The Little Hours: Nuns Behaving Badly

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Alison Brie, Aubrey Plaza, Christianity, Dave Franco, Jeff Baena, Kate Micucci, Medieval Europe, Medieval Italy, Monks and Nuns, Religious Stuff, The Little Hours

The Little Hours (2017, dir. Jeff Baena) is, as the name suggests, a modest little film dealing with some immodest nuns. The film is set at a convent in 14^th century Italy and is strongly inspired by two genuine medieval tales, the 1^st and 2^nd stories from the 3^rd day of Boccaccio’s Decameron.

Spoiler Alert: If you’re planning to see this film in the theater, you might want to wait to read this until after youv’e done so, since I discuss plot points, including the resolution of the film.

The Decameron, for those unfamiliar with it, is a medieval collection of stories with a loose frame-tale, sort of like the Canterbury Tales you might have read in your high school English class. Instead of a group of pilgrims telling stories as they head for Canterbury, Boccaccio’s ten story-tellers have fled Florence to escape the Bubonic Plague and have holed up in a villa outside the city for two weeks. To amuse themselves and to distract from the death outside, each day they take turns telling stories on a proposed theme (with two days off each week for chores and holy days), so they tell ten stories on each of ten days (hence the work’s title, ‘the Ten-Day Event’). That structure allows Boccaccio to tell a whole range of stories from the comic to the tragic to the morally instructional. The third day’s tales have as a theme something acquired or lost and regained with great difficulty.

The first tale deals with Masetto, a handsome young man who passes himself off as a deaf-mute in order to take work at a monastery of 8 nuns (in medieval usage, ‘monastery’ can refer to a house of either monks or nuns). Since they think he can’t speak, the nuns decide to explore the pleasures of the flesh with him, which he’s only too willing to allow. So he becomes their stud bull, servicing the nuns (including the mother superior) so frequently that he’s exhausted. Eventually he breaks down and demands that the nuns give him a set schedule, which they agree to because they don’t want to lose him or risk him spilling their secret. So he lives there the rest of his life, keeping the nuns happy and fathering a lot of children in the process.

The second tale deals with King Agilulf and Queen Theodolinda, Theodelinda has a servant who flirts with her and eventually he beds her by deceiving her into thinking he is the king. Theodolinda is fooled, but Agilulf realizes he has been cuckolded. He follows the servant back to the chamber where all the servants sleep and manages to figure out which one of the sleeping men in the darkened room is the guilty party. He cuts off a lock of the man’s hair to identify the man the next day. But after he leaves, the clever servant uses the scissors to cut off hair from each of the sleeping servants, so that in the morning the king cannot figure out which man to punish. He warns all the servants that he knows what is going on, but does it without harming his wife’s reputation.

 

The Film

About two-thirds of the Little Hours is drawn from these two stories. Masetto (Dave Franco) is the horny servant not of King Agilulf, but of Lord Bruno (Nick Offerman), an obnoxious blowhard whose wife loathes him. Masetto sleeps with her, but Bruno discovers it, leading to the whole hair-cutting sequence. Realizing that Bruno is on to him, Masetto flees and runs into Father Tommaso (John C. Reilly), a drunkard priest who befriends him (leading to a very funny drunken confessional sequence).

Tommasso is the priest for a small convent filled with unhappy and rather unspiritual nuns. Alessandra (Alison Brie), Ginevra (Kate Micucci), and Fernanda (Aubrey Plaza) take out their boredom and frustration by physically and verbally abusing the convent’s male worker so much that the man quits. Tommasso introduces Masetto to Mother Marea (Molly Shannon), telling her that Masetto is a deaf-mute.

Three unruly nuns

This leads Alessandra and Fernanda into having sex with Masetto, while a rather confused Ginevra (who’s probably a lesbian anyway) thinks she’s had sex with him but doesn’t really understand what sex actually involves.

Then the film leaves its source material completely. Fernanda’s friend Marta (Jemima Kirke) is part of a witch’s coven, and the two of them decide to sacrifice Masetto in a fertility ritual. But Ginevra, tripping balls on belladonna, unintentionally breaks the ritual up, thus saving Masetto and accidentally exposing the whole shenanigans at the convent to Bishop Bartolemeo (Fred Armisen), leading to a rather amusing episcopal visitation of the house in which all is revealed.

Masetto gets sent back to Lord Bruno, but the three nuns help him escape back to the convent, where everything ends happily with the assurance that all the principal characters other than Bruno will be getting a lot of sex.

The humor of the film is rather broad, in keeping with its ribald source material. Baena, who is also the screenwriter of the film, has made the amusing choice to write the characters as anachronistically 21^st century in their dialog and outlook on life. Apart from Franco and Micucci, who do a lot of mugging for the camera, all the actors give rather understated performances. If, like me, you’re not a fan of hipster comedy, you’ll probably find Offerman and Armisen more grating than funny, but Franco and the nuns are well-cast for this story. Fernanda has a lot of anger and violence roiling within, Alessandra is sexually and romantically frustrated, and Ginevra is a follower rather than a leader, at least until her repressed desires explode out of her.

The film largely captures the spirit and much of the substance of medieval farces, which are often at least as bawdy as some modern comedies. If anything, the film down-plays and avoids some elements of medieval farce, which is frequently far more violent, scatological, and misogynistic than its modern descendants. In the film, Masetto only sleeps with two of the nuns a total of three times, whereas in the original, every nun in the house has her way with him non-stop. So whereas modern audiences might assume the film is exaggerating medieval humor, it’s actually downplaying it a little.

Franco’s Masetto pretending to be deaf

Despite its comedy, which milks the contrast between its medieval setting and the contemporary-minded characters for all its worth, the film actually has a lot to say about the 14^th century Italy. Late medieval authors loved mocking unspiritual clergy, and with the exception of one elderly nun, none of the women at the convent are actually following the rules (although Marea does seem to take her job seriously, apart from her affair with Tommasso). To modern audiences, the comedy is simply the contrast of supposedly pious nuns doing things such as swearing like sailors, threatening to assault people, and fornicating, but these are in fact exactly the sorts of things that many 14^th century people suspected nuns actually did. Alessandra is so unspiritual, she can’t even reflect on her own sins during confession; instead she steals Ginevra’s confession by eavesdropping on it. Tommasso the drunken, bumbling priest is another staple of medieval literature; one gets the sense that he would happily gossip about the confessions he hears.

The three young nuns are not in the convent because they feel a calling to the spiritual life, but because their families have put them there. Alessandra’s father is a merchant, and she thinks she’s there simply to be educated before getting married, at least until a visit from her father makes her realize that he’s probably planning on dumping her there permanently so that he doesn’t have to shell out for her dowry. Fernanda and Ginevra’s backstories are never clarified, other than a throw-away joke that Ginevra is actually Jewish, but Fernanda is played as a bored rich girl stuck at a boarding school when she’d rather be out partying with her friends (complete with a scene in which Marta sneaks into the convent and all the girls get drunk on sacramental wine and start making out with each other). To me, these characters ring true (apart from Ginevra’s Jewish ancestry) because that’s how many young women actually wound up as nuns. Alessandra’s story is played for laughs, but I’m certain more than a few young women tragically lived out exactly that story.

Similarly, the bishop’s visitation, a sort of trial in which the moral failings of the nuns are revealed and punished, is played for laughs, but records of dozens of such visitations still exist for both male and female houses, and they reveal large numbers of monks and nuns who evidently found life in a monastery not to their taste. Cases of run-away nuns abound, and fornication was a regular problem, as both actual events and moralizing tales make clear. Even the lesbianism in the film can be documented in period sources. To us, The Little Hours is funny because it’s absurd, but to 14^th century Italians, Boccaccio’s story is funny because it’s true.

A genuine medieval image of nuns harvesting a penis-tree

The nuns here are bored, and take out their frustrations on those around them. They live lives of dull manual labor, although the upper-class Alessandra cheerfully dumps her laundry onto Ginevra because the latter girl is “good at it.” Alessandra is apparently good at needle-work, which gets her out of some of the drudgery, but partway through the film Marea orders her to double her production, so even her social class can’t protect her from unpleasant work. The nuns abuse their male servants for no reason other than that they can; Fernanda has a habit of pulling weapons on people. Ginevra is a tattle-tale, constantly running to Marea to reveal every minor offense her sisters make. Underneath the humor is a revealing portrait of the way many monks and nuns actually responded to their living situation. By the 14^th century, most monks were likely to have actively chosen the life they were living, and were frequently permitted to leave their houses, but many nuns were there against their will, and the rule of enclosure (which stated that nuns were not supposed to leave their convents for any reason at all) meant that many of these women struggled with the mind-number sameness of their daily routine and chafed at the constant close contact with other nuns.

The film also has a sub-plot dealing with finance. The convent needs an income to support its residents. Alessandra’s father is supposed to be paying money to the convent for her, but he’s either stingy or business is going badly (as Tommasso gossips), so he’s not giving what he’s supposed to. The convent makes money by selling the embroidery of the sisters, using Tommasso as their business agent, but he drunkenly ruins one shipment by letting his cart tip into a stream. In addition to being the spiritual leader of the house, something she seems to have some interest in (to judge from the readings she delivers at meals), Marea’s also responsible for managing the finances of the convent, something she seems to have no talent for. Bartholemeo audits her books and apparently finds serious problems.

These were genuine issues at convents, because the rules about keeping nuns separate from men often meant that women with no business experience wound up having to make major financial decisions. In some cases, the abbesses rose to the challenge, either making good choices themselves or finding other nuns who had a head for business and thereby building their house into a financial power, but in others, poor choices produced fiscal crises that led to impoverishment.

Plaza’s Fernanda WILL cut you

The only truly false note in the plot (as opposed to the anachronistic attitudes) is the witchcraft element that brings the film to its climax. Although the 14^th century did see the beginnings of a concern about groups of witches engaging in abominable activities, what the film shows us is straight out of a 16^th century panic about witches’ covens, naked orgies, and human sacrifice (although instead of sacrificing adult men like Masetto, these post-medieval fantasies focused on the murder and cannibalism of babies). The film’s depiction of the witches also draws off of 20^th century neo-pagan ideas of witches as engaging in an alternate religious system. These witches seem to be housewives and young women who are performing a “fertility ritual” of some sort, and it’s not entirely clear that they plan to actually kill Masetto. Fernanda, at least, is not the malevolent baby-killer of early modern anxiety, and Marta doesn’t seem to be either, although her motives are not developed at all. Both women are like naughty college students looking for something the conventional religion of their society does not offer them. Boccaccio does not tell stories about witches, although in one story a character describes a supposed secret society of revelers that uses some of the stock charges about witches, but which are eventually revealed to all be a prank on a gullible doctor. Far from being a believer in witches, Boccaccio seems to be a skeptic, something that is true of far more medieval people than popular imagination would allow.

The Little Hours isn’t trying to recreate a story from the Decameron. Instead, in the phrasing so loved by Hollywood, it’s ‘inspired by’ the stories. It takes whatever pieces it wants from two tales and plays with them freely, which is exactly what medieval authors like Boccaccio and Chaucer did with their source material, and what Shakespeare was going to do a few centuries later. In that sense. Jeff Baena is true to the spirit of Boccaccio, and he manages, perhaps unintentionally, to give a reasonable lesson in what life in a 14^th century convent might have looked like.

 

Want to Know More?

The Little Hours is still in the theater, so it’s not available for purchase or streaming yet.

Boccaccio’s Decameron has more than a little in common with the somewhat more-famous Canterbury Tales, and it’s actually complete! Give it a read.

