Showing posts with label classical receptions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label classical receptions. Show all posts
Sunday, September 03, 2023
Screening Britannia course update
Thursday, April 01, 2021
Things read and seen in 2021, #3
(Spoilers. * indicates something watched/read for the first time.)
Movies
16. La caduta di Troia (The Fall of Troy) (Italy, dir. Giovanni Pastrone and Luigi Romano Borgnetto, scr. Giovanni Pastrone, starring Luigi Romano Borgnetto, Giovanni Casaleggio, and Madame Davesnes, Itala Film, 1911)
A short, sometimes, as this poster shows, known as L'assedio e la caduta di Troia (The Siege and Fall of Troy). Rewatched as research for my Historical Fictions Research Network paper, back in February. It's an interesting treatment. Some of the tropes of modern adaptations are fully in place here, e.g. it tells the whole story of the war, not just the events of Homer's Iliad (in fact, the Iliad doesn't get a look in), and eclecticism runs riot in the design, drawing upon Classical Greece for the Spartan place, but with a very Roman garden, and Egyptian slaves, whilst Troy itself is full of Greek, Persian, Assyrian and Roman elements. On the other hand, this is still treated as mythology, with an active role for Venus in the eloping of Paris and Helen, and no better reason is given for the war beyond the insult to Menelaus dealt by Paris when he ran off with the Spartan King's wife. Classical Receptions Bingo Card: Of course.
I have joined a virtual film night group of friends, and this is the first movie I watched with them. Not surprisingly, this, the tale of the excavation of the Anglo-Saxon ship butial at Sutton Hoo, as the clouds of war gathered, was a movie I wanted to see ever since I became aware of it (which admittedly wasn't that long ago). The Anglo-Saxons are after my period (nasty modern rubbish), but I've done a fair bit of archaeological fieldwork in my time, and I think that this movie gives you some idea of how hard the physical work of excavating an archaeological site can be when you haven't got mechanical diggers to do the difficult and boring bits. Of course, there's a great deal of artistic license in the production of the movie, falling into all-too-predictable patterns (the 'professional' archaeologists all look down on the 'amateur' Basil Brown). I'm okay with most of the license, but I wish it hadn't been necessary to denigrate Peggy Piggott; she is depicted as someone with little experience, who has married an older and more experienced man (it is implied, and I believe made explicit in the original novel by John Preston, that she is a student who has married her tutor). In reality, Peggy Piggott had been digging for six years by the time she turned up at Sutton Hoo, had begin her career working for Mortimer and Tessa Wheeler at Verulamium, and had met Stuart Piggott when they were both students at the University of London, and both in their late twenties. She had more paper qualifications in Archaelogy than her husband did, and had directed her own dig. In a movie that aims at raising up to public attention the work of an archaeologist who, the movie suggests, was overlooked because he was working class, it is a shame that a woman's contribution is downplayed like this. Still, The Dig looks very pretty, and the performances are good. Carey Mulligan does very well playing someone twenty years older than her; though one does wonder, given that there are precious few cinema roles for women over 40, was it necessary to give one of them to an under-40? Despite all my reservations, I nevertheless do recommend this. Classical Receptions Bingo Card: The Ipswich archaeologists are desperate to get Basil Brown to come dig on a Roman villa.
A #ClassicsTwitterMovie that is also in my Ancient Greece and Rome on the Big Screen course. My Twitter thread is here. I've been writing a lot about this movie over the last few days, for my course, and for an LGBT+ History Month event I did on 23 February. What can more one say here? I have seen this time and time again, and it never gets dull. Certainly Ray Harryhausen's best movie, one of the best movies based on ancient Greece from the great days of the Hollywood epic, and arguably one of the best movies of Greek mythology ever made. Talos is one of Harryhausen's most memorable characters, and I really like that Harryhausen has the courage to delay his first bit of Dynamation to 30 minutes into the movie. Apart from that, there's just loads to enjoy. And it's great to see so many British character actors involved; Nigel Green, Laurence Naismith, Patrick Troughton, Niall MacGinnis, Douglas Wilmer, and that's just for starters. This is the second movie Harryhausen made after moving to London (though he was still under contract to a Hollywood studio), and that really shows through in the casting. Classical Receptions Bingo Card: House!
Another virtual film group movie; my pick, in fact. This rather seems to have flown under a lot of people's radars. I remember seeing it in a largely empty cinema, and the movie barely made its money back. I guess the lack of sheep, chickens or cheese-obsessed Yorkshiremen meant it didn't appeal to the wide audience Aardman can usually expect. Which is a shame, because it's really rather excellent. Funny throughout, if you can forgive some extreme punning, and also quite sweet. Tom Hiddleston is almost unrecognisable, and clearly having an enormous amount of fun voicing villain Lord Nooth with an outrageous French accent (please read that in an outrageous French accent). And I love the joke about the dinosaurs called 'Ray' and 'Harry'. Well worth following up, if you haven't seen it. Classical Receptions Bingo Card: the Bronze Age looks remarkably like ancient Rome, with some references to Greece thrown in.
Another #ClassicsTwitterMovie, in case you couldn't guess. The thread starts here. I'm not wholly sure whether I think 300 Spartans is a good movie. I think it's better than 300; it's certainly less racist and dehumanises the Persians far less, even if it doesn't quite have the style of 300's imagery. It's also probably the best movie from the 1950s and 1960s set in ancient Greece, but then there's not a lot of competition, since so few were made. It's definitely not a better movie than the likes of Ben-Hur or Spartacus. Its reconstruction of the Battle of Thermopylae is more accurate than that of 300, but again, that's not saying much. Ralph Richardson brings some much needed gravitas to the movie, but he doesn't wholly give the impression that he's taking it seriously. Richard Egan, on the other hand, is taking things Very Seriously, in the way that William Shatner would later make his own. My favourite moment remains where somebody who is Greek turns to someone else who is presumably Greek, and explains what a Greek phrase means. Classical Receptions Bingo Card: molon lave.
21. Le mépris (Contempt) (France, dir. & scr. Jean-Luc Godard, starring Brigitte Bardot, Rome Paris Films/Les Films Concordia/Compagnia Cinematografica Champion, 1963)
And once again, we are with #ClassicsTwitterMovie. My Twitter thread is here. What a delight it is to watch again this wonderful movie, and to bring it to a new audience. It looks and sounds beautiful, thanks to vibrant colours from cinematographer Raoul Coutard, and the lush strings of Georges Delerue's score. It's my favourite adaptation of the Odyssey (yes, over O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and that is also a movie I love), and probably my favourite adaptation of Homer. I need to watch À bout de souffle and Alphaville again to decide if this is my favourite Godard. Godard is extremely playful throughout this, keeping a minimum of jump-cuts, so the narrative isn't hard to follow, and subverting Bardot's image as a sex kitten, whether through utterly gratuitous shots of her lying naked on thick rugs, or dressing her up to look like Anna Karina (Godard's then wife). Jack Palance is also excellent as the sleazy and violent American producer. If you've never seen this movie, do yourself a favour and correct that. Classical Receptions Bingo Card: Jack Palance trying to seduce Bardot by showing her a book of Roman erotica.
I watched this as preparation for my class on versions of the Odyssey. Oh my. I confess to not being terribly familiar with the product of The Asylum before now, having slogged through ten minutes of Hercules Reborn (2014) before finding something better to do with my time, and I have never seen Sharknado. This is essentially a version of the Odyssey that seeks to cash in on Wolfgang Petersen's Troy a mere thirteen years after the Hollywood movie's release. The story appears to be constructed by chopping up Homer and throwing all the bits up in the air, and then adding a few extra bits. There's a Sword of Troy, which Odysseus seems to have go hold of, and is a full-on magic sword. There's a Kraken, because if your knowledge of Greek mythology is entirely based on movies, you probably think that's a Greek beast. There's fighting female Chinese monks guarding Troy, because ... no I can't explain that. Agamemnon, who appears to be a particularly angry Aussie Rules football player, is married to Helen. After Troy is stormed by about a half-dozen Greek soldiers, who vaguely tap at Trojan opponents with spears, in the background while the main cast are doing fight scenes, Odysseus heads home on what would be generously described as an overgrown dinghy. Fortunately, there are only three other Ithacans going home with him, which means there is space to give a lift to the Trojan priestess Circe (I am not making this up!), who decides Odysseus is a good bloke and worth fighting for, for no very good reason. There's Sirens! Who are the same as Calypso! There's a Minotaur in the Paths of the Dead. There's a Cyclops at the other side of the Paths of the Dead. Eventually Odysseus gets home, kills the Suitor and reunites with Penelope, only to have to fight off the Kraken! (I bet you'd forgotten about the Kraken. Odysseus certainly had.) Amazingly, this is not as bad as you might expect it to be. Which is still pretty bad. Classical Receptions Bingo Card: Norse! The Kraken is Norse!
