Heroes in Ancient Poetry and Modern Films - Essay Example

Your Your Lethal Weapons: The Treatment of Heroes in Ancient Poetry and Modern Film Two men awaken by the sea, separated from each other by history and distance but united by the fact that they are the masters of everything they see, as they look out over the water. They have chosen their homes far away from the meddlesome affairs of the rest of humanity, and yet they will soon be drawn into conflicts in which they have no personal or material interest. While the thrill of conflict and of killing causes the electricity that is adrenalin to course through their bodies, the idea of violence and murder disgusts them in their calmer moments. They both have reputations as being iconoclasts, rebelling against the rules placed upon them by their superiors, and often coming up with creative, clever solutions to the problems they face. However, these solutions often leave a wake of destruction behind them. At the base of each man's soul is a deep-seated sense of respect for the tenets of honor and courage. One of these men is Odysseus, king of Ithaca. Agamemnon and Menelaus drag him away from his peaceful home, where he leaves his wife and infant son for a war that will take ten years, and a journey home that will take twice that, stories chronicled in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The other is Detective Martin Riggs of the Los Angeles Police Department. The Lethal Weapon movie series shows how he tries to find and maintain a sense of personal peace while being pulled into chaos by criminal after criminal. Both of these men fit the description of the hero that has transcended time to become an idea that audiences all over the world have enjoyed since performance art began. The most dominant force in the hero is "competitiveness".1 The ancient Greeks loved athletic competitions, and it is no surprise that Homer's twin epics feature them: Odysseus must watch the games at Phaeacia before he is allowed to journey home, and Odysseus sets up a deadly contest in his own castle in Ithaca, ostensibly to give away Penelope to one of the suitors, but actually to trap all the suitors in his home. These are not just set-pieces used for plot purposes, however; the suitors in Odysseus' home while away the years by having contests of strength and agility virtually every day. In the example of Martin Riggs, the competition is somewhat different. While there are no athletic events in his story, he and his partner, Det. Murtaugh, go back and forth about the relative effects of aging on both of them, and they badger each other in a semi-humorous fashion about which one of them has better aim with a gun, can run faster to catch a criminal, and so on. Each of the movies in the series finds it climax in a hand-to-hand combat scene, using the competitiveness to build suspense within the audience. This idea of competition also appears in the 1959 classic Ben-Hur, where Judah and Messala engage in a friendly spear-tossing contest, aiming at a point where two wooden beams meet in the ceiling.2 Honor, and its attendant condition, fame, are also important to heroes across time. In Greek culture, the winner of a competition would receive "public acknowledgment of his superioritymarked by material tributes and gifts."3 This could take the form of gifts of land, sitting in honored seats, being given the best cuts of meat at feasts, among other honors. The central conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon at the beginning of Iliad is related to the king's prerogative to select the booty from a particular battle. At first, Agamemnon does not want to give back the Chryseis, the priest's daughter that he brought back from their previous war. Once Apollo's command becomes clear, however, Agamemnon gives her back, but only after taking Achilles' new prize, Briseis, from his tent. Achilles' anger over this lack of respect keeps him from fighting with the rest of the Greeks against Troy until Patroklos dons Achilles' armor and is slain in battle, and so the importance of honor and respect to the Greeks become clear. In the modern hero-movie, this honor and respect are accorded in somewhat different ways. Generally, the hero will have some sort of romantic love interest whom he conquers, sexually or otherwise, in a subplot intertwined with the main story of the movie. Each movie in the Lethal Weapon cycle features Riggs bedding a beautiful woman, who attempts to assuage Riggs' grief over his dead wife. In the third and fourth films, he slowly settles down with one in particular, but his sexual conquests are just as drenched with testosterone as his conflicts with the villains. Money and fame sometimes also come with the honor accorded the modern hero, but sex is a constant. A final point of comparison between the heroes of Homer and the modern cinema would be physical prodigiousness - both in terms of attractiveness, and in terms of strength and ability. Every time Athena prepares Odysseus for his viewing public, concluding in Phaeacia and in Ithaca, she makes him look even