynamics are partly responsible for the problems with

Gorgo’s liberation in the film.42

In contrast to societies in the modern West, ancient society was

overwhelmingly misogynistic and repressive. There have been a vari-

ety of responses in recent popular texts to the ancient world’s gender

relations: some reproduce antiquity’s male- centric and gynephobic

cultures, such as the film Hercules and the Amazon Women (1994);

while others overturn that vision and depict a unique mix of ancient

and modern ideas about women, as in the television series Xena: War-rior Princess (1995– 2001).43 An example of a text that falls in the

moderate range is the premium cable series Rome (2005– 7). The pro-

ducers of that series have claimed the Roman women portrayed in

their program could not wield political power overtly and were thus

forced to act in covert ways. Scholars have argued that the series Rome portrays these women in positive ways rather than reverting to stereo-

types of women in the ancient world:44 this demonstrates that modern

artists can portray women and the misogynistic realities of ancient cul-

tures realistically and simultaneously create powerful female characters

within those limitations. Creators can thus subtly advance modern

ideas of ideal womanhood while portraying the conditions of ancient

life. The other alternative, taken by Xena, is to explode the limitations

imposed on ancient women in favor of valorizing modern ideals. 300

tries both to portray the misogynistic attitudes of the ancient world as

well as deconstruct them, but it ultimately fails at the latter.



Because classical antiquity was often quite different from the mod-

ern West, films about the Greco- Roman world are in constant danger

of creating too little identification between characters and viewers.

If filmmakers hew too closely to ancient sources, they risk alienating

their modern audience, as was the case with Oliver Stone’s Alexan-der (2004), whose eponymous protagonist viewers could not identify

with partially because of his sexuality and his inability to engage a nar-

rative outcome like typical Hollywood action heroes.45 The ancient

Spartans are another good example of this problem: it is difficult for

audiences to identify with a society that existed in a distant time and

practiced infanticide, slavery, and wife sharing. Snyder’s Gorgo is one

of the bridges between the Greek past and the contemporary audi-

ence, where the audience can see something of themselves and their

values in a narrative about antiquity. The status of Spartan women is

especially contested in modern Western culture because it turns on a

crucial point of audience identification, the issue of female rights.46

Through Gorgo, Snyder’s 300 emphasizes the blatant misogyny of the

ancient Greek world and thereby increases its otherness, since in gen-

eral misogynistic behavior is no longer acceptable in public in modern

Western societies. At the same time, that otherness also supports audi-

ence identification, since it creates a backdrop against which Gorgo

may act. This technique of indicating the limitations of the ancient

world and inserting some aspects of modern behavior into it is not by

itself problematic; the issue is rather the way in which these limitations

are interrogated. Snyder’s Gorgo is stuck between fifth century B.C.

Sparta and twenty- first century A.D. Hollywood, simultaneously a

woman with much more power than was possible for her gender in the

ancient world and a caricature of female power in the modern world.

Western cultures, especially American culture, commonly believe

that they are descended from ancient Greece and especially Rome.

This belief in cultural inheritance, however true it may be, can encour-

age artists to elide the distance between “us” and “them.” This elision

is not easy, complicated as it is by the gap between modern expecta-

tions and ancient realities. Snyder’s 300 is an example of how this

elision does not always succeed. The film’s depiction of Gorgo raises

an issue that merits further exploration by classicists and film scholars:

how should popular representations of the classics deal with repre-

senting the realities of gender relations in the ancient world, as well

as the realities and ideals of those relations in the modern world? This

presents a challenge to the traditional study of classics, interested as

it is in unearthing factual evidence and carefully reconstructing the

ancient world “as it was”; how can we present an ancient Greece and


Vincent Tomasso124

Rome that addresses the gender issues of those societies while also

incorporating modern societies’ progressive views? Snyder has not

succeeded in his attempt to deal with this issue, but his failure plays

an instructive role in determining its contours. The ancient Spartan

mirror pictured on the cover of Paul Cartledge’s recent book, Spartan

Reflections (2001), is a good analogue here: while the bronze mirror

has oxidized over the centuries, leaving a brown, pockmarked surface,

it originally was able to reflect the image of the real woman gazing

into it. Only the sculpted figure of a nude woman, which forms the

handle of the mirror, is comprehensible to us, as we try to see dis-

torted reflections of ourselves in the mirror of antiquity.

Notes

1. I would like to thank the audiences and fellow panelists at the 2007

Pacific Ancient and Modern Languages Association meeting and at the

2010 Film and History conference. Special thanks go to Ruby Blondell

and Monica Cyrino for their insightful comments and encouragement

and to Erin Pitt for her support and careful eye.

2. Bullough, Shelton, and Slavin (1988) 43 note that in the classical

period, “the status of women seems to have achieved some kind of

nadir in Western history.”

3. See further Pomeroy (2002) 3– 32.

4. George (2003) 65, 71.

5. Miller (1998).

6. Hassler- Forest (2010) 121.

7. Murray (2007).

8. References in this chapter to “Snyder’s 300” simplify the creative

process surrounding the film. The film’s Gorgo was shaped by many

different individuals, including the director, writers, and actors. For

readability’s sake, however, in this chapter I have equated the film’s

depiction of Gorgo with Snyder’s vision. Note that in many interviews

Snyder portrays Gorgo’s role in the film as his contribution.

9. For an outline and discussion of the debate, see Hughes- Warrington

(2007) 16– 35.

10. “The Frank Miller Tapes” and “300: Fact or Fiction?” are both sup-

plemental features on the 300: Special Edition DVD, Warner Bros.

(2007).

11. See Wyke (1997) 13 and Burgoyne (2008) 11.

12. Herodotus, Histories 5.51. The Greek text is from Legrand (1932–

68). All English translations of Greek texts are my own.

13. Dewald (1981) 105.

14. Histories 7.239.



15. In the original Greek, the italicized phrase consists of a participle and

an intensive pronoun that emphasize Gorgo’s active role in this epi-

sode; Herodotus uses the participle in the Histories only once of a

male. Furthermore, the particular verb from which the participle is

derived appears a total of seven times and is used almost exclusively

with men. See Hollmann (2011) 45– 46 and 229– 30.

16. Plutarch, Sayings of Spartan Women 240.E6, from the Greek text in

Nachstädt (1935).

17. Sayings 241.F4. See Kunstler (1987) on whether Plutarch’s words

reflect actual quotes.

18. E.g. Cartledge (2001) 114– 15.

19. E.g. Goff (2004) 118.

20. Pomeroy (2002) 160.

21. The main arguments pro emancipation are Kunstler (1987) and Pome-

roy (2002), while on the anti emancipation side is Cartledge (2001).

See also Figueira (2010) (anti, with qualifications), with further bib-

liography. Dewald (1981) approaches the issue from a literary view-

point, arguing that women in Herodotus play important roles in the

narrative of history.

22. “300: Fact or Fiction?” DVD feature (2007).

23. E.g. Corliss (2007).

24. Hassler- Forest (2010) 123.

25. See Goff (2004) 118.

26. Zweig (1993) 47.

27. Daryaee (2007) argues that this quote “is inserted wrongly in the

dialogue,” but his complaint seems to rest primarily on the notion

that Snyder does not carefully reproduce every aspect of the ancient

sources.

28. Pomeroy (2002) 160. On motherhood and feminism, see Umansky

(1996).

29. Hassler- Forest (2010) 123; Cyrino (2011) 23.

30. Roos (2010) section 31.

31. See Cyrino (2011) 28.



34. Although posters are texts separate from films, they are paratexts that

add to and indeed are parts of the film’s meaning; see Gray (2010)

52– 56.

35. See Cyrino (2011) 24.

36. Scott (2011).

37. Wilkins (2011).

38. Murray (2007).

39. As suggested by Daly (2007).

40. Murray (2007).

41. Quoted in Daly (2007).


Vincent Tomasso126

42. Quoted in George (2003) 72. Miller’s comment also points to a meth-

odological issue that has not been addressed in this chapter. As Mulvey

(1975) argues in her seminal article on film’s representation of women,

sex is not mutually exclusive; we cannot study the representation of

women without also considering the representation of men. Thus a

fuller treatment of the depiction of sex in 300 is in order, though this

study tries to nuance that future discussion. On masculinity in 300 see

Turner (2010).

43. On Hercules, see Blondell (2005); on Xena, see Futrell (2003).

44. Both Cyrino (2008) and Augoustakis (2008) argue this point.

45. See further Paul (2010b) 17– 18.

46. See Cyrino (2011) 27, who argues that epic films like 300 “are now

crafting their narrative strategies to engage with and promote broad

cross- cultural and even universal structures of identification, affinity

and inclusivity.”


4

C h a p t e r 9

Oliver Stone’s Unmanning

of Alexander the Great

in A L E X A N D E R (2004)

Jerry B. Pierce

When the film Gladiator hit the big screen in 2000, its financial

success began a revival of the sword- and- sandals epic that had been

defunct since the last major classical- era film, Anthony Mann’s The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), spurring production of stories

ranging from the fall of Troy to the battle of Thermopylae to the

conquests of Alexander the Great.1 While Gladiator, Troy (2004),

and 300 (2007) tend to share a common patriarchal characterization

of the male protagonist as a hero who is strong, active, and above

all, heterosexual, Oliver Stone’s film Alexander (2004) presents the

Macedonian general as excessively emotional, under the sway of his

overbearing mother, and, unlike the male leads in the other films,

sexually ambiguous: bisexual if not homosexual. Ancient epic films,

in general, often use the male lead to represent a powerful standard

of masculinity through the main characters’ familial and/or sexual

relationships, their agency, moral fortitude, and the “safe” hetero-

sexualizing of their bodies. Such representations starkly contrast male

antagonists in the same films who appear as feminized, weak, and

cowardly and who often tend to exhibit “aberrant” sexual behavior

such as incest and possible pedophilia, who transgress traditionally

held concepts of gender, or who simply fail to follow convention-

ally accepted masculine stereotypes. Gladiator, Troy, and 300 present

traditional masculinity and heterosexuality not only as positive but


Jerry B. Pierce128

also as an antidote to the tyranny and despotism that threatens their

patriarchal and democratic worlds.2

Oliver Stone’s Alexander differs markedly from this shared rep-

resentation of ancient patriarchal masculinity, as the eponymous

character fails to conform to the standard tropes for male protago-

nists, especially in his public and private displays of love and affection.

The result is that this Alexander the Great ultimately resembles many

of the “villains” in ancient films, and indeed he is portrayed as acting

less “manly” than his recent cinematic counterparts, such as Maxi-

mus, Hector, Achilles, and Leonidas. Therefore, while these films

present traditional masculinity and heterosexuality as positive, heroic,

and admirable, Alexander inverts these traits, challenging the typical

representation both sexually and emotionally. In other words, as the

elder narrator— Ptolemy, one of Alexander’s generals— explains, Alex-

ander’s only defeat was by his friend Hephaestion’s thighs. The result

of this inversion is the rendering of his masculinity and ultimately his

heroism as ambiguous at best. While most of the other films were

commercially successful, the story of Alexander of Macedonia failed

both financially and critically, which may have resulted from its atypi-

cal portrayal of a classical hero.

These cinematic representations of proper masculinity rely on and

in fact reinforce heteronormativity, a constructed perception that

holds heterosexuality as the normal, default identity for members

of a society, and therefore the only accepted expression of sexuality.

Indeed, it is considered so “natural, universal, and monolithic” that

any variations from heterosexuality are considered deviant and thus

are devalued and shunned.3 According to Wheeler Winston Dixon,

in most films the “state of nonstraightness is essentially suspect.”4 To

demonstrate one’s heterosexuality and therefore follow the “norm,”

one can engage in heteroperformance. Marriage, male- female sex,

and procreation all are deemed suitable displays of heterosexuality

precisely because they reinforce traditional patriarchal gender roles.

This heteroperformance can occur either actively, through character

dialogue or action, or passively, via clothing, an actor’s body type, or

a prop such as a wedding ring.5

Each of the male protagonists in Gladiator, Troy, and 300 fit the

mold of a strong, heteroperformative male in terms of both their phys-

ical bodies and their actions or, more precisely, their interactions. The

toned bodies of Maximus, Achilles, Hector, and Leonidas are all on

display in these films, ranging from Maximus’s one shirtless scene, to

a partially nude Achilles, to a completely nude Leonidas. Their bodies

are also depicted as engaging in manly action like fighting hordes of


Oliver Stone’s Unmanning of Alexander the Great 129

barbarians, single- handedly killing numerous Trojans, or slaying wave

after wave of Persians. Strength and aggression then become active

indicators of each hero’s masculinity. As Lynne Segal argues, concep-

tions of “true manhood” typically involve “toughness, struggle and

conquest” and an “increasing glorification of a more muscular, milita-

ristic masculinity.”6 As evidence, one need only consider the film 300,

where the sculpted bodies of the Spartans are as much a spectacle as

the battles themselves.

Each of these films goes to great lengths to try to ensure that none

of these male bodies appear in a homoerotic fashion by safely heterosex-

ualizing the scenes with easily identified heteroperformative markers.

The reason for these markers is to ease the (usually American) audi-

ence’s apprehension and perhaps expectation that male bodies in any

stage of undress in a film set in the classical world are a possible gateway

to homosexual desire. Onscreen male- male relationships, according to

John M. Clum, are rife with anxiety because they have the potential

to threaten the demarcation between heterosexual and homosexual

interaction.7 Thus the all- male gladiators in Gladiator wear knee- length

tunics that conceal their bodies from both the audience and espe-

cially from their fellow warriors, and they never, ever are seen bathing

together or even sleeping in close proximity. Maximus’s own hetero-

sexuality is always reaffirmed through constant reference to his wife and

child, reinforcing his status as both husband and father. His desire to

return to his murdered family, if only in the afterlife, supersedes all other

desires, both political and sexual, and indicates that his heteroperforma-

tive role as father and husband is key to his masculine identity.

In Troy, Hector likewise is identified through his role as husband,

father, and protector, all traditionally masculine functions, and it is

only during such scenes with his wife and infant son where his body

is safely on display. These scenes thus provide proof that Hector is a

“proper” heterosexual male who has married and produced a legiti-

mate heir, thereby fulfilling his expected manly duties. Achilles is also

portrayed as a heteroperformative male from his first scene dozing in

postcoital bliss with two women to his “romance” with the Trojan

priestess, Briseis. Though not a father in the film, Achilles is depicted

as paternalistic through his safely heterosexual relationship with the

young Patroclus, now conveniently changed to his “cousin,” thereby

cancelling out any homoerotic relationship between the two and

eliminating the potential for the affection shared between them to be

construed as anything other than solidly heterosexual.8

Finally, 300 goes to exceptional lengths to depict the Spartans, espe-

cially Leonidas, as staunchly heterosexual, by attempting to mask any


Jerry B. Pierce130

homoeroticism with hypermasculinity and even deflecting accusations

of homosexuality onto others, such as the Athenian “boy- lovers.” The

Spartan warriors are portrayed as safely heterosexual either through

noting that all assembled have “grown sons to carry on their names” or

through the presence of both father and son in the army together. In

both cases, the presence of male heirs reaffirms the Spartans’ performa-

tive heterosexuality. And then there is Leonidas himself, who literally

engages in heteroperformance by being the only one of these males

shown having intercourse (with his wife, naturally). Unlike Gladiator

and Troy, 300 has the only extensive and graphic sex scene involving

the male protagonist, which serves to further normalize Leonidas’s

heterosexuality and, perhaps more important, also provides a safe set-

ting for the gratuitous display of the male body.

While Gladiator, Troy, and 300 all present a common conceptualiza-

tion of normative masculinity and its expression through heterosexual

activity, they also share a common depiction of aberrant or nonnorma-

tive masculinity, which is presented in the form of each film’s villain.

These exclusively male antagonists are generally presented as femi-

nized, excessively irrational and emotional, sexually “confused,” or

some mixture of these qualities. One thing is for certain: these villains,

in spite of being male, lack the heteronormative masculine qualities of

their adversaries and typically seek to quash the “real” man who stands

against them. In fact, these antagonists have not only blurred the tra-

ditional boundaries of masculinity but also intentionally disrupted the

formerly tranquil, “democratic” political system. According to Ina Rae

Hark, ancient epic films tend to follow a predictable political narrative

that centers on proper (masculine) political power being “perverted

by unmanly tyrants” who themselves are unmanned because they lack

the traditional “signifiers of masculinity” and appear as effeminate or

possess nonnormative bodies.9 This feminization is therefore both the

source and the telltale sign of their tyranny.

The emperor Commodus, the antagonist of Gladiator, fits this

stereotype from his very first scene where he is seated in an ornate,

armored wagon while wearing luxurious furs and purple robes. This

physical decadence indicates that Commodus is pampered and leads a

life of ostentatious wealth and luxury, a stark contrast to the harsh life

of the Roman soldiers, especially Maximus. Commodus’s effeminacy

is made apparent not simply by his contrast with the soldiers but by

his similarity to the only other person in the scene similarly dressed:

his sister, Lucilla. In later scenes, Commodus always appears in fresh,

vibrant clothing or armor that seems too perfect and clean, implying

simply ceremonial usage instead of actual combat use. Commodus’s



wicked nature is made vividly apparent through his violent mood

swings and his deviant and dangerous sexuality, which includes an

overt incestuous desire for his sister and leering, pedophilic intima-

tions toward his young nephew. His excessive emotionality paints

Commodus as both unstable and dangerous, to those close to him as

well as the Roman state itself, since most of his political activities are

costly attempts to make the people of Rome love him. Moreover, as

Commodus himself says, he is “terribly vexed” throughout the film,

and this vexation leads him into a downward spiral of paranoia and

murderous violence. But it is his deviant sexuality that is the most

insidious danger, since it threatens the heterosexual family unit (both

his own and that of Maximus), one of the core elements that defines

proper heteroperformance.

In Troy, Hector’s brother, Paris, embodies some aspects of the

feminized villain, and he is mostly responsible for the Trojan War,

although his role in the film is not so much as a direct antagonist to

the hero as it is a foil by which the masculinity of Hector and Achilles

can be contrasted. In terms of his physical body, Paris’s feminiza-

tion is conveyed by his slight build and smooth features, which are

augmented by his frequent wearing of silky, open- chested robes; this

physical weakness is compounded by his complete lack of any skill in

battle, one of the defining traits of the masculine hero. In fact, even

when Paris finally attempts to be strong and courageous, by facing the

significantly larger and stronger Menelaus, he fails miserably by ignor-

ing Hector’s tactical advice and then quite literally crawling away from

the fight to cower between his brother’s legs. However, it should be

noted that despite these numerous antiheroic traits, Paris’s masculin-

ity is not entirely unredeemable, since the entire cause of the war was

his heterosexual seduction of Helen. His physical relationship with

Helen thus somewhat mitigates his effeminacy.

Paris’s counterpart in terms of feminization is Agamemnon, whose

antimasculine qualities are witnessed more though his actions (or lack

thereof) than through his physical body or sexuality. If one aspect of

heteroperformance in these films is for men to physically exert them-

selves through battle, then Agamemnon comes up short because, with

one (cowardly) exception where he stabs king Priam in the back, he

does not directly engage in fighting. In fact, rather than enter the fray,

Agamemnon avoids the battles, preferring instead to send other men

to fight and die in his place. This avoidance of warfare and cowardly

slaying of an unarmed old man, in a temple no less, proves he is not

honorable, either as a warrior or as a man.


Jerry B. Pierce132

But none of these come anywhere close to 300’s effeminate extrav-

aganza of the Persians and their tyrannical leader, Xerxes. Virtually

every Persian seen up close wears “Eastern” attire (silky robes, scarves,

or headdresses), which, combined with an abundance of eyeliner and

ubiquitous piercings, represents feminized decadence and stands in

obvious contrast to the simple, unadorned, and thus masculine attire

of the Spartans. Literally arriving on the backs of countless slaves,

Xerxes himself is a hyperfeminized male. He has the muscular and

toned physique of the Spartans, but it is a body awash in feminized

accessories and modifications, such as ornate bracelets and necklaces,

a head- to- toe coating of gold makeup, long, manicured fingernails, a

thoroughly shaved body (even down to the eyebrows, which are pen-

ciled in), and countless piercings. In short, there is not the slightest

indication that Xerxes is a typical male, least of all a heterosexual one.

Unlike these other films, Stone’s Alexander offers up a nontra-

ditional hero, defying and even flouting conventional depictions of

male protagonists. Rather than resembling heroes such as Maximus,

Achilles, Hector, and Leonidas, Alexander instead recalls (sometimes

literally) the feminized and tyrannical antagonists such as Commodus,

Agamemnon, and Xerxes. Stone’s presentation of Alexander, ancient

conqueror of the “known world,” challenges the heteronormative ste-

reotype in a variety of categories, including his clothing and physical

appearance, overt homosexuality, inability to engage in heteroperfor-

mative acts, excessive emotionality, and feminized conduct in both

political and personal affairs.

Considering the importance of the visual representation of a char-

acter for conveying hetero- or homosexuality, rarely does the body

or attire of Alexander convincingly suggest normative masculinity.

Throughout the film, Alexander’s clothing makes him appear young

and boyish, if not infantile. For example, as a child of about five and

later ten, Alexander is clothed almost exclusively in white robes, which

naturally indicate innocence and purity. However, as an adult (of 18

years), Alexander still wears the white clothing of his youth. Juxtaposed

with the presence of his overbearing mother, Olympias, this dress hin-

ders the audience’s acceptance of Alexander as an independent adult.

Strikingly, on the eve of the great battle of Gaugamela against the Per-

sian emperor, Darius, Alexander’s battle attire, including his armor, is

again white (with the exception of a red cloak) and recalls the white

armor worn by the villain, Commodus, in his gladiatorial combat with

Maximus. Alexander’s masculinity, and by extension his leadership and

battle prowess, are further brought into question by the exceptional

shortness of the lower half of his tunic, or “skirt.” Whereas the tunics



of the other Greek soldiers extend down to near their knees, Alexan-

der’s barely extends past the lower groin. This childishly short “skirt”

and white attire consistently undermine the supposed greatness and

masculinity of the protagonist, yet they are understated in comparison

to Alexander’s attire after his arrival in Babylon.

After Alexander and his men discover the royal harem, from this

point forward Alexander’s traditional/heroic masculinity is openly

and permanently compromised. As Alexander and his generals take

in the sights of the harem, they are greeted by numerous beautiful

and seductive women who dance and writhe in an effort to entice the

men. Noticeable among them are several groups of women wearing

open- chested robes and sporting long, dark, luxurious hair. It is only

on further examination that these “women” are in fact recognized

as men, or at least eunuchs. After a brief interlude with one of the

eunuchs, the next time Alexander appears, his clothing replicates the

fine robes of the harem eunuchs and, also like them, he is shown wear-

ing heavy eyeliner, a trait that will continue throughout the rest of

the film. Like the choice of boyishly white clothing, the direct appro-

priation of eunuch attire visually emasculates Alexander in front of his

men and the audience.

This visual emasculation of Alexander is only strengthened by his

overt disdain for heterosexual relationships and avid embrace of an

alternative sexuality. Guided by the narration of an elderly Ptolemy,

the audience learns that Alexander was never once defeated in battle,

“except by Hephaestion’s thighs.” Thus begins a series of flash-

backs establishing a long- standing homoerotic relationship between

Alexander and his companion Hephaestion, starting with their early

childhood. During his youth at the feet of Aristotle, the young Alex-

ander learns that homosexual relations between men is not a corrupt

thing, provided that it is not simply an expression of passion or lust.

When the relationship pushes each to exceed the other in virtue, then

it is entirely acceptable.10 Yet the film pointedly fails to establish a vir-

tuous homosexual relationship between Alexander and Hephaestion,

and it instead gives the impression of a relationship based on emotion

instead of reason. In light of Aristotle’s rule about male relationships,

the film provides no tangible, virtuous byproduct of their relationship.

Although no overt homosexual love scenes occur between Alexan-

der and Hephaestion in the film, their relationship is a constant theme

that undermines any even remotely heteroperformative acts. Even as

a young boy, Alexander expressed an interest in Hephaestion, albeit

obliquely. While observing with his father a series of cave paintings

depicting various Greek myths, Alexander explains that his favorite


Jerry B. Pierce134

hero is Achilles, not because of his strength or godlike qualities, but

because Achilles “loved Patroclus and avenged his death.”11 Much

later, after entering Babylon and looking out over the darkened city,

Alexander confides in Hephaestion: “It is you that I love. No other.”

As the two embrace, it is important to note that this first scene overtly

expressing love between the two is also the first scene where Alexan-

der appears in the above- mentioned Eastern, “feminized” attire and

makeup. These two elements, the homosexual relationship and the

feminization, work together to undermine the traditional masculine

and heroic nature of the classical male protagonist.

Although the relationship between Alexander and Hephaestion

would not have raised any eyebrows among their contemporaries,

provided that each ultimately engaged in heteroperformative activi-

ties such as marriage and parenthood, Alexander’s open relationship

with the eunuch Bagoas further highlights his character’s active nega-

tion of traditional masculinity.12 During the harem scene, where by

all conventionally masculine standards, Alexander should be inter-

ested in the women, they instead are literally just passing through

the scene, as he sets his sights on the eunuch Bagoas, much to the

dismay of a visibly jealous Hephaestion. As eunuchs are often used in

classical films to display imperial decadence and imply some form of

deviant sexuality, Alexander’s open courting of Bagoas clearly con-

nects him to these “negative” stereotypes. Even by Aristotle’s own

standard within the film, Alexander’s sexual interest in the eunuch,

made abundantly clear by Bagoas’s erotic and suggestive dance in

a later scene, indicates more a surrender to passion than to reason

and virtue. Tellingly, when Alexander openly embraces then kisses

Bagoas after the dance, his Macedonians— and even the purportedly

Figure 9.1 Alexander (Colin Farrell) receives a shoulder massage from Hephaestion

(Jared Leto) in Alexander (2004). Warner Bros.



“feminine” Indians— are taken aback by this brazen repudiation of

expected masculine behavior.

While it is true that some of Alexander’s men engage in quasihomo-

sexual activities, these instances are fleeting and do not appear to be

defining features of their sexuality. During the Babylonian harem scene,

Parmenion is briefly shown caressing the face and cupping the chin of

one of the eunuchs. In another instance, during Alexander’s wedding,

when he offers to make the Bactrian women the official wives of the

men, some men in the crowd ask, “What about the boys?” But since

the question is followed by hearty male laughter, the request appears as

jest. Even so, both of these instances treat any inclination toward bi- or

homosexuality on the part of the Macedonian men as merely secondary.

In fact, the wives and children of Alexander’s men come up frequently

in conversation, and the mutiny that occurs on the riverbank in India

is the direct result of the men wanting to return to their families. Such

concern and longing for their heterosexual relationships clearly over-

shadows any marginal references to homosexual activities. By contrast,

Alexander’s flagrant sexual excesses, especially with Bagoas, challenge

the traditional expectations of both his onscreen cohort and the film

audience to such a degree that his character is more deviant than nor-

mative and thus shares more in common with the likes of Commodus

and Xerxes than with Maximus or Leonidas.13

Though male sexual relationships were generally accepted among

the classical Greeks (and by extension, the Macedonians), it was also

generally expected that a man would eventually take a wife and pro-

duce a legitimate heir. According to the film, Alexander technically

accomplishes both of these tasks, but they are done with great reluc-

tance, possibly even revulsion, which undercuts their very significance

as cinematic markers of proper masculinity. A husband/father such

as Maximus, Hector, or Leonidas does not shirk his familial respon-

sibilities, but rather embraces them. In the case of Alexander, several

of those close to him, including his mother, his generals, even Hep-

haestion himself, all urge him to have a son. On the surface, these

requests appear mostly political because such offspring would allow

the smooth continuance of his empire should anything happen to

Alexander. In fact, to bolster the notion of political utility, the Mace-

donian generals demand that Alexander take a Macedonian wife as his

first, in order to produce a legitimate Macedonian heir. When Alex-

ander spontaneously chooses Roxane, a Sogdian princess, as his first

wife, not only does the action fail to mollify the Macedonians, but it

also fails to provide convincing evidence of Alexander’s heteroperfor-

mative masculinity.


Jerry B. Pierce136

Although it could be argued that the marriage to Roxane was a

political maneuver of alliances, as was the case with many ancient

rulers, the scene of Alexander’s wedding night reveals that even the

heterosexuality implied by the marriage is illusory. In his bedchamber,

Alexander is waiting for Roxane but is instead greeted by a somber,

and possibly drunk, Hephaestion. Apparently fearing that he will lose

Alexander to his new wife, Hephaestion presents him with a gold ring

set with a large red stone, which Alexander promptly places on his ring

finger. Even though Hephaestion appears to be letting go of Alexan-

der and their relationship, especially when he wishes a son for the new

husband, the exchange of the ring and its placement on a finger obvi-

ously associated with matrimony clearly represents an inversion, or

perhaps a repudiation, of the recently concluded marriage ceremony

between Alexander and Roxane. As such, at the very moment that

Alexander appears to be engaging in a highly significant heteroper-

formative act, it is in fact negated by what essentially amounts to a

wedding ceremony between himself and Hephaestion.14

Even during the awkward consummation scene between the

husband and his new bride, Alexander’s full potential as both a (het-

erosexual) man and an adult are called into question. During a virtual

reenactment of an earlier scene between Alexander’s father and his

mother, where Alexander witnesses Philip essentially raping Olympias,

Alexander violently forces Roxane upstairs to a bed where the two are

disrobed during their struggles. As Roxane appears to submit to Alex-

ander’s advances, she notices Hephaestion’s ring on his finger, which

he promptly removes, only to have her throw it across the room. With

this connection to his homosexual relationship (temporarily) out of

the way, Alexander once again attempts to consummate his marriage,

only to be stopped by the snakelike armband on Roxane, an immedi-

ate reminder of Alexander’s mother, conveniently conveyed by a quick

flashback to Olympias’s snake- filled quarters.

This sexually charged and confused scene presents several obsta-

cles to a heteroperformative, masculine Alexander. First, the violence

between the couple differs markedly from the intimate scenes between

the normative masculine heroes and their wives, and if the proper

sexual relationship in such films between husbands and wives is more

about intimacy than brutality, then Alexander easily fails to measure

up. Second, the violence is a direct link back to the sexual aggression

of Alexander’s father, whom the film consistently portrays as an out of

control political and sexual tyrant.15 Finally, the overt association of

Roxane with Alexander’s mother fails to normalize their matrimo-

nial relationship and instead problematizes it as Oedipal and thus



deviant.16 The final nail in the coffin of Alexander’s traditional mas-

culinity during these wedding night scenes is when, after intercourse

with Roxane, he quietly picks up Hephaestion’s ring and replaces it

on his finger, effectively negating any heteroperformance that had

taken place.

Perhaps one of the most important heteroperformative duties that

Alexander neglects is the siring of a legitimate heir. After his wedding

night, the next time he has any significant interaction with Roxane

is immediately after the sexually charged dance of Bagoas during a

drunken interlude in India. As Roxane departs to her chambers in dis-

gust after his passionate kiss with and embrace of Bagoas, Alexander

stops her, and pleads, “I will come tonight.” Roxane’s response—

“And I will wait”— clearly indicates not only that Alexander will not

be joining her intimately but that he apparently has not done so for

quite some time, perhaps not even since their wedding night.

By contrast, the one constant factor in any domestic scene with

Alexander post- Babylon is not his wife but the unmistakable presence

of Bagoas, often in various stages of undress. The unmistakably sexual

nature of their relationship is first alluded to through shared seductive

glances, and of course with the kiss and embrace following Bagoas’s

dance, but most obviously in a scene in Alexander’s tent where he

disrobes completely, then watches as Bagoas does the same, and finally

motions the eunuch to join him. These openly sexual scenes between

Alexander and Bagoas far exceed any screen time given to Alexander’s

intimacy with Roxane (let alone Hephaestion), further distancing him

from the traditional husband’s matrimonial and, above all, sexual role.

As per the masculine norm, it is the duty and obligation of a husband

to have intimate relations with his wife and even more so to father a

child, especially for Alexander since his role as king/emperor obligates

him to provide an heir. Alexander’s general failure in this regard is

striking and presents him as either unable or, more likely, unwilling to

fulfill this critical responsibility.

This rejection of his proper masculine role peaks during the film’s

climax, and, as on his wedding night, when Alexander has an oppor-

tunity to embrace his role as a heteroperformative male, he literally

rejects it. In a telling scene immediately after the death of Hephaestion,

Roxane surprisingly informs Alexander that she is pregnant with a son,

a development never clarified by the filmmaker. Instead of embracing

her (and his unborn heir), Alexander actually recoils in horror from

Roxane when she tries to place his hand on her abdomen, screaming,

“Never touch me again!” Thus, at the film’s end, one of Alexan-

der’s last acts is a direct renunciation of his expected duties as both a


Jerry B. Pierce138

husband and a father, spurning both his wife and child. Such selfish

disregard for the heterosexual family unit completely negates his mas-

culinity and, by association, his heroism for the audience.

Alexander’s inability to comply with the heteroperformative mascu-

line ideal is compounded by his emotional instability, a trait he shares

with the antagonists of the other films and which is similarly connected

to his descent into despotism. In sharp contrast to the reserved and

stoic natures of Maximus, Hector, and Leonidas, Alexander is con-

stantly prone to emotional outbursts, bouts of weeping (or at least,

he is frequently teary- eyed), and other stereotypically feminine expres-

sions of emotion. He is often near tears in scenes with his mother, his

father, and members of the Macedonian nobility, on the battlefield

after Gaugamela, and directly in front of his own troops as he tried

to quell a mutiny. Recognizing his constantly fragile emotional state,

Philip at one point tells him, “Don’t look so hurt all the time, Alexan-

der. Be a man,” while his mother later orders Alexander to “stop acting

like a boy.” In both of these instances Alexander’s masculinity as well

as maturity are both challenged, once again undermining his manliness

by calling attention to his excessive emotional instability.

Scenes between Alexander and his mother typically display emo-

tional outbursts that are in marked contrast to Olympias’s strength

of character and determination. For example, immediately after the

death of Philip, Alexander, in a frenzy, tries to blame Olympias for his

murder but instead is forced to listen to her well- laid plans for secur-

ing his political future, plans that include executing his opponents,

confiscating their lands, and seizing the throne. Because she has to

spell out these actions to Alexander as if he had never thought of

them before, Olympias appears much more decisive and active than

her son, and thus that much more masculine. In another instance, also

regarding succession, Olympias again has to tell Alexander the appro-

priate way to become Philip’s legitimate heir, which includes taking

a Macedonian wife and siring a child of his own. When Alexander

balks at this idea, his stated reason is that he and Hephaestion love

each other, implying their love would preclude him from a traditional

marriage. Olympias’s response, that Alexander must “never confuse

feelings with duties,” reveals that he is ruled by emotion instead of the

more masculine reason. Such an admonition challenges Alexander’s

masculinity, first because it shows that his unstable emotions override

his sense of political duty and, second, because the rebuke comes from

a woman who appears to have more masculine qualities than he does.

The underlying question about this portrayal of Alexander is

whether Stone intended to invert the standardized classical film traits



of masculine protagonist with feminized antagonist. Stone himself has

said in numerous interviews that his vision of Alexander was crafted to

be nuanced, complicated, and somewhat ambiguous, not the typical

hero movie- going audiences— especially American ones— expect. As

Stone explained, “Alexander was not only a conqueror, a builder, but

he also had a fascinating blend of masculine and feminine qualities.

Many of the Greek heroes were known for their sensuality, for their

femininity as much as for their masculinity.”17 By presenting both

“masculine” and “feminine” aspects of Alexander’s character, Stone

contends that he was creating a more historically accurate portrayal of

his personality. In contrast to the other three films’ heterosexualized

and sanitized masculinity, Stone’s hero was intended to be a more

progressive reading on the Macedonian leader that embraced the pan-

sexual aspects of his nature. Stone himself has correctly noted that

by the standards of the ancient Greeks, there was “nothing unusual”

about Alexander’s relationships with both men and women, and defin-

ing him as “polymorphous or pansexual” would not have challenged

the ancient world’s reception of Alexander as a hero.18 Coupled with

his public displays of emotion, which Stone refers to as an expression

of the hero’s compassion, Alexander does indeed defy the mold of the

typical classical hero onscreen.