Graciela Diachman’s Wayward Nuns in Medieval Literature looks at medieval stories of bad nuns and the historical evidence for them. Similarly, Judith Brown’s Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renassance Italy looks at one particularly scandalous abbess, Benedetta Carlini, who not only had a sexual relationship with another nun but also faked visions and stigmata. She is perhaps the first well-documented lesbian in Western history.

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Start the Revolution Without Me: Farewell, Gene Wilder

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18th Century Europe, 18th Century France, Billie Whitelaw, Comedies, Donald Sutherland, Gene Wilder, Hugh Griffith, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Orson Welles, Start the Revolution Without Me, The French Revolution, Victor Spinetti, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

Like all right-thinking people, I was deeply saddened to learn that comic actor Gene Wilder had died. The news brought back memories of my childhood in the 70s, watching his movies with my older brothers in Milwaukee, the hometown I share with Wilder. Although Wilder’s film career ran from 1967 to 1991, he did his best work in the 1970s, managing to release two of his most famous works in 1974, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein.

Wilder in his most iconic role

But of course, what Wilder will always be best known for is his delightfully charismatic performance as Willy Wonka in 1971’s Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. In some ways it’s an unlikely film. Although it was inspired by the great children’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl, the reason it got made into a movie is that Quaker Oats was looking for a vehicle to promote a new candy bar. Despite having no experience in film-making, Quaker bought the rights to the novel, renamed the new candy bar the Wonka Bar, and filmed the movie as publicity for its launch. That’s right. One of the greatest children’s movies ever was actually a massive exercise in product placement. The Wonka Bar was a bomb; it was released in 1971 and then quickly recalled because of problems with it, and the movie did poorly in the box office, but by the 1980s it had entered the canon of children’s films because of constant showings on television.

Wilder insisted that when Willy Wonka first appears, he seems to be near-invalid, leaning heavily on a cane, until he executes a somersault and reveals that he’s actually in good health. As Wilder realized, that moment would destabilize Wonka as a character, because the audience would never know if he was telling the truth or not. And it works brilliantly, setting up later scenes such as the frightening boat ride he subjects his guests to and even more importantly, the famous “You get nothing!” scene at the end. And the Wonka character plays perfectly to the two halves of Wilder’s screen persona, the calm, gentle, empathetic man and the man teetering on the edge of hysteria and total loss of control. It’s a performance for the ages. It is precisely what the best children’s literature offers, a combination of reassurance and uncertainty.

In contrast, the ill-conceived 2005 remake starring Johnny Depp failed to achieve that same quality because Depp’s Wonka is just weird. The film strips away all of Wonka’s mystery by giving him a complex back-story, father issues, and motives that pulled Wonka down to humanity where Wilder’s Wonka was some sort of supernatural tutelary deity given human form.

But this is a blog about movies and history, and so I want to call your attention to one of Wilder’s earliest films, a little known gem that holds a special place in my heart just beneath Willy Wonka.

 

Fun and Games with the French Revolution

Start the Revolution Without Me (1970, dir. Bud Yorkin) was only Wilder’s third film, and only his second in a leading role. It’s a parody of films and literature set in the Ancien Regime of 18^th century France. It’s only nominally about history, but it’s a glorious romp through a lot of clichés about the French past.

It opens with Orson Welles, that 1970s symbol of high-brow respectability, gazing at a French chateau. “Hello, I’m Orson Wells. It’s lovely, isn’t it? The summer palace of Louis XVI. You know, historians have recently discovered a previously unknown fact concerning this palace, an event that almost changed the entire history of Western Europe. Did you know that the entire French revolution could have been avoided? It’s true. No one knows what took place there. It’s an event of such importance that men of integrity and may I say considerable resources made a film on the subject. It’s a color film, which I am not in.”

The premise of the film is that in the mid-18^th century, a traveling Corsican nobleman and his pregnant wife are forced to stop at a small inn so his wife can give birth. At luck would have it, a peasant woman is also giving birth, and both women produce twin boys. Unable to figure out which boys are which, the harried doctor gives one of each set of twins to each father.

As a result, Wilder and co-star Donald Sutherland each play half of two sets of brothers, the cowardly but well-meaning peasants Claude and Charles Coupe, and the haughty, ruthless noblemen Philippe and Pierre de Sisi, the best swordsmen in all of Corsica. Louis XVI (Hugh Griffith) is a bumbling king dominated by his wife Marie (Billie Whitelaw) and the ruthless Duc d’Escargot (Victor Spinetti). Louis summons the de Sisi brothers to Paris because he wants them to kill Escargot, but Escargot intercepts the message and uses it to persuade the de Sisis to kill Louis instead. He plans to offer the brothers half of France while he marries Marie and rules the other half.

Sutherland and Wilder as the de Sisi brothers

The de Sisis travel to Paris disguised as peasants, not realizing that revolutionaries, including the reluctant Coupe brothers, are planning to attack the boat they’re on because it’s carrying weapons and ammunition that they need for their rebellion. In the confusion of the attack, naturally the rebels mistake the de Sisis for the Coupes and drag them off to their hidden base while Escargot’s men mistake the Coupes for the de Sisis and take them to the palace.

From there, the Coupes stumble their way through the intrigues of Louis’ court, where everyone seems determined to persuade the Coupes to kill someone else. Escargot is planning to marry Princess Christina of Belgium, because that will give him the Belgian army and allow him to kill Louis, marry Marie, and rule France, but only if Louis’ plan to have Pierre kill Escargot, marry Christina, and use the Belgian army to help him get rid of Marie doesn’t happen first. Marie wants Claude to kill Escargot, marry Christina, use the Belgian army to kill Louis, then kill Christina, marry Marie, and help her rule France. You get the idea.

The characters are drawn with broad strokes and make use of all sorts of tropes from French literature. Whitelaw’s Marie is a sex-crazed woman who is juggling multiple lovers simultaneously, including seemingly the entirety of the palace guard, and Louis is too addled to realize it; in one scene he fails to notice Marie and Escargot making out right next to him in his own bed.

Louis is kindly, but utterly incompetent. In one of my all-time favorite movie scenes, he shows up to a formal ball dressed as a chicken, because, as he spends the rest of the scene explaining to people, he thought it was a costume ball.

Whitelaw and Griffith as Marie and Louis

Escargot is a sneering villain, given to absurd extended metaphors such as “The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of an eagle, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.” And that’s one of the simple ones. Here’s a scene where he verbally spars with the Coupes masquerading as the de Sisis.

The film borrows liberally from historical fiction, including Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and Alexandre Dumas’ The Corsican Brothers and The Man in the Iron Mask. It doesn’t particularly care that the Man in the Iron Mask belongs to the 17^th century, not the 18^th century.

The twin roles of Claude and Philippe allow Wilder to channel the two halves of his comic persona as well as Willy Wonka does. Claude is simply a decent man trying to survive his unusual circumstances, while Philippe is a leather-clad sadist barely able to control himself. Rosalind Knight has a number of brilliant scenes as his desperate, put-upon wife Helene that tell us more than we want to know about Philippe’s sexual habits. “You said we weren’t going to do the Choir Boy and the Monk any more! You said you wanted to do the Woodchopper and the Shepherdess! How many costumes do you expect me to pack?” (Apparently, that costume required her to pack a small flock of sheep.)

Poor Helene!

Start the Revolution Without Me shares a number of qualities with another comic gem from the same period, 1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Both are nominally historic films with the stars playing multiple roles. Both borrow liberally from literature but without much concern for accuracy. Both employ parody of historical documentaries in which the narrator is killed by a character from the documentary he’s narrating, and neither film has a conventional ending. As a result, both wind up using the instability of genre conventions as a key comic tool. It would not surprise me to learn that Revolution helped inspire Holy Grail.

But where Holy Grail is fundamentally absurdist, Revolution is essentially slapstick. There’s a great deal of pratfalling and mistaken identity. The film culminates in a comic chase in which the Coupe brother are trying to flee the palace along with Princess Christina and Claude’s fiancée Mimi (as well as a charter of reform they’ve persuaded Louis to sign), while the de Sisis are trying to sneak into the palace to kill Escargot. At the same time the revolutionaries are trying to storm the palace and Louis and Marie are just trying to survive.

The slapstick element of Revolution hasn’t aged as well as the absurdism of Holy Grail, which is perhaps the reason that the former has faded from the popular mind while Holy Grail has become a classic. But if you’re in the mood to revisit Wilder’s career, you should give it a look; it’s available on iTunes. Even though I’ve seen the film numerous times, re-watching it last night gave me a number of laugh-out-loud moments that reminded me of what a joy Gene Wilder’s best work really is.

Goodbye, Mr. Wilder. Thank you for giving me so many laughs.

If you like this review, please consider donating a buck or two so I can expand the range of films I cover.

 

Want to Know More?

Start the Revolution Without Me is available on Amazon. While you’re at it, pick up Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory too. There’s also his lovely memoir, Kiss Me Like a Stranger. 

Ben-Hur: A Long History

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Ancient Judea, Ancient Rome, Ben Hur, Charleton Heston, Gore Vidal, Jesus of Nazareth, Karl Tunberg, Lew Wallace, Mark Burnett, Messala Severus, Ramon Navarro, Religious Issues, Rodrigo Santoro, Roma Downey, Toby Kebbell, William Wyler

The new Ben-Hur (2016, dir. Timur Bekmambetov) is constantly talked about as a remake of the 1959 version starring Charleton Heston as the title character. But that’s not really true. The reality is that Ben-Hur is a complex enough body of material that it’s almost its own minor genre.

The origins of the film lie more than a century ago, in 1880 when Lew Wallace published his novel Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ. It’s a sprawling novel of more than 500 page that interweaves the lives of Judah Ben-Hur and Jesus. In fact Judah only makes his first appearance in Part 2 (out of 8); Part 1 is devoted entirely to a retelling of Jesus’ birth. So basically, Wallace took the Biblical account of the life of Christ and used it as a background to the life of his hero, with Judah periodically running into Jesus or meeting his followers.

Wallace himself was an interesting character. Trained as a lawyer, he served as a Union general during the American Civil War and served on the military commission that tried the conspirators involved in Lincoln’s assassination. He supported Rutherford B Hayes in one of the most controversial elections in American history, and was rewarded in 1878 after Hayes’ victory by being appointed Governor of New Mexico Territory. It was during his time in that office that he wrote Ben-Hur (having already written a novel and a play). He also found time to arrange for Billy the Kid to testify in exchange for immunity for his crimes. In 1881 he was appointed ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.

Lew Wallace

Sales of the novel were slow at first, but within a few years the novel took off, and by 1900 it had becomes the best-selling novel of the 19^th century. It remained at the top of the charts until 1936, when it was knocked off by Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind.

Wallace initially resisted allowing the novel to be turned into a play, out of a concern that no one could properly portray Jesus, but in 1889, he agreed to an adaptation in which Jesus was represented by a beam of light. That production was a run-away success, drawing an audience of religious men and women who had previously been uncomfortable with theater for moral reasons. It became a touring show and only ceased to be performed in 1921. The production used a system of horses running on treadmills with a moving background.

Ben-Hur in Films

Given the story’s intense popularity at the start of the 20^th century, it was a fairly natural choice for movie-makers. In 1907, Sidney Olcott made a 15-minute silent movie that focused entirely on the chariot race, using New Jersey firemen as the charioteers and horses that normally pulled fire wagons. However, Olcott never bothered to get permission from the Wallace estate, triggering a landmark lawsuit that established that film makers were legally obligated to obtain the rights to any previously published work that was still under copyright. If you’re interested in this version, you can watch it on Youtube.

