Robin Hood: The Movie That We Didn’t Get

Tags

Brian Helgeland, Magna Carta, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Paul Webb, Ridley Scott, Robert of Thornham, Robin Hood, Russell Crowe, Tom Stoppard

Over the past several posts, I’ve looked at Robin Hood (2010, dir. Ridley Scott) and tried to figure out its insanely convoluted and somewhat absurd plot, as well as its misappropriation of the Magna Carta and its silly climactic amphibious beach assault battle. Nearly everyone agrees that this isn’t a good film, although it deserves points for trying to do something new with the Robin Hood story. And what makes this particularly said is that the original script was, by all accounts, a much better idea.

The film began its life as Nottingham, a script by Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris, who created the TV series Sleeper Cell. Their concept was to write a lighthearted movie focusing on the Sheriff of Nottingham, who is trying to locate a “terrorist” who is robbing people. The Sheriff would use what passed for forensic science in the 12^th century, like following the trajectory of the arrow back to where it was loosed from. Robin is a less virtuous figure, and he and the Sheriff become embroiled in a love triangle with Marion. It’s essentially CSI: Sherwood Forest, and while it’s a totally anachronistic idea, since 12^th century law enforcement operated very differently from modern American law enforcement, but it would certainly have been a very fresh take on the material, because it treated the traditional villain of the story as the hero. Given the popularity of forensic crime shows on TV, it might have been quite successful at the box office.

The Sheriff was based on Robert of Thornham, one of Richard the Lionhearted’s lieutenants, who helped lead the conquest of Cyprus during the Third Crusade and whom Richard appointed as one of the island’s administrators. The script opened with a siege of a castle, a detail that somehow managed to survive the massacre that awaited the rest of the script. They also included Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard’s mother, because she was an important figure in England at this time and she had never been used in a Robin Hood story. For a lot more about the original script, here’s an interview with Reiff about it.

Ethan Reiff

The script became a hot commodity in Hollywood, and a bidding war broke out for it. Eventually, Reiff and Voris earned seven figures on their script, and Russell Crowe was signed to play the Sheriff, perhaps because he shared the same agent as Reiff and Voris. Crowe’s involvement meant that the studio needed to get a director that Crowe was comfortable with, and so Ridley Scott was brought in. But Scott didn’t like the script and insisted on a substantial re-write. Reiff and Voris were dismissed from the project, discovering that they’d been fired when they learned that there was opening for a writing assignment on their own movie.

Scott felt that the script didn’t have enough archery in it and wanted the archery to be the focus of the film, because apparently the archery focus of literally every other Robin Hood story ever filmed was fresher than never-been-done medieval forensic science. Despite the fact that the script had been highly sought-after, he declared that “It was fucking ridiculous…It was terrible, a page-one rewrite.” Crowe also stated that he “just wasn’t into doing” CSI: Sherwood. So basically, Crowe and Scott decided that they knew better than the rest of Hollywood (granted, not necessarily implausible), threw out the script, and started massaging the concept into something they liked more.

Ridley Scott

Scott brought in Brian Helgeland, the writer of LA Confidential, Payback, A Knight’s Tale, and Mystic River, to rewrite the script. The Sheriff was now Richard the Lionhearted’s lieutenant, who returns to England after Richard’s assassination, only to find that John is tyrannically trying to establish the whole concept of taxation in England and that an outlaw is inciting anarchy. So the Sheriff would be caught between two unreasonable men, trying to do what’s right. That’s still an interesting take on Robin Hood, although Scott found an absurd way to twist things. Robin Hood and the Sheriff are the same man, so the detective is chasing the killer without realizing it’s him. Given that this is the plot of Oedipus Rex, it’s striking that Scott thought what is literally one of the oldest plots in Western drama was somehow fresh.

Scott envisaged this script as the first in a series of films in which Robin battles the villainous King John repeatedly, with the storyline culminating in the signing of the Magna Carta. So that’s how the whole Magna Carta/Freedom element crept into the script.

Brian Helgeland

Eventually, however, someone talked sense into Scott and made him realize that his ideas were dumb. In July of 2008, when filming was supposed to have started for a movie that would open in November of 2009, Paul Webb was brought in to do another rewrite, perhaps because he had written a well-received play about the 1170 assassination of Archbishop Thomas Becket; Webb would go on to work on the scripts for Lincoln and Selma. In this draft, Robin becomes the Sheriff of Nottingham after he sees the Sheriff killed in a battle, and then later returns to banditry. That’s where the whole ‘Robin pretends to be Robert Loxley’ bit came from. The script also lost its humor and became much more serious at this point.

Filming started, but then Scott decided he didn’t like Webb’s script, so he brought back Helgeland for yet another rewrite during which the film took its current sewn-together form. But the script at that point was a Frankenstein’s Monster of dialog from at least five different rewrites. Reportedly, Robin’s personality veered so wildly that he seemed to have Multiple Personality Disorder. So the studio brought in Tom Stoppard to rewrite the dialog as the movie was being filmed. At this point, the script had pretty much become the exact opposite of what Reiff and Voris had penned and Crowe and Scott had signed on for. The filming process was so fraught with difficulty that it reportedly severely damaged Crowe’s relationship with Scott.

Tom Stoppard

The result, as we’ve seen, is a movie that’s ‘fresh’ in all the wrong ways, like raw kumquats on your dinner plate (something I experienced as a child and will never forget). Perhaps, some day, someone will find a way to resurrect Reiff and Voris’ original script and get it made, not that I’m holding my breath. This is Hollywood we’re talking about.

This is, I expect, my last post on this movie. I’d like to thank Lyn R for her generous donation that made this series of reviews possible. If you have a particular movie that you’d like me to tackle, please make a donation to my Paypal account and let me know what film you’d like me to look at. As long as I think the movie is appropriate and I can get access to it, I’ll give you a review.

 

Want to Know More? 

Robin Hood  is available on Amazon.

It’s not like there’s a book on the making of this movie. I had to piece together the story from a host of sites across the internet. But I’ve got a lot of work to do, so I’m going to be lazy and not document my work. But the place to start is this blog.

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Robin Hood: The Battle on the Beach

Tags

Cate Blanchett, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Military Stuff, Ridley Scott, Robin Hood, Russell Crowe

 

After a lot of exam grading and brief digression for Westworld, it’s time to get back to the Russell Crowe Robin Hood (2010, dir. Ridley Scott). The film culminates in a battle on the beach somewhere along the southeast coast of English. The evil French are launching an invasion, and it’s up to Robin Hood to help King John stop them.

You can watch the scene on Youtube.

There is so much wrongness here it’s hard to know where to begin. So let me just count the problems.

• The French are using amphibious vehicles to get their troops onto the shore. This is technology way beyond anything medieval people had. The earliest amphibious vehicle was built in 1787. I’m not aware of one being used for military purposes until World War II.
• Initially, the English forces are on top of the cliffs watching the French land. They have archers, and open fire on them. But then they decide to send their troops down to the beach to fight. This is just dumb. Up on the cliffs, the French can do nothing except take casualties until they can get up the cliffs somehow. But sending troops down to the beach means that the archers need to stop firing to avoid hitting the English soldiers. So the English forces throw away their advantage for no reason at all.
• Robin Hood (Russell Crowe) is an archer. That’s what he was doing on crusade. There’s no evidence that he has any military experience beyond that. He’s a lowly foot soldier. He’s certainly not a knight, since his father was a stonemason. So why the hell is he given command of the English forces?
• The English charge on the beach is totally undressed; there’s no line of horses to allow a lance charge to have a massed impact. These knights clearly don’t know how to make a charge as a unit.
• Why is Friar Tuck (Mark Addy) fighting?
• Why is Marion (Cate Blanchett) fighting? Why did they even bring her to a battle? So she can be attacked and inspire Robin to fight harder?
• Why does Robin jump off his horse and tackle Sir Godfrey (Mark Strong)? On horseback, he has an advantage over Godfrey; on foot he doesn’t. He immediately draws his sword, so he doesn’t jump because he has no weapon.
• Why does Sir Godfrey suddenly turn, jump on a horse and ride off? There’s no sign the French are losing, although some of their boats are crashing together. And where the hell is he riding to? He’s riding away from the boats. Is his horse going swim back to France?

Basically, there’s no way this battle ever happened anywhere in the Middle Ages.

This review was made possible by a generous donation from Lyn R. If you want me to review a specific film, please donate $10 or more and tell me what movie you’d like me to review, and I’ll do my best to track it down and review it, as long as I think it’s appropriate.

Want to Know More?

Robin Hood  is available on Amazon.

Robin Hood: The Magna Carta

Tags

King John, Kings and Queens, Magna Carta, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Oscar Isaac, Ridley Scott, Robin Hood, Russell Crowe

In most Robin Hood movies, John is a bad guy because he’s A) hoping to usurp the throne from his older brother King Richard and B) collecting taxes, which is always an evil thing to do in movies. But Robin Hood (2010, dir. Ridley Scott) takes a totally different approach. The first part of the movie deals with the totally legitimate transfer of the crown from the now-dead Richard to John (Oscar Isaac). John isn’t trying to usurp anything—he’s the lawful king. And while John wants taxes, his attempts to collect the taxes aren’t really the problem. The problem is that the villainous Sir Godfrey (Mark Strong) is abusing the authority John gave him because he wants to stir up a rebellion against John. So the film abandons the standard-issue Bad King stuff that Johns in these movies do. As a result, it has to find other ways to make John a Bad King, as Sellars and Yeatman would put it.

At the start of the film, John’s being a dick. His mother Eleanor discovers his wife Isabel of Gloucester standing outside his bedroom. She’s locked out because John is cavorting inside with Isabella of Angouleme (Léa Seydoux), the niece of his rival King Philip of France. He decides to divorce Isabel so he can marry Isabella. And in fact John did ditch Isabel just after his accession to the throne in favor of Isabella. This plotline, if we want to grace it with such a term, doesn’t go anywhere. It’s just there to signal that John’s a Douchebag with a Crown, even before he has the crown part.

King John

Then he starts getting demanding about tax money, and sends Godfrey off to collect some. But the film gets John’s financial situation all wrong. In the film, he just seems to want lots of money because the government is expensive to run. The reality is a lot messier. John’s financial problem most stemmed from the loss of Normandy to Philip in 1204. He spent the rest of his reign trying to raise the money to finance efforts to recover Normandy. So John was, in fact, trying to recover part of his rightful inheritance that had been confiscated from him.

John’s strategy for raising money had comparatively little to do with taxation, and everything to do with what historians term ‘feudal dues’. As King of England, John was the feudal lord of the English nobility; they held land from him as fiefs, and that gave them obligations to him. These obligations were widely acknowledged, but not really codified. Among the rights that it was universally acknowledged a king had over his vassals were

The right to control the remarriage of a vassal’s widow, or alternately the right to charge her a fee to be free from that control

The right to take a vassal’s orphaned minor heirs into wardship, which allowed him to draw revenues from their fiefs until they were adults

The right to arrange marriages from heirs in wardship

The right to demand a fee (called a relief) when a vassal’s heir took over the fief

The right to demand gifts from his vassals for the marriage of his daughters and the knighting of his sons

The right to demand either 40 days’ military service a year or alternately a cash payment (called scutage) to be free from that service

It needs to be emphasized that these practices were entirely traditional, and in England dated back to the Norman Conquest in the mid-11^th century. John’s father and brother had regularly demanded these dues from their vassals, and when John demanded them he had as much right to do so as his predecessors.