The problem with Stone’s presentation of Alexander is not that he

crafted a multifaceted, sexually nuanced hero, but that he tried to do

so in a genre of film that has generally eschewed such subtleties. If

Gladiator, Troy, and 300 are any indication, heteronormative heroes

are not only a general rule; they are expected by audiences. The direc-

tor even noted that his own 19- year- old son and his friends were put

off by the “gay scene” between Alexander and Hephaestion, which

spoiled the notion of Alexander’s heroism for them. Stone mused,

“They wanted a warrior and nothing else. They did not want to see

a man with vulnerabilities . . . We only want clearly defined heroes

and villains, no subtleties in between.”19 His son’s interpretation of

the film was not isolated, as indicated by the scarce return at the US

box office and the ubiquitous negative reviews of the film, many of

which savaged the casting decisions and the editing in addition to the

concept of a sexually ambiguous hero.20

What Stone further failed to realize is that all the qualities he

ascribed to Alexander, despite their historical accuracy, have long been

considered cinematic tropes of villains and tyrants. Where Maximus,

Achilles, Hector, and Leonidas are paragons of heteroperformativ-

ity, Alexander is their feminized antithesis. They are defined by their

unwavering devotion to their heterosexual unions, yet Alexander


Jerry B. Pierce140

purposefully shirks his expected masculine duties and abandons him-

self to his decadent desires. In complicating the figure of Alexander,

Stone either unconsciously or uncritically undermined the very her-

oism he was trying to glorify. Ultimately, the portrait of Alexander

that emerges is not that of a classical hero, but that of the classical

feminized tyrant, a corrupted and degraded inversion that unmans

Alexander’s supposed greatness.

Notes

1. This chapter is an extensive revision and expansion of an argument first

presented in Pierce (2008).

2. The following discussion of heteroperformance in Gladiator, Troy, and

300 is partially derived from my lengthier treatment in Pierce (2011)

40– 57.

3. Ingraham (1994) 207.

4. Dixon (2003) 1– 2.

5. See Chopra- Grant (2006) 96 for discussion of how performance con-

nects to masculine identity.

6. Segal (2007) 89, 91, 92.

7. Clum (2002) xix.

8. On the long history of the likely homosexual relationship between

Achilles and Patroclus in both the Iliad and Greek literary culture in

general, see Crompton (2006) 3– 6.

9. Hark (1993) 152.

10. For the focus on virtue, as opposed to self- gratification, in male- male

relationships and their acceptance in classical Greek society, see Skinner

(2010) 123– 24.

11. On the sexual relationship between Alexander and Hephaestion as a

mirror of that of Achilles and Patroclus, see O’Brian (1992) 57.

12. See Cartledge (2004) 228 for the lack of stigma attached to Greek

homosexual relations.

13. Winkler (1990) 45– 47 notes that the classical Greeks had a conception

of an antitype of masculinity, a kinaidos, a socially and sexually devi-

ant male, who by definition did not exhibit appropriate “manliness”

(andreia), and thus his identity was demoted from manly to feminine.

14. As O’Brian (1992) 59 has argued, “Alexander proved to be a reluctant

homosexual.”

15. In addition to Philip’s near- rape of Olympias, he also impregnates

another wife, whose Macedonian lineage threatens the status of

foreign- born Olympias, while the new child rivals Alexander’s chances

of succession. Furthermore, Philip’s constant drunkenness reveals him

to be dangerous and volatile, prone to violent outbursts or deviant



sexual behavior, such as his sodomizing of a young man during a drink-

ing party.

16. For more on Alexander’s confused and Oedipal sexuality, see Cart-

ledge (2004) 230.

17. Crowdus (2005) 22.

18. Crowdus (2005) 22.

19. Craig (2005).

20. See Cyrino (2010b) 177, who argues the film’s negative reception is

partly due to its “lack of coherence about sexual and emotional issues.”


4

C h a p t e r 1 0

The Order of Orgies

Sex and the Cinematic Roman

Stacie Raucci

When the movie Gladiator (2000) was released, critics, scholars, and

general audience members alike quickly noted a specific absence in the

film: the Roman orgy. John Simon titled his review, “What, No Orgy?”1

Another critic, Andrew Sarris, likewise emphasized the absence of orgies

in his title: “Russell Crowe in a Toga, but not a Single Orgy.”2 Other

viewers praised director Ridley Scott precisely “for not turning Gladi-ator into another cheap sexploitation epic of Roman imperial orgies.”3

Scott himself rather laconically defended his choice of not including

orgies: “I didn’t want any orgies because orgies are boring.”4

Since the early days of cinema, viewers of ancient Rome onscreen

have expected the same familiar scenes of decadence: beautiful ban-

quets at which guests gorge themselves on food and wine, extravagant

military triumphs in the streets, gladiatorial games, and of course,

not least of all, orgies. Although there have been toga epics without

orgies in the past, such as Anthony Mann’s Fall of the Roman Empire (1964),5 the orgy for the most part has become a “de rigeur” scene

of the genre.6 One need only think of the comedy, A Funny Thing

Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), in which all the standard

tropes appear and the orgy is no exception. In this film, the general

Miles Gloriosus orders a “sit- down orgy for forty.”7 By the 1960s, the

Roman orgy had clearly become ingrained into the pop culture con-

sciousness. This continues to be true in the most recent incarnations

of the Romans onscreen.


Stacie Raucci144

This chapter proposes to survey selectively the type scene of the

orgy, which, although often mentioned by scholars, has not been col-

lectively examined across time periods of production.8 The Romans

onscreen are often discussed as being more sexually liberal than the

modern movie audience. Yet a close analysis of sexual scenes reveals

that not all onscreen orgies are equal in this regard. Although the orgy

scene is often imagined as the quintessential frenzied event where all

rules disappear, this essay argues for a more nuanced understanding.

Cinematic orgies can indeed vary in their degree of disorder, either

because they remain somewhat organized and tame as a whole, or

because they introduce elements of order within the general disorder.9

Some orgies are indeed quite orderly and seem almost choreo-

graphed, with distinct groups of people engaged in activity in small

divisions and each group placed apart from the others. Bodies are

placed carefully in position and limbs flow smoothly from one move-

ment to the next. By contrast, the more chaotic orgies, which often

include animals, drugs, and in some instances even have a “foreign”

(non- Roman) overtone, tend to have people with arms flailing, their

limbs tangled haphazardly, and often performing sudden and erratic

movements. The participants usually appear as a large, indistinguish-

able mass of bodies, groping indiscriminately.

Regardless of the general organization of orgies, within an orgy

there are often characters who represent an ideal of moral order, which

then becomes all the more noticeable when it is set against the back-

ground of the other orgiastic participants. The aesthetics of the order

of orgies onscreen has the ability to typecast characters for the viewing

audience. These sexual scenes offer the audience a subtle, yet effective

means of appreciating the virtue and morality of the different char-

acters of a production. They tell the viewers with whom they should

identify and to whom they should have positive reactions. The Roman

orgy further offers the audience a chance to judge the immorality of

the characters while enjoying the visual stimulation of the taboo acts

onscreen. As Joshel, Malamud, and Wyke have noted, “projection is

complex and ambiguous because identification and distancing occur

simultaneously.”10 There is the excitement and allure of luxury and

the safety of morality all rolled into one package.

Although a logical place to find the most explicit orgy scenes would

be in the cinematic genre of pornography, this chapter deals only with

mainstream films and does not delve into films officially labeled as

pornography, such as Private Gladiator (2001).11 Further, it does not

deal with the historical accuracy of Roman orgies.12 Rather it examines

select cinematic orgies from their early appearances onscreen to the


The Order of Orgies 145

present time to demonstrate the existence of a stable approach to the

crucial narrative role of orgy scenes.

Roman Orgies

The Roman orgy had a place even in early cinematic undertakings,

for instance in a short and silent French film entitled L’Orgie romaine (The Roman Orgy, 1911) by Louis Feuillade. Despite its name, it con-

tains only one orgy scene very close to the end of the film. Although

the whole film only lasts eight minutes, it manages to reduce ancient

Rome to one basic idea, decadence. The orgy, which depicts a scene

from the reign of the emperor Heliogabalus (A.D. 218– 22), begins as

an event orderly in its organization. The participants are not depicted

negatively: they are dressed, they sit, drink wine, and somewhat calmly

wave their arms back and forth. The lack of explicit sexual activity is

not surprising given the early time period of production.13 Even with-

out onscreen sex, however, the screen caption clearly signals this scene

is an orgy: “After the sacrifice, the banquet and the orgy.” The relative

calm at the orgy indicates that these are Romans with whom the audi-

ence should identify. The people enjoy a tame performance by danc-

ers, who stand on tables and perform a choreographed dance. Rose

petals fall from the sky in a dreamlike sequence and coat the partygo-

ers who look at the flowers in childlike awe. These same people were

identified as moral Romans in an earlier scene when they displayed

shock at the killing of a man by lions at the order of the emperor. It

is only when the emperor Heliogabalus (Jean Aymé) introduces lions

into the feast that the scene becomes frenzied, with everyone running

in fear. The calm of the orgy is broken by the screen caption warning

ominously of the entrance of the beasts, “but suddenly, a frightening

howl,” and shortly after another caption attributing the disruption

to the evil emperor: “Heliogabalus releases unexpected guests.” As

the partygoers flee, multiple lions run down a flight of stairs into the

party room. Heliogabalus watches these events unfold, smiling from

above the chaos, marking his downfall. The emperor, who made the

orgy into a chaotic event, ends the film by dying, while the calm orgy

participants survive.

Roman orgies have found a place not only in toga epics but also in

films that do not take place entirely in ancient Rome. Manslaughter

(1922), a silent film by Cecil B. DeMille, is, for most of the movie,

set in the 1920s. Yet it makes an explicit connection between cha-

otic orgies and the downfall of civilization with a brief scene set in

Roman times. The film revolves around a young woman named Lydia


Stacie Raucci146

(Leatrice Joy) who engages in publicly wild behavior, going to parties

and drinking a great deal. Prior to the orgy scene, there is an image

of flappers dancing enthusiastically at a champagne- soaked party.

One woman looks ready for ancient Rome with a crown of laurel

on her head. The scene then morphs rapidly from the flappers to a

Roman orgy, as a district attorney watches the action and declares (in

a caption) the society of the 1920s to be the same as ancient Rome:

“Why, we’re no different today than Rome at its worst! This Dance—

with its booze and license— is little better than a Feast of Bacchus!”

This orgy shows crowds of people dancing in circles, running about

with arms flapping rapidly in the air. Lydia presides over the festivi-

ties from a throne, laughing and throwing coins out to the people.

She reclines on a couch, is fed grapes by a male servant, and kisses

him passionately. Women are carried off violently by men, people pull

each other’s hair, and gladiators even enter and start to fight. After

this scene, the district attorney later makes another declaration about

decadence: “The over- civilized, mad young set of wasters— to which

this defendant belongs— must be STOPPED! Or they will destroy

the Nation— as Rome was destroyed, when Drunkenness and Plea-

sure drugged the Conscience of its Young!” These are the Romans at

their worst and most chaotic, and the reckless Lydia is at the center of

this chaos. Her role in this commotion is a marker that she is not the

person with whom the audience should identify. She leaves the party

drunk, drives, and kills someone. She is publicly placed on trial, at

which lawyers show how “Roman” and thus guilty she really is. The

audience is taught a lesson: if they do identify with this character, they

may meet a similar fate.

DeMille continues with his orgiastic theme in the well- known epic

The Sign of the Cross (1932), set in the time of Nero. In this film, a

Roman prefect, Marcus Superbus (Fredric March), falls in love with a

young Christian girl, Mercia (Alissa Landi), and shows his affection by

bringing her to an orgy. At the start of the scene, there is the opening

of curtains and the orgy literally bursts into the room. We see an older

man frolicking with two women on top of him. The one obviously

moral character, the Christian Mercia, is in a corner away from the

activity of the orgy. She is then pulled forward and her body is put on

display to the orgiasts, but she never herself participates in the orgy. As

another woman, Ancaria (Joyzelle Joyner), sings a song to Mercia, the

other immoral Romans breathe heavily with chests rising in apparent

lust, while they stroke and kiss each other. The orgy reaches its pin-

nacle at the end of the scene when the Romans are shown streaming

out of the gathering en masse, looking inebriated, with men carrying



women over their shoulders, and people pulling each other’s hair

aggressively. The good woman, Mercia, is further defined in this orgy

by her light colored hair, while the indecent Romans have dark col-

ored hair and clothing.

Some years later in Quo Vadis (1951), an orgy appears in yet

another biblical epic. A Roman, again named Marcus (Robert Tay-

lor), who again lives in the time of Nero, falls in love with a Christian

girl, Lygia (Deborah Kerr). She stands apart from the Romans who

participate in their orgy, with people kissing and performing another

standard trope, eating grapes. When Lygia enters, the scene is over-

whelming, as the viewer first witnesses the orgy through her eyes.

She sees dancers with flowing yellow and black dresses swirling in

the middle of the room, with the colors flying in the air making the

scene move faster. The scene shifts from her point of view to that of

the audience. Once she begins to speak to others, the camera focuses

on this young innocent woman and helps to distinguish her character

from the others, as it shows the Romans directly behind her partici-

pating in their feasting. The changing perspective of the camera gives

the viewer a chance to participate in the orgy from two points of view,

allowing for different points of identification.

Although both The Sign of the Cross and Quo Vadis have serious

implications in their presentation of orgies for their time of produc-

tion,14 these are not the most interesting examples of cinematic orgies.

By itself, the distinction between Romans and Christians already

makes clear with whom the audience should identify; the orgy scenes

then merely reinforce this identification. In later, nonbiblical settings,

the divisions between Romans become blurrier and the orgies must

serve a stronger purpose of identification.

More than two decades later, the iconic BBC series I, Claudius (1976) depicts more explicit orgies. The most significant orgy is in

Episode 10 (“Hail Who?”). Caligula turns the imperial palace into

a brothel complete with orgies and gambling. The audience is privy

to people having sex on the floor, including with some women being

forced into the act. People are drunk, laughing, and hang onto each

other. There are two connected rooms involved in this scene: one in

which the orgy itself takes place and another right outside the fes-

tivities. In the external room, unwilling Romans wait to enter the

orgy room. One man even begs for his wife not to be taken into this

“brothel.” A woman is forcefully taken by the arm into the orgy room

and thrown at the orgiasts, who pounce on her. The spatial division

in the scene represents the pull of identification that might be felt by

a viewer. Although there is the possibility of visual pleasure within the


Stacie Raucci148

orgy, the viewer might feel sympathy for the innocent women being

led to their own rapes. The innocents wait outside in the calm area,

while the chaotic scene rages on inside with the deviant Romans. The

calm in the external room is further emphasized by other Romans

lining up to pay an entrance fee. The order of the queue and the sub-

sequent mayhem of these paying customers after they have entered

the internal room mark a visual change in the identification of these

Romans from calm to disorderly, moral to immoral.

Just three years after the airing of I, Claudius comes the most

graphic of all the depictions, even more so than the most recent ones

on cable television: Caligula (1979), starring Malcolm McDowell

and Helen Mirren. The edition originally released in US theaters was

a toned- down R- rated edition. This chapter addresses the less severely

cut “Imperial Edition” released in 2007.15 This film about decadence

and corruption, written by Gore Vidal, was sponsored by Penthouse magazine, setting the tone of the sexual scenarios of this film. It even

included many of the women known as Penthouse Pets. While Vidal

did try to separate his name from the film due to differences in artistic

vision, his overarching idea of corruption remains.

The most significant orgy scene depicts the same type of scene previ-

ously discussed in I, Claudius in which Caligula (Malcolm McDowell)

gathers elite women, including the wives of the senators, for what he

calls an “imperial bordello.” A golden penis waves in the background

and the audience is treated to images of people having sex, perform-

ing fellatio, and dancing wildly. Although the orgy scene was perhaps

highly choreographed, the tangling of limbs and the image of people

at all angles, combined with rapidly changing camera angles, give the

feeling that this orgy scene is chaotic. All positions and combinations

of people are possible at this orgy.

The immoral and the moral are again divided spatially, but this time

within the same room. The camera pans back and forth between the

orgiasts and the elite women who are being sold. These moral women

stand off to one side and watch the events with disgust and fear on

their faces, as Caligula announces they are for sale. Caligula himself

roams throughout the orgy, clearly in charge of the event and dem-

onstrating his lack of morality. As the camera follows him through the

orgy, the viewer is allowed a voyeuristic look into the scene.

In keeping with the public’s identification of sex with the Romans,

the image of Caligula’s orgies was recreated more than twenty years

later at the Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2005 and again at the

Whitney Museum in New York in 2006 by Francesco Vezzoli. A trailer

for a hypothetical remake of Caligula was shown, with costumes



designed by Donatella Versace draped on the bodies of actors Milla

Jovovich, Benicio del Toro, Courtney Love, and Helen Mirren. The

five- minute film, Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula, is now

an acquisition at the Guggenheim Museum. Vidal reclaims his credit

to the film, “explaining his original vision for the film as an allegory

of the universal tendency for unbridled power to lead to madness and

violence.”16 The orgy image from the trailer was reenacted in a photo

in Italian Rolling Stone.17

The presence of the orgy on the small screen continued with the

six- episode miniseries Empire (2005). The screening of an orgy, and

an explicit one at that, is particularly surprising in this show, since

it aired in the United States on prime time and on a major network

channel, ABC. The orgy scene opens as somewhat chaotic with a shot

from above and a spinning movement, drawing the viewing perspec-

tive to numerous people on the floor kissing and groping, and women

in red dresses dancing in their midst with convulsive movements.

Although there is the music of drums present, the sound rising above

the music is of people moaning in sexual pleasure. The camera fades

in and out to black as it moves from one couple to the next, focusing

on specific movements such as a hand reaching up a dress and a per-

son kissing another’s neck as eyes close in ecstasy, creating a sensuous

ambiance to the scene.

The camera then returns to the full scene, showing a couple hav-

ing sex, and directly behind them is the character about whom the

audience should care: Octavius (Santiago Cabrera). Most important,

although present at the orgy, he is somewhat removed from the activ-

ity of the gathering, merely talking to two women. The audience does

not see him engage in any sexual way until he is outside of the orgy

and in a closed room with these two women. His tame, almost loving,

sex acts are shown interspersed with shots of the increasingly wild orgy

in the other room. There are numerous shots of the dancers turning

and tossing their heads and hair in a circular motion. The camera

spins rapidly, allowing the audience to participate in the rising energy

and out- of- control feeling of the room. Octavius falls asleep only to

awaken to his female companions dead and then to find all those at

the orgy dead. The voice- over of a Vestal Virgin (Emily Blunt) tells

the audience that forty Romans were assassinated at this gathering.

Octavius’s separation from the chaos of the orgy stresses what the

series wants to project to the audience: Octavius is the character about

whom they should care.

Following just two months after the airing of ABC’s Empire (in

June 2005), HBO- BBC premiered a cable television series, Rome


Stacie Raucci150

(in August 2005). Although there is a great deal of sex in the series,

there are only two actual orgy scenes during two seasons of broad-

cast, both of which appear in Season Two.18 In the first orgy scene

(Episode 17, “Heroes of the Republic”), Octavia (Kerry Condon),

sister of Octavian (Simon Woods), is discovered at an orgy by Octa-

vian’s right- hand man, Agrippa (Allen Leech). Upon finding her there

under the influence of drugs, Agrippa picks her up and carries her off,

thrown over his shoulder like a sack of flour. The scene, although able

to be marked visually as an orgy, can also be easily identified by the

repetition of the word “orgy” itself in the mouths of the characters,

demonstrating a marked desire by the writers to have the audience

recognize it as such. The word is repeated five times in the space of

one and a half minutes of screen time, all of which occur after the

event itself is over. The delay of using the word has the possibility to

remind the audience of the images seen.

The orgy shows a certain level of disorganization. Some women

dance, bare- chested, as others play the flute and orgy participants

mingle with them. Octavia and Agrippa do not participate fully in the

revelries. Agrippa stands far apart from the actual activity and chooses

to leave quickly, whereas Octavia seems to be a more liminal figure.

She is clearly under the influence of drugs, and while she does not

touch anyone, as the camera pans to her, people can be seen engaged

in sexual activity very near to her. Her position and use of drugs stress

her liminal status at this event. The placement of the main characters

in these scenes categorizes them for the audience, with Agrippa in

the solid position of the pious Roman and the liminal Octavia being

rescued by him from the decadent side.19

This scene is particularly important in the narrative of the show,

since it opens the door for later sex scenes involving Octavia and

Agrippa during which it is clear that they are in love. With his help,

she overcomes the temptations of the corrupt Roman society (rep-

resented by the orgy) to move into the more acceptable coupled- off

relationship.

The second orgy appears in the last episode of the series (Episode 22,

“De Patre Vostro”). Cleopatra (Lyndsey Marshal) and Marc Antony

(James Purefoy) have already been defeated at Actium and are back

in Alexandria; the orgy follows on scenes in which Livia (Alice Hen-

ley), wife of Octavian, has called Marc Antony a “cowardly villain.”

The orgy is among the most chaotic of recent onscreen sexual depic-

tions, appearing the least choreographed. There are many Egyptians

on the floor with limbs tangled, their bodies draped over each other

as they have sex. There are hazy close- ups of various body parts as



the camera moves over the crowd and eventually shows the orgy from

above, giving the audience an overview of the number of people and

their various sexual positions. Of particular note is the way in which

the camera swirls, making the viewers feel as if they are part of the orgy

itself, in a drug- induced haze. A Roman soldier in full battle dress, sent

by Octavian, stands directly in front of the orgy and addresses Ant-

ony and Cleopatra. Each time the camera pans to the Roman soldier,

there is a view of the orgy continuing directly behind him, thereby

creating a striking visual contrast between the civilized Roman and the

debauched Egyptians. Only one other person remains in Roman dress

in the room, Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd), who is off to the side

of the orgy. His distance from the orgy is fitting, since he has been a

constant symbol in the series of the loyal Roman soldier.

Antony, sitting apart from the orgy itself, acts as a liminal figure

between the moral and the immoral sides. He has transgressed the

norms of Roman society and gone over to the Egyptian side. He

appears somewhat drugged and is in Egyptian dress and makeup. Yet

he is not fully Egyptian, and he does not directly take part in the chaos

of the orgy, but sits above it. He himself notes the questionable cast of

characters that surround him and participate in the activity: “Whores,

hermaphrodites, and lickspittles, this is our army now.” Still, he is

more involved in the orgy than Agrippa had been in the previous orgy

scene: if he is somewhat disconnected from the orgiastic action, it is

because he is presiding over it.

Antony at last stands up in the midst of the orgy, calls to the Roman

soldier sent by Octavian, and requests one- on- one combat with Octa-

vian, since he thinks it an honorable way to end the battle. In the next

Figure 10.1 Agrippa (Allen Leech) lectures Maecenas (Alex Wyndham) on the

impropriety of attending an orgy in Rome (2007). HBO- BBC.


Stacie Raucci152

scenes, he will leave the orgy, dress once again as a Roman soldier, and

kill himself, thus leaving his liminal state and returning to his status as

a good Roman man.

The most recent orgies appear in the cable television series Sparta-cus: Blood and Sand (2010) aired in the United States on the Starz

network. Although the series is known for its sexual content (to the

point where there were attempts to ban the series from UK televi-

sion), this chapter restricts itself to two clear examples of orgiastic

activity. The first orgy (Episode 6, “Delicate Things”) appears during

the first season of the show. The gladiators are having a celebration,

which turns out to be a wine- soaked orgy. There are many nude bod-

ies, people grope each other, and there is explicit sex. The bodies

appear almost as one mass, thrusting and writhing, with larger groups

than in most scenes. At one point, the series protagonist, Spartacus

(Andy Whitfield), walks through the middle of the orgy, but barely

blinks at it and leaves, signaling clearly that he is the good one in the

series, the one who resists temptation, unlike the corrupt characters

who succumb. In fact, he requested and offered to pay for the orgy in

order to provide distraction for plans to escape with his wife. Similarly,

the dedicated trainer of the gladiators, Oenomaus (Peter Mensah) is

not even present at the gathering. Spartacus and his friend Varro (Jai

Courtney) note that he is a “man of higher principle, not so easily

distracted.” In a later scene, the audience learns that Oenomaus still

mourns for his deceased wife.

There is one other orgy in the second installment of Spartacus, a

prequel entitled Gods of the Arena (2011), which takes place in Epi-

sode 4, “Beneath the Mask.” Instead of gladiators, the orgy scene

includes the elite members of society and takes place in the house

of Batiatus. Like the first season orgy, this one too is disorderly with

the writhing and thrusting of bodies. In an interview, the actor who

plays Batiatus, John Hannah, noted the reasoning for the aesthetics

of the scene: “There is one scene where we have an orgy. It’s shown

as a kind of cool, drug- induced montage, so we needed lots of dif-

ferent sexual positions. You can show people having sex, but it’s not

that easy to find that many different ways.”20 The orgy scene ends

with the participants sleeping naked on the floor, with bodies draped

over each other, as the camera films them from above. This chaotic

orgy ends badly for the household, with Gaia (the friend of Batiatus’s

wife, played by Jaime Murray) murdered and word of the doings of

the household under threat of seeping out. Prior to her murder, Gaia

had presided over the orgy with Lucretia (Lucy Lawless), an event

at which the slaves of the household were forced to perform sex acts



with the elite men. This orgy is also relatively calmer than the one in

the first season, giving the impression to the audience that orgies of

lower class people (gladiators and slaves) should be watched with a

different eye than those of the elite.

Orgies and Audience Identification

A survey of orgies thereby raises larger questions about the effect of

viewing them. What can the type scene of the orgy and its cinematic

aesthetics tell us about audience identification and pleasure? Gideon

Nisbet has noted that one of the reasons the Romans fare so well in

popular culture is the connection to decadence. According to Nisbet,

the Greeks are often seen as dull philosophers, so they do not get the

same onscreen treatment as the Romans.21 In this commercial age

of ubiquitous reality television shows, Nisbet’s reasoning certainly

makes sense: everything seems to indicate that modern spectators

would rather identify with partying Romans than with philosophical

Greeks. Alastair Blanshard, in his description of orgies, explains fur-

ther that the modern fascination with the orgy lies in the fact that it

“transgresses notions of monogamy, the distinction between private

and public space, and the idea that sex should be aiming towards

reproduction rather than pleasure. It promises multiple thrills. Voy-

eurism mixes with the opportunity to have every appetite satisfied.

There is always more at an orgy. More bodies, more orifices, more

positions.”22 The viewing audience perhaps wants to see itself as

liberal as the Romans, or at least as liberal as we moderns imagine

them to be.

But this conclusion raises another question: if orgies are so appeal-

ing to the modern audience, why do they not exist in every film?

Orgies are either relegated to the realm of pornography or, when it

comes to mainstream movies and television shows, appear typically in

the context of films about or related to antiquity. The appropriate way

for a modern audience to enjoy orgies seems to be in the company of

the ancients. Beyond the examples mentioned previously, one might

think of the recent big hit on HBO, the vampire show True Blood

(which premiered in 2008) based on the books by Charlene Harris.

There are multiple episodes that revolve around an orgy (Episodes 6

and 7 in Season Two, 2009). Even in the contemporary supernatural

context of this series, a connection to the ancient world is made: a

Bacchanalia is encouraged (magically) and led by a Maenad, Maryann

Forrester (Michelle Forbes), an acolyte of the god Dionysus. College

party films have also taken on the air of the Romans, with the tradition


Stacie Raucci154

of movies like Animal House (1978) in which the fraternity brothers

sport togas for their wild parties.

As other scholars have argued, the temporal distance of the Romans

allows, to some extent, the audience to enjoy onscreen decadence with

less taboo. The audience wants to project itself onto the Roman experi-

ence and allows itself to do so without guilt because the Romans live at

a safe enough distance from us. As Joshel, Malamud, and Wyke note,

“Moralism is elided in an invitation to join a city of limitless power

and fabulous parties.”23 This chapter has argued that the play between

distance and identification is not effectuated only by creating a tempo-

ral distance. Moviemakers have also made it present in the orgy itself,

either by making orgies somewhat orderly and therefore more moral, or

by juxtaposing both moral and immoral characters and letting specta-

tors identify with whomever they want. Far from being the place where

morality disappears, the orgy is where morality reveals itself.

Notes

1. Simon (2000).

2. Sarris (2000).

3. Ward (2004).

4. Hunt (2000). For the major scholarly work on this film see Winkler

(2004).

5. Winkler (2009a) 152 notes the lack of orgies in Fall of the Roman

Empire, noting that Mann wanted to signal that his film was “some-

thing different from standard cinematic fare about Romans.”

6. Joshel, Malamud, and Wyke (2001) 8: “Some sort of orgy . . . became

almost de rigueur in Hollywood epics.”

7. See Cyrino (2005) 4 on the use of stock scenes in comedy.

8. More often, if an orgy scene has been analyzed, it is only with reference

to a specific film (most often Caligula) or to one specific time period.

9. See Singy (2006) on the possibility of different types of orgies with vary-

ing levels of order, from which this essay takes its inspiration. Singy’s

focus however is not the ancient world, but the Marquis de Sade.

10. Joshel, Malamud, and Wyke (2001) 9. On the identification of the

viewer with the Romans, see also Cyrino (2005) 20, 238; Fitzgerald

(2001); Wyke (1997).

11. On this film, see Nisbet (2009).

12. On this question, see Blanshard (2010) 48– 54. Blanshard further

examines the reception of the orgy in noncinematic contexts.

13. On the lack of sex, see Williams (2008) 4. Scenes do not need to reveal

lots of skin to constitute a cinematic orgy.

14. See for instance Malamud (2008) on The Sign of the Cross and the

Great Depression. See also Malamud (2009) 186– 207.



15. According to the notes included in the DVD, there still remain scenes

unseen on the US side of the Atlantic and only included in the Italian

version Io, Caligola.

16. Mann (2005).

17. Rolling Stone, Italy, June 2005.

18. For the major scholarly work on this series, see Cyrino, ed. (2008).

19. After the orgy, Atia (Polly Walker) scolds Octavia: “While he [Octa-

vian] is at the forum preaching piety and virtue to the plebs, you’re

sucking slave cock at an orgy.” Octavia replies, “It hadn’t gotten to

that part,” showing her intent to participate in the sexual activities pos-

sible at the event.

20. James (2011). Indeed, the sex in this orgy is more graphic than most

before, but this can certainly be attributed to the time and venue of

production, with some critics going so far as to call it “softcore porn,”

or as Bianco (2010) called it, “Debbie Does Rome.”

21. Nisbet (2006) 1– 44.

22. Blanshard (2010) 49.

23. Joshel, Malamud, and Wyke (2001) 11.


4

C h a p t e r 1 1

Partnership and Love in S PA R TA C U S : B LO O D A N D S A N D (2010)

Antony Augoustakis

In the first season of Spartacus: Blood and Sand (2010), the viewer is

presented with a new version of Spartacus, the hero of the slave rebel-

lion in 73 B.C., an updated revision of the 1960 Stanley Kubrick epic,

and one that follows in the footsteps of major twenty- first century

productions, both big and small screen, such as the Gladiator (2000)

and HBO- BBC’s Rome (2005– 7).1 During the 13 episodes of the first

season, we witness Spartacus’s transformation from a Thracian nomad

to a leader in a revolution against his master and lanista, Quintus Len-

tulus Batiatus. The evolution of Spartacus’s heroism, however, is dra-

matic and undergoes all the phases expected in the making of a hero

in a sword- and- sandal historical series: excessive hope for a reunion

with his wife, Sura; followed by shock, grief, anger, thirst for revenge;

and finally the much longed- for and expected action of breaking out

from the ludus. In a way, in this preparatory season, we are invited to

watch the creation of Spartacus and look deeply into the process of

hero- making, as it is fitting for an ordeal that lasted three long years

(73– 71 B.C.) and passed through many stages that are not often dis-

cernible within the boundaries of a three- hour big screen movie.2 In

fact, the advantage of this Spartacus series is that we are able to watch

the enslaved Thracian become a hero during the show, since in the

very beginning he is by no means a skilled gladiator.

The show underscores well the conditions that prepare the ground

for Spartacus’s unquestionable heroism, which eventually leads to his


Antony Augoustakis158

daring act in the climax of the first season. Spartacus learns the art of

fighting, as he connects with his surroundings, and as he rediscov-

ers partnership after the loss of his wife, first in the figure of Varro

and then in the presence of his fellow slave, Mira, who becomes first

his confidante and then his partner and lover. What fuels Spartacus’s

hatred against the Romans, and Batiatus in particular, is deep love

for his wife first and foremost, and ultimately the abstract idea of

freedom, which becomes more concrete as the show progresses. The

loss of his spouse because of Batiatus’s machinations makes Spartacus

organize the escape in the final episode, which is the outcome of a

series of revelations that demand revenge, unquestionable and unam-

biguous, as the climax of the first season. Love and partnership then

become prominent themes in this show: love toward one’s partner

(heterosexual or homosexual) or toward one’s fellow gladiators (as

in the friendship between Spartacus and Varro) sets in motion the

revolt, as we observe each member of the school join the team and

cause of Spartacus (Crixus, Doctore/Oenomaus, Aurelia, and Mira).

As we shall see in the following analysis, it is this brotherly love that

bonds the slaves through a nexus of relationships and friendships that

mirrors and counters those of the Roman elite (for example, Lucretia

and Ilithyia, Batiatus and Glaber). What binds the slaves together is

the thirst for freedom and justice, not the boundless ambition for self-

promotion and social mobility.

Through this nexus of partnerships, often forced and failing, cer-

tainly eventually doomed to lead to misfortune, the well- known story

of Spartacus is reworked and refashioned in a refreshing way, one

that twenty- first century audiences will find appealing both culturally

and sociopolitically.3 If, as Monica Cyrino has perceptively suggested,

in 1960 Spartacus pushed the envelope in confronting many issues

important to liberal America, from the heightened intensity of the

discourse of civil rights to its provocative treatment of sexuality (with

the (in)famous “oysters and snails” exchange),4 this new Spartacus interrogates familiar issues in contemporary America and the world:

love and partnership emerge as prominent themes that contest our

own prejudices and taboos, especially with regard to the extensive

depiction of homosexual relations.

Conjugal Love: Spartacus and

Sura, Varro and Aurelia

Love and romance are important elements that push the story forward

in the first season of Spartacus. Lesley- Ann Brandt, who plays Naevia,


Partnership and Love in Spartacus: Blood and Sand (2010) 159

observes in the Special Features of the DVD that finding love emerges

as an important factor in the heroes’ lives, especially in the case of

Crixus, who becomes her lover. Sex scenes are really love scenes that

“a woman can appreciate”: by watching them, women can appreciate

the moment, the intensity of eros, and the love between two partners.

This becomes clear from the beginning episode of the show: con-

jugal love fuels Spartacus’s actions and passion. In the first episode

(entitled “The Red Serpent”), we are exposed to the intensity of the

sexual connection between Spartacus and his wife, a sexual attraction

that is fostered by a deep emotional bond and love for one another.

Soon afterwards, however, the separation from Sura turns the hero’s

life into a nightmare. Dreams function organically as a cohesive glue

throughout the series, and when it comes to Spartacus’s love for Sura,

it is not coincidental that dreams turn love into blood, as in Episode 2

(“Sacramentum Gladiatorium”): in this epic dream, Sura appears to

Spartacus, they engage in intercourse, and soon her head explodes

spurting blood everywhere. This scene functions as preparation for

the entrance of Glaber, who tells Spartacus that he had actually raped

Sura and shared her with his men before selling her to an unpleasant

Syrian. He then tosses at Spartacus’s feet a love token that Spartacus

once upon a time had given to Sura. Later in Episode 4 (“Thing in

the Pit”), Sura’s ghost reappears to urge Spartacus on, to keep him

focused. Love that once fueled Spartacus’s desire for the salvation of

his fellow people has now turned the man into an effigy of his former

self: he is now clearly hallucinating, talking to his friend Varro, while

at the same time he can hear Sura whisper into his ear and ask him

about the time of freedom. Sura insists that it is the thought of their

eventual reunion that keeps her alive, but Spartacus is already too lost

in his own hallucinations and deep thoughts to carry on a sensible

conversation with Varro. Spartacus’s condition is serious; a morale

that borders insanity and madness, a schizophrenia of sorts. Love sets

him free, wakes him up, and most importantly underscores the corre-

lation of Spartacus’s relationship with Sura and with Varro. As another

Medea, Varro brings the mandrake, the numbing pharmakon that will

save the day, but Spartacus declines to take the drug.

Episode 6 (“Delicate Things”) becomes an important turning point

in the series, especially from the point of view of love and partnership

at the lower social strata of Batiatus’s ludus. Batiatus reveals to Sparta-

cus the stunning news that Sura has been found, recently sold to a

merchant, and asserts that his promise is kept— namely, that she is on

her way to the gladiatorial school. Spartacus is astonished, making the

ironically tragic observation about what an honorable man Batiatus is.



