Alexander (part 1)
In defence of Oliver Stone's unappreciated masterpiece.
I believe that Oliver Stone’s Alexander is an unrecognised masterpiece. Its rating are terrible and it is infamously known as a botched adaptation — but I believe the opinions that produce its reputation are less than worthless to begin with. The series of historical and fantasy adaptation that came out in the early 2000s (Gladiator, Troy, Kingdom of Heaven, LOTR) were all great successes in their own right, but they are all substantially distinct from what Stone tried to achieve with Alexander.
A clear indulgence manifested from Hollywood producers in the early 2000s, allowing screen writers and directors to remake stories depicting certain heroic forms of Western masculinity and sell them as usually profitable blockbusters. The moral allowance in such depictions has totally ran dry in the politically correct era we came to live in in 2010s onwards. Who knows why this was—it is a more complex question concerning the mechanisms of Hollywood itself. Others could likely answer this question much more accurately than I ever could. But either way, it happened. The early 2000s are now looked back nostalgically (partly by the so called ‘online right’,) but not for particularly ideological reasons, but rather because it was the last time Western masculinity was allowed to be depicted positively in popular culture. This is a crucial topic in and of itself. Particularly the question why western masculinity (or any masculinity really) became unrecognisable in any positive light. The recent English TV series Adolescence, proves how pathological we have become in this light.
All of these films are favourites of mine as they offer something distinct. Troy is a success because of the costume design, fight choreography and its aesthetics are marvellous. As a depiction of the Iliad without the involvement of the Gods— a decision made for the modern audiences of the time— it worked. The type of film that was being produced would have been stupefied by cut scenes to Zeus and Ares squabbling over their favourite heroes from mount Olympus.
Troy worked for what is was. However, there is a key ‘flaws’, in the film, at least for those of us who have actually read the Iliad. This time I am not referring to absence of the Olympian Gods. Rather, it is the character of Achilles. Brad Pitt, from an aesthetic perspective, was the perfect Achilles. Yet in Troy, the character of Achilles himself was depicted as almost stoic. Achilles (the Brad Pitt one) loses his temper occasionally, but more or less stays emotionally composed. He briefly cries when handing back the body of Hector to Priam but more or less appears to modern audiences as an emotionally relatable person; proud, somewhat arrogant, but understandable(or at least to the audience of the early 2000s). Interestingly, int he Iliad, Achilles is far more likely to cry from the lack of ability to fully express his rage, than from guilt; an interesting choice in Troy was to depict Achilles usually proud character slipping up from the guilt of killing Hektor, rather than from the frustration that he can’t simply kill Agamemnon.
He is far closer to the modern self-disinclined solider than the bronze age warrior depicted in the Iliad. Brad Pitt’s Achilles is an elite solider, a technically perfect fighter, but he is not the hyper-thymotic Greek, that is depicted in the Iliad. In the Iliad, Achilles is not Stoic. He is emotionally volatile, dramatic and he would be, in our times, considered ‘childish’.
The directing decision to depict a stoic warrior (which is also the character ideal of Gladiator) was less alienating to modern audiences than a more literalist depiction of Achilles accurate to the Iliad itself. Perhaps due to the Iraq war and a neo-conservative America’s need for a temporary idealisation of the soldier (not the warrior), we may have a reasons why a stoic Achilles was depicted. Nonetheless it is inaccurate.
Interestingly , Stone himself, a veteran, a history enthusiast and an outspoken critic of neo-conservative foreign policy, should be taken as the best authority that Hollywood could offer when directing films focussed primarily on the theme of war. Yet, he is oddly dismissed in favour of directors that care little to nothing for the history or the phenomena of war itself, but have a knack for crafting visual excitement, of which war is the undefeated sovereign.