taller - one imagines him towering at eight feet or so in height by the time he makes it home. Hector, the hero of Troy, draws a crowd of Greeks after Achilles kills him in battle, all of whom scurry up to see his "wondrous strength and beauty"4 before stabbing his corpse. The modern cinema is no different in its depiction of heroes. The actors and actresses who fill the heroic role in action movies, starting with the bare-chested Johnny Weismuller in the Tarzan movies and in the present day with such perfectly toned actors as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mel Gibson, Will Smith, and Angelina Jolie, titillate their audiences with their strength, their expensively honed physiques, and their feats of strength and daring. The vast differences between the media of cinema and poetry, however, bring up the valid question of representation. Can a story written by an ancient poet be represented, at least in terms of theme, in film In his introduction to a collection of four screenplays by Carl Dreyer, Ole Storm writes that "[a]ll good films are characterized by a certain rhythmic tension, which is induced partly by the characters' movements as revealed in images, and partly by the tempo, rapid or less rapid, at which these images succeed one another."5 It may seem that words on a page cannot throw visual images before the reader with anything approaching the sheer power of pictures on a large screen, but there are few descriptions in any medium that exceed in power the carnage at the end of Odysseus' revenge against his wife's suitors. Especially powerful is the image of Odysseus slaying the deceitful "priest" Agelaus, "hack[ing] the prophet square across the neck and the praying headtumbling in the dust."6 Poems are built on rhythms and images, just as surely as great films are. Additionally, ancient poetry was written for an audience, in ways that modern poetry is not. Performers memorized Homer's epics and recited them dramatically for audiences, and so these performances were actually similar to putting on plays. Nagy writes that the epic is a "performance tradition"7 as opposed to a mere "oral" tradition. Andrew Ford reminds the reader that "performative context was not something "extra" added to the "pure" text but was inextricable from epic as a social and cultural object."8 When one considers the amount of acting that goes into a quality film, it seems that the epic would translate quite well from verse to screen. Walter Benjamin would seem to take a different view. With the ability to reproduce works of art, he argues, "that which withersis the aura of the work of art."9 As far as film, he writes that its most significant element is its "destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage."10 The cinema, in other words, will take the images of Homer, Shakespeare, and the world of visual art out of the viewer/reader's imagination and splash them up on the screen, and interpret them for the audience. Over time, viewers will be able to select the interpretation of a particular work of art that best fits his/her personal preferences - this diffusion of identity is the "liquidation" to which Benjamin refers. In some ways, Benjamin's argument is correct about modern society - in our preference for movies over texts and still images, we show our desire to "get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction."11 A film shows us many more sides of a person, or an object, than does the still image, or the written word. We get significantly more sensual input, and are required to do significantly less work filling in the sensory blanks with imagination, with film than we are with still media. We do tend to prize "fitness for exhibition" over intrinsic value in our art. However, many elements of the epic beg for performance, leap off the page and grab the reader's attention. The rage of Achilles and Agamemnon in the opening book of Iliad show in bold strokes the raw power of the dueling egos, and the naked greed that was part of the competitive hero in those days. The hand-to-hand combat, beneath the walls of Troy or at the black ships of the Achaeans, teems with vivid description. However, while one can imagine the screams of the dead and the stench of the entrails, such film epics as Braveheart and Troy bring those imagined voices and sensations to life. One significant example of a successful transfer of the epic from verse to screen is found in Carl Dreyer's screenplay for Joan of Arc. Ole Storm notes that Dreyer masters "the application of Aristotle's rules for the classical drama: unity of action, time and place."12 The entire plot of the movie happens in one day; the setting is comprised of one place, the fortress at Rouen where she is being held; and there are basically three major scenes: Joan's trial, her conviction, and her death at the stake.13 There are several scenes where Dreyer's script permits Joan to carry the role of the ideal hero off perfectly on the screen. As her trial begins, Joan walks forward into the chapel, beams of light streaming across her. She stops in the middle