Copyrighted Material - 9781137299598 Screening Love and Sex in the Ancient World Edited by Monica S. Cyrino Copyrighted Material - 9781137299598 pal-cyrino-book.indb iii 1/10/13 10:19 AM Copyrighted Material - 9781137299598 SCREENING LOVE AND SEX IN THE ANCIENT WORLD Copyright © Monica Cyrino, 2013. All rights reserved. First published in 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978- 1- 137- 29959- 8 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: February 2013 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Copyrighted Material - 9781137299598 pal-cyrino-book.indb iv 1/10/13 10:19 AM Copyrighted Material - 9781137299598 Contents List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Screening Love and Sex in the Ancient World 1 Monica S. Cyrino Part 1: Screening Love and Sex in Ancient Myth and Literature 1 G. W. Pabst’s Hesiodic Myth of Sex in Die Büchse der Pandora (1929) 11 Lorenzo F. Garcia Jr. 2 Kiss Me Deadly (1955): Pandora and Prometheus in Robert Aldrich’s Cinematic Subversion of Spillane 25 Paula James 3 Perversions of the Phaeacians: The Gothic Odyssey of Angels & Insects (1996) 39 Meredith Safran 4 Woman Trouble: True Love and Homecoming in Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver (2006) 55 Corinne Pache 5 Sappho and Pocahontas in Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005) 69 Seán Easton 6 Soul Fuck: Possession and the Female Body in Antiquity and in Cinema 85 Kirsten Day 7 Ancient Allusions and Modern Anxieties in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) 99 Christopher M. McDonough Copyrighted Material - 9781137299598 pal-cyrino-book.indb v 1/10/13 10:19 AM Copyrighted Material - 9781137299598 vi contents Part 2: Screening Love and Sex in Ancient History 8 Gorgo at the Limits of Liberation in Zack Snyder’s 300 (2007) 113 Vincent Tomasso 9 Oliver Stone’s Unmanning of Alexander the Great in Alexander (2004) 127 Jerry B. Pierce 10 The Order of Orgies: Sex and the Cinematic Roman 143 Stacie Raucci 11 Partnership and Love in Spartacus: Blood and Sand (2010) 157 Antony Augoustakis 12 Objects of Desire: Female Gazes and Male Bodies in Spartacus: Blood and Sand (2010) 167 Anise K. Strong 13 Glenn Close Channels Theda Bara in Maxie (1985): A Chapter in the Social History of the Snake Bra 183 Gregory N. Daugherty 14 Virility and Licentiousness in Rome’s Mark Antony (2005– 7) 195 Rachael Kelly 15 Love, Rebellion, and Cleavage: Boadicea’s Hammered Breastplate in The Viking Queen (1967) 211 Alison Futrell 16 Subverting Sex and Love in Alejandro Amenábar’s Agora (2009) 227 Joanna Paul Filmography 243 Bibliography 247 List of Contributors 263 Index 267 Copyrighted Material - 9781137299598 pal-cyrino-book.indb vi 1/10/13 10:19 AM Copyrighted Material - 9781137299598 Introduction4 Screening Love and Sex in the Ancient World Monica S. Cyrino Love and sex attracted the earliest filmmakers to screen the mythol- ogy, literature, and history of the ancient world. Images and narratives of torrid romance, provocative sexualities, and erotic excess have been a mainstay of screen depictions of ancient Greece and Rome since the beginning of cinema in the early twentieth century. Vibrant scenes of baths, orgies, and brothels were first borrowed from nineteenth- century paintings, photographic tableaux vivants, and stage plays, and given new life in the nascent medium of film, and then they were later reanimated on ancient- themed television series. By seizing the oppor- tunity to exhibit scantily clad dancing girls and bare- chested muscle men mingling with pagan abandon at bacchanals, banquets, and gladiator games, cinematic entrepreneurs are able to satisfy both their artistic and commercial senses. Characters, themes, and plots centered on romance and sexuality continue to appear in the most recent recre- ations of antiquity in blockbuster movies and on premium cable tele- vision. Today, filmmakers and television producers regularly return to classical antiquity as a persistent, powerful source of historical, lit- erary, and mythological models for representing sexuality— its prob- lems, pleasures, and intimate link to gender roles—to be celebrated on the screen, as well as for negative paradigms to be confronted, censured, or covertly savored. Screening the history, imagined and “real,” of famous ancient bat- tles and political intrigues has always been infused with a heavy dose of Copyrighted Material - 9781137299598 pal-cyrino-book.indb 1 1/10/13 10:19 AM Copyrighted Material - 9781137299598 2 Monica S. Cyrino love and sex. Although the notorious— and visually titillating— sexual debauchery of ancient Rome has especially captivated filmmakers throughout the first century of cinema and television, the complicated erotic inclinations