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fiction struggling to be
truth
II At times ROME
looks like a soap opera, an absurdist view of life today with history as a
stylistic rather than an archaeological fact. Roman vulgarity is
indistinguishable from contemporary vulgarity in manners, speech and action.
Life in the count-down of the "Before Christ" era (52--43 BC) is occultic and
tabloid, and as bloody as the six o'clock News. Sex is the greatest obsession,
even when you think politics are, or even the concomitants such as war and
economic advantage. Voyeurism is a way of life, "express yourself" the only
real credo. Like today, just about anything goes, although in this production
paedophilia is left in the shadows, a casualty of contemporary ambiguity and
the marketing concerns of Prime Time TV. But as for the rest... hey, it's full
frontal.
Sound interesting? It is
interesting, even if students of history will carp at the Anglican revisionism.
When you measure this BBC-HBO series against the great Fellini
Satyricon, say,
the cultural appropriation/deviation is obvious. The secondary characters --
the full fiction characters -- could be out of Coronation Street or Cracker. Is
this an aesthetic failing? Not necessarily. A creative writing cliche is that
you should write only what you know or what your audience knows. The real
bitching will be about the primary characters, those Roman icons who exist in
historical fact, such as Gaius Julius Caesar, Marc Anthony, Cleopatra, Pompey
Maximus, Brutus, Cicero et. al., those stalwarts of your early school history
classes. Some of you even studied them in Latin... if not, for sure you read
the Ladybird profile of Julius Caesar. You know these people like you know your
relatives and your catechism.
The 12 episodes of Season 1 of
ROME are primarily the story of Julius Caesar, although they in no way
come close to telling the complete story of this amazing man. Forget that he
stole 3000 pounds of gold from the Capitol, concealed this major crime by
substituting gilded bronze in its place. Forget that he bribed his way into the
office of Chief Pontiff and later Consul. Forget that he plundered the votive
offerings of the temples of the defeated, although he was a priest of the
Temple of Jupiter. Forget his homosexual escapades, bi-sexual delinquencies.
Forget that he plotted continuously against the Republic. The script writers
did and maybe they should, as it might all be hearsay. After all, history is a
fiction struggling to be truth.
Yet... the story as presented
could've benefitted by at least one motivating incident to explain his
egregious ambition. For example, the famous dream wherein he rapes his own
mother, then, after consulting the soothsayers, adopts their interpretation
that he would conquer the earth [our universal Mother]. This would help, as his
actions would then seem less the ambiguous moves of a nice guy who really loves
people. After all, in this Anglican version, Caesar is not really a tyrant but
a misunderstood democrat. He's a populist, just like Clinton, although he could
easily be written as Nixon.
the sentimental ghosts of
Charles Dickens & Sid Vicious
II Episode 1. 52 BC. Caesar
has just defeated Vencingetorix, the King of Gauls, has him prisoner, makes him
kiss the Standard, a gold eagle which shortly thereafter is stolen. While he
has been sending wagon loads of booty back to Rome, the jealous senators
consider this Gaullic war and Caesar's action to be "illegal" and order him to
disband his legions. Of course he doesn't and soon crosses the Rubicon river
(or stream, as shown here) and marches on Rome. His opponents, led by Pompey,
flee the city, hoping to out-manoeuver Caesar at a later date when his money
and popularity evaporate.
So much for the facts. The rest of
the action is fiction, much of it effective and clever. Such as: following the
story of the "13th Legion" and two of its soldiers, the steady Centurion Lucius
Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) and his loyal party-hearty Legionaire Titus Pullo (Ray
Stevenson). As Caesar's fortune rises, so do theirs. These are the
high-identification figures for today's international TV audience. Vorenus is
almost Christian in his values, and Pullo is like a wayward brother who really
has a heart of gold. They recover the Eagle, and they rescue young Octavian
from Pompey's hired thugs, the "blue Spaniards". When they return to Rome, we
follow their fortunes as they try to adjust to peace time outside the Legion...
and they do have problems. Yet somehow both remain at the centre of the action
(by the scriptwriters' artifice). Just like a decom vet returning to Coronation
Street, Vorenus has problems with his pretty wife Niobe (Indira Varma), and
Pullo manages to get himself messed up by a pretty slave girl... at the same
time slitting a few throats along the way. Ah, it's life among the plebs
longing to be bourgeois. Forget the history lesson here. This is tabloid
fiction and good laughs are had by all. The sentimental ghosts of Charles
Dickens & Sid Vicious sit behind the writing.
II Caesar is played by the
Belfast actor Ciaran Hinds, and in
this interpretation he plays him well. Hinds looks the part, talks the part,
walks within the benevolent persona of the dictator with just a hint of menace.