Only a douchebag sits on a throne like that

What John was doing that was problematic was finding ways to use these rights as money-raising devices to help fund a campaign in France. John took advantage of the fact that these dues were only vaguely regulated. It was unclear just how much of a relief a lord could demand from a vassal’s heir, for example, so John charged aggressive reliefs. He ordered his officials to aggressively exploit the fiefs he controlled through wardship, draining money out of them and failing to maintain the properties adequately. He essentially auctioned off the marriages of heiresses and widows, often marrying below their social station (called disparagement). He declared military campaigns, levied scutage, and then cancelled the campaign. These actions were not illegal, but they were distasteful to many of the nobles.

John’s father Henry II had built up royal authority in part by creating a centralized legal system in which plaintiffs paid the crown money to initiate various legal proceedings in royal court. John found various ways to manipulate the legal system to his benefit. Since it was his court, there was nothing illegal about, for example, imposing heaving fines for small offenses, or re-trying a defendant who had been acquitted, or ordering someone imprisoned without a trial. These were all tools that John used to coerce money or obedience out of various subjects.

What offended John’s nobles was not that he was doing these things per se, but rather that he was doing them more than they considered appropriate, and that he was doing these things against them. After nearly a decade of these practices, John’s barons rebelled and seized London. John, working through Archbishop Stephen Langton, negotiated the Magna Carta, an agreement in which John ‘voluntarily’ promised to abide by various enumerated limits. For example, the Magna Carta specifies the amount of money that can be demanded as a relief. It forbids mandatory scutage, the disparagement of widows, and so on. It establishes rules of due process in the legal system and forbids double jeopardy. And it established that if John wished to impose other financial devices, he would have to get the permission of the men who were going to be paying. In other words, if John wanted to impose taxes distinct from the feudal dues, he had to get permission from the tax-payers first. John hadn’t been collecting taxes at all; he was collecting feudal dues and legal fines. But Robin Hood movies translate the issue to modern audiences as taxes because that’s an issue we can understand.

One of four surviving copies of the Magna Carta

In Ridley Scott’s movie, however, the Magna Carta predates John. It was written by Robin’s stonemason father about 25-30 years earlier, during the reign of Henry II. It wasn’t a practical result of negotiations; it was some sort of political manifesto that articulated Enlightenment ideas about ‘freedom’ and human equality 600 years early. It wasn’t a disagreement about the exploitation of feudal rights; it was an attack on royal authority, viewed as tyranny. Needless to say, this is total Hollywood gibberish. Treating the Magna Carta as a sweeping statement of political rights makes no sense whatsoever and situating it in the reign of Henry II rather than late in John’s reign renders it so devoid of context as to be essentially meaningless.

But the movie does get one thing right. John repudiated Magna Carta the moment he thought he could get away with it, and it remained a dead issue until his infant son Henry III inherited the throne the next year. At his coronation, the infant Henry’s representative swore to adhere to the Magna Carta, thus reviving the arrangement. Subsequent monarchs swore to maintain it, thus embedding it in English legal tradition.

This review was made possible by a generous donation from Lyn R. If you want me to review a specific film, please donate and tell me what movie you’d like me to review, and I’ll do my best to track it down and review it, as long as I think it’s appropriate.

Want to Know More?

Robin Hood  is available on Amazon.

Dan Carpenter’s Magna Carta is a good introduction to the document and its interpretation.

Robin Hood: A Whole Lotta Plot Going On

Tags

Cate Blanchett, Douchebag with a Crown, Eleanor of Aquitaine, King John, Max von Sydow, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Oscar Isaac, Richard the Lion-Hearted, Ridley Scott, Robin Hood, Russell Crowe

I haven’t been able post in a long while because my husband and I just bought a house and spent most of last month moving and tackling moving-related stuff. But I’ve finally clawed out the time to tackle a movie, namely Robin Hood (2010, dir. Ridley Scott). Regular reader Lyn R. made a generous donation to the blog and requested that I review it. So Lyn, this is for you, and thank you again for your donation.

As I’ve already explored, all the evidence points to Robin Hood being a 14^th century fictional character rather than a real historical figure. Most Robin Hood films situate the story in the 1190s, at a point when King Richard the Lionhearted is away on crusade. His brother Prince John is making trouble by governing England unjustly and demanding harsh taxation, which forces Robin Hood and his band out of outlaws into resistance against him. Usually, Richard arrives home and puts a stop to John’s hijinks right at the end of the film.

But Ridley Scott’s film follows a very different story. It opens right at the end of Richard’s reign, in 1199. As the film’s prologue text tells us “King Richard the Lion Heart, bankrupt of wealth and glory, is plundering his way back to England after ten years on his crusade. In his army is an archer named Robin Longstride.”

Right away the film is confused about the facts. Richard departed for the Holy Land in 1190, and left for home in 1192. On his way home he was shipwrecked on the Dalmatian coast, wound up falling into the hands of an enemy, and was held for ransom, finally being released in 1194 after a substantial ransom was paid. He returned to his French lands that same year and was back in control of England quickly, although he spent very little time there. So the typical Robin Hood film ends sometimes in 1194 or 1195, after Richard returns to England after his imprisonment.

But in Scott’s telling of the events, Richard (Danny Huston) has apparently spent four years in captivity, based on a comment his mother Eleanor (Eileen Atkins) makes to Prince John (Oscar Isaac), meaning he was released in 1196 and then apparently fought his way westward, plundering as he went, which is total nonsense. By 1199, he still hasn’t gotten to England and is laying siege to Chalus Castle in France. Robin (Russell Crowe) has apparently been in his service the whole time, which raises the question of what Robin was doing while Richard was in prison for 4 years. Were he and the rest of Richard’s army just killing time somewhere in Germany? That seems to be what the film intends, because no one in his army has been home since they left, including Sir Robert Loxley (who is NOT Robin Longstride).

Robin fighting in the Siege of Chalus

The film loosely follows the actual events of the siege of Chalus, which was a minor castle held by one of Richard’s recalcitrant vassals. During the siege, one of the cooks fires a crossbow bolt and hits Richard, fatally wounding him. (In reality, the injury itself didn’t kill Richard; rather the wound became gangrenous and he died more than a week later in the arms of his mother Eleanor.) So as a result, most of the movie takes place after Richard’s death during the reign of King John (1199-1216). That alone puts the film in a different category from pretty much all other Robin Hood films I can think of. There’s no Richard waiting in the wings to swoop in and stop John and lift Robin Hood’s outlawry.

After Richard dies, Robin and his friends Little John, Will Scarlett, and Alan A’Dayle (a name that makes me violently stabby, because it’s pretending to be the Irish O’Doyle) decide that they are sick of fighting and want to get home to England, so they desert and ride for the English Channel before the cost of a ship’s passage becomes unaffordable.

But unbeknownst to them, King Philip Augustus of France (Jonathan Zaccai) is plotting with Sir Godfrey (Mark Strong), one of John’s henchmen. Not realizing that Richard is dead, they hatch a convoluted plan to ambush and kill Richard and then turn England against the new king John so that Philip can invade and conquer England. This is a stupid plot because a far smarter thing to do would be to capture Richard instead of killing him, and then invade England in Richard’s name, claiming that John is trying to usurp Richard. This is the first, but far from the last, time the film has more plot than it can handle.

Mark Strong as the villainous Sir Godfrey

But Richard is already dead, and instead Godfrey winds up ambushing Sir Robert Loxley (Douglas Hodge), who is taking Richard’s crown back to England. He mortally wounds Loxley but then Robin and his men intervene and drive him off. Loxley makes Robin swear to return his sword to his father Sir Walter (Max von Sydow), and then dies. Instead, Robin decides to impersonate Loxley, I think so that he and his men can get free passage to England. They wind up having to deliver Richard’s crown to London, where Eleanor declares John king and immediately crowns him. (In reality, it wasn’t entirely clear that John was the heir. Maybe I’ll do a post on that later.) John, having instantly become a Douchebag with a Crown, decides that instead of rewarding Robin/Loxley with a ring, he will demand that Robin/Loxley go to Nottingham and get the taxes Sir Walter owes him.

Meanwhile, At Nottingham

Apparently Loxley is the Lord of Nottingham, because Sir Walter lives in a castle there. Nottingham itself is depicted as little more than a manor, with a small village of perhaps 200 people outside the castle and the fields in easy walking distance. It seems to have been a great city at some point because there is a massive ruined archway that characters ride through repeatedly.

In reality, Nottingham was a much more substantial settlement. Already by the 9^th century it was of local importance, and by the 1080s it had a population of perhaps 1,500 people, making it by medieval standards a modest-sized town. By 1300, it had maybe 3,000 residents.  Additionally, the castle was just plopped in the middle of some fields, which is a dumb place for a castle because it’s not very defensible; the real Nottingham castle is located on a rocky outcropping above the city. So the film’s depiction of Nottingham is entirely wrong.

Marion (Cate Blanchett) is Loxley’s wife, or rather widow. She is the daughter of some minor knight who for reasons never explained managed to marry Robert Loxley, who is clearly an important figure, since he is the heir to a castle and a close confidant of King Richard. A week after the wedding, Loxley left to join Richard’s forces, and Marion has been living, childless, with Loxley’s blind father Sir Walter. As the semi-evil but largely pointless Sheriff of Nottingham (Matthew McFadyen) points out, because she has no children and her husband is thought dead, when Sir Walter dies, she will be penniless because the Crown will claim the castle.

In case you couldn’t guess, THIS IS NOT HOW MEDIEVAL LAW WORKS. As Ranulf de Glanville, the leading English legal scholar of the 12^th century lays out in his Treatise on the Laws and Customs of the Kingdom of England, when a man marries a women, he is required to give her a dower, property that becomes hers and is intended to support her when she becomes a widow. If Robert did this formally, he would have had to designate a specific property to serve as the dower; if he did not designate a specific property, she automatically gets 1/3 of his property as her dower. The dower property remains in Robert’s hands and out of his wife’s control, but in this case, since he’s out of the country, it would be in Sir Walter’s hands. If Loxley is assumed dead, the dower would now be in Marion’s hands.

Complicating this is the fact that Walter seems to be a vassal of the Crown, although that term is never used. This means that the castle and its manor are probably a fief that Walter holds (enjoys the use of) but doesn’t actually own. When Walter dies, the fief ought to pass to Robert, but if Robert is already dead, it would revert back to the Crown, which still probably has to honor Marion’s status as Robert’s widow and acknowledge whatever dower property she has a claim to. I say probably, because while Robert is the heir, he was never the vassal for the property, so maybe John could be a dick and just ignore Marion’s legal rights. More likely, what John would do is exercise his legal right to control the remarriage of Robert’s widow and sell her marriage to a man who wants to become the new fief-holder. John did that sort thing a good deal during his reign. So Marion would have a problem when Walter dies, because she either has to accept a marriage arranged for her by John or else pay John a sum of money for the right to control her own remarriage. But even if John tries to seize the fief when Walter dies, Marion still gets her dower property and won’t be thrown in a ditch.

