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Bruce S. Thornton - Contributor
Bruce Thornton
is a professor of Classics at Cal State Fresno and co-author
of Bonfire
of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished
Age and author of Greek
Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization (Encounter
Books). His most recent book is Searching
for Joaquin: Myth, Murieta, and History in California (Encounter
Books). [go to Thornton index]
 Not
So Great An Alexander
Oliver Stone's
pathological ideology…
[Bruce S. Thornton] 12/6/04
A
movie as bad as Oliver Stone's Alexander usually would not
be worth notice, but Stone has indulged several cinematic
and political pathologies that are illuminating. Some of the
film's flaws are curiously old-fashioned, redolent of studio
schlock of the 1950s--the bombastic musical score, Angeline Jolie's
pointless Elvira "Mistress of the Night" accent; the
heavy-handed, stale Oedipal psychology, complete with snakes;
and the corny dialogue whose purple patches sound positively
late Victorian. And Colin Farrel's waxed legs and dye job are
as embarrassing as Richard Burton's were in his turn as the Macedonian
conqueror.
More interesting is
what you wouldn't have found in the 1950s-the depiction of
Alexander's bisexuality. Stone must have thought
that this "daring" acknowledgement of the great man's
sexual proclivities--his romance with Hephaestion and the Persian
catamite Bagoas--would get him a leg up with the critics, as
such positive treatments of homosexuality play to their cultural
prejudices; as Ben Shapiro points out on Townhall, since 1994
seventeen actors and actresses have been nominated for Academy
Awards for playing gay characters. Indeed, the film did get some
bounce on that score: "Gay Hero," a New York Times headline bragged, without a clue that calling Alexander "gay" is
as anachronistic as calling him the CEO of Macedon. Other critics
patted Stone's head for the film's homosexuality, but ultimately
the movie's numerous flaws cancelled out its playing of the politically
correct "gay" card.
Not everyone is happy
about Stone's take on Alexander's bedtime habits. The Greek
government is upset with the scenes showing
Alexander mooning over Hephaestion and kissing the Persian boy,
but I'm not sure why. Alexander and Hephaestion carry on like
junior-high teeny-boppers, complete with eyeliner, a class ring,
back-rubs and long soulful interludes in the moonlight. Stone,
like all the critics, has imposed modern ideas on the ancients,
particularly our curious notion of romantic love and idealized
sexuality, the heart of modern "gay" identity. But
such notions are alien to the world of the ancients, who would
have found such ideas, especially applied to homosexuals, bizarre
if not freakish.
What, then, were the
physical dimensions of the historical Alexander and Hephaestion's
relationship? We can't be sure, for many factors
complicate our understanding. We post-Freudians tend to misinterpret
the rhetoric of passionate friendship, assuming that it has to
be really about sex. Aristocratic notions of shame and honor--completely
alien to us egalitarian democrats--would have made certain physical
acts, especially those that put a male in the role of a female,
abhorrent to status-jealous nobles. This means that while some
males would have had no compunctions about treating, say, a slave
boy like a woman, they would have died before allowing themselves
to be sexually used like that. And much of the evidence about
Alexander is either very late or filtered through the ethnic
prejudices of the Greeks, who looked down on Macedonians as semi-barbarians
excessively fond of buggery. Contrary to the popular myth that
ancient Greek men were happily blasé about sex with other
men, in actual fact the Greeks despised exclusive homosexuals
who were used sexually like women, and had a whole rich vocabulary
of abuse to express their disgust.
What I find more puzzling
is the pass Stone has been given over his treatment of Roxanne,
the central Asian princess Alexander
married probably for strategic and political advantage. The movie
depicts her as a Third World hellcat spitting and snarling and
crawling around on all fours before being sexually subdued by
the more civilized Westerner. Usually indulging such ethnocentric
and misogynist stereotypes earns one a trip to the woodshed for
a whipping by the "diversity" and feminist nannies.
Critics may be overlooking Stone's retrograde ethnic slurs because
he puts in Alexander's mouth several speeches about the glories
of "multiculturalism" that would warm the cockles of
any diversity commissar's heart. Such talk is another example
of modern superstition imposed on the ancients. Whatever the
propaganda about spreading the light of Hellenism to the barbarians
and integrating them into Greek culture in some universal "brotherhood
of man" utopia, the fact is Alexander slaughtered these
dark-skinned "others" wholesale, and he killed them
for selfish glory and cold hard cash.
This brings us to
the movie's most fascinating pathology. Stone is a famous "leftist" director
whose earlier movies document the destructive effects of the
evil Capitalist octopus
and its malign influence over the hearts and minds of the average
person not smart enough to see the truth behind the propaganda
about freedom and opportunity. Whether it's Vietnam, the murder
of JFK, or professional football, Stone's vision is predictably
banal in its leftist assumptions: evil white conservative men
who lust for money and power manipulate everybody else to pursue
their nefarious plots to dominate the world in compensation for
their repressed desires.
Given that rancid
vision, one would think Stone would show us an Alexander as
proto-imperialist and proto-colonialist, a bloodthirsty,
neurotic Western butcher of peaceful, dark-skinned Third World "others." He
would've shown us Alexander's sadistic cruelty in the sack of
Tyre, where he introduced crucifixion to the West, or the crushing
of Greek political freedom at Thebes and Chaeronea, or the wanton
burning of the Persian capital Persepolis after a drunken orgy.
The psychotic paranoia that led to the murder of the man who
saved his life or to the butchery of numerous Macedonians would've
been given the full Nixon treatment, rather than being presented
as the understandable excesses of a visionary thwarted by reactionary
prejudice. And Stone would've found a way to make it clear that
Alexander killed more Greeks than the Persians ever did, including
Greek mercenaries who fought on the Persian side against the
tyrant who had destroyed their city-states' freedom.
That interpretation, by the way, would've been closer to the
historical truth. Alexander conquered Persia not to spread the
light of Hellenism or to create a multicultural paradise, but
for money----tons of gold and silver were sitting in Persepolis--and
for glory. The destroyer of Greek freedom wanted to be a god-king
on the Oriental model, an ambition anathema to everything ancient
Greek culture stood for.
Instead, Stone gives
us the visionary Alexander, the great idealist who pursues
his vision until he burns out, and whose excesses
are the lamentable byproducts of such noble ambition. And here's
the most illuminating point about this forgettable movie: once
more we see the left's romantic admiration of any mass-murderer
who cloaks his slaughter in idealism. Wasn't it Lenin who said
you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs? The "omelet" of
Communist idealism took, as we now know, 100 million dead human
beings, and ended up inedible anyway. But that hasn't stopped
the left from continuing to excuse murder on the grounds of "idealism," provided
it comes from the left (after all, Nazis were idealists too).
Thus Stalin, Ho Chi Min, Mao and Castro continue to be more popular
on college campuses than Ronald Reagan, and ex-terrorists like
Bill Ayres and Bernadette Dohrn are professors at taxpayer-funded
universities.
Once more we see the bankruptcy of the left, the hollowness
of its populist rhetoric and democratic idealism. Behind all
that lofty rhetoric is the old lust for power and domination,
contempt for the average person, and a burning confidence in
the superiority of its ideas no matter how bloody their application
or how often they are discarded in the trashcan of history. Stone's
Alexander may not tell us much about the Macedonian killer, but
it reveals a lot about the pathology of the left. tOR
copyright
2004 Bruce S. Thornton
Searching for Joaquin
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Greek Ways
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Bonfire of the Humanities
by Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath, Bruce S. Thornton |
Plagues of the Mind
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek
Sexuality
by Bruce S. Thornton |
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