He shares with Varro that once he is reunited with Sura, he plans for

both of them to escape from the ludus, and he spells out an elaborate

scheme to overcome the guards and to take advantage of the distraction

caused by the celebration of Spartacus’s victory. Varro tries to dissuade

him, but to no avail. This scene epitomizes Spartacus’s narrow focus on

freedom defined by his reunion with Sura. “We will have our freedom,”

he exclaims. Liberty and love are confounded, and it is through the

separation of the two that Spartacus’s heroism will emerge. Loss of love

will become inspiration for revenge, through which Spartacus will con-

ceive another love, love for justice and freedom for all his fellow slaves/

gladiators. Spartacus here stresses the significance he puts on a future

reunion with Sura: she will call his real name, “not the one the Romans

branded me with,” thus defining the gradual process whereby the pro-

tagonist slowly comes to terms with his new identity, his new name, and

his new mission. Varro declines to help his friend, as he thinks Spartacus

is crazy and out of touch with the harsh reality of severe capital punish-

ment, should he be caught trying to break out from the ludus.Of course at the end, we realize probably for the first time the enor-

mity of Batiatus’s scheming and calculating personality: the carriage was

attacked, and the hero’s wife was butchered and fatally wounded. The

reunion takes place for a last time before she dies in his arms. Batiatus’s

sardonic “they are reunited, my word is kept” will be a memorable line

that no one forgets until the lanista receives the payment he deserves

in the last episode of the show. There is, however, another level to this

sad conclusion of Spartacus’s love for Sura: it is at the exact moment

when his love for his spouse is transformed into a homosocial bond

with Varro, in the place they call “the shit hole.” Varro is a Roman

who sold himself into slavery in order to pay his debts and support his

family, including his wife, Aurelia. Spartacus and Varro share the same

predicament, even though they are ethnically different: Spartacus is a

Thracian, Varro is a Roman. And here let us not forget that the Latin

classical authors repeatedly point out the obvious difference between

Romans and non- Romans, namely that real virtue and morality is to be

found in the periphery, not the center of the empire.5 In other words,

real friendship and love materialize among people of ethnically differ-

ent backgrounds and certainly nonelite parties.

Domesticated Love: From the

Homosocial to the Homosexual

To this pair of friends who discover a special bond that unites them, let

us now look at another pair from the periphery: Barca, the handsome



“Beast of Carthage” and one of the most successful gladiators, and

his dark- skinned boyfriend, Pietros. In Episode 6, it is not Spartacus

alone who contemplates freedom; Barca also shares with Pietros his

hopes about the possibility of buying their freedom, in a scene heavily

loaded with metaphors, especially the doves that will be set free even-

tually, and a context reminiscent of a Catullus poem, as the episode

title “Delicate Things” alludes to the Latin word deliciae, the object

of one’s desire. From what we can glean from the prequel series to the

first season, Spartacus: Gods of the Arena (2011), Barca has changed:

his former partner, Auctus, was a competent gladiator, diametrically

opposed to the young and innocent Pietros. Whereas in the prequel

series, Auctus and Barca seem to share a purely physical attraction,

Barca in these later years is portrayed as the domesticated husband of

Pietros, someone who works for the interests of both slaves and above

all for their interests as a couple. While the homosocial bond between

Spartacus and Varro is strongly reminiscent of the relationship between

the epic warriors Achilles and Patroclus, the union of Barca and Pietros

exemplifies such a bond with the addition of an intense sexual relation-

ship, perhaps suggestive of the Achilles/Patroclus erotic connection

that many scholars are willing to see in the Iliad.

The portrayal of gay sex is certainly pushing the envelope in this

show, especially between two mates that share and willingly submit to

it, unlike other depictions elsewhere where the passive partner sub-

mits to the active penetrator unwillingly, mostly to achieve or obtain

status or manipulate one another. The viewer may find it intriguing

Figure 11.1 Pietros (Eka Darville) and Barca (Antonio Te Maioha) enjoy an

intimate moment in Spartacus: Blood and Sand (2010). Starz.



that this relationship cannot last for long, however, and is bound to

mirror the doomed one between Sura and Spartacus. Batiatus soon

claims that Barca has broken trust, falsely accused by Ashur, and he is

put to death, while in Episode 7, Pietros hangs himself after believ-

ing that Barca abandoned him and betrayed their love and trust. The

boy has now become the object of ridicule, bullying, and abuse. Just

like Spartacus’s dreams are shattered forever with the loss of Sura,

the tragic end of this couple exposes the harsh realities of slave life in

the ludus and adds a gruesomely foreboding tone to what ensues, as the

plot unravels. Here viewers are invited to draw parallelisms with

contemporary twenty- first century issues, such as bullying (and in

particular how minorities are exposed to such abuse) and the issue

of domestic rights for couples of the same gender. By making such

concerns diachronic, from ancient Capua and Rome to contemporary

America and the world, the series underlines the significant nature of

these issues and the need for immediate solutions to some of them.6

Roman Matronae and Sl ave Gl adiators

The nexus of relationships and friendships, especially developing

among the men of the ludus, is enriched and sharply contrasted to a

fascinating pair of women emerging as key players in the first season:

Lucretia and Ilithyia, respectively the wives of Batiatus and Glaber.

These two women, always antagonizing and manipulating each other,

lock horns over the two foremost gladiators: Crixus and Spartacus.

When Licinia, the prominent cousin of Crassus, expresses an inter-

est in experiencing the pleasures of the ludus and a night of sex with

Spartacus, Lucretia arranges Spartacus to sleep with Ilithyia instead.

When Licinia and Lucretia discover Iliythia having intercourse with

Spartacus, Licinia herself wonders at the impact such a tale— namely

of the wife of Glaber sleeping with his most hated enemy— would

have on her reputation as a distinguished Roman matrona. Enraged

at Licinia’s uncontrollable giggling, Ilithyia smashes her tormentor’s

head on the marble floor and kills her. The revenge of Ilithyia against

Spartacus is not delayed much; in Episode 10 (“Party Favors”), she

puts the young Numerius up to asking for the death of Varro. In a

remarkable scene on the balcony that faces down to the open court-

yard where the gladiators practice, Ilithyia seals the pact with a cun-

ning, yet credulous and easily manipulated Lucretia.7 The two women

agree on helping each other out: Ilithyia will receive what she wants,

namely to inflict enormous pain on Spartacus, while Lucretia will get

in return approval for the games that she and her husband have been



craving so much. The lens zooms in on Spartacus and Varro practic-

ing in a playful mode in the training arena, while a vengeful Ilithyia

expresses her views on friendship from the balcony, her lips almost

pursed: “The value of a friend cannot be expressed by the clever

grouping of letters; it is blood and flesh granting life to the world.”

Soon afterwards, Spartacus’s relationship with Varro comes to an

end, after the heroic dilemma faced by the gladiator and his compan-

ion. Even though Spartacus and Varro engage in combat before the

spectators at Batiatus’s house for the entertainment of the bystand-

ers, the show ends tragically when Numerius asks Spartacus to kill

Varro, who has conceded defeat: death would be a very unlikely out-

come, since in such cases, the defeated in usually granted pardon.

Thus Spartacus loses a friend, because of the machinations of Ilithyia

and Lucretia’s thirst for power and money. It is only through pain

and suffering after all that Spartacus is led to the big decision of plot-

ting the rebellion. Not unlike Sura’s ghost, now Varro’s ghost makes

frequent appearances in Episode 11 (“Old Wounds”). The revelations

are shocking for Spartacus and come as an avalanche on him: Batiatus

was behind everything after all. Now revenge is in his eyes; this is all

the Thracian wants. The demise first of his wife and then of his best

friend is accompanied by the emergence of Mira who comes to attend

his wounds; Mira and Spartacus are indeed two damaged souls that

become one.

Spartacus and Crixus:

The Journey toward an Alliance

Still there is a further commitment that Spartacus needs to make

on his way to becoming the hero and leader of the revolt, and this

involves a compromise with Crixus, the champion Gaul. The Thra-

cian and the Gaul go through a tumultuous relationship throughout

the series. In the beginning, Spartacus is not as good as Crixus. What

drives Spartacus is love, whereas Crixus experiences permutations of

love and desire through his liaison with Lucretia, an affair of con-

venience and not one of choice. But then Naevia comes to the fore

as a slave that attracts Crixus like no other. In Episode 5 (“Shadow

Games”), Crixus and Spartacus have to collaborate, and by confront-

ing Theocles in the arena, their partnership is fleshed out as a result of

love: Spartacus’s love for his wife, and Crixus’s love for Naevia.

In the final episode of the first season (Episode 13, “Kill Them

All”), we see the further development of the relationship between the

two leading men, as Spartacus promises Crixus a reunion with Naevia:



they make a pact to find Naevia and kill Batiatus, if one of them dies.

Spartacus has by now grown closer to Mira; he is ready to turn the

page and start anew, as a free man. Crixus may not be completely on

board with the idea, but the two men have come to share more than

has ever divided them. Spartacus makes a clear and unambiguous offer

to Crixus: freedom can only be found outside the ludus, and it can no

longer exist separate from the women they love. Crixus then accepts

that he had never had stronger reasons to want to leave, now that

Naevia is in his heart. The two men can connect: Spartacus makes a

confession that he had once experienced the same feelings of deep,

unending love for Sura. This is the moment when Crixus realizes

Spartacus’s pain; Batiatus will never give him Naevia, but rather he

will kill them, just as he plotted Sura’s death. The bonding between

the two men takes place during a crucial turning point in the show, at

the decision to rebel, when the Thracian decides to become Sparta-

cus. The two gladiators have changed, and this has happened because

of love, which may eventually lead to friendship and the homosocial

bonding we have seen earlier. In an emotional outburst, Crixus admits

that he and Spartacus could have been “brothers” in another life. So

Spartacus and Crixus make a pact, joining their right hands and prom-

ising assistance to one another in the next day’s fight, the combat that

will lead to the revolution, the slaughter that ensues, and the breaking

out from the ludus.Thus Spartacus: Blood and Sand offers a remarkable array of trans-

formations. Batiatus is metamorphosed from an honorable man on

the surface to a social- climber, thirsty for glory and money; while

conversely, Spartacus is elevated from an ignorant, reclusive Thracian

warrior who at first does not know how to collaborate with his fellow

slaves. As Joanna Paul astutely observes on the 1960 Spartacus, “When

Spartacus is properly understood, in the context of the conflicts that

surrounded production, we can see the extent of its questioning and

challenging of what it means to be a hero, even if that is sometimes

only implicit. Such questioning is valuable because . . . understandings

and interpretations of heroism are continually changing, becoming

conflicted and muddied, but no less potent in the modern world.

Heroism cannot be taken at face value, and films such as Spartacus have a role to play in helping society work out what it wants or needs

from its heroes.”8

By the end of the first season of Spartacus: Blood and Sand, the

Thracian has become the Spartacus whom the viewer expects to

see, but it is only through love and partnership that this transfor-

mation becomes viable. Such relationships mark Spartacus for life:



even though Batiatus has always felt a special connection with Sparta-

cus, such a partnership is only one of convenience and can never be

developed further: it is one of opportunism and exploitation. And

yet Spartacus is the only one in the equation who comes to embrace

his new identity, who can shout “I am Spartacus” and move forward

toward a new life, through much wavering and doubt, but ultimately

with only one thing in sight: freedom.

Notes

1. My sincerest thanks to Monica Cyrino for her inspiring and indefati-

gable labors as conference organizer and volume editor.

2. A most up- to- date account of the revolution is offered by Strauss

(2009); the ancient sources have been collected and are readily avail-

able at Winkler (2007) 233– 47.

3. On the 1960 epic Spartacus, see the various essays in Winkler (2007),

and in particular Winkler’s essay on American ideals in the film.

4. Cyrino (2005) 89– 120.

5. As described, for instance, in the histories of Tacitus; for example, Cal-

gacus in the Agricola or the virtuous German wives in the Germania.

6. On Roman attitudes towards homosexuality, see extensively the land-

mark study by Williams (2010).

7. As we can see in the prequel to the first season, Spartacus: Gods of the Arena, Lucretia has in the past experienced deep bonding with

another woman, Gaia, and suffered tremendously when Gaia is brutally

murdered.

8. Paul (2013) in Chapter 5, “Spartacus: Identifying a Cinematic Hero.”


4

C h a p t e r 1 2

Objects of Desire

Female Gazes and Male Bodies in

Spartacus: Blood and Sand (2010)

Anise K. Strong

Despite initial expectations, the Starz 2010– 11 original television

series Spartacus offers a remarkably female- positive portrayal of sexual

relations and an intriguing inversion of normative cinematic represen-

tations of erotic relationships. The series thus presents a sharp contrast

with the sexualized objectification of women present in many earlier

television series and films about the ancient world or other contem-

poraneous television costume dramas. Through its female characters’

sexual dominance and agency, Spartacus explores the nature of social

hierarchies and the corruption of slave- owning societies.

When Starz originally showed the teaser for its 2010 original series

Spartacus: Blood and Sand, many television critics initially dismissed

it as low- brow entertainment, full of gore and cheap pornography. At

best, it was deemed “deliciously, marvelously bad,”1 according to the

Washington Post, although reviewers who revisited it at the end of the

season had a much higher opinion, calling it, only four months later,

“dramatic, suspenseful and brilliantly constructed.”2 In any case, there

is no point in denying that Spartacus does indeed feature an immense

volume of blood and violence. Random gladiators die frequently, and

at least one major character every episode is killed or badly injured.

The violence pays homage to video games like Mortal Kombat or,

more recently, the exaggerated, gory style of Zack Snyder’s film 300

about the Greek and Persian battle at Thermopylae.


Anise K. Strong168

This chapter focuses on the claim that Spartacus is a vehicle for

softcore pornography and, by implication, is thus less deserving of

serious scholarly consideration or ethical approval. There is no need

to pretend that there is no sex or nudity in Spartacus: the bare breasts

number in the dozens, mostly on the bodies of mute extras who serve

as gladiatorial cheerleaders or random slave girls in the background.

The level of simulated intercourse is fairly explicit, although no sexual

penetration is directly shown.

However, Steven S. DeKnight, Spartacus’s creator and lead screen-

writer, argues that the show is not pornography at all— that it merely

depicts “a brutal, visceral time filled with violence and passion.”3 After

the second season, DeKnight commented, “I don’t want to have sex

just for sex’s sake or violence for violence’s sake . . . When the show first

came out, there were a lot of cries that it was softcore, or pornography,

which really made me think that the people who’ve been saying that

haven’t been on the Internet in the last ten years . . . But the difference

between a softcore movie and Spartacus is, softcore is all geared toward

seeing people have sex. This show actually isn’t. The sexual act is part of

a bigger story. Something vital to the story is going on here.”4

If the sex and violence themselves are not the primary focus of

Spartacus, they nevertheless form a substantial part of its content and

drive the plot. The particular choices DeKnight and the other creators

make in their representation of such material contribute significantly

to the modern discourse about gender and sexuality and especially to

the representation of the ancient world in mass media.

Spartacus’s actual portrayal of sexual relations differs strikingly

from conventional twentieth century “pornography.” Ironically, the

word “pornography” itself was first used in English to refer to the

sexually explicit Roman wall paintings found in Pompeii from the first

centuries B.C. and A.D., close to the time and locale of the histori-

cal Spartacus.5 In the late twentieth century, “pornography” was

frequently, if controversially, redefined as an explicit act of violence

against women, which not only encourages assault and rape of women

by men but is in itself a symbolic assault on women.6 Radical femi-

nist theory argues that it is impossible for female representation to

escape the sexist hierarchies of Western culture. As stated originally

by the 1986 Federal Meese Commission, “Pornography is the theory,

rape is the practice.”7 The twentieth- and twenty- first- century typical

audience for pornography is also generally assumed to be a solitary

heterosexual young male.8

On the other hand, Gayle Rubin and other queer theorists have

argued that pornography should not be universally rejected as a tool


Objects of Desire 169

of patriarchal oppression, and that it is simplistic to assume an audi-

ence of only heterosexual males. The female porn producer Candida

Royalle now makes popular mainstream hard- core porn videos for

“women and couples,” claiming that she likes “to focus on sensuality,

tenderness, and mutual respect— a holistic approach, instead of a col-

lection of body parts.”9 Susan Faludi argued in 2000 that the modern

pornographic film industry is largely controlled by the female stars and

emphasizes exclusively consensual, nonviolent sexual encounters.10

This reclamation of pornographic films for a female audience and from

a female perspective offers the possibility of sexually explicit depictions

that do not victimize women. At the same time, the dominant cultural

meme continues to categorize pornography as a male- created genre

designed for a solitary straight male audience.

Most mainstream media that depict sexualized scenes or nudity

continue to presume a straight male gaze and male audience. For

instance, HBO’s acclaimed Rome series, about the dying days of the

Roman Republic, contains a multitude of sex scenes in which men

are the dominant partners and women are either explicitly or implic-

itly raped (e.g. Episode 2, in which Antony casually rapes a random

farmwoman in full view of his army.) While women like the noble

Atia, who has sex with grooms and slaves, are sometimes the socially

dominant partners, the cinematography still tends to objectify the

female figures rather than the bodies of their male partners. Although

Monica Cyrino notes that the series represents Atia (Polly Walker) as

a forceful, independent, sexually voracious character,11 the multiple

sex scenes featuring her have more in common with Samantha Jones’s

brief, casual flings on HBO’s Sex and the City (1998– 2004) than with

the intimate romantic moments of the couples in Spartacus, as dis-

cussed later.

On the male side, we see Antony’s nude body in multiple episodes of

Rome. However, while he becomes the object of the viewer’s gaze, he

retains authority and control over his sex scenes.12 The other prominent

male nude, a slave gift- wrapped for Atia’s rival Servilia in Episode 6,

is indeed objectified and powerless.13 However, given the paucity of

his role as a mute extra, this character is inherently an object; the

audience confronts no reversal of expectations in the camera’s callous

focus on the slave’s genitals.

If we compare Spartacus to sexually explicit depictions in more

contemporaneous media, HBO’s current medieval fantasy series,

Game of Thrones (premiered in 2011), seems to be a particularly apt

parallel. Like Spartacus, it features frequent nudity and sex scenes, as

well as the nearly ubiquitous presence of naked female extras in the


Anise K. Strong170

background. In both cases, these nude bodies are apparently intended

to provide visual stimulation while the lead actors advance the intri-

cate plot or describe their complex personal histories, often referred

to as “sexposition.”14 This technique perhaps inadvertently echoes

the infamous Bob Guccione hard- core pornographic film Caligula

(1979), in which John Gielgud and Helen Mirren declaim portent-

ously in the foreground while Penthouse Pets romp with each other

in the background.

Game of Thrones, however, also features numerous examples of men

raping and abusing women, sexualized coaching of women by men on

how to appeal more to a straight male audience, and a distinct lack of

sexualized male bodies, with the exception of one romantic gay male

scene. The cinematography in these scenes is relatively conventional,

evoking the classic Mulveian “gaze,” in which the audience takes the

perspective of a male viewer objectifying women.15

A Different Kind of Pornography

Where, then, does Spartacus fall in the realm of “pornography,” or

indeed within the standard Mulveian cinematic analysis focusing on

the objectification of female characters through a male- centered gaze?

To begin with, despite the violence, unlike 300 or Rome, there is no

onscreen rape in the entire first season. The single onscreen rape of

a named character during the second season, discussed later in this

chapter, becomes one of the traumatic turning points of that season’s

arc. Indeed, in the pilot episode, Spartacus’s wife Sura effectively (if

implausibly) defends herself against multiple rapists. Nearly all the

major sex scenes are between either married couples or couples whose

deep romantic love has been well established. These interludes are

frequently initiated by women and show sexual pleasure on the part

of both women and men.

The actresses on Spartacus have differed in their assessment of the

audience’s likely reaction to the nudity and sex on the show. Viva

Bianca, who plays the elite Roman matron, Ilithyia, comments, “The

guys will go for . . . the eye candy, hands down.” Erin Cummings,

who played Spartacus’s Thracian wife, Sura, argues in contrast, “This

show will probably appeal more to women than to men; all these men

covered in dirt and sweat and wearing nothing but loincloths; it’s the

most insane display of male testosterone . . . very exciting.”16

Cummings also praises the sex scenes in terms very reminiscent

of Royalle: “There are some really beautiful love scenes that are not

gratuitous; they are scenes that a woman can watch and say, ‘that’s a



great scenario. I would like to be that woman; I would like to have

that experience— the man who looks at me and touches me and kisses

me in that way.’ ” In Cummings’s imagination, then, the scenes are

attractive to women, but they still cast women in traditional cine-

matic gender roles as the object of the masculine gaze and touch.

The female spectator is supposed to desire to be the object of Sparta-

cus’s eager gaze and sweaty embrace. Such discourse fits within the

contemporary psychological analysis of normative sexual fantasies, in

which women tend to view themselves as the objects of sexual desire,

whereas men view others as the objects of their sexual desire.17

But is this really the underlying subtext of Spartacus? Is it merely

“romantic” pornography offering a space for women to indulge in

sexual fantasies involving buff men, more properly categorized in

the subgenre of series like Sex and the City? While Spartacus indeed

emphasizes the value and sexual appeal of loving relationships, its true

innovation in the representation of female desire is its frequent depic-

tion of women as sexually dominant figures who control not just the

sexual encounters themselves but the gaze and perspective of the audi-

ence. Spartacus is not simply “pornography for women”; it is both

“romantic” and “conventional” pornography for women, in which

women usurp the normal male roles and thus subvert our expecta-

tions. While not “sex for sex’s sake,” as DeKnight suggests, it certainly

self- consciously adopts the style and tools of the traditional objectify-

ing male gaze even as it reverses subject and object.

Women’s Gazes and Sl avery

As a close study of several scenes from the series will demonstrate,

the major power dynamic between characters in Spartacus is funda-

mentally not one between man and woman but between master and

slave. Ancient Roman settings permit a discourse about slavery that is

simultaneously critical and fetishistic. To offer a counterexample, it is

nearly impossible to imagine a television series in which the Ole Miss

of an antebellum Southern plantation summoned the black field slaves

before her, paraded them nude, and then chose the most attractive

as a sexual partner. Such a scene would naturally be viewed as deeply

racist and offensive.

In contrast, Roman slavery does not stigmatize any particular ethnic

or religious group. Furthermore, even if inaccurately, Roman slavery

is frequently represented as potentially temporary, a mere stage of

indenture on the path to success as a freed citizen. It can be seen as an

artificial construct, rather than as a sober historical record of oppression


Anise K. Strong172

and cruelty. Of course, modern works still condemn Roman slavery;

indeed, such criticism forms the backbone of works like Spartacus. However, unlike American slavery, Roman slavery’s temporal distance

and ethnic ambiguity allow writers and directors to explore its social

impact without fear of directly offending modern audiences or descen-

dants of slaves. Indeed, most Europeans and Americans are descendants

of Roman slaves, however distantly, but this fact forms little part of their

cultural identity.

Due to these nuances, ancient Roman society allows modern film-

makers a morally acceptable context in which to explore a Bakhtinesque

inversion of conventional power relationships— one in which women

can dominate men, black men can whip white men, and crippled men

can sneer at the tall and strong. In particular, slaves can be refigured

as emasculated regardless of their gender, and their powerlessness, in

both modern film and in the Roman world itself, is often coded as

feminine.18 This inversion can be seen in most cinematic representa-

tions of the Roman world— Ben Hur (1959) and Gladiator (2000)

stand out as two obvious examples— but it is especially emphasized in

the various retellings of Spartacus, one of the great Western cultural

touch points for the story of rebellious slaves. The legend of Spartacus

is inevitably a story that focuses on the disparate power relationships

between master and slave.

At the same time, the nature of that discourse has changed dra-

matically in this most recent retelling, particularly with regard to the

role of female characters. The most obvious comparison here is with

Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 film Spartacus. In one scene, the Roman

noble matrons, Helena and Claudia, visit the gladiatorial school of

Batiatus (Peter Ustinov) and request a private show of handpicked

gladiators, and Claudia says, “I want only the most beautiful. I’ll take

the big black one . . . I feel so sorry for the poor things in all this

heat. Don’t put them in those suffocating tunics. Let them wear just

(pause) enough for modesty.”

On an immediate surface level, this scene depicts the Roman matrons

objectifying and dehumanizing the gladiators; Draba becomes “the

big black one”; Helena compares the slaves to chickens. The women’s

sexual attraction toward the gladiators is explicit in their desire for

“the most beautiful” and for the gladiators to lose their tunics. Ina

Rae Hark argues that the gladiators here are both turned into animals

and emasculated by their mandated striptease, an act conventionally

reserved for female characters.19 However, the cinematography in

Kubrick’s Spartacus carefully undercuts any sense of the direct power

of matron over gladiator. Thick iron bars physically segregate the



slaves from the elite Romans. Batiatus and the male trainer moderate

the entire interaction with the gladiators. Most importantly, Spartacus

defies any attempt to visually subordinate him by openly and aggres-

sively returning the women’s gaze; the scene is shot from Spartacus’s

side of the bars, giving us the view of the gladiators, not the matrons.

Not only Spartacus but the other gladiators as well directly confront

the women’s assessment of them. The only possible interpretation is

that the women are immoral and foolish in their callous dismissal of

these men as mere beasts for their visual entertainment. The Roman

matrons’ sexual desires are seen as inappropriate and as another sign

of the corruption that will doom them.

The most recent Spartacus directly echoes this famous earlier scene

in two separate moments from different episodes. In Episode 8 of the

first season (“Mark of the Brotherhood”), the Roman matron Ilithyia

has been invited by Batiatus, the master of the gladiatorial school, and

his wife Lucretia to become the patroness of one of the new crop of

gladiators at the school.

Ilithyia: How should I choose?

Batiatus: Doctore, our honored guest wishes to assess the recruits’ vir-tus [manliness]

Doctore: Remove your cloths! (The camera pans behind the line of

recruits, focusing on their nude posteriors as they slowly remove

their loincloths. It then pans back up to the perspective of Ilithyia,

as she giggles with pleasure at the sight of Segovax’s extraordi-

narily large genitals, before swooping back down to give the audi-

ence the same view that Ilithyia has.)

Ilithyia: The one on the left: he has truly been blessed by the god

Priapus.

While there is again a physical distance between owners and slaves,

here the masters are placed on an explicit height, elevating them above

the gladiators. The perspective of the camera is either that of the mas-

ters, the veteran gladiators, or shown from behind the new gladiators;

the new recruits are merely a set of objectified male bodies.

While the Kubrick matrons chose on the basis of beauty, Ilithyia

discriminates purely on the grounds of penile size; only the man’s sex-

ual attributes are relevant. Like the conventionally objectified woman

in American mainstream films reduced to scattered shots of breasts

and legs, here the gladiator Segovax has only one valuable body part.

Ironically, the phallus in question is not even the actor’s own; for this

and other scenes involving male nudity a special, extra- long artificial


Anise K. Strong174

phallus was constructed, nicknamed “the Kirk Douglas.”20 The wom-

en’s bodies shown in Spartacus: Blood and Sand are those of the actual

actresses covered by small merkins. However, apparently certain male

actors were concerned that their own genitalia were not up to the

unusual challenge of serving as the object of the female audience’s

desires.

In the fifth episode, “Shadow Games,” written by Miranda Kwok,

the lead female writer of the first season, Ilithyia asks for a private

nude viewing of Crixus, the Champion of Capua and Batiatus’s prize

gladiator. The other women in the scene, Batiatus’s wife, Lucretia,

and her slave, Naevia, are each carrying on their own secret affair with

Crixus, who loves only Naevia. Unlike Kubrick’s Spartacus, Crixus

keeps his eyes down or turned askance. The gaze, and indeed the

possession, in this scene belong entirely to the women. Ilithyia treats

Crixus neither as human nor as beast, but as a beautiful statue, a motif

echoed in later episodes. This scene is remarkably lacking in the fear

or uncertainty that characterizes the typical cinematic women’s reac-

tions to the male body. Circling slowly around Crixus, Ilithyia echoes

common cinematic representations of aggressive male possessions

of female characters. She defines Crixus’s space and forces him into

the motionless, passive role. Later in the same episode, Ilithyia even

adopts the Foucauldian language of penetration, driving the tip of a

knife into the naked Spartacus’s chest. In every way except her lack

of a “Kirk Douglas” artificial phallus, Ilithyia takes on the normative

male sexual role in cinema. At the same time, this controlling female

Figure 12.1 Ilithyia (Viva Bianca) takes possession of Crixus (Manu Bennett) in

Spartacus: Blood and Sand (2010). Starz.



gaze is represented not as liberating or triumphant but as oppressive

and malevolent— not because the viewer is female, but because the

object is dehumanized.

In the ninth episode, “Whore,” the rendering of Spartacus as a

pinup poster, an artistic representation of male perfection, becomes

even more explicit. In one particular scene, Batiatus’s slave women

prepare Spartacus for his upcoming sexual service of the Roman

matron. In the first part of the scene, we again see the attractive

male body under the control of female eyes and hands. The camera

swoops around Spartacus and we the audience become the voyeurs,

not particularly of the random nude women, but of the target of their

attention, the gold- encrusted Spartacus, whose raw body becomes a

surface for female artists. Both male and female eyes are hidden dur-

ing the latter part of this scene by masks, but the camera lens explicitly

gives us the perspective of Ilithyia, who takes the active role in striding

toward her artistically framed sex slave.

Even while establishing this repeated defiance of conventional gaze

theory and gender norms, Spartacus is also careful to remind the

viewer that what fundamentally matters in these relationships is not

gender, but power. In a later scene, Lucretia aggressively questions

her slave Mira regarding the girl’s failure to seduce Spartacus, accord-

ing to her orders. Doubtful of Mira’s sexual attractiveness, she orders

her to strip. Mira is here framed, just as Spartacus was, as a statue

between columns, invoking classical Greek nudes of Aphrodite in her

pose. As a mere slave, she is the object of Lucretia’s gaze; Lucretia

treats her as simply another body for her use.

In one of the last episodes of the first season, Ashur, a former glad-

iator turned right- hand man of Batiatus, is granted the status of a

superior slave in return for his clever assistance to his master. He asks

for the right to have sex with Naevia, Lucretia’s most favored slave

woman and the secret mistress of Crixus.

Ashur: I have admired your beauty for many years. Were you aware of

my affections?

Naevia: I have felt your gaze linger of late.

Ashur: A gaze is all I could dare. Your position placing you forever

beyond my grasp. Delicate, ripe, Naevia. Always the forbidden

fruit, until now.

This scene demonstrates how much the fundamental sexual dynamic

within the household of Batiatus focuses on relative hierarchy, even

among slaves. Here Ashur echoes the physical movements of Ilithyia


Anise K. Strong176

around Crixus; while the scene is far less visually explicit, with his ver-

bal invocation of the gaze he takes possession of both the camera and

Naevia herself. He has moved from looking to owning; the last shot

is of the nude Naevia herself framed as if in a painting, turned into art

for a superior man’s pleasure.

Sex Scenes

The actual sex scenes in Spartacus, especially in the first season, pri-

marily focus on deeply committed couples in romantic, intimate

moments. Early examples include Spartacus and his wife Sura; Bati-

atus and Lucretia, who, despite their mutual use of slaves for pre-

intercourse “fluffing,” repeatedly demonstrate both their love and

desire for each other; the lead gladiator, Crixus, and the slave woman,

Naevia; and the gladiator Barca and his male lover, the slave Pietros.

Each of these couples has multiple sex scenes, often quite explicit in

both their nudity and with regard to the level of simulated sex. These

scenes also all feature extensive dialogue, eye contact between the

members of the couple, an exterior camera view that focuses on both

partners’ bodies rather than taking the perspective of only one, and

clear pleasure in intercourse on both sides, especially perhaps in the

case of women. Postures vary but generally do not leave women in

stereotypically submissive positions.

In other words, these sex scenes are also love scenes, intended to

emphasize the intimacy and equality inherent in these varied relation-

ships. While sometimes more pragmatic and cautious, the women are

neither shy nor prudish about expressing their attraction. Although

Lucretia and Batiatus, especially in the second season “prequel,” engage

in a variety of extramarital liaisons and ménages a trois, their encounters

with their peers continue to be visually depicted as intimate, mutually

pleasurable encounters similar to the format Royalle and Faludi present

as “porn for women.” Their love for each other, like the mutual passion

of Spartacus and Sura, drives the tragic drama of the plot in both seasons.

When Batiatus’s father demands that he divorce Lucretia, a supposedly

unsuitable wife, Batiatus responds pungently: “I would sever cock from

fucking body before take her from my arms” (Episode 5, “Reckoning”).

In other words, Batiatus would rather lose his masculinity— his virtus, so

emphasized as a key component of self- identity in earlier episodes— than

his wife. For Spartacus, explicit sex scenes serve as one means of depict-

ing the love and intimacy in these varied committed relationships.

These scenes contrast sharply with the cinematography and dia-

logue from other sexually explicit historical dramas like HBO’s Rome



or Showtime’s The Tudors, which typically fragment women’s bodies,

focus on them to the exclusion of male bodies, and often eroticize vio-

lent sex.21 One possibility for this difference may lie in the gender and

relationship status of the creators of each series. Spartacus has three

male executive producers, one of whom, Robert Tapert, is married

to the lead female star, Lucy Lawless, and a female producer, Chloe

Smith, who has a producer credit on more than half the episodes. Two

major writers for the second season were another husband- wife team,

Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen, who also served as coproduc-

ers; other women such as Kwok wrote multiple episodes. DeKnight’s

previous experience includes writing for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and

Dollhouse, two series featuring strong female heroines. Tapert and Sam

Raimi, the other two executive producers, are perhaps best known for

the television series Xena: Warrior Princess, another show that focuses

on sexually active, confident, competent female protagonists. In other

words, one would expect this particular writing and production team

to create stories that both emphasize female characters and appeal to

a mixed audience, specifically with regard to sex scenes. DeKnight has

spoken directly about his feminist slant in numerous interviews:

Series creator DeKnight said that part of his goal in writing the series

is to not to write weak women, even if they are slaves in the world of

Spartacus. “I love writing women in this show,” he explained, “because

even if it’s a slave who you would think has no power whatsoever, if it’s

Lucretia who really has no rights in this society, the interesting thing

to me is to find ways to give them strength. I mean, no one is a wilting

flower. I think we have some of the best female characters out on TV

right now.”22

Rome, Game of Thrones, and The Tudors all had between zero to two

female writers and a distinct minority of female producers; their cre-

ators do not have notably feminist pedigrees. None of these shows is

consciously sexist, but they tend to reinforce the patriarchy of their

historical settings, to utilize relatively conventional cinematography

during sex scenes, and to feature the frequent sexualized objectifica-

tion of women.

In contrast, Starz’s other current original series, Torchwood: Mir-acle Day (2011) and the short- lived Camelot (2011), both feature

more egalitarian, female- oriented sex scenes. They also employ prom-

inent female writers and producers, such as Jane Espenson, Anne

Thomopolous, and Louise Fox. This common thread in Starz origi-

nal programming suggests that, beyond their general reputation for


Anise K. Strong178

risqué and explicit television series, this cable network also has a con-

scious commitment to portray sexually egalitarian or dominant female

characters and to film sex scenes appealing to both male and female

audiences. Starz has, perhaps, found a new niche.

Rape

In any discussion of representations of female sexuality in the ancient

world, the subject of rape is almost unavoidable. The question of rape

in Spartacus is fraught with issues of power and its abuse, the domi-

nant themes underlying the tragic drive of both seasons’ plots. In one

sense, any sexual act between a free person and a slave in the Roman

world is rape, since the slave cannot meaningfully consent, and by this

standard rape is constant and ubiquitous in every episode of the series,

whether we consider male gladiators like Crixus required to serve as

fertile studs for matrons like Lucretia, or the anonymous masked slave

girls trotted out at the House of Batiatus orgies.

However, the creators of Spartacus make a significant and mean-

ingful distinction between this sort of implicit rape, which is depicted

nonviolently and often performed silently by extras, and the violent,

explicitly abusive rape of named characters. In the entire first season,

despite the extreme amounts of both sex and violence in the show, no

violent rape is depicted onscreen for the shock or titillation of the view-

ers. Spartacus is told that his wife Sura has been gang- raped by Roman

soldiers, and he catches a glimpse of the clearly abused, suicidal Pietros

after the boy’s rape by another male gladiator, but the only sex shown

is, if not freely consensual, certainly nonviolent. Even in the case of

Ashur’s sexual encounter with Naevia, which is clearly against her

choice, the camera cuts away at the instant that he removes her gown.