The sensibility is very modern, projecting a civilized and pragmatic leader.
The brutality that exalts his power is stage managed, so that he plays good cop
to the generic Roman bad cop in pursuit of imperial grandeur. This Caesar
delegates crucifixions rather than orders them, so he's always seen as the
merciful warrior. While the Hinds Caesar isn't adverse to using force, he
prefers the politics of bribery, delegation and reconciliation. He's too big to
hold petty grudges or avenge big-time treachery (mostly), as if these things
are part of an agreed political game for which everyone has rehearsed.
You can see why he goes easy on
Pompey (related by marriage) and Brutus (his nephew), although you might wonder
about Cicero, the real intellectual behind the opposition. Omitted from the
script is the fact that they corresponded, and that the Hellenist Cicero
admired Caesar's oratory, considered him the greatest public speaker of their
times... yes, even though he conspired in Caesar's eventual murder. Historians
tell us it was a personal grudge, actually, as at one point Caesar had Cicero
demoted to the plebeian classes. Thus Ciaran Hinds becomes Caesar as the tragic
hero rather than Caesar the homicidal megalomaniac who would be King.
sex as politics: every
woman's husband and every man's wife
Love? Caesar loves... to a point.
His wife is described as "a species of statue" by his male secretary, so he's
given a semblance of moral license here. While Suetonius in his touchstone work
The Twelve Caesars suggests that Caesar was a womanizer, here he is played as
no licentious sexist pig. Servilia (Lindsay Duncan) is his mistress, and the
mother of Brutus, the man forever associated with the assassination of Caesar.
While she has a husband, her position is also precarious, seasonally subject to
the violent politics of the time. Shortly after their reconciliation (when
Caesar arrives in town), pornographic graffiti depicting the couple appear on
walls in the vicinity of the Forum, and Caesar, stung by this ridicule, ditches
her.
Caesar was "every woman's husband
and every man's wife," Cato the Elder said, but here he's just a man who digs
power more than love.
Hell hath no fury like a woman's
scorn is the theme followed. Servilia goes voodoo in the temple, puts a curse
on her absconding lover... and Atia, who she discovers was behind the graffiti.
This misfortune provides the most personal of all the motives that drive Brutus
away from his uncle and into the plot.
Atia -- Caesar's social operative
in the city -- tries to compensate (and protect her own position) by passing on
her daughter Octavia as a "companion" who becomes in fact a lesbian substitute.
Typically, the line between expediency and humiliation is a shifting marker.
The affection between Servilia and Octavia is shown as genuine, despite the
politics of the situation. In fact, a time comes when Atia engages one of her
lovers (a horse dealer) to dispatch a gang of thugs to ambush Servilia in the
street as she's being transported in a curtained litter. The litter is
over-turned, the slaves put to the sword, and Servilia left to crawl in the
filth and blood in an ugly, public humiliation.
So much for the gentle spirit and
the feminine mystique. And while intrigue is their forte, the Roman women here
are shown to be good with a knife too.
recoil or
yawn
II Marc Antony. Maybe you
recall Marlon Brando's engaging version of this playboy swine who, in history,
was actually related to Julius Caesar. All accounts have him as a dissipated
individual, and this is the position assumed by the script writers. In 50 BC he
became a tribune of the plebs and went to Rome to represent the interests of
Caesar... and this is shown in the opening episodes with effective dramatic
clarity. On his way to town he stops off to shag a shepherd girl beneath a tree
as his detachment waits nearby, watching with varying states of amusement and
impatience.
 Voyeurism? Spectator sex is the most obvious modernism of this
BBC-HBO production which treats us to many such incidents of chic porn during
the 12 episodes, and Marc Antony is the star in a number of them. It certainly
helps to keep you alert for the history lesson. James Purefoy is the actor, and
he must've had fun. As Antony, he has the same submerged malevolence as Richard
Burton, that five o'clock shadow of the soul. He has the engaging nastiness of
a born predator -- you never know if someone is going to have his throat slit
or get it up the ass.
