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[The reviewer offers her sincere apologies for the lateness of this review.]
In answer to the perennial question of “whither Classics,” an
increasing number of people in the field have been looking toward the
commercial media where most people first encounter the stories and
images that continue to capture the imagination of children and adults
alike. The number of classicists who now produce substantial scholarly
work in this area of reception studies has increased markedly over the
past two decades, providing a basis for the next logical step: for
instructors to integrate treatments of Greek and Roman narratives in
popular culture into our courses, as objects of earnest and engaged
study.
Bridging the divide between scholarship and instructional materials is a major goal of Salzman-Mitchell and Alvares’ book,
Classical Myth and Film in the New Millennium.
Oxford University Press is marketing the volume as a textbook, which
the authors “hope…will be of interest both to college instructors and
to students, as well as to scholars and a broad readership of myth and
movie lovers.” (1) Speaking to such a diverse audience poses
significant challenges, which publishers are asking authors who work in
this area to meet in order to reach beyond the niche market for
academic publications. Considering primarily the educational angle, this
volume offers support to instructors by suggesting avenues of inquiry
for teaching the selected films, which range from action-oriented
blockbusters to young- adult franchises to art-house films. Although the
book includes pull-out boxes with plot summaries, brief definitions of
key terms, and discussion questions, students, especially in
introductory or no-prerequisite courses, may struggle to process the
book’s contents without significant assistance.
In their volume introduction (1-32), the authors clarify that they
aren’t using film as a vehicle for teaching myth per se, for which
readers should consult “mythological dictionaries, compendia, or…myth
textbooks.” (1) Their focus is on “thoughtful interpretations of the
myths and myth patterns that appear in our movies.” (1) Yet they also
acknowledge that the almost inevitable disjuncture between “so-called
canonical narratives” and cinematic versions of these narratives is a
matter of concern for “purists” (2). Such fidelity criticism is a
persistent anxiety in reception studies (addressed by e.g. Pantelis
Michelakis,
Greek Tragedy on Screen, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). The authors rightly prefer to embrace Martin Winkler’s focus (in
Cinema and Classical Texts: Apollo’s New Light,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) on the dialectical
dynamic within the still-developing classical tradition, in order to
gain purchase on how receptions produce their own meaning. The
introduction goes on to acknowledge further approaches that the authors
will and will not pursue: most pervasive will be “myth theories”
(12-23) that draw from literary adaptations of anthropological and
psychoanalytic theory (especially the concept of archetypes, which is a
major unifying idea across the book), while formalism in film studies
and discussions of the industrial imperatives that influence commercial
art will be de-emphasized.
The body of the volume is divided into five thematic parts, all of
which are of potential interest to instructors of various courses
commonly taught at the college level. The first, “Homeric Echoes,”
treats Wolfgang Petersen’s
Troy and the Coen Brothers’
O Brother, Where Art Thou? The second, “The Reluctant Hero,” treats Brett Ratner’s
Hercules, the mini-franchise
Clash and
Wrath of the Titans, and Tarsem Singh’s
Immortals.
All of these films’ narratives are explicitly anchored in classical
myth, but take various liberties with commonly taught mythic
literature, therefore providing readers with clear test-cases for the
authors’ aim of examining dialectical movements within the classical
tradition. Most of the art-house films and young-adult franchises
discussed in the latter three parts engage more obliquely with themes
and characters from classical myth. Part III, “Women at the Margins,”
treats two Spanish-language films, Guillermo del Toro’s
Pan’s Labyrinth and Arturo Ripstein’s
Such Is Life. Part IV, “Coming of Age in the New Millennium,” discusses
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,
The Hunger Games, and
Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief. Part V, “New Versions of Pygmalion,” analyzes
Lars and the Real Girl and
Ruby Sparks through a lens crafted by Paula James’ 2011 monograph,
Ovid’s Myth of Pygmalion on Screen: In Pursuit of the Perfect Woman (Bloomsbury).
The authors are clearly very enthusiastic about their project. The
chapters, each 20 to 30 pages long, are all brimming with observations.
The choice to integrate less-familiar films into a volume that could
easily have treated only movies that students likely have already seen
is commendable. At its best, the authors’ choice to consider the
concept of “myth” broadly creates opportunities to explore beyond the
plots of classical literature. The chapter on
Pan’s Labyrinth,
for example, discusses the historical context for the film’s setting,
after the Spanish Civil War, as a time when recourse to myth’s fantasy
world might be necessary, and acknowledges the importance of the fairy
tale as the generic framework for the film’s engagement with classical
myth. The authors’ use of archetypes in analyzing the young heroine’s
“Quest or coming-of-age myth” (193) invites engagement with classical
myth as mediated by the literary-psychoanalytic framework that
privileges symbolic images and structures (after Northrop Frye, whose
influence is several times acknowledged in the volume), and provides
richly gendered interpretations of the film’s visual poetics.
Instructors looking for concrete links to the classical tradition will
find it in sections involving the wild gods associated with pastoral,
Pan and Faunus (197-200), and the Demeter-Persephone myth (204-214).
Instructors of a course focused on gender and myth may find a congenial
companion piece to this chapter in Part IV’s discussion of the first
movie in
The Hunger Games franchise, which connects back to the
feminine pastoral/wild world (here, in connection with Artemis in myth
and cult) and the underworld concerns of the art-house film.
