Briseis
is revealed as Achilles’ heel in Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy, a postmillennial retelling of the plot of Homer’s Iliad. Homer enclosed the Calydonian boar hunt in his Iliad, a myth within the myth, as both a nod to what was
previously big box office for bards, and a guide to old hat newly worn (Il. 9.646-737). Phoenix’s internal account of the mythical
Meleagar thus mirrors Homer’s own innovative portrayal of the insufficient
merit, in the archaic age, of a warrior’s mere rage. Petersen’s Troy likewise constructs a new story around the
re-interpreted core events of an old myth, appropriating and humanizing the
characters for a new age.
In
Homer, Briseis is a bit part. She is mere booty, a prize occasioning Achilles
and Agamemnon’s quarrel as they compete for wartime power and recognition
(1.138-221, 334-55). Homer uses this quarrel to explore the common humanity of
both Achilles and Agamemnon. Eventually they abandon the mad fantasies that
have shattered their lives (9.19-32, 137-9; 16.115-9). Homer ends both with
their reconciliation to each other and Achilles’ to his mortality (23.979-92;
24.591-646). The theme of the narrative is Achilles’ resentment and, as Eric
Gans has argued, the poem exhibits high culture’s expulsion of this ethically
destructive and morally potent rage.
In
the Troy movie, Briseis reprises
her role as the narrative’s plot device. But she assumes a new centrality with
her postmodern victim status. Disappointingly, Agamemnon is a stock Hollywood
villain with no redeeming qualities, and he gets his postmodern comeuppance
when the empowered female victim, Briseis, kills him with her knife. This
spares Clytaemestra her famous murder (Od. 11.439-529, 24.219-25), and, in our age of war amidst wild accusations
of empire, demographically satisfies the resentment of the masses on the
periphery, but with the cheapest of pop culture tricks. Achilles himself
arrives too late to rescue Briseis, the feminist damsel in distress. But he is
not too late to be shot down by Paris’ arrows, the first into his notable heel.
Briseis thus becomes (in the movie’s reinterpretation of the human desires
driving the Trojan War) Achilles’ fatal weakness (whereas in Homer it is his outsized
rage and resentment).
The
formally clichéd tragic Hollywood ending is deployed, however, with
self-conscious formal innovations involving the new femme fatale, Briseis.
Achilles’ character arc (played out in an MTV time span of days, not as the
culmination of a ten-year war) is reconfigured to pivot on new heroic content:
his erotic surrender under Briseis’ knife. His heroism is thus rehabilitated
(according to postmodern necessity) by Briseis. She allows him to get in touch
with his sensitive side, to make the fatal decision to resolve to abandon the
Trojan War and to sail for Greece with her. Patroclus’ death functions to
dispel this fantasy (which here romantically doubles Helen’s; but cf. Homer, Il.
16.115-9). Achilles’ reconceived
character thus marks the movie as a postmillennial reflection on the clichéd
sacrificial requirements of the postmodern esthetic. Although belatedly (i.e.
anachronistically) heroic for Briseis, Achilles must die in a Hollywood
catharsis anyway. Yet Paris’ arrows bring redemption for the classical hero, in
a redemption palatable to the romantics of the new millennium.
In
the postmodern retelling of the legend, it is Achilles’ desire to rescue
Briseis from the sack of Troy and play the apparently obsolete male hero that
constitutes his fatal mythical flaw, rendering him vulnerable. But his willing
sacrifice of himself to these postmodern narrative exigencies tragically
highlights the problem that Briseis’ newfound victimary centrality poses for
classical male heroism. Both erotic and martial desire (Paris and Patroclus)
claim victim status, putting the affirmative action on the victims’ behalf (of
Hector and Achilles) into plot-driving conflict. The sacrificial solution
reveals a doubling of the romantic tragedy: if Paris and Helen are victims,
then so are Achilles and Briseis. But this Hollywood ending is not just
Achilles’ but also postmodernism’s Achilles heel. For Apollo’s delayed
sacrifice of the impious Achilles to his priestess Briseis reconstitutes
Achilles’ real (and heretofore undisclosed) glory as nothing less than immortal
chivalry.
Works Cited
Gans, Eric. “The Culture of Resentment,” Philosophy
and Literature 8.1 (1984): 55-66.
Homer, The Iliad. Translated by Robert Fagles. Penguin, 1990.
Homer, The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fagles. Penguin, 1996.