In Rome, he sets himself up in
Pompey's villa (abandoned in his hurried exit from the city), passes the time
in extortion and violent sex. One scene has two naked women sword fighting as
Antony lolls on the bed, urges them on, eager to lick their bloody wounds. You
might see this vampirism as gratuitous sadism, or you might see it as a nifty
sociological truth about the effects of hand-to-hand combat on the mind of a
Roman war veteran. However, whether you recoil or yawn, there's no doubt about
the effectiveness of this character who, as the number two, plays bad cop to
Caesar's good cop.
a large penis is always
welcome
Atia. This is a very contemporary
character -- the single mother who is an excellent example of the maxim that
politics is the manipulation of the strong by the weak. She too is a relative
of Julius Caesar, although this doesn't mean that she's secure in her position
as a leading aristo hostess in the city of the seven hills. Atia pimps not only
herself and various trophies but also her daughter Octavia (Kerry Condon), whom
she forces to divorce her husband (who she loves) in order to marry Pompey (as
a gift from Caesar). Sadly, Pompey merely has public sex with Octavia and then
marries someone else. Of course these in-house liaisons and forced marriages
were normal protocols within the tight aristocratic class of Rome, used as
political hedges and clan breeding formats. Atia's charming ruthlessness is a
thing to behold, and without doubt Polly Walker's character is one of the most
interesting in the drama, unshackled by fact, freed by fiction.
Brutus. A pivotal character in the
story, yet the interpretation here perhaps leaves him under developed and/or
under utilized. Torn between familial loyalty and the special interests of his
friends, he has the potential of a Hamlet, but here drifts between the two
camps like a horse without a rider. Tobias Menzies wears the saddle.
Octavian. This is the most
successful character in the drama... because, while we know a lot about him
later in life as the Emperor Augustus (Season II or III?), his childhood leaves
plenty of scope for creative fiction. As the great nephew of Caesar, his
education in the ways of the Roman zeit geist is a complete amalgam of
his mother and his uncle.
Although still a boy when we see him
in Episode 1, his ruthlessness is demonstrated early on when he kills one of
his kidnappers with a club. His intellectual grasp of the politics of the
Senate, the Roman street and his own family is clever and audacious, and a
perfect fit for the man who would one day become the great Augustus, the
Emperor of the Roman world. He's good with the books, not bad in a brothel, and
perfectly capable of engineering the murder of a Roman citizen in order to
protect Lucius Vorenus from finding out about his wife's indiscretion.
Murder as altruism -- the reality of
this action can slip past you in the speed of the montage, especially when you
like the murderers. Incest? We get that as well here, passed off as an act of
familial love. As for Caesar's famous affliction -- epilepsy -- Octavian is
able to keep it as a secret, despite his youth. Great character, great new
young actor, Max Pirkis.
when you ride with
destiny
II One of the best
dramatizations occurs when Vorenus and Pullo are shipwrecked en route to fight
Pompey's army (in Greece) and end up on a sandbar island with little hope of
rescue. Vorenus notices the floating corpses of fellow legionnaires in the surf
and uses them as floats for a raft, thus escaping the island. This leads to a
major use of "coincidence" in the scripting, when they just happen to encounter
Pompey on a beach where he's encamped for the night, en route for Egypt in
disguise. While not impossible -- there are no coincidences when you ride with
Destiny -- it certainly makes plot points easier to map. Vorenus & Pullo
seem to buffoon their way into history as if Cervantes runs the story board.
Still, the action is good, is kept visceral. But with such lengthy dramatic
absences from Rome, no wonder Vorenus's wife lives as if in a parallel
universe....
Cleopatra. Yes, she shows up, a
short-haired pussywhipper who looks like a graduate of the heroin chic school
of modelling. For some reason, she's omitted from the cast at the HBO Rome
website as if she's too hot for even them. In style, she's the most revisionist
of all the characters in sensibility. You might meet her in a L.A. boutique or
a Paris trance club. This interpretation of the Egyptian queen who almost
destroyed imperial Rome by bedding both Caesar and Marc Antony is certainly a
pornographic one, and one that will divide Old School from New School in terms
of acceptability. Mind you, if Old School has hung in there long enough to see
her Triple X romp with the Legionaire Titus Pullo -- Episode 8 -- then maybe
Old School is past textural fundamentalism. This aside, the Egyptian scenes are
well-written and staged, with great costumes, sets and sight-lines.
Cicero. If you ever have the
occasion to read it, you'll see a clear obsession with Caesar running through
some of Cicero's correspondence which teeters between admiration and fear, and
while this fear is usually read as Cicero's fear of tyranny, there's something
more to it. In this dramatization, this character is the most unrealized,
especially in view of how much we know about him. Here he's portrayed as an
ineffectual hanger-on, with none of the incredible forensic talent and verbal
brilliance he displayed in fact. Missed opportunity here, people.
Italian light
The producers/directors made the
best of the tonal lighting of the ancient world. The oblique back light, the
sense of the pre-electric... the natural light of Italy, the pastels of the
eastern Mediterranean etc. While Fellini's view of the Roman world is a
landscape view, emphasizing the mid-field and the panorama, this view is
closer, photographed for the small screen, a sequence of back-lit interiors,
alleys, plazas. Even when landscapes are used, they are often framed in tight
by walls, trees, aqueducts, or seen through windows and arches, using vertical
rather than linear perspective. There's a beautiful look to it all, no
question. The Italian light has that old Hellenic idealism about it, that
softening of the harsh edges of reality. Marco Pontecorvo is the
cinematographer, obviously another in the line of Italian greats.
