Euripides and Sam Peckinpah can be considered as the ‘bad
boys’ of their respective crafts. Their revolutionary approaches have often
exploded and deconstructed the status quo of their artforms. As a contemporary
of Sophocles, Euripides has competed with the former tragedian in a number of
occasions. Due to the more controversial themes in his plays, Euripides has won
less of the competition at City Dionysia, and got a few 3rd places
(which unfortunately was the last place of the competition). The people in his
era might not get the concerns of Euripides, but the modern audience do: viewing
these plays by today’s standard, one will be impressed by how forward-thinking
this great tragedian has been in his critique of morality and theodicy, and he
has committed to the strongest sense of psychological realism until that point
in the history of literature. Euripides’ influences can be found in great
playwrights and novelists such as Ibsen, Strindberg and Shaw. Some of his most
iconic characters have metamorphosed into the many archetypes we found in
cinema and novels of today. Medea, the resourceful woman who committed many
acts of revenge and violence in her story, leading to high body-count and
culminating in killing her children to strike back at her husband’s infidelity
(this plot was likely an Euripides’ innovation), would become the modern ‘Gone
Girl’ type of character, which the Japanese word ‘akujo’ (あくじょ
/ 悪女) is an appropriate description.
Meaning ‘villainess’ or ‘immoral woman’, this type of character often has a
perverse sense of charisma in its own right, and that is the type of character
where actresses like Isabelle Adjani and Yoshino Kimura are in particular
gifted at portraying. If
we try to transpose Euripides’ style to the standard of today, works like
‘Medea’ sit comfortably with the style of European Art Cinema. In fact, it
should not be surprising that Pier Paolo Pasolini and Lars von Trier have
respectively made their own cinema versions of the play, with quite different
emphasis.
Sam Peckinpah was
a member of the era of New Hollywood cinema in the late 1960s. As an iconoclast
of movies, he revolutionized the way of the approaches towards action sequences
in cinema. Though his uses of slow-motion shots, fast-cut and analytic editing,
with multi-camera captures, action sequences has become more realistic and
exciting since Peckinpah. Yet, his idiosyncratic method appeared to come with a
cost: the realism he was striving for resulted in spectacularly bloody violence
in many of his films, and he was nicknamed ‘Bloody Sam’ for exactly this
reason. ‘The Wild Bunch’, widely considered as Peckinpah’s masterpiece, was
once seen as the most violent movie in the history of cinema when it first came
out in 1969. What is ironic is that the blood-splattering moments account for
less than 10 minutes of the 2.5-hour runtime of the film, signifying the
intensity and impact of these cinematic images to the audience. Peckinpah was
an auteur who specialized in the genre of Revisionist Western – he tried to
dissect the true sides of the history of American Frontier. While he had a
strong emphasis on history and culture, he was just as concerned about human
nature and how that shaped our behavior in the world. Often with a nostalgic
and elegiac tone, Peckinpah could also be compared to an ancient Greek poet
Theognis, who composed elegiac poems on nature and advocated for a moral
existence.
An innovation for
Euripides was the kind of characters his work focused on. While all the 3
Classical Greek playwrights concentrated on tragic characters, those from
Aeschylus and Sophocles tended to be noble and larger-than-life characters. These
characters did receive loads of injustice and suffering throughout their
ordeals, yet their dispositions and behaviors often served as ideals for the
viewers to strive towards. As Sophocles have allegedly noted that his
characters were benchmarks of how one ‘ought to be’ in real life, Euripides
revolutionized in portraying the experience of the underdogs and rather
ordinary people. In particular, given the rather imbalance of power and rights
of the both sexes in ancient Greece, Euripides’ tragedies gave voice to the
female characters more than the other 2 playwrights did. Notwithstanding,
Euripides’ stories were far more realistic and juicier in some aspects. Sex,
desire, alienation, madness, aberrations in personality were topics abound in
his dramatic universe and they found a lot of resonance to the modern audience.
Even when the 3 tragedians were considering the same topic, their emphasis were
remarkably different. Take the character of Electra, for example. In
‘Oresteia’, Aeschylus focused on the big picture, chronicled the revenge of
Orestes towards her mother. After the death of the mother, the narrative
purpose of Electra has diminished. When Sophocles wrote his version of Electra,
he focused on creating a psychological portrait of this character, stressing
the dispositions and thoughts that led to her reunion with Orestes and the eventual
bloodshed. Euripides, in contrast to his predecessors, did not want the audience
to believe that the sibling has ‘made their oikos great again’ after the
slaughtering of their mother. The tragedian concentrated on the psychological
consequences on these two characters after the damage has been done, amplifying
the turmoil the sibling had to endure.