Another virtual film night movie. A weird one here. Colossal is billed on websites as a 'comedy' or a 'black comedy'. It is nothing of the sort. There are no real laughs anywhere in this movie, and it isn't really trying for them. It plays with romcom tropes early on, but halfway through reveals that actually it's a stalker movie. Or at least, that's one of the genres it is trying to bring together; the other is the classic Japanese monster movie (though for geographic reasons in this case, the monster is in Korea, not Japan). The central premise is intriguing, and there's a good central performance here by Anne Hathaway, who certainly gets more to do than usual. But for most of the time, the attempt to blend the two genres never quite works for me, until the very end, which is clever and satisfying, and almost makes up for the weakness of the rest of the movie. It doesn't help that all the men in her life are horrible, and can't respect boundaries, even the one who's meant to be the 'nice' one. So I'm not sure I could honestly recommend this to anyone. Classical Receptions Bingo Card: Colossus of Rhodes, innit?
Another movie for my Ancient Greece and Rome on the Big Screen course, and another #ClassicsTwitterMovie. My Twitter thread is here (due to the US shift over to Daylight Savings Time, I was an hour late to the viewing). I've watched this movie many times, and I'm still not quite sure what I think about it. Which is, I think, Pasolini's intention; he really doesn't want you to have any easy answers here. I use this as my example of Athenian tragedy rendered on screen, though really, only the last half of the movie presents Euripides' play, and in a somewhat truncated form (no room, for instance, for the visit of the Athenian king Aegeus). I actually prefer Michael Cacoyannis' three films of Euripides, but they're difficult to set in a course, as they are not easily got hold of. Nevertheless, this makes a nice companion piece to the portrayal of Medea in Jason and the Argonauts. Classical Receptions Bingo Card: We are not Team Jason here.
Another virtual film night, and another movie I'd been long meaning to get round to, because of my interest in London and the fantastic. It's been a while since I read Phillip Reeve's novel (and, of course, it's the only one in the series I can't find at the moment), and I don't remember it that clearly. Insofar as I do, this movie seems to treat it with respect, and preserves the main beats of the novel, though I remember that Hester and Tom don't get together until later in the series, and Katherine Valentine dies. I also seem to remember that the buzz around this movie from people I knew was that it was okay, if you didn't go in expecting the book. With this I concur. This movie was mauled by the critics, and flopped at the box office, but it's really not that bad, and the Traction Cities are well-envisaged. Reeve himself likes it. Classical Receptions Bingo Card: The deadly super-weapon is called the MEDUSA.
Another #ClassicsTwitterMovie, and the final movie in my Ancient Greece and Rome on the Big Screen course. The Twitter thread is here. This is an extremely important movie, for reasons that Nadhira Hill discussed briefly in her talk at the Res Difficiles 2.0 conference, the day before we did our viewing. She says 'for the first [and only] time I was seeing people like me [i.e. Black Americans] engaging with Classics'. This is a very important thing to say. It is still all too easy to conceive of Classics as by whites, for whites, and about whites. Chi-Raq says that these texts are part of Black American culture as well, just as Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona's The Island connected Black Africans with Sophocles. It's also a pretty good movie, that deserves to be better known. It negotiates shifting tone from comedy to brutal tragedy effectively, and rather than exploiting Black trauma for the purposes of entertainment, as some accused it of, it uses entertainment to highlight Black trauma. Classical Receptions Bingo Card: Essential.
Another virtual film night movie. The significantly fictionalised story of the creation of the screenplay for Citizen Kane, this has been festooned with Oscar nominations, at least partly, I suspect, because Hollywood likes to celebrate itself, even if this movie does attack the financial duplicity of Louis B. Meyer, and the pro-Republican propaganda of Irving Thalberg. It's beautifully shot, and a nice bit of familial pietas, as David Fincher directs a script by his late father, and Charles Dance is superb as William Randolph Hearst. But Gary Oldman is giving That Gary Oldman Performance, that we've seen before in Leon and Immortal Beloved. It doesn't help that he's about twenty years too old for the role; as the screenplay reminds us regularly, Herman Mankiewicz was in his mid-forties when he wrote Citizen Kane, and his mid- to late thirties for the flashbacks when he was part of William Randolph Hearst's circle, whilst Oldman is in his early sixties. This is not to say that Mank is bad, but I don't think it's as good as everyone else is saying it is. Classical Receptions Bingo Card: Mankiewicz's younger brother Joe, depicted in the movie, went on to direct 1953's Julius Caesar and 1963's Cleopatra.
Another #ClassicsTwitterMovie. My Twitter thread is here, and I actually reviewed this movie when it came out. It has a lot of the same Old Hollywood vibes as Mank. But it's a much less cynical work, with more of a feeling that Hollywood is doing something worthwhile. Of all the Coen Brothers movies I've seen, it is the one with the least substance. But it's still a lot of fun. Classical Receptions Bingo Card: Not just the movie-within-a-movie Hail, Caesar!, but also some of the elements in Scarlett Johansson's Esther Williams routine.
Books
I've actually read a book this year. I read this for an Ursula K. Le Guin reading group I'm part of. It's a collection of short stories about different planes that can be accessed while waiting for planes. Few of these are straightforward stories with beginnings, middles and ends; most of them feel like entries in a travel guide, if a little more literary. A number of the stories are satirical, particularly one, 'The Royals of Hegn', attacking the British obsession with the Royal Family. Quite a few stories are about the fact that we can never really understand the foreign cultures we visit; in one, 'Feeling at home with the Hennebet', the narrator is unable to understand the meaning of certain words the Hennebet use which are obvious to them, in 'The Nna Mmoy Language' an entire language is incomprehensible, and in 'The Building' locals are unable to explain in a manner that visitors can grasp why they have been working on a building for centuries. Classical Receptions Bingo Card: On one plane, the locals look very much like satyrs.
Comics
February's entry for #ClassicsTwitterComics. Every year or so, I reread Three. Not because I love it, but to try to find out why I don't. I ought to. It's a reception of ancient Sparta. I'm interested in any form of comics reception of the ancient world, and have been interested in Sparta since my days as a postgraduate, supervised by the man who was the historical consultant for Three. The writing is obviously skillful, and the art superior. Other Kieron Gillen stuff I do love, like Phonogram and The Wicked + The Divine. (I also know Kieron and like him; fortunately, he's well aware that Three doesn't quite work for me, and this isn't an issue between us.) When other people talk about why they think Three is so great, on an intellectual level I can absolutely see where they're coming from. Yet every time, I bounce off the story. For some reason, I just don't seem to care that much about the three helots, or King Kleomenes II. I expect, after so many rereadings, there's now very little chance either that I will have a sudden revelation and get it, or that I will finally understand what my problem is with the comic. Classical Receptions Bingo Card: On the plus side the notes and conversation between Gillen and Steve Hodkinson brought me up to date on a lot of Spartan stuff.
#ClassicsTwitterComics for March. I'm not really familiar either with this series (I haven't read volume 1) or Marguerite Bennett's work, though I've certainly heard her name get mentioned. At the heart of the story are two queer women who can transform themselves into insectoid bodies; it's a bit Ali Smith meets Kafka's Metamorphosis. These two have to make their way in a world that rejects independent women, often in the person of some violent men, who are met with violence. It's an interesting comic, that reminds me a lot of Alan Moore's Promethea, in both good and bad ways; it's beautifully drawn, and the colours, by Jessica Kholinne, are particularly gorgeous. The story is very interested in the occult and magic, and the writing is often very clever, but it does have a tendency to go off on long didactic speeches, conveying messages that need saying, but which one suspects the audience already takes as given anyway. Classical Receptions Bingo Card: That's a Medusa figure on the cover, though she's never actually named as such.