In contrast, Gods in the Arena, the “prequel” second season, features

an extended set of onscreen violent rapes of the slave woman Diona,

who ultimately serves as the tragic symbol for the entire season. Her

character arc exemplifies both the evils of slavery and the corruption of

Rome’s elite. Diona is initially actively interested in sexual pleasure and

romance; in the first two episodes she repeatedly stares at the gladiators’

nude bodies and giggles with her fellow slave, Naevia. In the third epi-

sode, however, the Roman senator, Cossutius, demands that the virgin

Diona be violently raped by both the ugliest, dirtiest gladiator in the

barracks and, simultaneously, by Cossutius himself, who forces anal sex

on her while abusing her verbally (Episode 3, “Paterfamilias”). At the

end of this encounter, Diona is visibly bruised and distraught. Lucretia

sympathetically but ruthlessly comments, “It was an unfortunate thing



to be so used by men for base entertainment.” Diona’s tragedy is not

the loss of her virginity but her powerlessness within Roman society.

Having lost the extra value of her virginity, Diona becomes a regular

sex slave at Lucretia’s parties, until she is finally so traumatized by her

repeated rapes that she attempts suicide. Naevia subsequently helps her

escape the House of Batiatus, only to see her captured and executed in

the gladiatorial arena. Like the male gladiator Varro in the first season,

who dies at the whim of a Roman elite boy, Diona thus serves as the

symbolic victim of the second season. Her degradation from lively,

innocent young woman to desperate, traumatized runaway is repre-

sented as the result not of individual evil deeds but as the inevitable

consequence of the Roman system of slavery and the gross inequality

between elites and other citizens.

Rape as a means of demonstrating the corruption of the Roman

elite is not restricted solely to interactions between free people and

slaves in Spartacus. The female protagonist’s name, Lucretia, espe-

cially in a Roman setting, inevitably recalls Livy’s famous story of the

Rape of Lucretia, in which the virtuous noblewoman Lucretia com-

mitted suicide after her rape by an Etruscan prince and precipitated

the first Roman revolution.23 As Spartacus’s initially modest Lucretia

gradually turns her house into a part- time brothel, in an effort to gain

the favor of wealthy magistrates for her husband, the possibility of a

rape of this Lucretia remains always on the horizon. It seems particu-

larly imminent in Episode 4, “Beneath the Mask,” when Batiatus’s

enemy physically threatens a vulnerable, temporarily isolated Lucretia.

However, she faces him down, only to discover that he has murdered

her friend Gaia in her place.

Rape, then, is an act that the creators of Spartacus use sparingly

and explicitly to signify the abuse of power; it is never glamorized

or eroticized. In this respect, Spartacus contrasts strongly with other

television series, most recently Game of Thrones, in which the writ-

ers altered a sex scene from the original novel from a scene of sexual

awakening to one of brutal, vividly depicted rape (Episode 1, “Winter

is Coming”): the camera focuses on the anguished face of a young

bride during her violent rape from behind; the character later falls in

love with her rapist husband. Following standard feminist and psycho-

logical theories, rape in Spartacus is always about power, not sex. This

model also echoes, whether deliberately or unconsciously, the ancient

Roman conceptualization of rape. For ancient Romans, the right to

be free of rape was one of the defining characteristics of a citizen, as

demonstrated in numerous stories from Livy and other chroniclers of

Rome’s early history, including in the tale of Lucretia herself.24 Rape,


Anise K. Strong180

in the Roman context, becomes a signifier of tyranny. Sandra Joshel

notes that rape in the Roman imagination is also inextricably linked to

imperialism and mass slavery.25

Conclusion

Starz’s Spartacus series, like many works of classical reception, is both

new and old, echoing not just antiquity but a century of films and

television series about the Roman world. At the same time, it breaks

new ground in its decisions about how to represent human society

and, in particular, its depiction of female sexuality. From one per-

spective, Spartacus utilizes the same sort of objectifying, dehuman-

izing cinematography and fragmentation of bodies that has long been

condemned by feminist film scholars. However, this objectification is

directed equally or perhaps even more at male slave bodies as well as

female ones. Even more startlingly, the gaze itself often originates in

the eyes of a powerful female figure.

Any analysis of this reappropriation must consider the larger

themes that DeKnight and the other creators of Spartacus have woven

through their episodes. The first season focuses fundamentally on

the tragedy of Batiatus and Lucretia— how two ordinary people are

brought down by their simultaneous ambition to join the ranks of the

elite and their callous disregard for the personhood of their slaves. It

is no coincidence that the character who most frequently and visually

objectifies the men of Spartacus is Ilithyia, the elite Roman matron

who serves as the most unambiguous villain on the show. In other

words, the creators of Spartacus are in fact telling a morality tale, one

which itself requires traditionally immoral “pornography” in order

to emphasize the greater evil of abusive power relations. Similarly,

Spartacus depicts rape not as another type of sex scene but as another,

even more culpable type of violence perpetrated by the powerful

against the powerless.

At the same time, sex scenes between major characters in commit-

ted romantic relationships are depicted as egalitarian, pleasurable, and

loving, suggesting that sex and its cinematic representation are not

inherently abusive to women. In this manner, the creators reject the

radical feminist theory linking all representations of heterosexual sex

with violence and offer a more positive, female- centered alternative.

At the same time, they recognize the inherent potential for objectifi-

cation and discrimination in conventional pornography and use that

traditional tool in order to condemn any dehumanization of individu-

als, whether female or male. Lucretia and Ilithyia’s powerful gazes are



not morally justifiable; they are merely another form of oppression

with the normative genders reversed.

Spartacus uses traditionally misogynistic modes of discourse like

pornography and rape to reflect on class inequality and its dangerous

consequences. The Starz series also reclaims the explicit representation

of sex as a feminist and socialist tool for provoking thought and even

activism. Such a radical agenda may be sugarcoated for viewers in the

attractive trappings of orgies and gladiatorial fights. However, just as

in the case of the creators’ previous series Xena and Buffy, the socially

liberal and feminist messages are consistent and clear. The series may

be called Spartacus, but it is no coincidence that the majority of the

promotional posters feature a sultry Lucy Lawless who directly chal-

lenges the gaze of the viewer.

Notes

1. Steuver (2010).

2. Ryan (2010).

3. DeKnight (2010).

4. DeKnight (2011).

5. Clarke (1998) 169– 77.

6. MacKinnon (1984) 321– 22.

7. Meese (1987) 78.

8. Strager (2003) 50– 61; Attwood (2002) 91– 105.

9. Royalle (2000) 549.

10. Faludi (2000) 533– 75.

11. Cyrino (2008) 131.

12. Raucci (2008) 210.

13. Raucci (2008) 211.

14. McNutt (2011).

15. Mulvey (1975) 17.

16. “Oh, Those Randy Romans,” Spartacus: Blood and Sand DVD fea-

turette (2010).

17. Ellis and Symons (1990) 527– 55.

18. Murnaghan and Joshel (1998) 3.

19. Hark (1993) 154.

20. DeKnight (2009).

21. Mulvey (1989) 6.

22. Halterman (2011).

23. Livy, Histories 1.57– 60. The text is from Ogilvy (1974).

24. Livy, Histories 1.57– 60, 3.44– 58, 8.28; Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 4.14.

25. Joshel (1992) 123.


4

C h a p t e r 1 3

Glenn Close Channels

Theda Bara in M A X I E ( 1985)

A Chapter in the Social History

of the Snake Bra

Gregory N. Daugherty

Maxie (1985) is a lightweight comedy that was clearly designed to

exploit the extraordinary range of Glenn Close.1 She had been in films

for ten years and had impressed audiences with The World According

to Garp (1982), The Big Chill (1983), and The Natural (1984), but it

would be her next film, Fatal Attraction (1987), which would make

her a star. Maxie called for her to play a dual role: Jan, a mousy and

repressed church secretary who unintentionally starts channeling the

spirit of a 1920s flapper, and Maxie, the very spirit of a silent film

actress who died on the way to a breakout screen test. Jan’s husband,

Nick (Mandy Patinkin), summons Maxie’s spirit after they rent her

old apartment, discover her lipstick graffiti behind the old wallpaper,

and learn about her from her former song and dance partner. Since

Nick is an ardent lover of silent film, he arranges to watch her only

existing scene.

Once Maxie has been summoned to her old apartment, she takes

over Jan’s body with comically predictable results. The climax of the

film features the fulfillment of her dream of a screen test in the role of

Cleopatra, complete with several verbal and visual allusions to the most

famous films on the Egyptian Queen, including the 1917 Cleopatra

starring Theda Bara and her equally famous snake bra. Since it is such


Gregory N. Daugherty184

a short scene and since the film drew so little attention, it has attracted

no discussion in any of the several essays devoted to this reception and

is not even included in the otherwise excellent and exhaustive survey

by Diana Wenzel.2 The reception of Cleopatra in American popular

culture came in waves, it seems, which did not include the 1980s.

A brief analysis of the novel on which the film was based does not

explain this isolated allusion.

Possession was a theme dear to writer Jack Finney, whose 1973

novel, Marion’s Wall, inspired this script.3 Best known for his 1955

science fiction novel, The Bodysnatchers, which was made into films

four times,4 Finney was also fascinated with time travel and time bend-

ing— a topic he visited in two other novels.5 Marion’s Wall touched

on both of these themes and also explored Finney’s passion for the

silent era of Hollywood. Nick, the principal character in the novel, is

drawn to Marion’s connection with the era and with his own father

(they had been lovers); Nick himself is possessed by Rudolph Valen-

tino once they get to Hollywood. It is a charming tale, but with a

radically different ending to Marion’s nude audition and a climax that

involves the discovery and destruction of the entire catalog of Film

Threat’s Top Ten Lost Silent Films. There is no mention of or allusion

to Cleopatra.

Including her would not have been remarkable in a 1970s book about

silent film, but Finney was clearly not the source for the decision to have

the film’s Maxie audition for a role as Cleopatra. It was not an obvious

choice. As noted, there was relatively little American popular culture

interest in Cleopatra during the 1980s when compared to the 1920s

and 1930s, or especially the 1960s, fueled by Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s

1963 film, Cleopatra, affectionately known as “Lizpatra” after its

star, Elizabeth Taylor. The current focus on Cleopatra in films, televi-

sion, novels, and comics seems to have been kicked off in the early

1990s, perhaps due to the graphic novel version of Anne Rice’s The Mummy.6 Between 1973 and 1978, the so- called Cleopatra Jones-

Wong- Schwartz trend had made its mark, as Francesca Royster has

cleverly analyzed.7 There was no shortage of pornographic Cleopatras,

including one from the same year as Maxie, often titled The Erotic Dreams of Cleopatra (1985).8 Cleopatra had appeared on several tele-

vision shows based mostly on reactions to Lizpatra— as The Patty Duke Show did in 19639— or brief allusions in M*A*S*H (1972– 86)

or The Love Boat (1977– 86). Some might remember the Dr Pep-

per television ads featuring comedian Judy Tenuta (occasionally as

Cleopatra) as late as 1989.10 Lizpatra had sated or killed most popu-

lar culture demand for receptions of Cleopatra.11 Clearly the version


Glenn Close Channels Theda Bara in Maxie (1985) 185

presented in Maxie was not part of a general revival in the long recep-

tion of Cleopatra.

As much as I would like to think that Maxie’s screenwriter, Patricia

Resnick, curled up with Plutarch’s Life of Antony one weekend and

thought this all up de novo, Hollywood does not work that way. The

most likely inspiration was from other films. The 1917 Cleopatra star-

ring Bara was lost by this time, but interest in it and its many stills was

piqued in 1963 with the premier of the Taylor film.12 The 1934 Clau-

dette Colbert version was clearly the source for several images in Maxie. Likewise, the impact of the images from the 1963 version and the bal-

lyhoo surrounding the search for a star are clearly reflected in Maxie. While none of these three films were on the popular culture radar in

1985, the screenwriter would have known of them and had access to

copies and/or still images, as both Taylor and Colbert are mentioned

by name in the press scene immediately following the audition.

Since the Cleopatra scene does not appear to have been included

due to obvious external influences, an analysis of the themes and tropes

of the film is in order. Glenn Close was not the only well- known player

in this film. Writer Resnick wrote the hit feature film Nine to Five (1980) while still in her 20s. Patinkin, who plays the husband Nick,

was fresh off his romantic role as Avigdor in Yentl (1983). This was to

be Ruth Gordon’s last film in a role (as landlady Mrs. Lavin) consid-

erably expanded from the book. Harry Hamlin, playing himself, had

recently done Clash of the Titans (1981), but was not credited as the

actor playing Marc Antony. Neither was Carol Lombard, whose image

from The Campus Vamp (1928) is used as that of Maxie in her only

surviving clip. Close was nominated for a Golden Globe, the film did

not do badly at the box office, and it even won an award, the Silver

Raven, at the Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Film in 1986.13

Critics were not kind. According to Roger Ebert, “This is the sort

of movie where, if Maxie had any brains, she’d appear in Jan’s body,

take one look at the script, and decide she was better off dead.”14

I have to agree that the script is contrived, especially in diluting Nick’s

role and adding a particularly awkward subplot involving the Catho-

lic bishop and exorcism. Richard Scheib notes, “This is an incredibly

dreary variation on the subgenre of eschatological comedies rep-

resented by the likes of Topper (1937) and Here Comes Mr. Jordan

(1941).”15 He is quite correct to point out the lame retelling of famil-

iar fantasy elements. The book was much more original and dark, but

that is Hollywood.

An obvious change from the book involves the character’s name. It

appears Marion did not evoke the Vamp or Flapper image the director,



Paul Aaron, wanted. Making Jan a church secretary was just a way

to work in the possession angle, some cheap anticlerical jokes, and a

heavy- handed homage to The Exorcist (1973). Some of Nick’s obses-

sion with the 1920s and silent film remains, but his character and

some essential motivation (Marion had been his father’s lover and she

thought she recognized Nick) and plot items (he too was possessed by

a silent star) have been gutted. His insistence that Jan live out Maxie’s

dreams of acting, therefore, comes off as less than noble, as does his

“technical” lack of marital fidelity, which is the setup for the audition

scene. Maxie had wanted another sexual romp while possessing Jan,

but Nick had promised not to do it. Peeved, Maxie does not show

up in time for the audition and Jan has to try it on her own— another

departure from the book. In the novel, Marion has to do her scene in

the nude. In the film, Maxie has to do it as Cleopatra. In the hands of

Close, however, the scene is in some ways even more sexually charged.

At this point I would beseech the reader to watch the scene on DVD.

Please note the change when Maxie does finally appear, and admire

how Close portrays these two characters using the same body, cos-

tume, and lines.

After several comical attempts, Maxie finally lands a screen test

in Hollywood. Since Maxie is angry with Nick, Jan is forced to go

through with the test. She hobbles onto the sound stage in platform

shoes and full Cleopatra regalia including a cloak, vulture headdress

complete with the uraeus (upright cobra emblem), large pectoral- style

necklace and wrist bracelets, and a bikini top with an elaborate jew-

eled snake embroidered on it. There is a good deal of glitter on her

chest and arms, but it is clear from her posture and demeanor that it

is Jan and not Maxie. She is greeted by the director who attempts to

introduce her to Harry Hamlin, playing himself in the part of Antony,

and to prep her for the scene, but she goes to Nick and pleads to

leave because she does not want to “throw up on Harry Hamlin.” He

forces her to carry on, with disastrous results. Jan is petrified and has

to read the lines off cribbed notes taped on her bracelet. The angry

director stops the action, but Nick literally pushes her back on the set.

This time she makes it to the bottom of the pillow- strewn bed, but

swoons dead away when Harry kisses her. Everyone is ready to throw

in the towel as Nick revives her, when she says, “Who’s the good look-

ing guy in the skirt?” and we know that Maxie is back in Jan’s body.

The transformation is rapid and complete. Maxie rips off the brace-

lets and necklace and asks for another take. No one seems interested.

She fastens the cloak at her shoulder, concealing the snake bra and

starts the scene again, with a deeper, sexier voice and so much feeling



that everyone on the set leaps back to action, including an obviously

smitten leading man. Jan has disappeared, along with all the body glit-

ter and the pile of pillows. This time there is real emotion and obvious

sexual chemistry as she does the same lines and more. The props and

gimmicks that were meant to recall earlier sexualized Cleopatras—

the bra, the bed, the glitter— weren’t even necessary: this Cleopatra

exudes all those things on her own. Those earlier film Cleopatras were

evoked only to show that a True Vamp does not need them.

As is clear from the brief dialogue, the writer did not bother to read

Plutarch or anyone else familiar with the actual story of Antony and

Cleopatra. Perhaps the writer intended to portray a very twentieth-

century American reception of the Egyptian Queen rather than attempt

an accurate representation of the historical figure, the very sort of story

that might have been made into a film in 1980s Hollywood. In fact, it

vaguely follows a scene from Cleopatra 1963 (near the end of the first

half of the film) when her political ambitions for an equal partner ignite

the sexual chemistry with Antony. In order to focus on the thematic

function of this scene for the film, however, I prefer to concentrate on

the sources of some of the images, costumes, and characterizations.

First of all, Close is wearing a bra with a snake motif. This is clearly

an homage to the famous snake bra worn by Bara in the 1917 Cleopa-tra film. There is a marked disconnect between the overt sexuality

and sensuality of the costume— with all the glitter on her skin— and

Jan’s timid awkwardness. She is outfitted with the one of the most

enduring icons of Cleopatra’s sensuality, but she is still just Jan, the

church secretary. As we shall see, it is an icon with a history that does

not stop here.

Most of the Cleopatra movies employ a costume that includes the

vulture headdress and uraeus, but this one seems very close to the one

worn by Claudette Colbert in Cleopatra (1934). Colbert’s costumes

were quite daring for her day. When the spirit of Maxie reappears

and suddenly becomes so self- confident and comfortable with her

sexuality and her authority, I suggest she is clearly reflecting Colbert’s

Cleopatra. She is so confident in her sensuality and desirability that

she sheds the ostentatious jewelry and covers the iconic snake bra

with her cape. The reaction of the costar and the crew in the film

mirrors Finney’s description of the impact of Marion’s nude scene in

the novel. “I don’t know that anyone has ever actually explained it

but there are an occasional few people born into the world who are

different from the rest of us. They are able to turn on something that

is real, invisible, and as actual in effect as electricity. And Marion was

doing it. Standing in the center of the party, she held it in her hand.”16



The added element of political power, which emerges as a covered-

up Maxie repeats Jan’s lines, seems to me also to evoke the 1963

Lizpatra. I believe that Taylor was most effective as an actress in this

much- maligned film when she was wearing the simpler costumes and

not posing in fantasy tableaux. I am convinced that the Maxie scene

evokes this comparison by the position of Cleopatra and Antony on

the bed, inspired by the billboard ad from Lizpatra— the one that was

done before Rex Harrison’s lawyers had him inserted! In 1985 it was

still fashionable to make fun of these cinematic images. That comic

element could have been largely derived from the British spoof Carry on Cleo (1964), starring Amanda Barrie. The prominence of the bed

in both versions points to a deliberate choice. The striking shift from

the humiliation humor at Jan’s expense to the sexual tension and

manipulation in the second take is the best aspect of this entire film.

The story requires a demonstration of Maxie’s sensuality, and the

image of Cleopatra in a snake bra filled the bill. As I noted, Cleopa-

tra does not appear in the novel. There the audition scene required

Marion to be nude. She did it, but then she denounced the entire film

industry. Clearly that scene had to change: the film needed a happy

ending with no nudity. Central to the novel and alluded to in the film,

however, was the intense search for an actress to pull off the scene in

question. That was perhaps enough to remind the screenwriters of the

well- hyped search for a cinematic Cleopatra in the 1960s, and it would

perhaps have led them to the Taylor and Barrie camp Cleopatras and

the superbly sensual Colbert version. Since the Bara film had been lost

for about thirty years and silent films were not back in vogue, it might

Figure 13.1 “Maxie” (Glenn Close) wears Cleopatra’s snake bra in Maxie (1985),

as an uncredited Harry Hamlin watches. Orion Pictures.



have come to the attention of the costume designers through the plot

points and through the uncredited use of Carol Lombard’s image from

The Campus Vamp (1928) to represent Maxie’s only screen time. Bara

was after all the quintessential Vamp, earning that title in A Fool There Was (1914). And as “Ukulele Ike” (Cliff Edwards) sang just a few

years later, “I know that . . . Cleopatra was a Vamp.”17 Having a mousy

character put on Cleopatra’s snake bra was a clever way to bridge the

comic and the sexual in a single episode.

While only a part of the costume, the bra has an intriguing history

of its own. When Bara donned her daring and precariously attached

snake bra for the 1917 silent Cleopatra, she was adding a new dimen-

sion to the reception of the Ptolemaic Queen as an alarming evocation

of the power and sexuality of the “New Woman.” Palmolive ads from

around the same year added a solid metal dimension to the depiction

of Cleopatra, and the image would soon be transferred to other feisty

women, including the character of Princess Leia in Return of the Jedi (1983), the singer- songwriter- performer Madonna, and more.

The history of this image parallels the evolution of feminine under-

garments themselves. The term brassiere originally meant an arm

protector and then a breastplate, which the Victorian corset closely

resembled. Sadly, the saga of Otto Titzling as sung by Bette Midler

is a modern fiction,18 but the actual accidental invention of the bras-

siere by Mary Phelps Jacob from two silk handkerchiefs in 1910 seems

almost as unlikely. By that time, the corset had been under attack from

the Rational Dress Society; so this timely invention, as well as the

need to conserve metal in World War I (corsets apparently consumed

enough to build two battleships), paved the way for the more reveal-

ing fashions of the Flapper Era.19

While there were no such representations in antiquity, Cleopatra

had been portrayed with bare breasts and snakes since at least the late-

fifteenth century. In Michelangelo’s famous sketch of Cleopatra (1534),

the snake is actually entwined around her breast. Other examples of

this representation, such as Guido Cagnacci’s powerful painting Death

of Cleopatra (1660), or Jean André Rixens’s languid depiction of La

Mort de Cléopâtre (1874), and even Gyula Benczur’s disturbing but

age- appropriate death scene in Cleopatra (1911), give a sense of the

range of sensual exploitations of this final chapter of her story. On the

other hand, as the contrasting modesty of Helen Gardner’s costume in

the 1912 silent Cleopatra attests, film had to be more circumspect.20

In pre- Code Hollywood, filmmakers were accustomed to pushing

the envelope, and the 1917 Cleopatra starring Bara was no exception.21

I have found no direct model in Western art for Bara’s costume in this



film, but the Michelangelo drawing could well have been the inspira-

tion for the uncredited costume designer who worked on the film. The

surviving publicity stills and tableaux suggest a fervent imagination as

well as familiarity with classical art and the adhesive properties of spirit

gum. Maeder thinks the actress designed her own costume,22 but her

comment that in watching the rushes, she saw herself getting “Bara

and Bara,” would seem to indicate otherwise.23 The costumers went as

far as they could to underscore both her oriental “Otherness” and her

predatory sexuality, and it certainly worked: Cleopatra was now a Vamp.

Starting in 1911, Albert Lasker and Claude Hopkins were applying

their revolutionary theories of advertising to the daunting task of sell-

ing green, funny- smelling soap for the B. P. Johnson Co. They hit on

the idea of marketing this cleanser as a beauty product, and, since it

was a blend of palm and olive oils, basing their pitch on a fictive con-

nection to Egypt and Cleopatra. Since the ads appeared in women’s

magazines, nudity was out, but a subtle connection to the contempo-

rary hit movie was. Instead of a snake bra, we see metallic brassieres of

different shapes in the earliest ads, but most emphatically in the 1917

versions. They reinforce the Flapper connection with an oriental icon

of beauty, sexuality, and authority aimed directly at the same New

Woman who would flock to see the Bara film. The campaign con-

tinued in 1918 and for several years beyond. After that, an armored

Cleopatra branched out in advertising to drive Packards, drink Coke,

Schweppes, and Cleo Cola, and smoke Players, but usually with her

now trademark metallic cup bra, quite appropriate for the flat- chested

Flapper look. Betty Boop even appeared as Cleopatra with a coiled

metal bra. Even with the advent of the “bullet bra,” Cleopatra was still

invoked by Maidenform and others. By the 1960s, a metallic bikini

top, with or without snakes, had become associated with popular cul-

ture representation of Cleopatra, in spite of the complete absence of

any such ancient depiction and the serious doubts raised about the

role of snakes in her death.24

When Marilyn Monroe was vying, along with many others, for

the starring role in the Cleopatra movie in development in the early

1960s, she posed for Richard Avedon in a roomier version of the

Bara snakes. When the 1963 Lizpatra failed to live up to expectations

both box- office and critical (undoubtedly due to her failure to sport a

snake bra), Cleopatra and her metallic bras quickly became an object

of satirical treatment from Amanda Barrie in the 1960s to Jamie Farr

on the television show M*A*S*H in the 1980s.

There was very little interest in Cleopatra in the 1970s and early

1980s either in American popular culture or in scholarship. But the



period did see three manifestations of Bara’s influence: Princess Leia’s

slave costume in Return of the Jedi, Maxie’s audition clothes, and

Madonna’s torpedo bra worn during her Blond Ambition World Tour

(1990). With a Hellenistic snake armlet, the minimalist snakes slither-

ing over her top, and the slave chain resting on her skin, Carrie Fisher’s

daring bikini in the Return of the Jedi appears to have been modeled

on the Bara snake bra in order to mark rather emphatically the shift in

Carrie Fisher’s character from white- clad, virginal princess to an Ama-

zon warrior who can attract the male gazes of more than a Hut and

then kick butt with the best of them. Quite memorable were the ado-

lescent gasps at Leia’s first appearance, from both the cinema audience

and her costars. This image directly influenced the design of Close’s

costume for the audition scene in Maxie, which came out two years

later. As noted above, Maxie is the ghost of a 1926 flapper/actress

who possesses the character of Jan until she will agree to fulfill her

silver screen dreams. In the ensuing audition for a Cleopatra epic, Jan

is initially left to fend for herself wearing a snake- motif bra, until Maxie

finally appears with no need of a mere bra to exude her own power and

sexuality. It seems that Princess Leia in Return of the Jedi may have sent

the costumers of Maxie back to Theda Bara for the right “sign.”

The saga of the snake/metallic bra does not end with Maxie. While

there is no overt allusion to Cleopatra in Madonna’s Blond Ambi-

tion tour, she (and designer Jean Paul Gaultier) resurrected the bullet

bra as a metallic breastplate/assault weapon. This belongs to the tra-

dition of all those metallic bras strapped on generations of sexually

confident and politically powerful Cleopatras. The contemporary out-

rageous bra costumes of performers Katie Perry and Lady Gaga are

all logical extensions of Bara’s snakes. This trend appears also with

Cleopatras featured in several Xena: Warrior Princess television epi-

sodes and comics. Aaliyah’s bra from Queen of the Damned (2002)

deserves mention as the film was based on an Anne Rice novel. And

in that same year, actress Rie Rasmussen also wears a daring snake bra

in Brian De Palma’s Femme Fatale (2002): as a femme fatale herself,

Bara would have appreciated the homage. Artist Jim Silke spares us

from such subtlety when he turned a pinup model, Bettie Page (who

as far as I can determine never posed as Cleopatra), into a comic book

action heroine in Bettie Page: Queen of the Nile.25 Bettie, who always

has trouble keeping her regular bra on, turns out to be a double for

one of the newly dark and deadly Cleopatras who manifests her dan-

gerous sexuality with a close replica of a Bara snake bra, without the

chain counterbalances. Cleopatras equipped with metallic bras con-

tinue to appear in comics, such as in the initial issues of Cursed where



Cleopatra lives on as Klara Peterson.26 Not surprisingly, the snake bra

appears in a few items of erotica. A rendering of Brittany Murphy by

Jeff Pitarelli (2007) is an adaptation, with even more attitude, of an

iconic Bara poster and her snake bra publicity shots.

Cleopatra has appeared in numerous recent films and television

series, most of which have few qualms about scenic nudity. There is

a gratifying homage to the tradition in the second season of HBO-

BBC’s Rome, when the talented Lyndsey Marshall portrays Cleopatra

in a Palmolive- worthy metallic bra.27 Among other Cleopatras, only

Sofia Essaidi from the 2010 French Spectacle Musical, Cleopatre: La derniere reine d’Egypt, appears armored, in more of a breastplate than

a bra. Note, however, that Anna Valle did sport a snake belt- buckle in

the miniseries Imperium: Augustus (2003). What the announced stars

of forthcoming Cleopatras (Catherine Zeta- Jones in a rock musical,

and Angelina Jolie in the Scott Rudin/Stacy Schiff vehicle) will wear

is beyond my kin, but in my prayers.

Many more metallic bras, breastplates, and images of snakes or

snakelike swirls adorn the torsos of dancers, actors, and models. Yet

I would maintain that before this motif took on a life of its own sepa-

rate from the Cleopatra narrative, it had its origin at a single point in

time when a sixteenth- century Michelangelo sketch inspired a silent

era film costume designer to create a bra for a daring actress playing a

powerful queen with a romantic story line, and in the process created

a “sign” for the New American Woman. That sign so resonated within

American popular culture that it could evolve into the metallic flapper

bra and be resurrected whenever a girl need a little Cleopatra to see

her through a tough stretch.

That is what makes the appearance of the metallic bra in Maxie so original in the long history of film Cleopatras. The premise of the

costuming and the opening of the scene is that to embody a power-

ful queen who can also attract an alpha male with her sensuality, one

needs all the headdresses, armlets, necklaces, glitter, and, most of all,

the snake- emblazoned bra associated with a stage or movie Cleopatra.

But a true Vamp or femme fatale can shed most of that and even cover

up completely, but still demonstrate to everyone in the room that

she is the one who deserves their complete attention. In the end, the

director, producer, lead actor Harry Hamlin, and even a young Leeza

Gibbons and Entertainment Tonight are convinced they have found an

authentic Cleopatra for their rather peculiar reception of the Egyptian

Queen. Maybe that is why the creators of Maxie revived her reception

in this period of criminal Cleopatra neglect as a statement that only the

spirit of an uninhibited flapper untainted by Hollywood’s decline from



its silent purity could possibly capture the essence of a strong, politi-

cally astute, and sexually self- confident figment of their imagination.

Notes

1. Earlier versions of this chapter were presented as “Channeling a Vamp:

Glenn Close as Cleopatra in Maxie (1985)” at the Classical Associa-

tion of the Middle West and South/Southern Section meeting (Octo-

ber 29, 2010), and as “A Social History of the Snake Bra” at the Film

and History conference (November 13, 2010).

2. Wenzel (2005).

3. Finney (1973).

4. Films include Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Body Snatchers (1993), and The Invasion (2007).

5. Time and Again (1970) and From Time to Time (1995).

6. See Daugherty (2009).

7. Royster (2003) 145– 69.

8. Original title: Sogni erotici di Cleopatra (1985); see IMDb.

9. In an episode entitled “The Actress” (1963), Patty auditions for a role

as Cleopatra in the school play.

10. See http:// www .judytenuta .com.

11. Wyke (2002) 279– 320 offers an excellent overview of Cleopatra in

film.

12. The surviving few seconds can be found on http:// www .youtube .com.

13. IMDb’s article on Maxie is the source for most of the information in

this paragraph.

14. Ebert (1985).

15. Scheib (1999– 2012).

16. Finney (1973) 151.

17. Quoted from the song, “Who Takes Care of the Caretaker’s Daughter

(While the Caretaker’s Busy Taking Care),” music and lyrics by Chick

Endor (1924).

18. Reyburn (1972).

19. The history of ladies’ undergarments contains much contradiction

and urban legend, but an entertaining overview is available at Walsh

(2007).

20. For some lovely drawings of this and other Cleopatra costumes, see

Claudon (1999).

21. See Wyke (2002) 266– 78; Royster (2003) 71– 82; and Wenzel (2005)

177– 95.

22. Maeder (1987) 46 and Wenzel (2005) 312, citing Zierold (1973) 51.

23. Golden (1996) 139.

24. See Roller (2010) 148– 49 for an authoritative discussion of this

episode.



25. Jim Silke, Bettie Page: Queen of the Nile: “Episode 1: Buried Alive”

(1999), “Episode 2: Mad Love” (2000), and “Episode 3: She Devil”

(2000), Dark Horse Comics.

26. Fiona Kai Avery and Tippi Blevins, Cursed vol. 1.1– 4 (2003– 4), Image

Comics: Top Cow Productions.

27. Daugherty (2008).


4

C h a p t e r 1 4

Virility and Licentiousness in

R O M E ’s Mark Antony (2005– 7)

Rachael Kelly

From the moment of his suicide in Alexandria in August of 30 B.C.,

the culturally reimagined body of Marcus Antonius has been avail-

able, essentially without challenge, as a site for the interrogation and

negotiation of issues of masculinity and gender performativity. This

is a cultural function afforded to it first by virtue of the semantics of

Roman political propaganda and second because the ideological bent

of historiography is dictated by the outcome of struggle, and Anto-

nius lost.

On September 2, 31 B.C., the combined forces of Antonius and

Cleopatra were forced into a strategic naval retreat from the promon-

tory of Actium on the northwest coast of Greece. It was, essentially,

the culmination of a propaganda war that had raged for almost a

decade between Antonius and the future Augustus Caesar, as each

man attempted to consolidate his power base in a struggle for control

over the Roman world. Although events at Actium did not necessar-

ily spell defeat for the Antonian campaign, a series of defections over

the following months led inexorably toward a confrontation outside

Alexandria that Antonius’s forces could not hope to win, and Actium

is thus generally regarded by modern historians of the period as the

event that marks the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of

the Imperial era. It is certainly a key reference point in a pervasive and

persistent cultural narrative that reconfigures the defeat as the inevi-

table outcome of Antonius’s transgressive performance of masculinity.


Rachael Kelly196

This chapter will seek to position Mark Antony, as he exists in

screen culture, as the product of centuries of sociocultural anxiety

about performing the male and to read his sexual availability in the

recent HBO- BBC television series Rome (2005– 7) in line with his

function as the embodiment of deficient masculinity that may be

negotiated, contained, and exorcised. Drawing on a range of theo-

retical perspectives, including recent work in masculinity studies and

feminist film theory, it attempts to situate the Antony- icon, as he is

recycled in twenty- first century texts, on a continuum of patriarchal

anxiety that is informed by shifting notions of idealized masculinity,

interrogating the screen text as a sociocultural artefact that reflects

prevailing hegemonic concerns about gender roles and performance,

whether consciously or unconsciously articulated. Finally, it will con-

sider the differential semantics of licentiousness and virility themselves,

and position both alongside the semantic meaning of fatherhood as a

signifier of masculine performance. First, however, I want to prob-

lematize the quasihistorical model of the deficient Antony on which

the screen narratives heavily rely.

Roman Political Invective

It would be inaccurate to situate the transformation of Marcus Anto-

nius (the historical figure) into Mark Antony (the popular- cultural

icon) as a direct result of the triumph of Augustus, although politi-

cal necessities in the early Principate undoubtedly contributed to the

revision process. While it is true that it was expedient for Augustus

to frame Antonius as deficient, it remains the case that Antonius/

Antony was an already available avatar onto which anxieties about

the nascent Principate and the termination of the Republic could be

readily transferred, negotiated, and exorcised, and this reading of the

body of Antonius as transgressive predates the Antonian/Augustan

propaganda war by around a decade through Cicero’s Philippics. To

understand the Antony- icon as a politico- cultural construct, there-

fore, it is necessary to understand the mechanics of Roman political

invective.