Instructors looking to support their students’ understanding of film
as a medium for narrative and mythopoesis will note that the authors
regularly remark upon a given director’s oeuvre and the reception of a
given film by the metrics of box-office receipts and aggregate critical
opinion, through references to popular websites like
RottenTomatoes.com. Consideration is also given to works of popular
culture that likely inform these films more directly than classical
literature and visual art. For example, their discussion of Ratner’s
Hercules in Chapter 3 is foregrounded by a treatment of Hercules in select films: the mid-twentieth-century peplum genre, Disney’s
Hercules, and a 2005 miniseries that aired on NBC. (Instructors may also wish to integrate
Hercules: The Legendary Journeys,
arguably the most influential televisual representation of the hero,
into this conversation.) In Part IV, which focuses on young-adult
franchises, the authors incorporate references to the literary
source-texts by Suzanne Collins, J. K. Rowling, and Rick Riordan. These
discussions, of necessity, are not comprehensive, but they do provide a
foothold from which students might launch themselves into further
exploration of how material beyond ancient sources shapes the
screen-texts of today.
There are a few caveats that people who consider adopting this volume as a textbook should note.
Instructors may feel that inquiring into the process of selection in
which filmmakers engage when constructing a film based in classical
myth—whether by excavating authorial intent from published interviews,
or analyzing what makes it into a film’s final cut—can assist students
in formulating a critical perspective on the use of ancient sources.
Such instructors will need to provide a significant amount of
supplementary material to that end. It is quite understandable that the
authors choose not to engage systematically with the many ancient
sources through which current knowledge of the narratives of classical
myth has been built. Passages like the highly selective one-page
summary of “the Matter of Troy”—which begins with “as the myth goes” and
stretches from Prometheus’ reconciliation with Zeus to Aegisthus’
murder of Agamemnon (43)—only gesture toward the complexity of that
tradition. The authors do recommend that readers look elsewhere for
that information (1). Yet some readers (especially those who skip the
introduction) may assume that they can rely on a book with “classical
myth” in the title for more detailed treatment of that material.
At some points, the capaciousness of the authors’ frame of reference
can be overwhelming. The most intense example, the opening paragraph of
the introduction to Part II, quotes or paraphrases in quick succession
the Gospel of John, Nietzsche, Wagner, the 1953 film
The Wild One,
Freudian psychology, and H.G. Wells (99). The most curious students may
revel in such a wide-ranging set of cultural referents; others will
simply ignore what they don’t understand; others will be distressed by
this habit. Even when the frame of reference is explicitly cinematic,
the authors ask a lot of their readers, including by invoking films that
are not treated in the volume, e.g.
The Wizard of Oz and
300.
Every chapter includes numerous offhanded comparative comments that
assume the reader’s prior familiarity with all the films treated in the
volume. This choice highlights the continuity of and variations on
themes and motifs shared by the authors’ selected films. It also
hinders the instructor’s ability to cherry-pick chapters that fit into a
given course’s syllabus, which at first glance is an appealing aspect
of this book’s organization.
A tantalizing question that hangs over the volume is posed by the
third element of its title: “in the new millennium.” Anyone old enough
to be considering this volume as a textbook has lived through
variations of millennial anxiety that erupted around the year 2000,
whether based in theological expectations of a new age, technological
anxieties connected to Y2K, existential crises brought on by the events
of September 11, 2001 and their aftermath, and/or fears of looming
ecological disaster. What does the deployment of classical myth in these
films contribute to discourses on this new era? Although each chapter
ends with a brief discussion titled e.g. “Harry Potter and the New
Millennium,” this concept feels least dear to the authors’ hearts. In a
way, the concept of the millennium is mythical in its own right:
effective when deployed within a particular ideological framework, but
outside of such a system, rather chimerical.
Like the concept of the decade, measuring out time in round numbers
can provide some conveniences, while obscuring continuities. Various
chapters cite ecological disasters, loss of faith in institutional
authority, and noxious ideologies based on oppression and hatred as
problems of the new millennium, yet these are problems that the world
suffered before, and likely will continue to suffer. Instructors who
want to push their students to consider classical myth not simply as an
artifact of the past, but as a vehicle for discussing contemporary
crises will be able to pick up on comments by the authors to stimulate
such debate. The fact that all the movies treated in the volume were
released in or after the year 2000, and so within the lifetime of our
students, may facilitate their ability to recognize and articulate what
is at stake in these films, as well as the cultural work that classical
myth continues to perform for contemporary societies: a significant
pedagogical goal.
The challenge inherent in reception studies generally—that every
manifestation of traditional material reflects a particular, even
idiosyncratic, engagement with that tradition—is no less true of what
once was dismissed as mass entertainment or popular culture than it is
of “high art.” A vast and exciting field stretches before scholars and
instructors who engage with the question of why the material that we
have come to cherish and steward professionally continues to fascinate
and delight audiences with no skin in the game of classics—but who may
yet be induced to appreciate how their current fandom for Percy Jackson
constitutes their participation in the classical tradition.
Classical Myth and Film in the New Millennium embraces that project wholeheartedly.
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