[COLUMN] What We Talk About When We Talk About Rome | by Darren Mooney

A few years back, there was a meme asking how often men think about the Roman Empire. The answer, it seems, is more often than one might assume.

Hollywood has seemingly never stopped thinking about the Roman Empire – and Ancient Greece, and the classical world in general. From the earliest days of cinema, spectacles have been constructed around the ancient world. After all, these exotic locations dripping with decadent luxury look great on-screen, in classics like D.W. Griffiths’ Intolerance, Fred Niblo and Charles Brabin’s Ben-Hur or Cecil B. DeMille’s Cleopatra and even The Sign of the Cross.

However, the interesting thing about these sorts of adaptations and epics is that, like any work of art or adaptation, they speak more about the society that produced them than they do to the civilizations that they depict. Cinema can be a window into a different world, but film can also serve as a mirror, reflecting a society back at itself. In particular, these sorts of films have always served as forums through which the American subconscious can try to navigate its issues and anxieties.

This becomes clear in the first true wave of these sorts of films, the movies that codified how modern audiences think of ancient spectacle. During the 1950s and into the 1960s, there was an explosion in big budget grandiose stories of Greece and Rome: Mervyn LeRoy's Quo Vadis, Mario Camerini’s Ulysses starring Kirk Douglas, Robert Wise’s Helen of Troy, Robert Rossen's Alexander the Great, Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, William Wyler’s Ben-Hur, Joseph Mankowicz’s Cleopatra.

These films existed for a number of reasons. Part of this was formal. Television was emerging as a young artform, and cinema needed to offer a sense of spectacle that audiences simply could not get at home on their fuzzy black-and-white boxes. Widescreen colorful epics were the order of the day, just as a reminder that the big screen could offer something unique. So, along with westerns and musicals, these classical epics whisked viewers away to fantastical worlds.

However, there was something else underpinning this wave of films. It was the dawn of “the American Century.” Still a relatively young nation, America had emerged from the end of the Second World War as a dominant global superpower. While the word itself is inherently loaded, some American thinkers at the time dared to describe what had emerged – or what was necessary – in the wake of the conflict as “an American Empire.”

America had modelled a lot of its structures on Rome. The nation’s founding fathers were obsessed with Greece and Rome. At the Convention of 1776, Edmund Pendleton claimed the nascent nation “treaded upon the republican grounds of Greece and Rome.” The embrace of the eagle as national bird cannot help but evoke the symbolic importance of the creature to Ancient Rome. If America were to think of itself as an Empire, it would filter than understanding through Greece and Rome.

That wave of epics set in Greece and Rome spoke to the tensions of the moment in a variety of interesting ways. For example, it’s telling how many of these films were explicitly about the Christian conversion of the Roman Empire – Quo Vidas, Ben-Hur, King of Kings, The Robe. These perhaps reflected America’s embrace of Christianity in that era. Under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, America’s Christian identity was a way of distinguishing it from the atheist Soviet Union.

It is surprising how much of the ubiquity of religion in contemporary American life was an invention of the postwar era. Eisenhower added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954. In 1955, “in God we trust” was added to all American currency. In 1959, he proclaimed “a national day for prayer.” The presence of Christianity in these classical epics was just a reflection of that, a demonstration of how profoundly that ideology permeated the culture.

These epics of the era provided a space where contemporary anxieties could be explored through metaphor. The 1950s and the 1960s saw the emergence of the Civil Rights movement in American public life, forcing a confrontation with the country’s racist past. America has never really grappled with slavery, and depictions of American slavery in the popular culture of the era tended to be the condescending and sentimental portrayals in films like Gone with the Wind or Song of the South.

With this in mind, it does feel interesting that the one part of American culture to really grapple with the idea of slavery during this crucial juncture of the nation’s history was the historical and biblical epic. Films like Ben-Hur and Spartacus could present the audience with white American heroes trapped in slavery, and through that present an empire that was unable to recognize the moral atrocity of slavery as one doomed to collapse and decay.

More directly, the genre provided a space for writers who had been victimized during the Red Scare to turn a mirror back on America. Kirk Douglas takes credit for “breaking the black list” by fighting for blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo to take the writing credit on Spartacus. It is very easy to read Spartacus, a film in which “lists of the disloyal” are “compiled”, as a none-too-subtle commentary on what Trumbo saw as the rot at the heart of America.

The classical epic was never quite as popular as it had been in that peak during the 1950s into the 1960s. However, whenever it did reappear, it was generally safe to read the film in question as more than just an attempt to recreate some lost history, but also as a statement on the present. It is, for example, very difficult to watch the decadence and corruption on display in Tinto Brass’ Caligula, written by Gore Vidal, as anything but a commentary on the cynicism and corruption of the 1970s.

If the genre enjoyed a major resurgence, it was towards the turn of the millennium. This is period in the history of the classical epic is interesting, because it really stands astride two particular moments in American history like a colossus. That creates a tension which really simmers through this wave, and is perhaps the reason that so many of the movies in it simply do not work, trying to reconcile two fundamentally different impulses.

This second wave really began with Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, which arrived on the cusp of a new millennium, imagining a Roman Empire that had vanquished its last external foe and – in doing so – perhaps reached its own “end of history” and “unipolar moment.” The tragedy of the version of Rome depicted in Gladiator was that of a nation that had, like Alexander, seen the breadth of its domain and wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer, retreating into fantasy and spectacle.