The directors. Well, there are a
number of them, just as there are several writers. Michael Apted unfortunately
directed Gorillas in the Mist... but he also directed Gorky Park. And now,
luckily, he has Rome in his CV. Bruno Heller wrote (or co-wrote) eight of the
episodes, so he has to take most of the credit for the attitude in the British
dialogue. He's also listed as one of the series "creators", so if the series
stank, he'd be the first to fall on his sword.
John Milius (one of the triumvir
producer/creators) wrote/directed such classics as Red Dawn &
Big
Wednesday... and Apocalypse Now. So some good old American violence is put
to good use here (they should consider bringing in Michael Mann for an episode
down the line). William J. MacDonald -- not to be confused with Peter McDonald,
who directed Rambo III, in case you think the style fits -- directed Episode 8,
which features the raunchy Egyptian sequences. So these are experienced
Hollywood professionals mixing it up with UK stage pros and Italian techs.
The writing is pretty good. You
wonder why no Latin is used, the odd phrase here and there for flavour, remind
us that this is Italy, after all, not Chelsea. But most people could probably
care less. Shaped by 4 centuries of King James I rhetoric and the blank verse
of Shakespeare, British dramatists do have a cachet when it comes to historical
subjects, and the UK writer Bruno Heller appears to have carried the most of
the writing. If you compare Rome to another HBO series, the western soap opera
Deadwood, you can see that they march in lock-step in terms of visual and
verbal sex and violence. Rome with its sober Royal Shakespearean pedigree is
far better than Deadwood with its Yankee wise-ass cool, yet both are
revisionist. If all history is "revisionist" because we can only see it in
terms of the present tense, so be it.
The world view is left-of-centre, a
social democrat's guide to the Roman world. The bad guys are clearly those 300
or so aristocrats who make up the Senate, in particular those patricians who
backed Pompey and later murdered Caesar. Cato is written up to look like a
fool, like some nasty English clergyman who gets elected by forging votes from
the death register. Cicero, one of the most brilliant men of the period, is
rendered as little more than a spear carrier. To be sure, an attempt is made
with the character of Brutus to move beyond an ideological stereotype, and
Pompey is only as venal as he has to be... indeed, we feel sympathy for him as
he and his wife and children attempt to escape to Egypt. But he's rendered as
weak, lacking true sexual karma. Caesar has the pop-culture mojo. Like Clinton
or Kennedy, he can be forgiven while Nixon remains a criminal, LBJ a pariah.
religion & the
rebel
Julius Caesar claimed descendancy
from Ascanius, and therefore from Venus, ergo, he was a legitimate patrician
and a chief priest. A pontifex maximus was a lifetime appointment, carried
great political significance. You do see him in the temple, communing with
Jupiter, and other characters making offerings to their personal gods. You also
see "the reading of the signs" at various junctures, and while some Romans are
devout believers, there are instances of artifice and cynicism. When Caesar
visits the auguries (a committee of priestly clairvoyants in shabby togas),
they say the "sign" will be the appearance of the birds of peace... and indeed
the day he is proclaimed emperor, a flock of doves is released from a hidden
cloister in the temple. Divine intervention is stage-managed if the politics
are auspicious.
It's interesting to see how this
aspect of Roman living is dramatized, the idea of personal gods within a
pantheon. Everyone has a shrine in the house, or has access to one in the
street. You wonder if Christianity (when it arrived in Rome) was a fad that
suited democracy, a plebeian checkmate against the old gods of the patricians.
While there's no hint of this in Season I, it might come by Season 3. The
struggle between the plebs and the patricians was 300 hundred years old and
still going when Caesar emerged.
© LR 8/06
"Rome boasts the largest standing
film set in the world, comprising five acres of backlot and six soundstages at
the world-famous Cinecittà Studios", says the BBC website. The sturdy
HBO DVD box set comes with an extra DVD with interviews, production details,
off-set, out-of-character clips, etc, but you can find out further details
about the production at the dedicated
BBC and
HBO
sites.
Mcourt
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Cast: Ciaran Hinds (Caesar), James Purefoy (Antony), Max Pirkis
(Octavian), Kevin McKidd (Vorenus), Ray Stevenson (Pullo), Polly Walker (Atia),
Lindsay Duncan (Servilia), Kerry Condon (Octavia), Indira Varma (Niobe),
Kenneth Cranham (Pompey), David Bamber (Cicero), Tobias Menzies (Brutus), Lee
Boardman (Timon) et. al.