As a postscript, the reviews of She-Hulk I mentioned in the last one of these posts, have now appeared at The Slings and Arrows Graphic Novel Guide. I reviewed Essential The Savage She-Hulk, Marvel Masterworks: The Savage She-Hulk, volumes 1 and 2, The Sensational She-Hulk by John Byrne, and Sensational She-Hulk: The Return, and the collected Sensational She-Hulk by John Byrne Omnibus. The Savage She-Hulk material is drivel; positively embarrassing. The John Byrne material is very much better. The Return isn't so great; Byrne quickly seems to lose interest, and starts repeating himself, and the gag wears thin pretty quickly. But the collection of his first run is really quite fun. Nothing earth-shatteringly significant at all; just gags about the medium (Deadpool before Deadpool, and less crude), and a series of Marvel's Silliest Villains. But it's not meant to be particularly significant. It's just a bit of fun on Byrne's part. Some people don't like Byrne's artwork; I generally do, though I think he tends to be better with a sympathetic inker than when inking himself, and sometimes (though not really in this material) he can make people look emaciated. Byrne has turned into a horrible man in his old age, but he rescued She-Hulk and gave her a personality, and She-Hulk fans have to acknowledge that. (In fairness, I think that mostly they do.) And yes, I know the colouring on that cover is horrible. Classical Receptions Bingo Card: There's lots of references to Prince Namor, ruler of Atlantis, whom Byrne was writing at the same time.
Virtual Theatre
5. Girl on an Altar, by Marina Carr, directed by Susie McKenna and Indhu Rubasingham, Kiln Theatre, 2021 *
This rehearsed reading presented a project that Kilburn's Kiln Theatre are working on, an adaptation of the myth of Iphigenia and Clytemnestra. It takes a lot of liberties with the most commonly known version, but that's allowed. The actual sacrifice of Iphigenia takes up a short amount of time at the beginning, and most of this play is devoted to what happens after Agamemnon returns home, which is considerably extended beyond the version familiar from Aeschylus, with a child of Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus being introduced, as well as children of Agamemnon and Cassandra, and full-scale war between Agamemnon on one side and Aegisthus and Clytemnestra's father Tyndareus on the other. The presentation of this is a bit odd; actors are both delivering their lines, and also narrating portions of the story as if it were a book that they are reading out loud. I'm not sure that this entirely works, and it might well work less when everyone is in full costume, though it does allow a lot of information to be conveyed, and a lot of expository dialogue to be omitted. As a whole, this didn't blow me away, but it wasn't awful either. Classical Receptions Bingo Card: Agamemnon kills Tyndareus in battle. No, really.
I'm also in a virtual theatre-going group, and this was seen with them, though it was shown on BBC Four as part of their Culture in Quarantine: Shakespeare series; I've put it here as it is a recorded play performance. The plot is pretty well-known to everyone, though I had forgotten the role of Paris in events. This was a good production, with particular standout performances from Gill as Romeo, and Andrew French as Friar Laurence, perpetrator of one of the worst cunning plans in literature. Karen Fishwick's Juliet was a bit over-the-top at first, but I warmed to her as the play went on, and everything got more serious. Classical Receptions Bingo Card: 'You are a lover; borrow Cupid's wings.'
An interesting comparison with Pasolini's movie, seen with my virtual theatre group (or at least a small subset of them). The production was made by filming all the cast in close-up; none of them interacts physically with anyone else. Mary-Kay Gamel's translation is excellent; vibrant English that still respects the Greek. And there are excellent performances, particularly from Elizabeth Bunch in the title role, and Chris Hutchinson as a loathsome Jason, who clearly believes in the rightness of his actions. This is still available to see until 11 April, and I heartily recommend it. Classical Recptions Bingo Card: Still not Team Jason.
Audio
Last year I got invited to contribute to a documentary on Rosemary Sutcliff, which I was delighted to do. But I hadn't listened to it yet. I sound terrible, but lots of other people also contribute much more interesting bits. I found it very useful for filling in some of Sutcliff's background. There are some very poignant reminiscences from her godson, and an interesting light on how she felt about the relationships between men she depicted. (Had I listened to this earlier, I would probably have talked about a Sutcliff novel for my LGBT+HM show-and-tell.) I should be getting round to rereading her books in the next few months, so that will get reported here. Classical Receptions Bingo Card: Eagles.
(I have also been listening to a lot of episodes of Hammer House of Podcast, which is fun. I've been working my way from the beginning, and have got up to Bonus Episode 23, and have also listened to the latest five episodes, and, for research purposes, the one on She.)
Tuesday, June 23, 2020
Cinema and Ancient Greece and Rome - Course coming soon.
http://mancent.org.uk/?page_id=3142
Tuesday, February 11, 2020
2020 Movies #2: Boadicea
This is, at the moment, the earliest screen depiction of Roman Britain of which I am aware. It very much presents itself as 'authentic' - an opening caption proclaims that '[M]any incidents in this story were reconstructed in the neighbourhood where they actually occurred.' But this is misleading. Many incidents presented in this short movie have been invented for dramatic purposes, and sometimes flatly contradict the sources - so, for instance, Colchester is depicted with walls and gates, which Tacitus explicitly says it did not have.
It's still interesting (though clearly done on a shoestring budget). Phyllis Neilson-Terry, niece of the famous Ellen Terry, plays a more matronly Boadicea than some later portrayals. As is often the case with Boadicea/Boudicca narratives, the Druids are closely associated with the Queen. And clearly the viewer is meant to sympathise with the defeated Queen of the Iceni, even at the time when the identification of the British empire with the Roman was a major cultural theme. But because this is an 'educational' movie, the rapes of Boadicea's daughters are very much underplayed, to the point where no rape actually takes place - instead a daughter is roughly manhandled, causing Boadicea to strike the Roman. The Queen's flogging then follows.
Friday, November 01, 2019
Britannia, Season 1, Episode 1
Okay, I should have caught up with this ages ago. But with the new season due next week, and my planning on really getting stuck into the 'Screening Britannia' project in November, it's time I did actually watch all this.
The first thing a viewer sees when watching Britannia is a caption that says:
IN 55 BC JULIUS CAESAR INVADED BRITANNIA
Then:
HE CAME FACE TO FACE WITH ANOTHER LEGEND ...
And the next caption says:
THE DRUIDS
Those of us of a certain age and disposition are probably expecting that the next caption will be 'NO-ONE KNOWS WHO THEY WERE OR WHAT THEY WERE DOING', and the dulcid tones of Spinal Tap's 'Stonehenge' will then be heard. But, of course Britannia isn't that sort of show at all - it's a serious drama. And then the titles play out to Donovan's 'Hurdy Gurdy Man', and you realise that maybe it is that sort of show after all.
When it was broadcast in early 2018, Britannia was accompanied by a lot of high expectations. After all, this was award-winning playwright Jez Butterworth, author of Jerusalem, wasn't it? Well, yes - but it's also Jez and Tom Butterworth, screenwriters for odd cod-Arthuriana The Last Legion, a movie deeply uncertain about its own identity.
Britannia does one very interesting thing. As Juliette Harrisson and I shall discuss in the book we're writing together, most cinematic and television versions of the Roman invasion of Britain are interested in Julius Caesar's invasion, not that of the emperor Claudius nearly ninety years later. And they are almost without exception, comedies (e.g. Carry on Cleo or Asterix in Britain). Britannia is very definitely about the Claudian invasion - the only other screen example of this I've been able to find is 'Pritain', the first episode of the 1974-1975 BBC series Churchill's People. And Britannia is certainly not sold as a comedy.
There's also something a bit odd going on in terms of diversity. The Romans are clearly the bad guys here - this is not to say that the Britons are necessarily the good guys, as they are too caught up in internecine murder, kidnapping and warfare for that, but the Romans are the imperialist invaders who massacre an entire village that was doing nothing more offensive than getting stoned at a massive Solstice party, so they are definitely bad. Yet it is among the Romans that one finds ethnic diversity, with black and Asian soldiers, and it is from these soldiers that the only significant working class voices emerge. Now, that is quite possibly true to the actual ethnic and class make-up of a Roman army, but one wonders what purpose it serves dramatically. Is the intention to elicit some sympathy for the Roman point of view?
The Britons, on the other hand, whilst beating the Romans in terms of gender diversity - there is a complete absence of female voices on the Roman side - are remarkably white and middle-class, occasional Irish person aside, such that one imagines that when not trying to bump each other off they sit round the hillforts doing Guardian crosswords and forbidding their children from watching ITV. This is epitomised by a somewhat careworn Julian Rhind-Tutt, who is just a bit ... well, a bit too Julian Rhind-Tutt to convince as an Iron Age Man of Kent.
