Last night I watched Renaissance, an animated film from 2006. It’s one of the more visually striking films I’ve seen in a while, and worth taking a look at for that reason alone. As I watched it, though, I gradually became more and more irritated and eventually a bit offended by the message of the film.
It’s near future, dystopic science fiction set in mid-21st Century Paris. As we eventually find out, a scientist has discovered a method of maintaining life indefinitely, effectively producing immortality. The secret will be exploited by the evil cosmetics/life science corporation she works for so that the company will have power over life and death. The protagonist, a postmodern Harry Callahan from the Casbah type cop, puts an end to the threat posed by the scientist’s research by putting a bullet in her head. (She does eventually come across as arrogant, though only in a scene that’s out of character with her presentation throughout the rest of the movie, and the fact that she’s presented as someone who needs a bullet put in her head by an aggressive male cop when her main sin seems to have been being a bit arrogant was part of what disturbed me, though not the aspect of what disturbed me that I’m mainly writing about here.)
The movie confuses and conflates two messages, that a single entity monopolizing immortality would be bad (to which I’d agree), and that immortality per se would be bad. If anything, it’s the second message that’s ultimately emphasized. The key message of the movie is “Without death, life is meaningless.” That’s not my abstraction from the film, but a direct quote from a pivotal moment, which is then replayed in flashback form a bit later (right before the bullet in the head) in case anyone didn’t get the take away point.
I realize that my taking offense is probably an overreaction on my part based in the fact that I lost my own partner, Reginald, to cancer so recently. Still, that sentiment that death is what makes life meaningful seems at best to rationalize the inevitable as virtue or wisdom. Personally, I don’t want to live forever, but that’s because I don’t want to live forever without Reginald. I also wouldn’t want to live forever in pain or in an invalid state, but if I could live forever, healthily, with Reginald, I would very much like that.
(The idea that death is what makes life meaningful, in addition to being a rationalization [if we’ve got to die, then that’s a good thing] seems perhaps a misapplication of market thinking where it doesn’t really apply. Death makes life and our days scarce, and scarce things are more valuable. But that sort of supply and demand thinking only really works well for tradable items, like gold. We can’t trade our days, and supply, demand, scarcity, and so forth apply to life and death only in vague and inexact ways at best.)
In any case, if death is what gives your life meaning, that’s just sad. I certainly didn’t need death to enter the picture for life with my partner to have meaning.
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
In The Long Run, Our Culture Has Good Taste
The continuing fascination with Britney Spears’ apparent meltdown. The success of pop songs like “My Humps” or “The Thong Song” (just to pick two from the past decade) or of movies like Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo or Alvin and the Chipmunks (over $200 million at the domestic box office and counting).
There are also examples of pop culture in its various forms that are clearly (or at least debatably) high quality and that are popular. I’d never suggest that popularity is a sign of bad art (or bad or faddish scholarship), but at the same time, no one could accuse contemporary North American culture of having impeccably good taste. (I’ll leave aside for the moment issues of whether cultures can have taste – I’m really talking about the aggregate taste of millions of North American individuals. I’d also note that North America is by no means alone in having a fondness for a mixed bag of profound faire alongside tacky, or even godawful ephemera.)
People often have the impression that pop culture and the arts used to be better. This impression comes from the fact that in the long term, we actually have good taste, and this skews our memory of the past.
In contemporary society, whether you want to call it the society of late capitalism, the postmodern era, or something else, novelty is relentlessly marketed to all of us as consumers of popular culture and commodities generally. (And I think this basic argument applies as much outside North America as to North America.) Most of the novel things have very short shelf lives, momentarily amusing us or catching our eye, until something else does.
Objects of creative expression (and I would include scholarly expression as much as art here) that maintain the interest of many for very long, though highly various, tend to have objective qualities that reward repeated reflection and rumination (i.e. they’re actually at least somewhat profound) and that are not overly determined by the moment of their creation, allowing them to communicate across temporal contexts.
The art objects and scholarship that we continue to go back to over long periods of time are generally first rate stuff (though I’d leave room for exceptions – and it’s crucial to note that I’m not arguing that over time all instances of good art or scholarship come to be appreciated for what they are, but simply that creative expression that is appreciated over long periods of time is generally worthy of the appreciation).
We can have the impression that movies were better in the 1930s or 1940s because we mainly continue to watch and remember Casablanca or Citizen Kane, and compare them to the full range of good and schlocky movies being made today, forgetting about equally schlocky early movies like Gold Diggers of 1935 or Earthworm Tractors. We remember Frank Sinatra, but most don’t know, or have forgotten, a novelty song he sang with a singing dog, and most who do know about that have probably never actually heard it.
There are also examples of pop culture in its various forms that are clearly (or at least debatably) high quality and that are popular. I’d never suggest that popularity is a sign of bad art (or bad or faddish scholarship), but at the same time, no one could accuse contemporary North American culture of having impeccably good taste. (I’ll leave aside for the moment issues of whether cultures can have taste – I’m really talking about the aggregate taste of millions of North American individuals. I’d also note that North America is by no means alone in having a fondness for a mixed bag of profound faire alongside tacky, or even godawful ephemera.)
People often have the impression that pop culture and the arts used to be better. This impression comes from the fact that in the long term, we actually have good taste, and this skews our memory of the past.
In contemporary society, whether you want to call it the society of late capitalism, the postmodern era, or something else, novelty is relentlessly marketed to all of us as consumers of popular culture and commodities generally. (And I think this basic argument applies as much outside North America as to North America.) Most of the novel things have very short shelf lives, momentarily amusing us or catching our eye, until something else does.
