Clash of the Texts

Last week, I happened to stumble upon a 2005 NBC adaptation of the Hercules myth. From the opening scene, which depicts a man on ship in a storm-tossed sea lifting his arms and praying not to Poseidon, but to Zeus, it was clear that the screenwriters were not prioritizing any kind of loyalty to Greek mythology. Interestingly enough, the filmmakers seem to have attempted to make Hercules a more sensitive, relatable hero who grapples with issues of identity as he struggles to find his place in society. As the creators clearly did not have a Greek history or literature lesson in store for their audience, we are left with the overarching themes of the new text they have crafted.

These themes, especially from a feminist perspective, become highly problematic as the plot unfolds. On the surface, the film espouses a rugged individualism as well as a defiance of organized religion. This immediately calls to mind Protestant critiques of Catholicism during the Reformation period, an interpretation that the script readily supports. However, Hercules’s struggles with religion, determinism, and corruption take a darker turn. It becomes apparent that organized religion is the female, and that, the one being corrupt and evil, the other is as well, and both must be destroyed or controlled in order to restore the peaceful equilibrium of the universe. As offensive as the film is to me, I find the way in which the filmmakers have woven together at least four cultural “texts” (Greek mythology, Reformation discourse, subliminal misogyny, and rugged individualism) absolutely fascinating. The endless layers of intertextuality apparent in the film make it a Herculean labor to interpret. As Barthes recognized in his “Mythologies” essay that we read in class, film is myth, and myth is a “second-order semiological system” where “that which is a sign (namely the associative total of a concept and an image) in the first system, becomes a mere signifier in the second” (81). The hodge-podge of signs that serve as signifiers in this film makes it especially interesting to analyze. As it strays from what one might expect (what might be called a “traditional” portrayal of Greek myth), the interpretations that Fish claims we carry with us and bring to the text really stand out. As an American Catholic woman attending a women’s college, I would like to share with you some of what my interpretive community might find noteworthy and significant, but I encourage you also to view the film for yourself, to see what you might bring to it.

As the film opens, the viewer is informed that he is entering “a time outside of history…a time of war, not a war between armies, but a war between gods, as Zeus and Hera fought for power. Their war became the war of mankind, as the followers of Hera battled for supremacy against the worshippers of Zeus.” This war of mankind quickly takes on meaning as a battle of the sexes that comes to dominate the entire plot. It all begins with the double rape of Alcmene, Hercules’s mother. As the high priestess of Hera, she is about to castrate and sacrifice a young man for the harvest festival. Unfortunately, this young man happens to be Tiresias, who also happens to be a hermaphrodite. The priestesses cannot kill the female part of him, so they decide to blind the male part of him by gouging out his eyes with their round ceremonial knife (Freud, anyone?). Tiresias, understandably unhappy with this turn of events, remarks, “I’m not afraid of the gods, Priestess…It is those who claim to speak for them that I fear…Even in my blindness, Zeus has given me a second sight…Zeus will punish you this very night, and Hera will not answer your prayers!” The equation of women, specifically non-virgins, with corrupt organized religion begins. Sure enough, later that night, Alcmene prays to Hera that she be spared her marriage to Amphitryon, a follower of Zeus who is coming to Thebes for her. (Amphitryon follows the cult of Zeus, but this cult is never visibly portrayed onscreen, and often does not seem to exist as an organized religion, merely a vague loyalty.) As Alcmene prays, she is attacked and raped by a faceless man with a thunderbolt scar while the bard Linus watches from behind a wall. After Alcmene limps home, she is raped again by Amphitryon. Hercules and his brother Iphicles are the results of this eventful night. After hearing from Linus that her faceless rapist had a thunderbolt scar, Alcmene decides that he was Zeus in disguise and that Hercules is his son. She then begins unsuccessfully attempting to kill Hercules throughout his childhood.

Hercules survives, as does the film’s fundamental mistrust of the sexual woman. One night, the young and beautiful Megara seduces Hercules while seemingly “under the influence” of something at the annual harvest festival honoring Hera. When she wakes up in the morning, she claims that he raped her, but her father and the other men decide that it would be best for her unborn babies that she marry Hercules. Some years later, Hercules’ conniving mother, Alcmene, convinces his now-resentful wife and evil brother Iphicles to drug him, causing him to hallucinate and kill his triplet sons. The labors are portrayed as a sort of wergild for these murders. Alcmene, Megara, Iphicles, and Eurystheus (the king of Thebes and Megara’s new husband), as devoted followers of Hera, are trying to eliminate Hercules, so they conspire to have him challenge all of the “champions of the mother goddess.” Hence, the monsters he must destroy (and whom his enemies hope will destroy him) are distinctly feminine.