The problem lies in the fact it is somewhat difficult to express the emotional intensity and extreme level of negativity in a character such as Achilles without the presence of metaphysics. In the actual Iliad, Achilles is prepared to kill Agamemnon outright in their squabble over Briseis, were it not for the intervention of Athena. Now, we can assume that only Achilles can see Athena in this situation; she appears exclusively to him. But it is not the presence of anger-management that holds back Achilles but rather divine intervention. It is not a moral character that restrains him — but a God .
When Achilles responds to the death of Patroklus and we see his anger expressed directly at the Trojans and Hektor, the film Troy, also doesn’t entirely capture the real Achilles. One particular scene in the Iliad best depicts the overwhelming and monumental phenomenology of Achilles and his thymotic power. In this scene, after slaughtering a handful of Trojan soldiers on a river bank, and turning a river red, clogging it with bodies, Asteropaeus, a descendent of the river God Xanthus, who presides over the river, finds himself in direct battle with Achilles. He states;
"High-hearted son of Peleus, why ask about my birth?
I hail from Paeonia's rich soil, a far cry from here, heading Paeonian troops with their long spears,
and this my eleventh day since raising Troy.
My birth? I come from the Axius' broad currents Axius floods the land with the dearest
stream on earth
and Axius fathered the famous spearman Pelegon.
Men say I am his son.
Now on with it, great Pelides. let us fight!"
After killing the opposing warrior, Achilles exclaims;
Achilles tore his gear ', glorying over him now:
"Lie there with the dead! Punishing work, you see,
to fight the sons of invincible Cronus' son,
even sprung from a river as you are! You- no
you claimed your birth from a river's broad stream?
Well I can boast my birth from powerful Zeus himself!’.(Book 21)
A depiction of Achilles in his wrathful combat is not reachable through a de-metaphysical depiction of higher combative skill, nor psychological expressiveness. His superiority is narratively reflected in the very subversion of the power of nature itself; of an origin that comes from above and beyond a natural order — in this case from Zeus, who is himself a conqueror of natural and titanic forces.
Leonard Mullneur’s the Wrath (menis) of Achilles, illustrates this parallelism between the heroes of the Trojan war and the cosmic dispute between Olympians and Titans ,which ad incorporated into it a heroic lineage of demi Gods (half mortal, half God). Recall that in Greek mythology, Olympian Gods bred heroic humans as participants in their own battle against Titans during the titan-Olympian wars. This breeding programme produced heroes that themselves sometimes subverted the cosmic authority structure that separates Gods and men. When Ares was struck by the spear of Diomedes, we see such brief transgressions take place. Achilles’ wrath is special, according to Mullneur, because it contains within it a subversion of natural orders themselves. These mythological cosmic nuances are largely lost within the film Troy, which is written almost more like a historical drama than a mythologised epic.
And this is the irony. Stone’s Alexander, although, actually a historical adaptation of real events, and not an epic, comes across more as an epic than a historical drama. Although the Gods are not depicted as literal characters in Alexander, the metaphysical world is far better integrated into the events of the regular world. Not only are references to Gods and myths more common, the imagery, editing and visuals often depict the mythological realm as resting on a very thin layer of separation from the material realm. Its plays on that heroic subversion of a thin layer between Gods and men, myth and reality.
This thinner layer between myth and reality is essentially Dionysian in nature. It expresses a Dionysian character — but not the post-war Dionysus of the 60s, that favoured peace, comfort and pleasure. But a diaspora of ambition, always within a background of a Eurasian wilderness, which is more like a Dionysus of a life entirely defined by war, rather than the housebound Dionysus of drug dens.
Here, the thymotic character of heroism is also marked by diaspora, touched by the mind-breaker, Dionysus himself. It is this diaspora that makes the story of Alexander unique; a feeling that would have been even greater in the ancient world before the the historical advent of circumnavigation.
In Robert Garland’s text Wandering Greeks, we see how dealing with forms of exile and displacement was quite axiomatic to the formation of Greek culture itself. Many renound Greeks, such as Thucydides and Alcibiades, died as exiles. It may indicate political instability, but it also perhaps allowed the Greeks to build up the capacity for diaspora, and so gave them an advantage in the challenges navigation, exploration, cosmology, and social organisation through crisis.
