Ranting to /dev/null

Pax Americana

It's over as far as I can tell. The half-century of peace and prosperity after WWII - though it did involve fighting and significant tension for most of it - seems to have ended. We've started a new conflict, one that will probably never end, and one that I'm not entirely convinced we can win. The barbarians are at the gates. I really think we're living in the twilight of our civilization, and can't help but think that a pretty big downturn is bound to come in the next century or so. I'm pretty sure I will look back on the late twentieth century as the "good old days", and I'm almost certain my children and their children will.

Oddly enough, this realization struck me while I was watching Troy. So the following will be a discussion of both the previous paragraph and my thoughts on the movie. If that sounds like something you don't want to read, you were warned.

First, Troy. Eric Bana totally stole the show as Hector. In the original Illiad, Hector is by far the most likable character, and posesses the closest thing to what we would consider a noble spirit out of all the people involved. I'm going to assume that the reader is familiar with the events in the Illiad, because if you aren't you should be. Anyway, the slaying of Hector is one of the better emotional moments in the movie, though not nearly the only one the movie tries to have. It just doesn't work most of the time.

The reasons for this have to partly with the dialog - which is pretty stilted most of the time - and partly to do with the fact that three really major elements of the Illiad are almost totally gone. The first is the gods. They are mentioned from time to time, but this seems to be at best a way of confirming that yes, this really is ancient Greece. The few characters that actually believe in the gods are made to seem foolish for doing so. In the original story, the gods take a very active role in the events of the war. Without them, the primary motivation for the war is pretty much gone. The reason for Hector not turning around and taking Helen back to Sparta as soon as he finds Helen onboard are pretty thin. There isn't much reason for Troy to want to fight, nor is there much reason for Agamemnon to rally the armies of Greece and sail to Troy. Achilles was spoken to many times by Athena, who encouraged him and supported him throughout the war. He made a few critical decisions under her guidance, decisions which in the film appear kind of out of nowhere. Agamemnon's motivation in the movie is simple greed (and one can't help but think that the director is trying to make some kind of comment about the war in Iraq), and he seems pretty insane a lot of the time. Agamemnon may have been ambitous, and most of the characters in the Illiad act like petulant children from time to time, but without the presence of the gods, most of the characters don't seem to make much sense.

The other thing present in the original but absent from the movie is a sense of Homeric honor. Achilles was motivated by a desire for glory, as were all the warriors of the Homeric era (or at least, that's what we're given to believe by their descendants who compiled the Illiad), and this was thought to be a virtue, not a liability. A lack of wisdom combined with pride proved to be Achilles downfall, but his flaw was wanting too much of a good thing and having too high an opinion of himself, not wanting the wrong thing. In the movie, the deaths of his opponants weigh on his conscience, and we expresses a weariness in war, wondering why men fight. The real Achilles knew why men fight, or at least why they fought in those days: the sheer glory of combat and victory. The men you kill don't add to your already burdened conscience, they're notches on your sword. This sense of self-promotion as a centerpiece of personal growth and progress being absent also makes the characters really hard to understand. The director and screenwriter are constantly having to come up with political and psychological reasons for the actions of the characters when these reasons are largely absent from the original. Achilles was a pretentious and self-aggrandizing whiner, it's true, but he was just as good as he thought he was, and his actions made sense. In the movie, he's still pretty immature, but I was left wondering what on earth he was doing a lot of the time.

The third big factor missing from the film is, believe it or not, homosexuality. The ancient Greeks were pretty ragingly bisexual, not to mention pederasts. Plato comments that a wealthy city man could expect to have "a wife for legitimate children, a mistress for pleasure, and a boy." In fact, homosexuality was considered a more perfect kind of sexual union as it didn't stand to produce any offspring, and considering the fact that matter is bad, this is a good thing. Patroklos wasn't Achilles cousin, he was his armor-bearer and, more importantly, his lover. Which goes a long way towards explaining why Achilles goes totally apeshit when Patroklos gets killed by Hector.

Generally, I'm not really all that much of a hardass about making movies from books and insisting that things be exactly the same. You'll notice that I haven't complained about the fact that what was a ten-year war in the Illiad is settled in two weeks, nor am I complaining about the fact that a lot of people die who weren't supposed to. But in leaving these three things out of the film, the director has made the choices of his characters really hard to follow and pretty implausible. The answers he is forced to come up with really don't fit with the text, and it shows.

So what the hell does all of that have to do with the Pax Americana I mentioned so long ago? What struck me more than anything watching the film is that basically we were seeing twenty-first century Americans with good postmodern sensibilities doing the Trojan War, and it just doesn't work. We don't think single-handedly killing large numbers of people is something to brag about. We tend not to like war and think that peace is a really valuable and important thing. In the film, someone asks Achilles "Where does it end?" His response was that it never ends.

For some reason - quite possibly because I was pretty sure the director was trying to make a contemporary political statement - I started thinking about the current state of affairs, Islam vs. the West. The Islamists want one thing from us, and one thing only: they want us to die. They aren't interested in learning about our values or gaining the benefits of modern economies. They want to kill as many of us as they can while they reestablish the Caliphate.

This is going to be a state of neverending war until one side collapses or the whole system goes down. Peace is over. The last remnants of the Pax Americana were shattered when America was attacked, and are now being effectively dissolved by the foreign policy of the current administraion (not that I think any of the nine dwarves has a better idea). We can expect conflict from here on out.

To tie the two together, this isn't really something our postmodern psyches are prepared to deal with. We want to talk, discuss, learn, and share. When someone else just wants to kill, we don't seem to have a very effective response. The current President seemed to have one at one point - shoot first and ask questions later - but this has been derailed by both his own ideological incompatence and the heel-dragging emasculatory and entirely unrealistic tactics of his opponants. What we need is a bit of the Homeric to be reborn. Despite being drenched in violence, the influential portions of our culture are really averse to violence to the point of never thinking it justified (though how one can support this and be a Christian is beyond me: violence is essential to the Christian faith).

We need a sense of the virtue involved in killing one's enemies and defending one's nation (oh yeah, the introduction of nationalistic ideologiy about 5000 years too early pissed me off too). Before they became the province of barely civilized rednecks, the arts of war were considered a noble and necessary task, largely because one never really knew when large men with axes were going to come over the next hill with the barbarian triathelon on their minds: raping, looting, and pillaging. We've grown soft. We have forgotten the value and virtue of defending the people we hold dear.

Well the barbarians are indeed at the gates. And if reading about Homeric values will help us remember our fortitude, then go read Homer.

Posted by ryan at May 15, 2004 11:10 PM | TrackBack