Objects of creative expression (and I would include scholarly expression as much as art here) that maintain the interest of many for very long, though highly various, tend to have objective qualities that reward repeated reflection and rumination (i.e. they’re actually at least somewhat profound) and that are not overly determined by the moment of their creation, allowing them to communicate across temporal contexts.
The art objects and scholarship that we continue to go back to over long periods of time are generally first rate stuff (though I’d leave room for exceptions – and it’s crucial to note that I’m not arguing that over time all instances of good art or scholarship come to be appreciated for what they are, but simply that creative expression that is appreciated over long periods of time is generally worthy of the appreciation).
We can have the impression that movies were better in the 1930s or 1940s because we mainly continue to watch and remember Casablanca or Citizen Kane, and compare them to the full range of good and schlocky movies being made today, forgetting about equally schlocky early movies like Gold Diggers of 1935 or Earthworm Tractors. We remember Frank Sinatra, but most don’t know, or have forgotten, a novelty song he sang with a singing dog, and most who do know about that have probably never actually heard it.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
My Favorite Moview of 2007, Part II
I didn’t intend for my listing of favorite books and movies from last year to stretch out through the entire month of January, but between starting a new semester of teaching and still recovering from 2007 (see the introduction to My Favorite Books of 2007), it’s taken longer than I anticipated.
Anyway, here are the remainder of my favorite movies from those I watched last year:
11. Pan’s Labyrinth
This was one of the rare movies that I felt deserved the lavish praise that was heaped upon it. I found the ending heart-breaking, but it’s a beautiful film in almost every regard.
12. Pumping Iron
This is a silly film, a documentary about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s last (and once again successful) bid for the Mr. Universe title in the late 1970s, but I found it highly entertaining. And it gave us not just one but two stars of science fiction/fantasy/action film and television, even if Lou Ferrigno’s star faded before Schwarzenegger’s.
13. Shoot the Piano Player
A great film by Truffault. This is an example of an “art film” that succeeds in being good art in part by being a good and well-crafted genre film, in this case an engaging crime and gangster caper. (Another film similar in that one regard was Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon from a few years back. Part of what was different about the film was not actually the high-flying theatrical action. Anyone who had seen The Bride with White Hair or The Heroic Trio had seen similar action, also well done. What was different about Lee’s film, and arguably Truffault’s film, was getting audiences to experience a well crafted example of genre faire many of them normally never encounter.)
14. The Simpsons Movie
“Spider Pig, Spider Pig, does whatever Spider Pig does.” If you like and get The Simpsons, I don’t need to say anything else. If you don’t like or get The Simpsons, I don’t need to say anything else.
15. The Squid and the Whale
I was really prepared to hate this film. White, upper middle class angst in pop culture turns my stomach. For example, I found the similarly praised Sideways literally unwatchable – when I tried to watch it, I was able to recognize that it seemed like a nicely put together movie, but every moment I watched annoyed me more and more. Further, while family melodramas don’t necessarily actively annoy me, they do tend to bore me – the daily lives and travails of “ordinary” people are deeply meaningful to them, but most people’s lives aren’t worth making movies about. Put them together, and I feel like there’s often something highly narcissistic about white middle class people watching movies about the trivial details of lives of people like themselves and finding it somehow profound. So, I see the fact that not only did I not hate this film, but found it actually pretty gripping to be a sign of how good the movie is. (One caveat: when the oldest son plays an acoustic version of Pink Floyd’s “Hey You” at a school talent contest, proclaiming he had written the song, I found it absurdly unbelievable that no one in an audience of mostly middle aged white people recognized it until well after the fact.)
16. Trane Tracks: The Legacy of John Coltrane
This isn’t really a documentary or movie in any conventional sense. It’s simply a collection on DVD of video footage of the John Coltrane Quartet in performance, something there’s not a lot of, unfortunately. Some of the clips have been issued on other videos, though the highlight for me was a clip I had not seen before of the quartet performing “Impressions.” Much of the video footage throughout the performance actually focuses on drummer Elvin Jones. Jones was known as a highly virtuosic, polyrhythmic drummer, something that can be readily heard from any of his recordings with Coltrane (or for that matter on any of his recordings without Coltrane). Seeing this performance, though, in addition to hearing it, is to bear witness to a spectacle of musical beauty and nearly unbelievable athletic prowess. Between his two arms and two legs, Jones bangs out four distinct rhythms simultaneously, sometimes arguably five. It was one of those visual images that altered the way I heard things, heightening my sensitivity to Jones’ drumming.
17. Umberto D.
One of the bleakest films I’ve ever seen. An old man in post-war Italy struggles to pay his rent, and after a series of misfortunes ultimately ends up homeless, having nothing but his small dog, Flick. As the film ends, he resolves to kill himself and Flick by stepping in front of a train. As the train approaches, Flick becomes increasingly agitated, eventually leaping from the man’s arms and running away. The man desperately tries to catch up to Flick, but the dog nervously shies away from him now. At the very end of the movie, Flick finally comes back to the man (which is the only reason the film didn’t leave me crying for a week), but you know there’s no real future for this man and his dog.
18. I Vitelloni
An early Fellini film. It’s not one of his great films, but even decent Fellini is pretty good. This is a sort of coming of age story of five young men from Rimini, a sort of Italian Diner, except a better and more interesting movie.
