History that hurts

Fueled by obscenity, HBO's series "Rome" shocks us back 2,000 years -- and reflects the horror show in Iraq today.

By Gary Kamiya

Read more: Rome, Gary Kamiya, Opinion, Iraq War

REUTERS and HBO images

Left: Burnt cars lie on the road at the site of twin car bomb attacks at Shorja market in Baghdad February 12, 2007. Right: A scene from "Rome"

Feb. 13, 2007 | In his book "Mythologies," the French theorist Roland Barthes turned his jaundiced gaze on, among other things, bad movie haircuts. In a chapter titled "The Romans in Films," Barthes mocked the dos in Joseph Mankiewicz's 1953 film "Julius Caesar." "[A]ll the characters are wearing fringes. Some have them curly, some straggly, some tufted, some oily, all have them well combed," Barthes wrote. "What then is associated with these insistent fringes? Quite simply the label of Roman-ness ... The frontal lock overwhelms us with evidence, no one can doubt that he is in Ancient Rome." For Barthes, these "Roman" haircuts, along with the constant "passionate" sweat that pours from everyone, are a "degraded spectacle, which is equally afraid of simple reality and of total artifice." By pompously pretending to be "natural," the Roman haircut is a sign of artistic bad faith.

Barthes' essay helped me understand why I'm addicted to HBO's series "Rome." It is part of a new breed of dramas -- "Deadwood" is another one -- that have found an infinitely more potent way of hurling us into the outer space of history than archaic hairstyles. Combining the savage realism that is now acceptable on the tube with meticulous research, they use the most visceral means, including strange sex and extreme violence, to shock us out of our contemporary cocoons and summon up a time when human beings were profoundly different from human beings today. By refusing moral judgment, they allow the pastness of the past to come to shocking life. They are time machines fueled by obscenity.

"Rome" is based on solid historical research. But what makes it draw imaginative blood is the fact that it's uncensored scholarship, audacious history. "Rome" is incredibly entertaining, while also being incredibly shocking. It's history porn. It dares to depict an alien worldview, one untouched by Christianity and the moral ethos introduced by that strange little sect. Perhaps those Catholic watchdog groups should stop worrying about heretical fluff like "The Da Vinci Code" and pay more attention to "Rome."

More to the point, maybe the geniuses who brought us the war in Iraq should have watched it before they decided to slap around an ancient religiously based culture they knew nothing about. They thought they would be getting "The Ten Commandments" -- instead they got "Rome." Or "Caligula."

There is no reason to believe that "Rome's" creators were thinking about contemporary affairs when making the series. Nonetheless, it's hard not to think of the nihilistic horror show in Iraq when watching "Rome." Brutal civil wars, shifting alliances, the machinations of the powerful -- it's all happening again. Some historians have made an explicit comparison between America at the start of the third millennium and Rome at the start of the first. The distinguished Israeli military historian Martin Van Creveld called Iraq "the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them." The uncomfortable truth is that genuine history, as opposed to the kitschy, sentimental version that American politicians and moviemakers alike cling to, does not necessarily reward the good. Indeed, it calls into question what "the good" is. Our leaders proclaim that America is a force for historical good, and our commercial storytellers sing us to sleep with happy fairy tales. But historians take a much colder view.

Invading Iraq, as I argued before the war started, was such an enormous and unpredictable act that it plunged America out of the explicable realm of politics and into the great abyss of history. "It cannot be explained or defined. When it comes, it will simply exist, with the opacity of history. Its outcome is not foreseeable ... To exist in history is to have passed beyond the pieties and slogans of the political. History is tragic: politics is not. History is glorious. It is also fatal."

It is not surprising that historians and scholars who actually knew something about the Middle East were overwhelmingly opposed to the Iraq war. Nor is it surprising that neither our political leaders nor our media listened to them. History hurts. And watching "Rome" is a sharp and salutary reminder of this.

"Rome" covers one of the most turbulent periods in Rome's history -- the civil war, the rise and fall of Julius Caesar, and the final end of the Republic marked by the reign of Octavian, who became the first emperor. The Senate, that ancient bastion of aristocratic resistance to autocracy, is weakened and no longer able to stand against powerful military leaders like Caesar and his great rival, Pompey. With epic sweep, the show shows us the desperate deliberations of senators, for whom betting on the right horse was a matter of life and death. It takes us into the tents of the generals, and the opulent houses of two Roman matrons plotting each other's destruction. And, above all, it focuses on the lives of two plebeians, Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo, whose friendship, enduring against all odds, is the emotional heart of the story. As the second season nears its midpoint, Julius Caesar has been killed, and a showdown looms between the army led by the two leading conspirators, Brutus and Cassius, and the forces of Mark Anthony and the young Octavian.

"Rome," which cost $100 million to make, is justly celebrated for its extraordinary attention to historically accurate detail, from the "bullas" (amulets) young Romans wore around their necks to the look and feel of the teeming streets of the ancient city. As with "The Lord of the Rings," high production values play a big part in creating a convincing alternate reality. Any tiny detail in the show is certain to be based on historical research. In a recent episode, for example, Servilia, Brutus' mother and Julius Caesar's former lover, prayed to the ancient ur-female deity Isis. I Googled some of the phrases from her incantation and found they came from Apuleius' 2nd-century A.D. proto-novel "The Golden Ass," a significant historic source. The writers took artistic liberties -- the passage they pulled is not a prayer but a description -- but the point is that they didn't just make up some archaic gobbledygook. The academic message boards about the show are mostly laudatory, with only a few complaints concerning minor inaccuracies such as Servilia's anachronistic ox-blood ritual and the fact that Cleopatra was not in Ptolemy's custody or rescued by Caesar's men. It's obvious, watching this show, that smart historians and researchers who know a lot about ancient Rome were consulting with equally smart screenwriters who weren't going to go "Gladiator" on us.

The biggest difference between "Rome" and "Gladiator," or "Ben-Hur," or the vast run of Hollywood costume dramas, is that it resists making its characters familiar. This is a bigger achievement than it might appear. A work of art set in the distant past must walk a tricky line between portraying its characters as essentially the same as us or as utterly alien. Most history-themed films and TV shows have always fallen decidedly on the "human beings are always the same" end of the spectrum. There are many reasons for this. It requires both historical scholarship and a certain imaginative audacity to create characters who don't share some of our most basic assumptions and beliefs. It's also a lot easier to hook viewers with characters whose emotions and beliefs they share. Moreover, there's a self-contradiction at the heart of the enterprise: to create a three-dimensional character, one must fully enter into his or her mind -- not easy to do if that mind is radically different.

Small wonder that typical Hollywood historical schlock -- which does not include "Julius Caesar" -- presents the past as being just like now, only with bangs. The past is manifested only by "Roman" locks, or "Roman" sweating, or "brazen" trumpet motifs that all seem to come from the same Olde Times Sound Effects Shoppe. These feeble signifiers are the only things that tell us we're in 50 B.C.; the characters themselves are simply yokels from a 1963 street in the Bronx wearing sheets. Tony Curtis' deathless line, "Yonda lies da castle of my fadda," is the kitschy banner that waves over the whole enterprise.

Next page: How "Rome" compares to "I, Claudius"