“Oh, come on, honey. Let’s get it.”
“No. Not just ‘no,’ but hell no. We ain’t gettin’ it.”
“Aw, why not?”
“Because it’s the most inaccurate crock of shit ever committed to celluloid. So fuck me dead if we’re gettin’ it. I’d rather stick my pecker into a hornets’ nest than watch it again.”
By this time, people were beginning to stare, and as my mood gradually shifted from mildly irritated to highly pissed-off, I was on the verge of serving up a good, old-fashioned “What are you starin’ at, fuckface?” or two. Maggie -- probably dreading the prospect of bailing my ass out of the pound for putting my martial arts training to not-so-good use on the next cretin who “eyeballed” me – then conceded victory to me, and hustled me toward the door.
The argument, in case the Gentle Reader hasn’t yet guessed, was over purchasing a movie. Between the two of us, Maggie and I have hundreds of ‘em: horror, sci-fi, film noir, action/adventure, war, grindhouse, anime, foreign, “chop-socky,” you name it. And it doesn’t take much to persuade either of us to buy a new one. This time, though, we were in between paychecks, and Mags wanted to buy one of the most godawful pieces of shite ever filmed: Troy.
How do I loathe Troy? Let me count the ways. For starters, Brad Pitt stars in the fucking thing – playing the part of Achilles, no less. (If that isn’t a clear-cut case of insult being added to injury, I don’t know what is.) Then, there’s the fact that the screenwriters mutilated the Iliad beyond recognition when they wrote the atrocious – and laughably inaccurate -- screenplay.
I don’t give a shit what the film depicted: Helen was not Paris’ devoted lover, but a sort of “kickback” he’d picked up for proclaiming Aphrodite the most beautiful of goddesses (pissing Athena and Hera off, in the process, by the way) and awarding her the golden apple.
(That, incidentally, is why the word Καλλιστι appears in the odd post on this blog, as a private joke of sorts. It’s Greek; means “to the most beautiful,” and no, I have no fucking idea which of the vowels – if any – takes a tonos mark. My acquaintance with the sole surviving member of the Indo-European language family’s Hellenic branch is confined to whatever I retained from my high school and college lit courses, and to the menu at one of Roswell’s better restaurants. In other words, Greek is – well – “all Greek to me.”
My occasional use of Καλλιστι is also a crude reference/salute to Greg Hill’s Principia Discordia, a bit of bitter – if well-deserved—self-mockery, and a dig at “the face that launched – uhm – a single, rented Ford Taurus.”
Now you know…)
Menelaos was not killed at Troy, but rather returned to Sparta at the war’s conclusion, lived more-or-less happily ever after, and was – quite inexplicably, owing to his lack of classical, heroic virtues – whisked off to the Elysian Fields when the time came for him to “punch his ticket,” if you will.
Paris was not a sympathetic character, but a weasely, underhanded little wanker who, in one episode, actually fled the field of battle rather than face the wrath of Menelaos – hardly the epitome of heroism, himself.
And Achilles – where to begin? Achilles, to be sure, was the greatest warrior in the Achaean host. The son of Thetis, an immortal nymph, he was as much a demigod as a man. Moreover, as his mother had immersed him in the waters of the Styx during his infancy, his entire body – save for the heel by which she’d held him – was invulnerable to the weapons of mortals. To say that this gave him something of an “attitude” is a ludicrous understatement -- and Pitt never even came close to portraying it.
In many respects, the Iliad is actually Achilles’ story, so I’ll restrict my criticism of Pitt’s sub-par performance to a few specifics, and cover the rest in a moment.
Achilles wasn’t blond, but red-haired. Additionally, he wasn’t a prettyboy, but ferocity personified. His rages, as related in the Iliad, were comparable to those of Cuchulainn in the Irish Tain Bo Cualigne, and he simply delighted in carnage. Simply put: Killing was Achilles’ job, and not only was he damned good at said job; he enjoyed it. Leafing through the Iliad, as a matter of fact, one quickly and inescapably concludes that he enjoyed the business of war every bit as thoroughly as I didn’t enjoy watching the abomination yclept Troy.