The Sophocles /
Euripides connection seems to find some parallels with the Kurosawa / Peckinpah
connection, and that is the reason why I write this series of articles in the
first place. Peckinpah, who admired Kurosawa, has made ‘The Wild Bunch’, which
was heavily influenced by ‘Seven Samurai’. While both films may have some
narrative similarities, the outlook is in stark contrast, and one can see
Peckinpah’s world view was more pessimistic than that of Kurosawa’s (though I
would admit this may be an over-generalization in some respect). If Sophocles
and Kurosawa demanded their viewers to look carefully at and consider every
specific details in the picture, then what Euripides and Peckinpah were doing
was to expose all the conflicts and contradictions and thus tore the whole picture
apart.
While Euripides often had strong and intelligent women in his
tragedies, and also the tragedies were often named after a female character, it
is difficult to consider that as 'feminist' if it puts it into the modern
context. I
would argue Euripides's approach was
similar to the films of Howard Hawks or Kenji Mizoguchi, who appeared to
portray women in a strong light, with the independent 'Hawksian women' who
often
helped or outwitted the male
characters in his Film Noir and screwball comedies, or with Mizoguchi, his
sympathetic portrayal of women who suffered under the social context. One can
argue that it is
rather unlikely that a demonstration
of feminism was these filmmakers' intention.
Yet for Sam
Peckinpah, that is a more difficult position! Peckinpah’s cinema has been
criticized by many as misogynistic. The female characters, often not important
in the narrative sense, were subject to the brutality and violence from men.
Classic examples are films like ‘The Wild Bunch’ and ‘The Getaway’, and ‘Straw
Dogs’ has reached a level of extreme controversy due to an intense scene of
sexual violence towards the female protagonist. This issue regarding
Peckinpah’s style is very contentious and the opinions have changed a lot throughout
the years. Personally, I do not agree to the viewpoint that Peckinpah was
misogynistic. From my observations of all his films, Peckinpah always placed
the blame on the male characters. Peckinpah appeared to have a belief in a
Hobbesian state of nature, yet he has always demanded humans to be responsible
for their actions. If the women in his films were treated unfairly in any
sense, that was because the world was flawed as being male-dominated and the
characters failed to control their desire and aggression towards others. In
fact, for ‘Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia’, a minor yet rather moving
scene was when the protagonist and his girlfriend were threatened by a band of
violent hooligans, the girl was willing to sacrifice herself to protect the
protagonist, eventually raped and murdered by the bad guys (and the protagonist
avenged by killing them all). Such a gesture is in no way degradative to women,
that affirms women’s courage and gumption. Putting the dramatist and the
filmmaker together, one will be baffled by the fact that they were both
considered haters of women, with very different reasons: Euripides was
considered misogynistic because he frequently portrayed evil and hysterical
women; Peckinpah due to his belittling and undermining of the female
personality.
Nevertheless, we
should not overlook that Euripides did provide a positive portrayal of female
characters in some of his tragedies. He was also a pacifist and advocated for the
end of war and maintenance of peace. Work like ‘Trojan Women’ and ‘Orestes’
provided a look into the effects of war on normal people, and he often used his
tragedies to comment on the historical context that surrounded him, the fact
that Athens was declining at that point and soon entered into military
conflicts.