And all of this raises the question of why the hell Sir Walter hasn’t remarried to have another son to act as his heir. Apparently he’s surprisingly unconcerned about things like carrying on his family line or taking care of his son’s wife. Given that he was once an extremely important man politically, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

To make matters worse for Marion, there are bandits around Nottingham, and Marion is apparently the only defensive force. She knows how to use a longbow (a century before the English adopted that weapons, but that’s the least of the film’s anachronisms), but despite that, at the start of the film, bandits break into the storehouse and steal all the seed-grain, so Marion has no grain to plant in the fields. The local church has grain that has been tithed to them, but the priest insists that the grain goes to the archbishop of York. Why the archbishop of York should have a claim on the grain from the village church of Nottingham is unexplained, since medieval Nottingham was part of the diocese of Lincoln in the archdiocese of Canterbury, but who knows? Medieval clergy just make up the rules as they go, remember?

Cate Blanchett as Maid, err Wife Marion

Enter Robin

Robin and his men show up as themselves, having apparently forgotten that Robin is supposed to be pretending to be Robert to get John’s taxes. Robin turns over the sword and tells Walter and Marion that Robert is dead, but Walter promptly proposes that Robin pull a Martin Guerre and pretend to be Robert. In exchange he will give Robin the family sword.

Are you starting to notice that this film has way too much plot? The film gives Robin not one but two different bouts of pretending to be Robert Loxley. Godfrey has tricked John into allowing him to rampage around England collecting taxes in a brutal fashion in order to incite the barons of England against John. And Philip’s troops have snuck into England to help Godfrey. But William Marshall (William Hurt) has warned Eleanor about what’s going on, and Eleanor convinces John’s wife, Isabella of Angouleme (Léa Seydoux) who is Philip’s niece, to warn John of what’s going on so John can stop it. But John’s a Douchebag with a Crown and doesn’t want to negotiate with his barons. And meanwhile, Friar Tuck (Mark Addy) and Robin/Loxley orchestrate the theft of the church’s grain when it is being shipped to York, and then they sow the grain in the middle of the night.

But Wait, There’s More!

As it turns out, Sir Walter knew Robin’s father. How he connects the two men is unclear, given that he can’t see and Robin’s father has been dead since Robin was a little boy (he only has faint memories of the man). Apparently the connection is that both were called ‘Longstride’, because the movie mistakenly thinks that people had hereditary last names in the 12^th century.

Spurred on by a clue written on the sword’s hilt, Sir Walter tells Robin that his father was a mason who built a monumental cross in Nottingham. But he was also a political revolutionary who wrote a charter of liberties for a group of barons, the same group who are now rebelling. Why a common stonemason would be able to write or to lead a group of nobles is never explained, and is pretty silly. But it turns out that Longstride Sr anticipated the Magna Carta by about half a century, since he seems to have been active in the 1160s or 70s. Sir William now has the charter, and he sends Robin off to the meeting of the barons and John. So Robin/Loxley proposes that John accept a charter of liberties that will establish equality so that John can be stronger because the people will love him, because 12^th century Englishmen think just like 21^st century Americans. John agrees and the barons call off the rebellion just in time for Robin/Loxley to lead their troops to rescue Nottingham from Godfrey’s men, who are plundering the village, killing Sir Walter, trying to burn people alive and trying to rape Marion.

When that’s done with, the film still isn’t over. Robin/Loxley leads everybody, including the bandits and Marion and Tuck, halfway across England to Dover, where King Philip’s troops are trying to stage the most absurd amphibious landing in cinematic history. Robin and Marion both suddenly discover that they know how to fight with swords from horseback, so they lead a charge on the beach and foil Philip’s invasion and force him back to France, and everyone lives happily ever after except that John is Douchebag with a Crown and burns the Magna Carta and outlaws Robin Loxley aka Robin of the Hood (cuz apparently Nottingham is in the Inner City) and that’s how Robin Hood became a bandit and almost established American democracy in 1199.

There’s a lot for me to comment on here, so we’ll be dining out on this movie for several blog posts.

This post was made possible by a generous donation. If you have a movie you particularly want me to review, if you make a donation and tell me what film you want me to review, I’ll do at least one post on the film, assuming A) I can get access to the film somehow and B) I think it’s appropriate for the blog. (If there’s an issue, I’ll let you pick another movie.)

Want to Know More?

Robin Hood  is available on Amazon.

If you want to know more about Robin Hood, the place to start is J.C. Holt’s Robin Hood (Third Edition). It’s a really good exploration of the historical issues with the Robin Hood legend. But if you want to dig a little further, take a look at Maurice Keen’s The Outlaws of Medieval Legend, which discusses Robin Hood as well as several other real and folkloric outlaws.

Exodus: Gods and Kings: Does It Whitewash?

Tags

Aaron Paul, Ancient Egypt, Ben Kingsley, Christian Bale, Exodus, Exodus: Gods and Kings, Joel Edgerton, Moses, Racial Issues, Ramesses II, Ridley Scott, Sigourney Weaver, Whitewashing

In my last post I dug into what we know about the race/ethnicity of ancient Egyptians. In this post, I want to dig into the accusations that Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014, dir. Ridley Scott) was whitewashing its story.

 

Film vs Fact

The story of the Exodus involves two distinct groups, the Egyptians and the Hebrews. The Egyptians of the 19^th dynasty period, as I explored last time, were probably somewhat ethnically mixed and would probably look to us like Middle Easterners, perhaps with some Nubian features. Ramesses II, according to a French analysis of his mummy, was fair-skinned and red-haired, and therefore might have looked somewhat more ‘white’ than the people he ruled over. The Hebrews of the period would definitely have looked Middle Eastern.

Ridley Scott

So who did Ridley Scott cast in his film? (In this list, I identify the actor’s country of origin, his or her ancestry to the extent I can determine it, and my subjective opinion of what ‘race’ the actor appears to be based on publicity photos)

Here are the Eygptians:

Ramesses II: Joel Edgerton     Australian, of Dutch and English descent,

White

Seti I: John Turturro                American, of Italian descent, White

Tuya: Sigourney Weaver           American, of British descent, White

Priestess: Indira Varma            English, of Indian and Swiss descent, Mixed

Hegep: Ben Mendelsohn          Australian, of British descent, White

Bithiah: Hiam Abbass              Israeli, of Arab descent, Middle Eastern

Nefertari: Golshifteh Farahani  Iranian, of Iranian descent, Middle Eastern

Vizier: Ghassan Massoud           Syrian, probably of Arab or mixed descent,

Middle Eastern

Farahani and Egerton as Nefertari and Ramesses

Here are the Hebrews:

Moses: Christian Bale             English, of English and white South African

descent, White

Nun: Ben Kingsley                   English, of English and Indian descent, Mixed

Joshua: Aaron Paul                  American, of British and German descent,

White

Zipporah: Maria Valverde     Spanish, probably of Spanish descent, White

Jethro: Kevork Malikyan        Turkish, of Armenian descent, Middle Eastern

Miriam: Tara Fitzgerald         English, of British descent, White

Aaron: Andrew Tarbet            American, uncertain descent, White

Maria Valverde, who played Zipporah

(I classified Varma and Kingsley as looking ‘mixed’ because in different photos they can appear variously as White or Middle Eastern.)

So the major Egyptian characters (those who appear in multiple scenes, have a decent number of lines, or play an important role in a scene) are almost entirely played by white actors. Of the non-white actors, only Farahani’s Nefertari is presented as a significant character, and objectively it’s not a large part. Varma’s unnamed Priestess does appear in several scenes, usually with a line or two in each, but I wouldn’t call her an important character.

Of the Hebrews, the only character of significance played by a non-white actor is Nun, played by the mixed-race Kingsley, whom most Americans probably think of as a white actor. Malikyan’s Jethro does play a prominent role in a couple of scenes when Moses is meeting Zipporah, but disappears into the background after that.

Ben Kingsley as Nun

The only characters of any significance at all played by actual Middle Eastern actors are Nefertari and Jethro, neither of whom is truly a key figure in the film.

But among the Egyptians are large numbers of Middle Eastern and black actors playing minor characters like “Egyptian soldier #3.” If you scroll through the IMDb full cast list you’ll see lots of black and Middle Eastern actors playing uncredited roles like “Moses’ General”, “Fan Handler”, and “Egyptian Civilian Lower Class”.

So all of the important characters are played by white actors, a few supporting roles are played by Middle Eastern or mixed-ethnicity actors, and the minor or uncredited roles are played by a mixture of Middle Easterners, blacks, and Latinos (to judge by surnames and photos).

This photo perfectly captures the racial make-up of the cast

Now, as far as Ramesses, Seti, and Tuya are concerned, one could possibly make a case for casting white actors in those roles. As I noted in my previous post, Ramesses II seems to have been fair-skinned and red-haired, although his statuary suggests he might have had Nubian facial features. One of Seti’s few statues depicts him with thin lips (the nose is missing), and his mummy certainly suggests that, at least in terms of facial features, he could have passed for European, although what he looked like in life is a guess. About Tuya we don’t have much to go on. But if Ramesses was fair-skinned, at least one of his parents might have been as well. So if Ridley Scott had wanted to, he could have said something like “Based on the best evidence we have, Ramesses II and his parents appear to have looked European, so in the interests of historical accuracy, we decided to cast white actors in those roles.” It might not have been a very good answer, but at least there would have been a little historical support for it.

Seti I’s mummy

But that’s not how Scott responded to accusations of whitewashing. What he actually said was “I can’t mount a film of this budget, where I have to rely on tax rebates in Spain, and say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such….I’m just not going to get it financed. So the question doesn’t even come up.”

I’ll give him credit for admitting that money and studio politics were a major factor in his casting decisions. What he’s basically saying is “Look, the studio and the financial backers wouldn’t let me do a big budget film with non-white leads, so I didn’t even consider casting non-whites in the important roles.”

Weaver as Tuya

But I don’t buy it. He’s insisting that because he was making a blockbuster film, he needed actors who can really pack theaters, and whether we like it or not, big name white actors ‘open’ movies much more reliably than non-white actors. But let’s look at the big names in that cast list again.

Christian Bale is undeniably a hot actor, having done Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy in the past decade. So Bale can definitely ‘open’ a big film effectively. Sigourney Weaver is a wonderful actress and probably still a household name, but she hasn’t carried a major film since 1997’s Alien Resurrection, or perhaps 1999’s Galaxy Quest if we’re being a little bit charitable. Ben Kingsley, like Weaver, is a marvelous actor and highly respected, but his only ‘big’ film was 1982’s Gandhi. Like Weaver, he mostly adds prestige to a film rather than drawing the kinds of audiences blockbusters require. Joel Edgerton is nice actor (you might remember him as the lead from 2005’s Kinky Boots or in 2012’s Zero Dark Thirty), but he’s not a huge box office draw; I didn’t even know the actor’s name when I saw the film. Aaron Paul is best known from Breaking Bad, so maybe he brought in some fans of that series, but I doubt the studio was banking on him; he’s in a modest supporting role. And after that we get to character actors like John Turturro and Indira Varma. So Bale was cast for his ability to carry a blockbuster. Weaver, Kingsley, and Turturro add some gravitas, but probably weren’t critical to getting the financing for the film, and Edgerton, the number two lead, seems sort of like an afterthought.