That the charges against Antonius remain relatively stable across

his political career may well indicate a proclivity toward bodily and

fiscal excess, but it is important to understand the centrality of gen-

dered mores of behaviour on Roman sociopolitical discourse before

accepting the Ciceronian or Augustan model unproblematically. The

conflation of the masculine with the public sphere— and its inverse,

the feminine with the private sphere— is critical in unpacking the key


Virility and Licentiousness in Rome’s Mark Antony (2005– 7) 197

characteristics that have been used to define the Antony- icon in popu-

lar cultural representations. These are as follows:

• alcohol abuse

• licentiousness

• tearful despair

• consuming love

• feminized dress

• political inability

• the abandonment of Roman duty

• quasisociopathic behaviour

• the absence of his children from the narrative

• the infantilization of his character

• a narrative structure that allots equal run- time to both Caesar’s

and Antony’s affairs with Cleopatra

• Antony presented as a gift to Cleopatra

• the positioning of other male characters, often rivals to

Cleopatra’s affections, as the embodiment of appropriate

masculinity that is above reproach1

While the final six items may be considered modern revisions to the

Antony- icon, correlative to the standard tropology and expanding on

established mythology in a manner that contemporizes the figure for

the screen age, the first seven represent direct projections of Roman

gendered invective into twentieth and twenty- first narratives.2 These

reflect the rhetorical devices of incontinentia (lack of self- control) and

mollitia (feminized behaviour), widely employed within Roman ora-

tory but problematically mapped onto modern Western discourse. In

much the same way as contemporary pejoratives make heavy use of

metaphor that relies on cultural familiarity with the trope for it to

be comprehensible (the literal meaning of invective such as “limp-

wristed” or “brown nosing” bears no direct referent to its subject

matter or the implied accusation), so accusations of alcoholic or sex-

ual excess, decadence, and emotionality are marked within Roman

discourse as belonging to a defined and readily interpolated system

of allegory, but one that has not survived antiquity along with the

narratives it presents. In other words, when Cicero accuses Antonius

of being “a drink- sodden, sex- ridden wreck” (Philippic 2.3),3 it may

be that he refers to behaviour that is commonly known in Rome;

however, it may equally refer to a complex system of metaphor and

allegory, designed to position Antonius as unfit to rule, and under-

stood as such to his intended audience.


Rachael Kelly198

Since Roman political invective operates in the gendered, public/

masculine, private/feminine dichotomy, it is unsurprising that ideo-

logically motivated attacks on Antonius as politician have sought to

conflate his persona with a deficient performance of masculinity—

such a charge is a tacit accusation that he is unfit to operate in the

public sphere. Mollitia and incontinentia operate by othering the

male, and they do so in a manner that is at the same time familiar

enough to modern discourse to allow us to believe that we under-

stand the mechanisms at work but operating within a rhetorical

framework that translates poorly from antiquity despite— or, rather,

more precisely because— it superficially accords with known behav-

iours. When Cicero accuses Caesar of scratching his head with one

finger and suggests that this is enough to ameliorate his threat to the

Roman Republic,4 the reference is sufficiently obscure that a modern

reader requires some form of explanation to render it comprehensible

as an expression of incontinentia, and thus we are able to align it

with rhetoric and treat it with caution in terms of historiographical

fact. Yet when Cicero accuses Antony of hosting regular orgies in his

home (Philippic 2.3) or being “always drunk” (Philippic 5.9), it is

possible to map these behaviours onto the modern body and there-

fore understand the accusations as literal. This does not discount the

possibility that they have some basis in historical fact, but it problema-

tizes this assumption. However, this semantic disconnect has been the

foundation of Antony’s mythology, and it has allowed the excessive

behaviour of Ciceronian invective to become possibly the defining

characteristic of the Antony- icon.

Virility vs. Licentiousness

There is clearly a difficulty inherent in positioning sexual excess as

a marker of deficient masculinity, given the considerable overlap

between virility (a word that shares an etymological root with virtue and which is derived from the Latin word vir, meaning “manliness”)

and licentiousness, which is negatively coded in terms of signifying

appropriate masculine performance. Moreover, the trope only gradu-

ally becomes prominent in Antony’s screen narratives, certainly as a

result of the constraints imposed on earlier texts in terms of the degree

of sexualized behaviour that could be portrayed onscreen under the

Hays Code. While reference is occasionally made to Antony’s sexual

appetites, this is generally oblique and his excess is much more fre-

quently depicted as manifesting itself through alcohol consumption

and/or extravagance.



Twenty- first century texts, however, not only foreground licen-

tious behaviour but also mark a discursive break in their positioning of

Antony’s deficiencies. The film Cleopatra (1999) follows the tropology

of the feminized Antony, yet by Augustus (2002), Antony’s subhege-

monic performance is conceived of as stemming from a pathologized,

overdetermined hypermasculinity, suggesting a paradigm shift in the

boundaries of the hegemonic male. I have elsewhere attributed this shift

to the increasingly interrogative nature of masculinity studies over the

past several decades and its problematization of traditional ideals of mas-

culinity.5 What might once have been coded feminine/nonmasculine

(e.g., emotional expressivity) is lately afforded a degree of ambiguity:

in moderation, indeed, “manly emotion”6 is used to signify appropriate

masculinity, where emotional inexpressivity is used to define masculine

deficiency. This clearly further confuses the semantic division between

positive and nonpositive sexual behaviour— virility, an ephemeral con-

struct to begin with, is now subject to the same interrogative scrutiny

as any other conventional trope of idealized masculinity.

How, then, do we distinguish between positively and negatively

coded sexual behaviour? For the purposes of this study, I have defined

licentiousness as excessive sexual desire that is not reciprocated by its

object, to include both nonconsensual sexual intercourse and com-

mercial transactions with prostitutes. The desire is coded as excessive

under a similar discursive structure to that which informs incontinen-tia: it is entirely of the body, and it is of a body that is not subject to

self- governance. In Freudian terms, it is id- driven, without the con-

straints of the ego or super- ego. The virile body, on the other hand,

according to Kelly Oliver, “becomes a representative of control and

power. It is an antibody insofar as its virility defies the uncontrollable

passions and flows of the body. It is the body that represents the over-

coming of boy. The virile body is the symbol of manliness; manliness

is associated with culture; culture is associated with overcoming the

body.”7 As I will show, the chaotic exhibition of sexual desire exhib-

ited by Rome’s Mark Antony very neatly bounds this definition of the

nonvirile.

Bounding the Hegemonic Male

While the boundaries of hegemonic masculinity may be fluid and sub-

ject to sociohistorical pressures, its central tropology remains remark-

ably stable. Regardless of the varying weight given to distinct signifiers

according to the historical and cultural moment, the components of

the masculine ideal continue to conform, broadly, to the warrior- hero


Rachael Kelly200

archetype. Brett Carroll describes it as follows: “The hero projects

strength, virility, control, power and dominance . . . It has historically

been used to create social and cultural norms of manhood, defined

by characteristics of race (white), class (wealthy), and physical stature

(grand). All of these traits exist in art as ideals of the form to which

men of all backgrounds should aspire.”8 The key word is “aspire”: this

is a model of masculinity that is generally not achievable in any prac-

ticable sense. Furthermore, it is not necessarily an ideal of masculinity

to which all men will aspire: poststructuralist work on the nature of

masculinity has exploded the myth of masculinity as a single, coherent,

stable entity in favor of a spectrum of available subject positions that

allow for race, sexual orientation, or differential readings of the ideal.

It is, however, the very nature of hegemony to elide the plural and

assume the singular; to appear, as Mike Donaldson says, “ ‘natural,’

‘ordinary,’ ‘normal’.”9 The permanence of the warrior- hero archetype

is partly due to its ability, through its ubiquity, to appear invisible.

It should be noted that Carroll’s “social and cultural norms of

manhood” include physical and social characteristics that Antony

shares with the hegemonic male: “race (white), class (wealthy), and

physical stature (grand).” This does not serve to negate his deficien-

cies, however, but instead underlines them. The Antony- icon is not

designed to be explicitly rejected, but rather to be a source of unset-

tling identification: were he completely Other, his body could not

be appropriated for the negotiation of anxieties that trouble Us. The

nature of the hegemonic is that it is denied to Them; therefore, in

order for Antony to embody the deficient, it must be at least within

the boundaries of possibility that the hegemonic is available to him

yet precluded by his failure to perform masculinity to the required

standard. If we take Bruce R. Smith’s continuum of identification

as our guide, we are required to see the process of identification/

disidentification as a question of perspective: “To understand mascu-

linity in terms of others, we need to consider two distinct situations:

one in which masculinity is defined vis- à- vis various opposites and one

in which masculinity is experienced as a kind of merging or fusion of

self with others. We need to understand, not just the ‘not me,’ but

the ‘partly me’ and the ‘other mine.’ ”10 Antony may best be described

as a kind of troubling ‘partly me’— attractive, enjoyable (as demon-

strated, at least in part, by his central role in most narratives in which

he features, and the fact that he is almost without exception played by

the male box- office star of the text)— but critically, seriously flawed.



Licentiousness and Fatherhood

Screen fatherhood is a contested, contentious site for the negotiation

of masculine performance and, as such, is available to a wide range of

semantic interpretation. There are, therefore, multiple available read-

ings of the performance of fatherhood within Rome. It is possible, for

example, to align it with the performance of political power, so that

failed fatherhood becomes symbolic of corruption within the public

sphere, and this is unquestionably a reading that applies to Antony

within the second season of the series. However, my primary con-

cern here is the implication of a discourse of fatherhood on reading

Antony’s excessive sexual behaviour within the text and using this to

trace, interrogate, and analyze a paradigm shift in the rhetoric of viril-

ity versus licentiousness.

“Possibly the quintessential virile subject is the figure of the patriar-

chal father,” according to Oliver. “He has proven his virility through

his paternity and he takes on the control of himself and his family.”11

She continues, “It is the power associated with traditional paternal

authority that makes the father’s body and his phallus/penis repre-

sent power and authority . . . Paradoxically, the ultimate virility of

this masculine power is the sublimation of aggressive sex drives into

productive and reproductive social economy. Aggressive instincts turn

inward to aggress the self; this becomes self- control.”12

The man who does not sublimate his sexuality into the virility of

the father, therefore, is a man who has not learned to contain the

urges of the body; he is, by definition, not a man in the adult, socio-

cultural sense.

Historically, Marcus Antonius had at least eight children— one by

his first wife Antonia, three by Cleopatra, two by Octavia, and another

two by Fulvia. However, before the production of Augustus (2002),

they were conspicuous by their screen absence. Antony is childless

in De Mille’s Cleopatra (1934), Serpent of the Nile (1953), Mankie-

wicz’s Cleopatra (1963), and Roddam’s Cleopatra (1999). Augustus (2002) is confused in its rendering, apparently suggesting that Iullus

Antonius, the only child of Antony depicted onscreen, is the son of

Antony and Cleopatra (he was in fact his second son by Fulvia); how-

ever, after this inauspicious start, the HBO- BBC series Rome finds

him three times a father, with two of his children by Cleopatra and

one by Octavia shown onscreen (although the narrative suggests that

it is equally likely that paternity of Octavia’s child belongs to Marcus

Agrippa). Given the close semantic connections between concepts of


Rachael Kelly202

fatherhood and virility, the significance of Antony’s children— or their

absence— to his narrative cannot be ignored.

The omission of Antony’s children from the earlier narratives is

somewhat easier to unpack: it poses a clear challenge to his masculin-

ity, by challenging his sexual potency— not least in those narratives

that oppose his apparent childlessness with the regular (although

not ubiquitous) appearance of Caesarion, Cleopatra’s son by Caesar.

Consider, for example, Cleopatra (1963): discussing Brutus, Cleopa-

tra muses, “You’ve spared his life more than once. People say it is

because Brutus is your son.” Caesar replies, “I have no son,” but the

scene unequivocally situates responsibility for his lack of heirs with

his wife, Calpurnia. Cleopatra then discusses her own fertility: “I am

the Nile. I will bear many sons . . . My breasts are filled with love and

life. My hips are rounded and well apart. Such women, they say, have

sons,” and, true to her word, two scenes later she is carrying Caesar’s

child. Not only has Caesar demonstrated his own potency, by displac-

ing his childlessness onto his wife and by impregnating his fecund

mistress, but, by implication, Cleopatra’s own fertility is evidenced in

the production of a son— provided her partner is similarly fertile. Yet

Antony’s potency is simply never discussed. There is no equivalent

discussion of his own progeny (which are omitted from the film), and

Cleopatra, who was destined to “bear many sons,” conceives no fur-

ther children with Antony. Fertility has been mobilized as a signifier

of equivalent performances of masculinity.

Oliver’s concept of the virile antibody notwithstanding for the

moment, virility, in overly simplistic terms, implies healthy reproduc-

tion, while licentiousness implies pathological behaviour. Sexual excess

that does not lead to reproduction, by this token, is wasted energy,

and a man that indulges in sexual behaviour to excess and does not

father a single child is emasculated in principle.

However, while this is certainly a major factor in accounting for

Antony’s childlessness, it does not address the question of why his

sexual excess is allowed to recuperate the progenerative discourse

in the twenty- first century, particularly given the fact that his sexual

excess is more foregrounded in these texts. To understand the shift

from nonprogenerative to progenerative licentiousness, it is necessary

to look more closely at the semiological positioning of screen father-

hood in general.

There are a number of angles from which we can approach an expla-

nation, both for the absence and the presence of Antony’s children,

which are, paradoxical as it may seem, both aspects of the same marker

of deficiency. At the simplest level, the omission of Antony’s children



from the narrative is in part a dictate of the expediency demanded by the

standard two- act structure adopted by most of these texts, which appor-

tions equal or greater run- time to the Caesar/Cleopatra affair (which

lasted 4 years) and the Antony/Cleopatra affair (which lasted 11).

No great mathematical skill is required to determine that an equal

division of narrative space to two grossly unequal periods of time will

necessarily privilege Caesar’s position and prejudice Antony’s. Even

Rome, which foregrounds neither affair and focuses instead on the

major Roman players, can be roughly divided into Caesar (Season 1)

and Antony (Season 2), although admittedly this employs a differ-

ent logic in the subdivision. In fact, Season 2 of Rome, which covers

the years 44 to 30 B.C., expands the years 44 to 41 B.C. over eight

episodes, which leaves Antony and Cleopatra’s 11- year affair only the

final two episodes to play out.13

The meaning and connotative implication of the word father has

been subject to significant interrogation and negotiation as masculine

sociology has sought to reposition the male within a contested gen-

der framework. Antony’s changing status as father (or not- father),

therefore, comes invested with a huge semiological significance.

Furthermore, since the ability to draw connotative meaning from

Antony’s childlessness is entirely dependent on audience familiar-

ity with his historical status as father— and particularly his superior

progenerative capacity vis- à- vis Caesar— this discourse of Antony as

not- father remains, for the most part, entirely covert.

I have argued that excessive desire is bound up with a discourse of

loss- of- masculinity, through the projection of the Roman concept of

incontinentia. By examining Aristotelian theories of reason and posi-

tioning them alongside the associated “paradox of love,” Oliver shows

that society— culture, the mark of the masculine body— is essentially

divorced from the biological sexual urge. “The identification of sex

and nature leads to the philosophical notion of Eros as disembodied

reason rather than embodied passion,” she says. “Eros is opposed to

sex just as mind is opposed to body.”14 It is this idea of the separa-

tion of reason and passion, the disembodied Eros, that informs the

construct of the patriarchal father: “Even when he is present in the

lives of his children, the father is present as an abstraction; his body is

merely the representative of abstract authority or law. The association

between father and culture, and the opposition between nature and

culture or body and mind, disembodies the father. His body must be

evacuated to maintain images of his association with culture against

nature. From Plato to Arnold Schwarzenegger, paternal Eros has been

figured as virility.”15


Rachael Kelly204

Oliver specifically situates the construct of the father as an abstraction

outside of the body and, by extension, outside of sexual desire. Sexual

desire is necessary, of course, for procreation; however, that desire, in

configuring the father, is situated outside of virility, which exists con-

current with, but evacuated of, bodily urges. By associating virility and

fatherhood in this way, I would argue that Antony’s status as nonfather

is made nonmasculine through both his implied lack of sexual potency

and by the fact that the sexual behaviour that flags his lack of potency

is excessive. Both markers serve to reinforce and legitimate each other,

and thus the omission of Antony’s children from the narrative funda-

mentally underscores his deficient performance of masculinity.

Counterintuitive as it may seem, however, this dynamic also feeds

into the mechanism by which Antony- as- father is positioned as defi-

cient. I have already argued that licentiousness is differentiated from

virility through a discourse of containability— where the expression of

sexual desire is entirely of the body, it is broadly pathologized; where

it is subject to rational, cultural control, it may be termed virile. Rome, being deliberately provocative and boundary- pushing, abounds with

instances of sexuality as marker of gender performance: Octavian’s

sadomasochism, Pullo’s habitual use of prostitutes, Vorenus’s awkward

attempts at lovemaking with his wife Niobe before his recuperative arc

begins. However— and this is critical— very little of the copious sexual

congress within either season is reproductive: in total, four children

are born within the 22 year period covered by the two series (52 to

30 B.C.), and three of these children are either explicitly or potentially

Antony’s. The other child is Caesarion. The use of sex- as- spectacle in

the series is complex and fascinating, interrogating modern notions of

sexuality and nudity by mapping them onto the bodies of the Roman

players in order to illustrate the disconnect between Then and Now

in a manner that evokes Catharine Edwards assertion, “To examine

sexual attitudes in the ancient world with the intention of determin-

ing whether ‘they’ were more liberated than ‘us,’ is to neglect the fact

that ‘their’ preoccupations were quite different from ‘ours.’ ”16 This is,

however, outside the scope of this study. For the purposes of the present

discussion it should be noted that where frequent sexual congress leads

only infrequently to reproduction, we must acknowledge that the pro-

duction of children, where it occurs, fulfils a specific narrative function.

Stephanie Shields points to an emerging discourse of fatherhood

that may suggest a rationale behind the sudden emergence of Anto-

ny’s children into his screen narrative. She defines the model of the

“New Father” as an idealized paradigm of paternal performativity:

“The new nurturant father, today a fixture of the lifestyle section of



the newspaper and films and TV, is portrayed as offering emotional

support to mom so that she can be a happier and more effective care-

giver, but also and more importantly, he interacts directly with the

children in caregiving and in play and emotional support.”17

With this in mind, it is useful to contrast two possible models of

fatherhood on display in Rome: Antony’s, carrying with it a discourse

of masculine deficiency, and Vorenus’s, with its discourse of hege-

monic masculinity, albeit qualified. Vorenus is identified in large part

by his construction as father and his desire to perform the idealized

family man; indeed, considerable screen time in the first season is

devoted to his efforts to rise above his limitations and to learn how

to meet not only the fiscal but specifically the emotional needs of

his wife and children. His primary motivational concern is repeatedly

articulated as the welfare of his family. After Niobe’s death, this con-

cern is transmuted to a purely paternal anxiety, initially configured as

his retributive murder of Erastes Fulmen, and later his rescue of his

children from slavery and his efforts to rehabilitate them into norma-

tive family life.

It should be noted that, under the model of the New Father, father-hood, as a signifier of virility, is held in higher esteem than physical fact

of fathering a child. It is notable, therefore, that Vorenus, once his

character arc has situated him more reliably along the paradigm, is

driven to defend not only his own children but the illegitimate son of

his dead wife, and also the child Caesarion, whose defense costs Vore-

nus his life. Moreover, this is the theme that unites the progenerative

and nonprogenerative Antonies: for it is through his performance of

fatherhood that the progenerative Antony manifests his lack of virility.

Consider the construction of Antony’s paternity: his fertility is

well attested within the second series, fathering Cleopatra’s twins and

(potentially) Octavia’s daughter and acting as a presumptive stepfa-

ther to Octavian and Octavia throughout the first and for part of the

second season. However, each paternal or quasipaternal relationship is

intensely problematic. In terms of Atia’s children, Antony’s ahistorical

status as her lover introduces a quasi- Oedipal structure to his political

dispute with Octavian in the second season, which culminates in a bru-

tal fight between the adult Antony and the young Octavian (still played

at this point by a teenage Max Pirkis). What begins as an argument

between Antony and Octavian very quickly descends into a vicious

assault by Antony, which, but for the intervention of Atia and Octavia,

would certainly have resulted in Octavian’s death. As Octavian lies,

wounded and barely able to move, Atia drags Antony out of the room

while he screams, “You’re lucky you’re breathing!” (Episode 2.2).


Rachael Kelly206

Likewise, although it is manifest that Octavia does not consider Ant-

ony a father figure (nor does Antony exhibit any paternal affection

for Octavia), their wedding night scene cannot help but encourage a

discourse of inappropriate sexual desire, as Antony apparently cannot

resist the urge to have sex with his lover’s daughter (Episode 2.7).

However, it is with regards to his biological children that the

discourse of Antony as Inappropriate Father is most apparent. His

abandonment of Octavia’s daughter recalls the rhetoric of the “dead-

beat dad” who assumes neither financial nor emotional investment in

his child’s life. Octavia is pregnant when Antony leaves Rome, and

the implication in the text is that he never meets his daughter, who

is shown onscreen in the final episode as a child of four or five years

at the time of her father’s death. Likewise, his twins by Cleopatra are

shown onscreen as small children, barely more than toddlers. They

enter Antony and Cleopatra’s private quarters shortly after Antony

has thrown himself face first onto a day bed in the middle of the room,

complaining of tiredness. While Cleopatra fusses indulgently over the

children, Antony acknowledges their presence with an irritable sigh

and does not lift his head to look at them.

The appearance of the twins serves no narrative purpose besides

establishing their existence, and they are not seen again onscreen

until Antony is dead and Cleopatra has decided to send them out of

Alexandria for their safety. As such, we must conclude that they are

introduced to the scene purely to allow Cleopatra to identify Antony

as their father and for him to exhibit no interest in them. He is the

Figure 14.1 Antony (James Purefoy) ignores his twin children by Cleopatra

(Lyndsey Marshal) in Rome (2007). HBO- BBC.



manifestation of what Ralph LaRossa calls “the functionally absent

father”:18 one who is physically present in the family home, but openly

disengaged from his children.

Recall that Oliver argues “the quintessential virile subject is the fig-

ure of the patriarchal father,” who “has proven his virility through his

paternity and . . . takes on the control of himself and his family.”19 It is

no longer enough to signify virility simply as the fathering of children

in the abstract sense; virility, under the new paradigm, is configured as

responsible fatherhood. It is therefore entirely unsurprising that Ant-

ony’s excess should now manifest itself in the production of children

in whom he has no interest. It is, as I argue above, complementary to

the original paradigm in which Antony’s sexual drive was excessive but

nonprocreational; where his lack of virility was previously signified by

the failure of his sexual excess to produce the hegemonic nuclear fam-

ily,20 it is now signified by his failure to assume his position as father

to the family he produces. Indicative of changing norms of behaviour

and the decreased emphasis on male fertility as signifier of masculinity,

it is the logical consequence of Shields’s paradigm of the New Father

as “a public symbol of caregiving as reflecting a progressive set of

values” that Antony’s licentious behaviour must now be configured

as progenerative in order to perpetuate his deficient performance of

masculinity through his deficient performance of virility.

Conclusion: The Male Body

and the Male Gaze

I have attempted to position the discourse of licentiousness as signi-

fier of deficient masculinity along a continuum of anxiety surround-

ing masculine performance and to suggest that Antony’s exhibition

of sexual desire in his screen narratives marks him as nonhegemonic,

thereby continuing a tradition of embodying him with containable

and exorcisable patriarchal anxiety. I want to conclude by discussing

the configuration of his sexual availability in terms of Mulvey’s notion

of the male gaze.

Part of the genre tropology of the historical epic is the display of

the male body, and much scholarly work has focused on interrogat-

ing the methods by which the implied homoeroticism of masculine

display is negotiated and elided for a presumed male audience. Wil-

liam Fitzgerald, for example, discusses the “unquiet pleasure” of the

male gaze and argues, “the male look at the male body must be moti-

vated in such a way that its erotic component is repressed, hence the

sadism and violence connected with many of the scenes in which the


Rachael Kelly208

male body is displayed.”21 It is notable that neither of Fitzgerald’s

suggested mechanisms for diffusing the homoerotic in the historical

epic— displaying the male body engaged in action, most usually vio-

lent action, or causing it to suffer— is applied to the regular display of

Antony’s body. Indeed, Rome presents him explicitly and unreserv-

edly to the gaze: in addition to repeatedly depicting Antony naked

and engaged in coitus, a sequence early in Season 1 (Episode 1.4) has

Antony stand, fully naked, for consumption both by the nondiegetic

audience and by Vorenus, who is obliged to witness his naked body

with evident discomfort.

Recent discussions around female awareness of sexual objectifica-

tion and a presumed mitigation of the power of the gaze may seem

to bear little relevance to a specifically male display. However, this is

a discursive theme that is repeatedly evidenced within Rome, which

makes heavy use of the body as spectacle. Most frequently, it is the

female body on display, and female full- frontal nudity abounds, gener-

ally accompanied by a putative discourse of sexual- availability- as- power

that the narrative nevertheless covertly undermines: for example,

Cleopatra’s sexualized political maneuvering in Episode 1.8, which is

invested with a rhetoric of betrayal/duplicity through the audience’s

privileged knowledge of her prior liaison with Pullo and the probable

paternity of any child she attributes to Caesar. When male full- frontal

nudity is featured, then, it cannot help but reference this long- standing

notion of the gaze, and, indeed, it is generally accompanied by notions

of powerlessness and objectification; note, for example, the naked slave

that Atia sends as a gift to Servilia (Episode 1.6).

Where Antony clearly believes that the power rests with him in

his full- frontal nudity, he is referencing a recent debate within femi-

nist media theory that examines the widespread cultural awareness of

notions of female objectivity and reasons that by knowingly manipu-

lating their own objectification, the female object of the gaze inverts

the power dynamic and controls the gaze herself. Scholars such as

Rosalind Gill and Angela McRobbie have disputed this notion, argu-

ing that this is in fact a covert way of forcing the object of the gaze

to actively collude with their objectification.22 It is possible to extend

this analysis to Antony’s full- frontal display in Rome: by giving him no

mechanism by which to disavow the homoeroticism manifest in his

nakedness, he is given no opportunity to reclaim the gaze. This is, of

course, only one way of reading this sequence; however, I would argue

that by investing him in the implicitly female position as object, his

masculinity is fundamentally elided, and, as not- masculine, his bodily

display cannot be read as virile. It is simply another manifestation of



bodily excess as licentiousness, and licentiousness as deficient mas-

culine performativity. In the twenty- first- century screen text, Antony

as never before validates Cicero’s description of him as a “sex- ridden

wreck” (Philippic 2.3).

Notes

1. Kelly (2009) 4.

2. Kelly (2009) 4.

3. Translations of Cicero are from Grant (1971).

4. Cited in Edwards (1993) 81.

5. Kelly (2009).

6. Shields (2002) 126.

7. Oliver (1997) 128.

8. Carroll (2003) 33.

9. Donaldson (1993) 645.

10. Smith (2000) 104.

11. Oliver (1997) 162.

12. Oliver (1997) 168.

13. This was less an active narrative decision, however, than the result of

the decision by HBO to cancel the series while Bruno Heller, one of

the show’s creators, was “halfway through writing the second season.”

Heller states that his original intent was to end Season 2 with the death

of Brutus and set Seasons 3 and 4 in Egypt, which, assuming Season 4

was to end with Antony’s death, would have made it the first of these

texts to actively correct the two- act structural paradigm: see Hibberd

(2008).

14. Oliver (1997) 4.

15. Oliver (1997) 5.

16. Edwards (1993) 66

17. Shields (2002) 131.

18. LaRossa (1997) 133.

19. Oliver (1997) 162.

20. For a discussion of the critical importance of paternity in signifying

hegemonic adult masculinity in the postwar period (which informs

Cleopatra, 1963), see Tyler May (1997).

21. Fitzgerald (2001) 37.

22. See Gill (2007) and McRobbie (2009).


4

C h a p t e r 1 5

Love, Rebellion, and Cleavage

Boadicea’s Hammered Breastpl ate

in The Viking Queen (1967)

Alison Futrell

Hammer Studios, perhaps best known for its wildly successful, low-

budget horror movies of the 1950s and 1960s, released a number of

revisionist presentations of the past, including She (1965), One Mil-lion Years B.C. (1967), and Prehistoric Women (1967). These alter-

native histories were visions of female domination: titillating, but

not directly threatening, located as they were in a distant past or a

“forgotten” corner of the earth. The female leadership featured in

these productions was also flawed in certain key ways, be it by fatal

misunderstanding of authority, transgression of human limitations, or

the pursuit of “forbidden” pleasures, “forbidden” power. The Viking

Queen (1967) follows in this tradition, drawing on the Romano-

British past to reshape events of the Boudiccan Revolt of A.D. 61.

In this retelling, however, male structures of power are problema-

tized; the rebel queen is a model of duty and moral insight, guided

by selfless love for her people and her family and deferring romantic

happiness. Even so, the strength of her family ties and her sense of

community responsibility, features traditionally gendered as female,

inevitably doom the queen to death and (cinematic) historical failure.

The Viking Queen fits into the pattern of representation frequently

followed by the “barbarian queen” archetype, in which prominent

female opponents of empire, familiar from the Roman historical tradi-

tion, are reworked in subsequent cultural practices to accommodate


Alison Futrell212

contemporary normatives of gender and power. Characterized as

“Vamps” by the twentieth century, these evil exotic queens routinely

deployed their feminine wiles to sinister purpose, seducing agents

of civilization into lives of dissipation but ultimately meeting a well-

deserved doom. Boudicca, however, represents something of a special

case within the “barbarian queen” group because of her centrality

in British discourses of nation and empire. The more typical hos-

tile depiction that downplays political competence and emphasizes

gendered flaws is complicated by the effort to reconcile Boudicca’s

authority as an essential Briton with her likewise essential cultural and

gendered differences.

Boudicca’s Revolt

In A.D. 61, a major rebellion rocked one of Rome’s more distant

provinces.1 In the generation following formal conquest, Britannia

had experienced the changes that typically accompanied absorption by

Rome.2 Tribute demands had been an unwelcome fact of imperial life,

and financial stress was ratcheted up further by loans from imperial

lenders to pay for lifestyle adjustments to conform to Roman expecta-

tions. Local disarmament and a permanent Roman military presence

likewise jolted the warrior elites of British society, even among the

peripheral client kingdoms that retained their nominal autonomy. A

financial panic in Rome in A.D. 59 sent shock waves through the Brit-

ish economy, as lenders started to call in provincial loans. In A.D. 60,

Britannia’s governor launched an attack on the island of Mona, a

center for druidic priests active through much of the imperial West.

In the wake of these tensions, the death of Prasutagus, king of the

Iceni tribe, opened new uncertainty: Prasutagus was survived only by

his widow, Boudicca, and two daughters, lacking an adult son with

whom the Roman administration could comfortably negotiate. The

king’s will designated that his property should be shared between

the emperor, Nero, and the royal daughters. The imperial procura-

tor, however, took this opportunity to absorb Iceni territory into the

Roman province, a viable option by Roman terms; indeed, he took

it a step further: all property was to be assessed by Rome.3 Meeting

with resistance, Roman administrators secured their objectives bru-

tally, beating the royal widow and raping Prasutagus’s daughters as

they looted the possessions of Iceni nobles.

The revolt thus catalyzed is in line with other native revolts

described by Tacitus, in which the root problem is corruption in the

Roman center, undermining basic social and political structures and


Love, Rebellion, and Cleavage 213

warping moral standards. The narratives typically feature a charis-

matic leader rising to the fore, here Boudicca, queen of the Iceni,

who like her Tacitean parallels gives stirring speeches that highlight

British adherence to essential virtues, to freedom, in stark contrast to

Roman imperial corruption.4 Tacitus crafts these set pieces as lessons

about morality and power for a Roman readership, lessons coming

from the “barbarian” periphery but meant “to reach all the nations.”5

Boudicca’s message likewise reaches beyond the Iceni, as the revolt

spreads to sweep up tens of thousands of resentful Britons, outraged

at Roman greed and abuse.

Initially the rebels enjoy some alarming success: three Roman cen-

ters are looted and as many as seventy thousand Roman settlers and

colonists are killed. In the Tacitean narrative the “noble” barbarians

soon revert to type; skittering wildly over the countryside, they take

savage vengeance on Roman victims. This is in contrast to the imperial

legions, who return from Mona with newfound self- control. The gov-

ernor recovers his Roman voice, stirring the legions with reminders

of manly Roman discipline, and then leads them to victory over the

British rebels. Boudicca, the voice of ancient virtue, dies.

Building Boadicea

The memory of Boudicca, or (as she was later known) Boadicea,6 was

resurrected on the British archipelago in the early modern period, in

the wake of Renaissance recoveries of classical tradition. This coin-

cided with efforts to create a specifically “British” political identity that

reflected the unification and ambition of the island empire.7 Building

on a perceived shared past, writers and artists crafted new narratives of

the pre- and post- Roman period, inhabited by core ancestors whose

innate love of freedom burned in their ancient patriot hearts, firing

their resistance to foreign overlords. At the same time, there were

tensions inherent in this creation of nation: Boadicea and her cohort

of freedom fighters were not resisting ordinary invaders but Romans,

primary carriers of civilization in Europe and quintessential Imperi-

alists, a troubling stance to memorialize at a time of British impe-

rial aspiration. Boadicea is thus problematic: a hero of the imagined

nation, but also an ignorant savage and a bloody- minded, ruthless

woman. Nevertheless, she becomes part of the canon of founding

heroes that includes Caratacus, Calgacus, and Julius Caesar.

Literary and theatrical reworkings of the rebellion focus on gender

as a crucial dynamic. British treatments of Boadicea as early as Raphael

Holinshed (Chronicles of England, 1577) downplay her political


Alison Futrell214

authority and present the rebellion as a solely female “domestic”

affair, its aftermath allowing the alliance of Roman and British states-

men. In the Jacobean period, her sex undermines her military control;

in John Fletcher’s play Bonduca (1609), she is shortsighted and reck-

less, unable to restrain her savage subordinates, unable to compete

against Roman legionary discipline. Caratach, Bonduca’s cousin and

general, links femininity and failure when he articulates his regret that

the “divell”- driven woman ever left her home and spinning wheel.8

Male Britons, like Caratach (an invented character), assume the char-

ismatic leadership highlighted in Tacitus, leaving to the queen the

wildness that resists the Roman yoke, along with the femininity that

requires domestication. Fletcher’s play enjoyed generations of revival

and other artists adopted his habits of segmentation to deal with the

tensions inherent in this founding mother.

A patterned iconography develops around these national origins.9

Specific attributes of Boadicea become signifiers, including scythed

chariot wheels added to her conveyance; in Francis Heyman’s illustra-

tion for a 1757 Complete History of England, Boadicea has a driver for

her scythed chariot, leaving her free for rhetorical gesticulation toward

the mistletoe- bearing druids that accompany her. As a 1908 mascot

for the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, Boadicea is

purely emblematic, depicted on a parade banner as a disembodied

scythed chariot wheel framed by swords and sprigs of mistletoe.10

Boadicea’s breastplate originated seemingly in Romantic- era bare-

breasted depictions of the barbarian queen, as she appears in Henry

Courtney Selous’s winning entry for the 1843 design competition

for the new House of Parliament.11 By the early twentieth century,

Boadicea’s association with national origins had created a leakage

with “Britannia” and similar warrior maiden personifications, whose

breastplates molded on the female form likewise drew on operatic

costuming traditions. Village pageants regularly featured Boadicea,

sporting decorative, bejeweled, feminized cuirasses. By the late-

twentieth century, the breastplate was iconic for Boadicea, a favored

mascot of special beer production runs as well as the frenemy of Xena: Warrior Princess.12

Hammer History

In the mid- 1960s, Hammer Studios, the “studio built on blood,”

was looking for new directions to secure continued success for the

Hammer brand. Since the mid- 1950s, Hammer had enjoyed astonish-

ing returns at the box office, due to their resuscitation of the gothic



horror film with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula

(1958). Hammer also strained the sensibilities of the British Board

of Film Censorship (BBFC) with their “graphic” (for contempo-

rary standards) depiction of blood and sexuality.13 The productions

were scorned by critics as “degrading,” “repulsive,” a “nauseating”

trend that would “debase” the medium itself, but a primarily youth-

ful demographic adored them.14 Hammer movies, like other B- grade

films, played into the “camp” sensibility of its teenage audience, which

could find pleasure in the chills- ’n- thrills and the high breast quotient

but at the same time recognize high hilarity value in the exaggeration

of these especially visual features.15 The Hammer corpus was treasured

by fans because of the notoriously fake gore, because of the bosomy

actresses draped around Christopher Lee, and because of all those

penetrating wooden stakes. The films were also, to a certain extent,

subversive, reflecting the growing societal fracture of the times: Ham-

mer horror films did not feature happy endings with hero and damsel

vanquishing the monster.16

Building on this success, Hammer expanded beyond the realm of

horror to give a distinctive touch to the cinematic past. The British

Empire became luridly gothicized, focusing on India’s Thuggee cult

in The Stranglers of Bombay (1960) and nineteenth- century Hong

Kong in Terror of the Tongs (1961). So too a more distant imagined

past: the studio produced a number of films featuring female- centered

narratives built around the “Vamp” paradigm of ancient female lead-

ership, well established by earlier patterns of cultural production.17

She, based on the H. Rider Haggard novel, both seduced and horri-

fied the audience with the regime of She Who Must Be Obeyed. The

beautiful blonde Queen Ayesha, played by Ursula Andress, transcends

mortality, ruling through the centuries in African isolation by depend-

ing on an endless stream of male subjects/slaves whose sacrificial

deaths enable the queen’s evasion of natural law. A startling success

for Hammer studios was their remake of One Million Years B.C., with

its breakout bestselling poster featuring Raquel Welch. The film tells

of tension- filled efforts by inarticulate early humans to reach a sort of

détente, against a backdrop of battling dinosaurs. Brought together

by Luana, the ambassador of love for the blond and more “civilized”

beach tribe, the dark- haired inland Cro- Magnons learn to establish

positive “race” relations. Prehistoric Women, like She, presents a land

that time forgot, subject to female rule. Again using the hair- color- as-

coded- race dichotomy, here one finds a more overtly ruthless queen

deploying sexualized violence to enslave the hapless local blondes,

who thirst for freedom in their relatively ineffectual way. In both She


Alison Futrell216

and Prehistoric Women, the sinister queen attempts to lure the male

protagonist (a “modern” man trapped out of time) into embracing

her regime, literally and ideologically, and becoming a subordinated

consort. In each, the male protagonist realizes that personal physical

pleasure cannot outweigh the moral corruption entailed in yielding to

a politically freighted passion. Female rule is demonstrably flawed and

must be destroyed.

