{"id":5295,"date":"2004-12-05T20:57:49","date_gmt":"2004-12-05T20:57:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com.108-166-28-151.mdgnetworks.com\/wordpress\/?p=5295"},"modified":"2013-04-09T20:59:31","modified_gmt":"2013-04-09T20:59:31","slug":"so-much-lost-and-little-gained","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/so-much-lost-and-little-gained\/","title":{"rendered":"So Much Lost and Little Gained"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stone’s leftist agenda robs\u00a0Alexander\u00a0<\/em>of authenticity.<\/h1>\n

by Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n

Private Papers<\/em><\/p>\n

A<\/strong>\u00a0movie as bad as Oliver Stone’s\u00a0Alexander<\/i>\u00a0usually would not be worth notice, but Stone has indulged several cinematic and political pathologies that are illuminating. Some of the film’s flaws are curiously old-fashioned, redolent of studio schlock of the 1950s–the bombastic musical score, Angeline Jolie’s pointless Elvira “Mistress of the Night” accent; the heavy-handed, stale Oedipal psychology, complete with snakes; and the corny dialogue whose purple patches sound positively late Victorian. And Colin Farrel’s waxed legs and dye job are as embarrassing as Richard Burton’s were in his turn as the Macedonian conqueror.<\/p>\n

More interesting is what you\u00a0wouldn’t<\/i>\u00a0have found in the 1950s-the depiction of Alexander’s bisexuality. Stone must have thought that this “daring” acknowledgement of the great man’s sexual proclivities\u2014his romance with Hephaestion and the Persian catamite Bagoas\u2014would get him a leg up with the critics, as such positive treatments of homosexuality play to their cultural prejudices; as\u00a0Ben Shapiro<\/a>\u00a0points out on Townhall, since 1994 seventeen actors and actresses have been nominated for Academy Awards for playing gay characters. Indeed, the film did get some bounce on that score: “Gay Hero,” a\u00a0New York Times<\/i>\u00a0headline bragged, without a clue that calling Alexander “gay” is as anachronistic as calling him the CEO of Macedon. Other critics patted Stone’s head for the film’s homosexuality, but ultimately the movie’s numerous flaws cancelled out its playing of the politically correct “gay” card.<\/p>\n

Not everyone is happy about Stone’s take on Alexander’s bedtime habits. The Greek government is upset with the scenes showing Alexander mooning over Hephaestion and kissing the Persian boy, but I’m not sure why. Alexander and Hephaestion carry on like junior-high teeny-boppers, complete with eyeliner, a class ring, back-rubs and long soulful interludes in the moonlight. Stone, like all the critics, has imposed modern ideas on the ancients, particularly our curious notion of romantic love and idealized sexuality, the heart of modern “gay” identity. But such notions are alien to the world of the ancients, who would have found such ideas, especially applied to homosexuals, bizarre if not freakish.<\/p>\n

What, then, were the physical dimensions of the historical Alexander and Hephaestion’s relationship? We can’t be sure, for many factors complicate our understanding. We post-Freudians tend to misinterpret the rhetoric of passionate friendship, assuming that it has to be\u00a0really<\/i>\u00a0about sex. Aristocratic notions of shame and honor\u2014completely alien to us egalitarian democrats\u2014would have made certain physical acts, especially those that put a male in the role of a female, abhorrent to status-jealous nobles. This means that while some males would have had no compunctions about treating, say, a slave boy like a woman, they would have died before allowing themselves to be sexually used like that. And much of the evidence about Alexander is either very late or filtered through the ethnic prejudices of the Greeks, who looked down on Macedonians as semi-barbarians excessively fond of buggery. Contrary to the popular myth that ancient Greek men were happily blas\u00e9 about sex with other men, in actual fact the Greeks despised exclusive homosexuals who were used sexually like women, and had a whole rich vocabulary of abuse to express their disgust.<\/p>\n

What I find more puzzling is the pass Stone has been given over his treatment of Roxanne, the central Asian princess Alexander married probably for strategic and political advantage. The movie depicts her as a Third World hellcat spitting and snarling and crawling around on all fours before being sexually subdued by the more civilized Westerner. Usually indulging such ethnocentric and misogynist stereotypes earns one a trip to the woodshed for a whipping by the “diversity” and feminist nannies. Critics may be overlooking Stone’s retrograde ethnic slurs because he puts in Alexander’s mouth several speeches about the glories of “multiculturalism” that would warm the cockles of any diversity commissar’s heart. Such talk is another example of modern superstition imposed on the ancients. Whatever the propaganda about spreading the light of Hellenism to the barbarians and integrating them into Greek culture in some universal “brotherhood of man” utopia, the fact is Alexander slaughtered these dark-skinned “others” wholesale, and he killed them for selfish glory and cold hard cash.<\/p>\n

This brings us to the movie’s most fascinating pathology. Stone is a famous “leftist” director whose earlier movies document the destructive effects of the evil Capitalist octopus and its malign influence over the hearts and minds of the average person not smart enough to see the truth behind the propaganda about freedom and opportunity. Whether it’s Vietnam, the murder of JFK, or professional football, Stone’s vision is predictably banal in its leftist assumptions: evil white conservative men who lust for money and power manipulate everybody else to pursue their nefarious plots to dominate the world in compensation for their repressed desires.<\/p>\n