Anyway, here are the remainder of my favorite movies from those I watched last year:
11. Pan’s Labyrinth
This was one of the rare movies that I felt deserved the lavish praise that was heaped upon it. I found the ending heart-breaking, but it’s a beautiful film in almost every regard.
12. Pumping Iron
This is a silly film, a documentary about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s last (and once again successful) bid for the Mr. Universe title in the late 1970s, but I found it highly entertaining. And it gave us not just one but two stars of science fiction/fantasy/action film and television, even if Lou Ferrigno’s star faded before Schwarzenegger’s.
13. Shoot the Piano Player
A great film by Truffault. This is an example of an “art film” that succeeds in being good art in part by being a good and well-crafted genre film, in this case an engaging crime and gangster caper. (Another film similar in that one regard was Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon from a few years back. Part of what was different about the film was not actually the high-flying theatrical action. Anyone who had seen The Bride with White Hair or The Heroic Trio had seen similar action, also well done. What was different about Lee’s film, and arguably Truffault’s film, was getting audiences to experience a well crafted example of genre faire many of them normally never encounter.)
14. The Simpsons Movie
“Spider Pig, Spider Pig, does whatever Spider Pig does.” If you like and get The Simpsons, I don’t need to say anything else. If you don’t like or get The Simpsons, I don’t need to say anything else.
15. The Squid and the Whale
I was really prepared to hate this film. White, upper middle class angst in pop culture turns my stomach. For example, I found the similarly praised Sideways literally unwatchable – when I tried to watch it, I was able to recognize that it seemed like a nicely put together movie, but every moment I watched annoyed me more and more. Further, while family melodramas don’t necessarily actively annoy me, they do tend to bore me – the daily lives and travails of “ordinary” people are deeply meaningful to them, but most people’s lives aren’t worth making movies about. Put them together, and I feel like there’s often something highly narcissistic about white middle class people watching movies about the trivial details of lives of people like themselves and finding it somehow profound. So, I see the fact that not only did I not hate this film, but found it actually pretty gripping to be a sign of how good the movie is. (One caveat: when the oldest son plays an acoustic version of Pink Floyd’s “Hey You” at a school talent contest, proclaiming he had written the song, I found it absurdly unbelievable that no one in an audience of mostly middle aged white people recognized it until well after the fact.)
16. Trane Tracks: The Legacy of John Coltrane
This isn’t really a documentary or movie in any conventional sense. It’s simply a collection on DVD of video footage of the John Coltrane Quartet in performance, something there’s not a lot of, unfortunately. Some of the clips have been issued on other videos, though the highlight for me was a clip I had not seen before of the quartet performing “Impressions.” Much of the video footage throughout the performance actually focuses on drummer Elvin Jones. Jones was known as a highly virtuosic, polyrhythmic drummer, something that can be readily heard from any of his recordings with Coltrane (or for that matter on any of his recordings without Coltrane). Seeing this performance, though, in addition to hearing it, is to bear witness to a spectacle of musical beauty and nearly unbelievable athletic prowess. Between his two arms and two legs, Jones bangs out four distinct rhythms simultaneously, sometimes arguably five. It was one of those visual images that altered the way I heard things, heightening my sensitivity to Jones’ drumming.
17. Umberto D.
One of the bleakest films I’ve ever seen. An old man in post-war Italy struggles to pay his rent, and after a series of misfortunes ultimately ends up homeless, having nothing but his small dog, Flick. As the film ends, he resolves to kill himself and Flick by stepping in front of a train. As the train approaches, Flick becomes increasingly agitated, eventually leaping from the man’s arms and running away. The man desperately tries to catch up to Flick, but the dog nervously shies away from him now. At the very end of the movie, Flick finally comes back to the man (which is the only reason the film didn’t leave me crying for a week), but you know there’s no real future for this man and his dog.
18. I Vitelloni
An early Fellini film. It’s not one of his great films, but even decent Fellini is pretty good. This is a sort of coming of age story of five young men from Rimini, a sort of Italian Diner, except a better and more interesting movie.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
My Favorite Movies of 2007, Part I
I saw quite a few movies last year that I highly enjoyed for one reason or another: movies that I thought were well crafted examples of cinema as art; movies that kept me thinking; and/or movies that I found entertaining.
The following (in alphabetical order) are my favorite movies of 2007, “of 2007” in this case meaning movies that I watched during 2007.
1. Blade Runner
One of my favorite science fiction movies of all time. For that matter, one of my favorite movies of all time. When I re-watched this movie this past year, it was probably about the 35th or so time I had watched it. (For the record, I’ve seen all the different versions, and like them all. Give it to me with or without the noir-ish narration.) The one thought I had about the film that I’d not had before is that there are a lot of individual elements of the film that if take out of context would be either banal or silly sci-fi-geek-babble (Roy Batty’s death speech is a prime example), but which in context of the film are both effective and poignant (Batty’s death speech again, after seeing which I do wonder how Rutger Hauer ended up playing in straight to video nonsense involving chasing Ice T through the woods).
2. The Born Losers
The original Billy Jack. Like many, I had assumed that Billy Jack (1971) had been the first appearance of Tom Laughlin’s Billy Jack character, until I happened upon this movie from 1967 showing on AMC. Tom Laughlin’s there, Billy Jack is a fully formed character doing what Billy Jack did, fighting for those who are innocent and weak against The Man and against outlaw thugs. If you’re a fan of Billy Jack, you should see this (especially if you stuck around for Billy Jack goes to Washington). If not, or if you don’t know who Billy Jack is, don’t bother.