Gladiator was a massive success. It won Best Picture at the Academy Awards. It was the second-highest grossing movie of the year. It seems fair to concede that the success of Gladiator inspired a lot of the wave of epics that followed, few of which managed to scratch the itch in the same way. It’s also worth acknowledging Peter Jackson’s fantasy epics, which were shot in that window before 9/11, but were released after them, and which came to define the post-9/11 cinema.

The wave of movies that followed were caught between competing cultural contexts. They were chasing the feeling of Gladiator, but were the product of a fundamentally different world. So many of the epics that followed were in conversation with the War on Terror: Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy, Oliver Stone’s Alexander, Zack Snyder’s 300, Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven. Even Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur imagines the knights as an elite special forces squad for the Romans on foreign soil.

Allowing for the masterpiece that is Ridley Scott’s restored cut of Kingdom of Heaven, which is quietly one of the filmmaker’s best works, there was a circle that could not be squared here. These movies wanted to be classical epics very badly. In fact, the one thing that recommends both Troy and Alexander is that they feel like they belong to the last moment where these films would have used real sets, real extras and real animals, before that stuff disappeared into the digital ether.

Narratively, Troy is a cynical story about a pointless war waged in the Middle East to sate the territorial ambitions of a hungry imperial power. It is not subtle, to the point that it casts Brian Cox, who had re-established himself playing the living embodiment of the American military-industrial complex in X2, as Agamemnon. Hector (Eric Bana) warns his brother Paris (Orlando Bloom) there is no romance in war. “War is young men dying and old men talking,” Odysseus (Sean Bean) laments.

The problem is that Troy is shot, designed and scored like an incredibly romantic film. Petersen had established himself with gritty German films like Das Boot, but Troy came hot on the heels of his wave of incredible 1990s blockbusters In the Line of Fire, Outbreak, Air Force One and The Perfect Storm. Petersen makes every actor in Troy look like a model and makes every action beat look really cool, which is fundamentally at odds with the film’s actual text.

Watching Troy, one can feel the blockbuster cinema of the 1990s breaking against the cultural mood of the 2000s. There is a similar tension in Alexander, in which Stone leans even harder into the aesthetics of the classic epics. The ultimate cut of the film includes both an overture and an intermission. It has a really awesome Vangelis score that makes it feel like the product of another era. It casts Anthony Hopkins as its narrator, allowing the Welshman to channel Richard Burton.

However, Alexander is also clearly a snapshot of its moment. This is another story of an imperial power marching into the Middle East and entering a world they do not understand. “The surveyors told us we were now on the borders of where Europe and Asia meet,” Ptolemy (Hopkins) laments. “In fact, we were totally lost.” Because subtext is for cowards, Alexander (Colin Farrell) is motivated to march further into the Middle East than his father (Val Kilmer).

“I've taken us further than my father ever dreamed!” Alexander boasts of his expansion into the region, a moment that very strongly resonated in an era in which it was popularly debated whether the American President had pushed further into Iraq because he was “attracted to the idea of finishing something his father had left undone.” As a Lost episode title would quip in the year that Alexander and Troy were released, “All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues.”

In case this reading of Alexander feels like a stretch, it is worth acknowledging that Stone’s next two films were World Trade Center and W., with W. explicitly contextualizes George W. Bush’s (Josh Brolin) invasion of Iraq as finishing what his father (James Cromwell) started. It was clearly something that was percolating through Stone’s mind as he was working on the film. Alexander, which is a spectacular and quite impressive mess, is as much about its moment as it is about its subject.

All of this feels like important context when discussing Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, a film which has attracted a lot of online outrage over perceived “historical inaccuracies” or other creative choices. Setting aside the fact that this is an adaptation of a myth derived from multiple sources set in a fantastical world and that Nolan clearly understands the core themes of the work like “xenia”, it ignores that these films have always reflected the world that produces far more than the worlds that they purport to depict.

It can often feel like the arguments over the “historical inaccuracies” of these films are ultimately arguments over the aspects of the contemporary world that they should reflect. A lot of the right-wing backlash to Nolan’s take on The Odyssey seems to be using the words “historical accuracy” to argue for a version of the era reflected in the films of the 1950s: one less diverse, more conservative, more traditional. This makes sense, given the broader fixation on that era in modern conservatism.

After all, Ancients Greeks and Romans did not speak with British accents. They did not speak English at all. The on-screen Greeks and Romans only spoke that way in the films of the 1950s because that was the cinematic convention of the moment. The films of the 1950s took greater liberties with casting outside of established demographics than Nolan does. Cleopatra of Egypt did not look like Elizabeth Taylor any more than Jesus Christ of Nazareth looked like Jeffrey Hunter.

Those films looked that way because they were made during the 1950s, and they reflected the constraints of filmmaking of that time. While there are certainly aspects of 1950s Hollywood that are missed, it seems strange to fixate on those particular limitations. Better, perhaps, to ask why these things were the way that they were than to accept at face value that they were the way that they should have been. The Odyssey is, after all, a story about time and change.

Part of what makes Nolan’s take The Odyssey so great, and part of why it works so much better than the wave of films including Troy and Alexander, is that it rejects nostalgia. It does not couch its adaptation of the material in a reflection of an America long gone, albeit one that is trying to be clumsily resuscitated. Instead, it does what those classic epics did, and reflects America as it is at this moment in time. That is why The Odyssey is the best film of the year so far.

Nolan clearly understands Homer’s epic poem so much more than the angry people shouting about it online, but he is also more engaged with this genre of film than many of those who claim to advocate on its behalf. The Odyssey is a story of a world in decline, and the beauty of Nolan’s adaptation is that he understands that it speaks as much to the audience watching the film as it does to the characters in it.