Bale in front of a painfully white-looking Sphinx

When you look at in that light, Scott’s defense reads much more like an excuse. He’s shifting the blame for his casting choices onto the nameless suits of the Hollywood system and essentially saying he had no control over whom he cast. Sure, Bale was the anchor; the film wasn’t going to get made without him, so we probably just have accept that Moses had to be played by a white guy. But Ramesses could probably have been played by almost any young male actor, and certainly Seti and Tuya could have been anyone who could plausibly have been presented as Ramesses’ parents. They could even had cast Tuya as a different race from Seti. And they could have cast Joshua, Aaron, and Zipporah with Jewish or Middle Eastern actors, since only Aaron Paul has any significant name recognition at all. Scott’s defense rings mostly false, and I think the real issue is that he just didn’t want to be bothered to go to bat with the studios and try to produce a more ethnically-appropriate cast.

For me, there’s one thing that seals the deal, that really demonstrates that Scott didn’t particularly care that he was whitewashing his film and producing a cast that makes no historical sense whatsoever.

This character:

That’s Malak, the manifestation of God/angel/boy/figment of Moses’ imagination that speaks for God. This character could have been played by literally ANYONE. The character could have been any race whatsoever, could even have been played by a young girl. The character is entirely made up, so he could look however Scott wanted. No one was going to the film to see the total unknown who played Malak (except presumably that actor’s family), so casting for box office draw wasn’t an issue. If Scott had cast a Yoruba child, a Sudanese, a Latino, a Haitian, an Arab, a Japanese, or an Eskimo, it’s not like the studio could say, “There are no angels of color. God has to be white.”

But Scott cast this kid:

Isaac Andrews is a lily-white English schoolboy. That’s right, Scott choose a white kid to represent God. Even Cecil B. DeMille’s 10 Commandments, made at the height of 20^th century American racial insensitivity, didn’t dare to make God white. So in addition to all the actually important and authoritative characters being white, so is God. Whitewashing doesn’t get any worse than that.

Exodus: Gods and Kings: Film vs Narrative

Tags

Ancient Egypt, Ben Kingsley, Christian Bale, Exodus, Exodus: Gods and Kings, Joel Edgerton, Moses, Ramesses II, Religious Issues, Ridley Scott, Sigourney Weaver

How do you a historical analysis of a movie based on a sacred text that scholars have not been able to find much factual corroboration for? It’s not possible to compare the Biblical story of the Exodus to historical records from Egypt, because Egyptian records make no clear reference to the event, and the Exodus narrative doesn’t identify the pharaoh involved, making it hard to know when the events are supposed to have taken place. So how do I review Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014, dir. Ridley Scott)?

The film tells the story of Moses (Christian Bale) and Pharaoh Ramesses II (Joel Edgerton) as they fight over whether or not Ramesses will free the enslaved Hebrews. We get all the major beats of the Exodus narrative, including the burning bush, the ten plagues and the crossing of the Red Sea. But the film takes substantial liberties with the narrative. Scott decided to take the approach that all of the miraculous events could have had modern scientific explanations, and so he left the question open as to what was actually happening in Egypt.

I guess the place to start my analysis is to see where the film follows the Biblical narrative and where it doesn’t.

 

Moses Gets His Start

The film basically follows the Biblical birth-narrative for Moses (described in back-story rather than shown), that when the Pharaoh ordered the Hebrew boys killed because the Hebrews were multiplying too quickly, Moses’ mother put him in a basket and floated him down the Nile, so that he was found by Pharaoh’s daughter. Bithiah. As a result he’s raised in the royal household and rises to become a general, a detail not in the original text. We get to see Moses and Ramesses fighting the Hittites and Moses saving Ramesses’ life in battle.

This allows the film to develop the relationship between Moses, Ramesses, and Seti I (John Turturro), Ramesses’ father, who quietly regrets that he cannot make Moses his successor, because he can see that Moses is a better leader than Ramesses. Ramesses slowly comes to resent his foster brother. None of this is in the book of Exodus; the ruler is simply called Pharaoh, and there is nothing to suggest that the Pharaoh whom Moses confronts is not the same Pharaoh who ordered the deaths of the Hebrew boys.

Edgerton and Bale as Ramesses and Moses

So the whole “Moses and Pharaoh are foster brothers” element of the film is made up; in doing this, Scott is probably drawing off of Cecil B DeMille’s Ten Commandments. Since DeMille’s 1956 version was a partial remake of his 1923 silent film of the same name, I suspect that the idea to make Moses and Pharaoh brothers ultimately goes back to Jeanie MacPherson, the screenwriter who penned the silent version’s script. The three films certainly have a lot of parallels beyond the ‘foster brothers’ angle: the emphasis on enormous sets, villainous Egyptians whipping Hebrews, white people playing all the principle roles, and many others. But I’ll confess to not having researched the history of Moses fiction, so perhaps I’m off-base there.

The Biblical narrative does not explain how Moses rediscovers his birth family, but in the film Moses meets Nun (Ben Kingsley), who tells him of his Hebrew parentage. He initially conceals the fact, but the villainous Egyptian Hegep (Ben Mendelsohn) tells Ramesses, who threatens to cut off the arm of Miriam (Tara Fitzgerald), a palace slave who is also Moses’ sister and the one who brought the baby to Bithiah’s attention in the first place. So Moses admits the truth, at which point Queen Tuya (Sigourney Weaver, given pretty much nothing to do except dislike Moses), Ramesses’ mother, persuades the pharaoh to exile Moses and send assassins after him. This is a deviation from the original text, in which Moses flees after killing an Egyptian (a detail that does happen in the film, but is not the reason why Pharaoh wants him dead).

Then we get Moses’ meeting with the shepherdess Zipporah (Maria Valverde) and her father Jethro, which happens the way it does in the Biblical text. They get married with suspiciously modern-sounding wedding vows, have a son, and debate whether to raise him religiously or not. Zipporah wants Gershom to be able to decide for himself what he believes when he reaches adulthood, while Moses wants to raise him to believe in himself. This whole sequence is laughably modern in the way it thinks about issues of marriage, family, and religion, and is in some ways the real low point of the film.

Moses and Zipporah swearing to ‘trust whatever they do not yet know’ of each other. The scene with the Unity Candle got cut

 

Are You There, God? It’s Me, Moses

Then Moses wanders up Mt Horeb looking for some lost goats. He gets caught in a landslide during a storm and is knocked out, and when he wakes up he’s trapped in mud. He sees a burning bush and has a conversation with a young boy, identified in the credits as Malak (the Hebrew word for ‘angel’ and ‘messenger’). While the choice to use this mysterious boy as Yahweh’s mouthpiece in the film attracted a lot of attention, I actually don’t find the idea problematic. Throughout the Biblical narrative God and Moses talk a good deal, but the text rarely explains what that looked like. Scott made the reasonable choice that it needed to be depicted visually rather than just using a booming voice from nowhere. And, as Christian Bale said in an interview, “I’m always interested in asking other people’s opinions on it. How would you have represented God, if you were in Ridley’s position? It can be very easy to pick apart someone’s choice for a depiction of God. But if you are put in Ridley’s shoes, it’s an immensely difficult thing. How on earth do you do that?” That’s a pretty fair point. Scott had to make a choice about how to show that, and his choice was inevitably going to bother some people.

Malak (Isaac Andrews)

 

So for the rest of the film, when Moses talks with God, he has a conversation with Malak. Malak is a bit like Harvey the Pooka; only Moses can see him, which raises the question of whether Malak is all in his head. That’s Bale’s interpretation. “I think [Moses] was likely schizophrenic and was one of the most barbaric individuals that I ever read about in my life.”

A bigger issue than Malak’s appearance is his personality. As divine messengers go, he’s very angry, and wants to take revenge on the Egyptians for what they’ve done to His people. As the film goes on, Moses becomes more and more appalled at what is happening to the Egyptians, whom he naturally cares for, and he argues with Malak several times. The notion of arguing with God is a very Jewish notion, and does have at least a bit of support in the text, since Moses is initially very resistant to acting as God’s messenger and keeps trying to offer excuses for why he’s not the best man for the job. But the Biblical Moses slowly becomes more certain over time, and directs his anger not at God but at the Hebrews when they become disobedient. But the film does do a nice job of exploring the uncertainty of a prophet, a common theme in the Tanakh/Old Testament.

 

Back to Egypt

Moses heads back to Egypt and meets his brother Aaron (Andrew Tarbet). In the original text, Aaron is an important figure who accompanies Moses on repeated visits to Pharaoh’s court and performs the famous staff-into-snake miracle. In the film, Aaron is pretty much an afterthought, with virtually no dialog or function. As a matter of fact, I kept thinking Joshua was Aaron, because Joshua keeps sneaking off to watch Moses talk to empty air (since no one else can see Malak) and Aaron basically just disappears into the background.

In the Biblical narrative, Moses and Aaron’s visits to Pharaoh alternate with the various plagues, as Pharaoh remains unmoved by what is happening. Scott’s film pares down the meetings, perhaps because the repetition doesn’t make for compelling cinema, At one point, a visit from Moses is replaced by Moses writing a text on a horse’s side and sending it to the court, a really bizarre choice that isn’t explained and just seems silly.

Pharaoh’s response to Moses’ first visit is the famous ‘bricks without straw’ edict, but in the film Ramesses issues that order long after the plagues begin. Instead, when Pharaoh refuses to release the Hebrews, Moses trains them in guerilla tactics and they start blowing stuff up and attacking ships with fire arrows, because you can’t skip the Shit Blows Up and the Fire Arrows at Night scenes in films like this.

I’m a bit conflicted about this. A charitable reading of this is that the film is trying to highlight the ineffectiveness of violence compared to God’s power. But given that the film doesn’t want to definitively say that Yahweh exists, I think it’s more likely to just be an attempt to bring some macho violence to a film that doesn’t really get to have much of that.

Moses teaching the Hebrews how to do archery

Malak shows up and tells Moses he’s taking way too long to liberate the Hebrews, and that it’s time to get Biblical on Ramesses’s ass. The Ten Plagues all occur, in almost the right order (the death of the livestock and the boils are switched). But Scott favors a naturalistic explanation for the plagues. The Nile turns to blood when large crocodiles slaughter a bunch of fishermen (ignoring the Biblical detail that even water than was kept in buckets and jars was affected), and the blood kills the fish and forces the frogs out of the water. Without the frogs in the river, lice and flies proliferate, giving many people boils. Then a disease strikes the livestock, which die bleeding for the mouth. Then a massive hailstorm strikes, followed by a swarm of locusts that eat all the crops in the field. Because Ramesses is by this point just being an asshole, he refuses to release any food from the royal granaries, which provokes a food riot, which Ramesses crushes with his soldiers.

Then darkness sets in, and Ramesses declares that if one more bad thing happens, so help him God, he’s gonna kill all the Hebrew babies just cuz. But apparently this gives Yahweh an idea…

Malak tells Moses that he wants to humiliate Ramesses and gives him the rules for the Passover, which Moses teaches to the Israelites. A shadow sweeps across the land and all the Egyptian boys die. This is the only one of the plagues that the film makes no real attempt to naturalize.