3. Children of Men
One of the better examples of near future science fiction dystopia.
4. Dersu Uzala
One of Akira Kurosawa’s lesser known films, and one of the few set outside of Japan. The title character is a woodsman and guide in Eastern Siberia. This is a sad film, akin in some ways to some Westerns, where modern society ultimately tames a wild land, with the character of Dersu Uzala unable to fit in, and ultimately being tragically victimized by “progress.”
5. Donnie Darko
I was prepared to dislike this movie. I do often dislike “art movies” or “indie movies,” because although a few are quite good, many more are ridiculously pretentious, overly snarky, overly ironic, or otherwise annoying and not half so smart as they aim to be. This movie was none of those things, and was instead entertaining and thought-engaging.
6. Downfall
There was controversy when this German film came out about whether or not it humanized Hitler and those around him in their last days. It did, but only I think in the sense that Hitler, Goebbels, et al. are presented as multi-faceted human beings rather than one dimensional bogey men. If anything, I found myself feeling an even greater sense of revulsion toward the Nazi leadership after viewing the film, though that could just be my reaction.
7. The Fountain
I wasn’t as moved by this film as by Darren Aronofsky’s two earlier movies Pi and Requiem for a Dream, but this is a beautiful and poignant movie (even if at moments a bit draggy, something that often accompanies beautiful and poignant movies).
8. Hiroshima Mon Amour
I’m not quite sure why I had not previously seen this 1959 film by Alain Resnais. It manages to explore the personal and generic horror of war and its effects on individuals without ever feeling exploitative (something difficult to pull off when pulling out footage of Hiroshima after the nuclear attack).
9. Hustle & Flow
Another movie I was prepared to dislike more than to like, in this case because it had been so heavily hyped by so many critics and media outlets. I tend to find that few movies can come close to living up to such hype. I don’t think this is a great movie, but it’s one of my favorites of the year because I thoroughly enjoyed watching just about every minute of it, perhaps especially the acting of Ludacris (his acting was one of the few things I found bearable about the similarly hyped Crash).
10. Kinsey
One of the few biopics that managed to avoid the tedious formula of telling a life through key episodes. Also, probably the only movie I’ve ever seen to convey a sense of social science research method for a popular audience through the clever technique of revealing much biographical detail through footage of Kinsey training research assistants in interview technique with himself as practice subject.
The following (in alphabetical order) are my favorite movies of 2007, “of 2007” in this case meaning movies that I watched during 2007.
1. Blade Runner
One of my favorite science fiction movies of all time. For that matter, one of my favorite movies of all time. When I re-watched this movie this past year, it was probably about the 35th or so time I had watched it. (For the record, I’ve seen all the different versions, and like them all. Give it to me with or without the noir-ish narration.) The one thought I had about the film that I’d not had before is that there are a lot of individual elements of the film that if take out of context would be either banal or silly sci-fi-geek-babble (Roy Batty’s death speech is a prime example), but which in context of the film are both effective and poignant (Batty’s death speech again, after seeing which I do wonder how Rutger Hauer ended up playing in straight to video nonsense involving chasing Ice T through the woods).
2. The Born Losers
The original Billy Jack. Like many, I had assumed that Billy Jack (1971) had been the first appearance of Tom Laughlin’s Billy Jack character, until I happened upon this movie from 1967 showing on AMC. Tom Laughlin’s there, Billy Jack is a fully formed character doing what Billy Jack did, fighting for those who are innocent and weak against The Man and against outlaw thugs. If you’re a fan of Billy Jack, you should see this (especially if you stuck around for Billy Jack goes to Washington). If not, or if you don’t know who Billy Jack is, don’t bother.
3. Children of Men
One of the better examples of near future science fiction dystopia.
4. Dersu Uzala
One of Akira Kurosawa’s lesser known films, and one of the few set outside of Japan. The title character is a woodsman and guide in Eastern Siberia. This is a sad film, akin in some ways to some Westerns, where modern society ultimately tames a wild land, with the character of Dersu Uzala unable to fit in, and ultimately being tragically victimized by “progress.”
5. Donnie Darko
I was prepared to dislike this movie. I do often dislike “art movies” or “indie movies,” because although a few are quite good, many more are ridiculously pretentious, overly snarky, overly ironic, or otherwise annoying and not half so smart as they aim to be. This movie was none of those things, and was instead entertaining and thought-engaging.
6. Downfall
There was controversy when this German film came out about whether or not it humanized Hitler and those around him in their last days. It did, but only I think in the sense that Hitler, Goebbels, et al. are presented as multi-faceted human beings rather than one dimensional bogey men. If anything, I found myself feeling an even greater sense of revulsion toward the Nazi leadership after viewing the film, though that could just be my reaction.
7. The Fountain
I wasn’t as moved by this film as by Darren Aronofsky’s two earlier movies Pi and Requiem for a Dream, but this is a beautiful and poignant movie (even if at moments a bit draggy, something that often accompanies beautiful and poignant movies).
8. Hiroshima Mon Amour
I’m not quite sure why I had not previously seen this 1959 film by Alain Resnais. It manages to explore the personal and generic horror of war and its effects on individuals without ever feeling exploitative (something difficult to pull off when pulling out footage of Hiroshima after the nuclear attack).
9. Hustle & Flow
Another movie I was prepared to dislike more than to like, in this case because it had been so heavily hyped by so many critics and media outlets. I tend to find that few movies can come close to living up to such hype. I don’t think this is a great movie, but it’s one of my favorites of the year because I thoroughly enjoyed watching just about every minute of it, perhaps especially the acting of Ludacris (his acting was one of the few things I found bearable about the similarly hyped Crash).