In 1922, Goldwyn Studios secured the rights to Ben-Hur and made an epic silent movie staring Ramon Navarro in the title role. Filmed in Italy, this version told the whole of Ben-Hur’s story, but stripped out most of the material about Jesus and his followers. It was the most expensive silent movie ever made and when it was released late in 1925, it managed to lose money even though it was a blockbuster (in part because the licensing deal gave the Wallace estate 50% of the profits). The film made Navarro one of the leading Hollywood actors. Its version of the chariot race was highly influential, and provided the template for racing scenes in the 1959 version of the film, as well as the 1998 Prince of Egypt animated movie and the pod-racing scene in The Phantom Menace.

The production was extremely troubled; among other catastrophes, May McAvoy, who was playing Esther, dislocated both her wrists; it was rumored that several extras died during the naval battle scene because they couldn’t swim; and the racing scene involved the death of quite a number of horses. The chariot race drew the whole pantheon of Hollywood royalty to watch it, and if you looked closely, you can see  Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Harold Lloyd, John and Lionel Barrymore, Lilian and Dorothy Gish, Sid Grauman, Samuel Goldwyn, Myrna Loy, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, and Fay Wray in the stands. If you’re a fan of cinema history, it’s worth reading about the production.

The film is also quite explicit about its pro-Christian stance. It opens with the Nativity. Jesus cures Judah’s mother and sister of leprosy, while Judah attempts to lead an anti-Roman rebellion in the name of Jesus. It ends with the whole Hur family converting to Christianity. Like the stage play, Jesus is never show full-on, and is sometimes represented by a shaft of light.

In 1959, the story got its most famous cinematic treatment when it was directed by William Wyler, with Charleton Heston playing the lead. Like the 1925 version, it was a huge hit, winning 11 Academy Awards (a feat not equaled until 1997’s Titanic). It is widely considered one of the greatest movies ever made.

But getting the script written was a challenge; it went through 12 different drafts. Karl Tunberg got the script after numerous re-writes and stripped out a good deal of material that had been in the novel, including a substantial chunk of material that follows the fate of the characters after the Crucifixion.

Wyler intensely disliked Tunberg’s dialog, which he felt was too modern, and so he hired Gore Vidal to re-do the dialog. In 1995, Vidal famously claimed that he felt that the dynamic between Judah and Messala only made sense if the two men had once been lovers and that Messala was hoping to get back together with Judah but felt rejected after Judah spurned his advances. According to Vidal, he persuaded Wyler to accept his reading, and told Stephen Boyd, who was playing Messala, to play the scenes that way, but did not tell Heston. When the notoriously conservative Heston learned about Vidal’s claim, he vehemently denied it, but if Vidal’s story is true, Heston wouldn’t have known about it.

Decide for yourself if you believe Vidal’s story.

Regardless of whether Vidal added a homoerotic subtext or not, the film made other changes to the novel. Wallace’s novel is unabashed in its treatment of Christianity being superior to Judaism; the major Jewish characters mostly wind up converting to Christianity after all. Wyler’s version, which was made about a decade after the establishment of the modern state of Israel, was more respectful to Judaism. Jesus’ face is not shown and the actor who played him was not given any lines. Although the ending strongly hints at Ben-Hur’s conversion, it doesn’t make it explicit.

In 2003, Charleton Heston reprised his role in an animated version of the story, produced by his own production company. This version returns to Wallace’ approach to the religious issue. Jesus (voiced by Scott McNeill) is seen and given dialog. Ben-Hur’s sister and mother are both miraculously healed of leprosy, and Messala is miraculously cured of the injured leg he received in the chariot race. Mary Magdalene witnesses Jesus’ resurrection and ascent into Heaven, and the film closes with Judah teaching his children to be Christians.

There was also a 2010 Canadian miniseries of the story, with a cast that included Hugh Bonneville, Alex Kingston, Ray Winstone, and Ben Cross in supporting roles, but I haven’t been able to find enough about it to know how closely it adheres to the original material.

 

The 2016 Ben-Hur

I think it’s important to see the 2016 film in this light. Many people who’ve commented on the film seem unaware of any version other than the 1959 one, and consequently assume that the Heston version represents a sort of baseline from which the 2016 version has deviated. In fact, the Heston version is really the outlier. With the exception of the 1907 silent version, which is just the chariot race, most of the other versions have been explicitly Christian in their sympathies, and it’s the Christian element of the story that really attracted its executive producers, Roma “Touched By an Angel” Downey and Mark Burnett. Downey and Burnett have been nicknamed “Hollywood’s Noisiest Christians” for their unabashed interest in pursuit of the evangelical film market. They produced the History Channel miniseries The Bible, and they have said they viewed the film as “a story of forgiveness with an underlying story of Jesus”.

Downey and Burnett are Christians, in case you were at all unclear

So the film’s decision to cast Rodrigo Santoro as Jesus and to give him several scenes beyond just the Crucifixion is in fact quite true to the source novel. It represents a movement away from Classic Hollywood’s desire to avoid directly showing Jesus on screen, but that’s a convention that no longer has much force.

Given the explicitly Christian background of this version, it’s perhaps surprising that the script isn’t even more Christian than it is. Until the Crucifixion scene, none of Jesus’ dialog comes from the Gospels, and you might be forgiven for not figuring out that this anonymous carpenter is supposed to be Jesus instead of some New Age political thinker. The film even has a clever twist. Dismas (Moises Arias) is an angry anti-Roman zealot whose attempt to assassinate Pontius Pilate causes the ruination of the Hur family, but at the end of the film he’s one of the two criminals crucified with Jesus, the one who declares that Jesus has does nothing to deserve this punishment.

Santoro as Jesus

Unfortunately, the film’s treatment of its Jewish characters is rather awkward. Given the anti-Semitism that was so common in American culture in the late 19^th and early 20^th century it’s not surprising that the novel and the earlier cinematic versions were so explicitly pro-Christian. The 1959 version, as I noted, downplayed that. But in 2016, having literally all the Jewish characters convert feels rather culturally insensitive.

At no point does the film make any real effort to establish what Judaism involved in this period, except that it doesn’t involve the worship of multiple gods. There are a few minor details in the sets; for example, the individual graves in the Jewish cemetery have small stones placed on them in keeping with the modern Jewish custom of doing just that. But that’s about it. None of the Jewish characters ever does anything that seems distinctly Jewish in either a cultural or a religious sense. For example, there are no shots of the Second Temple or depictions of any Jewish religious rituals, no references to Jewish dietary rules, or anything like that. Combined with the conversions at the end of the film, it seems clear that Judah and the rest of the Hur clan aren’t really Jews so much as proto-Christians.

And perhaps the expanded Christian elements of the film are part of the reason that it did so poorly at the box office. The story isn’t Christian enough to draw a large evangelical audience, but it’s Christian enough that its tenor feels out of step with what contemporary film-goers are looking for. It’s a bit like Toby Kebbell’s Messala, too Roman to fit in with his Jewish adoptive family and not Roman enough to please the Romans he serves. In the end, both Messala and the film failed to win out.

This post was written with the help of generous donations to my blog. If you like it, please think about sending a few dollars my way.

 

Want to Know More?

The 2016 movie isn’t available on Amazon yet, since it’s still in the theaters, but the 1925 silent version and 1959 Charleton Heston version of Ben Hur are. The 2010 miniseries is also available.

Or think about reading the original novel, which was the best-selling novel of the 19th century. It’s still one of the 20 best-selling novels of all time.

 

Ben Hur: A Few Thoughts

Tags

Ancient Judea, Ancient Rome, Bad Clothing, Ben Hur, Jack Huston, Jerusalem, Messala Severus, Morgan Freeman, Toby Kebbell

Yesterday, thanks to generous donations via Paypal, I went to see the new Ben Hur (2016, dir. Timur Bekmambetov, based on the novel by Lew Wallace). I’ll get around to writing a longer post soon, but today I’m just going to post a few random thoughts that aren’t enough for an individual post.

Warning: Spoilers ahead! If you intend to see the movie, you may want to do so before reading this. But if you’re like most people and don’t intend to see it, read on!

1. It’s not a good movie. At 2 1/2 hours, it still manages to be too short. The backstory between Judah Ben-Hur (Jack Huston) and Messala Severus (Toby Kebbell) needs more time than it’s given. The performances are unexceptional; Morgan Freeman delivers his lines as if he’s narrating March of the Jewish Resistance Fighters. 
2. Apparently 1st century Jewish men dress like 21st century fashion models. In one scene, Ben-Hur appears to be wearing blue jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt that he just bought from Abercrombie. It’s such a jarring look that I honest-to-God thought that somehow the film had veered into meta-theater by shooting the scene in contemporary clothing. Note to the costume designer: the only Middle Eastern people who wore pants in this period were Persian women.
   

   See what I mean?

3. The film continues the Hollywood tradition of having trouble with Roman names. Messala Severus has no praenomen (no private ‘first’ name) for his adoptive family to use; they all just call him Messala. It’s no wonder he never feels like he’s really part of the family; they’re calling him by his last name. And one of the supporting characters is named Druses instead of Drusus. But I suppose we can forgive it, since the characters’ names were lifted from a 19th century novel.
4. The film also continues the Hollywood tradition of depicting Rome as an evil, oppressive empire that the world would be better off without. The characters spend so much time complaining about how horrible the Romans are, I wanted to shout “but what about the aqueducts?” (Given that the theater was virtually empty, I could have done so with impunity.)
5. I’ve already commented a little about the naval combat scene. And the full scene holds up pretty well. It does a fairly good job of capturing the realities of trireme combat from the rower’s point of view, and it’s quite an effective scene: claustrophobic, chaotic, and frightening. As I pointed out before, however, by 33 AD, there was no naval combat in the Mediterranean, because the Romans ruled the whole Mediterranean basin. The ‘Greek rebels’ the Romans are fighting in this film never existed, and are invented entirely to provide an action scene in a film that really only gets three of them, as well as to provide a way for Ben-Hur to escape captivity.
6. Since I’ve complained before about films whitewashing, I feel obligated to say that this film did things better. The performers who play Judah Ben-Hur’s household are actually mostly Jewish or at least Middle Eastern, even if Jack Huston is British. Jesus (Rodrigo Santoro) is played by a Italian-Portuguese Brazilian actor though. Has Hollywood ever cast a Jewish actor to play Jesus?
7. Freeman’s Ilderim has literally no motive whatsoever. He decides to bet Pontius Pilate a massive sum of money to allow Ben-Hur to race Messala even though Messala is an undefeated champion and Ben-Hur has never been in a chariot race before, and he agrees to cover all bets on the races because the climactic chariot race won’t happen unless he does, but he never explains why he’s doing this, except for a throw-away line that he used to hate the Romans for killing his son, but he’s over that now.

And thank you to those who donated to my Paypal account so I could go see this! If you want me tackling more first-run films, donating is a good way to make sure I do.

Want to Know More? 

The movie isn’t available on Amazon yet, since it’s still in the theaters, but the 1959 Charleton Heston version of Ben Hur is

Or think about reading the original novel, which was the best-selling novel of the 19th century.

Penny Dreadful: The Problem with Frankenstein

Tags

19th Century England, 19th Century Europe, Billie Piper, Dracula, Frankenstein, Henry Treadaway, John Clare, Mary Shelley, Penny Dreadful, Romanticism, Rory Kinnear, Showtime, The Enlightenment, Victorian England

Showtime’s Penny Dreadful is set in the late Victorian era, specifically the early 1890s, and features a cast suggested by Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Both Frankenstein and his Monster, called Caliban and later John Clare, are prominent characters in the story, which takes place in London. But the series’ version of Frankenstein represents a pretty sharp deviation from Shelley’s character.