Hammer’s creative methodology, however, presented real obstacles

for creative expansion of the brand.18 Since the 1950s, the British film

industry had been reliant on American film companies for as much

as 95 percent of the production funding. Hammer had consistently

depended on this kind of support— Warner, Columbia, and Seven

Arts all contracted with Hammer— and secured approval by being

risk- averse and working on a very abbreviated schedule. Hammer

would pitch an idea, some possible story points, and an eye- catching

poster, foregrounding the marketing and projecting possible returns,

calculated internationally. Approval was therefore based on a limited

series of images meant to appeal to a certain set of expectations; the

full script only came afterward and was constrained by the selling

points that had secured the financing.

In the case of The Viking Queen, the completed production displays

evidence of high aspirations: the relatively high budget, the lofty polit-

ical ideals of the protagonists.19 This is, however, in tension with how

the movie was sold, both to initial financiers and eventually to film-

goers in the publicity campaign. Posters featured a sword- swinging

woman in a familiar leather bikini, strikingly similar to that worn by

Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C.20 Above her is the Viking

Queen herself in her scythed chariot, likewise posed to enhance her

physical assets, likewise endowed with pointy sword at the upthrust.

Tiny Romans are barely visible underneath the rearing horses, sil-

houetted against a flame- covered backdrop. Text frames the action,

tempting audiences with “sights of savagery and splendor,” including

the “savage rites of the Iceni” and “men roasted alive in the cage of

Hell.” Gendered tensions are sexualized in poster and trailer, as copy

conflates erotic and military conquest. A “temptress turns warrior to

conquer a world of men” even as “an army of men brought her to

her knees, but no one could conquer The Viking Queen.” Indeed, the

very title of the film was doubtless created for international consump-

tion; an audience outside Britain would not necessarily be drawn to

Boadicea, Queen of the Druids (for example), but Vikings were more

of a known commodity.21



Love, Rebellion, and the Breastpl ate

In crafting the Hammer version of the Boudicca narrative, the deci-

sion was made to rework the plot and protagonists considerably to

focus on a love relationship as the main source of dramatic tension.

Further, this would be a romance between young lovers, prior to mar-

riage, instead of the autumnal union between long- married spouses

that sparked events in the historical tradition. This choice falls in line

with standard cinematic presentations of the past: one famous estimate

suggests that some 85 percent of classical Hollywood films present a

heterosexual romantic relationship as the chief plot line.22 How the

love story functions to “cause” cinematic history varies. Sometimes

the private life is in conflict with the historically “real” and mostly

political drives of the character. Sometimes the love story creates

history.23 Having eliminated Boudicca’s status as wife and mother,

Hammer borrowed a King Lear element from elsewhere in British

tradition, making “Priam,” the dying king of the Iceni, the father to

three daughters, one of whom, Salina, he chooses to succeed him as

(Viking) Queen.24

Queenly power is problematized throughout the film, from Sali-

na’s reluctant assumption of authority at her father’s deathbed. Salina

turns to ask the chief royal advisor, “How can I be a queen?” He

responds, “There’s a time to be a queen and a time to be a woman.”

But when? And what differentiates between the two? The dilemma

of separate roles and separate spheres lingers over the cineplay. Sali-

na’s initial response to this advice is presented visually, when she

first emerges from her father’s privy chamber. She has been trans-

formed into a Hammer queen, now wearing the trademark Hammer

nightgown with its familiar plunging décolletage and well- bolstered

cleavage.25 The camera lingers on a series of approving male faces in

the new queen’s court, including that of Justinian, the handsome

young Roman governor.

Salina’s royal bust and Justinian’s approval thereof trigger more

intense cooperation with Rome, but this is a particular relationship

between a masculine Roman governor and a feminine client queen;

Salina assumes a feminized role as subordinate, domesticated chan-

nel for power, reliant on Roman guidance and decision making. The

queen is first and foremost a woman, and her initial political coopera-

tion with Justinian is soon reciprocated in a more personal fashion.

Salina, clad in a furry mini skirt, drives her pretty pastel blue chariot

to the camp of the Romans, ready for perky scenes of flirtatious boar

hunting and chariot racing, sexually charged, like that in Ben- Hur


Alison Futrell218

(1959). A chariot accident lands the pair in a convenient stream.

Romance ensues.

Legitimate authority in The Viking Queen is not, however, entirely

displaced to the male sphere; indeed, many male authority figures

in the film are demonstrably and profoundly flawed. The Romans,

for example, are riven by conflict that stems from competing impe-

rial stances. The opening of the film establishes a particular line of

the problematic. The Ubiquitous Map, a staple of the historical

film, visually places the audience within an imperial context, while

an Authoritative Voice- over emphasizes Roman conquest, asserting

that Imperial administrators are “trained only in the art of Roman

warfare,” that Roman peace relies on constant militarized vigilance,

and that the Britons are a conquered people who must pay tribute to

the Empire. Having established this “historical truth” from the out-

set, any compromise of this stance represents weakness, as is explicitly

articulated by Octavian, subcommander of Roman interests in Britan-

nia, who in the first scene expresses concern about what he regards as

Justinian’s “soft” leadership, his failure to remember that the Roman

sword (one of which he brandishes in emphasis) is what keeps the

peace in Britannia. While Octavian is suspicious of Justinian’s nods to

compromise over provincial self- rule, he is also scornful of the cultural

degradation that he reads in Justinian’s “soft” approach to leadership.

When Justinian disrupts Octavian’s heavy- handedness at a druid ritual

and when he chooses abbreviated civilian togs for a date with Salina,

Justinian does not act “like a Roman soldier.” Justinian has violated

the essential rules of empire as established by the opening voice- over.

It is on this basis that Octavian legitimizes his plotting of a coup with

the overtly disreputable Osiris, an oily and corrupt merchant and

dealer in sexual slaves; Octavian claims to take these sinister measures

in order to reinstate Roman law.

Justinian’s authority, although seemingly balanced and fair, is like-

wise problematic. He asserts that the continued prosperity of the

empire depends on the long- term value of provincial civilians as a

resource. He secures this resource, however, in a fairly calculated

fashion, through demagogic efforts to manipulate the popular will

and contrive the compliance of the Britons; the populist imagery in

his approach overlies a core hostility to the “British savages,” as he

repeatedly labels them. His motivations are also divided. Throughout

the film, his cooperation with British power structures is increasingly

subordinated to his romantic intentions: his plan to marry Salina. To

contemporary viewers of the film, this matrimonial goal validates the

relationship as “honorable” and his feelings as “real”: Salina is not



Justinian’s native concubine. A scene of romantic togetherness in the

British countryside allows Justinian to expand on his plans as the two

cuddle near a picturesque waterfall. His vision of their life together,

however, involves their displacement to a sunny Mediterranean villa by

the sea, where the two of them lie at ease enjoying the wine brought

them by slaves. He thus remodels Salina in their fantasy future, strip-

ping away both her cultural heritage and her political identity, in

order to relocate her in a luxurious nest enabled by the economic

force of Rome.

The British stakeholders of The Viking Queen are likewise flawed, as

is driven home by the representation of native institutions. The druids

are sinister indeed; the introductory voice- over notes that they “held

sway over people’s minds.” In the first scene, Octavian asserts that the

religion is banned in the Empire, that druids preach treason, speak-

ing “against the rule of Nero”; furthermore their rituals are “Filthy!

Disgusting!” In this case, the cineplay tends to support Octavian’s

extremist stance, presenting a range of deliberately chilling druidic

rituals throughout the film. Interestingly, however, it is Maelgan, the

chief druid, who has been remade as the freedom- loving passionate

orator found in Tacitus. Just as clearly that oratory is revealed as dan-

gerous and insincere.26

As represented by Maelgan, druids are doubly treasonous, both

in their vehement invective against Roman oppression and in their

repeated assertions that druids are the rightful rulers of the people,

a claim that seriously undercuts the secular authority of Salina. The

emotive power of Maelgan’s rhetoric is clear even from his first scene,

at the deathbed of King Priam, in which he squeezes every possible

effect from his lines, from overwrought pauses and straining vocal

pitches to the use of frenzied gesture and pounding paralleled phras-

ing. Signs of popular druidism verify the “authentic” Britishness of

this leader, who points to “the sacred mistletoe and the golden sickle”

as guarantors of righteous action. Druidic divination punctuates

the scene, as Maelgan repeatedly references an “ancient” prophecy,

citation of which is scattered throughout the film, beginning with

the summary statement of the opening voice- over. “It is written in

the clouds,” Maelgan tells the dying king and his family, “that you

[Salina] will wear armor! And carry a sword in your right hand!” The

immediate cut to dark clouds above and the clash of thunder, right on

cue, seems to validate the accuracy of druidic divine connection, here

and elsewhere. In the film narrative, therefore, there is visual confir-

mation of genuine connection between druids and the forces in the

universe. It should, however, be noted that, from the preproduction


Alison Futrell220

period, Hammer had played up the presence of “savage rituals” in

The Viking Queen as part of the push- pull draw for the film. In the

realized production, these rituals contain features typical of cinematic

paganism as well as signs from the Boudiccan tradition. The former

plays against the potential appeal of the latter, as Maelgan stage-

manages sinister and threatening ceremonies, representing a real and

immediate danger to the Britons. In true Hammer form, the threat is

explicitly sexualized: Maelgan orders his followers to “make a virgin

sacrifice . . . so that our words shall not go unanswered!” A line of

exotically eye- linered maidens, clad in symbolic white, visibly quails at

this, beginning to perceive that Maelgan may be more perilous than

the Roman overlords, at least to British virgins.

Worse even than druids, however, are the British merchants, like the

oily Osiris. They have been co- opted by empire and have opportunis-

tically compromised their own heritage to take advantage of Roman

benefits. They are parasites on British prosperity, Justinian notes, pri-

marily interested in acquisition of wealth, to be used primarily for the

pleasures of the flesh. Osiris’s corruption is symbolized by his con-

stant accompaniment by a “Nubian slave,” a signifier of dehumanizing

decadence familiar in films about Mediterranean antiquity, here given a

Hammer patina in the body paint, heavy eyeliner, and nudity shielded

just sufficiently for BBFC standards. The exoticism of the emblematic

slave likewise marks Osiris as culturally corrupt, as a Briton who has

abandoned his own heritage for imperial luxuries. The cultural treason

is followed by a political one, as Osiris plays on Octavian’s ambition

and political extremism to launch their conspiracy. Osiris is overtly

motivated by new taxes imposed by Justinian, who notes that the pro-

vincial mercantile class does not pay its fair share. The end goal of

the plot, however, manipulates both Roman and British populations,

imagining a return to militarized imperial domination and the destruc-

tion of British autonomy, to benefit only a menacing few. The final

confirmation of the villainous conspiracy plays out against a backdrop

of fleshly corruption, as Osiris and Octavian, reclining on lush textiles,

are massaged by a crew of naked female slaves. Given the context of

the production, following a wave of disassembly of the British Empire

during the 1960s, the plotline presents a politically interesting rework-

ing of the rebellion of A.D. 61. Here outposts of empire are torn apart

by a conspiracy masterminded by “natives” who have “gone Roman.”

In this scenario, original British freedoms have been destroyed not so

much by the Roman extremists as by the co- opted British nationals.

Where is female authority in this? Salina is represented as by far the

most insightful and moderate ruler on ancient British soil. The dying



Iceni king points to her decisive qualities of tolerance and understanding,

characteristics she uniquely holds that validate his choice of successor.27

Indeed, Salina’s initial uses of royal authority are measured. She ensures

a proper burial for her father, fulfilling her filial duty in accordance with

British tradition, but she takes care that this be done discreetly, privately,

so as not to flout Roman restrictions. Mayhem, however, interrupts

the ceremony, initially created by the lechery and bloodthirstiness of

Maelgan, who insists not just on human sacrifice but the immolation of

near- naked virgins. Salina’s negative reaction is meant to redirect druid

ritual away from these transgressive behaviors, but her efforts to exert

her authority are undermined by an unauthorized Roman raid on the

ceremony, organized on his own initiative by Octavian, who, like Mael-

gan for the British, is resisting the “official” chain of command. In a

rapidly deteriorating hostile situation, Salina’s is the voice of power that

calms the crisis and preempts massacre, initially of the virgins, then of the

entire group of threatened Britons at hand.

Salina prioritizes the obligations of rule to emphasize her responsi-

bility for the needs of her people. Even in the afterglow of a romantic

interlude, Salina urges on an eager Justinian the need for caution and

deliberation. Recognizing that people’s hearts are slow to change, she

counsels discretion; for now, she can be satisfied with only “a little

happiness” rather than risk “dissension” and divisiveness that puts

everyone and everything at risk. Here and elsewhere, Salina tempers

her policy with due respect for the will of the gods, her piety flavored

by prayer and quiet supplication, in stark contrast to fanatical druid

religiosity or the cynicism of the Romans: Justinian complains that

the British gods are “politicians” when Maelgan’s sanction for their

marriage is refused. Salina’s faith, however, is not without politic cir-

cumspection. As the plot starts to unfold, she is the only person to

be suspicious of the confluence of events, intuiting, unlike Justinian,

the presence of “some evil plan” that warrants prudence. Justinian

dismisses her doubts and proceeds blithely ignorant of the conspiracy.

It is notable, however, that Salina’s success as ruler is tightly bound

to her connection with Roman authority. Indeed, throughout the

cineplay, the queen’s “wisdom” is presented as yielding to the will

of others to whom she is obligated, rather than the dynamic action

of her own agency. As the queen’s court listens to petitions of her

subjects, it is Justinian who renders judgments; nominally he confirms

the decisions with Salina, but it is his voice that prevails. As the con-

spiracy plays out and Octavian ratchets up his abuse of the Britons,

Salina, though empathetic to their suffering, remains inert, deferring

action until Justinian’s return, citing not only the Roman alliance but


Alison Futrell222

her father’s policy of peace. Octavian uses the Britons’ dissatisfaction

to legitimize his violent seizure of power. Salina’s just protestations

against this action inspire his literalized abuse of authority, as he rapes

princess Talia and flogs the seminude queen, the latter event presented

onscreen as a public spectacle, the Hammer camera lingering in brutal

eroticism over every lash of the whip.

The first initiative that is purely Salina’s follows in the wake of this

(sexualized) physical violation. As she and her sisters watch the fiery

destruction of the royal home, Salina at last yields to the forces of

destiny, as outlined through druidic (and voice- over) prophecy. “This

land shall run with blood!” she vows, as she takes on at last the iconic

markers of Boadicea.

Gone is the pastel blue pleasure chariot of her romantic idylls. Here

is sword, scythe, and breastplate. More focus shifts to British actions

in the countryside, where fur- covered and woad- blue barbarians enjoy

savage success against the Romans, despite the fact that they’re using

stone weapons and clubs and despite the fact that, as a losing Octa-

vian complains, “They’re only women.” Strength and conviction

of the queen are, however, flavored with a fatalism that eventually

overcomes the catalyzing rage that drove her initial rebellion. Salina

knows that the Britons cannot succeed, but at her final meeting with

Justinian, she refuses to trade her own life, her potential happiness

with Justinian, for the freedom of her people. She cannot ask them to

return to “slave” status under Roman rule. Life cannot be purchased

with liberty.

Figure 15.1 Salina (Carita) takes on the breastplate of Boadicean destiny in The Viking Queen (1967). Twentieth Century Fox.



So Salina deploys the “chariots of death” in a final battle, the

scythe- cam offering moviegoers brief glimpses of dismayed Romans

being mown down by the fearsome blades. The tactical flexibility

of Justinian’s legions, however, soon dooms the rebel efforts and

the British protagonists start to fall. When the queen is captured on

the battlefield, Justinian’s hand stays a fatal blow. Salina faces a final

choice, one that has shaped the presentation of female leadership

throughout the film: will she yield to her love or remain true to her

people? Will she choose life or death? Is she a woman or a queen?

Salina passionately refuses to be “taken to Rome as a slave!”—

a rejection that carries with it a denial of love, life, and, ultimately,

her female gender, as it is framed by the cineplay. Even so, Salina’s

final choice is visualized as an embrace, as she thrusts a Roman sword

between her breasts in a parody of passion. Hammer’s queen then

turns to the cinematic model of Cleopatra (1963); like that great

queen, her final words contrast life’s outcome with her personal,

romantic dream, hinting at the incompatibility of political success

and happiness for female rulers. As in Cleopatra, the camera centers

on the body of the dead queen, and then the still image is converted

to a painted frieze, securing as historically inevitable the sublime ruin

of the Viking Queen.

Notes

1. Ancient accounts can be found in Tacitus’s Agricola 16, 31 and Annals 14.29– 39, and Dio Cassius 62.1– 12.

2. See Hingley and Unwin (2005); Aldhouse- Green (2006); Braund

(1996).

3. This is treated in the ancient narratives as Roman seizure of all Iceni

property, which differs from the census assessment of taxable property

that was standard for new provinces.

4. See Civilis’s leadership of Batavian rebels in Histories 4.12– 37 and

especially Calgacus’s famous speech to the Caledonians in Agricola 31,

with his diatribe against the Roman habit of creating a wasteland and

calling it peace.

5. Annals 14.35.

6. This spelling of the name in modern British contexts is based on a

scribal misreading of Tacitus’s text.

7. By this time, England had incorporated Wales, parts of Ireland, and

Scotland; 1707 saw the formal Treaty of Union.

8. See Hingley and Unwin (2005) 129– 32 and Williams (2009).

9. See Smiles (1994) and Williams (2009).


Alison Futrell224

10. Designed by Mary Lowndes, head of the Artists’ Suffrage League. See

Lowndes’s album housed in the Fawcett Collection at the Women’s

Library in London: 2ASL/11, box 0534. The banner itself is in the

suffrage collection at the Museum of London, acquisition number

81.113/24. See Tickner (1988) 81– 90.

11. See Clarke (1843) 19.

12. See, for example, the postcards for Colchester and for St. Albans 1907

pageant. “Boadicea Ale” is made by the Iceni and the Rother Valley

breweries. Boadicea appeared in Xena: Warrior Princess, Episode 304.

13. Pirie (2008) xv and 67 describes the BBFC’s special rage at Hammer

horrors, demanding script revisions and film edits even to merit the X

certificate, i.e. suitable only for adults over 16. Springhall (2009) notes

that this eventually led to a reconsideration of the BBFC rating system.

14. Critical response from the Tribune, the Observer, and the Sunday Times, quoted in McKay (2007) 17– 18.

15. See Sontag (1964), especially section 29.

16. See McKay (2007) 17– 25, who also makes connections to British cul-

tural traditions in Victorian melodrama and Jacobean staged excess.

See also Coe (1996); Wilson (2007); and Springhall (2009).

17. McKay (2007) 105– 11 points to female- centered plots in Hammer

horror as well, including Frankenstein Created Woman (1967). Con-

temporary US filmmakers, similarly, did not craft ultimately reassuring

tales of female agency; see Hatch (2004).

18. See McKay (2007).

19. Noted by Simpson (2007), who points out that The Viking Queen’s

budget of £350,000 was twice what the studio habitually laid out for

its horror films.

20. Tom Chantrell, Hammer’s mainstay poster artist, worked on the post-

ers for One Million Years B.C., She, and The Viking Queen. See Hearn

(2010).

21. Vikings had appeared recently in Viking Women and the Sea Serpent (1957), The Vikings (1958), Erik the Conqueror (1961), and Last of the Vikings (1961).

22. See Wexman (1993) 3– 16 and Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson

(1985) 5, 16– 17.

23. As seen in both Spartacus (1960) and Spartacus: Blood and Sand

(2010). On how the (invented) domesticity of Spartacus works in stage

and film renditions of the narrative, see Futrell (2001).

24. Shakespeare’s play drew on legendary narratives of pre- Roman Leir,

like those in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae. As

elsewhere in the Boadicea tradition, invented characters with histori-

cally resonant names populate the cineplay: Priam, Octavian, Tiberian,

Tristram, Osiris, and Justinian.

25. See Hearn (2009).



26. A faint trace of the Tacitean Boudicca’s oratory lingers in the public-

ity posters and trailers, where this “warrior woman . . . challenged

men with her courage and taunted them with her flesh”; this may

be a reflection of the prebattle rhetoric in Tacitus Annals 14.35, in

which Boudicca contrasts the resolution of a woman to the servility

of British men.

27. Priam notes that in this she is “like your mother . . . a Viking queen,”

the sole reference in the dialogue to the titular ethnicity.


4

C h a p t e r 1 6

Subverting Sex and Love in

Alejandro Amenábar’s A G O R A (2009)

Joanna Paul

The Hollywood film epic has typically, and usually unapologetically,

been a male genre. Particularly in the 1950s, cinematic narratives of

Greece and Rome concerned themselves above all with the heroic

exploits of soldiers, gladiators, and slaves, with female costars gener-

ally consigned to supporting, stereotypical roles as winsome Christian

maidens or dangerous femmes fatales. With its twenty- first- century

rebirth, it might have seemed that the ancient world epic had finally

caught up with the feminist movement: 300 (2007), for example,

attempted to depict Gorgo, Queen of Sparta, as a “political and sexual

equal” to her husband, Leonidas.1 But in most recent films (and argu-

ably in 300, too, with its glorification of the warrior), the presentation

of gender remains unbalanced. Centurion (2010) may include women

among its band of Picts, but, as barbarians, they remain dangerous

“others,” suspected of witchcraft (Arianne) or even denied the right

of speech (the mute Etain). The Eagle (2011) does not include even

one female character in its principal cast. Of course, the ancient world,

in very general terms, was hardly renowned for “equal opportunities,”

but it would be misleading to argue that these films simply offer a pic-

ture of antiquity “as it really was” and must therefore be acquitted of

charges of gender bias. Hollywood rarely feels honor- bound to adhere

to an authentic and verifiable vision of the past; instead, its version

of Greece and Rome is more profoundly shaped by societal contexts

and by its own self- perpetuating, often conservative take on what the


Joanna Paul228

ancient world looked like and what it meant— and for many filmmak-

ers and viewers, antiquity looks very male.

Yet amid the testosterone- driven surge of swords and monsters that

characterized these recent ancient world epics, one film stood out.2

Agora (2009), directed by Alejandro Amenábar, tells the story of the

female scholar Hypatia (Rachel Weisz), who lived in Alexandria in

the late fourth and early fifth century A.D. Although it follows the

conventions of the Hollywood epic in certain ways (particularly in its

spectacular sets, costumes, and action sequences), it bucks the trend

in others. Its central protagonist is a woman who— unlike the Cleopa-

tra beloved of twentieth- century Hollywood— cannot be defined

primarily through her relationships with men, and her story depicts

religion, and intellectual culture, very differently than earlier films.

Agora is also notable for its late antique setting, which allows it to

confront directly the demise of the classical world.3 Such ambition

and innovation, however, did not translate into widespread box- office

success. After becoming Spain’s top- grossing film in 2009, Agora

struggled to find a global theatrical audience. Although it premiered

at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2009, it did not arrive in UK cin-

emas until April 2010, followed by its US opening in late May/early

June.4 Its widest release in the United States was a mere 17 screens

nationwide (compared to nearly 4,000 for Clash of the Titans, which

opened in early April 2010), and in the United Kingdom it screened

in most cinemas for little more than a week.5

The reasons for this limited impact are not straightforward. Since,

as we will see, Agora appears to judge early Christians very harshly,

we might assume that it was simply too controversial; but this over-

looks the fact that it played remarkably well in Spain and, to a lesser

degree, other Catholic countries.6 Nor can it be explained by poor

critical notices, since Agora was greeted more warmly than other

ancient world films released in 2010/11. The Guardian declared

that it was “cleverly done” (May 18, 2009), and elsewhere review-

ers commended this “ambitious, cerebral and complex movie” (The Guardian, April 22, 2010), describing it as “an historical epic that

is mercifully different from most Hollywood biblical movies” (The Observer, April 25, 2010) and “a thoughtful, adult film” that offers

“an interesting and engaging peep into the past” (The Times, April 22,

2010). Whatever the reasons for the mismatch between this critical

appraisal and the film’s financial failure (which may yet be mitigated

by a stronger showing in the DVD sales and rental market), it is clear

that Agora needs to be judged on criteria other than its box- office

takings. This chapter argues that its distinctive approach to screening


Subverting Sex and Love 229

the ancient world can best be appreciated by exploring its depiction

of Hypatia: a central female character who marks Agora’s originality

by subverting epic’s conventions surrounding love and sex and offers

a mouthpiece for a series of powerful messages relating to religion,

historical change, and intellectual thought.

Although Weisz’s Hypatia is the first cinematic portrayal of this

ancient character, imaginative retellings of her story are nothing new;

in literature, art, theater, and philosophy, she has been appropriated

to symbolize a range of concerns, to the extent that the “historical”

Hypatia is difficult to reconstruct, certainly within the confines of this

chapter.7 As Maurice Sartre notes, “Hypatia’s story was removed from

the historian’s purview before it even came into focus, and the ideo-

logical stakes that have been attached to her name for nearly three

centuries have somewhat obscured the realities.”8 It is these ideologi-

cal stakes, and the ways in which Agora utilizes and builds on Hypatia’s

earlier reception history, that are the concern of this chapter;9 the

historical “realities” will only be addressed when they have some bear-

ing on the argument. But before examining this cinematic version,

let us begin with a brief synopsis of the film. It begins in Alexandria,

in 391. Hypatia lives with her father, the scholar Theon, and lectures

to the city’s youths, who include Synesius, future bishop of Cyrene,

and Orestes, future prefect of Alexandria. The latter courts her affec-

tions, but to no avail; her household slave, Davus, is also in love with

her. Hypatia’s intellectual pursuits, which center on her study of plan-

etary orbits, are threatened by the increasingly powerful, and violent,

Christian community in Alexandria. The film’s first half culminates in

riots between the Christians and the pagans, the siege of the Serapeum

(a large temple complex), and the destruction of its library. As the nar-

rative resumes in 415, Hypatia has maintained her influential position

in the city, and Synesius and Orestes, now powerful men, remain fond

of her, but religious conflict, particularly between Jews and Christians,

continues to threaten the peace. Cyril has succeeded Theophilus as

patriarch of Alexandria, and the parabalani, led by the charismatic

Ammonius, and including Davus among them, act as moral enforcers,

dispensing charity and violence in equal measure. As tensions build,

and Cyril attempts to impose his authority over the Roman rulers

of the city, Hypatia becomes caught up in the conflict; finally, she is

seized by the parabalani and killed. Agora frames her death as the

culmination of these ideological battles and the direct consequence of

Cyril’s brutal and misogynistic stranglehold on Alexandria.


Joanna Paul230

Hypatia and Gender

This outline shows that romantic love and erotic desire are certainly

not absent from Agora. Both Orestes and Davus desire her and, in dif-

ferent ways, attempt to possess her. Orestes is a chivalrous and persis-

tent suitor, flattering and courting her publicly by performing a piece

of music for her in the theater. Hypatia never reciprocates his feel-

ings, and though she treats him kindly at first, his adulation is entirely

incomprehensible to her: “Can you believe he was courting me as if I

was one of his conquests?” she asks her father. Hypatia’s only passion is

for her scholarly endeavours, as her father confirms when asked about

her marriage plans. “Hypatia, subject to a man, with no freedom to

teach or even speak her mind?” replies Theon. “The most brilliant

philosopher I know, having to give up her science? That would be

death to her!” That she is not merely indifferent to love, but actively

hostile or inimical to the possibility of a relationship, is underlined

by her response to Orestes’s musical declaration of love. In class, she

presents him with her bloodied menstrual rag, telling him that there

is little harmony or beauty in the blood of her cycle. This revealing act

(likely seen as taboo even by some modern audiences) splinters our

comfortable preconceptions of female behavior and sets Hypatia apart

from usual societal expectations; it certainly ends Orestes’s pursuit of

her, and their relationship in the rest of the film is realigned, as they

become close confidantes rather than romantic partners.

While Hypatia and Orestes are presented as equals, Davus’s feel-

ings toward Hypatia are shaped by his position as slave, even as he

demonstrates his intellectual prowess and is invited to address her

class. Thus his desire for her is conveyed in his attempts to possess

her bodily, implicitly overturning her family’s ownership of him. This

proprietorial relationship is underlined by Theon’s beating of Davus,

followed by Hypatia’s tender, yet chaste, bathing of his wounds.

Later, after desperately and repeatedly praying to God, “don’t let

anyone else have her, don’t let anyone else have her,” and tenderly

grasping her foot as she sleeps, Davus’s illicit desire eventually spills

over in an attempt to rape her. Yet he cannot go through with it,

breaking down with emotion: just as Hypatia thwarted Orestes’s

romantic longings, so here a sexual encounter is deflected. Though

she is clearly vulnerable to Davus’s advances— we know that he could

have raped her, if he wished— it is as if the force of her character,

combined with her evident fear, destroys his resolve and reinforces

Hypatia’s agency and potency as a woman impervious to romantic

and erotic desire.



Extracting Hypatia from love and sex in this way is atypical for

mainstream cinema; however, there is nothing unconventional in

casting an actress such as Weisz in a leading part. Though her act-

ing is widely acclaimed, and she is given minimal makeup and plain

costumes in Agora, it would be an unusual filmgoer who did not

appreciate her beauty or acknowledge that a star’s bankability rests

on their appearance as well as their ability. Furthermore, the film still

includes these romantic subplots; even if their purpose is ultimately

to demonstrate Hypatia’s resistance to male desire, the time- honored

narrative of unrequited love still plays out, offering the necessary emo-

tional engagement that Agora might otherwise have lacked for some

audiences. We cannot claim, then, that this Hypatia is asexualized or

that her gender is entirely immaterial to the film’s narrative; yet her

interactions with the male characters subvert the typical offerings of

ancient world films, and for most of Agora, at least, she maintains her

agency and self- determination.10

Hypatia’s relationship with Agora’s male protagonists is best encap-

sulated by Synesius’s description of her as “lady, sister, and mother,”

as he blesses her one night during the siege of the Serapeum. This

familial association underlines her chastity (making any sexual entan-

glements with her students tantamount to incest), a central feature of

Hypatia’s characterization from antiquity onwards. In fact, Synesius’s

words in the film are drawn from an extant letter, one of a number

the historical Synesius wrote to Hypatia: Letter 16 addresses her as

“mother, sister, teacher,” while Letter 81 describes her as “inviolate.”

Hypatia’s purity becomes a recurrent motif in later receptions. Stand-

ing for virtue and virginity as high intellectual ideals, she can easily

appear aloof, even cold, a charge laid against Charles Kingsley’s depic-

tion of her in his novel Hypatia, or Old Foes with a New Face (1853).11

But with her death, her inviolability is violently overturned. To under-

stand how the film tackles this shocking end, we must turn to the issue

of Hypatia’s religious stance.

Hypatia and Religion

In Kingsley’s novel, written amid the fervent religious debates of the

mid- nineteenth century, the early Catholic Church stands for dogma

and superstition over humanity and virtue, with Cyril as the self-

serving, power- hungry figurehead responsible for the terrible crime of

Hypatia’s death. Yet a pure, originary Christian faith (which for King-

sley means Protestant) remains important, and this Hypatia is slowly

drawn toward it: as she falls on the altar in the church in which she is


Joanna Paul232

killed, she appeals to God. Such a conversion is never on the cards in

Agora. Here, Hypatia consciously separates herself from the religious

conflict that besets the city. Whatever their beliefs, she twice tells her

students, “We are all brothers” (again emphasizing the familial nature

of their relationship). Furthermore, the cinematic narrative adopts a

far more challenging view of Christianity in general, taking us far from

the conventional narratives of earlier ancient world epics in which a

virtuous Christianity is oppressed by decadent pagans. Certainly,

Amenábar argued that he did not intend to attack the Christian faith,

and we do see examples of Christianity as a force for good: the para-balani minister to the poor, and Synesius is a benevolent figure who

attempts to keep the peace. But what lingers is the image of a hard-

line, authoritarian Cyril, controlling a violent mob whose punishments

by stoning recall the brutalities now more readily associated, in some

Western eyes, with the harshest penalties of Islamic Sharia law. Indeed,

some reviewers pointed out that the most fanatical Christians— Cyril

and Ammonius— are played by Middle Eastern actors, as opposed to

the white European Synesius, underscoring the discomfiting elements

of Agora’s apparent critique of religious fundamentalism.

Consequently, Agora cuts closer to the bone than comparable

films like Life of Brian (1979). Whereas Monty Python targeted

institutional structures and dogmatism, stopping short of question-

ing core beliefs, Agora does not shrink from putting scripture in

the dock. A key scene, which returns us to the issue of Hypatia’s

gender, depicts Cyril reading from the Bible in front of a gather-

ing of Alexandrian dignitaries, led by Orestes; the reading is the

First Epistle of Paul to Timothy, a well- known scripture relating to

women and their behavior, which in the film ends with Cyril’s dec-

laration: “I do not permit a woman to teach, or to have authority

over a man; but to be in silence.”12 By now, with Orestes steadfastly

resisting ceding power to Cyril, the archbishop can no longer toler-

ate Hypatia’s influence in Alexandria, and so he attempts to foment

outrage against this woman whom he calls “a witch.” In narrative

terms, the reading triggers the events that lead to her death, but

for the film’s audience, it also directly challenges our identification

with or sympathy for the Christians by revealing such a brazenly

misogynistic worldview.

As such, Hypatia’s death is framed by the religious contexts of

Agora’s story: the freethinking female scholar the victim of a fanati-

cal, bigoted religion. Although historians argue that Hypatia’s death

was not religiously motivated and that she was a victim of the politi-

cal struggles between Orestes and Cyril,13 and while Agora certainly



interweaves the political with the religious, still the film takes its cue

from the conventional view of Hypatia as a martyr to pagan classical

culture, destroyed by Christianity. This characterization prevailed in

the eighteenth century, when Enlightenment thinkers adopted her as

a heroine of rational thought in opposition to narrow- minded Church

oppression. John Toland’s 1720 pamphlet memorialized Hypatia

as the “Most Beautiful, Most Virtuous, Most Learned and in Every

Way Accomplished Lady; Who was Torn to Pieces by the Clergy of

Alexandria, to Gratify the Pride, Emulation and Cruelty of the Arch-

bishop, Commonly but Undeservedly Titled St. Cyril”; Voltaire and

Gibbon would offer similar encomia.14 Although these accounts praise

Hypatia’s virtue and scholarship, they also privilege her “celebrated”

beauty.15 Moreover, descriptions of her gruesome death— she was

flayed by ostraka (broken tiles, or possibly oyster shells), according to

the fifth-century Socrates Scholasticus16— can assume a distinctly erotic

flavor, as in Gibbon’s description of how, stripped naked, “her flesh

was scraped from her bones with sharp oyster shells, and her quivering

limbs were delivered to the flames.”17 This tendency only increased

in the nineteenth century: Kingsley’s description of her “snow- white”

naked form, her “golden locks,” and her dying shrieks verges on the

sadomasochistic, and a painting by Charles William Mitchell, Hypatia

(1885), depicts a Botticelliesque nude Hypatia at the altar, just before

her death.18

By contrast, notwithstanding the casting of Weisz discussed above,

the cinematic Hypatia is more emphatically desexualized (although

we do see her stepping nude from her bath early in the film, a quite

conventional set- piece for ancient world films),19 and the moment of

her death is quite different from the fetishistic martyrdom of some

earlier receptions. The parabalani strip her naked and announce that

they will skin her alive, as expected; but Davus intervenes, telling

them that they should not stain their hands with impure blood. As

the other parabalani leave to find stones with which to kill her, Davus

approaches. The sense of threat quickly fades; in contrast to his earlier

assault, his desire to possess and violate Hypatia is replaced by an act

of loving mercy, as he holds her tight in an embrace strong enough

to smother her to death, yet heartbreakingly tender as the film shows

flashbacks to earlier, happier times. Fear and pain still play in Hypa-

tia’s eyes, but as she dies and sinks to the floor just as the parabalani return, Davus has ensured that she cannot be brutalized by them. In

a personal sense, her purity and chastity are preserved, though politi-

cally and culturally, her murder violates, destroys even, something far

more profound.