10. Kinsey
One of the few biopics that managed to avoid the tedious formula of telling a life through key episodes. Also, probably the only movie I’ve ever seen to convey a sense of social science research method for a popular audience through the clever technique of revealing much biographical detail through footage of Kinsey training research assistants in interview technique with himself as practice subject.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Troy and the Purposes of Art
The blog post I mentioned in my previous entry (by Morrigan on Anthropology Net) on the purposes of art had been part of a thread of discussion on the movie 300. I agree with Morrigan’s point that 300 is not just art and not just entertainment. All movies are both art and entertainment (and often other things besides), though they might be good or bad art, good or bad at being entertaining.
Since I haven’t seen 300, at least not yet, I can’t say much about it. I’d like to shift to another epic movie set in the ancient Mediterranean, Troy. Troy was widely panned (a bit unfairly, I think) when released a few years ago and considered a commercial failure (despite making over $140 million at the U.S. box office, and about half a billion dollars worldwide – I’d like to be a commercial failure, too). Like most art, Troy does several things at once, having several distinct purposes simultaneously.
Art as Entertainment
Art in all forms can provide amusement, diversion, and entertainment. For big budget Hollywood movies, entertainment is the primary function of art. Troy is no exception, all of which is fairly obvious. The main reason to even discuss this is to emphasize that while entertainment may be the primary function of a movie like Troy, it is not the only thing happening.
Art as Aesthetic Object
Troy presents a set of aesthetic ideals – of masculinity, violence, and war especially. In his introduction to his modern adaptation, An Iliad (which faithfully preserves the content, but eliminates much of the repetition in Homer’s text), Alessandro Baricco speaks of the beauty of war in the Iliad. It’s one thing to state that The Iliad or Troy glorify war. They do, but more they present ideals of masculinity, violence, and war as objects of beauty. Baricco’s point is that any discourse on war, including opposition to it, needs to involve not just intellectualization but take into account also the appeal because of the beauty of (representations of) war.
In Troy, this aestheticization of masculinity, violence, and war takes several forms. Brad Pitt’s body, as Achilles, is an aesthetic object – at least since the movie Fight Club, Brad Pitt’s body has been an embodiment of a particular masculine body-aesthetic. In Troy, Orlando Bloom, as Paris, provides an embodiment of an alternate masculine body beauty. But it’s not just about men’s bodies, even if Troy and many other recent movies are very much about men’s bodies. The lines of the Greeks’ ships, the soldiers’ armor, the unity of movement of the Myrmidons, the arc and sweep of swords and spears, and the pacing of the action – imagery slowing and speeding up in an increasingly common Hollywood trick – all contribute to the aestheticization, the creation of a representation of violence and war as beautiful, something which I must admit works to an alarming extent.
Art as Intellectual Object
Art can provide grist for more intellectual contemplation as well (such as this blog post, and the blog post which prompted me to write it). Most of us don’t expect to encounter much food for thought when we go see a big budget action movie like Troy, but occasionally they surprise us. I’ll simply point out two ways in which Troy left me thinking as I left the theater.
Achilles’ Dilemma
Achilles has a dilemma as he goes off to war. He’s been told by his mother, Thetis, a minor goddess no less, that he has a choice. If he stays at home, he’ll live a long, comfortable life, be well-loved, but also be forgotten. If he goes to war, he’ll die at war but achieve a glory that will be remembered for generations. We all know what he chose, but he had to think about it (In The Iliad, he goes on thinking about it right up until Patroclus’ death and his own return to battle). Granted, the filmmakers didn’t come up with this – that would be Homer and whatever earlier oral traditions he was drawing upon – but they present it well, and I was certainly touched by it, left thinking, “What would I choose?” Not being a warrior, I’ve a pretty good idea what I would have chosen, but the equivalent dilemma for any scholar might be: “What would you do and what would you sacrifice in order that your work and ideas continue to be read and discussed not just during your lifetime, but 100 or 500 or 1000 years after your death?”
Patroclus’ Death
Troy is not a movie of The Iliad in the sense that it starts before the start of The Iliad (perhaps defying contemporary expectations – about either Troy or The Iliad – Troy is actually a much more straightforwardly linear text) and ends after the end of The Iliad, addressing material (such as the death of Achilles, the Trojan Horse, and the Fall of Troy) covered in The Odyssey. Still, it draws primarily on the material in The Iliad. It’s interesting then to compare some ways in which the two presentations of events significantly differ. One of these concerns the death of Patroclus, Achilles’ companion.
Through most of The Iliad and much of Troy, Achilles sulks in his tent over an act of Agamemnon, specifically Agamemnon taking away from Achilles a woman that he had claimed as a war prize. In The Iliad, this breach between the two heroes opens the narrative, ten years after the start of the war itself. Without Achilles and his men fighting on their side, the Trojans gain the upper hand. At a critical moment, in The Iliad, Patroclus beseeches Achilles to allow him to put on the armor of Achilles, both to rally the Greeks and to strike fear into the Trojans. By this point, Achilles clearly realizes he’s been petty, but he refuses to break his vow to not enter the battle, and so allows Patroclus to don his armor. Patroclus’ arrival on the scene of battle does rally the Greeks and strike fear into the Trojans, at least for a while, but after a few moments, everyone realizes it’s not actually Achilles. The more critical factor in turning the tide of battle a bit is as much the arrival of Achilles’ men as Achilles’ suit of armor. When Hector rallies some of his own Trojan troops and ends up killing Patroclus (with more than a little help from Apollo, not to mention another Trojan who spears Patroclus before Hector finishes him), he’s well aware of whom he has killed.