of one shaft of light and looks around her, "aware that every eye is turned toward herhard, cold and uncomprehending."14 Here, the iconoclast side of the hero emerges: Joan is one against an unseeing horde. As her questioners pelt her skeptically, her "eyes are raised to heaven, as if it [is] heaven that [gives] her courage" and she speaks with a voice "almost unearthly."15 Her beautiful expression makes her seem as though she is "far removed from this world," leading Ladvenu to declare, "For me she is a saint!"16 There are numerous examples of films that carry out the epic convention successfully. One of the most recent reproductions of Odyssey was the version starring Armand Assante as Odysseus. This version attempts to stay fairly close to the original text, but the difficulty of reproducing supernatural events and some stilted writing stifle the effectiveness. While Vanessa Williams plays a strong, proud Calypso, she does not approach the emotional energy of Calypso in Homer's text - a case where the emotional energy of verse does not carry over onto the screen. The only character in the movie whose emotional energy is not concealed behind some strange sort of classical screen is Tiresias (Christopher Lee), whose gleeful scorn of Odysseus in the depths of Hades so accurately represents the envy and resentment felt by many in the world of the dead by those who continued in the land of the living. A more effective rendition of the Odyssey, although changed in terms of setting, is the aforementioned O Brother, Where Art Thou The hero in question is one Ulysses Everett McGill, whose quest is not to save the Greeks but merely to get home from prison, having heard that his wife is divorcing him and is planning to marry, and resume his role as "pater familias." He finds humility not at the hands of Poseidon, but at the hands of Baptists - it is after ridiculing the baptisms of Pete and Delmar that obstacles rise up in his path. The Cyclops assumes the form of a traveling Bible salesman with "large appetites." The ideas of the heroic quest, of the hero's love for fame, of the transcendent power of the supernatural, of the love of a man for his own home, all swell throughout Odyssey and are all found throughout the quirky journey of Ulysses Everett McGill. Another modern film that carries the epic well is Ben-Hur, which retains classic status despite its creation 47 years ago. This film definitely carries out Ole Storm's aforementioned dictum that a film have rhythmic tension, particularly in its famous chariot-race, which "speaks for itself"17 as special effects go, especially in that time period. Judah Ben-Hur also fits the role of the iconoclast, which is such a significant part of the hero ideal. When Messala, part of the Roman establishment, offers him friendship, should he inform on Jews who sought to overthrow the government, Judah responds, "I tell you, the day Rome falls, there will be a shout of freedom such as the world has never heard before."18 Much like Odysseus, and much like Ulysses Everett McGill, Judah receives supernatural aid when Jesus of Nazareth gives him a gourd of water that restores him, giving him strength beyond what the other galley slaves possess; it is this strength that helps him survive and face Messala at the movie's end. Audiences have long loved heroes, for a number of reasons. They break rules, they possess beautiful women, they are almost always underdogs fighting an ostensibly stronger power, but they always have honor as one of their reigning motives. These themes transcend time, and the medium of film is well-suited to bring these timeless ideas to modern audiences. Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. "The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction." Dreyer, Carl Theodor. L'Passion de Jeanne d'Arc. Ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, , p. Edwards, Mark W. Homer: poet of the Iliad. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Ford, Andrew. "Performing interpretation: early allegorical exegesis of Homer." Epic traditions in the contemporary world. Ed. M. Beissinger, J. Tylus, and S. Wofford. Berkeley: University of California Press, , p. 33- Homer. The Iliad. 20 April 2006. http://www.online-literature.com/homer/iliad/. Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. Homer's Odyssey. Dir. Andrei Konchalovsky. Perf. Armand Assante, Greta Scacchi, Vanessa Williams. Hallmark Entertainment. 1997. Lethal Weapon 2. Dir. Richard Donner. Perf. Mel Gibson, Danny Glover. Warner Brothers. 1989. Nagy, Gregory. "Epic as genre." Epic traditions in the contemporary world. Ed. M. Beissinger, J. Tylus, and S. Wofford. Berkeley: University of California Press, , p. 21-32. O Brother, Where Art Thou Dir. Joel Coen. Perf. George Clooney, Holly Hunter, John Turturro. Touchstone. 2000. Storm, Ole. "Introduction." Carl Theodor Dreyer: four screenplays. Ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, , p. 24. Troy. Dir. Wolfgang Petersen. Perf. Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom, Bryan Cox. Warner Brothers. 2004. Read More