What is nice about the plagues sequence is that it does a very good job of dramatizing just how appalling the Biblical plagues are in the text; at different moments, they’re frightening, disgusting, dangerous, and tragic, and the made-up detail about the food riot highlights the undercurrent of the Biblical narrative, which is that the plagues are destroying Egypt’s economy, ruining all the sources of food and driving the people to desperation and panic. Naturalistic explanations or not, Scott’s film drives home for those who believe the Biblical narrative just how horrible it would have been to live through.

The Plague of Locusts

 

The Parting of the Sea

When Moses first leaves Egypt, he crosses the sea at what the film identifies as the Tiran Straits, which the film apparently thinks separates Egypt from the Sinai peninsula. In reality, the Tiran Straits separate the southern end of the Sinai peninsula from Arabia and the Gulf of Aqaba from the Red Sea. The Straits are depicted as shallow enough to walk across, when in reality its shallowest channel is 240 ft deep. So the geography is way off. Moses tries to lead the Israelites to the Tiran Straits, but decides that because Pharaoh will easily be able to follow them with his chariots, so instead he takes a mountain pass, gets lost, and runs into the Red Sea. So apparently Moses is as bad at map-reading as Ridley Scott is.

Egypt is to the left of the Sinai peninsula

Frustrated, Moses takes a nap, and when he wakes up, the water has inexplicably receded. Scott says that his treatment of this event is based on a tsumani caused by an earthquake that happened around 3000 BC off the Italian coast. I’m a bit skeptical about this claim, since there aren’t records about Italy reaching back that far, and I’m not sure how archaeology could document the temporary recession of water like that, but let’s put that aside. The film ignores the Biblical details about the pillar of smoke and fire that separated the Hebrews and the Egyptians or the powerful wind that split the water in two. Moses hurriedly leads his people across and Ramesses foolishly leads his men into the sea. Then tornadoes and a huge tidal wave sweep in and destroy the army and Ramesses barely gets out alive.

The Red Sea, starting to un-part

A little later, Moses carves the 10 Commandments at Malak’s instruction and rides off to Canaan.

Although the film deviates from the narrative in a variety of ways (the reason Moses has to leave Egypt, the guerilla war against Egypt, omitting most of the meetings between Moses and Pharaoh), these are comparatively small alterations to the text that can mostly be understood as simplifying the structure of the narrative and trying to add more ‘action’ to the film (which is to say, violence). It’s hard to have a blockbuster film without at least one major battle and a Shit Blows Up scene.

The biggest deviation from the text comes in the desire to pare out or naturalize the various miracles. The idea of using science to explain away Biblical miracles emerged in the 18^th century as a way of demonstrating the superiority of the Scientific Revolution over the ignorance and superstition of the past. I’ve never found it a particularly useful way to understand Biblical miracles because it relies on the assumption that ancient people were so steeped in ignorance and superstition that they were incapable of exercising even the smallest bit of rational thought, curiosity, or skepticism. It assumes that people who lived far more intimately with nature than we do today were unable to actually observe nature. It also ignores the whole question of why ancient people interpreted a scientific phenomenon in a particular way, so it doesn’t actually explain very much. And Biblical miracle stories often emphasize that the observable facts don’t fit with naturalistic explanations. The whole point of saying in Exodus 7:19 that even water in jars and buckets will turn to blood is to demonstrate that natural explanations couldn’t explain it. For the first several miracles, Pharaoh’s wise men are able to duplicate the miracles, but after the third plague they admit they can’t reproduce the effects. The text is fairly plain; these events defy natural explanation. Accept the story as a miracle or discount it and explore why a culture would tell stories about miracles that didn’t happen, but trying to naturalize the miracles is just condescending to our ancestors.

Sucks to be Egyptian

Scott was clearly trying to avoid having to replicate DeMIlle’s Ten Commandments, and you can’t blame him. While that film also makes alterations to the text, it plays the miracles pretty much as written, so if Scott had followed the same strategy, all he would have gotten was a bigger remake of a Hollywood classic, and critics would probably have complained that he wasn’t bringing anything fresh to the film. Like it or not The Ten Commandments works quite well, as long as you accept the 50s film conventions and Heston’s acting style. There’s no point in remaking a successful film (although these days Hollywood doesn’t understand that), so I think Scott made the right choice to take the film in a very different direction. Its portrait of a deeply uncertain and conflicted Moses who argues with a very certain and angry Yahweh is an interesting one, one that highlights elements of the original text that don’t normally get a lot of attention. I’m not sure the film really succeeds, but it’s a valiant effort to breathe new life into a familiar story.

Next time, I’ll take a poke at the historical issues around the Exodus narrative.

 

Update: When I wrote this post, I forgot about a reference in Exodus 2 about the pharaoh who raised Moses dying before Moses saw the Burning Bush. So the Moses and Pharaoh are foster brother” thing is actually readily derivable from Exodus itself, although it is not pointed out in the text.

“Want to Know More?

Exodus: Gods and Kings is available on Amazon. If you want to read the story, check out the Bible!

1492: The Conquest of Paradise: Trouble In Paradise

Tags

1492: The Conquest of Paradise, Adrian de Moxica, Bartolome de las Casas, Christopher Columbus, Francisco Bobadilla, Francisco Roldan, Gerard Depardieu, Latin America, Medieval Europe, Medieval Spain, Michael Winscott, Ridley Scott

As I mentioned in my last post, the traditional Columbus narrative that most Americans learn focuses almost entirely on his first voyage to the New World and the supposed obstacles leading up to that voyage. But 1492: The Conquest of Paradise (1992, dir. Ridley Scott) covers that material in only about 40 minutes or so. The remaining two thirds of the film are devoted to what came after Columbus arrived on the Bahamian island (probably) now known as San Salvador. The fact that Scott devoted a majority of the film to what came after the discovery of the New World is definitely to his credit; this is a portion of Columbus’ story that is largely unknown to the average American. Unfortunately, what is less to Scott’s credit is the systematic effort the film makes to exonerate Columbus from some of the things he did after he discovered San Salvador.

(And to be clear, Columbus discovered the “New World” the same way hipsters discover new bands. It’s new to them, but that doesn’t mean that no one else knew about it before them. They just want to pretend that.)

In an unintentionally accurate metaphor, Columbus is apparently going to stab the surf.

The film depicts Columbus (Gerard Depardieu) as experiencing a deep sense of wonder about the lush jungle environment of San Salvador. In a voice-over narration by Columbus, he says that he has found a new Eden, a theme the film reinforces with shots of snakes (one of whom kills a crew member, in a foreshadowing that this Eden is not all smiles and fluffy bunnies). Throughout the rest of the film, Columbus is shown as idealistically longing for this promised land, envisioning Spaniards and native peoples living together harmoniously. He wants to convert them to Christianity, but he wants to achieve this peacefully.

They discover the native Arawak people and build a tentative relationship with them. Columbus expresses interest in the gold artifacts they possess, and the Arawak chieftain gives him some. Parts of the film are here drawing directly off of Columbus’ journal, but what the film leaves out here is that Columbus took a number of Arawaks captive and tried to force them to show him where the gold came from. He leaves 39 men behind to build a fort and then returns to Spain with gold, parrots, and native men (which the film again conveniently forgets to explain were his prisoners). The film also falsely represents him as introducing tobacco to the Spanish court.

The Second Voyage of Gerard Depardieu

The film then collapses Columbus’ second and third voyage into one long sequence. He prepares a second expedition, but it is clear that his rise to prominence is resented by the Spanish nobility, who emerge as the bad guys of the second half of the film, especially Adrian de Moxica (Michael Winscott), a surly trouble-making noble whose hair and make-up are styled to make him look creepy. Over the course of the film Moxica emerges as the real snake in Eden. He repeatedly wants to kill natives and has to be talked down by Columbus, who just wants peace. It is implied that he helps one of his men rape a native woman. He resents Columbus’ demands that he engage in physical labor. When the natives begin bringing gold dust to the settlement, he chops the hand off a man who hasn’t found any. Columbus arrests him for this, but then a local tribe stages an ambush and Columbus has to take men to suppress it. While he is gone, Moxica is released from prison, burns Columbus’ house and leads a rebellion. When Columbus finally defeats and corners him, Moxica jumps off a cliff rather than surrender.

With a face like that, you know Moxica eats babies for breakfast

The minor problem in this narrative is that Moxica was not the leader of the rebellion; he was only a participant in Francisco Roldán’s rebellion. He was captured and hanged, while Roldán successfully negotiated with Columbus for peace. It’s possible to reconcile much of the film’s version of events with the actual events, but Moxica’s role in the whole matter is exaggerated.

The bigger problem is that Scott is leaving out the fact that Columbus himself was guilty of most of the things the film shows Moxica doing. When Columbus arrived back on San Salvador, he discovered the Taino people had destroyed the fort and killed the men who had stayed behind. In retaliation, Columbus forced the Taino to provide gold dust on a regular basis and cut the hands off those who failed to deliver the tribute. He began enslaving native peoples and may have participated in the rape of at least one of them. He resisted the conversion of the native peoples because it was illegal under Spanish law to enslave Christians. In other words, Columbus showed comparatively little interest in peacefully co-existing with the natives and instead violently exploited and enslaved them.

The subtitle “The Conquest of Paradise” is clearly meant to convey Ridley Scott’s sense that the Spanish mistreated the Carib peoples. The opening credits play over wood-block scenes of Spaniards massacring natives. Depardieu’s Columbus wants to treat them well, while the Spaniards around him want to abuse and exploit them. It’s laudable that Scott wanted to present this side of the story to an American population that is still today largely unaware of these issues, but his insistence on treating Columbus as the hero of the story prevents him from admitting that Columbus was in fact the driving force behind much of this ‘Conquest of Paradise’. So once again, the film’s insistence on a heroic Columbus turns the facts upside down. The hero is shown opposing the evils he himself enacted.

Columbus making some new friends

Nor does the film want to admit that Columbus and his brothers were largely incompetent governors. The film depicts Moxica rebelling because Columbus is preventing him from abusing the natives, because he resents a commoner having authority over him, and because he is unhappy that he is being forced to labor like a commoner. One colonist accuses him of treating the natives better than the Spaniards. So Columbus’ problem is that he’s too good to the natives. Here the typical American film’s prejudice against aristocrats comes through. Moxica is a noble and therefore a bad guy, while Columbus is a commoner and therefore a good guy. Never mind the fact that Columbus had been ennobled by the Spanish government; Columbus remembers his roots.

The film shows natives being sent to Spain as slaves, as a punishment for their rebellion, but never explains who took the decision to impose this punishment, even though it obviously has to be Columbus, since he’s the guy in charge. Then a (fictitious) hurricane strikes San Salvador, badly damaging everything. This provides the opening his opponents need, and they orchestrate his recall to Spain and the loss of his office and much of his property, with the film suggesting that he was left quite poor.

