[home]

The Legendary Macedonian King Gets Stoned

Alexander the Flop!
by Marian Kester Coombs
Human Events, December 3, 2004

n a movie market where fantastical history (The Lord of the Rings) and historical legend (Troy) have fared so well, Oliver Stone's producers must have felt assured of a lucrative reception for the actual history of Alexander the Great. But we are dealing with Oliver Stone, who can never leave well enough alone. Despite his own best intentions, likely, he managed to contemporize, psychologize and "queerize" Alexander to a near fatal degree.

Britain's Independent claims that the film flopped because "conservative Christians have loudly denounced 'Alexander' as 'pro-gay' propaganda from Tinseltown, insisting that Alexander was a firmly hetero hero." But the paper does not cite a single named source for this claim. Meanwhile, even the pro-gay mainstream press has panned the movie.

Critics have been especially harsh toward Stone's choice of Colin Farrell as Alexander, but an actor is only as good as his director. Baz Luhrmann, whose own Alexander the Great project has been delayed until Stone's is gotten out of the way, chose Leonardo di Caprio as his star. Luhrmann plans to make Alexander's "homosexuality" a central motif as well. He may want to analyze carefully how easy it was for Stone to mishandle this.

Intense male friendships were a pillar of social order in the ancient world; the "old boy network" is a faint echo of that traditional social reality. The bond between men in a society of warriors, priests and kings is difficult for moderns to comprehend, but it's safe to say that it was alien to the culture of Christopher Street or the Castro. Ironically, nothing has been unhealthier for true male bonding than the rise of gay rights and its trifling, reductionist presumptions about intermasculine relationships.

On top of the "bent" toward boys that Stone ascribes to Alexander, he saddles the hero's mother Olympias with a heavy snake fetish (Angelina Jolie leading with her lips as always, plus an accent from Russia with love), while his one-eyed father Philip (a party-hearty Val Kilmer) alternately embraces and shoves the lad away. Clearly a textbook case of...

Stone realized he must have a theory of why Alexander had to conquer, and in fact comes up with several: Alexander's thrust eastward is a sort of "civilizing mission," forcibly bringing much-needed "change" to the Persian empire, like an ancient Operation Iraqi Freedom. Or he is searching for the Home he's never had. Or escaping from his harpy mother and the guilt for his father's murder (which he almost certainly had a hand in). Or seeking death, since he could not have love. Or simply striving for "everlasting fame," the key to immortality in the ancient world. Or all of the above.

But can modern people begin to comprehend a man like Alexander? We know he was a pupil of Aristotle, and many of Aristotle's works are still available to us, but what effect did those teachings have on a youth in the 4th Century before Christ? The bare facts of Alexander's short life, thickly mythologized, point to a charismatic sociopath drunk on battle glory and inspired both by his own father and his Grecian ancestor, Achilles of immortal fame.

Alexander's worst problem, however, is that it repeatedly breaks the spell of art. The music is... hokey—syrupy and overblown. The reproductions of ancient painting and sculpture are just "off' enough to keep reviving our disbelief. The performances too often fail to distract the mind from thoughts like "That's an actor in a wig and heavy makeup."

Yet speaking of Gaugamela, another of Alexander's routs of the Persians that took place near what is now Mosul in 331 B.C., this battle is the zenith of the film, the one sequence that does keep us spellbound. All is bronzed and glaring yellow, veiled in vast swaths of dust. The camera's eagle-eyed view penetrates the plain where long-lanced phalanxes wheel and scythe-hubbed war chariots race as Alexander's brilliant tactics wrest victory from the immense forces of Darius III. Here the theme of free men vs. a slave army actually plays out onscreen, amid great slaughter.

Alexander, whose name means "keeps harm from men," lived only 33 years, was reputed to be the son of Zeus, sent vast quantities of gold, frankincense and myrrh home to Macedonia from Persia for use in ritual sacrifice, and attempted to unify the known world under one king. After death his body was regarded as the most sacred relic on earth; possession of it was necessary to legitimate kingship for many years.

At the film's end, Anthony Hopkins as the pharaoh Ptolemy calls Alexander's "an empire of the mind." "The dreamers [like Alexander]," he says, "exhaust us" and we must destroy them.

Clearly there are parallels between the lives of Alexander the Great and Jesus Christ. Did Alexander foreshadow Christ, as some say, "in an earthly way"? Is Alexander referred to in the Book of Revelation as part of the advent of the Antichrist? Was Christ God's reply to the vanity of dreams of human dominion? ' The life of Alexander continues to fascinate because we may never be done learning its lessons.