I won’t say that the film was utterly devoid of merit, mind you: only that for the most part, it sucked and gave change. Sean Bean (no relation, to the best of my knowledge) made a fine job of portraying Odysseus (for all that he’d have been a better choice for Achilles); the cinematography was lovely; and Achilles’ predilection for “swinging both ways,” while less evident than in Colin Farrell’s portrayal of Alexander the Great, for example, wasn’t skirted or downplayed any more than it was shoved up the viewer’s ass (no pun intended, of course). In short: The makers of Troy didn’t attempt to disguise the fact that Achilles was playing “hide the kopis” with Patroclos, but neither did they transform Troy into Broke Back Mountain, transplanted into Anatolian soil.
Anatolian soil – well watered by the blood of Hattian, Hittite, Luvian, Lycian, Lydian, Kurd, Persian, Phrygian, Galatian, Greek, Roman and Turk, from time immemorial – may be thin, rocky and infertile in places, agriculturally speaking. Literarily speaking, though, it’s among the most fertile on earth.
Schliemann and his successors may have proven Troy’s existence, archaeologically and historically, but upon hearing this “news,” the literate must, of necessity, say (to paraphrase a line from a Hindu folktale): “Ye need not stop work to tell us; we knew it many seasons ago.”
Troy – or Ilium, if one prefers – was the legendary setting of Homer’s epic poem, the Iliad. Far from being a mere, obscure piece of ancient poetry, the aforementioned work can rightfully be called one of the wellsprings of the Western literary tradition. In addition to its sequel, the equally renowned Odyssey, Homer’s epic spawned or influenced an entire current of literature: Virgil’s Aeneid (and thus, indirectly, Dante’s Inferno), Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, William Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, and a numerous 5th century (B.C.) Greek plays, including Sophocles’ Electra,
Not bad for one l’il poem, eh?
“OK, Bean,” says the Gentle Reader, “So some dead, White male writes a poem that influences the next 2,500 or so years’ worth of dead, White, male poets and playwrights. Well, whoop-dee-shit! None of that stuff’s relevant today, is it? Now let me get back to my fave ‘reality TV’ shows. I don’t wanna miss the next episode of My Roomies are Pus-Buckets, after all. This is gonna be a great one! Brandi discovers that ‘Steve’ is actually a cross-dressing necrophiliac named Stephanie, and I gotta see if she calls off their engagement when she finds out!”
Resisting with all my might the urge to crush the Gentle Reader’s skull with a meat-tenderizing mallet for daring to utter anything so moronic, I’ll point out that (oddly enough; hmmmmm…) the Classics have only been deemed “irrelevant” since the mid-late 1960’s and early 1970’s. (Quite unlike Easy Rider, Billy Jack, The Trip or The Harrad Experiment of course; all of which are as fresh and socially relevant today as when first they were released…)
Moreover, the kind of imbecile who brands the Iliad “irrelevant” usually falls into one of three categories: 1.) Those who’ve never read it and use its “irrelevance” as an excuse not to; 2.) Self-styled “intellectuals” who’ve actually devoted their lives to undercutting Western civilization, and therefore don’t want anyone examining its roots; 3.) Their bleating, passive followers, who are too dense and/or brainwashed to understand that whereas times change, people don’t.
The first two types of imbecile (the second is, admittedly, more accurately classified as a variety of shitbag) are essentially incorrigible: The first is willfully ignorant, while the second has a post-Rousseau/Kant/Hegel/Marx sociopolitical agenda to foist upon the rest of us. Therefore, it is (quite ironically) with the third class of simpleton that all hope for the future rests.
When stripped of the Bronze Age armor and weaponry, florid speeches and alien (to a modern, post-American American, at any rate) cultural trappings, the Iliad is a quintessentially human story – which is exactly why, once its proper situational context is established, it should resonate more with the “Great Unwashed” than with Type I and II imbeciles.
In a nutshell, Paris, an oily, “Handsome Jake” type, pulls a fast one (think of it as divinely abetted “date rape” – but please don’t start referring to “rufies” as “golden apples”) and runs off with Menelaos’ wife, Helen. Menelaos then calls in his brother, Agamemnon, who subsequently rounds up several thousand of his noble drinking buddies and sets sail for Troy to get a bit of payback. Shortly after they land, a large chunk of Asia Minor comes to resemble a cross between Detroit in the aftermath of a Pistons’ defeat, and the Jerry Springer show.
(Utterly irrelevant in this day and age, of course. No modern man ever got the hots for another guy’s chick, nor would one ever (perish the thought!) round up a few friends and take a road trip, to the end of opening a can of whupass on the scumbag who swiped his gal, now would he?)