The story of Troy regarding this incident is different in important respects. Patroclus doesn’t ask Achilles’ permission to don the armor – he takes it on the sly, so Achilles has no idea that Patroclus has gone to battle, wearing his own armor no less. The appearance of “Achilles” on the battlefield has its intended effect, and no one else is in on the deception. When Hector kills Patroclus (this time without any god’s help), he thinks he has killed Achilles (a fact that Achilles later taunts him about), until the helmet is removed. For Achilles, the shock of Patroclus’ death is heightened, as he didn’t even know Patroclus was in the battle.
On this incident, I find myself far preferring the version of the story told in Troy. The intervention of Apollo to wallop Patroclus in the head in The Iliad hardly seems fitting, and I find Hector’s fate more poignant if he thinks he’s already defeated Achilles in battle before finding out that he’s not even come close to fighting someone of Achilles’ skill in battle. I wondered at the time, though, and still wonder now, whether my preference stems from a modern mindset, or whether, in fact the makers of Troy have one-upped Homer in telling a better story on this point.
Art as a Reflection of its Society
In a number of ways both Troy and The Iliad reflect the societies in which they were produced. Here, I’ll discuss two – one a way in which the two works have much in common, the other one of the main differences between the two works.
War as a way of life
As I said above, both works glorify war and violence. They don’t do this by making an argument that war is good (if they did, they could be more easily countered with opposing arguments) – they take that largely for granted, though both texts also occasionally interject awareness of the sadness and tragedy of war also. Instead, they successfully aestheticize violence and war and make of it an object of beauty.
In doing so, they reflect societies for which making war is a part of the way of life of the culture as a whole. In the case of the United States, the U.S. military has been nearly continuously involved in the application of force around the world for the past several decades, e.g. the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the first Persian Gulf War, enforcement of the no-fly zone between the two Iraq wars, Haiti, Kosovo, peace-keeping in Bosnia, Somalia, military advisors and trainers in Colombia and other spots associated with the “War on Drugs,” Panama, cruise missile strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan after the Kenya and Tanzania embassy bombings, etc. Note that the motivations and details of these different missions vary considerably, and also that I’m not making an argument that lumps them all together as good or bad. Rather, I’m simply stating a fact – that the U.S. military has been nearly continuously engaged for decades, albeit at different levels of intensity, and that making war is a regular part of a way of life for the culture as a whole.
A key difference between the United States today and Ancient Greece is that in the U.S. today, the military and war are quite distant from the lived day to day experience of many, if not most, Americans. I live and work in a region of the country, the Southeast, which is the source of a high proportion of military personnel. I also live and work in a community, the Pensacola area, which is dominated by the military. Most businesses in town offer discounts for active duty military personnel; people routinely give thanks and prayer for members of the armed services, especially those actively engaged in combat; I routinely have active duty and military reserve personnel enrolled in my classes. I also realize that this is not typical of most places in the U.S. For many middle-class Americans, the military, military personnel, and war seem like very distant phenomena, while at the same time war is encountered very regularly in its aestheticized form in movies, television, and to a large extent mainstream news.
The Gods
The largest difference between Troy and The Iliad has to do with the role of the gods. In The Iliad, the gods are omnipresent – barely a page goes by (except in sections cataloguing the men present in battle, how many ships and men they brought, their genealogies, etc.) without the gods intervening in some way. In Troy, the gods exist, but they aren’t directly involved in the story. The only one we see is Achilles’ mother, Thetis, a minor goddess, and she interacts by giving him advice – that is, she acts as his mother and not as a goddess. This reflects a basic difference in the cultures. Contemporary American society is not so secular as some (especially religious fundamentalists) think, but it is one profoundly affected by the humanism of the Enlightenment. Which is to say, most Americans don’t expect God to directly intervene in mundane affairs and they find the actions of people more interesting and compelling than the interventions of Greek gods.
Many of the parts of The Iliad I find most unsatisfying involve such interventions, and here my dissatisfaction is very much a result of the ways in which my thinking and preferences reflect modern culture. I’m dissatisfied with the role of Apollo in Patroclus’ death and the role of Athena in Hector’s death – I find the versions of the narrative in Troy more compelling. More importantly, two incidents, which open and close The Iliad, demonstrate key differences in Ancient Greek and modern American worldviews.
At the opening of The Iliad, Achilles isn’t just bitter at Agamemnon. He doesn’t just go to sulk in his tent. He also beseeches his mother to beseech Zeus to turn the tide (at least for a while) of battle against the Greeks. Much of the misfortune of the Greeks through much of the narrative is partly the result of Achilles’ request against his own side. The main closing event of The Iliad is Priam’s visit to Achilles’ tent to recover his son Hector’s body, which Achilles had been abusing for many days. Many of the gods had favored Achilles but had since been angered by his treatment of Hector’s body. Achilles’ mother has warned him to allow Priam to take the body or incur the wrath of the gods. When Priam visits, Achilles is genuinely moved by him, but it’s also clear (through the explicit statements of Achilles) that the only reason Achilles gives up the body is because of the threat of the gods’ wrath.