In reality, Columbus made numerous mistakes as governor. He sent Isabella 500 slaves, which angered her, because she objected to the enslavement of Spanish subjects, so she sent them back with a stern rebuke. The colony struggled not because of a hurricane but because of Columbus’ poor decisions. What drove Roldán’s rebellion was apparently a sense that Columbus and his brothers were mismanaging the colony, because the Spaniards wanted the right to exploit the natives for their own profit instead of just for Columbus’ profit. Ultimately, Columbus capitulated and signed a deal with Roldán that established the encomienda system that permitted the virtual enslavement of natives.

Columbus recognized that he was losing control of the situation and asked the Spanish Crown for assistance. Instead, Isabella sent Francisco de Bobadilla to conduct an investigation. Ultimately Bobadilla removed Columbus from office, sent him back to Spain as a prisoner, and assumed the governorship for two years until he was replaced.

In 2006, a scholar in Spain discovered Bobadilla’s report about the accusations against Columbus. The report, which names 23 witnesses, including both supporters and opponents of Columbus, describes him as a tyrant who sought to maintain his authority through violence and intimidation. It claims that Columbus regularly employed torture, mutilation, and slavery as punishment to keep control of the colony. He punished a native rebellion by dismembering the rebels and parading their body parts around. We must be cautious about simply trusting Bobadilla’s report; since he took over Columbus’ office, we can see a motive for exaggerating Columbus’ misdeeds.

But other sources confirm the general picture of the report. One Spanish priest, Bartolemé de las Casas, claimed that between 3 and 4 million native people died under Columbus’ rule. This may well be an exaggeration; an incomplete census taken by Columbus’ brother found 1.13 million people on Hispaniola, but if even a tenth of de las Casas’ figure is accurate, it’s still pretty horrible. By 1540, the Taino people had become extinct; in 1514, the native population of Hispaniola had been reduced to around 22,000. In 1542, de las Casas’ report about the Spanish treatment of the natives shocked Charles V into abolishing the encomienda system, although the system that replaced it wasn’t much better.

However, in fairness to Columbus, not all of the death toll was intentional; the natives were particularly vulnerable to Old World diseases that had inadvertently been brought along. Claims that Columbus presided over a virtual holocaust of natives are a conflation of his actual misdeeds with a death toll from disease that Columbus could not have anticipated or prevented.

Bobadilla’s report wasn’t rediscovered until more than a decade after 1492 was released, so Scott couldn’t have included these specific charges, but much of Columbus’ brutality against the natives and the charges of mismanagement were well known to scholars when he made the film. So while Scott wants to be honest with the audience about how poorly the Spanish treated the native peoples, he is also engaging in misdirection, trying to shift the blame for Columbus’ actions onto Moxica. He’s trying to eat his cake and have it too, and the result is a film that obscures the past as much as it reveals it.

A Few Other Things

Two other elements of the high school textbook narrative need to be briefly addressed. The first is that Columbus never realized what he had found. In the film, when he is removed from office (which happened in 1500), Bobadilla tells him that Amerigo Vespucci has discovered the mainland just beyond the Caribbean Islands. There is some uncertainty about how many voyages Vespucci made (at least one, and possibly two fabricated letters supposedly by Vespucci have muddied the waters), but he definitely sailed along the Brazilian coastline in 1501 and may have made a voyage in 1499. So the film suggests that it was Vespucci who finally located South America.

Amerigo Vespucci

However, in 1498, at least one year before Vespucci, Columbus found the mouth of the Orinoco river and correctly recognized that he had to have found a continent and not just another island. In 1502, during his fourth and last voyage, he found Honduras and Panama, and was told by the natives of another ocean. Thus he probably figured out that he had not found China or India, although we cannot be certain.

Also, the film implies that Columbus died poor. When he returns to Seville after being released from a Spanish prison, he is reunited with his mistress Beatriz (whom the film allows us to think is actually his wife) and she tells him that “they” took everything from their house. It’s true that the Spanish Crown stripped him of most of his titles and refused to pay him the 10% of all profits from the colonies as they had earlier agreed to do, but he was not left penniless. He died in relative comfort and his son was eventually able to reclaim some of the rights that had been granted to him. His descendants today still hold his title “Admiral of the Ocean Sea”, as an epilogue text to 1492 tells us.

Want To Know More?

1492: Conquest of Paradiseis available on Amazon.

Columbus’ writings are available from Penguin as The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Classics)

Marvin Lunenfeld’s 1492: Discovery, Invasion, Encounter: Sources and Interpretations (Sources in Modern History Series)would be a good place to start learning about the impact of Columbus on the ‘new world’ he found. Another good book is William D. and Carla Rahn Philip’s The Worlds of Christopher Columbus.

1492: The Conquest of Paradise: (Not) Your High School Columbus

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1492: The Conquest of Paradise, Christopher Columbus, Flat Earth, Gerard Depardieu, Latin America, Medieval Europe, Medieval Spain, Ridley Scott, The Caribbean

In 1992, there was obvious interest in the anniversary of Columbus’ famous voyage of discovery, so not one but two films were released to cash in on public interest. Ilya Salkind’s Chrisopher Columbus: The Discovery faired quite poorly at the box office and was viewed as something of a fiasco. 1492: The Conquest of Paradise (dir. Ridley Scott) didn’t do very well at the box office either; apparently there was less interest than people thought (Americans not interested in history? What a shock!). But Scott’s film got somewhat better reviews, and it’s probably a little bit more remembered nowadays, so I’m going to tackle this one first. I’ll probably get around to the other film at some later date.

The Basic Problem with Columbus

The essential problem with telling Columbus’ story is that Americans tend to have a very strong idea of what it looks like, largely derived from high school history textbooks. And much of what these textbooks have to say about Columbus is crap.

In his 1995 book Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen examined the most widely-used high school American history textbooks and studied both what percentage of their material was factually correct and how this material was presented to students. His conclusion is that a very high percentage of the material is either provably false or simply made-up speculation. In his chapter on Columbus, he offers a composite paragraph representing what these textbooks generally have to say, which I reproduce here; boldface portions are what scholars can actually say with reasonable certainty.

“Born in Genoa of humble parents, Christopher Columbus grew up to be an experienced seafarer, venturing as far as Iceland and West Africa. His adventures convinced him that the world must be round, and that sailing west could have the fabled riches of the East—spices and gold—, superseding the overland routes, which the Turks had closed off to commerce. To get funding for his enterprise, he beseeched monarch after monarch in Western Europe. After first being dismissed Isabella of Spain, Columbus finally got his chance when Isabella decided to underwrite a modest expedition. Columbus outfitted three pitifully small ships, the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria and set forth from Spain. After an arduous journey of more than two months, during which his mutinous crew nearly threw him overboard, Columbus discovered the West Indies on October 12, 1492. Unfortunately, although he made three more voyages to America, he never knew he had discovered a new world. Columbus died in obscurity, unappreciated and penniless. Yet without his daring, American history would have been very different, because in a sense he made it all possible.” (Loewen, p.54)

As you can see, more of the paragraph is speculation or falsehood than is fact. From your own education, you might remember details such as that the voyage involved heavy storms, that Columbus altered the logs of his journey, or that the crew was on the brink of mutiny when land was sighted. These are common details included in some high school textbooks, but they’re made up. The fact is that we don’t actually know much about the journey itself.

Most famously, you probably heard the story that everyone in Columbus’ day thought the world was flat and that it was possible to sail off the edge of the world. According to the story, Columbus was the first person to realize that the world was round. That’s crap too, made up by Washington Irving for his History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, a three-volume historical novel published in 1828. Irving was consciously trying to create a patriotic American mythology, and he succeeded well enough to embed this myth of the flat earth in American minds still to this day. Mercifully, as Loewen points out, the textbooks have mostly abandoned this particular bit of nonsense.

The fact is that educated people and sailors have understood that the Earth is round since at least the 4^th century BC or so. There are many ways to recognize the sphericity of the planet, including the curved shadow it casts on the moon during a lunar eclipse, the fact that where you are influences which constellations you can see, and the fact that when ships sail away from land, they gradually disappear from view hull-first. The reason that Europeans generally didn’t try sailing westward was that they understood that the circumference of the Earth is more than 22,000 miles. Since they didn’t know about the existence of the Americas, they assumed that the distance from Europe westward to Asia was too great to sail, because it would be impossible to take along enough fresh water for the entire journey. What is important about Columbus here is not that he figured out that the Earth was round, but that he miscalculated the circumference as being much less than it was, and he also thought that Japan was further to the east of China than it is. As a result, he estimated that the journey involved about 3,000 miles, rather than the nearly 20,000 miles it actually involves. So instead of being a brilliant geographer, he was actually quite a bad one.

The First Voyage of Gerard Depardieu

The first third of 1492: The Conquest of Paradise focuses, unsurprisingly, on the lead up to the first voyage of Christopher Columbus (Gerard Depardieu). The film does a delicate dance between the facts and the traditional narrative that Americans have been spoon-fed. It wants to include the stuff you learned in high school, but it doesn’t want to be blatant about it. Right at the start of the film, in 1491, we see Columbus teaching his young son Fernando. He shows Fernando how ships disappear out of view hull-first, and he illustrates the sphericity of the Earth using an orange. So the film implies the flat-earth story without actually asserting it. Young Fernando might plausibly think the Earth is flat, so Columbus teaching him the truth is technically accurate without the film having to claim that everyone thought the world was flat.

Soon he is informed that a friendly monk has arranged for him to have a meeting with the faculty of the University of Salamanca to present his radical theories (in reality, the meeting happened 6 years earlier, because Queen Isabella had already agreed to patronize him). The film shows the faculty understanding that the world is round; they cite Aristotle and Ptolemy’s calculations that the world was too large to allow sailing westward to Asia (actually the calculations are those of Eratosthenes of Cyrene, but at least they’re in the ball-park). In reply, Columbus cites Pierre D’ailly and a few other medieval authorities and argues that the world is smaller than the ancient calculations. So the film gives a reasonably accurate depiction of what the issues are, although it doesn’t explain that Columbus’ figures are woefully wrong. He’s the hero, and he did actually get to the Americas, so explaining that he was wrong and got lucky is sort of embarrassing. But the refusal to acknowledge this seriously distorts at least two scenes in the film, including this one.

Because the film can’t admit that Columbus was mistaken, the uninformed viewer is likely to take away from the scene that the faculty were wrong when in fact they are basically correct. The scholars are depicted as arrogantly mocking Columbus and refusing to consider new ideas. But since Columbus is the hero and must be right, even though his arguments are actually wrong, the scholars opposing him must be wrong and therefore bad, even though they’re actually right. And this, unfortunately, is the basic tone this part of the film takes. Everything Columbus does is good, even though in fact he’s wrong. It makes analyzing the film a little maddening because black is white and down is up.

Even Depardieu can’t figure out what the film is trying to say

Not long after he is turned down, Columbus is approached by Martín Pinzón, a shipmaster who offers to support him. In reality, it was Columbus who approached Pinzón and had to win his support. Pinzón was a skilled mariner who, according to some French stories, had already discovered the Americas four years earlier. He and his two brothers captained the Pinta and the Niña, vessels they owned, and they provided a very substantial sum of money to fund the voyage. They also recognized that the ships and crew that Columbus has arranged for were inadequate and entirely dismissed them. So these three brothers deserve a great deal of the credit for the success of the voyage. But in the film, Martin Pinzón is depicted essentially as a follower (in the words of Carla Rahn Phillips and William D. Phillips, Jr, as a “supportive sidekick”), and his brothers don’t really feature at all.