One particular phenomena of note was the Oikestes. This refers to a collectively agreed upon duty of a certain number of the population to organise a trip to settle on another yet uninhabited land. Perhaps due to a problem with over population, an Oikist would be selected to lead an expedition to new settlements. They were not allowed to return for five years, unless under extreme circumstances —and could be violently punished if unpermitted returns were attempted.
This quite traumatic phenomena which likely plagues us like as a child like fear of parental abandonment, and also on the individual’s fear of abandonment by the community, was surely an intensely stressful and terrifying duty imposed on one by the community. It is notable that Alexnder himself, and many of his generals and soldiers, never went home to Macedonia. How much diaspora could be endured, is a key theme hiding within he politics of Alexander’s expedition. We know this by way of the mutiny attempts that occurred within the Macedonian army.
However, how we interpret these tensions is crucial. One should never simply see these attempts as power grabs in the vulgar sense. They express a tension over the capacity for diaspora, and the vision of a horizon yet undiscovered. In this sense Pothos (yearning) becomes spatially schismed; one yearning towards home and other towards the horizon. Alexander’s great motivational speeches reflect this tension in the nature of opposing genres Pothos; one muse sings for home, the other sings for the horizon.
Described in Stone’s adaptation quite poetically trough dialogue between Ptolemy and Alexander, when Ptolemy attempts to convince Alexander to return to Babylon instead of pushing over the Hindu Kush. Alexander responds ‘ We must go on Ptolemy, until we find an end.’
The almost incommunicable nature of that ‘end’, or vision, is exactly what can alienate such a figure like Alexander from those around him. He does not simply wish to find a home in the literal sense of Oikos, but to find himself within a larger cosmic and mythological home, always divided between myth and reality, possible and actual.
This is a vision that cannot be predicted as coming to and end when it reaches a certain specific point. Here geography represents a spiritual threshold. It must remain open. The limit and the journey home do eventually come —even if that journey home remains incomplete as it did with Alexander, given he died in Babylon — but this limit is entirely a spiritual limit, not a physical one. The loss of that spiritual sensibility is clear in the modern world of quantifiable mapping, calculating and locating (think particularly of the invention of satellite geo-location technologies).
Nonetheless, vision has always been part of a classical understanding of good military leadership from ancient Greece all the way up to Clausewitz. Recall in Clausewitz time, just in the tail end of Napoleonic era warfare, we see the latent spirituality of warfare with notions such Coup d'œil; a term taken from French, that more or less corresponds to the words glimpse or glance in English. The literal meaning is "stroke of [the] eye.’
It marks the capacity to see something others don’t ; a vision that in this instance, Clausewitz tried to understand through a fusion of the correlation between life experience, intellect and temperament. But it remained a capacity that could not be codified and exceeded calculation.
Stone actually held a 2013 lecture with the various historians and archaeologists that helped write the film; far more academic work was put into this adaptation than any shallow and obnoxious Chris Hemsworth-styled adaptation of antiquity or pagan mythology such as Thor, who has always held a special place in the hearts of nerds who, despite being outspoken multiculturalists, display a great affection (some what homoerotically) for shallow, Americanised Aryan muscular men. Chris Hemsworth is a great protype of western homo-erotic nerdism.
Secondarily to the affects of NERD-ification (which should be another topic in the recent historical of declining Western masculinity), the films bad rating also has a political context. Stone, a vet, an ambitious and brave man, interestingly claimed that the aftermath of the Iraq war made the film almost untenable to approve of. It depicted a civilisational conflict between Europe and Asia. It depicted a Western expansion into Asia driven by military might and domination. Yet, is the film’s lack of approval among the usual critics, and even much of the general public viewership, not retroactively a huge compliment to Stone’s adaptation? The neo-conservative appetite for vacuous propaganda that attempted to justify a catastrophically stupid war such as Iraq, is incomparable to a figure like Alexander.