Troy plays these incidents quite differently. Achilles is angry at Agamemnon, but doesn’t try to bring down intervention of the gods against his own side. Priam visits Achilles, genuinely touches him, and convinces him to give up the body of Hector out of respect and pity for Priam.
I don’t think I’m alone in finding Troy’s versions of these two key events more compelling, even finding The Iliad’s versions a bit strange. In the case of Patroclus’ death, Troy might even simply tell a better story, but in these two instances, the sense of satisfaction or strangeness is shaped by the social context which the work also reflects.
Since I haven’t seen 300, at least not yet, I can’t say much about it. I’d like to shift to another epic movie set in the ancient Mediterranean, Troy. Troy was widely panned (a bit unfairly, I think) when released a few years ago and considered a commercial failure (despite making over $140 million at the U.S. box office, and about half a billion dollars worldwide – I’d like to be a commercial failure, too). Like most art, Troy does several things at once, having several distinct purposes simultaneously.
Art as Entertainment
Art in all forms can provide amusement, diversion, and entertainment. For big budget Hollywood movies, entertainment is the primary function of art. Troy is no exception, all of which is fairly obvious. The main reason to even discuss this is to emphasize that while entertainment may be the primary function of a movie like Troy, it is not the only thing happening.
Art as Aesthetic Object
Troy presents a set of aesthetic ideals – of masculinity, violence, and war especially. In his introduction to his modern adaptation, An Iliad (which faithfully preserves the content, but eliminates much of the repetition in Homer’s text), Alessandro Baricco speaks of the beauty of war in the Iliad. It’s one thing to state that The Iliad or Troy glorify war. They do, but more they present ideals of masculinity, violence, and war as objects of beauty. Baricco’s point is that any discourse on war, including opposition to it, needs to involve not just intellectualization but take into account also the appeal because of the beauty of (representations of) war.
In Troy, this aestheticization of masculinity, violence, and war takes several forms. Brad Pitt’s body, as Achilles, is an aesthetic object – at least since the movie Fight Club, Brad Pitt’s body has been an embodiment of a particular masculine body-aesthetic. In Troy, Orlando Bloom, as Paris, provides an embodiment of an alternate masculine body beauty. But it’s not just about men’s bodies, even if Troy and many other recent movies are very much about men’s bodies. The lines of the Greeks’ ships, the soldiers’ armor, the unity of movement of the Myrmidons, the arc and sweep of swords and spears, and the pacing of the action – imagery slowing and speeding up in an increasingly common Hollywood trick – all contribute to the aestheticization, the creation of a representation of violence and war as beautiful, something which I must admit works to an alarming extent.
Art as Intellectual Object
Art can provide grist for more intellectual contemplation as well (such as this blog post, and the blog post which prompted me to write it). Most of us don’t expect to encounter much food for thought when we go see a big budget action movie like Troy, but occasionally they surprise us. I’ll simply point out two ways in which Troy left me thinking as I left the theater.
Achilles’ Dilemma
Achilles has a dilemma as he goes off to war. He’s been told by his mother, Thetis, a minor goddess no less, that he has a choice. If he stays at home, he’ll live a long, comfortable life, be well-loved, but also be forgotten. If he goes to war, he’ll die at war but achieve a glory that will be remembered for generations. We all know what he chose, but he had to think about it (In The Iliad, he goes on thinking about it right up until Patroclus’ death and his own return to battle). Granted, the filmmakers didn’t come up with this – that would be Homer and whatever earlier oral traditions he was drawing upon – but they present it well, and I was certainly touched by it, left thinking, “What would I choose?” Not being a warrior, I’ve a pretty good idea what I would have chosen, but the equivalent dilemma for any scholar might be: “What would you do and what would you sacrifice in order that your work and ideas continue to be read and discussed not just during your lifetime, but 100 or 500 or 1000 years after your death?”
Patroclus’ Death
Troy is not a movie of The Iliad in the sense that it starts before the start of The Iliad (perhaps defying contemporary expectations – about either Troy or The Iliad – Troy is actually a much more straightforwardly linear text) and ends after the end of The Iliad, addressing material (such as the death of Achilles, the Trojan Horse, and the Fall of Troy) covered in The Odyssey. Still, it draws primarily on the material in The Iliad. It’s interesting then to compare some ways in which the two presentations of events significantly differ. One of these concerns the death of Patroclus, Achilles’ companion.
Through most of The Iliad and much of Troy, Achilles sulks in his tent over an act of Agamemnon, specifically Agamemnon taking away from Achilles a woman that he had claimed as a war prize. In The Iliad, this breach between the two heroes opens the narrative, ten years after the start of the war itself. Without Achilles and his men fighting on their side, the Trojans gain the upper hand. At a critical moment, in The Iliad, Patroclus beseeches Achilles to allow him to put on the armor of Achilles, both to rally the Greeks and to strike fear into the Trojans. By this point, Achilles clearly realizes he’s been petty, but he refuses to break his vow to not enter the battle, and so allows Patroclus to don his armor. Patroclus’ arrival on the scene of battle does rally the Greeks and strike fear into the Trojans, at least for a while, but after a few moments, everyone realizes it’s not actually Achilles. The more critical factor in turning the tide of battle a bit is as much the arrival of Achilles’ men as Achilles’ suit of armor. When Hector rallies some of his own Trojan troops and ends up killing Patroclus (with more than a little help from Apollo, not to mention another Trojan who spears Patroclus before Hector finishes him), he’s well aware of whom he has killed.