 

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Although popular imagination views both Dracula and Frankenstein as Victorian works of literature, they come from opposite ends of the 19^th century, and in fact Frankenstein is not a Victorian novel at all, having been published in 1818, just under two decades before Victoria became queen. Frankenstein is roughly contemporary, not with Dracula, which was published in 1897, but with the novels of Jane Austen, all of which were published in the 1810s. And the events of Shelley’s novel are set at an unspecified period in the 18^th century, meaning that Frankenstein probably created his creature around the period of the French Revolution at the latest. So Penny Dreadful’s Frankenstein is a long way from his proper context.

Frankenstein is usually seen as one of the greatest examples of Romantic literature (as well as one of the first works of Science Fiction). The Romantic movement was a reaction against the rationality of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. While the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment sought to use science and human reason to explain all the mysteries of nature, Romantic artists and authors were much more attracted to the grandeur, power, and mysteriousness of nature. Romantic painters loved depicting shadowy moonlight landscapes, medieval buildings ruined by the passage of time, and a contrast between the immensity of the landscape and the smallness of humanity.

Mary Shelley

Whereas the Enlightenment favored the power of reason to explain things, Romantic authors and artists favored the internal experience of their own emotions, which they struggled to express in painting, music, poetry, and prose. The content of their creativity was supposed to emerge from the artist’s own imagination, and to express their inward reality more than the objective external reality. Shelley’s inspiration for her novel was reportedly a waking dream she had. Because Romantics sought to express their own interior feelings, another major theme in Romanticism was the isolation of the individual, both within nature and within society. Romantic characters in novels struggle to convey their feelings to those around them, find themselves overwhelmed by their emotions, and, overcome by a sense of isolation and the inability to communicate with others on a deep level, often commit suicide.

Shelley’s novel explores many of these themes. In her novel, Frankenstein is a brilliant scientist who discovers how to create life. In other words, he uses the tools of science to usurp one of the most mysterious facts of nature, the power of life and death. In doing this, he is transgressing the limits of nature and exploring What Man is Not Meant To Know; Shelley practically created this now-clichéd theme in Science Fiction. Thus from a Romantic point of view, Frankenstein is doing something foolish, and demonstrating the errors of the Enlightenment. The novel describes the process by which he learns the error of his ways.

He creates his Monster through an unnamed process, literally putting together an enormous human body and reanimating it. Both the modern idea of the Monster as being stitched together and the idea of electricity as the tool for its reanimation are later cinematic additions to the story. But the Monster is hideous, and unable to exist in human society, because Frankenstein is not truly the master of life and cannot replicate the beauty of nature, only crudely imitate it.

The Monster is never quite given a name, but there are several references to it as Adam, so that’s what I’ll call it. In contrast to the arrogant Frankenstein, who foolishly blunders into things he doesn’t understand, Adam is the Romantic hero. He is a deeply sensitive man who simply wants to fit into society and find friends, but is unable to do so because of his monstrous appearance. Tormented by his isolation, Adam demands that Frankenstein create a mate for him, but Frankenstein is disgusted by his own efforts and destroyed her, which drives Adam into seeking revenge by killing Frankenstein’s fiancée Elizabeth.

Although Adam is ugly on the outside, he is human on the inside. Frankenstein is just the opposite. Although to outward appearances he is a great and wise man, inwardly he is a sort of monster: selfish, arrogant, obsessed with discovering the secrets of nature and keeping them for himself. He steals corpses to cobble together Adam’s body. He is gradually consumed by his hatred of his creation.

Finally, Adam flees northward into the arctic, pursued by the increasingly weak Frankenstein. Discovered by a ship’s captain, Frankenstein relates his tale. He is wracked by guilt and has came to realize his folly. But he dies before he can destroy his creation. Adam appears to mourn his creator and then declares his intention to commit suicide. He is last seen on an ice floe, drifting into the darkness, still alone in the vastness of nature.

 

Penny Dreadful’s Frankenstein

The series’ Frankenstein (Henry Treadaway) is a far cry from Shelley’s character. Both men are scientists, and Treadaway’s character occasionally voices skeptical, if not atheist viewpoints. But he’s not the moral monster of the novel. He’s quite sensitive and loves Romantic poetry by figures like Wordsworth and Keats, as well as Shakespeare, whereas Shelley’s character is primarily interested in science. Only when he smothers Brona (Billie Piper) in the season 1 finale does he demonstrate any of the arrogant assertion of the power of life and death that so characterizes Frankenstein in the novel, and even then, his act can be viewed as trying to make amends for failing Caliban (Rory Kinnear).

Treadaway as Frankenstein

The biggest issue, for me at least, is a moment in the third episode of season 1 when Caliban explicitly tells Frankenstein “you are a Romantic.” But Shelley’s Frankenstein isn’t a Romantic. He’s too arrogantly obsessed with understanding the secrets of nature to be a Romantic. In fact, he’s the anti-Romantic. The whole point of the novel is that Frankenstein’s lack of appreciation for the power of nature causes much sorrow.

The series does a better job of depicting Caliban as a Romantic figure. He too likes poetry, and in the second season takes his name from the Romantic poet John Clare. Like his creator, he is a sensitive soul, and what he wants most of all is what Adam wants, a mate. He demands that Frankenstein reanimate a woman for him, and threatens to kill Frankenstein’s friends until he does so, thus driving Frankenstein to eventually murder Rose Tyler Brona.

Kinnear as Caliban

(One nice thing the series does in the second season is to collapse Frankenstein’s beloved, Elizabeth, with the ‘bride’ he starts to make for Adam in the person of Brona/Lily Frankenstein. That creates an interesting love triangle for Frankenstein and his creation to grapple with. Actually, ‘triangle’ isn’t the right word, because Dorian and Ethan are also interested in her, but Ethan thinks she’s dead. I think the correct term for this geometric shape is a ‘clusterfuck’.)

Overall, the series loves Romanticism. Malcolm Murray quotes Keats’ Ode to a Nightengale, for example. In fact, the series’ creator, John Logan, has admitted that the series’ ultimate origin was Wordsworth’s poetry. Wordsworth led him to read Percy Bysshe Shelley, which led to Frankenstein, which led to Dracula.

For a show set in the 1890s, it’s perhaps not unreasonable that the well-educated characters would enjoy the poetry of half a century before. But why don’t any of them read poets closer to their own day, such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Matthew Arnold, or Algernon Swinburne? Why don’t any of them quote Gilbert and Sullivan? Why doesn’t the Bohemian Dorian Gray read the works of the Bohemian Oscar Wilde? That’s such an obviously meta thing for the show to do, I’m a bit sad they didn’t think of it.

And while we’re talking about the late 19^th century, would it kill Dorian to wear a fucking tie occasionally? For a show set in the high society of late Victorian London, he’s rather absurdly louche. The whole point of Wilde’s Gray is that the man appears reputable on the outside but is corrupt on the inside. The trope doesn’t work very well if he dresses in a way that rejects social convention.

 

Want to Know More?

Penny Dreadful is available at Amazon.

You have read Shelley’s Frankenstein, haven’t you?

If you want to know more about Romanticism, a good place to start would be Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction.

Chi-Raq: Do Sex-Strikes Really Work?

Tags

20th Century Africa, 20th Century America, Aristophanes, Charles Taylor, Chi-Raq, Chicago, Leymah Gbowee, Liberia, Liberian Civil War, Lysistrata, Nobel Peace Prize, Peloponnesian War, Spike Lee, Teyonah Parris

The plot of Chi-Raq (2015, dir. Spike Lee) involves the women of Chicago going on a sex-strike in an effort to get the gangs of their district to stop engaging in senseless gun violence. The strike spreads to the strippers, prostitutes, and gay men on the down low, and eventually to women across the country and the world (the wives of the mayor of Chicago and the US president both take the oath). And ultimately, the plan works. The two rival gangs lay down their weapons and everyone, including the large corporations who have been ignoring the south side of Chicago economically, sign a pledge to deal with the roots of the problem as well as its manifestations.

Chi-Raq is based on Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, first performed in Athens in 411 BC in the middle of the Peloponnesian War between the Athenians and the Spartans. In this case, the story was pure fantasy. Greek women did not go on a sex-strike, and the war only came to an end in 404 BC, following the disastrous defeat of the Athenian navy at Aegospotami, which ensured that the Athenians would be starved into surrendering. But has the strategy been used successfully somewhere else?

Lee himself seems certain the answer is yes. In an interview with Stephen Colbert, Lee suggested that such a tactic might be an effective response to sexually harassment and date rape on college campuses. See for yourself. The comment comes at about the 3:55 mark.

This implies that rapists are worried about what their victims think and want, which seems unlikely in most cases, and it suggests that there is a direct connection between women’s actions and rape, which there isn’t. But let’s assume that Lee was simply speaking carelessly during the pressure of a nationally-televised interview, and that he was intending to be empowering to women. But he says something else during the interview that is factually problematic.

Shortly before the comment about date rape (about the 3:10 mark), Lee mentions Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee and claims that she used a sex-strike to bring an end to the Second Liberian Civil War. He’s quite specific about this, and in fact, during the movie, Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) googles Leymah Gbowee and learns that Gbowee used a sex-strike to end the war in her country.

Leymah Gbowee

The Second Liberian Civil War erupted in 1999 against president Charles Taylor and ran for four years, being brought to an end in 2003 by the Accra Comprehensive Peace Agreement (ACPA). In 2002, activist Gbowee helped found the Women in Peacemaking Network (WIPNET), and Gbowee used this group to organize Christian and Muslim Liberian women to publicly protest for peace, defying orders by President Taylor to stop.

WIPNET used a number of tactics. They staged pray-ins at churches and mosques. They occupied a soccer field that President Taylor’s motorcade regularly drove past. They wore white t-shirts to make themselves more visible. And they initiated a sex-strike. According to Gbowee, the strike lasted on and off for a couple of months. As she said in a book about the protest, “It had little or no practical effect, but it was extremely valuable in getting us media attention.” Some of those involved were beaten for refusing to have sex (which again underlines the fact that it’s not a tactic likely to solve a problem like rape.)

During the peace talks, WIPNET staged a sit-in of several hundred women literally right outside the meeting room (which had a glass wall, making the sit-in visible to the negotiators), essentially holding the negotiators hostage, and refusing to let them get food or go to the bathroom. When the negotiators tried to leave the room, Gbowee and her supporters threatened to rip their own clothes off, taking advantage of a powerful African cultural taboo against female nudity; the action essentially threatened a curse on the soldiers who tried to physically move the women. After a few weeks of this, Taylor agreed to resign. Two years after the war came to an end, WIPNET helped orchestrate the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first elected female African head of state.

Former Liberian President Charles Taylor

Gbowee’s efforts were considered so instrumental to achieving the ACPA that she, along with Sirleaf and a third woman, received the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for their work.

So by Gbowee’s own account, the sex-strike did not have any direct effect on the effort to stop the war. If that was its purpose, it failed. But the fact that it was an off-and-on affair suggests that it wasn’t actually intended to stop the war so much as to garner publicity and raise awareness, which it did a good job of. So while in Lysistrata and Chi-Raq, the sex-strike ends the violence directly, in Gbowee’s approach it was a way to strengthen the movement.

Other Recent Sex-Strikes

Liberia is not the only place sex-strikes have been attempted. Twice in the space of two years from 2011 to 2013, the women of Barbacaos, Colombia, led a Crossed Legs movement as a protest against the lack of a paved road leading to their community. They argued that the lack of adequate roads presented a serious health hazard and an economic obstacle for women who needed to get inland from the small port town. The catalyst for this as a woman’s issue was the death of a 23-year-old pregnant woman whose ambulance got stuck on the way to a hospital. Unlike in Lysistrata and Chi-Raq, however, the men of the town quickly came to support the Crossed Legs movement, presumably because they saw the road as something they wanted as much as the women did. The Crossed Legs movement raised enough publicity (something previous protests had failed to accomplish) that the government vowed to pave at least half the 57-kilometer road. But by 2013, the women decided that the last 30 kilometers also needed paving and resumed the strike. (I haven’t been able to find anything about how effective the 2013 strike was.)

