Achilles the Heel

Posted on May 16, 2004 in Culture Myths & Mysticism

I am amused to find a new Hollywood attempt to tell the story of the Trojan War, sans the fidelity to the story told by Homer and everyone else. The new version starring Brad Pitt attempts to modernize the ancient story of the war the Mycenaens made upon the Illyrians over the rape of Helen. My local newsweekly (it would be nice to have a news daily worth reading here in the Orange) sums up Brad Pitt’s role like so:

the high-flying, tae-kwon-do-si-do Achilles (Pitt), for all of his vanity, is boiled down to human history’s first embittered, cynical man of action. Ambiguity is swapped for a pleasant sense of mythic angst: Homerians will remember it was Hector, not Paris, who ran from his duel, but Achilles’ Bogartian self-interest is impressively monolithic until Briseis (Rose Byrne) dents it, the two of them barely amounting to a hill of beans in this crazy world….as a war movie, Troy is strangely noncommittal—the slaughter has a numb, ineffective, overprocessed tone to it. Although the Greeks are clearly the bastard plague, both sides of the conflict possess a variety of sensible rationales. The story’s one unmitigated monster, Agamemnon, makes the case for nation building; if you sought out a political agenda within this exceedingly quixotic studio epic, he’s your Bush II, and Troy is Baghdad.

I’v often dreamed of writing a film of the Trojan War — a mini-series based on Homer’s Illiad (subtitled The Wrath of Achilles — isn’t that just begging for blockbuster status?) would be even better — which would tell the story as it should be told, as a long-term slaughter which could have been avoided if Paris had kept control over his gonads.

Brad Pitt wouldn’t be a bad choice for Achilles in my version, though I dare say he’d undergo a sea change from what he’s reported to be like in this movie. In Greek mythology, Achilles got to be so damn bad because his nymph mother (not nympho) dipped him into the waters of the River Styx which rendered him invincible. (Except for the small matter of the heel which she held him by as she doused him.)

Think what kind of man results from such a privileged start. Would he be compassionate, understanding of the pain of others? Not on your life. Achilles is a major jerk. Homer’s story tells about how he throws a temper tantrum over a slave girl that both he and Agamemnon want. It comes down to a matter of pride — not any real love for the girl as Petersen’s rewrite suggests. Achilles, knowing his indispensability to the Mycenaean cause, goes into his tent and mopes. In the mean time, the Trojan War begins to go badly and Agamemnon thinks of ways to get his killing machine back on the battlefield without giving up the girl.

How does one deal with a useful monster is a central theme of Homer’s Illiad. This is no nice guy. He can kill just about anyone he wants and they can’t scratch him. When he meets and defeats Hector in battle — there’s a decent fellow — he ties the corpse to his chariot and drives it repeatedly around the city of Troy, whooping up his victory until poor Hector’s body is strewn over the countryside. Even the Greeks dropped their jaws at that one.

Petersen’s Achilles, like many of the characters who populate his militarist propaganda, is just too nice a guy. Homer’s man could have worked in Abu Ghraib and loved his job when he wasn’t bonking Lynndie England. Hell, this guy would love to see the bits of gore flying up when a cruise missile hit. A better analogy to him would have been Colonel Kilgore, sniffing the napalm in the morning.

But most Americans — having never read the original and having no desire to think of their undefeatable wonder technology in such a critical fashion — just wouldn’t get it*. This is a country where a sizeable proportion of the population thinks it’s just great that we have the power to blow the arms off of a young boy and then sort of put him back together again as a demonstration of our maganimous nature. An Achilles portrayed as the Greeks saw him wouldn’t register. Many Americans just wouldn’t understand that this scathing caricature of unfettered war-making power showed their own country, armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, cruise missiles, tanks, and — in the works — a suit to make the common soldier into a superman. A monster on our side? they’d say. No. That has to be an Iraqi.

*When I was in college, I lived across the hall from an ROTC cadet who actually saw Kilgore as a role model. I think that this isn’t all that unusual.