Joanna Paul234

Hypatia and the End of the

Cl assical World

Although Hypatia’s gender is an important factor in her death, it is

this combined with her role as scholar, philosopher, and teacher that is

ultimately more significant for Agora’s message and for the ideologies

underpinning Hypatia’s reception history. As a symbol of female intel-

lectualism, she has been frequently adduced to the cause of feminism,

or protofeminism, even as other (male) writers and artists fixated on

her looks. To take one example, when Kingsley’s novel was adapted

for the London stage in 1893, many newspaper and periodical reviews

praised the actor playing Hypatia, Julia Neilson, in purely aesthetic

terms, focusing on her costume or her appearance as “a lovely Greek

picture” or “like a painting on a Greek vase.”20 But The Lady’s Picto-rial took a more political view, commenting that “we do not mob,

outrage, and assassinate our feminine philosophers nowadays, but we

have methods of torture not much less brutal . . . [I]n the case of

our modern wise- women, their enemies rend them limb from limb

in metaphor only, in the columns of scurrilous newspapers, and strip

them of every rag of noble quality— in the name of orthodoxy.”21

Hypatia becomes a charged symbol for feminist ideologies, whether

in the 1890s, as the suffrage movement was gathering pace, or in the

1970s, when the American artist Judy Chicago included her in her

work The Dinner Party (first exhibited in 1979).22 This installation

comprises three long tables, each bearing 13 place settings for iconic

women from mythology and history who symbolize female power and

the many ways in which it has been suppressed and silenced (and with

a further 999 women commemorated on ceramic floor tiles). The

first table deals with “prehistory to Rome,” with place settings for

women from the Hindu goddess Kali, to the Greek poet Sappho, to

the warrior- queen Boadicea; Hypatia is at the end of the table where,

in Chicago’s words, she “symbolises the destruction of female genius

in the Classical world.”23 On the embroidered table runner, a female

face is shown gagged, making Hypatia an emblem of the perception

that patriarchal Christianity silenced female voices in antiquity and for

many centuries to come.

While such accounts focus on Hypatia’s silencing from a gendered

perspective, others emphasize her death as a different kind of silenc-

ing: a symbol of the historical transition from a pagan, classical world

to a new Christian world order. This transition is usually characterized,

in this context, as destructive and regressive, partly because of Chris-

tianity’s perceived misogyny, as enshrined in Agora’s Cyril, but mainly



because of the perception that the end of the classical world means a

loss of intellectual achievement, high culture, and rational thought—

the ideals that Hypatia the scholar easily represents. In this transition/

destruction, the Library of Alexandria plays an important parallel role

in the film and in the broader cultural tradition. Already powerful in

antiquity as a symbol of status and identity, it continues to reverberate

throughout the modern world as an image of “universal knowledge.”

Oliver Stone’s Alexander (2004), for example, stages Ptolemy’s dicta-

tion of his history of Alexander the Great in the Library, presenting it

as a “theatre of documents [which] exemplifies and puns on Alexan-

der’s global and stereoscopic vision, a vision that vastly expanded his

monocular father’s reach.”24 The Library’s imaginative power is com-

pounded by the uncertainties surrounding its eventual fate. Whether

its demise is primarily attributed to a fire started by Julius Caesar

during his Alexandrian conflict in 48 or 47 B.C., or to a much later

deliberate destruction by Christians in the fourth century, or Muslims

in the seventh century, the destruction of the Library is couched in

ideological terms. In Susan Stephens’s words, “the idea of the ‘uni-

versal’ library is aligned with freedom from censorship and open or

scientific enquiry incompatible with deeply held religious beliefs”;25

when those religious beliefs prevail, the Library can no longer exist.

Figure 16.1 Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) attempts to save the Library’s scrolls in Agora

(2009). Focus Features/Newmarket Films.


Joanna Paul236

Although the Library’s real fate is likely to have been a combination

of deliberate attacks and prolonged neglect,26 Agora nails its colors to

the mast by making the Christians responsible. Its story is broadly

in keeping with Gibbon’s account (Decline and Fall, chapter 28),

in which Caesar destroys the original Library, and a Christian mob

then destroys the reconstituted version in the Serapeum in 391. The

film’s Library is clearly part of the Serapeum complex, nor is it the

original collection: while discussing cosmological theories, one char-

acter mentions Aristarchus, adding that “his work was lost in the fire

that destroyed the mother library. This is why we have to take great

care of this place. Our library is all that remains of the wisdom of

man.” However, the fact that the Serapeum Library was likely severely

depleted, in comparison to the original Ptolemaic collection, is not

forced in Agora; it is more important that the cinematic Library

functions as a significant emblem of universal knowledge, with the

mention of the earlier destruction highlighting its vulnerability rather

than its degradation. It symbolizes the collective endeavors of classical

learning and creativity against the narrow- minded will and dogmatic

outlook of the Christian sect, with Hypatia as its figurehead, as Cyril

is for the Church.

Crucially, the parallelism of Hypatia and the Library also emphasizes

that, while Agora’s conflict is partly a religious one, between Chris-

tianity and paganism (and Judaism), and while the Library is clearly

linked to the worship of Serapis, it is also a profoundly intellectual—

that is to say, secular— struggle. Hypatia, as we have seen, separates

herself from the spiritual and theological debates, stressing to her

students that their religious differences are irrelevant. Instead, she is

devoted to the intellectual realm, of which the Library is the physical

manifestation (making it significant that the Library can be gendered

female, both in the film’s description of the “mother library” and in

modern scholarship.)27 Consequently, when the Serapeum is sacked

and the Library destroyed, Hypatia’s anguish is palpable. She and her

pupils struggle to save what they can, frantically gathering up scrolls

and dramatizing the seemingly random processes that decide what

survives in a manuscript tradition and what doesn’t. After being told

to “Leave the lesser works!” a student asks, “Which are the lesser

works?” Hypatia urges, “Just take the important ones!” though with-

out indicating which those might be. While Gibbon expresses pleasant

surprise about the number of classical works that survived what he

calls the “suffrage of antiquity” (chapter 51), Agora draws attention

to what was lost. As we see the Christian mob scattering and destroy-

ing the scrolls, the camera begins a dramatic, vertiginous revolution,



slowly turning until the floor appears at the top of the frame— a literal

rendering of the world being turned upside down. If the Library and

Hypatia are parallel symbols of the classical world’s undoing, then we

are witnessing her mind and intellect being violated and pillaged in a

way that her body could not be.

With this scene, Agora presents a pivotal moment in what its trailer

describes as “the last days of the Roman Empire . . . the fall of civiliza-

tion.” Arguably, most Roman Hollywood epics address this theme of

cultural transition in some way, exemplified by the prologue to Sparta-cus (1960), which refers to “the new faith called Christianity, which

was destined to overthrow the pagan tyranny of Rome and bring about

a new society,” but this directs the audience to look beyond the cin-

ematic narrative and into the future (or the audience’s past). Likewise,

The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) hardly addresses Rome’s actual

fall but rather outlines what is to come. It is Agora that comes closest

to actually dramatizing this as both theme and historical event. As it

shows us the aftermath of the Serapeum’s destruction, with pigeons

and cattle the new inhabitants of the Library, the implications of the

new world order— a culturally, intellectually impoverished one— are

made clear. Imperial Roman power clings on, in the rather desperately

oversized lions on Orestes’s throne, but when Synesius meets Orestes

at the prefect’s palace, we see in the background shelf upon shelf of

broken imperial portrait heads, deftly visualizing what has happened to

this great empire. Just before this, at the end of his reading from scrip-

ture, Cyril has commanded the Roman elite to kneel before the Bible:

the scrolls of the Alexandrian library are now replaced by the codex

Word of God, a text for which no alternate reading, no Alexandrian-

style literary criticism, can be offered. Only Orestes refuses to kneel,

and he tries to tell Synesius that Cyril’s misogynistic pronouncements

are twisting God’s words, but Synesius replies that Cyril was sim-

ply reading what is written. “The scripture is correct,” he says, and

Orestes’s failure to submit to it will precipitate Hypatia’s death.

The film’s Hypatia, then, is completely unacceptable to the new

order of Christianity because of the interlinking identities that she

bears: she is a woman, a woman who thinks and teaches and presumes

that she can teach men, and worst of all, her way of thinking is insepa-

rable from the classical world, over which Christianity must triumph.

As such, her death is aligned with the death of an old world order. It

does not matter that, in reality, “pagan religiosity did not expire with

Hypatia, and neither did mathematics and Greek philosophy”;28 it

is Hypatia as “the symbol of a certain end of antiquity, the end of cul-

ture and freedom of thought, the end of the philosophical tradition


Joanna Paul238

and the taste for beauty” that counts.29 Nor is her gender inconse-

quential in this alignment. Although the death of a male scholar or

philosopher can symbolize the end of the classical past— or at least

the “crossroads of the Classical and Medieval worlds,” as in the case

of Boethius, executed a century after Hypatia30— Hypatia’s femininity

lends the laments a particular and varying quality. For those for whom

Hypatia’s imagined beauty was as important as her intellect (if not

more so), her death represents the specific loss of the idealized, Hel-

lenic classical past, a past idolized primarily for its aesthetic purity. Such

feelings are perfectly exemplified by the poetry of Leconte de Lisle

(1818– 94), figurehead of the French Parnassian poets, who addressed

Hypatia as “la vierge de l’hellenisme” (“the virgin of Hellenism”) and

praised her as an immaculate, luminous, marble- like personification

of a beauty that the contemporary world, ruled by “l’impure laideur”

(“impure ugliness”), struggles to find.31

A more modern, feminist view might see things differently. Rather

than representing an aesthetic loss, Hypatia’s death— as presented in

the film— could exemplify the trope that connects the female body

to a wider sociopolitical context and frames the body as a territory to

be fought over, conquered, and transgressed in the name of (male)

hegemony and associated ideologies such as imperialism. Feminist

scholarship of classical literature has detected this trope in a variety of

texts— for example, Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita, his account of Rome’s his-

tory, where the rapes of the Sabine women, Lucretia, and Verginia are

closely connected to the formation of the Roman state;32 and I would

argue that a similar reading applies to Agora. Destroying the Library

was not enough, and the struggle for supremacy must ultimately be

brought to bear on Hypatia’s very flesh, her actual body destroyed as

the Christians seek to impose their worldview; yet, in the terms of the

film, although Hypatia is defeated, her body remains intact and invio-

late (we do not see the after- effects of the stoning, only learning that

she was mutilated and burned on a pyre in the closing credits), perhaps

indicating that for Amenábar, the classical world embodied by Hypatia

remains meaningful, precious, and worthy of salvaging.

Conclusion

It is this celebration of classical culture— or, to be more precise, Alex-

andrian scholarship’s achievements in science and philosophy— that

drives Agora. Bravely for an epic film, a considerable amount of narra-

tive time is devoted to Hypatia’s musings and expositions of her cos-

mological theories, but it is not all dry academic discourse, for this



theme shapes another layer of Agora’s ideology, concerning the lasting

significance of religious conflict and political strife. The image of the

circle, as symbol of the planetary orbit, recurs throughout the film,

most strikingly when the camera looks through the oculus, or circu-

lar hole, that crowns the dome of the Serapeum. At the film’s end,

when Davus walks away from this building after Hypatia’s death, the

camera looks down on the oculus one final time, before pulling away

and creating an oblique angle that flattens the circle into an ellipse,

thereby representing Hypatia’s discovery, just before her death, of the

true nature of planetary orbits. This is a fiction, but a necessary one for

the film, since it underlines the magnitude of what was lost as Chris-

tianity replaces the classical. Had Hypatia been allowed to live, Agora

suggests, then we wouldn’t have had to wait out the endless Dark Ages

before Renaissance scholars such as Johannes Kepler “discovered” the

truth all over again. The camera pulls back further still, showing us the

city, the Nile delta, and then, with the longest of all long- shots, a view

of the Earth from space. Through this visual device, which appears at

other key moments in the film, the squabbles of men and women in

Alexandria are shown from their rightful perspective and presented as

ultimately futile and meaningless in the context of the universe.33 Man

should look to the heavens, it implies, but not in search of God.

This long- view also reminds us to consider how Agora uses an

ancient story to speak to twenty- first- century concerns, making a

powerful statement in favor of religious and intellectual tolerance and

gender equality. Events since the film’s release only serve to underline

its currency. As the Egyptian revolution took hold in early 2011, news

reports told of how Alexandrian youths banded together to protect

the Bibliotheca Alexandrina— the new incarnation of the Library of

Alexandria, opened in 200234— from the “lawless bands of thugs”

who sought to loot and vandalize it, making us think, inevitably, of

the desperate efforts of Hypatia and her fellow scholars to preserve

the library in Agora.35 In the film, of course, they did not succeed,

and Agora could be said to be quite pessimistic in its view of what

happened after Hypatia’s death. But as A. O. Scott of The New York

Times commented, “The warning bell that Agora sounds may be loud

and at times a little grating, but what’s wrong with that? The skepti-

cal and the secular also need stories of martyrdom and rousing acts

of cinematic preaching.”36 With this comment, we see how Agora

appropriates stories of martyrdom, and the cinematic idiom in which

they are usually presented, in order to preach a very different kind of

message. It is refreshing to see the language of mainstream Holly-

wood epic used to tackle such different issues, not only regarding the


Joanna Paul240

dangers of fundamentalism and narrow- minded, dogmatic thought,

but also, and especially, about where they intersect with feminism and

the female voice.

Notes

1. Cyrino (2011) 23.

2. 2010 also saw the release of Clash of the Titans; another mythological

blockbuster, Immortals, followed in 2011.

3. Two recent films, King Arthur (2004) and The Last Legion (2007),

also deal with this historical period history, though with less intellec-

tual ambition and critical success.

4. See the Agora article in IMDb for worldwide release dates.

5. Box- office receipts indicate the disparity between the film’s success in

Spain and elsewhere: Spain’s total is $29,609,470, with the second-

highest takings in Italy a far lower $2,819,873. The advertised produc-

tion budget totaled $70 million, but worldwide takings currently stand

at only around $39 million (http:// www .boxofficemojo .com).

6. This is not to say that there were no protests against the film: on Octo-

ber 7, 2009, the Catholic News Agency reported that the Religious

Anti- Defamation Observatory had written to Amenábar to com-

plain that Agora promoted hatred of Christians. That same month,

the newspaper La Stampa described Agora as “Il film che l’Italia non

vedrà” (“the film that Italy will not see”), speculating that religious

discomfort was responsible for its failure to find an Italian distributor.

However, Amenábar claims the Italian distributors arranged a prere-

lease screening at the Vatican, and that no particular controversy was

caused: see Holleran (2012).

7. Dzielska (1995) is particularly accessible.

8. Sartre (2009) 370.

9. Dzielska (1995) 1– 26 and Jaccottet (2010) survey Hypatian receptions.

10. See Dashú (2010).

11. See Rhodes (1995) 86– 98.

12. Cyril’s passage is an abridged version of 1 Timothy 2. Amenábar appar-

ently claimed that the script uses the King James version, and that the

“softest version” was sought for the Italian subtitles, to avoid contro-

versy at the Vatican screening: see Holleran (2012). In fact, only the

injunction “to be in silence” uses the King James wording; the rest of

the passage mainly follows the New International Version.

13. Jaccottet (2010) 142; Sartre (2009) 373– 76.

14. Dzielska (1995) 2– 4; Jaccottet (2010) 144– 45; Stephens (2010) 272.

15. Voltaire, L’examen important de Milord Bolingbroke (1736) chap-

ter 36.

16. Historia Ecclesiastica 7.15, in Hussey (1992).

17. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1781– 89) chapter 47.5.



18. Prettejohn (1996) 154– 55; Jaccottet (2010) 149.

19. As Hypatia steps from the bath, she is framed by two well- known

ancient nudes: on her right, a Capua- type Venus, and on her left, the

mosaic of Neptune and Amphitrite from Pompeii (rendered in the film

as a low relief.)

20. Morning Post, January 3, 1893; Woman, January 7, 1893.

21. The Lady’s Pictorial, January 7, 1893.

22. Hypatia has also lent her name to Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Phi-losophy (founded 1986).

23. Chicago (2007) 85.

24. Thompson (2011) 40.

25. Stephens (2010) 272.

26. Canfora (1987) 139– 44.

27. Canfora (1987) also describes the Serapeum as the “ ‘daughter’

library” (63).

28. Dzielska (1995) 105.

29. Sartre (2009) 370, emphasis added. See also Avezzù (2010) 342.

30. Watts (1969) 7.

31. Leconte de Lisle’s “Hypatie,” written in 1847, was published in 1852

in Poèmes Antiques; a revised version, “Hypatie et Cyrille,” was pub-

lished in 1874.

32. See, for example, Joshel (1992) and Arieti (1997).

33. Cf. Avezzù (2010) 338.

34. The library houses a metal statue of Hypatia by the artist Tarek El

Koumy.

35. The Guardian, February 1, 2011.

36. Scott (2010).


Filmography

Feature Films and Shorts

300 (2007). Directed by Zack Snyder. Legendary Pictures/Warner Bros.

The 300 Spartans (1962). Directed by Rudolph Maté. Twentieth Century Fox.

Agora (2009). Directed by Alejandro Amenábar. Focus Features/Newmarket

Films.

Alexander (2004). Directed by Oliver Stone. Intermedia Films/Warner Bros.

All About My Mother (1999). Directed by Pedro Almodóvar. Sony Pictures

Classics.

Angels & Insects (1996). Directed by Philip Haas. Playhouse International

Pictures/Samuel Goldwyn Company.

Animal House (1978). Directed by John Landis. Universal Pictures.

Ben- Hur (1959). Directed by William Wyler. Metro- Goldwyn- Mayer.

Broken Embraces (2009). Directed by Pedro Almodóvar. Sony Pictures

Classics.

Caligula (1979). Directed by Tinto Brass, Bob Guccione, and Giancarlo Lui.

Penthouse Films International.

The Campus Vamp (1928). Directed by Harry Edwards. Mack Sennett

Comedies.

Carrie (1976). Directed by Brian De Palma. United Artists.

Carry On Cleo (1964). Directed by Gerald Thomas. Peter Rogers

Productions/Anglo- Amalgamated.

Centurion (2010). Directed by Neil Marshall. Celador Films/Pathé.

Clash of the Titans (2010). Directed by Louis Leterrier. Legendary Pictures/

Warner Bros.

Cleopatra (1917). Directed by J. Gordon Edwards. Fox Film Corporation.

Cleopatra (1934). Directed by Cecil B. DeMille. Paramount Pictures.

Cleopatra (1963). Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Twentieth Century

Fox.

Die Büchse der Pandora (1929). Directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst. Süd- Film.

The Eagle (2011). Directed by Kevin Macdonald. Focus Features.

The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005). Directed by Scott Derrickson. Lakeshore

Entertainment/Screen Gems.

The Exorcist (1973). Directed by William Friedkin. Warner Bros.

The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964). Directed by Anthony Mann. Samuel

Bronston Productions/Paramount Pictures.


Filmography244

Femme Fatale (2002). Directed by Brian De Palma. Epsilon Motion Pic-

tures/Warner Bros.

The Flower of My Secret (1995). Directed by Pedro Almodóvar. Sony Pictures

Classics.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966). Directed by Rich-

ard Lester. United Artists.

Gladiator (2000). Directed by Ridley Scott. Scott Free Productions/Dream-

Works Pictures/Universal Pictures.

Immortals (2011). Directed by Tarsem Singh. Relativity Media/Universal

Pictures.

King Arthur (2004). Directed by Antoine Fuqua. Touchstone Pictures/

Buena Vista.

Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Directed by Robert Aldrich. Parklane Pictures

Inc./United Artists.

The Last Exorcism (2010). Directed by Daniel Stamm. Strike Entertainment/

Lionsgate.

The Last Legion (2007). Directed by Doug Lefler. Dino De Laurentiis Com-

pany/The Weinstein Company.

Manslaughter (1922). Directed by Cecil B. DeMille. Paramount Pictures.

Mariette in Ecstasy (1996). Directed by John Bailey. Price Entertainment/

Savoy Pictures.

M*A*S*H (1970). Directed by Robert Altman. Aspen Productions/

Twentieth Century Fox.

Maxie (1985). Directed by Paul Aaron. Orion Pictures.

Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979). Directed by Terry Jones. Handmade

Films/Orion Pictures/Warner Bros.

The New World (2005). Directed by Terrence Malick. New Line Cinema.

The Omen (1976). Directed by Richard Donner. Twentieth Century Fox.

The Omen (2006). Directed by John Moore. Twentieth Century Fox.

One Million Years B.C. (1967). Directed by Don Chaffey. Hammer Film Pro-

ductions/Twentieth Century Fox.

L’Orgie romaine (1911). Directed by Louis Feuillade. Gaumont.

Paranormal Activity (2009). Directed by Oren Peli. Blumhouse Produc-

tions/Paramount Pictures.

Paranormal Activity 2 (2010). Directed by Tod Williams. Paramount Pictures.

Paranormal Activity 3 (2011). Directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman.

Paramount Pictures.

Prehistoric Women (1967). Directed by Michael Carreras. Hammer Film Pro-

ductions/Twentieth Century Fox.

Poltergeist (1982). Directed by Tobe Hooper. Metro- Goldwyn- Mayer.

Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986). Directed by Brian Gibson. Metro-

Goldwyn- Mayer.

Poltergeist III (1988). Directed by Gary Sherman. Metro- Goldwyn- Mayer.

Private Gladiator (2002). Directed by Antonio Adams. Private Media Ltd.


Filmography 245

Psycho (1960). Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Shamley Productions/

Paramount Pictures.

Psycho (1998). Directed by Gus Van Sant. Imagine Entertainment/Universal

Pictures.

Quo Vadis (1951). Directed by Mervyn LeRoy. Metro- Goldwyn- Mayer.

Return of the Jedi (1983). Directed by Richard Marquand. Lucasfilm/

Twentieth Century Fox.

Rosemary’s Baby (1968). Directed by Roman Polanski. Paramount Pictures.

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954). Directed by Stanley Donen. Metro-

Goldwyn- Mayer.

She (1965). Directed by Robert Day. Hammer Film Productions/Metro-

Goldwyn- Mayer.

The Sign of the Cross (1932). Directed by Cecil B. DeMille. Paramount

Pictures.

The Shining (1980). Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Peregrine Productions/

Warner Bros.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937). Directed by David Hand. Walt

Disney Productions/RKO Radio Pictures.

Spartacus (1960). Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Bryna Productions/Universal

Pictures.

Stigmata (1999). Directed by Rupert Wainwright. FGM Entertainment/

Metro- Goldwyn- Mayer.

Sucker Punch (2011). Directed by Zack Snyder. Legendary Pictures/Warner

Bros.

Talk to Her (2002). Directed by Pedro Almodóvar. Sony Pictures Classics.

Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula (2005). Directed by Francesco

Vezzoli. Crossroads.

Troy (2004). Directed by Wolfgang Petersen. Plan B Entertainment/Warner

Bros.

The Viking Queen (1967). Directed by Don Chaffey. Hammer Film Produc-

tions/Twentieth Century Fox.

Volver (2006). Directed by Pedro Almodóvar. Sony Pictures Classics.

Witchboard (1987). Directed by Kevin Tenney. Paragon Arts International.

Witchboard II: The Devil’s Doorway (1993). Directed by Kevin Tenney. Blue

Rider Pictures.

The Wolfman (1941). Directed by George Waggner. Universal Pictures.

The Wolfman (2010). Directed by Joe Johnston. Relativity Media/Universal

Pictures.

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988). Directed by Pedro

Almodóvar. Orion Classics.

Television Series and Films

Cleopatra (1999). Directed by Franc Roddam. Hallmark Entertainment.

Empire (2005). Created by Chip Johannessen. ABC.


Filmography246

Game of Thrones (2011). Created by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. HBO.

Hercules and the Amazon Women (1994). Directed by Bill L. Norton. Renais-

sance Pictures.

I, Claudius (1976). Produced by Martin Lisemore. BBC Television.

Imperium: Augustus (2003). Directed by Roger Young. EOS Entertainment.

Julius Caesar (2002). Directed by Uli Edel. De Angelis Group/TNT.

Rome (2005– 7). Created by Bruno Heller, William J. MacDonald, and John

Milius. HBO- BBC.

Spartacus: Blood and Sand (2010). Created by Steven S. DeKnight. Starz.

Spartacus: Gods of the Arena (2011). Created by Steven S. DeKnight. Starz.

Spartacus: Vengeance (2012). Created by Steven S. DeKnight. Starz.

True Blood (2008– 12). Created by Alan Ball. HBO.

Xena: Warrior Princess (1995– 2001). Created by John Schulian and Robert

Tapert. Renaissance Pictures.


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Contributors

Monica S. Cyrino is Professor of Classics at the University of New

Mexico. Her academic research centers on the erotic in ancient

Greek poetry and the reception of the ancient world on screen. She

is the author of Aphrodite (2010), A Journey through Greek Mythol-ogy (2008), Big Screen Rome (2005), In Pandora’s Jar: Lovesickness in Early Greek Poetry (1995), and the editor of Rome, Season One: History Makes Television (2008). She has published numerous articles

and book chapters and often gives lectures around the world on the

representation of classical antiquity on film and television. She has

served as an academic consultant on several recent film and television

productions.

Antony Augoustakis is Associate Professor of Classics at the Univer-

sity of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. His research interests include

Roman comedy and historiography, Latin imperial epic, women in

antiquity, and gender theory. He is the author of Ritual and Reli-gion in Flavian Epic (2013), Motherhood and the Other: Fashioning Female Power in Flavian Epic (2010), and Plautus’ Mercator (2009).

He is the editor of the Brill Companion to Silius Italicus (2010), and

coeditor of the special journal issue Statius’ Silvae and the Poetics of Intimacy (Arethusa 2007).

Gregory N. Daugherty is Professor of Classics and Chair of the

Department of Classics at Randolph- Macon College in Ashland, Vir-

ginia. His research focuses on the reception of classics in American

popular culture, including the depiction of ancient battles, adapta-

tions of Homeric epic, and the representation of Cleopatra. He is the

coauthor of To Be a Roman: Topics in Roman Culture (2007). He has

been president of the Classical Association of the Middle West and

South as well as the Classical Association of Virginia.

Kirsten Day is Assistant Professor of Classics at Augustana College in

Rock Island, Illinois. Her research interests include women in antiquity


Contributors264

and representations of the classical world in popular culture. She is the

editor of the special journal issue Celluloid Classics: New Perspectives on Classical Antiquity in Modern Cinema (Arethusa 2008) and has chaired

the Classical Representations in Popular Culture area for the Southwest

Texas Popular/American Culture Association conferences since 2002.

Seán Easton is Assistant Professor in the Classics department and the

Peace Studies program at Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter,

Minnesota. His research interests include Latin epic, the cinematic

and literary reception of the Greco- Roman world, and the representa-

tion of peace in ancient and modern cultures. He has published on

Lucan’s Pharsalia and presented papers on Latin epic and the films

of Terrence Malick. His current work is on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and

John Frankenheimer’s 1966 film Seconds.

Alison Futrell is Associate Professor of Roman History at the Univer-

sity of Arizona. Her research focuses on the texts, performance, and

imagery of power in imperial Rome. She is the author of Blood in the Arena (1997) and Roman Games (2006) and coeditor of the forth-

coming Oxford Handbook of Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World.

She has also published essays on Spartacus, HBO’s Rome, and Xena: Warrior Princess. Her current book project is Barbarian Queens: Par-adoxes of Gender, Power and Identity.

Lorenzo F. Garcia Jr. is Assistant Professor of Classics at the Uni-

versity of New Mexico, where he teaches a course called “Homeric

Cinematography.” His research focuses on Homeric epic, early Greek

poetics and mythology, narratology, and cinema theory and technique,

which he uses to analyze the filmic aspects of ancient poetry. He is the

author of Homeric Durability: Telling Time in the Iliad (2013) and

has published articles on Greek and Roman literature and the recep-

tion of antiquity in film.

Paula James is Senior Lecturer in Classical Studies at The Open Uni-

versity in the United Kingdom. She is the author of Ovid’s Myth of Pygmalion on Screen (2011) and is coeditor of The Role of the Parrot in Selected Texts from Ovid to Jean Rhys (2006). She has published on

a variety of Latin literary texts, including Apuleius, Ovid, Claudian,

and Prudentius, and she has written book chapters and articles on the

reception of Greco- Roman motifs and myths in literature, art, film,

television, and mass culture.


Contributors 265

Rachael Kelly is a recent graduate of the University of Ulster in

Northern Ireland, where she was awarded a PhD in Film and Gen-

der Studies. Her academic research explores the cultural function of

Marcus Antonius in screen texts. She has presented several scholarly

papers and published a number of articles on Mark Antony in film

and television, as well as on screen portrayals of Cleopatra in light of

recent debates in feminist film theory. She is presently revising her

doctoral thesis for publication.

Christopher M. McDonough is Professor and Chair of Classical

Languages and former director of the Interdisciplinary Humanities

Program at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. His

scholarly research centers on Roman literature and religion, as well as

the classical tradition in American literature, film, and culture. He is

the coauthor of Servius’ Commentary on Book Four of Virgil’s Aeneid: An Annotated Translation (2004), and he is a frequent contributor

to The Sewanee Review.

Corinne Pache is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at Trin-

ity University in San Antonio, Texas. Her academic research focuses

on Greek archaic poetry, Greek religion and myth, and the modern

reception of ancient poetry. She is the author of “A Moment’s Orna-ment”: The Poetics of Nympholepsy in Ancient Greece (2010), and she is

currently working on a new book project, Remembering Penelope, on

the reception of the Homeric heroine in modern literature and film.

Joanna Paul is Lecturer in Classical Studies at The Open University

in the United Kingdom. She is the author of Film and the Classi-cal Epic Tradition (2013) and the coeditor of Pompeii in the Public Imagination from its Rediscovery to Today (2011). She has published

numerous articles and book chapters on classical receptions of antiq-

uity in cinema and popular culture. Her current project is a mono-

graph on Pompeian receptions that explores how Pompeii has been

used as a reference point for modern disasters.

Jerry B. Pierce is Assistant Professor of History at Penn State Hazle-

ton University. His research is divided between portrayals of masculin-

ity in ancient film and violence in medieval heresy. He is the author

of Poverty, Heresy and the Apocalypse: The Order of Apostles and Social Change in Medieval Italy 1260– 1307 (2012). He has published a

book chapter on heteronormativity in the epic films Gladiator, Troy,


Contributors266

and 300, and he is currently researching masculinity and sexuality in

films about the ancient world.

Stacie Raucci is Associate Professor of Classics at Union College in

Schenectady, New York, where she teaches an undergraduate course

on the ancient world in the cinema. Her academic research focuses

primarily on Roman love elegy and the reception of the ancient world

in popular culture. She is the author of Elegiac Eyes: Vision in Roman Love Elegy (2011). She has published articles and delivered papers on

the popularization of antiquity, Medusa Barbie, and the Roman poet

Propertius.

Meredith Safran is Assistant Professor of Classics at Trinity College in

Hartford, Connecticut. Her research interests include late Republican

Roman society, Greek and Roman political thought, mythology, and

historiography. Her current project analyzes prominent female char-

acters in Roman historiography and the positions women assume in

relation to Rome as a political community. She has delivered numer-

ous lectures on the “Sabine women” myth in ancient literature and its

modern adaptations from the Renaissance to the twentieth century.

Anise K. Strong is Assistant Professor of History at Western Michi-

gan University. Her research centers on Roman social history, gender

and sexuality in the ancient world, and the reception of classical cul-

ture in modern mass media. She is finishing a book entitled Roman

Women and the Construction of Virtue: Wicked Wives and Good Whores. Recent articles include Roman toleration of ancient incest, sexuality

in the HBO series Rome, and the treatment of ethnic intermarriage in

Herodotus’s Histories.

Vincent Tomasso is Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics at Ripon

College in Wisconsin. His research focuses on archaic and imperial

Greek literature and reception. He has published on the reception of

the battle of Thermopylae in Frank Miller’s graphic novel Sin City: The Big Fat Kill in Classics and Comics (2011) and Triphiodorus’s

reception of Homer in Brill’s Companion to the Greek and Latin Epyl-lion and Its Reception (2012). His current project is a monograph on

the reception of Homer by imperial Greek poets.