Paris, the “black sheep” of an otherwise noble and admirable family, hides behind his better kinsmen, and ultimately brings utter ruin upon them and their city.
(Sheer archaic fantasy! No modern, self-serving shitbag would ever count upon his kinsmen’s senses of honor and familial obligation to shield him from the consequences of his own actions – to their detriment!)
The war rages on for ten years, the Greeks’ woes being prolonged and exacerbated by capricious, divine intervention and Achilles’ stubbornness. Achilles, the mightiest of the Greek heroes, had, as it happens, thrown in his lot with the brothers Atreidês, only to be screwed over by the unscrupulous Agamemnon -- the arch “Indian giver”-- for his pains.
(Not that anything of the sort – heaven forefend! -- ever happens in today’s world, mind you; just more of that incomprehensible, socially irrelevant, dead, White male behavior…)
And since the Iliad is, at its core, the story of Achilles, I’ll focus the remainder of this combination review/polemic upon him.
Before I continue, I’ll admit to identifying strongly with “red-haired Achilles.” Although he’s a legendary figure, shrouded in the myth and mist of a Greece that was already ancient when Homer composed his magnum opus, he’s character a man of Scots-Irish descent can easily understand -- and with whom one can just as easily sympathize. Like us, he was “born fighting.” Like us, he was proud, passionate, arrogant, touchy, quick to anger, and often self-defeatingly vindictive. Like ours, his rage, once kindled, was equally dangerous to friend and foe – and, at times, led him to the brink of abandoning his fundamental humanity.
An angry man – There is my story: the bitter rancour of Achillês, prince of the house of Peleus, which brought at thousand troubles upon the Achaian host. Many a strong soul it sent down to Hadês, and left the heroes themselves a prey to dogs and carrion birds, while the will of God moved on to fulfillment.
-- W.H.D Rouse’s prose translation
Like Achillês, the actor, the drama is all too human -- in and of itself.
If the ancient Greeks were the quintessential humanists of their age, then Achilles – being among the greatest of their mythical heroes – was, in many respects, the quintessential human being. Like most heroes of classical antiquity, Achilles falls into that category so despised by modern pseudo-humanists, the tragic hero. Unlike contemporary “humanists,” the Greeks of classical antiquity (and yes, there were exceptions to the general rule) studied and commented upon man for what he was, as opposed to what they believed he should be.
A discussion of the possible influences of Buddhism, Taoism, and/or Zoroastrianism upon Classical Greek thought (surely ideas accompanied material goods along the Silk Road…); the possibility of intellectual “cross-pollination” between Greek and Hebraic thought during the Hellenistic age, and the subsequent influence (or lack thereof) of Stoicism and other schools of thought upon early Christianity is far beyond the scope of this review/rant, so I’d invite the Gentle Reader to do his own research and draw his own conclusions.
Having gotten that out of the way, I’ll return to the matter of the tragic hero. No halfway honest student of Greek thought – however cursory his knowledge thereof – would ever submit that the classical Greeks were “anti-human.” Only the maddest and most doctrinaire acolytes of the Marxist, Libertarian or Objectivist lunatic fringes would dare make so ridiculous an accusation. When, however, it came to observing human behavior, they were far more (and rather wisely, at that) apt to give empirical observation precedence over idealistic notions of what man “should” be.
From Aesop to Aeschylus, the modern, colloquial sayings “Nobody bats 1.000,” and even (pardon my crudeness -- **snicker**) “Shit happens” are implied in much early Greek literature, eerily presaging the (horribly misunderstood) Christian doctrine of complete moral depravity. CMD, incidentally, doesn’t hold that man is incapable of good behavior; but rather that none of his mental/spiritual faculties is immune to perversion by his preferences, prejudices, and predilections – i.e., by his very nature.
Achilles, folks. Achilles.
Focus!
This isn’t a dissertation on the parallels between Greek humanism, Christian theology and Buddhist doctrine, so don’t even go there (for all that it’s wonderful “chat fodder”) – unless on your own time. I’m simply pointing out that the ancient Greeks noted man’s (Achilles’?) “Heels of clay” and commented thereupon. In short, they were honest observers of the human condition and of human nature –even if they were a bunch of heathens.
Renaissance organ grinder/pious, anti-Hohenstaufen Mafioso, Dante Alighieri, (my kind of guy, incidentally) himself only condemns Achilles to the “minimum security” circle of hell -- that reserved for the chronically intemperate.
