Screening Love and War in Troy: Fall of a City

Antony Augoustakis, Monica S. Cyrino, Antony Augoustakis, Monica S. Cyrino

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350144262
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria antica e classica

This is the first volume of essays published on the television series Troy: Fall of a City (BBC One and Netflix, 2018). Covering a wide range of engaging topics, such as gender, race and politics, international scholars in the fields of classics, history and film studies discuss how the story of Troy has been recreated on screen to suit the expectations of modern audiences. The series is commended for the thought-provoking way it handles important issues arising from the Trojan War narrative that continue to impact our society today. With discussions centered on epic narrative, cast and character, as well as tragic resonances, the contributors tackle gender roles by exploring the innovative ways in which mythological female figures such as Helen, Aphrodite and the Amazons are depicted in the series. An examination is also made into the concept of the hero and how the series challenges conventional representations of masculinity. We encounter a significant investigation of race focusing on the controversial casting of Achilles, Patroclus, Zeus and other series characters with Black actors. Several essays deal with the moral and ethical complexities surrounding warfare, power and politics. The significance of costume and production design are also explored throughout the volume.

PART I

EPIC NARRATIVE

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CHAPTER 1

BINGE FOR ME, O MUSE: EPISODES, BOOKS, AND CYCLES

Dan Curley

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A 2018 co-production of the British Broadcasting Company and Netflix, Troy: Fall of a City reached television audiences in two distinct phases.¹ First, from February 28 onward, new episodes were broadcast weekly on BBC One in the prestigious Saturday prime-time slot. Second, after the final broadcast on April 7, all eight episodes became available to stream on Netflix and, later, other digital platforms like Amazon Prime. Both phases underscore the seriality of TFOAC, its status as a series of self-contained installments that collectively tell the larger story of the Trojan War made famous in Homer.²

This chapter places the seriality of TFOAC in dialogue with the seriality of ancient epic. Along the way it draws analogies between the production of episodic media in antiquity and modernity, and between the reading and viewing (or consumer) cultures of both. Enabling the latter analogy is the era of complex television in which we now live, an era that demands viewers pay attention to the poetics of the medium, of which seriality is an indispensable feature.³ In other words, it is an era whose sophistication is comparable to that of literary communities in Greco-Roman antiquity. Most important, the dialogue is meant to be two-sided. Just as the traditions of ancient epic inform considerations of screen epic, so the reverse ought to be true.

Episodes

We begin with the episode, the building-block of serial media. The origins of the term can be traced back to the putative godfather of screenwriting, Aristotle, and his epoch-making treatise on drama, the Poetics (fourth century BC).⁴ Although concerned with the genre of tragedy, Aristotle also has much to say about epic, as represented by Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. The philosopher finds considerable common ground among the two genres, but draws a hard line between their ideal lengths. The Iliad, which depicts the rage of Achilles in the ninth year of the Trojan War, is a long poem. But, as Aristotle notes, it could have been longer:

Homer’s inspired superiority is evident, because of his refusal to attempt to make a poem about the entire war … Such a plot would be too bulky, and could not be perceived as a unity; or, if moderate in size, would be too intricately detailed.⁵

As though taking Aristotle’s verdict as a dare, screen adaptations of the Trojan cycle delight in ranging beyond the poem and incorporating past episodes, such as the meeting of Paris and Helen; or future ones, such as building the Trojan Horse and sacking the city. These and other extra-Homeric incidents are so common as to constitute traditional features of Iliadic screen epic, from Borgnetto and Pastrone’s La caduta di Troia (1911) onward. As we will have occasion to observe, TFOAC is fully invested in aligning with these traditions.

The extreme length of an epic poem, as opposed to a tragic play, depends on the number of episodes as well as their impact on the plot. To explain this idea, Aristotle cites the Odyssey:

Now, in drama the episodes are concise, while epic gains extra length from them. The main story of the Odyssey is short. A man is abroad for many years, is persecuted by Poseidon, and is left desolate. Further, circumstances at home mean that his property is consumed by suitors, and his son is a target for conspiracy. But the man survives shipwreck to reach home again, reveals his identity to certain people, and launches an attack. His own safety is restored, and he destroys his enemies. This much is essential; the rest is episodes.⁶

On the one hand, Aristotle’s minimalist synopsis shows how straightforward the premise of the Odyssey is, such that he can reduce it to a few spare clauses. On the other hand, he is pitting the concision of tragedy against the expansiveness of epic poetry. Epic is prone to adding on—the word for episode, epeisodion, is prefixed by epi-, “in addition”—and this tendency helps to explain the size of poems like the Odyssey and the Iliad. As in tragedy, some episodes will be integral to the plot, such as the altercation between Achilles and Agamemnon in Iliad Book 1. Other episodes, like the Catalog of Ships in Book 2, will digress from it and prolong the poem.⁷ To call epic “episodic” is to draw attention as much to the sheer accumulation of episodes, as to their potential to stray from the main business of the text. Their discursiveness is more design feature than flaw.⁸