In annihilating these monsters, Hercules always uses their own weapons against them. For example, the first labor is to kill the harpies, and Hercules is portrayed using the harpies as human shields, causing them to kill one another with the razor sharp feathers they intend to fire at him. Once they are dead, the vile swamp they inhabit becomes a beautiful pond and meadow, displaying that the feminine is not only dangerous, but also unnatural. The Nemean lion is described as luring the young men of the countryside to its den to eat them. The lion lures Hercules deep into her cave by pretending to be a naked woman, but transforms into her monstrous true shape as he embraces her. He then uses her own claws to slit her throat. The mares of Lemnos are really women who use a magic medallion to transform themselves into horses on the night of the harvest festival and stampede through the island, trampling their lovers to death. Hercules is given the labor of “taming” these mares. He takes their medallion, causing them to transform back into women, and convinces them to change their ways. When they protest that they are required by “some dark thing of the mother” to transform, he scolds them, saying, “The dark thing is you, not Hera…you choose to let superstition and empty ritual steal your will. Don’t blame Hera for what has always been your choice.” In response to all of this male rationality, the mares surrender their medallion, saying, “Hercules has shown the women of Lemnos that Mother Hera is not found in blood rites and magic icons of power. We surrender to Hercules, tamer of the mares of Lemnos, and in surrender, find strength and victory.” Women who stand before Hercules must surrender or die, not because of his aggression, but because of the force of their own.

This idea that women irrationally destroy one another and themselves is echoed by the actions of Megara and Alcmene, who, though they both follow Hera, are in constant competition with one another. First, Alcmene sabotages Megara’s daughter’s chances at inheriting the throne of Thebes from Eurystheus by encouraging a homosexual relationship between him and Iphicles (prompting Eurystheus to make Iphicles his heir). Megara enacts a scheme that ends with Alcmene unwittingly castrating and killing Iphicles during the harvest festival. The next morning, Megara looks on the grieving Alcmene with contempt, saying, “It was not the goddess who was against me; it was you, you who after Hera, I loved most of all. You, who since my earliest childhood, taught me the magic of my sex, the secret ways of the Mother. But they were just your ways, the ways of a bitter, denied woman stripped of power. Look on your creature. I am just like you.” Throughout the film, motherhood is essentially bloodthirsty and monstrous, and, when left unregulated, communities of sexual women are only capable of destruction.

It must here be noted that there is a sole female protagonist in the film, the nymph Deianeira. She is Hercules’s love interest, though she is pointedly disassociated with the cult of Hera and with the other women in the film. First of all, she has metallic skin and is immortal, so in a very literal way, she is defined as non-human, non-woman. Second, she is identified as a follower of “the path of the virgin goddess” and hence refuses to take part in the harvest festival at the film’s opening, though she observes it and interferes when Tiresias is found to be a hermaphrodite. It is she who introduces to Hercules the anti-organizational religious discourse. The film ends with their wedding, an event of unification identified multiple times as a symbol of the reunification of Zeus and Hera, but as Deianeira has come to represent neither “Hera” nor “woman” as they are portrayed by the text, the feminine in the film remains completely subordinated by the masculine.

It is through the highly feminine and sexual cult of Hera that the film accesses its central discourse surrounding faith and identity. This feminine organized religion is constantly associated with blood sacrifice. The prevalence of blood can be seen to symbolize menstruation, but seems more consciously to refer to debates surrounding philosophies of transubstantiation in Christianity. Rebellion against such religious practices becomes much more evident in the last quarter of the film, with Hercules defying the religious cults altogether, declaring: “I’ll be my own oracle!” and “[I will offer] not a sacrifice of blood, but of reverence!” Here the Reformation discourse comes to the fore, with Hercules practically chiseling 95 theses into a Greek column as he proclaims his new philosophy to a massive crowd gathered around him beside a cliff. The scene is staged to resemble the Sermon on the Mount, with Hercules standing with outstretched arms before a CGI multitude.

From here the film takes an unexpected turn for the existential and atheist. Hercules’s final showdown is supposed to be with Cerberus, the three-headed dog guarding the Underworld. It turns out that the followers of Hera have tricked Hercules once again: Cerberus does not exist, but their male champion, Antaeus, is waiting in a deep underground cavern to kill Hercules with the round ceremonial castration knife. Linus, who has become Hercules’s faithful sidekick, notices Antaeus’s thunderbolt scar and tells Hercules that he must have been Alcmene’s rapist all along, and that Hercules is not in fact the son of Zeus. This revelation empowers Hercules, as he shouts, “I am not my father!” and, as Antaeus grasps at the dirt trying to literally gain strength from the earth, “Yes, Antaeus, seek the mother’s strength; I am my own strength.” Hercules’s overwhelming strength causes the entire womb-like cavern to collapse with Antaeus inside. The womb is not only the entrance to the land of the dead, but a death trap in and of itself. As Hercules returns from his last labor, he encounters Alcmene, who apologizes for her actions before throwing herself off a cliff. There is a final battle in Thebes, during which Hercules’s remaining enemies, Megara and Eurystheus, are killed. With the final showdown portraying a strange deicide/patricide/matricide, the film assumes a secular individualism and seems to question the existence of the gods in the first place.

As you can see, “Hercules” displays infinite degrees of interpretability. The film seemed to me to be obviously and shockingly sexist, but I was surprised to find that no online film critics or people posting to message boards mentioned anything about this interpretation. I was shocked that no one else seemed to notice what seemed to be being said by this mainstream “family” movie. I then realized that this experience exemplifies the interpretive process Stanley Fish tried to identify in “Interpretive Communities.” Following his ideas, my reading of the film exists for me because I bring to the film pre-existing interpretations of the signs “blood”, “religion”, “rape”, and so on. What signs do you carry with you?