The road into Barbacaos, Colombia

Poor roads were not the only reason that Colombian women have tried sex-strikes. In 1997, a male military official called for a sex-strike to try to get the various guerrillas and drug lords to work for peace. That effort failed. So too did a 2006 attempt by the wives and girlfriends of gang members in Pereira in an effort to get them to surrender their guns. That strike was called off 10 days later. It was claimed as a success, despite no evidence that it actually reduced homicides.

However, in 2011, a sex-strike in the Filipino town of Dado succeeded in ending separatist violence on Mindinao after just a few weeks. In this case, it was not simply a sex-strike though. The women of Dado maintain a sewing collective that was unable to deliver its products because of violence on the roads outside of Dado. So in addition to withholding sex, the women also withheld their income from their husbands. In Kenya and Togo, week-long sex-strikes were held in 2009 and 2011 as a form of protest, but the brief duration seems unlikely to have done more than demonstrate that women cared strongly about specific local issues.

From this survey of recent sex-strikes, a few things seem clear. First, sex-strikes are useful for attracting attention to a problem. The outlandishness of the gesture garners media attention, which shines a spotlight on a major issue. So when they are used as a tool to focus attention on an issue, they stand some chance of bringing results. Second, sex-strikes don’t seem very effective when used on their own to directly address violence, for the simple reason that a man who is willing to be violent will presumably consider using force against his wife or girlfriend, or else will simply seek out a prostitute or another willing woman. Third, they are more likely to succeed when they are combined with other incentives. The modest success of the 2011 sex-strike in Barbacaos was actively supported by the men of the town because they wanted the road too, and the Dado sex-strike was used to reinforce the fact that the violence was hurting Dado economically.

So Lee is wrong when he claims that Gbowee’s sex-strike ended the war in Liberia, and he’s probably wrong when he suggests that the tactic might be effective against date rape, unless he meant that it might be useful in raising awareness about what date rape is and why it’s wrong.

Spike Lee

But Chi-Raq is clearly a fantasy. I don’t think Lee is suggesting that a sex-strike would actually work to end violence (although one Chicago woman has decided to organize an actual sex-strike in response to the film). Too many scenes in the film are obviously unrealistic, such as the scene where Lysistrata seduces a National Guard armory general by getting him to strip down to his underwear and then dry hump a cannon while blindfolded and handcuffed, or the scenes where women across the world jump onto the sex-strike bandwagon. Instead, I think that what Lee is doing is what Gbowee actually did with her sex-strike, using it to generate media attention for a deadly serious problem. Lee’s a smart guy (as he reminds Colbert in that interview, he’s a tenured professor in film studies at Columbia), and it’s clear that he sees his film not as a literal solution to the problem but as a wake-up call to the nation. Let’s hope that his cinematic sex-strike has the same sort of success that WIPNET’s did.

Want to Know More?

CHI-RAQ [DVD + Digital]is available on Amazon.

Lysistrata is a classic, and definitely worth reading. The Penguin edition of Lysistrata and Other Plays (Penguin Classics) would be a good place to start.

If you want to know more about the remarkable Leymah Gbowee, she tells her story in her book Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War. There is also a documentary about her, Pray the Devil Back to Hell.

Chi-Raq: Ancient Athens in Modern Chicago

Tags

20th Century America, Ancient Greece, Chi-Raq, Chicago, Comedies, Jennifer Hudson, John Cusack, Lysistrata, Movies I Love, Samuel L. Jackson, Spike Lee, Teyonah Parris

Chi-Raq (2015, dir. Spike Lee) is a modernization of the classic Athenian comedy Lysistrata, first performed in 411 BC during the Peloponnesian War. When I heard about Lee’s film, I was intrigued, since it’s not every day a movie based on an ancient play gets produced, and I wasn’t disappointed.

Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t seen the film, you may wish to do so before reading this post, since it discusses major plot points, including the end of the film.

 

 

Lysistrata

Lysistrata was first performed during a war between the Athenians and the Spartans. The war began in 430 BC, and had continued ever since. By 411, the tide of the war had begun to turn against the Athenians. 4 years previously, they had opened a new front in the war with a disastrous invasion of Sicily; they had lost much of their navy and large numbers of citizen sailors had been captured. The failure of that invasion probably marked the point at which the Athenians should have decided to cut their loses and sue for peace, but the Athenians stubbornly refused to do so.

So in 411, Aristophanes, who was part of the anti-war faction at Athens, staged Lysistrata as a critique of the war. In the play, Lysistrata proposes to bring the war to an end by persuading both the Athenian and Spartan women to go on a sex strike. They vow not to have sex until the men arrange a peace. To advance their cause, Lysistrata’s followers occupy the Acropolis and seize the state treasury, which will hinder the war cause, since the city will not be able to pay its war expenses without it. During a conversation with one of the city’s magistrates, Lysistrata accuses the Athenians (who are literally sitting in the audience watching) of having made disastrous decisions in the war. Eventually a desperately tumescent Spartan herald arrives with news that the Spartans want to negotiate, and the equally desperate magistrate agrees to sit down and discuss terms with him. Lysistrata shows up with a young woman named Reconciliation and uses their lust for her as an incentive to keep the negotiations moving. The peace is celebrated with a feast. Throughout the play, choruses of Old Men and Old Women clash in bawdy ways, dramatizing the struggle between masculine lust and feminine chastity.

The play is often today read as an anti-war play, which is probably reading more into it than Aristophanes intended. The play does not condemn war in general, only this war in particular. By 411, the Athenians were clearly tired of war, but could not seem to find a way to extricate themselves from the conflict without damaging their pride. The play wittily suggests that male military aggression and male sexual desire are somehow combined.

Lysistrata is not an easy play to stage nowadays. In this period, Athenian comedy was extremely topical, and many of the play’s references no long make sense to audiences who don’t know who, for example, Hippias or Cleisthenes were. Many of the jokes are directed at men who were probably sitting in the audience, satirizing them for their personal foibles and reputation. The play also contains a lot of jokes so deeply connected to the exact situation that modern audiences won’t get them any more; during the negotiations, the herald and the magistrate treat Reconciliation’s body as a map of Greece, discussing which parts of it they want to claim, but without understanding the actual geography of the war, the double-entendres lose much of their punch.

Another challenge to staging Athenian comedy is that it is extremely bawdy, far more so than all but the most raunchy of modern comedies. This mixture of political satire and sex jokes is off-putting to most modern audiences. Imagine a Saturday Night Live political sketch crossed with American Pie and you start to get the effect. Athenian comedy is so frankly sexual that one scholar commented, “if you don’t find a dirty joke in a line of text, you’re probably not looking hard enough.” The women of Lysistrata want the war to end because it’s interfering with their ability to get laid and purchase dildoes. The Spartan herald’s erection is given almost an entire page’s worth of attention, as people try to guess what he’s got hidden under his cloak. This is not some genteel Victorian farce; this is comedy all about penises and vaginas.

 

Chi-Raq

Lee has transposed the action of the play to the south side of Chicago, often nicknamed Chi-raq by its inhabitants because there is enough violence for a war zone. The two warring factions are rival gangs, the Spartans, led by the rapper Demetrius ‘Chi-Raq’ Dupree (Nick Cannon), and the Trojans, led by Cyclops (Wesley Snipes). One day, Chi-Raq’s woman, Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) stumbles across the scene of a gang shooting in which an 11-year old girl has become an innocent victim. She sees the girl’s mother Irene (Jennifer Hudson) grieve for her daughter and demand that something be done.

Lysistrata (center) persuading the woman to take the oath

Lysistrata gathers a bunch of her friends and arranges a meeting with some of the women who date the Trojans, including Indigo (Michelle Mitchenor), Cyclop’s woman. She persuades them to swear an oath. “I will deny all rights of access or entrance from every husband, lover, or male acquaintance who comes to my direction in erection. If he should force me to lay on that conjugal couch, I will refuse his stroke and not give up that nappy pouch. No peace, no pussy!”

From there, the movement grows as even the strippers, prostitutes, and guys on the down low take the oath. Then the women seize control of a National Guard armory, and the movement goes global, much to the frustration of Mayor McCloud (D.B. Sweeney), whose wife takes the oath. From there, the story plays out to its conclusion.

Hudson’s Irene

But as the story progresses, Lee inserts scenes of Father Corridan (John Cusack) performing the funeral for the murdered girl and leading an anti-gun march. Although skeptical of Lysistrata’s tactics, he plays an important role in getting Chi-Raq to come to the negotiating table. He and Irene circulate posters offering a reward for information about who shot the girl. Finally, at the end, when it looks like the negotiations between the Spartans and the Trojans will collapse because of Chi-Raq’s resistance, he tearfully acknowledges that he is the girl’s killer. Accepting the magnitude of his crime, he is led away, calling on all the gang members to admit their guilt in the situation and work to end the violence.

On paper this all sounds heavy-handed and tendentious. But Lee manages to make the material work through a combination of three contrasting elements. The film is every bit as vulgar as the source material. Jokes about dick and pussy and blue balls abound. The Old Men of the film just want to get laid again and are determined to restore their masculine pride, while the Old Women aren’t entirely happy to give up sex but see the greater goal behind the strike.

But the coarseness of the humor is off-set by the fact that most of the dialogue is in rhyming verse. Although some of the verse feels a bit clunky, and can be hard to follow, at its best, it becomes Shakespearean, elevating the vulgarity to the level of high art. Chi-Raq’s speech at the end plays as a morality tale, in which the actor is exhorting the audience to learn from his mistakes. Here’s an example, in which Lysistrata confronts the Old Men:

 

And then there is the profound passion of the film. The film opens with a prologue text informing us that more Americans have been killed in Chicago in the past 15 years than in both the Iraq and Afghan wars combined. “This is an emergency!” a voice declares at both the start and finish of the film. Cusack delivers the funeral sermon with an urgency that grows to fury at “this self-inflicted genocide,” and it’s clear that he is voicing Lee’s own feelings about the situation. Both Lysistrata and her friend Dr. Helen (Angela Bassett) deliver powerful speeches about how they are fighting to save the lives of their community.

Cusack’s Father Corridan, preaching the funeral sermon

Jennifer Hudson’s performance is particularly powerful. Her own personal tragedy, in which her brother-in-law murdered her mother, brother, and nephew in their West Chicago home, hangs over the film, a profound reminder that this is not simply an exercise in entertainment. When Hudson as Irene leads an anti-gun march, she is surrounded by dozens of extras all carrying photos of the actual relatives they lost to gun violence. And the film is not afraid to point fingers. At different moments, it accuses the NRA, the prison-industrial complex, Indiana’s gun shows, the Republican party, the media, the banks, and the adolescent gang-bangers of all playing a role in the slaughter. The mayor is a thinly-veiled satire of Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, who reportedly opposed the film because it was bad for tourism.

Lee has quite masterfully managed to transpose Lysistrata for a modern audience, capturing the marriage of bawdy humor and serious intent and even much of the original’s structure. Both play and film are in verse, both make use of song and dance, and both have choruses that act to set the stage and keep the action moving; Lee’s chorus is Samuel L. Jackson.

Jackson as Dolmedes, the film’s Greek chorus

Given the challenges of reproducing Classical Athenian comedy for modern audiences, Lee has pulled off an impressive feat. While Chi-Raq is not a perfect film (the verse is not always easy to follow, and a few scenes fall flat, including one where Lysistrata seduces the general of the armory), it’s a worthy effort, both in terms of cinema and in terms of the cause it serves, and you should definitely give it a viewing.