Just before the voyage, Columbus confesses to his priest that he’s been lying to everyone. He doesn’t actually know how long the journey is. All he knows is that he’s right. The priest angrily tells him that he must tell all the sailors, and when Columbus refuses he threatens to tell the men himself, until Columbus reminds him that he cannot speak about matters he hears in confession. Columbus demands absolution, and the priest gives it to him.

This scene is incredibly problematic. Its obvious purpose is to ratchet up the drama; Columbus is having a crisis of confidence that he needs to work through, and the revelation of his uncertainty raises the stakes for the journey itself. But it’s pointless and made-up drama; the audience knows he’s going to make it. So really all it does it cast Columbus in the mold of the Heroic Individual. He can’t prove he’s right; he just knows he is. What matters is not anything as unimportant as science; what matters is that he’s certain he’s right (except that he’s not actually certain). And he’s not actually right, because he’s completely miscalculated the distance. What saves him is the fortunate existence of the Bahamas, not his certainty that he can get to Asia. So he’s totally wrong, but thinks he’s right even though he doesn’t know he’s right, but his certainty carries him through and he’s rewarded for being certain but wrong! My head hurts just trying to understand what this scene is actually saying. But I guess we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.

And then there’s the wrongness of the theology in this scene. The priest forgives him even though Columbus is still actively committing a sin and risking the lives of all the sailors in the bargain. In Catholic theology, confession only merits absolution if the sinner is penitent and sincerely intends to amend his sin, but Columbus is demanding forgiveness for a sin he’s still actively committing and refusing to give up. But, if it’s one thing I’ve learned in writing this blog, it’s that the medieval clergy just make everything up as they go along, so Columbus gets his absolution basically for being pushy.

The journey itself manages to avoid most of the textbook clichés about the journey. There’s no storms, there’s a little lesson on how a quadrant is used in navigation, and there’s some nice details about life on board a ship. Pinzón gets anxious and Columbus has to point out that there’s not enough water left to turn around and get home. Then he has to persuade a nervous crew that they need to have faith in God and themselves, and that if they succeed, future generations will talk about how brave they all were. That does the trick, despite not being a very good speech. Then Columbus gets bitten by an insect and realizes they must be near land because I guess they don’t have bugs out at sea.

The actual landfall is nicely done. Instead of someone shouting “land!” as your high school textbook probably had it, the ship drifts through a fog bank and then a lush jungle emerges out of the mists in a really beautiful peace of photography that briefly manages to capture what must have been a genuine sense of wonder about the new land they’ve just arrived at. In some ways, it’s the best moment in the whole film.

What’s nice about this film is, unlike your high school textbook’s story about Columbus, the film’s story is only about a third over. The film is actually far more interested in what happened after Columbus arrived than what it took to get there. But that’s for another post.

Want To Know More?

Read James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong Reprint Edition by Loewen, James W. published by Touchstone (2007) Paperback. No, seriously. Read it. It’s a necessary corrective to a lot of the nonsense in American history textbooks, especially since the Texas Board of Education started getting the final say in what goes into high school textbooks. If I were ever going to teach an American history class, I think I’d use this as my textbook. If you teach high school history, you pretty much have to read this. You might also look at Loewen’s Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History (Multicultural Education Series).

If you want a biography of Columbus, one of the better ones is Kirkpatrick Sale’s Christopher Columbus and the Conquest of Paradise: Second Edition (Tauris Parke Paperbacks).But Sale isn’t a historian, and is not always as objective as he ought to be. So read with caution.

Oh, yeah. 1492: Conquest of Paradiseis available on Amazon.

Gladiator: Hey, Gang! Let’s Revive the Republic!

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Ancient Rome, Commodus, Derek Jacobi, Gladiator, Marcus Aurelius, Richard Harris, Ridley Scott, Russell Crowe

Early on in Gladiator (2000, dir. Ridley Scott), Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) tells Maximus (Russell Crowe) that he wants to “return Rome to the people” and re-establish the Roman Republic. He feels that Maximus has the moral qualities that will enable him to accomplish this feat, while Commodus lacks those virtues, and thus Marcus makes the choice to declare Maximus his successor, although Commodus murders him before he can announce the decision. Thus the film’s plot is driven by Marcus’ idea of restoring the Republic.

Nor is Marcus alone in this goal. Senator Gracchus (Derek Jacobi) and Senator Gaius (John Shrapnel) both want to see Rome returned to a Republic as well. They plot with Maximus and with Commodus’ sister Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) to foment a rebellion that will overthrow Commodus and put Maximus in control, so that he can empower the Senate to rule Rome again. So while the memorable part of the film is the conflict between Commodus and Maximus, the actual plot of the film is an attempt to end the entire system of the Principate (as modern scholars term the rule of the emperors in this period) and re-establish the system of the Republic.

So Is the Film’s Plot Plausible?

In a word, no. The Roman Republic, which was founded around the year 510 BC (at least according to Roman tradition), entered its decline in the late 2^nd century BC. This period, termed the Late Republic, is generally taken to have begun with the disputed election of 133 BC, during which the supporters of the populist tribune Tiberius Gracchus (note his cognomen) forced through his illegal re-election so that he could enact a law aimed at helping the poor. The Senate, lead by the pontifex maximus (high priest), rioted and massacred Tiberius and around 300 of his supporters in the street.

This combination of political violence and disregard for the electoral processes became one of the chief characteristics of the Late Republic, as politics increasingly became a matter of force. By the time Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC, the Roman political system was in a state of near-total collapse, and it fell to Caesar’s adopted son Octavian (more commonly known as Augustus) to create a new system on the ruins of the old one, as I discussed in a previous post.

Augustus, Rome’s first emperor

In Augustus’ day, there were still many people who longed for a revival of the traditional Republican system, and for that reason, Augustus had to be careful to cover his absolute rule with a fig-leaf of Republicanism. In 41 AD, when a conspiracy by Cassius Chaera led to the assassination of Gaius Caligula, there were calls for the re-establishment of the Republic. But this doesn’t seem to have been the main motive for the assassination; rather, Chaerea seems to have been primarily motivated by Caligula’s constant ridicule of him. The Senate briefly supported the cause of a revived Republic, but their support evaporated when the Praetorian Guard declared Caligula’s uncle Claudius the new emperor.

Perhaps, had events played out differently, it might have been possible to revive the Republic in 41 AD, but it’s doubtful. By 41 AD, there was no one alive who had any experience with the genuine Republican system; a few ancient men and women might have remembered the Republic’s final collapse under Caesar and Octavian, but even that is unlikely.

Furthermore, the collapse of the Republic was due in considerable measure to forces unleashed by the expansion of the Roman state outside the Italian peninsula. The Republic was essentially a system set up to run a single city; the Senate was in many ways like a large city council. The entire slate of elected officials only numbered in the low dozens, and there was no bureaucracy to assist these elected officials. As the Roman state conquered new territory, instead of revising the system to keep up with new demands of running a large state (for example by adding more levels of elected officials), the conservative Romans just kept jury-rigging this city government. For example, they decided that conquered provinces would be administered by former consuls appointed by the Senate. So in other words, imagine the city council of Chicago trying to run the entire United States government, and constantly appointing former mayors to help do so. It’s not a perfect analogy, but you get the idea.

The whole system became riddled with political corruption, profiteering, overweening political ambition, and civil war. Eventually, by the time Julius Caesar came along, the whole system was simply stretched past its breaking point, and Caesar was the guy who finally snapped it. By the end of Augustus’ reign, Rome ruled the entire Mediterranean basic and a good deal more beyond that. There was simply no way that Rome could go back to a system that had collapsed in some part because it was no long adequate to manage its needs. So the idea that the Republic could be restored in 41 AD was little more than a transient fantasy.

If the Republic was moldering in its grave by 41 AD, the corpse had long since been reduced to nothing by 180 AD. While Marcus Aurelius could have been an idealistic dreamer who fantasized about restoring the Republic (although there’s little evidence of that), there is no way it could possibly have accomplished, any more than Barack Obama could plausibly expect the United States to revert to the Articles of Confederation.

So the idea that a serious conspiracy could be hatched to accomplish this pipe dream is pretty silly. It becomes slightly more plausible if we assume that Gracchus or Gaius is hoping to make himself emperor by using Maximus to depose Commodus and then get rid of Maximus, but there’s no evidence that that’s what they’re up to.

Additionally, the film makes the assumption that the Roman Republic was somehow ruled by the ‘people’ in the sense of modern American democracy. It’s true that the Roman officials were elected, so there is a faint resemblance to modern democracy, but the Roman system had almost nothing in common with the American system beyond having elected officials. The Roman electoral system was designed to heavily privilege the Roman aristocracy; they voted first, they controlled the votes of a large number of people below them, and voting stopped the moment the winner was clear, so that many poor people never voted at all. Rather than being a Republic in the modern sense, modern scholars tend to see the Roman Republic as a type of oligarchy, in which the same two dozen or so aristocratic families were perpetually in control through the election of different family members. And the Senate, which in this film is supposedly the representatives of the Roman people, was the least democratic element of the system, since it was comprised of all former office-holders, who served more or less as lifetime senators after having held almost any elected office.

Again, I suppose we could make more sense of the plot by saying that after 200 years, no one understood that the Republic was actually an oligarchy, and instead that they somehow actually want modern democracy, but that’s pretty dubious.

The biggest problem with the film’s plot is that it can’t make up its mind who actually represents ‘the people’. Gracchus and Gaius are disgusted by Commodus’ gladiatorial spectacles, precisely because they see how easily Commodus will sway the Roman people to support him. As Gracchus says, “He will bring them death, and they will love him for it.” But somehow, at the same time, Gracchus is convinced that the Senate is the body that represents the people. He claims that “The senate is the people, sire. Chosen from among the people to speak for the people.” His claim is totally false; at no point was the Senate the voice of the people. Even at the height of the Republic, it was the tribunes who represented the lower classes, not the Senate (which is part of the reason the Senate was afraid of Tiberius Gracchus). Again, this will make a little more sense if we assume that Gracchus is either deluded or simply looking to justify his jealousy of Commodus’ power.

Derek Jacobi as Senator Gracchus

So the whole plot of the film is problematic. It claims to be a plot by various people to overthrow the emperor and restore the Republic, but this is so unrealistic as to be implausible. The only way we can really make this story make sense is to assume that Gracchus’ true aim is to make himself emperor. If that’s the case, Maximus is simply a puppet in a failed political coup. That means that this film isn’t actually based on how Commodus died (since he died in 192, not 180); it’s really the story of Senator Quadratus’ failed attempt to assassinate Commodus in 182, with Maximus playing the role of Quintianus. Ridley Scott got the names wrong, and he shows the conspiracy succeeding when it actually failed, but this still makes more sense then the film’s putative plot.

Gladiator: What Every Film about Gladiators Gets Wrong

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Ancient Rome, Gladiator, Gladiatorial Combat, Oliver Reed, Ridley Scott, Russell Crowe

Gladiator (2000, dir. Ridley Scott) falls into a long line of films featuring gladiatorial combat. From older films like Spartacus to more recent works like Pompeii and the Spartacus tv series, Western audiences are quite familiar with the idea of gladiators. But every cinematic depiction of gladiators I’ve ever seen has gotten some key facts about gladiators and gladiatorial combat wrong.