Given that rancid vision, one would think Stone would show us an Alexander as proto-imperialist and proto-colonialist, a bloodthirsty, neurotic Western butcher of peaceful, dark-skinned Third World “others.” He would’ve shown us Alexander’s sadistic cruelty in the sack of Tyre, where he introduced crucifixion to the West, or the crushing of Greek political freedom at Thebes and Chaeronea, or the wanton burning of the Persian capital Persepolis after a drunken orgy. The psychotic paranoia that led to the murder of the man who saved his life or to the butchery of numerous Macedonians would’ve been given the full Nixon treatment, rather than being presented as the understandable excesses of a visionary thwarted by reactionary prejudice. And Stone would’ve found a way to make it clear that Alexander killed more Greeks than the Persians ever did, including Greek mercenaries who fought on the Persian side against the tyrant who had destroyed their city-states’ freedom.<\/p>\n

That interpretation, by the way, would’ve been closer to the historical truth. Alexander conquered Persia not to spread the light of Hellenism or to create a multicultural paradise, but for money—-tons of gold and silver were sitting in Persepolis–and for glory. The destroyer of Greek freedom wanted to be a god-king on the Oriental model, an ambition anathema to everything ancient Greek culture stood for.<\/p>\n

Instead, Stone gives us the visionary Alexander, the great idealist who pursues his vision until he burns out, and whose excesses are the lamentable byproducts of such noble ambition. And here’s the most illuminating point about this forgettable movie: once more we see the left’s romantic admiration of any mass-murderer who cloaks his slaughter in idealism. Wasn’t it Lenin who said you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs? The “omelet” of Communist idealism took, as we now know, 100 million dead human beings, and ended up inedible anyway. But that hasn’t stopped the left from continuing to excuse murder on the grounds of “idealism,” provided it comes from the left (after all, Nazis were idealists too). Thus Stalin, Ho Chi Min, Mao and Castro continue to be more popular on college campuses than Ronald Reagan, and ex-terrorists like Bill Ayres and Bernadette Dohrn are professors at taxpayer-funded universities.<\/p>\n

Once more we see the bankruptcy of the left, the hollowness of its populist rhetoric and democratic idealism. Behind all that lofty rhetoric is the old lust for power and domination, contempt for the average person, and a burning confidence in the superiority of its ideas no matter how bloody their application or how often they are discarded in the trashcan of history. Stone’s Alexander may not tell us much about the Macedonian killer, but it reveals a lot about the pathology of the left.<\/p>\n

\n

\u00a92004 Bruce Thornton<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stone’s leftist agenda robs\u00a0Alexander\u00a0of authenticity. by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers A\u00a0movie as bad as Oliver Stone’s\u00a0Alexander\u00a0usually would not be worth notice, but Stone has indulged several cinematic and political pathologies that are illuminating.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[87,22,795],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1np","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":4539,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/culling-from-among-mediocre-in-hollywood\/","url_meta":{"origin":5295,"position":0},"title":"Culling From Among Mediocre in Hollywood","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 27, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"A short review of Oliver Stone's\u00a0Alexander the Great by Victor Davis Hanson Private Papers Well, I thought it was simply terrible. The film goes on for nearly three hours, but we hear nothing of what either supporters or detractors of Alexander, both ancient and modern, have agreed were the central\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reviews"","block_context":{"text":"Reviews","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/reviews\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4524,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/gay-old-times\/","url_meta":{"origin":5295,"position":1},"title":"Gay Old Times?","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 18, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Oliver Stone perpetuates a classical myth by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Magazine The consensus about Oliver Stone's\u00a0Alexander\u00a0is that the film's splashy gay motifs could not overcome the stilted dialogue, ludicrous Irish-brogue and Count Dracula accents, and excruciating minutes of dead screen time devoted to model-like poses, secretive eye contact,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "December 2004"","block_context":{"text":"December 2004","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2004\/december-2004\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6606,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/bruce-thornton-on-secure-freedom-radio-with-frank-gaffney\/","url_meta":{"origin":5295,"position":2},"title":"Bruce Thornton on Secure Freedom Radio with Frank Gaffney","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 10, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Seth Jones, Bruce Thornton, Peter Pham, Diana West October 9th, 2013\u00a0\u00b7\u00a0Comments SETH JONES, Associate Director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corporation, joins guest host DAN BONGINO, to help explain the terror threat from and historical background of the terrorist organization al-Shabaab. BRUCE THORNTON, a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11627,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-issue-is-not-roger-stones-lurid-personal-life-but-equality-under-the-law\/","url_meta":{"origin":5295,"position":3},"title":"The Issue Is Not Roger Stone\u2019s Lurid Personal Life but Equality under the Law","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 29, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review The issues of special Robert Mueller\u2019s indictment of Roger Stone have nothing to do with his personal life. His sexual habits should be of no concern to anyone. And what is so funny about the Internet jokes about (a still presumed innocent) Stone enjoying\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Donald Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Donald Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/donald-trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2228,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-lefts-selective-outrage\/","url_meta":{"origin":5295,"position":4},"title":"The Left’s Selective Outrage","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 11, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine You know liberals are edging toward a full Jonestown-style meltdown when someone as smart as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman starts losing it. Last week Friedman worked himself up into a paranoiac frenzy over the tone of some of the criticism Obama and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2043,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-other-california\/","url_meta":{"origin":5295,"position":5},"title":"The Other California","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 10, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton City Journal In 1973, as I was going through customs in New York after spending the summer bumming around Italy and Greece, the customs agent looked at my passport and said with a Bronx sneer, \u201cBruce Thornton, huh? Is that one of them Hollywood names?\u201d Hearing\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. 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