 

Want to Know More?

CHI-RAQ [DVD + Digital]is available on Amazon.

Lysistrata is a classic, and definitely worth reading. The Penguin edition of Lysistrata and Other Plays (Penguin Classics) would be a good place to start.

If you want to know more about the remarkable Leymah Gbowee, she tells her story in her book Mighty Be Our Powers.

Beowulf: Shame on You, Neil Gaiman

Tags

Anthony Hopkins, Beowulf, Grendel, Medieval Europe, Medieval Scandinavia, Movies I Hate, Neil Gaiman, Ray Winstone, Robin Wright Penn, Woman as Prize

Beowulf ranks among the greatest works of literature in the English language, and holds pride of place as the first great work of English-language fiction. It is a powerful, profound, and mysterious text that continues to move and fascinate readers more than a thousand years after it was first written down.

Unfortunately, when film-makers try to translate the story to the big screen, this strange old tale thwarts their best efforts to produce a decent story. Beowulf (2007, dir. Robert Zemeckis, screenplay by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary) is perhaps the worst adaptation of a piece of medieval literature I’ve ever read, and Neil Gaiman, who is normally a great storyteller as Sandman demonstrates, ought to be embarrassed that he wrote it.

The Poem

Beowulf, as many who read it high school or college know, tells the story of the Germanic’s warrior’s three greatest battles. He is a Geat, belonging to a tribe that resided in what is today southern Sweden, a branch of the Gothic people. (Side note: ‘Geat’ is pronounced ‘Yat’ or “Yay-at’, not ‘Geet’.) He travels to Denmark to help the great Danish king Hrothgar. Hrothgar is a successful war leader, but he is outclassed by the horrible troll Grendel, who is harrying the Danes in their great hall, Heorot. Beowulf kills Grendel by ripping off the creature’s arm. But then Grendel’s unnamed mother (whom I’ll just call Mother) continues her son’s feud against the Danes, and Beowulf is forced to track her to under lair in the moor where he eventually kills her.

The geography of Beowulf

After that Beowulf returns home to Sweden and becomes the Geatish king. Fifty years later, a slave steals a cup from the horde of a dragon, who goes on a rampage, killed and destroying the Geats until Beowulf and his warband go to confront the monster. With the exception of the faithful Wiglaf (‘Wee-laf’, not ‘Wig-laf’), the warband chickens out and runs away, leaving Beowulf unsupported in his battle against the dragon. As a result, he kills the dragon but is mortally wounded. The poem ends as it begins, with the funeral of a great king. The Geats lament not only the death of their king but also the cowardice of the warband, because they are now vulnerable to the depredations of their neighbors. One woman predicts the destruction of the Geatish tribe, a prediction that eventually came true in the real world when the Swedes eventually conquered and absorbed the Geats.

While a great poem, Beowulf presents many puzzles to the reader. In a surface reading, the first two fights seem essentially unconnected to the third fight, and scholars have debated how much unity the poem actually has. Indeed, it’s been suggested that the poem as we have it (which survives in a single 11^th century manuscript) may in fact represent the fusion of two unrelated poems. My personal feeling is that two halves of the poem are in fact a unitary whole, tracing as it does a hero from his early triumphs to his disastrous death. There is an underlying theme about the dangerous nature of violence. The poem is riddled with apparent digressions about unrelated acts of violence, but I tend to see these digressions as commenting on the nature of violence and highlighting Beowulf as a hero precisely because he understands when violence should and shouldn’t be resorted to. The cowardice of his men serves as a warning that sometimes violence is necessary, and Beowulf’s successful battle as an elderly ruler counterpoints Hrothgar’s earlier inability to triumph over Grendel. But that’s just one way to understand the poem.

The first page of Beowulf

As a result, the story presents a basic problem for modern audiences. The first two acts don’t connect to the third in any obvious way; there’s no through-line for the plot. Beowulf is a Germanic hero; he lacks the interiority and personal conflict that modern audiences tend to want in their heroes. His conflicts are mostly of a purely physical kind, although he does face social challenges as well, such as when he arrives as an outsider at Heorot and is challenged by the loud-mouthed asshole Unferth. And at a later moment in the poem, he is tempted by Queen Hygd to seize the Geatish throne, but refuses to do so, refusing to take it until King Heardred is killed in battle. (Like I said, he knows when to use violence and when to reject it.) But the moral universe in which he operates is drastically different from modern America, and that makes it harder to get modern audiences engaged with the underlying ideas in the poem.

The Movie

When Gaiman and Avary were trying to figure out how to turn this story into a 3D animated film that uses motion capture technology, they clearly recognized the problem of the disjunction between the first two acts and the third. Unfortunately, their solution to the problem was to tie the third act to the first two in a way that shits all over the heroic qualities of Beowulf and Hrothgar. In order to explain what’s so wrong with their screenplay, I’ll need to summarize the whole film.

The film opens with a feast in the newly-built Heorot. The elderly Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins) is a fat, drunken slob who has to be carried into the hall and can barely keep his bed sheet wrapped around his otherwise naked body. His beautiful young wife Wealtheow (Robin Wright Penn) is disgusted by him and refuses to sleep with him. The feasting and merriment unsettles Grendel (Crispin Glover), who has very delicate ears, and so he rampages through the hall, killing men while the impotent Hrothgar proves unable to attack him.

Grendel

Eventually Beowulf (Ray Winstone) the ‘Geet’ shows up and promises to fight the monster. He is confronted by Unferth (John Malkovich), who points out that the only thing Beowulf has done of note is lose a swimming contest. Beowulf responds by explaining that he lost the competition because he had to take time to kill nine sea monsters. One of his retainers comments that the last time Beowulf told the story, there were only three monsters. And in the flashback to the event we see that Beowulf is lying; one of the monsters is actually a mermaid, who successfully seduces him, rendering him unable to kill her.

Beowulf clearly has the hots for Wealtheow, because as the feast is winding down, he literally takes off all his clothes while everyone watches. She is appalled by this and flees the room, so he just lies down to relax while his men keep partying. When the fight with Grendel comes, Beowulf rather inexplicably watches the monster kill most of his men before getting into the fight. He manages to trap Grendel’s arm in the door of the hall and smashes it off. As he later retells the story, he just ripped the arm off while wrestling with him.

After Mother comes to slaughter Danes in vengeance, Hrothgar offers Beowulf his greatest treasure, the Dragon Horn, an elaborate drinking cup, which he got when he killed Fafnir, a dragon. (Fafnir is the dragon from a completely different legend, the story of Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer, but whatever.) Beowulf inexplicably takes the horn with him when he tracks Mother back to her lair, and discovers that it glows in the cave (which is actually kind of a nice touch).

Hrothgar giving Beowulf the Dragon Horn

When he meets Mother, she turns out to be Angelina Jolie with golden body-paint, a sexy braid that is also her tail, and built-in stiletto heels. Instead of fighting her, she seduces him with a promise that as long as the cup remains in her lair, nothing will be able to harm Beowulf and he will be a great king. So instead of killing her, he bones her and then goes back to Hrothgar and claims to have killed her. Hrothgar is relieved, declares Beowulf his heir, and then commits suicide by jumping off a tower. By this point it has become clear that years ago Hrothgar did exactly what Beowulf has just done, and that Grendel was actually Hrothgar’s son.

It must be really hard for Mother to shop for shoes

The film jumps forward to years later. King Beowulf of the Danes is married to Wealtheow, who is as disgusted with him as she was with Hrothgar, so he needs to sleep with slave girls instead. He’s disgusted with himself, because he knows he’s not actually a hero but rather just a liar. There’s a hint that perhaps his deal with Mother has made him invulnerable to battle, so that he no longer feels any danger when he fights.

Unferth has inexplicably become a Christian. But his slave steals the Dragon Horn from Mother’s lair. A dragon, who is Beowulf’s kid, goes on a rampage, destroying the local church (which is several centuries too early for a film set in 6^th century Denmark), and sending Beowulf a message that the deal is off. Beowulf returns the horn to Mother, but she refuses to accept it, and releases the dragon again. The dragon rampages, destroying the town and much of Beowulf’s castle. He eventually realizes that the dragon has a soft spot at the base of its throat, but for reasons I won’t go into, he has to partly sever his right arm in order to reach into the soft spot and rip out the dragon’s heart (I guess because he tore off Grendel’s right arm). They both plunge to the surf, where the dragon transforms into Beowulf’s son, and they both die.

The fight with the dragon is pretty much the best part of the film

Wiglaf (Brendan Gleeson) becomes king and Beowulf is given a Viking ship funeral. Right after that, Wiglaf finds the Dragon Horn in the surf. Mother appears to kiss Beowulf’s corpse, and then beckons Wiglaf to come to her, implicitly offering to repeat the cycle again. Wiglaf stares back at her, and the film cuts to black, leaving it unclear how he responds.

My Analysis

Words cannot express just how much I hate this mangling of the story of the poem. It’s only with great force of will that I am going to refrain from swearing as I dissect it.

The central problem is that instead of presenting Hrothgar and Beowulf as great heroes, which is exactly who they are in the poem, the film offers us two decidedly unheroic liars. Both men achieve their worldly success not by killing monsters but by having sex with Mother and then lying about it. It’s clear that both men are glory hounds who are more than willing to exaggerate their great accomplishments. They are both fundamentally weak men incapable of keeping their pants on when presented with the opportunity for hot monster sex. Their glory is purchased with the future slaughter of their own men because their pretended triumphs lay the foundations for the future crisis that will ruin them and wreak havoc on their people.

Heorot at the start of the film

Whether Hrothgar was ever a great man is entirely unknowable, because we don’t get enough evidence to tell whether anything in his version of events is true. Beowulf shows signs of being a potentially great man; he does basically kill Grendel nearly single-handedly, albeit not the way he later claims. Whether he actually kills any sea monsters is left uncertain; he’s clearly an unreliable narrator and it’s entirely possible that he lost the swimming contest because he decided to get busy with a mermaid and then made up the sea monsters to explain his failure. But in his fight with Grendel he literally just watches Grendel butcher his warband until it’s pretty much only Wiglaf left. So in contrast to the poem, which emphasizes the mutual obligations between war leader and warband by showing the failure of the warband in the battle with the dragon, it’s Beowulf who fails his men.

It’s only at the end of the film that Beowulf gets truly heroic by confronting the dragon and severing his own arm in order to kill the dragon, well aware that he will die when the dragon he’s clinging to falls from the sky. It’s a heroic moment, but sharply undercut by the fact that the whole disaster is his own fault.

Instead of being a film about heroic men doing great deeds, this Beowulf is a story about lying faux-heroes discovering that glory is ultimately hollow and emasculating. Hrothgar’s response to this discovery is to drink himself into a stupor and eventually kill himself, whereas Beowulf manages to rise above himself and finally do the right thing. In other words, the film is about the falseness of heroism far more than its possibility. All heroic inspiration is a falsehood rooted in boasting and deceit. And Wiglaf’s final comment, “He was the bravest of us. He was the prince of all warriors. His name will live forever” reads more as an ironic commentary on the impossibility of true heroism. If the greatest of all heroes is basically a liar and braggart who barely deserves his acclaim, what possibility of heroism is left to the rest of us lesser men?

Seeing the film in the theater in 2007, I was struck by how much the film read as a critique of contemporary American politics, with political leaders whose “Missions Accomplished” are little more than hollow boasts covering up miserable failures that got lots of good people killed. But maybe that was just the mood I was in at the time.