First, most films about gladiators fail to realize that the term ‘gladiator’ covered a wide range of fighters, each with specifically-defined equipment. For example the thraex (“Thracian”) wore a high-crested helmet, greaves (shin guards), and a manica (arm guard) for his sword arm and shoulder, and he carried a small shield and a short, curved knife. The murmillo wore a helmet with a fish crest, a manica, and short greaves, and carried a gladius (a short sword, hence the term gladiator) and a tall, oblong shield. The retarius (“net fighter”) wore a manica that covered part of his chest but no other actual armor, and carried a trident and a net. The secutor was much like a murmillo, but wore a different style of helmet that was smooth, so that a net could not catch on it. A hoplomachus (“hoplite warrior”) wore quilted trousers, greaves, and a manica, and used a gladius, a small shield, and a javelin. There were a number of other, less common styles, and some of the styles evolved over time. None wore any chest armor other than the retarius’ large manica.

A thraex fighting a murmillo. Note that both are wearing a manica on their right arms.

But if you look at the most familiar shot of Maximus (Russell Crowe), he doesn’t fit any of those weapon sets. He’s wearing a breastplate with a leather skirt covering his groin, a sort of manica that covers one shoulder but not the arm, hand-wraps, and, early in his career as a gladiator, a face mask. He carries a round shield and uses a gladius. The use of a breastplate and lack of a real manica right away sets him off from all the styles I’ve mentioned. No gladiator that I know of would have worn a real breastplate, and most styles wore a manica. Most, though not all, wore a helmet of some type. So he’s not any type of standard gladiator.

Maximus in his third fight

There were rules about which types of gladiators fought which types. The thraex usually fought the murmillo or the hiplomachus, while the retarius was normally pitted against a murmillo or a secutor. Romans debated which type of fighter was best against particular types, the way that modern sports fans debate the nuances of football and baseball, and while a clever host might occasionally do something unusual in the way he paired off gladiators, too much deviation from the traditional rules and weapon sets would probably have upset the audience.

So when Maximus walks out wearing a breastplate and without a helmet, imagine the response modern American football fans would have to seeing a quarterback walk out without his helmet and wearing hockey gear. Maximus’ breastplate is essentially cheating, because it provides him way more protection than he’s supposed to have. I suppose we could say that Proximo has balanced out the breastplate by taking away the manica and helmet, but it would basically have been breaking the rules.

From a film-making standpoint, the lack of a helmet is clearly about helping the audience keep track of Maximus and allowing them to see his emotions during the fight, but there’s really no good reason for getting the rest of the gear wrong, especially since Scott made a point of claiming that the film was historically accurate.

The Bigger Mistake

More importantly, however, Gladiator, like other similar films, misunderstands what happened in the gladiatorial arena in a fairly fundamental way. Not all games had a full program of events, but those that did had three major sections that happened in a fairly rigid order. By the end of the Republic, the morning of a game was given over to the venationes, the animal hunts. Animals would be made to fight each other, or animals fought a specific type of fighter called a bestiarius, who was specifically not a gladiator. A more sophisticated type of animal fighter was the venator, who “hunted” animals in the arena (not always dangerous animals, but also creatures like deer, camels, and rabbits), and who sometimes performed tricks comparable to those done by modern lion-tamers and similar circus performers. The descriptions of these hunts make clear that in the largest games, thousands of animals might be slaughtered. The purpose of such hunts was to demonstrate Roman superiority over the natural world and over non-Romans, who could be viewed as ‘savage beasts’ metaphorically.

Around lunch-time, there was a break, and many spectators left the arena to escape the heat and the spectacle of the next element, namely the executions. Romans conducted many forms of public executions, including crucifixion, burning at the stake, and damnatio ad bestiae (being ‘thrown’ to the animals). Crucifixion took too long to conduct this way, but many of the faster methods were performed in the arena. Lower class Romans (never Roman elites) might be condemned to being exposed to hungry animals, or tied to a wild horse or bull and dragged around the arena or trampled. Some were tortured in various ways before being killed, for example by being castrated. Execution was meant to be humiliating, so it sometimes involved theatrical scenarios in which the condemned was dressed up as an unfortunate figure from mythology (for example, as Actaeon, a hunter who accidentally saw the goddess Diana bathing; she turned him into a stag and let his dogs tear him apart). The Roman audiences wanted to see criminals suffer, they wanted to see criminals experience fear and degradation, and they wanted to see criminals begging for a fast and merciful death. The purpose of such harsh executions was to deter crime and to teach people that the Roman state triumphed over the forces of criminality and disorder.

The afternoon component was the gladiatorial games proper (generally termed a munus). Pairs and groups of gladiators fought each other, sometimes simply as gladiators and sometimes as ‘re-enactors’ of mythical or historical battles. The purpose of such fights was to give the audience a show of Roman bravery and skill, and courage in the face of death. As a purpose, that goal clashes dramatically with the goals of the executions and the beast hunts. So it’s important to realize that these three phases of a game were completely different and distinct events.

What cinematic depictions of gladiatorial games get wrong is that they generally conflate the three phases carelessly. Maximus is shown having to fight wild tigers during his second game, despite the fact that he was a gladiator, not a bestiarius. Actual gladiators never fought animals; it would have been beneath them. Although he is an elite man, the film shows him being sold as a gladiator, which would have been a shocking violation of his rights, and probably one that would have led to conspiracies and rebellions against Commodus, since if Commodus could strip a powerful man like Maximus of his legal rights, he could do the same to any other senator or general.

Most importantly, what every depiction of gladiatorial games gets wrong is that actual gladiators did not inevitably fight to the death. Most fights allowed for the possibility of missio, (roughly, ‘surrender’), unless they were explicitly billed as sine missione matches, (basically, fights to the death). A typical gladiatorial fight lasted until one fighter was too exhausted to fight, or if he suffered an injury or accident that prevented him from continuing. At that point, he held up two fingers as a gesture of surrender, indicating that he was conceding defeat. The host of the game (termed the editor) then had the option of sparing the gladiator or ordering the winner to kill him. But the editor (influenced by the crowd) would have made his choice based on how good a show he felt he had gotten for his money and how well he felt the loser had fought. Death was not the normal outcome of a gladiatorial fight.

The Romans did not go to a gladiatorial game to see gladiators die, any more than modern Americans go to NASCAR races to see flaming car wrecks; in both cases what the audience was seeking was a show of skill, daring, and courage. Both sports are dangerous and men certainly died during them; that risk made things more exciting, but it wasn’t the main purpose of the event. The notion that half of all gladiators died confuses gladiators with criminals to be executed, when those were entirely distinct things. The bravery that audiences wanted from gladiators was at odds with the humiliation and fear they wanted from criminals.

Films like Gladiator envision a system in which half of all the participants in any given combat will die. But the economics of this scenario doesn’t actually make sense. Gladiators were supplied to the editors by a man called a lanista, who trained, housed, and fed gladiators, and then rented them out to an editor for a show. In Gladiator, the lanista is Proximo (Oliver Reed). While slaves could, at many points in Roman history, be purchased rather cheaply, the expenses of training them were considerable. If a lanista lost half his gladiators at every fight, it’s very hard to see how he could possibly have gotten a return on his investment.

So contrary to films like Gladiator, gladiatorial combat was not usually a fight to the death. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a dangerous sport. It was quite dangerous. Clearly gladiators died when they received inoperable wounds, or if they bled out from an arterial wound. Some died when they slipped and fell onto their opponent’s weapon. And some were executed because the editor was dissatisfied with the fight. But it wasn’t the non-stop slaughter Ridley Scott offers us in the film.

So Why Show Us Constant Slaughter?

If gladiatorial combat wasn’t as lethal as the movies present it, why do the movies always show it this way? To some extent, it might just be what audiences expect from the genre. And in some cases perhaps it’s ignorance of what a real gladiatorial game was like, but Ridley Scott consulted with historians who were quite familiar with gladiatorial combat, so he probably knew better.

One thing that most depictions of gladiatorial combat have in common is that they spend some time dwelling on the bloodthirsty barbarity of the Romans who enjoy watching the slaughter. The people in the audience are usually shown eagerly awaiting the death blow, cheering or shouting for blood, and sometimes being spattered with blood. This allows the film to implicitly critique the Roman audience for being so bloodthirsty, and it allows the film to flatter its audience by demonstrating the modern audience’s moral superiority; we know that killing people for entertainment is wrong, even if the Roman audience doesn’t know it.

What has always bothered me about this is that it’s false flattery. Films like Gladiator try to eat their cake and have it too. They draw us in with promises of cinematic bloodshed shown in a theoretically realistic style (although with far more body parts getting lopped off than is likely the case in actual combat), while at the same time telling the audience that we’re better than the Romans because we don’t like actual bloodshed, just fake bloodshed designed to look real.

Scott’s film is particularly egregious in the way it plays this game. Most gladiator films leave the moralizing to the camera and let the viewer draw his or her own conclusion, but Scott actually includes a scene specifically designed to make the moral point. Early in his fighting career, Maximus fights alone against a large number of gladiators and defeats them all easily. Then he turns to the crowd and shouts “Are you not entertained? Is this not why you are here?” before spitting in disgust and throwing down his sword. The film explicitly condemns the Roman audience for its bloodthirstiness, but fails to acknowledge that the modern audience is just as culpable in the slaughter as the Romans are. After all, we’re going to see Gladiator because we want to see Russell Crowe kill people.

If Maximus is disgusted by all the killing he’s doing, he has a choice. He can stop fighting and choose to die instead; after all, that will reunite him with his dead family, which is what he spends half the film wanting. But that would violate one of the basic rules of Hollywood action films, which is that, contrary to what we’re taught in school and church and everywhere else, violence does indeed solve problems. In fact, in action films, violence is the only thing that ever solves problems. Bad guys must be killed because they cannot be reasoned or negotiated with or shamed into relenting. Violence is consistently depicted as the morally acceptable way to fix problems. Maximus’ slaughter is good because he’s fighting to save his life. Commodus is evil mostly because he’s just evil, and he won’t allow Maximus to not fight. And, of course, Maximus has a healthy dose of manpain because Commodus has had his wife and son killed and is threatening Lucilla and her boy. And that means that violence is the only option, and if Maximus is violent enough, if he can be more violent than his opponents, everything will be made better and society will be saved. This is the same narrative that every other Hollywood action film offers us, just with a different setting and characters.

Remind me again which morally corrupt society enjoys watching slaughter?

Want to Know More?

Gladiatoris available at Amazon.

There are a lot of good recent books on Gladiatorial Combat that you could look at. David Potter and Garrett Mattingly’s collection of essays, Life, Death, and Entertainment in the Roman Empirehas an excellent chapter on “Entertainers in the Roman World,” that does a very good job in a short space of explaining the issues. If you want something more substantial, try Thomas Wiedeman’s Emperors and Gladiators. Alison Futrell’s The Roman Games: A Sourcebook is a collection of primary sources related to Roman sports, including gladiatorial combat.