Certainly, there are quite a few glaring, inherent contradictions in Dante’s theological and moral stances -- I’ll leave it to the late T.S. Eliot (of whom I approve) and the (sadly) still-extant Democratic Party (of whom I do not) to expound upon ‘em at length, though.
My point: Even Dante, who liberally populated his Inferno with his political and personal enemies, conceded that ol’ Achilles was only being human, and should therefore spend eternity being buffeted about by the winds of his own passions.
And what passions they were!
Among most primitive, Indo-European peoples (as, for the record, among most contemporary, Third World peoples), women were considered part of the spoils of war. Achilles, as it happenes, has, during the course of the siege of Troy, captured a girl named Brisëis, with whom he falls madly in love. By long-established folk-custom and usage, she should have been his.
Enter “the big boss man,” Agamemnon, who has transformed “avenging” his brother, Menelaos, into an ambitious – if largely unsuccessful – exercise in personal aggrandizement and profit. Having seized Chyseïs, the daughter of the Apollonian priest, Chrysês, our boy finds himself in imminent danger of having a can of Olympian whupass opened upon him. This being the case, he opts to relinquish his prize – and, like most of the “brass” -- screw Achillês, his nominal subordinate, out of his in the bargain.
None of that; you may be a great man, Achillês, you may be more than a man, but do not try cheating (Note: Does this sound a tad liberal/neocon to anyone other than me?) -- you will neither cajole me nor persuade me. Do you want to keep your own prize, and tell me to give up mine and just sit forlorn without any? If our brave men (Support the troops!) will give me a prize, and satisfy me that I get as much as I give, well and good; but if they will not give, then I will take…
Achillês, Gentle Reader, isn’t having this for even a second, and immediately calls bullshit on Agamemnon:
Ha! Greedyheart, shamelessness in royal dress! How could any man be willing to obey you, whether on some errand or on the battlefield? I cared nothing about the Trojans when I came here to fight; they had done nothing to me, never lifted my cattle or horses either, never destroyed my fruit or my harvest in Phthia – too many hills and forests between us, and roaring seas. No, it was you I came for, shameless man! To give you pleasure, to revenge Menelaos, and you too, dogface! For the Trojans’ wrong. And now you threaten to rob me of my prize, which I worked hard to get, and which the army gave me…
(Situational irrelevance once again rears its ugly head. No “enlightened” modern leader would ever stoop so low as to enrich himself and his supporters at the expense of the “grunts” – whether in Kosovo or Iraq…)
At this point, all hell breaks loose, as Achillês opts to “take his ball and bat and go home,” as it were – but he doesn’t. Rather, he opts to “take his ball and bat” and watch Agamemnon – and the entire Greek host – suffer ass-kicking after ass-kicking, until his best friend/lover (the ancient Greeks were hardly averse to the odd bit of butt-piracy), Patroklos, is killed in a case of mistaken identity.
This, needless to say, shoots a double-dose of HGH into each of Achillês’ balls, and rather pisses him off. Forsaking his “Neener, neener, neener! Bite me, Agamemnon!” attitude, he petitions his divine mother for a new suit of armor, takes spear, sword and shield in hand once again, and wreaks havoc among the hapless Trojans – reveling in the slaughter, all the while.
In keeping with most of the combat scenes in the Iliad, Achillês subsequently puts Quentin Tarantino’s cinematic offerings to shame, in terms of sheer brutality and complete defiance of social convention – even that of his day and age, in which casual – if institutionalized and sanctioned -- murder was considered relatively unremarkable.
I’ll say no more – this isn’t a “spoiler” site, after all – beyond mentioning that Achillês, the consummate tragic hero, passes through his personal hell-on-earth and redeems himself in this world, if not necessarily in the next – even by Classical Greek standards.
Just read the book. And pass it on to your sons, while you’re at it, Gentle Reader.
G’night and God Bless.
Hey Bean,
I actually liked Troy, not because it was an especially great movie but because I really liked Pitt's portrayal of Achilles. I think he pulled off the "huge swinging dick" thing very well in a subtle way. I liked Chronicles of Riddick for similar reasons though that one may place me well beyond the pale of civilized society.
I wrote about my thoughts on this crap here: http://degreesofclarity.com/writing/heroes/
Posted by: Brandon | May 11, 2008 at 07:23 AM