of the ancient Greeks have also received screen time. The artistic preference for screening antiquity as a time of sexual exploration and excitement— where the lack of erotic inhibition is set against the rise of powerful warriors, politicians, and femmes fatales, as well as the birth of great empires and their eventual decay and destruction— has provided the historical framework for literally hun- dreds of films and television programs set in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. From the various cinematic versions of Cleopatra as a spectacle of sex and power (such as Cecil B. DeMille’s in 1934 and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s in 1963), to the eye- popping exposure of buff male physicality in Zack Snyder’s 300 (2007), to the recent cable television adaptation of the Spartacus story with its unparalleled dis- play of graphic nudity, sex, and violence (Spartacus: Blood and Sand on Starz, 2010), these recreations transport the viewer back to an imagined ancient world brimming with enormous romantic passions and sexual appetites. While purporting to offer a morally edifying illustration of the dangers of overreaching power and erotic license, the process of screening antiquity has at the same time allowed film- makers and television producers to exploit the audience’s pervasive and prurient fascination with the unbridled and alluring sexualities of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Modern fascination with and anxi- eties about love and sex are thereby projected back vividly onto the ancient world onscreen. Along with ancient historical accounts, the narratives and motifs of classical mythology and literature have also provided a wide range of thematic material for filmmakers and television producers to engage with topics of love and sexuality, gender and power, erotic desire and jealousy, loss and reunion. In using the archetypal characters and plot outlines from ancient myth and literature, rather than strict “history,” writers and directors find themselves more free to adapt stories and images of romance and sexuality to the screen, often locating them in a temporal setting far removed from antiquity, or even in the mod- ern day. For example, the Greek myth of the first woman, Pandora, together with the erotic danger she brought to mankind, has inspired the cinematic narratives of numerous films, from the silent film clas- sic of consuming female sexuality in G. W. Pabst’s Die Büchse der Pandora (1929), to the evocative name of the lush tropical moon, Pandora, lethal but valuable to humans, in James Cameron’s futuris- tic adventure Avatar (2009), while the epic tale of Homer’s Odyssey, Copyrighted Material - 9781137299598 pal-cyrino-book.indb 2 1/10/13 10:19 AM Copyrighted Material - 9781137299598 Screening Love and Sex in the Ancient World 3 with its exotic, sexually adventurous travel narrative embedded within a frame of enduring conjugal love, has been reimagined countless times in films such as Mervyn LeRoy’s romantic drama, Homecom- ing (1948), the Coen brothers’ caper comedy, O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), and Anthony Minghella’s Civil War love story, Cold Mountain (2003). Films like these allow viewers to enjoy the essence of an ancient literary work or myth distilled into its most basic narra- tive and authentic archetypal paradigms of love, sexuality, and gender that resonate deeply with the contemporary world. Moreover, since these films are not bound by any obligation to recreate a genuine ancient setting or a precise historical context, the filmmaker can take a more direct and innovative approach to the timeless themes and char- acters, just as the ancient authors and mythographers did. This volume of essays has the ambitious aim of engaging with these two reception strands for screening love and sex in the ancient world, both the mythic/literary approach, and the historical one; in doing so, the chapters seek to demonstrate the importance of understanding the many different ways in which filmmakers and television produc- ers use the past to explore contemporary issues of love and sexuality. In 16 original and compelling essays, the contributors to this proj- ect address the question of how love and sex are portrayed in films that refer to the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, either directly in the context of ancient history, or indirectly through allusion to clas- sical mythology and literature. These 16 chapters are organized into two sections: the first half focuses on films that evoke characters and themes from ancient myths and literature, and the second half deals with onscreen representations of subjects rooted (more or less) in his- torical accounts from antiquity.