INTRODUCTION

How do a hero's adventures connect with the human quest for immortality? This chapter compares two fairly recent, but very different, films that both use ancient stories about the Greek hero Theseus for their plots and characters to explore this question. The first is the 2011 fantasy and CGI action film Immortals, starring Henry Cavill and Mickey Rourke, and directed by Tarsem Singh. The second is the philosophical art film Ship of Theseus, a 2013 Indian drama written and directed by Anand Gandhi, and produced by Kiran Rao, along with Sohum Shah, who is also an actor and one of the film's protagonists. While on the surface these two films could not be more different in structure and purpose, both films deal with the complex connections between the desire for immortality and the struggle for personal identity and meaning, as well as the subsequent ethics of such a quest. These issues infiltrate ancient Greek myth and are still compelling today, as is evident on all levels of culture from popular media to high-brow art.

In his 2012 book Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How it Drives Civilization, Stephen Cave suggests four paths people have taken to achieve immortality. He sees the ascent to the mountain as the dominant metaphor for this quest that he argues is central to the construction of cultures in different times and places. The four paths are: (1) staying alive through either magic or science; (2) resurrection, or bringing the dead to life again; (3) the perpetuation of the self through the survival of the soul; and (4) legacy, through either progeny, fame, or monuments of art. After a long exploration of each path, Cave concludes not only that none of the paths is ultimately successful but that each can have the negative effect of sacrificing the living to save the dying, of destroying the weak to perpetuate the powerful.

Taken together, the two films under analysis here examine all these mechanisms for achieving immortality, with all their inherent complications. What is most interesting in comparing the two films is the ways they overlap in exploring these questions, given their differences.

At 10.25pm on Sunday 14 November 1965, the British television viewer had three options. Coming to the end of that year's Royal Variety Performance they may have been gearing up to watch the US sitcom Beverly Hillbillies on ITV, the Independent Television network, or to enjoy the wit and repartee of Frank Muir and his guests in the wordbased game show Call My Bluff on BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation's second television channel, which had been instituted the previous year. Then again, they may have stayed with BBC following the end of a 40-minute excerpt from the Magic Circle's Annual Show, broadcast from London's La Scala Theatre, for The Drinking Party. This ‘Sunday Night’ feature by Leo Aylen and Jonathan Miller was billed as ‘a modern recreation’ of an ancient Greek philosophical text, Plato's Symposium. Within the wider schedule of light entertainment this evening, The Drinking Party stands out as a serious-minded, if not entirely sober affair. Although antiquity came late to the television screen by comparison with its sister medium radio, which had since the 1920s drawn on ancient Greece and Rome for programme material, from the late 1950s ancient Greece has offered a creative source of inspiration and content for the medium. Today it may be difficult to imagine a dramatisation of a Platonic dialogue being afforded prime position in the schedule of the principal public service channel, but ancient Greek culture, politics, archaeology, literature, mythology and thought have regularly appeared in British television schedules in various forms to the present day.

It is the purpose of this book to examine television's engagements with ancient Greece across these decades. As the first book-length study of this topic, it cannot be exhaustive. Yet, as a collaborative and cross-disciplinary endeavour that capitalises upon the expertise of researchers with backgrounds in Classics, Ancient History, Classical Reception Studies, English, Media Studies, Cultural History and Digital Humanities, as well as television practitioners, it captures something of the scope, diversity and texture of ancient Greece on television. Rather than attempt a catalogue of Greek-themed programming, which would be of limited critical value, each of the chapters drills down into specific examples of different genres, combining close analysis of individual television programmes, production contexts and (where possible) audience engagement.

INTRODUCTION

Heroism is one of the great preoccupations of Western, if not global culture, though standards for what heroes can or should do are ever-shifting. Because they are prone to antiheroic passions such as greed, lust, and vengeance, Greek and Roman heroes often become rehabilitated in modern screen texts. The opening narration of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995–9) exemplifies this tendency: “Hercules possessed a strength the world had never seen – a strength surpassed only by the power of his heart… . But wherever there was evil, wherever an innocent would suffer, there would be Hercules.” His mission is not quite Superman's “truth, justice, and the American way,” but the show clearly reconfigures one of antiquity's most problematic characters as a superhero of the past.

This chapter focuses on three historic and mythical figures – Alexander the Great, Perseus, and Hercules – portrayed in screen epics as both heroes and antiheroes. Their antiheroic status stems not so much from gestures toward ancient authenticity as from our own ambivalence toward heroism. Furthermore, antiheroism is depicted cinematically through the dissolution or fragmentation of conventional heroic storytelling, with its familiar plot patterns and filmmaking techniques. The later, antiheroic films play quite differently from their earlier, heroic counterparts – which in turn receive the relative status of classics.

SURROGATE CLASSICISM: FORMULATING ANTIHEROES

Antiheroes fulfill many cultural functions. Some of the more common include the following.

• • Failures. The antihero is frequently defined in opposition to the traditionally successful hero: “A ‘non-hero,’ or the antithesis of a hero of the old-fashioned kind who was capable of heroic deeds, who was dashing, strong, brave and resourceful… . The antihero … is given the vocation of failure.” “Vocation of failure” is provocative and suggests that antiheroes do not achieve much – or, if they do, that their achievements are feeble or unworthy.

• • Modern mirrors. “A fragmented society – torn by war, conflicting values, cultural crisis, and different aspects of modernity – produces its own heroic model: sick, anti-social, and introspective antiheroes whose salvation is individualistic in the midst of social and cultural disarray.”

INTRODUCTION

With the exception of his nephew Iolaus’ help against the Hydra in the second canonical labor, the Hercules of classical myth largely works alone in his heroic adventures. Cinematic depictions of Hercules during the 1950s and 1960s peplum or sword-and-sandal era largely follow suit, and more recent film and television reimaginings of the quintessential Greek mythological hero present him working with single sidekicks or very small groups at most. The 2014 Brett Ratner film Hercules takes another tack entirely. Based on the late Steve Moore's 2008 graphic novel Hercules: The Thracian Wars, the screenplay by Ryan Condal and Evan Spiliotopoulos features a large ensemble cast. While Dwayne Johnson plays the titular hero with charismatic star power and commensurate top billing, this Hercules works extensively with five companions. Each one has a complex relationship with mythological precedent and modern adaptation, and together these six form a tightly knit band of adventurers verging on adoptive family. The heroic name and reputation of “Hercules” soon reveals itself as the composite, corporate identity of Hercules the individual and his comrades seamlessly cooperating as a unit. This new company both draws from heroic fellowships of classical myth and reconfigures them for an innovative original narrative.

STEVE MOORE's GRAPHIC NOVEL AS ADAPTATION AND SOURCE

Complex layers of reception are at work in the finished film. Brett Ratner directed from the script by Condal and Spiliotopoulos, who in turn adapted Steve Moore's graphic novel. In an interview in 2008, Moore spoke at length about the inception and execution of Hercules: The Thracian Wars for Radical Comics, giving valuable insight into his artistic vision and creative choices. Imagining “a grittier, more human Hercules, which played down the more mythological aspects and emphasized that of the warrior,” Moore framed group dynamics as the fundamental starting point of his adaptation: “Obviously a warrior doesn't fight alone, so my first job was to give him some companions.”