These points of interest aside, Britannia is mostly cliché. There's a neat trick where the character set up to be one of the audience's points-of-view fails to make it out of the first episode, but even that's not all that original. Aside from that, the Romans are all gruff legionaries, the British villagers simple farmers with a close resemblance to the peasants of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the local Druids are like Native American Shamen, and purveyors of New Age Woo, whilst at a higher level they're rather more sinister, led by Mackenzie Crook's Veran, made up to look like a Batman villain.
Britannia's biggest weakness, of course, is what got it made in the first place - its potential to be the next Game of Thrones, and therefore its tendency to lean in the direction of HBO's series. So there is much swearing, though in a remarkable act of restraint, no female nudity until fifty-five minutes in (compare Troy: Fall of a City, which had boobies after only five minutes) [on rewatching, I see that there's a flash of bare breasts eighteen minutes in]. The Cantii's 'citadel' (rather than hillfort) of Crugdunon clearly went through several drafts where the designers were asked to make it more Game of Thrones-y, until the result doesn't look exactly like Winterfell, but would feel oddly familiar to any Starks visiting. And Nikolaj Lie Kaas' Outcast Druid and Eleanor Worthington-Cox's Cait, the pubescent girl he rescues from a massacre and is then contemptuous of, are so painfully NotArya and NotTheHound that it's slightly surprising legal action wasn't taken.
The problem that Britannia has which Game of Thrones didn't, of course, is that the audience knows the outcome. Whatever the various Britons may do, the Romans are here to stay, at least for the next four hundred years. The bad guys are going to win. (This may shed light on why the invasion is often treated as a comedy.)
The salvation of Britannia is that every ten or twenty minutes or so, David Morrissey as Roman commander Aulus Plautius turns up and chews every bit of scenery in sight, in a way that you have never seen him do before. This is not the nuanced Morrissey of Sense and Sensibility or The City and the City - this is full-on Alan-Rickman-as-the-Sheriff-of-Nottingham scenery chewing, as he flings his dead-mink [I think it's meant to be a wolf, but looks like a husky] decorated coat around his shoulders, advises legionaries to take a dump on the landscape, or say things like 'let's get on that fucking boat'. I have high hopes that he will be matched by Zoë Wanamaker's Queen Antedia, arriving as she does in a smoke cloud apparently of her own generation and sporting a wig that deserves its own star billing, but we haven't really seen enough of her yet. And Ian McDiarmid, as the improbably-named king Pellenor, seems to be keeping his scenery chewing in reserve for The Rise of Skywalker.
Still, this is only episode 1 - let's see what the next eight deliver.
My collaborator on 'Screening Britannia', Juliette Harrisson, has also reviewed the first episode.
Link to all reviews of Britannia.
Tuesday, September 10, 2019
You be my Hercules, I'll be your Athena.
So, Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has told British Prime Minister Boris Johnson that he wants to help Johnson with the Herculean task of getting a Brexit deal, to be Athena to Johnson's Hercules. A number of commentators have taken this as a subtle jibe against Johnson, intended as a reference to Athena's intervention after Hercules went mad and killed his wife and children (or, according to the BBC, when she prevented him killing his family).
I actually don't think Varadkar's reference to being Athena to Johnson's Hercules is quite the dig some people are making it out to be, or at least not in the way they're taking it. 'Herculean tasks' refers to the Twelve Labours of Hercules, and there's a strong tradition in which Hercules was aided in his Labours by Athena (it's all over metopes of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, for instance - see the image above). That's surely what Varadkar means, rather than any reference to the less pleasant sides of Hercules' personality (e.g. his tendency to drunkenness, gluttony, public urination, and yes, going mad and killing his children).
But there is a dig is in the power dynamic implied. Ireland Athena to Britain's Hercules? Vardakar Athena to Johnson's Hercules? Ireland's goddess to the UK's demi-god? To judge from how Brexiters and government ministers have recently spoken about Ireland, they would conceive of it as being the other way round; they see Ireland as the weak neighbour, to be helped, patronised and pushed around by the UK. And that is Varadkar's subtle jibe at the UK, a reminder that, with the rest of the EU27 behind them, Ireland is in the best position its been in a thousand years to tell the other island to go fuck itself, and yes, they're going to have some fun with that.
Also, as Liz Gloyn says, if anyone ever offers to be your Athena, seriously consider running.
 |
| I love this image - Athena is so casual. 'Here I am, nothing to see here, just holding up the sky ...' |
But there is a dig is in the power dynamic implied. Ireland Athena to Britain's Hercules? Vardakar Athena to Johnson's Hercules? Ireland's goddess to the UK's demi-god? To judge from how Brexiters and government ministers have recently spoken about Ireland, they would conceive of it as being the other way round; they see Ireland as the weak neighbour, to be helped, patronised and pushed around by the UK. And that is Varadkar's subtle jibe at the UK, a reminder that, with the rest of the EU27 behind them, Ireland is in the best position its been in a thousand years to tell the other island to go fuck itself, and yes, they're going to have some fun with that.
Also, as Liz Gloyn says, if anyone ever offers to be your Athena, seriously consider running.
Thursday, July 19, 2018
T for Tiberius revisited
[This post is
an annotated reposting of an entry from 2006. That entry is probably the most
influential thing I’ve ever posted on Memorabilia
Antonina, an early attempt to theorize
how we look at reception of classics in science fiction. A few years ago I
revisited this for the Once and Future Antiquity conference at the University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, in 2015, giving a
paper about how I felt the models stood up, and what I thought were the
challenges facing scholars in this field. For the publication arising from that
conference, I planned to revise that paper, and include the original post.
Unfortunately, due to space restrictions in the volume, it wasn’t possible to
include the original post. However, I had done a lot of new commentary on that
post, and with the encouragement of the editors, Brett Rogers and Ben Stevens,
I present the annotated version of the post. For the broader reflection, I’m
afraid you’ll have to wait until the publication of Once
and Future Antiquities in Science Fiction, due in December. It’ll be worth the wait – I think it’s one of
the best things I’ve ever written. And there’s a lot of other great stuff in
there.
I have
removed images and a lengthy quotation from Stephen Baxter’s Coalescent (2003), which was included in the original
post as an appendix; but otherwise I have tried to present this as it was in
2006, only correcting typos, adding references and standardizing formatting.
Where greater clarification or correction is needed, I have added [2018] notes.
Other notes were in the original text. Several note references have been moved
to the ends of their sentences.]
[Original preface: The following is a
paper I delivered at the 2006 Classical Association Conference in Newcastle. I
had to edit it down to fit a twenty-minute slot, and what follows is the
full-length version, with some changes as a result of points made in the
subsequent discussion. … Comments and corrections are warmly invited.]
This paper
forms the introduction to a planned larger work looking at a number of different
aspects of the way in which SF uses the Greek and Roman classics. I shall start
with two parallel, interrelating introductions.
Introduction number one:
Studying
the way that classical antiquity is received in modern works changes not only the
way we look at those works, but also how we look at the source material. For instance,
many of my thoughts on what Athenian dramatists were actually trying to say have
been formed or amplified through observation of contemporary interpretations. Sometimes
the insights are quite unexpected – it wasn’t until I read Ulysses, and saw
what Joyce was trying to do, to find the exact combination of English words that
conveyed the precise nuance that he desired, that I finally understood what Thucydides
was trying to do with Greek. And so it is with SF.
Introduction
number two:
I am aware
that in looking at SF, I am in danger of being perceived to be engaged in the study
of the ‘banal and quotidian’ that Charles Martindale condemned in the Reception
debate at the 2005 Classical Association Conference in Reading.[1]
The frivolous response to such a charge would be to say that I’m just using this
as an excuse to read all the books and watch all the television and films I would
read and watch anyway, and call it ‘research’; but that would be rather to denigrate
my own work, and potentially that of everyone else working in reception. So instead
I shall defend myself from such a charge in two rather more serious ways. First
of all, SF is not intrinsically banal and quotidian. (I’m not going to argue this
– it just isn’t.) Secondly, even if it was, it wouldn’t matter. Martindale’s objection,
in my view, confuses aesthetic value with cultural significance. I have no objection
to people making aesthetic judgements, and make plenty of my own. But any such judgement
I or others might make is unrelated to whether the piece of work judged is worthy
of study in terms of its reception of Classical ideas. Put simply, one can say that
Gladiator is a poor film, but it doesn’t follow from such an opinion that
Gladiator is not important. If most people are getting their experience of
the ancient world through the banal and quotidian, then it is the banal and quotidian
that must be studied.
