The Minute Man is disappointed because the story of Troy is not as clear-cut as he remembers it:
JustOneMinute: We Battle At the Gates Of Troy: Has the era of moral clarity been eclipsed by a season of moral obscurity? The popular "Lord of the Rings" was an epic clash between Good and Unmistakeable Evil suitable for George Bush. With "Troy", Hollywood delivers nuance and ambiguity sure to delight John Kerry. When I was young, the Trojan War story was pretty simple - sly Trojans kidnapped Helen, and the brave, clever Greeks sailed off to bring her home and Punish the Evildoers. The current movie, with Brad Pitt as Achilles, is more complicated. Among the Greek leaders, the only sympathetic figure is Odysseus, played by Sean Bean (Boromir from LOTR); the other Greek generals combine greed and vanity in different but unappealing measures...
But the original Iliad is full of nuance. The Trojans did indeed kidnap the valuable property of Menelaus (Helen) and refuse to return here. But the Greeks are vain, boastful, jealous, and brutal while the Trojans are by-and-large noble (even if Paris is cowardly) from the beginning ("Sing, Muse, of the rage of Achilles...") to the end ("Thus they buried Hector the Horse-Tamer.").
And, as I've said before, my heart breaks whenever I come across this passage:
Posted by DeLong at May 18, 2004 07:44 PM | TrackBack | | Other weblogs commenting on this postHector stretched his arms towards his son, but the boy cried and grabbed for his nurse, scared at the fierce sight of his father's armor and especially at the nodding horse-hair plume on Hector's helmet. Hector and Andromache laughed. And Hector took the gleaming helmet from his head and put it aside on the ground. Then he took his dear child, kissed him, and bounced him in his arms, all the while praying to Zeus and all the gods: "Grant, oh gods, that this boy, my son, with whom I am well pleased, may be like me--first in glory among the Trojans! Strong and brave like me, Hector, his father! And grant, oh gods, that Scamandrius, son of Hector, may one day rule all Ilium in power and glory. And grant that all men shall say, 'He is a better man than his father!'..."
"When I was young, the Trojan War story was pretty simple - sly Trojans kidnapped Helen, and the brave, clever Greeks sailed off to bring her home and Punish the Evildoers."
Was this the popup picturebook version? Because it sure as hell wasn't Homer's.
Posted by: Keith M Ellis on May 18, 2004 08:20 PMKidnapped? I always thought she run away with Paris.
Posted by: bubba on May 18, 2004 08:51 PMMy daughter (30+ ya) was at a birthday party over the weekend with someone who had just seen the movie: she (the someone, a college classmate) complained vociferously about killing Agamemnom during the siege -- What about Clytemnestra? What about Orestes?
Posted by: Brian Boru on May 18, 2004 09:15 PMIf you like Homer or if you really don't understand what the fuss is about, read Christoper Logue
War Music
Don't know why the url didn't stick for War Music
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or here
Posted by: liberal japonicus on May 18, 2004 11:10 PMBrad, great passage. I had the same feeling.
Hector's piety was rewarded in death at the hands of his mortal enemy, his city burned, his son tossed from the walls and his wife sold into slavery. That's not how the Iliad ends, of course. The Iliad ends as it begins, in the middle of the fighting, with Achilles and Priam together at a funeral, perhaps jointly thinking that there will be no 'winners' on the fields of Troy.
By the by, going to war for specious if not entirely spacey reasons... sounds familiar, no?
Posted by: cc on May 18, 2004 11:48 PMDid he read the Reader's Digest version of the Iliad? Despite being told from the Greek side, the Iliad is strongly pro-Troy. Hector is probably the only true hero of the whole story, while the Greeks are a bunch of selfish and often boyish louts (think about Agamennones stealing Achilles lover Briseide and the Achille skulking in his tent refusing to fight). If you also remember that Agamennones had to sacrifice his own daughter to the gods to get the war started in the first place and how in Hecates can you picture the Greeks as brave and clever? Even Odisseus (Ulysses) in the Iliad is not very nice, he is presented as canny, yes, but in the slimy kind of way. His "polutropon" (many abilities) becomes a positive only in the Odissey, where btw is mentioned the Horse which does not appear in the Iliad.
Posted by: Manfredi on May 19, 2004 12:45 AM'What about Clytemnestra? What about Orestes?'
it's not like hollywood to screw up the sequel potential.
Of course the attack was not about the woman the greeks needed slaves and treasure to keep their economy alive, their slaves were overworked and underfed and didn't live long. With the fall of Troy, which didn't produce much in the way of either, the greek economy collapsed. Why are the yanks in Iraq? How is your economy?
Posted by: big al on May 19, 2004 04:00 AMThe fact the manly Achilles was also AC/DC has been skirted (so to speak) over as well.
Posted by: Nabakov on May 19, 2004 06:38 AMThere's nuance in the Lord of the Rings: the inevitable corruption of power, the fact that Gollum's obsessed evil saves the day, that the elves depart and the she-Ents are who-knows-where, that the Shire needs to be cleansed of fascist dictatorship afterwards. Of course, my 12 year old daughter isn't into all this--she currently plans her college career in New York, majoring in Orlando Bloom Studies--but she'll get there...it's on the table, and she'll pick it up one of these days.
Posted by: Mike on May 19, 2004 07:43 AMHaven't read the Iliad in decades, but I think that the message is along the lines of "nice guys finish last" and "there's no security or justice in this world". The anti-war, pro-Trojan message is there but not dominant. Fictional literature is able to present many facets of something without necessarily choosing one.
More recently I have read Beowulf, from which you could also extract an anti-war message if you were anti-war, but that's not the message message.
It's hard to imagine how brutal the world used to be, or how much the brutality used to be taken as inevitable. Or the degree to which trained killers were more admired than anyone else.
A sort of trashy comparison is with the 50's-60's car crash songs like "Dead Man's Curve", "Teen Angel", "Tell Laura I Love Her", etc. It would be hard to prove from a distance that these weren't arguyments for careful driving and traffic safety, but if you were there at the time you know they just absolutely weren't. Same for a lot of suicidal drug songs.
Posted by: Zizka on May 19, 2004 08:27 AMI saw and enjoyed the movie Friday. I'm not sure that Agamemnon really is killed. He gets a severe dagger wound, several inches deep near the collarbone. I'd think such a wound certainly could be fatal, but it might well be survivable also.
So they can just have him do the sequel bandaged up with his arm in a sling.
Plus you can do a whole revisionist uncertainty shtick about if he was really poisoned by Clytemnestra or just died of an infected wound.
[ I'm not a doctor and didn't even play one in Ancient Greece. ]
Was this the popup picturebook version?
Might have been, I was about ten at the time. And remind me never to attempt nuance. My point was not that the Iliad is a simple story, or ought to be presented that way. Rather, since Hollywood is aiming for a summer blockbuster and not a documentary, they can tell the story any way they want (the whole war lasted about three weeks on the big screen, so they weren't straining to stay true to the text).
The rest of my observation is that it was probably the success of Lord of the Rings that prompted Hollywood to dust of the archery and swordplay epics - this summer we also get King Arthur, by uncanny coincidence.
So, I found it interesting that the marketing mavens of Hollywood opted for a "war is troubling" film, when they could have chosen a "Punish the Evildoers" storyline without much difficulty (that would be the simple version I remember from my youth, although it is not the only version I remember). One presumes they have their marketing studies (or finger on the pulse) to justify such an "artistic" decision. Given the budget, cast, and timing, if the studio had wanted a rah-rah film, the story would have been told much differently.
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