Peckinpah situated
in a similar kind of era. In fact, Peckinpah has indirectly stated and alluded
to the fact that the violence in his film reflected a critique of real life
events, especially the Vietnam War. The violence in ‘The Wild Bunch’ was a
backlash and wake-up call for the audience, who has become desensitized to the
news on the television regarding the ‘progress’ of the Vietnam War. Yet,
Peckinpah’s position on war and violence was an ambivalent one. In Straw Dogs,
Peckinpah seemed to share a more pessimistic and complex viewpoint – he did not
know the answer, and he challenged the viewers to come up with their own
answers. On one hand, Peckinpah was critiquing the failure of the pacifying
attitudes of the protagonist, David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman). They were bullied
by a group of rowdy town men, and Sumner was perceived as a coward and weak by
his wife. That went as far when Sumner was tricked and his wife was raped by
the men without his knowledge. Surprisingly, the table was turned when in an
attempt to save a youngster (who Sumner had no commitment to protect) from the
rowdy men, Sumner turned NBK-mode and became so violent that he literally
killed every one of these men (bear trap, boiling oil pot, shotgun to blow one
of the men’s feet apart, fire poker to a brain matter-splattering end, you name
it). The breaking of Sumner’s spectacles signified the breaking point of
civilization. Sumner, holder of a professorship of theoretical physics, shifted
from a civilized demeanor back to an animalistic, primal state of nature,
championing in aggression more than the complex sets of his equations on his
blackboard. Peckinpah has maintained consistently that he intended Sumner, who
was supposed to be weak and humble, to be the villain of the film. If Peckinpah
condemned Sumner due to his choice of violence and his war-like tendencies, then
at the same time he was casting doubts on the civilized approach to the
conflicts, and that was approaching a sense of nihilism. I am a big fan of
‘Straw Dogs’, yet I can’t make up my mind about the complex issues portrayed in
the film. Peckinpah was likely just as undetermined, too.
Phaedra
What
is it when they say that men “love”?
Nurse
That
is the sweetest thing, child, and also full of pain.
Phaedra
We only get the
second part.
-Euripides, 'Hippolytus'
The conflicts in
Euripides’ plays are even more apparent if we consider the heated nomo-physis
debate of Classical Athens. Works like ‘Hippolytus’, ‘Orestes’ and ‘Medea’
addressed the implications of this dichotomy. Euripides's
meticulous design inferred that, the more the audience wishes to find some
order or categorizations in the narrative, the more they will discover the
irreconcilable aspects of these conflicting perspectives. While less explored
in my previous articles regarding the debate, the distinction of nomos and
physis actually followed a more intimate yet sexist view – that nomos was often
associated with reason and the male identity, while physis was often associated
with emotion and the female identity. The sad fact that some people can still
use this assertion to undermine the ability of women in life suggests that
humans have not changed much after all. Moreover, ‘physis’ took a more
dangerous meaning in a sense relevant to drama: it tended to symbolize the
uncontrollable forces of nature, and the chaos that resulted. In ‘Hippolytus’,
Hippolytus and Phaedra served as ideas in human form: Hippolytus served as a
symbol of ‘nomos’ while Phaedra served as a symbol of desire. The 2 characters
had a parallel development in terms of narrative – their flawed character led
to their deaths respectively. Hippolytus, a moral and restrained man, could not
contain his hubris and felt that his assertion of reason exceeded that of the
Divine. Phaedra could not contain her sexual desire and led to conflicted
feelings of both love and hate towards Hippolytus. While ‘Medea’ could be
considered as a nice portrait of a psychopathic mind, who aced the art of
persuasion and rhetoric, Euripides gave Medea complexity by showing the
conflict of her reason and passion in a memorable monologue before she murdered
her children, showing the bleak impossibility to reconcile both ends. Euripides
actually went as far to question if the nomos-physis debate would really
contribute to humanity at all – as that seemed the debate to be a key concern
for the Sophists of Classical Athens in particular. In ‘The Bacchae’, a
god-intoxicated madhouse of drama, Euripides wished to imagine a world when nature
and culture were more harmonious and co-existed without any tiffs. Dionysus, a
god for wine and also for destruction and chaos, was the protagonist of the
play and what took place in the tragedy said more about humans than about gods.
We will return to this later, yet at this stage, the statement that ‘one can
only win by not playing’ sounds totally reasonable.
Peckinpah also
imagined, yet his thoughts were nostalgic and elegiac. Peckinpah’s films were
also characters in changing times, when they perceived that they were outmoded
and could not catch up with the present. Peckinpah’s concerns were realistic
and existential, and it was about how the characters found their places in the
new world, or how they were destructed by the world. In films like ‘The Wild
Bunch’ and ‘Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid’, Peckinpah’s heroes often reminisced
the good old days and how fxxked up the universe has become. It was not that
they could not accept new things, but the great traditional old ideals – brotherhood,
friendship, selflessness - have been undermined by the new values, which were
often based on self-interest and corporate greed.