Let us start
then, as an example of how SF receives the classics, with Tiberius. Not the second
Roman emperor, stepson and adopted son of Augustus, but arguably the single most
iconic figure in all of SF, Star Trek’s James Tiberius Kirk.
Captain
Kirk’s middle name took a long time to be established. Indeed, when he was first
introduced, in the second pilot of Star Trek, ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’,
his middle initial is shown on a gravestone as ‘R’. This detail had been forgotten
by the next time someone wanted to give Kirk’s middle initial, and so it became
‘T’. But what this stands for remained unknown throughout the original run of Trek.
That it
is ‘Tiberius’ was finally established in 1974, in an episode of the animated series
of Star Trek that followed the original: ‘Bem’, written by David Gerrold.
Now, almost everything that happened in the animated episodes is considered non-canonical
for subsequent Trek productions. That is, they are never referred to, and
no attempt is made to avoid contradicting them. But, curiously, the detail of Kirk’s
middle name does get into the Star Trek canon.[2]
This suggests to me that it was series creator Gene Roddenberry’s notion, rather
than writer Gerrold’s.[3]
In the novelization
of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), there is a preface made out to be
by James Kirk himself. (The novelization is credited to Roddenberry, but reportedly
is actually by Alan Dean Foster, so what we have here may be Foster pretending to
be Roddenberry pretending to be Kirk.[4])
In that preface, Kirk shows his classical credentials by stating that he has come
to be seen as a new Ulysses and that he is uncomfortable in the role. He also explains
his name:
My name is James Tiberius
Kirk. Kirk because my father and his male forebears followed the old custom
of passing on a family identity name. I received James because it was both
the name of my father’s beloved brother as well as that of my mother’s first love
instructor. Tiberius, as I am forever tired of explaining, was the Roman
emperor whose life for some unfathomable reason fascinated my grandfather Samuel.[5]
Anybody
who has read Suetonius’s Life of Tiberius, or is familiar with I, Claudius
or Tinto Brass’s 1979 film Caligula, will know that Tiberius was notorious
for the quantity, variety, and invention of his sexual perversions.[6]
Several questions therefore clearly arise. What exactly was it about Tiberius that
so fascinated Samuel Kirk? Do Samuel Kirk’s interests, together with James being
named after his mother’s ‘love instructor’ (whatever one of those is), explain the
voracious heterosexual appetite of the grandson?[7]
But above all, what was Roddenberry thinking?[8]
I’d now
like to examine some theoretical models. Greco-Roman elements (or indeed elements
from any historical culture) can be used in SF in a number of different fashions.
What follows is a rough framework for discussion, and is not meant to be a rigid
categorization of use of Classical elements, but a broad heuristic tool. It is a
model, and like most models, breaks down when subjected to rigorous examination.
And I remain firmly in the camp of those who would rather break the model than break
the evidence.
Retellings
Straight
retellings of mythological tales don’t really interest me for the purposes of this
paper or for the larger work. These stories, such as Weight (2005), Jeanette
Winterson’s recent reinterpretation of the Atlas myth, belong in the genre of fantasy
rather than SF (where they do not, as David Gemmell’s bestselling Troy: Lord
of the Silver Bow [2005] does, belong in historical fiction). Of course, the
boundaries between SF and fantasy are frequently blurred, as anyone familiar with
the works of China Miéville will know.[9]
But I don’t have time to go into a detailed discussion of the definitions of both
genres, which would in any case only be my definitions, and would not necessarily
be recognized by everyone. Let me just say that, in my view, SF assumes a rational
explanation to everything, no matter how fantastic it might seem or how pseudo-scientific
that explanation might be, whilst fantasy assumes the irrational.[10]
So, gods that are in fact super-powerful aliens are SF, gods that are gods belong
in fantasy. And to this latter category we must consign, as well as retellings,
new tales featuring mythological characters, such as the various different film
and television series featuring Hercules, stories featuring new characters in a
mythological past, such as Xena: Warrior Princess, tales of the fantastic
set in historical antiquity, such as Gene Wolfe’s Latro in the Mist novels,[11]
or even tales of the gods still walking amongst us, such as the episodes of Hercules:
The Legendary Journeys, ‘Yes Virginia, There is a Hercules’ (1998) and ‘For
Those of You Just Joining Us’ (1999), where there is no science fictional element.[12]
What are
the truly science fictional uses?
Allusion
First is
simple allusion, brief references to ancient history or literature that are
not particularly central to the story being presented. This can manifest itself
in titles, without carrying any deeper message. Stanley G. Weinbaum’s 1934 story
‘A Martian Odyssey’, that later gave its name to a collection of his stories from
1949, has little in common with Homer’s epic poem beyond both being about long journeys.
The same appears to be true, at least on the surface, of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968
film 2001: A Space Odyssey.[13]
Such title
allusion can sometimes be not to the Graeco-Roman
originals, but to other receptions, such as when Eando Binder (Earl and Otto Binder)
entitled their short story ‘I, Robot’ (1939), referring to Robert Graves’s classic
1934 novel I, Claudius. (The title was later stolen by Isaac Asimov’s publisher
for the first collection of Asimov’s own robot stories in 1950, much to Asimov’s
annoyance, as he preferred Mind and Iron.[14])
Allusions may be in the SF work
in the form of names, such as James Tiberius Kirk, already mentioned; or the use
of terms like ‘imperium’, as in Keith Laumer’s Worlds of the Imperium, where
the Imperium is the name of the principal state in the story.[15]
In the latter case, the name of that state may have inspired first-edition cover
artist Ed Valigursky to put Roman-style helmets on the figures illustrated.[16]
More substantially,
classical allusion may be used to comment
on the situation in which the characters find themselves. One such may be found
in an episode of the sequel to Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation,
‘Best of Both Worlds’ (1990). Faced with the Borg, an implacable enemy that may
destroy the Federation, Captain Jean-Luc Picard muses on whether this was how the
emperor Honorius felt in 410 ce as
the Goths descended upon Rome. The purpose of the allusion is not always so immediately clear. In Ken MacLeod’s novel
The Stone Canal (1996), two drunk men sit by the Forth Estuary and talk about
how this is where Rome stopped (a reference in keeping with the theme of the Newcastle
conference, ‘On the Frontier’). The immediate significance of this isn’t apparent
on first reading, though there does seem to be something of a meme in recent British
literary SF of scenes with two blokes drinking and talking about the Roman empire
– there is a similar scene from Stephen Baxter’s Coalescent (2003), though
there it’s more obviously relevant, as the story begins in early fourth century
ce Roman Britain.[17]
This meme may go back to the American author Philip K. Dick, whose characters, as
the SF critic Andrew M. Butler has shown, often muse on Rome – even before Dick’s
(presumably drug-induced) visions of being himself transported back to the late
first century ce.[18]
However,
MacLeod is a man with interests in classical antiquity – he is well-versed in the
Epicureans and Stoics, and the works of Lucretius and Marcus Aurelius – so the reference
in his case is unlikely to be gratuitous.[19]
As one reads The Stone Canal further, it becomes clear that the novel is
very interested in the limits of empire, and that may be why MacLeod has included
this scene.[20]
These allusions
make important points about popular understanding of antiquity. Classicists know
that Honorius was actually in his capital Ravenna at the time of the sack of Rome,
but the writers of Star Trek clearly don’t.[21]
Ken MacLeod probably does know that to say that Rome stopped at the Antonine Wall
is an oversimplification that ignores the Flavian, Antonine, and Severan penetrations
further into Scotland; but his characters, two drunk blokes talking shite, can’t
necessarily be expected to have that knowledge.
Appropriation
A step up
from allusion is appropriation, the depiction of a society or individual
which has in some method consciously modelled itself upon Greco-Roman (or other
historical) precedents. For examples of this I turn once again (but for the last
time) to Star Trek. A non-classical instance is the episode ‘A Piece of the
Action’ (1968), in which a planetary culture is encountered that imitates Chicago
mobsters of the 1930s. ‘Plato’s Stepchildren’ (1968) provides a classical example.