An Aristotelian sense of episode, denoting an “incidental narrative or digression in a poem, story,” and other literary kinds, prevailed through the nineteenth century.⁹ Examples from this period and earlier mostly derive from works of classical scholarship and reception, where Aristotle’s theories had ongoing purchase. Not until the early twentieth century, with the widespread distribution and broadcast of dramatic media, does episode finally signify an installment “into which a film, television or radio drama … is divided for transmitting as a series.”¹⁰ This shift in semantics reflects a larger shift in the reception of dramatic media, in which episodes become principal, not ancillary, texts in the delivery of plot. As such—and this is key—they become conflated with the plot itself. The conflation was apparently underway before Aristotle, in the gradual marginalization of the Chorus from Athenian tragedy and comedy, which would have rendered these genres episodic in a sense rather close to current usage.¹¹ Nonetheless, it is in recent modernity that the episode has come into its own, the primary vehicle by which dramatic media—and even news programs and podcasts—have been parceled out for serial consumption.

This brief history of episodes has bearing on TFOAC as televised screen epic. Producing a series on Troy obviously mandates an episodic approach, or by definition it could not be a series. Less obvious, perhaps, are the benefits of such an approach. One advantage, if not the advantage, is the spaciousness afforded by the episodes themselves, which allow the plot to unfold at length. As noted above, Iliadic screen epics traditionally ignore Aristotle’s advice and range well beyond Homer. When these epics are feature films, their totalizing ambitions can be at odds with their run times. For example, Helen of Troy and Troy (1956 and 2004, respectively) both have sequences set in Sparta, where Helen and Paris first meet. While the first movie covers everything from Helen (Rossana Podestà) finding Paris (Jacques Sernas) shipwrecked and unconscious, to their arrival at the Trojan harbor, the second presents an affair in medias res and with far less nuance. The differences are striking: over forty minutes of screen time incorporating many scenes of dialogue between the two lovers, versus less than nine with only one dialogue scene—which cuts to the chase and whisks Helen (Diane Kruger) and Paris (Orlando Bloom) out of the banquet hall and into the bedroom. Even as it devotes nearly two-and-a-half hours to a complete Iliadic saga, the 2004 film Troy ends up spreading itself too thin where Helen is concerned. Rather than a protagonist, Kruger’s heroine is treated like “a minor character” (as one classicist-critic puts it), “poorly realized and insubstantial.”¹²

Helen of Troy faces the inverse challenge. Because it is heavily invested in the Helen–Paris origin story, the film is half over, and the war not yet begun, by the time the lovers reach Troy. Extra-Homeric material on the front end exacts a toll on the best-known Homeric material later on. In Iliad 22, Achilles and Hector duel to the death; Hector is killed, and Achilles drags his corpse around the city walls and back to his camp. In Book 24, Priam visits Achilles and persuades him to return his son’s body for burial. These episodes are integral to the theme of Achilles’ rage, initially directed at Agamemnon and his fellow Greeks, and later toward Hector and the Trojans. Returning the body to Priam signals a resolution to Achilles’ anger, and the poem ends, appropriately, with Hector’s funeral. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Editors’ Acknowledgments
• List of Episodes
• Introduction: Screening Love and War in Troy: Fall of a City
• Part I Epic Narrative
• 1 Binge for Me, O Muse: Episodes, Books, and Cycles
• 2 Delineating the Divine: Gods and Religion at Troy
• 3 From Judgment to Fall: Aphrodite and Paris
• 4 Sympathy for Troy’s Jezebel: Helen as Antihero
• 5 The Curse of Troy: Odysseus’ Story
• Part II Cast and Character
• 6 Racist Reactions to Black Achilles
• 7 Pussy Politics: Women and Power in the Homeric Patriarchy
• 8 Queering Troy: Freedom and Sexuality
• 9 Heroic Hairstyles and Manless Amazons at Troy
• 10 Costume Changes: Dressing Helen of Sparta and Troy
• Part III Tragic Resonances
• 11 Fallen Heroes: Recasting Ajax and the Greeks on Screen
• 12 Family vs. Compassion: Odysseus and the Ethics of War
• 13 Bloody Brides: Iphigenia, Helen, and Ritual Exchange
• 14 Kings of Men and Sacrificial Daughters
• 15 Lessons for Leaders: Destiny, Devotion, and Self-Deception
• Epilogue: Troy: Fall of a City and Its Ancient Sources
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index
• Copyright