 

And Then There’s the Women

The film has three female characters, Wealtheow, Mother, and Ursula, Beowulf’s concubine (who’s mostly there to demonstrate the failure of Beowulf and Wealtheow’s marriage). Wealtheow is on the surface a strong women, refusing to sleep with either of her husbands because she is disgusted that they both slept with Mother. But she’s like a day-old sink full of dirty dishes and brackish water; the moment you poke the surface, you’re assaulted by the nasty stench underneath.

Wealtheow

It’s hard to see her disgust as anything other than sexual jealousy. She’s angry that her husbands both slept with a woman who is incomparably more beautiful than she is. And her disgust appears to be the reason that both her husbands are emotionally broken men. She has driven Hrothgar to drink and left Beowulf bitter with his life. It is her failure to adore her husbands that forces them to see the hollowness of their victories, because neither man understands the long-term consequences of sleeping with Mother until long after they’re broken men. So basically, if Wealtheow wasn’t such a jealous shrew, these men would have been happy and able to enjoy their false victories. She is the cause of most of their man-pain.

What makes this worse is that she’s also the Woman as the Prize. Hrothgar literally gives her to Beowulf when he declares Beowulf his heir. So Beowulf’s reward for apparently defeating Mother is a kingdom and a beautiful young wife. But that beautiful prize turns out to be a viper that gradually poisons him by refusing to have sex with him. The film treats this as entirely natural, and is completely oblivious to the fact that Wealtheow clearly has no attraction to Beowulf. She’s his prize and ought to put out for him, and her persistent refusal to do so is part of his ruin.

She’s also incapable of saving herself. When Grendel menaces her, she is saved by Hrothgar distracting Grendel, and when the dragon attacks and she is about to fall off the castle’s bridge to her death (because Ursula isn’t strong enough to pull her up), it’s Wiglaf who saves her. And, inexplicably, the older Wealtheow has grey hair but no wrinkles; her skin seems as dewy fresh as it does at the start of the film. So she’s literally four of the worst cinematic tropes about women rolled into one. She has no agency and exists purely to drive home the plot lessons for her husbands.

And Mother is even worse. She’s an eternally young and hot sex kitten, who never bothers putting clothes on. She is literally the cause of all the evil in the film. She is the mother of Fafnir, the dragon that Hrothgar confronted; the mother of Grendel; and the mother of the unnamed second dragon who is Beowulf’s son. Presumably she seduced Fafnir’s father the way she seduces Hrothgar and Beowulf, and the film ends with the very real possibility that she will seduce Wiglaf and repeat the cycle. (In fact, I think the film makes it likely that she does seduce him; Wiglaf has just declared that Beowulf is a far greater man than he is, so if Beowulf has fallen to Mother’s temptations, it is likely that Wiglaf will give in as well. He’s a helper, not a hero in his own right, even by this film’s tawdry standards. And his reception of the Dragon Horn just a moment before acts as a symbol of his impending seduction, since both Mother and the Horn are passed on from Hrothgar to Beowulf and now apparently from Beowulf to Wiglaf.) So the locus of all evil in Denmark is Mother’s irresistible sexuality; she has been birthing monsters since before the film begins and will apparently continue birthing monsters after the film ends. Her evil triumphs over all male efforts to stop her, and no women can apparently stand in comparison.

She is also an emasculating figure. In the poem, when Beowulf ventures into the lair, Unferth gives Beowulf his ancestral sword Hrunting. The sword turns out to be unable to hurt Mother, and she melts the blade down to its hilt. In the film, as she seduces Beowulf, he holds up Hrunting and she begins to stroke it with her hands, causing it to melt even as he has sex with her. So the film directly associates the sword with Beowulf’s penis, showing it softening when he yields to her.

Mother stroking Beowulf’s sword

And lest I be accused of getting Freudian without warrant, the film repeatedly draws parallels between swords and Beowulf’s dick. When Beowulf strips naked before the fight with Grendel, the film has a running joke of various things obscuring his penis: Wiglaf’s arm, smoke, a candlestick, and finally and most blatantly a sword. When he confronts the mermaid, he drops his sword just as she embraces him. At the end, as he is trying to reach the dragon’s heart, he drops his knife and its only then that he can reach in and rip the heart out with his hands. So the film has an odd pattern in which being swordless is somehow a metaphor for sex and heroism. It’s a clumsy image; how can he get Mother pregnant if his sword has already gone flaccid? But it’s definitely there. So the film seems to say that having sex with Mother is going to lead to his impotence.

See what I mean?

And of course, Mother sends her son the dragon out to kill when her deal with Beowulf is broken by the theft of the cup. So she gets her son killed because she’s angry with Beowulf. Grendel goes out on his own, not at her instigation, but when Beowulf comes to the lair the first time, she actually decapitates Grendel’s corpse for some reason. So just as she ruins the men she sleeps with, she also seems to ruin her children and treat them as pawns.

When you combine Wealtheow and Mother as images of femininity, we’re left with a view that women are simply destructive to men. Their power is profound, corrosive, irresistible, and ultimately enduring. Both women survive the film.

I get it. I understand why Gaiman and Avary decided to make the plot of the film fold back upon itself by linking the dragon to Beowulf’s mother and using the cup/Dragon Horn as a recurrent symbol of Mother’s seductive power. I’m sure they thought that resorting to the cliché of the Hero’s Redemption would produce a satisfying twist on the original text. But I’m baffled by why Gaiman, who is normally a subtle and perceptive author, didn’t recognize what a moral sludge the story becomes as a result of these choices and how deeply misogynist the film’s treatment of its female characters are. And he failed to recognize that the poem’s continued power grows to some extent from the fact that it doesn’t follow contemporary notions of story-telling. It produces a satisfying story of a great hero doing great deeds despite the lack of a through-line plot and the directness of the hero’s personality. And it’s not as if American action films aren’t brimming over with morally simplistic heroes whose heroism mainly consists of killing all their opponents. There must have been other ways they could have made the story engaging for modern authors than just pissing all over the entire notion of heroic valor.

Still, there’s one thing I take comfort in, no matter how much this film infuriates me. As Gaiman wrote in Sandman 13, “The Great Stories will always return to their original forms.”

Want to Know More?

If you really want to see this crappy film, you can find Beowulf on Amazon. Better yet, read the original. The Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (Bilingual Edition) is popular these days, but honestly, I think it’s terrible, constantly introducing Irish terminology where it doesn’t belong and horrible to read aloud. Burton Raffel’s Beowulf (Signet Classics) is a prose translation, but does an excellent job of translating for meaning. A much better poetic option is Dick Ringler’s Beowulf: A New Translation for Oral Delivery (Hackett Classics), which is meant to capture the way the poem would have sounded. (Full disclosure: I was a student of Ringler’s in grad school–he’s the best teacher I’ve ever had the privilege of taking a class with.)

Queen Margot: Leyrac de la Mole

Tags

16th century France, Alexandre Dumas, Early Modern Europe, Kings and Queens, Leyrac de la Mole, Marguerite of Valois, Movies I Love, Patrice Chéreau, Queen Margot, Vincent Perez

A very significant portion of Queen Margot (1994, dir. Patrice Chéreau, French with English subtitles, based on Alexandre Dumas’ 1845 novel La Reine Margot) deals with Leyrac de la Mole (Vincent Perez). In the film la Mole is a Huguenot soldier who has come to Paris to seek service under the Huguenot commanders gathered in Paris for the wedding of Henry of Navarre (Daniel Auteuil) to Margot (Isabella Adjani). Unfortunately, he gets caught up in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre when Coconnas (Claudio Amendola) tries to kill him. In his desperate flight, la Mole staggers into Margot’s chambers, who prevents Coconnas from killing him. Later that same night, la Mole runs into Coconnas outside and the two men fight until they are both unconscious.

Instead of being buried with the rest of the dead, the two men are rescued by the executioner, who nurses them both back to health. La Mole has fallen in love with Margot and wants to see her again. He learns that Coconnas has access to Margot’s handmaid Henriette (in fact, they seem to be lovers) and when he meets Coconnas again, he discovers that the man has had a change of heart and now repents of the murders he committed that night. So with the aid of Henriette, la Mole becomes Margot’s lover and tries to find a way to help her escape the royal court. Navarre knows of their affair and gradually learns to tolerate it, since he doesn’t love Margot anyway.

Unfortunately, for la Mole, when Catherine de Medici (Virna Lisi) hatches a plan to murder Navarre with a poisoned book, the book that gets used coincidentally turns out to be one that la Mole inherited from his father and sold to a bookdealer. It has la Mole’s name written in it. So when Catherine discovers to her horror that she’s poisoned her own son Charles IX, she blames the poisoning on la Mole, who by this time is known to be Margot’s lover. As a result, la Mole and Coconnas are apprehended and executed shortly after Charles’ death. Margot, acting on a comment la Mole once made to her, claims his head and has it preserved as a memento of their love.

Vincent Perez as la Mole

La Mole’s story is a grand example of the sort of story 19^th century audiences had a taste for: doomed romance, dramatic changes of heart, narrow escapes, the struggle for redemption, and macabre details like preserved heads. But does it have any basis in fact?

The Real La Mole

While not entirely fiction, Dumas’s doomed lover is a far cry for the historical la Mole. Joseph Boniface de la Mole was a French nobleman, who does seem to have been part of the Huguenot faction at court. He was indeed rumored to have been Marguerite of Valois’ lover early in her marriage to Navarre. So that part is basically true.

But Marguerite didn’t rescue him from death during the Massacre. It was another man, the fortunate Huguenot M. de Teian, who benefitted from Marguerite’s somewhat unintentional intervention. Here is Marguerite’s description of what happened:

“As soon as I beheld it was broad day, I apprehended all the danger my sister had spoken of was over; and being inclined to sleep, I bade my nurse make the door fast, and I applied myself to take some repose. In about an hour I was awakened by a violent noise at the door, made with both hands and feet, and a voice calling out, “Navarre! Navarre!” My nurse, supposing the King my husband to be at the door, hastened to open it, when a gentleman, named M. de Teian, ran in, and threw himself immediately upon my bed. He had received a wound in his arm from a sword, and another by a pike, and was then pursued by four archers, who followed him into the bedchamber. Perceiving these last, I jumped out of bed, and the poor gentleman after me, holding me fast by the waist. I did not then know him; neither was I sure that he came to do me no harm, or whether the archers were in pursuit of him or me. In this situation I screamed aloud, and he cried out likewise, for our fright was mutual. At length, by God’s providence, M. de Nangay, captain of the guard, came into the bed-chamber, and, seeing me thus surrounded, though he could not help pitying me, he was scarcely able to refrain from laughter. However, he reprimanded the archers very severely for their indiscretion, and drove them out of the chamber. At my request he granted the poor gentleman his life, and I had him put to bed in my closet, caused his wounds to be dressed, and did not suffer him to quit my apartment until he was perfectly cured.”

If you’re interested, you can read her recollection of the Massacre (including this incident) here, under Letter V. You’ll find that it differs substantially from the film’s depiction of the slaughter.

But La Mole’s historical importance is completely unrelated to his relationship with Marguerite. What he’s actually remembered for is an attempt to assassinate Charles IX. He was a friend of François of Alençon, Margot and Charles’ youngest brother. In the film, Alençon is a secondary character; he participates in the Massacre, it’s hinted that he would like to see his brother dead, and in one scene he humiliates Margot and helps force her to confess her adultery.

François d’Alençon

In reality, before the Massacre, Alençon aligned himself with the Huguenot faction, which included Navarre and Admiral Coligny. When there was a proposal to marry his brother Henry of Anjou to Elizabeth I, Alençon acted as the French negotiator perhaps because he was seen as a Protestant sympathizer. When the Massacre happened, la Mole and another Huguenot nobleman, Annibal de Coconnas, were arrested and thrown in prison but survived, apparently due to their relationship with Alençon.