This episode was controversial in the United States because it reportedly featured
the first depiction of an interracial kiss on network television, and was banned
in the UK, probably because of a sado-masochistic whipping scene that suggests Jim
Kirk may know more about his grandfather’s fascination with Tiberius than he’s letting
on. But my interest in it is because it features a society that has allegedly modelled
itself upon Plato’s ideal state. However, I doubt Plato ever envisaged his philosopher
kings as being in addition super-powerful psychokinetics, and I also doubt that
the episode’s writer, Meyer Dolinsky, had read much Platonic philosophy – certainly
there’s little sign of it in the episode.[22]
Allusion aside,
appropriation is far and away the most plausible form of reception of the
classics in SF, as it is simply imagined societies and individuals doing what real
historical cultures, such as Napoleonic France or Fascist Italy, did. However, it
is also one of the least common. Nazis seem to be much more popular for this sort
of story (q.v. Star Trek, ‘Patterns of Force’, 1968).
Interaction
More frequent
is what I call, perhaps somewhat misleadingly (and not necessarily in honour of
the 2005 Worldcon), interaction. This covers stories actually featuring the
cultures or individuals (real or imagined) of the classical past, or some continuation
of the same. The locus classicus for this sort of tale, of course, is the
long-running BBC television series Doctor Who, a show based around the concept
of travel in time and space. And indeed, the Doctor has on his travels visited Rome
at the time of Nero, the Trojan War, and the pre-Hellenic Aegean in the age of Atlantis,
and encountered displaced Roman soldiers and creatures of classical myth; and more
such stories are to be found in spin-off novels and audio dramatizations.[23]
But interaction can be seen elsewhere. There are two consecutive 1974 stories
from ITV’s 1970s rival to Doctor Who, The Tomorrow People.[24]
In the second, A Rift In Time, the Tomorrow People travel back to the Roman
period (and inadvertently interfere in human history by bringing about the Industrial
Revolution a thousand years too early, forcing them to go back and put it right).
In the first, The Blue and the Green, more unusually, they find themselves
up against entities which promoted the rivalry between factions in the Roman circus.
For a literary example, Stephen Baxter’s Coalescent, already mentioned, concerns
a secret society whose origins lie in fifth-century CE Rome. Or one might encounter
a Princess who comes from among the Amazons, who have kept themselves sealed off
from Man’s World for millennia (the origin of William Moulton Marston’s superheroine
Wonder Woman).[25]
It is in
these sorts of stories that I think one can start to see what SF can do that other
forms of reception perhaps can’t as easily.
As an example,
I take Helen of Troy. Casting Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, is very
difficult for a naturalistic stage, film or television production, since beauty
is such a subjective concept. My favourite exemplar of this is Michael Cacoyannis’s
film of Euripides’s Trojan Women (1970). Cacoyannis cast Irene Papas in the
role, who was his wife, and therefore his idea of perfection in female beauty.[26]
But she’s not mine, especially not when the same film features Vanessa Redgrave
at her most radiant in the role of Andromache. When Doctor Who tackled the Trojan War, in a 1965 story called ‘The Myth Makers’, writer Donald Cotton
solved this problem simply by never bringing Helen on screen, and thus her appearance
always remains in the viewers’ imaginations. Now, it might well be said that any
writer of historical fiction could pull the same trick, but I’m not sure that a
non-SF treatment would think to exclude Helen in this way. More likely they would
take the approach of Eric Shanower’s series of graphic novels Age of Bronze (1998 onwards), where Helen’s supreme
beauty is a rumour spread by Odysseus to motivate the Greek army. This is a realistic
approach, but for me lacks the elegance of Cotton’s trick. However, the trick is
not unique to SF, as Hector Berlioz in the nineteenth century omitted Helen from
the onstage cast of Les Troyens
(1890), and it may well have been this which gave Cotton the idea.[27]
If the example
of Helen is something that genres other than SF can do, then a convincing portrayal
of the Greek gods is much more SF’s province. Nick Lowe has observed that almost
all recent treatments of the Trojan War have excluded the direct involvement of
the gods, either through eliminating them entirely or through segregating them from
the principal human characters.[28]
This is true not just of Wolfgang Petersen’s film Troy (2004), which was
much criticised for this aspect (as well as others), but also of Shanower’s Age
of Bronze and Gemmell’s Troy, and (as far as I am aware) of Lindsay Clarke’s
The War at Troy (2004) and Valerio Massimo Manfredi’s The Talisman of
Troy (2004).[29]
According to Lowe, the only recent treatment of the Trojan War to successfully integrate
the gods is Dan Simmons’s SF novel Ilium (2003; the sequel, Olympos
appeared in 2005). There advanced technology takes the place of the divine power
that seems to embarrass other writers interested in writing historical adventures;
the gods’ Mount Olympos becomes Olympus Mons on Mars.[30]
Into this
category I would also put stories dealing with alternate histories (or ‘counterfactuals’
for authors worried that they might otherwise be accused of writing SF), e.g. ones
where Rome never fell.[31]
The two characters in Baxter’s Coalescent are discussing what might have
happened had the western Roman empire survived, and such a notion is at the heart
of Robert Silverberg’s Roma Eterna (2003),[32]
and of Sophia McDougall’s recent Romanitas (2005). In Silverberg’s collection
of stories, the combined factors of the Jewish Exodus from Egypt ending in disaster,
and a different emperor succeeding Septimius Severus, lead to the survival of the
Roman empire past the twentieth century.
Alternate
history, to my mind, makes us ask new questions of the ancient world. Classicists
often look at, for instance, how the Roman empire worked, but less often, I feel,
at questions of whether the Roman empire was a good thing or not. Would we want
it to survive? Would we want to live in a state which, though it brought order and
peace, was a slave-owning military dictatorship where freedom to criticize the government
was severely limited? Looking at alternate histories prompt us to ask such questions,
even if they were not always in the original authors’ minds.
Sometimes
the connection between alternate history and scholarship can be even closer, and
alternate history can take on the form of academic discourse, as in Neville Morley’s
brilliant paper to the 1999 Classical Association Conference: ‘Trajan’s Engines’,
a scholarly examination of technological feats the Romans never actually achieved.[33]
So well done is this that some were fooled, and it still crops up in some online
bibliographies of writing on Trajan.
Borrowing
My fourth
category, borrowing, is much like appropriation, in that elements
of classical antiquity are used to build an imagined society. The difference is
that in this case only the author and audience are aware of the origins of features
of the imagined culture – the members of the culture themselves are not,
and cannot be, for there is no connection between them and Earth’s antiquity.
Sometimes
this borrowing can be as minor as simply the use of nomenclature. Greek and Latin
can be a reliable source of names that are sufficiently unfamiliar to a readership
to be credibly alien, yet retain the ring of something that might actually be spoken,
rather than something that an author has made up off the top of their head. This
is especially the case where a name does not conjure a particular individual in
the popular imagination.[34]
M. John Harrison takes the Roman name of Wroxeter, Viriconium, for a fictional city
at the centre of a sequence of what are strictly speaking fantasy stories, but ones
with a strong SF undercurrent.[35]
In the paper that formed the other part of the panel in which the current paper
was presented, Amanda Potter commented on the use of names like Apollo, Athena,
and Cassiopeia in Battlestar Galactica;[36]
I would also note the use in that series of the Zodiac to denote the Twelve Human
Colonies.
Another
example came be drawn from the Planet of the Apes franchise. There the characters
played by Roddy McDowall are called ‘Cornelius’ in Planet of the Apes (1968),
Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) – though there the character was played
by David Watson – and Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), ‘Caesar’
in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) and Battle for the Planet
of the Apes (1973), and ‘Galen’ in the Planet of the Apes television
series (1974). This is, it must be admitted, a slightly problematic case. Caesar
appears in two films that take place in what was then the near future, when there
would still presumably be access to Roman history. Though in the others knowledge
of human history has been lost by the apes, it remains possible that some names
might survive. However, this example does illustrate the way genuine Latin names
can then be supplemented by ones with a pseudo-Latin feel, such as the orang-utan
Dr Zaius in Planet… and Beneath…[37]
For an example
where Classical sources have been used to help imagine an entire culture that can
have no connection with those sources, we can go a long, long time ago to a galaxy
far, far away. I am, of course, talking about Mike Butterworth and Don Lawrence’s
classic comic, The Trigan Empire, which has been described by Neil Gaiman
as ‘the story of something a lot like an SF Roman Empire on a distant planet’.[38]
It is in fact a great deal more, and Butterworth and Lawrence used popular views
of the Greeks, Mongols, and Saharan nomads to populate the planet of Elekton. But
it is the SF Augustus, Trigo himself, and the Roman trappings of his empire, that
are always remembered.