Index

Aaron, Paul, 185– 86

Ab Urbe Condita (Livy), 238

“Ac- Cent- Tchu- Ate the Positive” (song),

100

Achilles, 40, 52n19, 128– 29, 131– 32,

134, 139, 140n8, 140n11, 161

Adam, 17

Addey, Wesley, 31

Aeneid (Vergil), 78– 80, 86, 89

Aeschylus, 26, 30, 38n31, 89, 119

Agamemnon, 49, 62, 89, 97n19,

131– 32

Agamemnon (Aeschylus), 89, 97n19

Agave (character; Bacchae), 89, 97n20

Agora (2009), 8, 227– 40, 240nn5– 6

and the end of the classical world,

234– 38

and gender, 230– 31

and religion, 231– 33

Agora characters

Cyril, 229, 231– 33, 235– 37, 240n12

Davus, 229– 30, 233, 239

Hypatia (see Hypatia)

Orestes, 229– 30, 232– 33, 237

parabalani, 229, 232– 33

Synesius, 229, 231– 32, 237

Theon, 229– 30

Theophilus, 229

Alberich (character; Rheingold), 71

Alcaeus, 70

Alcanfor de las Infantas, 56– 57, 60– 61,

67

Alcinous (character; Odyssey), 39, 42

Aldrich, Robert, 4– 5, 25, 28– 31, 33– 35,

36n1, 38n28, 38n31

Alexander (2004), 6, 123, 127– 40, 235

Alexander the Great, 6, 127– 40

Alexandria, 8, 150, 195, 206, 228– 29,

232– 33, 235, 237– 39

All About My Mother (1999), 57– 58

Almagro, 58, 60

Almodóvar, Pedro, 5, 55– 61, 63, 66

Altman, Robert, 107– 8

Amandry, Pierre, 88– 89

Amata (character; Aeneid), 89

Amazon, 39, 42, 47, 51– 52, 122, 191

Amenábar, Alejandro, 8, 228

Anchises (character; Aeneid), 79

Andress, Ursula, 215

Angels & Insects (1996), 5, 39– 52

and courtship, 41– 43

and cuckoldry, 49– 50

and fidelity and license, 51– 52

and marriage as misalliance, 43– 45

and nature vs. culture, 45– 48

Angels & Insects characters

Bredely Hall, 39– 45, 48– 51, 52n3

Edgar, 43– 44, 46– 50

Eugenia Alabaster Adamson, 39– 40,

43– 46, 49– 51

Lady Alabaster, 39– 40, 42– 43

Matilda Crompton, 51

William Adamson, 5, 39– 51, 52n3

Animal House (1978), 153– 54

Anne Catherick (character; The Woman in White), 29

Anthony, Albert, 37n19

anthropopoieisis, 36n8

Aphorisms (Hippocrates), 18

Aphrodite, 26, 34, 44– 45, 49– 50,

53n28, 78, 175

Apollo, 86– 89, 93, 97n19

Appius Claudius Pulcher, 87

Ares, 49– 50, 53n28


Index268

Arete (character; Odyssey), 39, 41– 43,

46, 50

Aristotle, 133– 34

Ars Amatoria (“The Art of Love”; Ovid),

106– 7

“Arthur Freed Unit” (MGM), 105

Assemblywomen (Aristophanes), 120

Athena, 17, 26, 41, 44, 51, 53n32

Athens, 26, 50, 95, 113, 118, 120, 130

Augoustakis, Antony, 7

Augustus (2002), 199, 201

Avatar (2009), 2

Avedon, Richard, 190

Aymé, Jean, 145

Bacchae (Euripides), 89, 97n20

Bacchanalia, 153

Bacchus, 146

Bagoas, 134– 35, 137

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 172

Bara, Theda, 7, 183– 85, 187– 92

“barbarian queen,” 8, 211– 14

barbarism, 3, 8, 42, 63, 117, 128– 29,

211– 14, 222, 227

Barrie, Amanda, 188– 90

BBC, 8, 147, 149, 151, 157, 192, 196,

201, 206

BBFC. See British Board of Film

Censorship

Bell Jar, The (Plath), 104

Benét, Stephen Vincent, 109n1

Ben- Hur (1959), 99, 172, 218– 19

Bettie Page: Queen of the Nile, 191

Bezzerides, A. I., 25, 28, 33, 36n1,

37n17, 38n30

Bianca, Viva, 170

Bianco, Robert, 155n20

Big Chill, The (1983), 183

Blanshard, Alastair, 153

Blatty, William Peter, 90, 97n24, 98n33

Blondell, Ruby, 124n1

Blunt, Emily, 149

Boa, Elizabeth, 20

Boadicea, 213– 16, 234

Bodysnatchers, The (1955), 184

Bonduca (1609; Fletcher), 214

Boudicca, 3, 8, 211– 13, 217, 220,

225n26

Boudiccan Revolt (A.D. 61), 8, 211

Bowra, C. M., 77

B. P. Johnson Co., 190

Brandt, Lesley- Ann, 158

brassiere, 189– 92

See also snake bra

breastplates, 189, 191– 92, 214, 217– 23

Briseis, 129

British Board of Film Censorship

(BBFC), 215, 220

British Empire, 211– 23, 224n16,

225n26

Broken Embraces (2009), 58

Brooks, Louise, 11– 12, 14, 19– 22

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 177, 181

Butler, Gerard, 117– 19

Byatt, A. S., 5, 39– 40, 52, 52nn3– 4,

53n30

Cabrera, Santiago, 149

Calame, Claude C., 36n8

Calchas, 86, 89

Calgacus, 165, 213, 223n4

Caligula, 147– 49, 154n8, 170

Caligula (1979), 148

Caligula (2007 “Imperial Edition”), 148

Caligula “remake” trailer, 148– 49

Calypso, 40, 42, 44, 52n18

Camelot (2011), 177

Cameron, James, 2

Campus Vamp, The (1928), 185, 189

Caratacus, 213– 14

Carr, Marion, 34

Carrie (1976), 91

Carroll, Brett, 200

Carry on Cleo (1964), 188

Carson, Anne, 89

Cartledge, Paul, 124

Casanova, 106

Cassandra (character; Agamemnon), 89,

97n19

castration anxiety, 93

Catholic Church, 185, 228, 231, 240n6

Catullus, 74, 161

Centurion (2010), 227

Cerberus, 28

Chafe, William, 104

Chicago, Judy, 234

Christianity, 27, 94, 99, 146– 47, 227–

29, 231– 39, 240n6


Index 269

Chronicles of England (1577), 213– 14

Cicero, 196– 98, 209

Circe, 40

“civilization,” 3, 42, 63, 145– 46, 212–

13, 237

Clash of the Titans (1981), 185

Clash of the Titans (2010), 228, 240n2

Cleopatra, 2, 7, 150, 183– 92, 193n1,

193n9, 193n11, 193n20, 195, 197,

200– 203, 205– 6, 208, 209n20,

223, 228

Cleopatra (1534 sketch; Michelangelo),

189– 90, 192

Cleopatra (1911), 189

Cleopatra (1912), 189

Cleopatra (1917), 183– 85, 187, 189

Cleopatra (1934; DeMille), 2, 187, 201

Cleopatra (1963; Mankiewicz), 2, 184–

85, 187– 88, 190, 201– 2, 223

Cleopatra (1999), 199, 201

Cleopatra Jones- Wong- Schwartz trend,

184

Cleopatre: La derniere reine d’Egypt (2010), 192

Close, Glenn, 7, 183– 93

Clover, Carol, 93, 96n3, 97n24, 98n33

Clum, John M., 129

Clytemnestra, 49, 62, 97n19, 119

Cobo, Yohana, 56

Coen brothers, 3

Colbert, Claudette, 185, 187– 88

Cold Mountain (2003), 3

Cold Storage Room, The, 57– 58

Cold War, 35, 36n1

Collins, Wilkie, 29

Commodus, 130– 32, 135

Complete History of England (1757), 214

Condon, Kerry, 150

Cooper, Maxine, 27

corsets, 189

Courtney, Jai, 152

“crisis of American masculinity,” 102

Cruz, Penélope, 56– 57, 65

cuckoldry, 49– 50

Cummings, Erin, 170– 71

Curse of Frankenstein, The (1957),

214– 15

Cyrino, Monica, 22n1, 52n1, 81n1,

82n16, 83n32, 96n1, 118, 124n1,

126n46, 141n20, 154n7, 154n10,

158, 165n1, 169

Darius, 132

Darville, Eka, 161

Darwinism, 40, 46, 49– 50, 53n30

Daryaee, Touraj, 125n27

Daugherty, Gregory N., 7

Davis, John, 79– 80

Day, Doris, 107

Day, Kirsten, 5– 6

Death of Cleopatra (1660), 189

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbon), 236

Dekker, Albert, 27– 28

DeKnight, Steven S., 168, 171, 177, 180

Delphi, 86– 87, 89

del Toro, Benicio, 149– 50

Demaratus, 115– 16, 118, 121

Demeter, 63– 64

DeMille, Cecil B., 2, 145– 46, 201

Demodocus, 49, 66

Dennis, Nick, 37n16

De Paul, Gene, 100

Diary of a Lost Girl, 22

Dido, 37n13, 79– 80

Die Büchse der Pandora (1929; Pabst), 2,

4, 11– 22, 23n10, 19

and Alwa, 12– 16, 19, 22

and Countess Geschwitz, 12– 14, 22,

23n10

and Dr. Goll, 12

and Dr. Hilti, 20

and Dr. Schön, 12– 15, 19– 20, 22

and Lulu, 4, 11– 15, 19– 22, 22n7,

23n10, 23n19

and Marquis Casti- Piani, 13– 14, 22

and Schigolch, 13– 14

and Schwartz, 12, 19

Diessl, Gustav, 13

Dinner Party, The (installation;

Chicago), 234

Dionysus, 154

Dixon, Wheeler Winston, 128

Doane, Mary Ann, 20

Dodds, E. R., 38n31, 97n20

Donaldson, Mike, 200

Donen, Stanley, 6, 105

Don Quixote, 60


Index270

D’Ora, Daisy, 12

Dracula (1958), 214– 15

Dr Pepper television ads, 184

Dueña, Lola, 56

Durgnat, Raymond, 33– 34

Eagle, The (2011), 227

Easton, Seán, 5

Ebert, Roger, 185

ecstasy, 86– 90, 94– 95, 96n2, 9, 97n12,

98n34, 149

Edwards, Catharine, 204

Edwards, Cliff, 189

Egyptians, 150– 51

Elsaesser, Thomas, 20– 21, 22n7, 23n10

Empire (2005), 149

Enlightenment, 233

epikleros, 53n29

Epimetheus, 17– 18, 26, 30, 32– 35,

36n12

epithalamium, 70, 73, 76– 77

Erdgeist (“Earth Spirit”; 1895), 12

Eros, 82n3, 203

Erotic Dreams of Cleopatra, The (1985),

184

Euripides, 89, 119

Euryalus, 46– 48

Evans- Grubbs, Judith, 103

Eve, 17, 19, 27, 37n19

Exorcist, The (1973), 5, 90– 92, 186

and Father Karras, 92, 98n33

and Father Merrin, 98n33

and Regan, 90– 91, 98n33

Fall of the Roman Empire, The (1964;

Mann), 127, 143, 154n5, 237

Faludi, Susan, 169, 176

Farnell, Lewis Richard, 88– 89, 97n22

Farr, Jamie, 190

Farrell, Colin, 71, 134

Fatal Attraction (1987), 183

father/fatherhood, 8, 13, 19, 21, 29,

37n13, 39, 41, 45– 50, 57– 58, 62–

67, 79– 81, 92, 106, 115, 129– 30,

133, 135– 38, 176, 184, 186, 196,

201– 7, 217, 221– 22, 229– 30, 235

Federal Meese Commission (1986), 168

“female gaze,” 7, 167– 81

“feminine mystique,” 103– 4

Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan), 103–

4, 108– 9

feminism, 7– 8, 27, 55, 86, 95, 113, 118,

121, 125n28, 168, 177, 179– 81,

196, 208, 227, 234, 238– 40

feminist theory, 7, 27, 55, 86, 95, 113,

118, 121, 168, 177, 179, 180– 81,

196, 208, 227, 234, 238– 40

“feminization,” 5– 6, 34, 64– 66, 98n41,

127, 130– 32, 134, 138– 40, 197,

199, 214, 217

feminized male, 5– 6, 98n41, 127– 40,

197, 199, 214

Femme Fatale (2002), 191

femmes fatales, 2, 4, 11, 21, 27, 37n17,

191– 92, 227

fetish, 14, 19, 87– 88, 93– 94, 118– 19,

171, 233

Feuillade, Louis, 145

film noir, 4, 34, 38

Film Threat’s Top Ten Lost Silent Films, 184

Finney, Jack, 184

First Epistle of Paul to Timothy, 232

Fitzgerald, Robert, 79

flappers, 146, 183, 185– 86, 189– 92

Fletcher, John, 214

Fletcher, Judith, 40

Flinn, Carol, 34, 37n23

Flower of My Secret, The (1995), 57– 58,

61, 67n6

and Alicia, 57– 58

and Leo Macías, 57– 58, 67n6

Fool There Was, A (1914), 189

Forbes, Michelle, 153

Foucault, Michel, 174

French New Wave cinema, 38n27

frenzy, 86– 90, 96n2, 97n12, 138

Freud, Sigmund, 93, 199

Friedan, Betty, 103– 4, 108

frontier mores, 103, 109

Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, A (1966), 143

Futrell, Alison, 8

Game of Thrones (2011), 169– 70, 177,

179

Garcia, Lorenzo F., Jr., 4

Gaugamela, battle of, 132


Index 271

Gaultier, Jean Paul, 191

Genesis, 17

Gibbon, Edward, 233, 236

Gielgud, John, 170

Gill, Rosalind, 208

Gladiator (2000), 127– 30, 139, 140n2,

143, 157, 172

Glaucon, 60

Gloriosus, Miles, 143

Gods of the Arena (2011), 152, 155n20,

165n7, 178– 79

Goetz, Carl, 13

Gordon, Ruth, 185

Graces, 26

Group of Polygnotos, 30

Guccione, Bob, 170

Guggenheim Museum, 149

Haas, Belinda, 39

Haas, Philip, 5, 39

Hades, 35, 50, 64

Haggard, H. Rider, 215

Hamlet, 37n13

Hamlin, Harry, 185– 86, 188, 192

Hammer Studios, 8, 211, 214– 17, 220,

222– 23, 244n13, 244n17, 244n20

Hannah, John, 152

Hanson, Victor Davis, 120

Hark, Ina Rae, 130, 172

Harris, Charlene, 153

Harrison, Rex, 188

Harrison, Tony, 26

Hassler- Forest, Dan, 117– 18

Hays Code, 198

HBO, 153, 169, 176– 77, 209

HBO- BBC, 7– 8, 149– 51, 157, 196,

201, 206

Headey, Lena, 117– 20

Hector, 128– 29, 131– 32, 135, 138– 39

Helen, 70, 80– 81, 82n8, 131

Heliogabalus (A.D. 218– 22), 145

Heller, Bruno, 209

Henley, Alice, 150

Hephaestion, 128, 133– 39, 140n11

Hephaestus, 15– 17, 26, 31, 35, 38n30,

49– 50, 53n28

Hera, 53n28

Hercules and the Amazon Women (1994),

122

Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), 185

Hermes, 17, 26, 48

Herodotus, 88– 89, 114– 16, 118, 121,

124n12, 125n15, 125n21

Hesiod, 4, 11– 22

heterosexuality, 127, 129– 30, 132– 36,

140n8

Heyman, Francis, 214

Hippocrates, 18

Histories (Herodotus), 114– 16, 118,

124n12, 125n15

Hitchcock, Alfred, 34, 37

Holinshed, Raphael, 213– 14

Hollywood film epics, 227– 40

Hollywood musicals (1950s), 6, 99– 109

Homecoming (1948), 3

Homer, 2, 5, 39– 43, 47– 48, 50– 52,

52n3, 53n28, 55– 64, 66, 69– 70,

77, 80, 82n3, 89

Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 5, 63– 64

homosexuality, 127– 40, 140n8,

140n12, 140n14, 158, 160– 62,

165n6, 170

Hopkins, Claude, 190

horror films, 85– 95, 215

Hours, the, 26

Hudson, Rock, 107

Hughes, Bettany, 116– 17, 119

Hypatia, 8, 228– 39, 240n9, 241n19,

241n22, 241n34

and the end of the classical world,

234– 38

and gender, 230– 31

and religion, 231– 33

Hypatia (1885 painting), 233

Hypatia, or Old Foes with a New Face (1853; Kingsley), 231

I, Claudius (1976), 147– 48

Ibycus, 70

Iceni tribe, 212– 13, 216– 17, 220– 21,

223n3, 224n12

Imperium: Augustus (2003), 192

incest, 39– 52

incest taboo, 53n30

incontinentia (lack of self- control), 197–

99, 203

Io (character; Prometheus Bound), 30


Index272

Jack the Ripper, 12– 15, 23n24

Jacob, Mary Phelps, 189

James, Paula, 4– 5

James, Richard, 155n20

Jamestown colony, 5

Jayamanne, Laleen, 37n17

“Jeepers Creepers!” (song), 100

Jordaan, L. J., 36n8

Joshel, Sandra, 144, 154, 154n6,

154n10, 180

Jovovich, Milla, 148– 49

Joy, Leatrice, 145– 46

Joyner, Joyzelle, 146

Julius Caesar, 213, 235

katabasis theme, 38n28

Keel, Howard, 101– 2

Kelly, Rachael, 7

Kensit, Patsy, 45

Kepler, Johannes, 239

Kerr, Deborah, 147

Kilcher, Q’Orianka, 72, 74

kinaidos, 140n13

Kinder, Küche, und Kirche, 103

King Arthur (2004), 240n3

King Lear, 217

Kingsley, Charles, 231, 233– 34

“Kirk Douglas,” 173– 75

Kiss Me Deadly (1955), 25– 36

and the modern Prometheus, 28– 33

and the movie, 27– 28

and the myth, 26– 27

and readings of the film, 33– 36

and seizing the fire, 33

Kiss Me Deadly characters

Berga, 28– 31

Christina, 27– 32, 34– 35, 36n11

Dr. Soberin, 27– 28, 31– 33

Friday, 34

Gabrielle, 25, 27– 28, 31– 35

Lily, 25, 27– 28, 31– 35

Mike Hammer, 25, 27– 35, 36n12

Pat Murphy, 31

Velda, 27– 28, 32, 35, 36n1

Kortner, Fritz, 12

Kristeva, Julia, 37n24

Kubrick, Stanley, 157, 172– 74

Kungu Poti, 20

Kwok, Miranda, 174

Lady’s Pictorial, The, 234

Laertes, 67

La Mancha, 59

La Mort de Cléopâtre (1874), 189

Lampreave, Chus, 56

Landi, Alissa, 146

Laodamas, 46– 47

La Rosa del Azafrán (1930), 59, 67n10

“Las Espigadoras” (“the Gleaners”),

59– 60

Lasker, Albert, 190

Last Exorcism, The (2010), 92

and Nell, 92

and Reverend Cotton Marcus, 92

Last Legion, The (2007), 240n3

Lauretis, Teresa de, 94

Lawless, Lucy, 152– 53, 177, 181

Leachman, Cloris, 27– 28

Lederer, Franz, 12

Lee, Christopher, 215

Leech, Allen, 150

Leonidas, 89– 90, 116– 21, 128– 30, 132,

135, 138– 39, 227

LeRoy, Mervyn, 3

Leto, Jared, 134

Lev Kenaan, Vered, 27, 33

Life of Antony (Plutarch), 185

Life of Brian (1979), 232

Lilith, 19

Littau, Karin, 11

Livy, 238

Lizpatra. See Cleopatra (1963)

Lombard, Carol, 185, 189

Lonely Planet, 89

Lord, Mary- Louise, 64

L’Orgie romaine (The Roman Orgy; 1911), 145

Lot, 28

Love, Courtney, 148– 49

Love Boat, The (1977– 86), 184

Lucan, 87– 88, 95

Lucretia, 152, 158, 162– 63, 165n7,

173– 80

Lydia, 145– 46

Lysistrata (Aristophanes), 120

Macmillan, Maree, 11

Madonna, 189, 191

Maenad, 153


Index 273

Malamud, Margaret, 144, 154, 154n6,

154n10, 154n14

male anxiety, 93– 95, 109

male gaze, 71, 87– 95, 96n8, 169, 170–

71, 191, 207– 9

Malick, Terrence, 5, 69– 81

Mankiewicz, Joseph L., 2, 184, 201

Mann, Anthony, 127, 143, 154n5

Manslaughter (1922), 145

Marc Antony, 7, 150– 51, 169, 185– 88,

195– 209, 209n13

characteristics of, 197

and fatherhood, 196, 201– 7

and licentiousness, 196, 198– 201

and Roman political invective,

196– 98

in Rome, 195– 209

and virility, 196, 198– 200

March, Fredric, 146

Marcus Antonius (historical figure),

195– 98, 201

Mariette in Ecstasy (1996), 94

Marion’s Wall (Finney), 184– 89

and Marion, 184– 88

and Nick, 184

Mark Antony. See Marc Antony

Marshal, Lyndsey, 150

Marshall, George, 21

Martin, John, 36n3

masculinity, 6– 8, 12, 14, 20, 44, 47,

102, 107– 8, 113, 116– 17, 120,

126n42, 127– 40, 171, 176, 195–

205, 207– 9, 209n20, 217

M*A*S*H (1970 film), 108

M*A*S*H (1972– 86 series), 184, 190

Maura, Carmen, 57

Maurizio, Lisa, 93, 96n9, 97nn11– 12

Maxie (1985), 7, 183– 93

and Antony, 186– 87

and Cleopatra, 183– 87

and Jan, 183– 88, 191

and Maxie, 185– 89, 191– 92

and Nick, 183, 185– 86

screenwriter of, 185

and snake bra, 7, 183, 186– 92, 193n1

and uraeus, 186– 87

Maximus, 128– 32, 135, 138– 39

McCarthyism, 36n1

McDonough, Christopher M., 6

McDowell, Malcolm, 148

McRobbie, Angela, 208

Medea, 119, 159

Medusa, 32

Meeker, Ralph, 27

Menelaus, 131

Mensah, Peter, 152

Mercer, Johnny, 100– 103, 107, 109n2

Metamorphoses (Ovid), 35

methodology, 3– 5

Michaels, Lloyd, 81

Midler, Bette, 189

militat omnis amans (“every lover is a

soldier”), 108

Miller, Frank, 109n4, 114– 17, 121– 22,

126n42

Minghella, Anthony, 3

Mirren, Helen, 148– 49, 170

misogyny, 11, 27, 113– 14, 118– 19,

121– 23, 181, 229, 232– 37

Mitchell, Charles William, 233

mollitia (feminized behavior), 34, 197

monogamy, 103, 153

Monroe, Marilyn, 190

Monstertragedy (Eine Monstretragödie), 12, 19

Monty Python, 232

morality, 2, 5– 7, 21, 39, 43– 46, 48, 50,

52, 53n25, 72, 94, 127, 144– 48,

151, 154, 159– 60, 172– 73, 180–

81, 211– 13, 216, 229

“Morpho Eugenia” (Byatt), 39– 40,

52n3

Mortal Kombat (video game), 167

mother/motherhood, 18, 20, 24n49,

41, 50, 55– 61, 63– 67, 70– 71,

73– 79, 90– 92, 104, 106, 117– 18,

125n28, 127, 132, 135– 38, 214,

217, 225n27, 231, 236

Movie That Changed My Life, The, 103

Mulvey, Laura, 11, 37n18, 37n24, 91,

93– 94, 96n9, 98n42, 126n42, 170,

207

Mummy, The (Rice), 184

Murray, Jaime, 152

Muse, 70– 71, 77– 78

My Fair Lady (1964), 108

narcissism, 30, 34


Index274

National Union of Women’s Suffrage

Societies, 214

Native American culture, 118

Natural, The (1984), 183

Nausicaa (character; Odyssey), 37n13,

39– 43, 46, 50– 51, 52n11, 62

Neilson, Julia, 234

Nero, 146– 47, 212, 219

Newes, Tilly, 12

New Line Cinema, 78

New World, The (2005), 69– 81,

82nn3– 4

and desire and loss, 76– 77

and desire and marriage, 70– 76

and the goddess, 77– 78

and the “hero of her own story,”

78– 81

Nine to Five (1980), 185

Nisbet, Gideon, 153

nostos, 55– 56, 62– 67, 67n3

Notorious (1947; Hitchcock), 37n24

objectification, 7, 13, 22, 31, 44, 64, 70,

87, 93– 95, 96n9, 167– 81, 199,

208

O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), 3

Octavia, 150

Octavian, 150– 52, 204– 5, 218– 22,

224n24

Octavius, 149

Odysseus, 5, 37n13, 39– 52, 56, 61– 63,

66– 67, 78

Odyssey (Homer), 2– 3, 37n13, 39– 40,

41– 42, 48– 49, 51– 52, 52n3, 52n18,

55– 56, 59– 64, 66, 78, 86, 89

Oedipal complex, 136– 37, 141n16, 205

Oliver, Kelly, 199, 201– 4, 207

Olympias, 132, 136, 138, 140n15

Olympus, 26

Omen, The (1976), 93

Omen, The (2006), 93

One Hour to Madness and Joy (Whitman), 76

One Million Years B.C. (1967), 211,

215– 16, 224n20

On Generation (Hippocrates), 18

orgasm, 34, 85– 95

orgies, 1, 6– 7, 113, 143– 54, 154n5, 9,

155nn19– 20, 178, 181, 198

and audience identification, 153– 54

Roman, 145– 53

Osiris, 218, 220, 224n24

Ovid, 34– 35, 87, 105– 8

Pabst, G. W., 2, 4, 11– 22, 22n7, 23n8,

23n10, 23n19, 24

Pache, Corinne, 5

Padel, Ruth, 87, 96n10

Palmolive ads, 189

Pandora, 2, 4, 11– 22, 23n27, 28, 30,

24n34, 25– 36, 36n4, 36n8, 37n14,

37nn18– 19, 37n24

and Hesiod, 11

jar of, 17– 18

Panofsky, Dora, 24n34, 36n8

Panofsky, Erwin, 24n34, 36n8

Paranormal Activity (2009), 5, 85, 92

and Diane, 85, 92

and Katie, 85, 92

and Micah, 85, 92

Paranormal Activity 2 (2010), 91– 92

Paranormal Activity 3 (2011), 91– 92

Paris, 131

Parke, H. W., 97n12

Patinkin, Mandy, 183, 185

patriarchy, 7, 11– 12, 18, 41, 44– 45, 49,

51, 53n32, 64, 72, 79, 95, 96n9,

116, 127– 28, 168– 69, 177, 196,

201, 203, 207, 229, 234

Patroclus, 129, 134, 140n8, 141n11, 161

Patton (1970), 108

Paul, Joanna, 8, 164

Pax Romana, 99

Peitho (Persuasion), 26

Penelope (character; Odyssey), 42, 44,

48– 49, 56, 61– 62, 66

Penthouse magazine, 148

Penthouse Pets, 148, 170

Penwill, John, 38n32

Persephone, 50, 64

Phaeacians, 5, 39– 47, 49, 52n4, 62, 66

Phaedrus (Plato), 86

Pharsalia (Lucan), 87– 88

Philip, 136, 138, 140n15

Philippics (Cicero), 196– 98, 209

2.3, 197– 98, 209

5.9, 198

Pierce, Jerry B., 6


Index 275

Pillow Talk (1959), 107

Plath, Sylvia, 104

Plato, 86, 203

Plutarch, 99– 103, 105, 108, 114, 116–

18, 122, 125nn16– 17, 185, 187

plutonium, 38n32

Pocahontas, 5, 69– 81, 81n2, 82n14,

82n27

Polanski, Roman, 97n23

Poltergeist (1982), 91– 92

and Carol Anne, 91– 92

and Diane, 91– 92

Pomeroy, Sarah, 116, 118, 125n21

pornography, 94– 95, 144, 153, 155n20,

167– 71, 176, 180– 81, 184

Portillo, Blanca, 56

Poseidon, 47, 49, 51

possession, 85– 96, 96n2

in the ancient world, 86– 89

defined, 96n2

in film, 89– 94

post- 9/11 world, 95

Powell, Jane, 103

Powhatan, 69, 73– 74, 81

Prasutagus, 212

Prehistoric Women (1967), 211, 215– 16

presidential election, US (2008), 95

Princess Leia, 189– 91

Private Gladiator (2001), 144– 45

Prometheus, 4, 15– 17, 25– 28, 30– 32,

34– 35, 36n4, 36n11, 37n19,

38nn30– 31

Prometheus (1998), 26

Prometheus Bound (Aeschylus), 26,

30– 31

Prose, Francine, 103, 107

Protestantism, 231– 32

Psycho (1960), 34, 93

Psycho (1998), 93

Ptolemy, 128, 133, 235

Purcell, Henry, 37n13

Purefoy, James, 150

Pygmalion (mythology), 34

Pythia, 86– 89, 97n12, 97n16

Queen of the Damned (2002), 191

Quo Vadis (1951), 99, 147

and Lygia, 147

and Marcus, 147

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), 38

Raimi, Sam, 177

rape, 3, 6, 48, 57– 58, 62– 64, 86– 95,

97n23, 99– 107, 119, 136, 140n15,

148, 159, 168– 70, 178– 81, 212,

222, 230, 238

“divine,” 97n23

and raptus, 103

Rape of the Sabine Women, 3, 6, 99–

106, 238

rapture, 94

Raucci, Stacie, 6– 7

Resnick, Patricia, 185

Return of the Jedi (1983), 189– 91

Rheingold (Wagner), 71

Rice, Anne, 184, 191

Richlin, Amy, 107

Robson, Eddie, 38n27

Rodgers, Gaby, 27– 28

Rolfe, John, 70, 78– 80

Rolfe, Rebecca, 80, 82n2

Rolling Stone magazine (Italian), 149

Roman Holiday (1953), 99

Roman orgy. See orgies

Rome (HBO- BBC series), 7– 8, 122,

149– 51, 155n19, 157, 176– 77,

192, 195– 209

and Egyptians, 150– 51

and fatherhood, 201– 7

and the male gaze, 207– 9

and Roman political invective, 196– 98

and virility, 198– 200

Rome characters

Agrippa, 150– 51, 201– 2

Atia, 169

Caesar, 198, 202– 3, 208

Caesarion, 202, 204– 5

Cleopatra, 150– 51, 201– 3

Livia, 150

Lucius Vorenus, 151, 204– 5, 208

Maecenas, 151

Marc Antony, 150– 51, 169, 195– 209

Niobe, 204

Octavia, 150, 155n20, 201– 2, 205– 6

Octavian, 150– 52, 204– 5, 218

Pullo, 204, 208

Servilia, 169

Romulus, 100– 101, 106

Rosemary’s Baby (1968), 97n23


Index276

Rossetti, Christina, 31, 37n13

Roxane, 135– 37

Royalle, Candida, 169– 71, 176

Royster, Francesca, 184

Rubin, Gayle, 168– 69

Rylance, Mark, 45, 48

Sabine Women, 3, 6, 99– 106, 238

sadism, 95, 207

sadomasochistic, 204, 233

Safran, Meredith, 5

Samantha Jones (character; Sex and the City), 169

Sappho, 5, 69– 81, 82nn3– 4, 234

Sarris, Andrew, 143

Sartre, Maurice, 229

Sayings of Spartan Women (Plutarch),

114– 24, 125n16

Scheib, Richard, 185

Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 102

Schwartz, Russell, 78

scopophilia, 85– 86, 91– 92

Scott, A. O., 121, 239

Scott, Ridley, 143

Segal, Lynne, 129

Selous, Henry Courtney, 214

Serapeum, 236– 37, 239, 241n27

Serpent of the Nile (1953), 201

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), 6,

99– 109

and Adam Pontipee, 99– 104

Sex and the City (1998– 2004), 169, 171

“sexual productivity,” 19– 21

Sharrock, Alison, 34, 36n11, 107

She (1965), 211, 215– 16

Shining, The (1980), 93

Shrek (2001), 107

Sibyl, 86– 87, 89, 96n3, 97n12

Sign of the Cross, The (1932), 146

and Ancaria, 146

and Marcus Superbus, 146

and Mercia, 146– 47

Silvae (Statius), 87

Simon, John, 143

Singy, Patrick, 154n9

Skinner, Marilyn, 78

slaves/slavery, 3, 7, 13– 14, 88, 104,

123, 132, 152– 53, 155n19, 157– 64,

167– 69, 171– 80, 190– 91, 205,

208, 215, 218– 23, 227, 229– 30

Smith, Bruce R., 200

Smith, Chloe, 177

Smith, John, 5, 69– 81, 82n27

snake bra, 7, 183, 186– 92, 193n1

Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937), 103

Snyder, Zack, 2, 6, 90, 113– 24, 124n8

See also 300“sobbing women,” 99– 102

Soranus, 18

“soul fuck,” 85– 96

Sound of Music, The (1959), 108

Sparta, 113

Spartacus (1960; Kubrick), 157– 58,

164, 165n3, 172

Spartacus: Blood and Sand (2010 series),

7, 152, 157– 65, 167– 81

and conjugal love, 158– 65

and domesticated loved, 161– 62

and dreams, 159

and pornography, 170– 71

and rape, 178– 80

and Roman matronae, 162

and sex and violence, 167– 81

and sex scenes, 176– 78

Spartacus: Blood and Sand characters

Ashur, 162, 175, 178

Aurelia, 160

Barca, 160– 62, 176

Batiatus, 157– 60, 162, 173– 76,

178– 80

Crassus, 162

Crixus, 158– 59, 162– 64, 174– 76, 178

Gaia, 152, 165n7

Glaber, 159, 162

Ilithyia, 158, 162– 63, 170, 173– 75,

180

Licinia, 162

Lucretia, 152, 158, 162– 63, 165n7,

173– 80

Mira, 158, 163– 64, 175

Naevia, 158– 59, 163– 64, 174– 76,

178– 79

Numerius, 162– 63

Oenomaus, 152

Pietros, 160– 62, 176, 178


Index 277

Sura, 157– 60, 162– 64, 170, 176

Varro, 152, 158– 63, 179

Spartacus: Gods of the Arena (2011), 161

and Auctus, 161

and Barca, 161

Spartan Reflections (2001; Cartledge),

124

Spartans, 3, 6, 89– 90, 113– 24, 129– 30,

132

Spartan women, 113– 18, 123, 125n16

Spielberg, Steven, 38n29

Spillane, Mickey, 4, 25, 28– 30, 33, 35,

38n27

See also Kiss Me DeadlyStarz network, 2, 7, 152, 161, 167, 174,

177– 78, 180– 81

Statius, 87

Stephens, Susan, 235

Stevenson, Adlai, 104

Stigmata (1999), 94

Stone, Oliver, 6, 123, 127– 40, 235

Stranglers of Bombay, The (1960), 215

Strong, Anise K., 7

Sucker Punch (2011), 121

Sweeney Todd, 63

Tacitus, 98n41, 165n5, 212– 14, 219,

223n1, 223n6, 225n26

Talk to Her (2002), 58

Tancharoen, Maurissa, 177

Tandy, David, 47– 48

Tapert, Robert, 177

Taylor, Elizabeth, 184, 188

Taylor, Robert, 147

Teiresias, 86, 89, 51

Telemachus, 45, 67

Te Maioha, Antonio, 161

Tenuta, Judy, 184

Terror of the Tongs (1961), 215

Theogony (Hesiod), 11, 15– 17, 20, 22n2,

23n27, 28, 26

Theoklymenos (character; Odyssey), 89

Thermopylae, battle of (480 B.C.), 3,

113– 14, 116, 118– 20, 127, 167

Thetis, 52n19

Thomson, David, 34, 37n17

“Those Sobbin’ Women” (song),

99– 100

Three Coins in a Fountain (1954), 99

300 (2007), 2, 6, 90– 91, 113– 24,

124n8, 126n42, 126n46, 127– 30,

132, 139, 140n2, 167, 170, 227

and Cleomenes, 115– 16

and Dilios, 115

and Ephors, 89– 90

and Gorgo, 113– 24, 124n8, 125n15,

227

and Leonidas, 89– 90, 116– 21, 128–

30, 132, 138– 39, 227

and Theron, 114, 119– 21

and Xerxes, 113– 14, 117

300 (graphic novel; Miller), 114– 15

300 Spartans, The (1962), 116

Thuggee cult, 215

Tiberius, 98n41

Titan, 26, 35, 36n3, 185, 228, 240n2

Toland, John, 233

Tomasso, Vincent, 6

Topper (1937), 185

Torchwood: Miracle Day (2011), 177

Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula, 148– 49

Trojan War, 39, 66, 131

Troy (2004), 127– 31, 139, 140n2

True Blood, 153

Truman, Harry, 101

Tudors, The, 176– 77

uranium, 38n32

Ustinov, Peter, 172

Vajda, Ladislaus, 12

Valentino, Rudolph, 184

vamps, 7, 185– 87, 189– 90, 192, 212,

215

Venice Biennale (2005), 149

Venus, 79, 241n19

Vergil, 69, 78– 79, 82n3, 83n29, 86– 89,

95

Vernant, Jean- Pierre, 27

Versace, Donatella, 149– 50

Vestal Virgin, 149

Vezzoli, Francesco, 149

Victorians, 29, 36n3, 40, 42, 50, 53n30,

189, 224n16

Vidal, Gore, 148– 49


Index278

Viking Queen, The (1967), 8, 211– 23

and “barbarian queen,” 211– 12

and Boudicca’s revolt, 212– 13

and the breastplate, 217– 23

and building Boadicea, 213– 16

and Iceni tribe, 212– 13, 216– 17,

220– 21, 223n3, 224n12

Viking Queen, The characters

Justinian, 217– 23, 224n24

King Priam, 217, 219, 224n24,

225n27

Maelgan, 219– 21

Octavian, 218– 22, 224n24

Salina, 217– 23

Virgin Mary, 93

“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”

(Mulvey), 93

Voltaire, 233

Volver (2006; Almodóvar), 5, 55– 67

and Agustina, 56– 57, 61– 62

and Emilio, 61

and Irene, 56– 57, 62– 66

and Paco, 57, 61– 64

and Paula (aunt), 56, 62– 63

and Paula (daughter), 56– 57, 60,

62– 65

and Raimunda, 56– 57, 59– 66

and Sole, 56– 57, 60, 63, 65

von Newlinsky, Michael, 13

voyeurism, 87, 91– 92, 94, 148, 153,

175

Wagner, Richard, 71

Walker, Polly, 155, 169

Walter (character; The Woman in White), 29

Washington Post, 167

Wedekind, Frank, 11– 12, 14, 18– 21,

22nn3– 4

Weisz, Rachel, 228– 29, 231, 233, 235

Welch, Raquel, 215– 16

Wenzel, Diana, 184

Werewocomoco, 73

West, Dominic, 119– 20

Whedon, Jed, 177

Whitfield, Andy, 152

Whitman, Walt, 76

Whitney Museum (New York), 149

Williams, Linda, 94

Winkler, John J., 67n2, 140n13,

154nn4– 5, 165nn2– 3

Witchboard (1986), 91

Wolfman, The (1941 and 2010), 93

Woman in White, The (Collins), 29

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), 57– 58

Woods, Simon, 150

Works and Days (Hesiod), 11– 12, 15– 18,

22n2, 23n27, 26, 35

World According to Garp, The (1982), 183

World War I, 189

World War II, 104

Wormell, D. E. W., 97n12

Wyke, Maria, 98n41, 144, 154

Xena: Warrior Princess (1995– 2001),

122, 177, 181, 191, 214, 224n12

Xerxes, 113– 14, 117, 132, 135

Yentl (1983), 185

Zeitlin, Froma, 27, 37n18

Zeus, 15– 17, 26, 28, 33, 38n31, 48, 50–

51, 52n19, 53n28, 64, 78

Zweig, Bella, 118


Screening Love and Sex in the Ancient World

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