As Charles began his final decline, Alençon was implicated in a plot to assassinate Charles by means of a wax doll stabbed with pins. The doll was found in la Mole’s possession, and after being tortured, la Mole and Coconnas were both beheaded. Whether they had genuinely attempted to kill the king or were simply convenient scapegoats for Charles’ medical problems is unclear. Charles, however, was still alive when they were executed and only died later on, so Dumas has reversed the order of the events here. Margeurite mentions all of this in her memoirs (see the previous link, in Letter VII), and offers no suggestion that she had any feelings for la Mole at all, although it’s unlikely she would have admitted to the affair in such a document. There was indeed a rumor that Marguerite had his head preserved.

So what Dumas has done is taken two separate men, la Mole and de Teian, and conflated them. He’s built the post-Massacre portion of his story around la Mole’s eventual execution and has greatly changed Coconnas to turn him into a redeemed villain rather than a man who avoided one political plot only to fall victim to a second one. The historical la Mole was not an outsider at court but rather a well-known courtier.

But if you’re a long-time reader of this blog, it won’t come as a surprise that the facts and the story you saw were quite different things, will it?

Want to Know More?

Sure you do! Queen Margot (English Subtitled)is available on Amazon. The novel is available in English there as well, as Queen Margot; Or, Marguerite de Valois – With Nine Illustrations.There’s also a historical biography of Margot and her mother Catherine, The Rival Queens: Catherine de’ Medici, Her Daughter Marguerite de Valois, and the Betrayal that Ignited a Kingdom, although Nancy Goldstone is not a professional historian.

Queen Margot: Poisoned Lipstick and Bloody Sweat

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16th century France, Alexandre Dumas, Catherine de Medici, Charles IX, Daniel Auteuil, Early Modern Europe, Henry of Navarre, Isabella Adjani, John-Hugues Anglade, Margaret of Valois, Medical Stuff, Movies I Love, Patrice Chéreau, Queen Margot, Religious Issues, St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, Virna Lisi

My previous post on Queen Margot (1994, dir. Patrice Chéreau, French with English subtitles) dealt with the film’s treatment of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris in 1572. That event and its lead-up takes about a third of the film; the remainer of the film focuses on the fall-out from that event in the lives of Margaret of Valois, the titular Margot, who is by virtue of marriage now queen of Navarre (Isabelle Adjani), her imperiled husband Henry of Navarre (Daniel Auteuil), her lover Leyrac de la Mole (Vincent Perez), and the barely stable King Charles IX (John-Hugues Anglade).

The film opens in 1572, a few days before the Massacre. It closes shortly after Charles’ death and the accession of his brother Henry of Anjou in 1574, so roughly two years pass, although the film gives us few markers for the passage of time except for the death of the king. In between these two solidly historical events, the film essentially descends into romantic political fantasy, as far as I can tell.

The massacre of the Huguenots was a huge blow to the Protestant community in France, which lost tens of thousands of adherents and their leaders to slaughter, flight from France, and fear-driven conversion to Catholicism. The film, however, has only a nominal interest in this issue; it is interested in the Massacre primarily because of the dramatic tensions it creates for its main characters. The ensuing political intrigues revolve not around the Huguenot response to so much death, but rather on the complex web of emotions spawned by the crisis. In the film, Navarre converts to Catholicism the day after the Massacre, because he is essentially held hostage at court and needs to find a way to escape. In reality, he promised to convert, but did not actually undergo a formal confirmation at a Catholic; like Elizabeth Tudor during the reign of her Catholic sister Mary I, he used the period of religious instruction to play for time.

Henry of Navarre

In the film, his conversion opens the door to a growing friendship between Navarre and Charles. Catherine de Medici (Virna Lisi), Charles’ mother, quickly realizes that Navarre is beginning to step into the void Coligny’s death has left for Charles; she orchestrated the failed assassination of the Admiral in order to retain her hold on political power, and now that hold is in danger once again. So she immediately plots to murder Henry. At the same time, Navarre is trying to find a way to escape from the court, while la Mole plots to find a way to rescue Margot. But neither can escape without the other; to do so would leave the other in terrible danger and Navarre feels he owes Margot his life, so he is reluctant to abandon her even though he knows she is in love with la Mole. So the tension in the later portions of the film grows from the question of whether the Catholic assassins will manage to kill Navarre before he and Margot can both get away from Paris.

Marguerite of Valois, about the time of her marriage

In true 19^th century literary fashion, the court is aswirl with plots, poisons, and adultery. Catherine first tries to murder Henry by giving a tube of poisoned lipstick to his mistress, and when that fails, she arranges to lace a book with arsenic. Rumors of political assassination by poison were incredibly common in ancient, medieval and early modern writings, and virtually any political figure who died unexpectedly was rumored to have been poisoned.

But as a historian, I tend to be very suspicious of any claim that a historical figure died from poison. Prior to the 19^th century, the poor state of medical knowledge meant that many potentially fatal medical conditions could go undiagnosed and untreated for years. People could have fatal heart attacks, strokes, aneurysms, and the like with no noticable warning signs. The lack of modern hygiene techniques and the poor state of food preservation meant that food poisoning and other food-borne illnesses were probably far more common than people realized. As a result, there were numerous ways that apparently healthy people might suddenly fall ill and die without being poisoned, and many of those deaths could easily be mistaken for poisoning. That’s not to say that poisoning did not happen, only that we ought to be extremely cautious about attributing unexpected death to poison.

In the film, after the Massacre, there are essentially three key incidents: the attempt to murder Henry with poisoned lipstick, the hunting accident where Henry saves Charles’ life at the cost of giving up a chance to escape the kingdom, and the attempt to poison Henry with an arsenic-laced book.

The first incident revolves around Henry’s mistress, Charlotte de Sauve (Asia Argento), who is given a tube of poisoned lipstick and told that it contains a powerful aphrodisiac. Margot, suspecting a plot, stops Henry from kissing Charlotte, who unfortunately dies a horrible death. Charlotte was in fact Henry’s mistress, but she did not die in 1573 or 74; she remained his mistress until 1579, long after he had left the French court, and she only died in 1617, seven years after he had died. She was, in fact, one of Catherine de Medici’s informants, so if Catherine had wanted to poison Henry, she could just have given Charlotte something to slip into his drink. So the poisoned lipstick and Charlotte’s untimely death are entirely Dumas’ invention.

Charlotte de Sauve

Similarly, as far as I can tell, the hunting accident in which Henry saves Charles from a wild boar also appears to be complete fiction. Charles did enjoy hunting, however, and by the end of his life he and Henry appear to have become good friends (or at least Charles thought they were good friends). In the film, right after the accident, Charles takes Henry to meet his secret mistress, who seems to be a common servant, and infant son. Charles did in fact have a mistress on whom he fathered an illegitimate son, but she seems to have been known at court, and after his death, she received a pension and her son was raised well and allowed to inherit some of Catherine de Medici’s property and a noble title.

What Killed Charles IX?

The third major incident involves Catherine’s attempt to poison Henry using a book on hunting that has been impregnated with arsenic. The pages are stuck together and to unstuck them, the reader must lick his finger and loosen the page; as a result, as the reader works his way through the book, he will inevitably consume a lot of arsenic. Unfortunately, before Henry sees the book, Charles finds it and reads it. so Catherine unintentionally poisons her own son. In the film, Charles lingers for a remarkably long time, constantly exuding a bloody sweat that makes for a ghastly cinematic image, especially because he and Margot wear a lot of white clothes during this part of the film precisely so Charles can bleed on them.

Charles getting blood all over his nice white clothes

The reality of Charles’ death is rather different. Bloody sweat is a real condition, known as hematohidrosis or hematidrosis, but it’s extremely rare and its causes are unknown. It’s not generally fatal, except in newborns. So it’s wildly unlikely that Charles could have died from such a condition, even if there was clear evidence that he had it. But there isn’t any solid evidence that bloody sweat was a symptom of his death.

We have two narratives of Charles’ death, which you can read here. In the first, Charles spends a long time silent and then sends for Henry of Navarre, with whom he has a substantial conversation. Then he dies some time later. In the second, he experiences pain and sweats a great deal, groans, and has a conversation with his nurse during which he cries a lot. Then he apparently dies. The two narratives are not completely compatible, since the first makes no mention of the conversation with his nurse and the second makes no mention of his conversation with Navarre, but it is not impossible that they could both be true; usually scholars read the second account as happening earlier in the evening than the first account. But neither makes any mention of bloody sweat or indeed blood at all, although in the second narrative Charles laments the shedding of Huguenot blood.

The idea that he died of a bloody sweat is probably a Huguenot story meant to convey divine justice; the monarch who shed so much blood died oozing his own blood as a manifestation of his guilt. There is a long tradition in Western historical writing of monarchs who did awful things supposedly dying in horrible ways. These stories nearly always revolve around the idea that the ruler’s moral corruption somehow becomes physically manifest at the end of his life. For example, William I of England (often called William the Bastard) was badly injured during siege in which his troops burned a church; his horse shifted and threw him against the pommel of his saddle. He died not long thereafter, but according to a monastic chronicle, when his body was placed into his sarcophagus, it burst open and produced such an awful stench that the funeral service had to be hurriedly finished so everyone could flee the smell. While it is not completely impossible that William might have ruptured an internal organ and died of a severe infection that would produce a terrible odor, it’s just as likely that the chronicler in question is trying to demonstrate William’s moral decay with a story about literal rot and stench.

Charles IX

Additionally, Charles’ symptoms do not match those of arsenic poisoning. The classic symptoms of arsenic poisoning include headaches, confusion, diarrhea, sleepiness, convulsions, discoloration of the fingernails, vomiting, bloody urine, hair loss, and stomach pains. Bloody sweat is not one of the symptoms. In the film, Charles experiences several abdominal pain, and possibly confusion (a general issue for him) and hair loss (his hair looks quite thin at the end), but none of the messier and less glamorous symptoms like vomiting, diarrhea, or bloody urine.

In reality, most historians attribute his death to pulmonary tuberculosis, the symptoms of which include severe coughing, coughing up blood or bloody mucus, chest pain, weight loss, fatigue, fever, night sweats and chills, and loss of appetite. It’s clear he was producing blood; shortly before his death he had a violent hemorrhage and after his death, one Catholic bishop claimed that the amount of blood he produced was a sign he was a saint. But he seems to have been coughing it up, rather than sweating it. His other symptoms included bursts of manic energy, general weakness and fatigue, heavy sweating, severe weight loss (the English ambassador described him as being “no more than skin and bone”) and pain. Additionally, his brother Henry III also died of a form of tuberculosis, so his family may have been particularly susceptible to it for some reason. Tuberculosis is not a slam dunk diagnosis, but it certainly fits the symptoms more closely than arsenic poisoning.

Alexandre Dumas

But Dumas is at least drawing off of 16^th century claims that Charles had died of bloody sweat, and his plot uses this story to good effect, dramatizing his moral complicity in the massacre and working in the irony that Catherine, who is trying to murder Henry to maintain her position with her son, instead murders her son and enables Henry to escape the court. It may not be good history, but it’s certainly a good story.

Want to Know More?

Queen Margot (English Subtitled)is available on Amazon. The novel is available in English there as well, as Queen Margot; Or, Marguerite de Valois – With Nine Illustrations.There’s also a historical biography of Margot and her mother Catherine, The Rival Queens: Catherine de’ Medici, Her Daughter Marguerite de Valois, and the Betrayal that Ignited a Kingdom, although Nancy Goldstone is not a professional historian.

If you’re inclined to learn more about Henry of Navarre’s rather eventful life, the only thing readily available is Desmond Seward’s The First Bourbon: Henry IV of France & Navarre. Seward is a popular historian rather than a scholar, but his work is highly readable.