It is also
the case that George Lucas’s Star Wars films (commencing in 1977 with Star
Wars) take much of their political terminology (Republic, Empire, Senate, etc.)
from Rome, and even the broad outline of the galaxy’s political history (the change
from Republic to Empire). Some of this has come via the influential Foundation
novels of Isaac Asimov, which helped establish the popular space opera trope of
the Galactic Empire, and themselves draw upon two classically-related sources, Edward
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788) and Thucydides’
History of the Peloponnesian War.[39]
But not all of the Roman elements in Lucas’s work have come from Asimov. Lucas may
not have consulted any classical sources or works on Roman history himself, but
he is clearly familiar with cinematic interpretations of Rome’s past.[40]
This is
shown if we move from the sublime to the ridiculous, which in this case means moving
from Episodes IV-VI of the Star Wars series to the more recently made
Episodes I-III.[41]
In The Phantom Menace (1999), not only does the capital of the planet of
Naboo draw its appearance partly from many reconstructions of ancient Rome, as well
as being reminiscent of the modern city (and other cities such as Istanbul), but
a triumphal sequence at the end is stolen shot-for-shot from Commodus’ arrival in
Rome from Anthony Mann’s Fall of the Roman Empire (1964).[42]
This sort
of reception in SF through a previous reception can also be seen in the Doctor
Who story The Robots of Death (1976). The robot faces in that story derive
ultimately from a Greek comic mask (itself presumably influenced by the archaic
kouros).[43]
But the production designer for Doctor Who has gone not to Greek originals,
but to the appropriation of Greek objects by the Art Deco movement.
Stealing
My next
category is one step up from borrowing – stealing. Here not just elements
of the background or foreground have been taken from an ancient culture, but the
story itself derives from a classical original. This approach is, of course, not
unique to SF. Two non-SF examples are James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), and the
Coen brothers’ movie O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000), both of which take
Homer’s Odyssey as their source text (though both depart from it considerably).[44]
In SF there
is Brian Stableford’s Dies Irae trilogy (all 1971), which draws heavily upon
the Iliad in its first volume and upon the Odyssey in its second.
The Odyssey is again used in R.A. Lafferty’s novel Space Chantey (1968).[45]
Robert Silverberg’s The Man in the Maze (1969) is a retelling of Sophocles’
play Philoctetes, even retaining Lemnos as the name of the planet to which
his Philoctetes-equivalent has been exiled.
The use
of the term ‘stealing’ is not necessarily meant to pass any judgement on the merit
of works that take this approach. Some, such as Joyce’s novel, are high art. However,
sometimes stealing (or indeed borrowing) seems to encourage a laziness in writing,
a sense that all the work has already been done for the writer, so they needn’t
bother. There are two Doctor Who stories from the late 1970s that exemplify
this. One, ‘Underworld’ (1978),
is a reworking of the Jason and the Argonauts myth; the other, ‘The Horns of Nimon’ (1979-1980), retells
Theseus’s adventure in the Cretan Labyrinth. Neither is very good, and through the
use of anagrams for names (for instance, Herick and Tala for Heracles and Atalanta
in the first, and Aneth and Skonnos for Athens and Knossos in the second) come close
to insulting the intelligence.[46]
(I said earlier that reception studies allows one to revisit favourite works of
art and media, but sometimes you have to watch ‘The Horns of Nimon’ again.)
Ghosting
At Nick
Lowe’s suggestion, I have added a final category, ghosting. This covers stories
where no direct influence of classical originals can be established, but where nevertheless
there are strong hints of themes derived from antiquity. Once could in this category
talk of the possible influence of the Jason myth upon 2001 – both are stories
in which an adventurer goes beyond the limits of the known universe in order to
recover wondrous artefacts. However, this category is inherently nebulous, and such
connections can be difficult to establish. Moreover, one can start to see them everywhere,
especially since, as most recently demonstrated by Simon Goldhill, western civilization
is deeply rooted in the classics.[47]
That concludes
my tentative framework. It oversimplifies, breaks down when applied to examples
that cross the boundaries, and may be of little use to anyone else – but I find
it useful for myself and for my work.
Given western
civilization’s roots in the classics, it is inevitable that classical references
will be found throughout SF, and no study can hope to cover them all. But I believe
that looking at how the two areas interact can be valuable for both. For classics
and SF are both areas that can be used to put a comforting distance between subject
and audience.[48]
It can be easier to comment on modern imperialism if you take as your background
the Peloponnesian War or the far future.
It’s worth
noting the differences, though. Edith Hall has pointed out to me that Joyce in particular
(and others) uses the classics as a peg of familiarity in order to allow himself
to write a more avant-garde literary work. Derek Walcott does something similar
when he uses the Odyssey for his ambitious poem Omeros (1990). SF, on the other hand, tends
not to do this, as the genre can often be conservative in terms of literary form,
and is already attempting to get its readership to buy into novel ideas, and cannot
always afford to load novel structure upon that.
Nevertheless,
classics will continue to be received in science fiction[49]
– and indeed my next reading matter is Stephen Baxter’s new novel Emperor (2006).[50]
Works cited
Written fictional texts
Almond, Maureen.
2004. The Works (Washington,
Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Biscuit Publishing).
Asimov, Isaac.
1950. I, Robot (New York: Gnome Press).
Asimov, Isaac.
1951. Foundation (New York: Gnome
Press).
Asimov, Isaac.
1952. Foundation and Empire (New
York: Gnome Press).
Asimov, Isaac.
1953. Second Foundation (New York:
Gnome Press).
Asimov, Isaac, and
Greenberg, Martin H. (eds). 1979. Isaac
Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories 1 (1939) (New York: DAW Books).
Baxter, Stephen.
2003. Coalescent (London: Gollancz).
Baxter, Stephen.
2006. Emperor (London: Gollancz).
Binder, Eando.
1939. ‘I, Robot’, Amazing Stories,
January 1939: 8-18.[51]
Bulis, Christopher.
1994. Doctor Who: State of Change (London:
Virgin Publishing).
Butterworth, Mike,
and Lawrence, Don. 2004a. The Trigan
Empire: The Prisoner of Zerss (Oosterhout: Don Lawrence Collection).
Butterworth, Mike,
and Lawrence, Don. 2004b. The Trigan
Empire: The Sun Worshippers (Oosterhout: Don Lawrence Collection).
Butterworth, Mike,
and Lawrence, Don. 2005a. The Trigan
Empire: The House of the Five Moons (Oosterhout: Don Lawrence Collection).
Butterworth, Mike,
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[1] [2018: Subsequently published in Martindale
2005 and 2006: 11, and defended in Martindale 2013: 176-177. For critiques, see Winkler 2009: 12-13, and
Bakogianni 2017: 481.]
[2] Technically not until mentioned on-screen in Star
Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991). [2018: On canon in the Star Trek universe, see StarTrek.com
2003, and Silverman 2015: 159.]
[3] [2018: Gerrold has always claimed it was his
idea, come up with at a Star Trek
convention in 1973. However, his story has changed over the years. Originally
he claimed that he took inspiration from the BBC series I Claudius (1976); but that was first broadcast two years after
‘Bem’. He later said that he had been reading a book on Roman history. An added
factor is that the protagonist of an earlier Roddenberry series, The Lieutenant (1963-1964), also had the
middle name ‘Tiberius’, something Gerrold claims to have been unaware of until
2014. Forty years on, whose idea the name actually was is probably
irrecoverable. See Tescar n.d., Drew 2014, and Silverman 2015: 159, 163 n. 79.
Silverman reports a third version of the story, where Gerrold got the name from
reading Robert Graves’ novel I, Claudius (1934); this is probably a
conflation of the first and second versions.]
[4] [2018: This is probably untrue. Persistent
rumour suggested that Foster, rather than Roddenberry, wrote the novelization.
However, although Foster wrote the original story for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and there is a precedent for this
practice – in that Foster had ghost-written the novelization of Star Wars, which was published as by
George Lucas (1976) – Foster denies writing the Star Trek: TMP novelization, and David G. Hartwell, who edited the
book, insists that it was written by Roddenberry; Ayers 2006: 236.]
[5] Roddenberry 1979: 5.