Euripides's
narrative world also questioned the point of reference we took for granted to
govern our behavior. Justice, theodicy, moral objectivism were often absent in Euripides’
tragic world. In ‘Herakles’, our hero had a mingled background of
both divine and human aspects. While the play appeared to stress Herakles’
status as the son of the Divine, throughout the play he was defined by his
human failures and fallacies. Euripides, like his predecessors, appreciated the
importance of including supernatural and divine elements in his work, yet they all
welcomed both spiritual and secular explanations. Incidents could be attributed
to both supernatural causes, or rationalistic causes such as necessity. In the
play Herakles has been put into misery by Hera, Zeus’ wife, because the god’s
infidelity has led to the birth of Herakles. After proving his manhood by
enduring the 12 Labors, everyone might expect a happy ending for our hero. But
with Euripides’ master stroke, the hero was again doomed. Euripides’ version of
‘Herakles’ ended with our hero killing his children in a bout of madness, and Hera
was behind all this. While the play did not deny Hera’s divine intervention,
Euripides provided a moral process to Herakles by having him to feel
responsibility for his mistakes. That made Herakles a secular thinker, who did
not desire to attribute spiritual factors into explanations. Yet, ‘Herakles’
served as one of Euripides’ greatest critique on traditional conception of
religion and gods. When Herakles cried in despair how someone as nasty as Hera
could be qualified as a goddess, he was questioning the conception of divine benevolence,
and echoed the ‘best of all possible worlds’ theme from theodicy.
Sam
Peckinpah’s cinematic world did not place much emphasis on religion or
spiritual issues, yet he believed in the transcendence of ideals, when people
remembered the past and the great things other people have achieved. At the end
of ‘The Wild Bunch’, the 4 old gunmen decided to confront the rouge general and
his many associates, in order to save their young friend. Though they were
fully aware that they would likely sacrifice their lives by doing this, they
decided to hold their beliefs and took a stand on the issue. The climax saw the
gunmen killing close of a hundred of the ‘bad guys’, with the help of a
Browning automatic throughout the bloodshed, and they all died at the end. The
posse, which was assigned to pursue them throughout the film, arrived and
investigated their dead bodies. They could not stop feeling a sense of respect
to these old men. Though they were enemies, the posse appreciated the values
these dead men represented. When the leader of the posse, an old friend of the
gunmen, decided to move on, Peckinpah juxtaposed the final images of all the 4
men – they became memories and legends for the future generations.
The
conflicts and contradictions inherent in the characters of Euripides led to
alienation, and eventually destruction. The alienation experienced by Herakles
was not only apparent in his psychological struggle, but that also led to his
madness and demise of his children. While Dionysus was a god that signified
excitement from art, uncontained desire also led to chaos. The fact that the
bundles of drives and properties could not be sorted out in the psyche would
result in an identity crisis and a complete breakdown. King Pentheus learnt it
the hard way in the tragedy: he literally was torn apart by a number of mad and
intoxicated women, the followers of Dionysus, at the end of the play when a
party was rolling. The gruesome fate signified the destruction of the human
psyche.
The
characters in Peckinpah’s films also suffered from alienation. For David Sumner
in ‘Straw Dogs’, he was trying really hard to be friendly and hospitable. The
façade of ‘Mr. Nice Guy’ could not sustain the fact that he was a cold and
analytical person, and with the right triggers he became an aggressive killing
machine. For ‘Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid’, the two friends became enemies
after Pat became a sheriff. Originally sharing similar idealistic beliefs about
freedom, Pat feel uneasy because he had to cater the demands of the corporate
power, and he knew that soon he would have to face Billy the Kid. Pat lamented
the great old days that he has always desired has passed, and he was not the
one who once thought himself of. The story ended tragically when Pat finally
killed Billy during an ambush. In a symbolic movement by Peckinpah, Pat looked
into a mirror and shot the mirror with his pistol, signifying the symbolic
death of a conflicted identity.
Concluding Remarks
Euripides and Sam
Peckinpah challenged his audience by confronting them with narratives that ends often did not meet. The viewers have to engage with these memorable yet
questionable characters, and their views may likely change or evolve through
time. Many of the work mentioned in this article deserves a full treatment –
and that, will be another story!
by Ed Law
Conatus Classics
Euripides plays mentioned:
Medea, Electra, Herakles, Hippolytus, Trojan Women, Orestes, The Bacchae.
Peckinpah films mentioned:
The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs, Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid, The Getaway, Bring
me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.