The story of Troy regarding this incident is different in important respects. Patroclus doesn’t ask Achilles’ permission to don the armor – he takes it on the sly, so Achilles has no idea that Patroclus has gone to battle, wearing his own armor no less. The appearance of “Achilles” on the battlefield has its intended effect, and no one else is in on the deception. When Hector kills Patroclus (this time without any god’s help), he thinks he has killed Achilles (a fact that Achilles later taunts him about), until the helmet is removed. For Achilles, the shock of Patroclus’ death is heightened, as he didn’t even know Patroclus was in the battle.
On this incident, I find myself far preferring the version of the story told in Troy. The intervention of Apollo to wallop Patroclus in the head in The Iliad hardly seems fitting, and I find Hector’s fate more poignant if he thinks he’s already defeated Achilles in battle before finding out that he’s not even come close to fighting someone of Achilles’ skill in battle. I wondered at the time, though, and still wonder now, whether my preference stems from a modern mindset, or whether, in fact the makers of Troy have one-upped Homer in telling a better story on this point.
Art as a Reflection of its Society
In a number of ways both Troy and The Iliad reflect the societies in which they were produced. Here, I’ll discuss two – one a way in which the two works have much in common, the other one of the main differences between the two works.
War as a way of life
As I said above, both works glorify war and violence. They don’t do this by making an argument that war is good (if they did, they could be more easily countered with opposing arguments) – they take that largely for granted, though both texts also occasionally interject awareness of the sadness and tragedy of war also. Instead, they successfully aestheticize violence and war and make of it an object of beauty.
In doing so, they reflect societies for which making war is a part of the way of life of the culture as a whole. In the case of the United States, the U.S. military has been nearly continuously involved in the application of force around the world for the past several decades, e.g. the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the first Persian Gulf War, enforcement of the no-fly zone between the two Iraq wars, Haiti, Kosovo, peace-keeping in Bosnia, Somalia, military advisors and trainers in Colombia and other spots associated with the “War on Drugs,” Panama, cruise missile strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan after the Kenya and Tanzania embassy bombings, etc. Note that the motivations and details of these different missions vary considerably, and also that I’m not making an argument that lumps them all together as good or bad. Rather, I’m simply stating a fact – that the U.S. military has been nearly continuously engaged for decades, albeit at different levels of intensity, and that making war is a regular part of a way of life for the culture as a whole.
A key difference between the United States today and Ancient Greece is that in the U.S. today, the military and war are quite distant from the lived day to day experience of many, if not most, Americans. I live and work in a region of the country, the Southeast, which is the source of a high proportion of military personnel. I also live and work in a community, the Pensacola area, which is dominated by the military. Most businesses in town offer discounts for active duty military personnel; people routinely give thanks and prayer for members of the armed services, especially those actively engaged in combat; I routinely have active duty and military reserve personnel enrolled in my classes. I also realize that this is not typical of most places in the U.S. For many middle-class Americans, the military, military personnel, and war seem like very distant phenomena, while at the same time war is encountered very regularly in its aestheticized form in movies, television, and to a large extent mainstream news.
The Gods
The largest difference between Troy and The Iliad has to do with the role of the gods. In The Iliad, the gods are omnipresent – barely a page goes by (except in sections cataloguing the men present in battle, how many ships and men they brought, their genealogies, etc.) without the gods intervening in some way. In Troy, the gods exist, but they aren’t directly involved in the story. The only one we see is Achilles’ mother, Thetis, a minor goddess, and she interacts by giving him advice – that is, she acts as his mother and not as a goddess. This reflects a basic difference in the cultures. Contemporary American society is not so secular as some (especially religious fundamentalists) think, but it is one profoundly affected by the humanism of the Enlightenment. Which is to say, most Americans don’t expect God to directly intervene in mundane affairs and they find the actions of people more interesting and compelling than the interventions of Greek gods.
Many of the parts of The Iliad I find most unsatisfying involve such interventions, and here my dissatisfaction is very much a result of the ways in which my thinking and preferences reflect modern culture. I’m dissatisfied with the role of Apollo in Patroclus’ death and the role of Athena in Hector’s death – I find the versions of the narrative in Troy more compelling. More importantly, two incidents, which open and close The Iliad, demonstrate key differences in Ancient Greek and modern American worldviews.
At the opening of The Iliad, Achilles isn’t just bitter at Agamemnon. He doesn’t just go to sulk in his tent. He also beseeches his mother to beseech Zeus to turn the tide (at least for a while) of battle against the Greeks. Much of the misfortune of the Greeks through much of the narrative is partly the result of Achilles’ request against his own side. The main closing event of The Iliad is Priam’s visit to Achilles’ tent to recover his son Hector’s body, which Achilles had been abusing for many days. Many of the gods had favored Achilles but had since been angered by his treatment of Hector’s body. Achilles’ mother has warned him to allow Priam to take the body or incur the wrath of the gods. When Priam visits, Achilles is genuinely moved by him, but it’s also clear (through the explicit statements of Achilles) that the only reason Achilles gives up the body is because of the threat of the gods’ wrath.
Troy plays these incidents quite differently. Achilles is angry at Agamemnon, but doesn’t try to bring down intervention of the gods against his own side. Priam visits Achilles, genuinely touches him, and convinces him to give up the body of Hector out of respect and pity for Priam.
I don’t think I’m alone in finding Troy’s versions of these two key events more compelling, even finding The Iliad’s versions a bit strange. In the case of Patroclus’ death, Troy might even simply tell a better story, but in these two instances, the sense of satisfaction or strangeness is shaped by the social context which the work also reflects.
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