[6] [2018: Suetonius’ Life of Tiberius is available, e.g. in Graves 2007 [1954]: 104-144.]
[7] Writers of ‘slash’ fanfiction featuring the
unspoken love between Kirk and Spock (of whose work Roddenberry was presumably
aware) might take such a statement as evidence that they were right all along.
[2018: On Kirk/Spock, see Woledge 2005. Roddenberry himself responded
positively to an interview question that compared the relationship between Kirk
and Spock to that between Alexander and Hephaestion; see Shatner 1979: 147-148.]
[8] [2018: It is worth noting that there is a
tradition in Hollywood movies that is far more sympathetic towards Tiberius
than that in Suetonius or Robert Graves; this can be seen in The Robe (dir. Koster, 1953), Salome (dir. Dieterle, 1953), and Ben-Hur
(dir. Wyler, 1959), and more recently in The Last Legion (dir. Lefler, 2007).]
[9] [2018: E.g. Perdido Street Station (2000).]
[10] [2018: I expand on this definition in Keen
2015a: 110.]
[11] Soldier of the Mist (1986)
and Soldier of Arete (1986), both set in the early fifth century BCE.
[2018: Subsequently followed by Soldier
of Sidon (2007), on which see Keen 2007a. See also Tomasso 2018.]
[12] Where there is a science fictional element,
however, such as in the Star Trek episode ‘Who Mourns for Adonais?’
(dir. Daniels, 1967), or the use of gods in superhero comics, which are
inherently science fictional milieus, then, of course, I am interested. [2018: As discussed in the new chapter, I
am now no longer as dismissive of fantasy as I was. And superhero comics blend
the science fictional and the fantastic in an indiscriminate fashion.]
[13] I discuss deeper Homeric themes in 2001 in
Keen 2006c [2018: See now Rogers 2015: 217-222, and Keen 2018].
[14] I agree with the publisher – I, Robot is a
much better title. [2018: See the introduction to Asimov and Greenberg 1979.]
[15] Since classical names have been given to the
planets, constellations and many stars, such names abound in those sections of
SF that deal with space exploration. Similarly, Greek and Latin are hardwired
into the language of science, and therefore into the language of science
fiction. But one cannot cover these in detail as classical receptions in their
own right – that way madness lies.
[16] It should be noted that Laumer gives a fin de
siècle/Edwardian feel to his descriptions of the Imperium, and Valigursky
may actually be referencing c. 1900 imitations of Roman attire.
Incidentally, Damon Knight’s cover quotation on the 1962 edition, ‘A major new
idea in time travel …’, is quite curious, as the novel contains no time travel
whatsoever. [2018: Though it is concerned with alternate time lines. Another
Laumer novel with classical resonances is Galactic
Odyssey (1967).]
[20] [2018: In conversation and personal
correspondence, MacLeod has confirmed that this is indeed the case, with one of
the characters, Reid, having a respect for the British empire, while the other,
Wilde, is happy to see empires fall. The allusion is linked to the basic
premises that underlie MacLeod’s Fall
Revolution quartet, of which The
Stone Canal is the second part: that the fall of capitalism and its
replacement by socialism will resemble the passage from the Roman empire into
the early medieval period, and that the collapse of the Soviet empire presages
that of the USA. (The other novels in the quartet are The Star Fraction, 1995, The
Cassini Division, 1998, and The Sky
Road, 1998.) My thanks to Ken MacLeod for responding to my queries.]
[21] [2018: Or do not care.]
[22] Rather more knowledge of Plato is shown in the 1972
Doctor Who story ‘The Time
Monster’ (dir. Bernard, 1972), where minor characters have the names of
Platonic dialogues. [2018: See on this now Keen (2010: 107-108).]
[23] The stories referred to are ‘The Romans’ (dir. Barry, 1964), ‘The Myth Makers’ (dir. Leeston-Smith,
1965), ‘The Time Monster’ (dir.
Bernard, 1972), ‘The War Games’
(dir. Maloney, 1969), and ‘The Mind
Robber’ (dir. Maloney, 1968). [2018: On these, see now Keen 2010: 100-106,
and Potter 2018, 169-175.] For relevant spin-off stories, see, e.g. Christopher
Bulis’s novel State of Change (1994), set around the time of Cleopatra,
or the Big Finish audio story The Council of Nicaea (2005).
[24] [2018: In both, the screenplay is by the
show’s creator Roger Price.]
[25] [2018: Marston and Peter 2016. The first Wonder Woman comics were published in
1942. On Wonder Woman, see Sandifer 2013 and Hanley 2014.]
[26] [2018: It is not true that Cacoyannis was
married to Papas, and I am not sure why I thought it was. That Papas
represented a certain type of ideal beauty to Cacoyannis, however, I still
believe.]
[27] [2018: Helen has to be made peripheral for
this device to work, not easy if telling the story from her departure with
Paris onwards.]
[28] In a paper (Lowe 2005) delivered immediately prior
to a performance of the pseudo-Euripidean Rhesus.
[29] For my own views on the relationship between Troy
and Greek myth, see Keen 2005. Manfredi was first published in Italian in
1994.
[30] [2018: Note now, however, Troy: Fall of a City (dir. Farr, 2018),
which does include the gods, whilst at the same time telling the whole cycle.]
[31] [2018: On counterfactuals, see Lewis 1973.]
[33] Published as Morley 2000.
[35] The sequence began with The Pastel City
(1971). The stories are collected in Viriconium (2000, reissued in 2005
with an introduction by Neil Gaiman).
[36] Potter 2006.
[37] The Roman references are continued in Tim Burton’s
‘re-imagining’ of Planet of the Apes (2001), where the ape city is ruled
by a Senate. [2018: And also in Rise of
the Planet of the Apes (dir. Wyatt, 2011), Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (dir. Reeves, 2014), and War for the Planet of the Apes (dir.
Reeves, 2017), where the name ‘Caesar’ is again used.]
[38] Gaiman 2003. [2018: The series ran from 1965
to 1982, with other artists in the later years. The Lawrence-drawn stories are
collected in Butterworth and Lawrence 2004a-b, 2005a-b, 2006a-c, 2007a-b, and
2008a-c.]
[39] Asimov’s novels:
Foundation (1951), fixup of stories originally published in Astounding
Science Fiction (1942-1944);
Foundation and Empire (1952), stories in ASF (1945); and Second
Foundation (1953), stories
in ASF (1945). Gibbon is published 1776-1789. For the classical roots of
the Star Wars series, see Winkler 2001.
[2018: And see now Keen 2012. For Thucydides, see Hammond 2009.]
[40] [2018: See Bondanella 1973: 233-237.]
[41] [2018: The comment about moving from the
sublime to the ridiculous is unscholarly and I would not now endorse it.]
[42] It is known that during the making of Star Wars,
before the special effects sequences had been filmed, Lucas used footage from
WWII air combat films cut with what he had shot to illustrate how the final
film would appear [2018: see Rinzler 2007: 25]. I suspect the same technique
was used for the triumphal scene in Phantom Menace, with Lucas recutting
Mann’s film to show Industrial Light and Magic what he wanted from this CGI
sequence.
[44] One could also mention poetic reworkings of
classical authors, such as the anthology After Ovid (Hofmann and Lasdun
1995) or Maureen Almond’s transpositions of Horace into twentieth century
Teesside (2004).
[45] Stableford (1999 [1993]: 966) notes at least five
SF versions of the Odyssey. [2018: See now Stableford 2016.]
[46] Compare also Asimov’s transparent lifting of
Belisarius as ‘Bel Riose’ in Foundation and Empire (1952). [2018: Bel Riose is
discussed in Keen 2007B. On ‘Underworld’ and ‘Horns of Nimon’, see now Keen
2010: 108-110, and Potter 2018: 175-178.]
[47] Goldhill 2004.
[49] Not least because of those SF and fantasy writers
who have Classical backgrounds - e.g. Adam Roberts has a degree in English and
Classics (https://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/adam-roberts(0cf8af32-e487-402e-ac87-b80e3cf7c735).html, accessed 18
May 2018), Juliet McKenna one in Classics
(http://www.julietemckenna.com/?page_id=5, accessed 18
May 2018), and Harry Turtledove wrote a Ph.D. in Byzantine history (Turtledove
1977).
[50] [2018: Baxter’s novel is reviewed and
discussed in Keen 2006b and 2011a.]
[51] My thanks to Edward James for providing
pagination in old SF journals,
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