As Stone points out, somewhat naively, but still importantly, Alexander respected the local customs of a place. He was more curious about integrating certain characteristics of the Asiatic world, than he was with forcing the Greek world onto others. Alexander was undeniably brutal in direct combat — and perhaps in reality, any conquering will inevitably achieve some of both integration and cultural domination — yet, it is still worth observing that the attempt to push a liberal hegemonic, secular (post historical) order onto the rest of the world was a total failure.
Stone has always been a harsh critic of America’s neo-conservative foreign policy, so it remains entirely understandable that he attempted to create a subversive adaptation of war itself.
Stone’s Alexander is actually such an attempt to criticise a degraded and contemporarily-familiar form of warfare, by way of asking us to view warfare through entirely alien themes. Returning back to Greece to understand warfare is never necessary if you simply want to understand the quickest route to technological domination. It is necessary, however, if you wish to understand anything about how man’s spirituality and historiography is defined strongly by war; not as a moral failure, but as a necessary part of the history of man.
Stone’s Alexander is not moralistic. It critiques contemporary forms of military domination through somewhat of a pathos and nostalgia for a much earlier era’s form of warfare (not to mention geopolitics). But what is it exactly that is absent from contemporary warfare that could produce a sort of war-romantic-anti-war movie? I believe it comes down to what I have already labelled an agonistic relationship to nature. Alexander’s journey was as much a pilgrimage as a simple military march. It’s goal was transformative, and not simply the enforcement of economic or power interests. While for example, the Iraq war’s goal was to transform the world to look more like a secular consumer society, the transformative process of alexander and his generals was to transform man himself—not through social engineering or wealth or education, but through a militarised journey through some of the harshest and most vast Eurasian and Asiatic topography, depicted quite beautifully in certain scenes in the film.
The speed of globalised warfare, through the domination of sea and air power, that the US managed to achieve in the post war era, largely strips this diaspora-pilgriming element from the military campaign. When far greater technological superiority is reached— especially when it allows the soldiers and generals to stay home in comfort and safety, while they send specialised squad teams, weapons systems, aircraft, drones and weaponised sea-craft that can dominate an enemy without the intimacy, grind and mastery of such a classical journey, means that technological superiority favours the quickest domination possible over the most significant historical encounter.
This film can be seen as a still young and still somewhat incoherent genre of war-critical thinking that expresses itself through the phenomena of going to war itself. The moral simplicity of pacifism is contrasted with the much more mature nuances of phenomenology of war as something that should be taken seriously as something more than cheap and abstract moralisations, followed by the usual hypocritical and ironically violent calls for world peace. Alexander was a globalist of sorts. He did want a more open and connected world. Yet, he was no pacifist, not in action nor rhetoric. He would have had absolutely no understanding of very idea of pacifism, which for his time, would have be akin to claiming one can chose to photosynthesise like a plant, instead of eating and drinking for nourishment.
Yet, to put ourselves honestly in the minds of such military leaders, without jumping to cheap pacifist moralisations, is ironically perhaps the only way to critique the destructiveness and dehumanization of technologically advanced ‘war’. Again, its lack of popularity might be explained by its unique subversiveness that couldn’t be identified by a viewership that either wanted a greased up Chris Hemsworth aimlessly justifying the foreign policy stupidities of the neo-cons, or of abstract and cheap moralisation coming from progressive pacifists (who in reality couldn’t care about the use of drones to kill foreign enemies so long as the companies making those drones have a DEI department. )
A rewatching of Stone’s 2004, long hated and forgotten adaptational flop, might just be considered one of the early attempts at badly needed novel ethical, historical and even spiritual lens to look at the phenomenology of warfare through. I personally think it was a huge success—and given the appetite for propaganda and slop that typically defines consumers today, I would disregard its reputation as irrelevant.