Ecology of the Undead

Ye gods...!  Who would invent such bogeys, such farcically loathsome things, unless ... I raised my eyes to the grey bated sky, and shivered.  No, I was not, to word it temperately, much enamoured of this devil's nook, this baleful twelfth- or thirteenth-century pocket of provincial France, where superstitions and obscene mythologies, instead of just remaining quaintly decorative, had the unpleasant trick of springing suddenly alive and driving mad all those who brooded on them overlong [57].

In this passage from John Metcalfe's novella The Feasting Dead, originally published in 1954 by Arkham House, an widowed English father shakes his fist at the sky after discovering that his adolescent son Denis has become the willing prey of a sans-nom, a nameless not-quite dead thing that feeds on the living.  Denis had been spending his school holidays in France, where he met the sans-nom, which followed him back to England before the father, Colonel Habgood, drove it away.  The boy retaliated by running away to France to find the thing.  The father vacillates between believing what he sees and rebelling against it as superstition, but his question was one I sometimes ask myself: Who would invent such bogeys, such farcically loathsome things?  For the fact is that people do invent them, and even become obsessed with them, as if they really existed.

As Walter Kendrick wrote in 1992 when Anne Rice's vampire series "seem[ed] to be careening down a steep, sad slope and The Tale of the Body Thief read "like the pilot for America's first vampire sitcom, 'I Love Lestat'":

Despite their basic absurdity, they're also quite convincing; they've apparently sent some people right around the bend into belief. In "Vampire: The Complete Guide to the World of the Undead," Manuela Dunn Mascetti treats "Interview With the Vampire" not as a novel but as an operating manual. That "exceptional book," she writes, offers the "best account of the birth of a vampire"; it "gives a good account of the process occurring in the physical body during transformation."

At times, Ms. Mascetti seems dimly aware that "the process" is fictional. But she spends several pages summarizing J. S. Le Fanu's "Carmilla" (1872), E. F. Benson's "Room in the Tower" (1912), Fritz Leiber's "Girl With the Hungry Eyes" (1949) and other anthologists' favorites, without attributions or any hint, besides the present tense, that these stories are fictional.

I've never been a fan of horror stories.  In early adolescence I watched The Twilight Zone regularly for a while, but in retrospect it seems to me that its stories were about something else.  (One that haunted me was the episode where Burgess Meredith plays a mousy clerk who loves to read but is bullied constantly about it.  Then the world ends and he's the only person left alive, free to read as much as he likes ... until he breaks his only pair of glasses, without which he's effectively blind.  It doesn't take a psychoanalyst to figure out why that struck a chord with me, even though my parents encouraged my reading and I was never actually picked on for it; but I was still the only kid I knew for whom reading mattered.)  I read one Lovecraft story, "The Colour Out of Space," which I encountered in a science fiction anthology, and though I thought I should read more of his work, I didn't.  I saw House of Wax a couple of times on late-night TV before I was out of high school.  But that's the extent of my engagement with the genre, and compared to sf and fantasy and even detective fiction, it's barely dipping my toes in the shallows.

Kendrick's Voice Literary Supplement review turned me on to Rice -- her erotica and historical fiction as well as the vampire books -- but when I read other works in the genre, I quickly found that despite her literary limitations, Rice transcended it.  (For a while: as Kendrick said, she went downhill rather quickly.) The writers and fans inspired by her example seemed to be doing something else, getting some other kind of satisfaction from the stories.  Their work seemed like porn (remember written pornography?): hot stuff if it fit your kinks, bland and boring if it didn't.  Which it didn't.  Why would they invent such bogeys, such farcically loathsome things, unless ... ?  Colonel Habgood's "unless" presumably is meant to be followed by "unless they did exist after all."  But they don't.  So why invent them?

In Barbara Ehrenreich's Blood Rites (1997) she speculated (or maybe I inferred it from her speculations) that horror films appeal to atavistic ancestral memories of the distant past before human beings became hunters, when we were prey, and the night was full of dimly seen nocturnal predators ready to snatch us away and feast (or at least snack) on us.  Whatever I think of her baseless attempt to ground this in our genes, I think she was on to something here, though I also think of Erica Jong's paraphrase (in Fear of Flying) of Georg Groddeck's Book of the It: the fear of the intruder is also the wish for the intruder.  (In roughly the same way that the wish to possess the desired love-object is also a wish to be the desired love-object, which is wanted and feared at the same time.)

The slasher subgenre didn't interest me either.  My boyfriend in the mid- to late 1980s had been into such movies to some extent, and pointed out to me that Ridley Scott's Alien was basically a slasher film in science-fiction drag.  Much later I read Carol Clover's Men, Women, and Chainsaws (Princeton, 1992), and with its discussions in mind I finally saw The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  I then understood it, but I still didn't get it.  Joan Hawkins' Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde (Minnesota, 2000) illuminated the affinities between avant-garde cinema and horror films (think of Un Chien Andalou for an obvious example), and I still want to reread it and engage it in argument, but it didn't answer Colonel Habgood's question either: Why invent such bogeys?

Another thought: I happened to read Susie Bright's Inspired by Andrea Dworkin recently.  In one of those essays she tells of reading Bedtime for Frances to her young daughter.  Little Frances Badger's father, exasperated by her "bedtime phobias ... growls in his sleep and says, 'Do you know what will happen if you don't go to sleep right now?' 'I will get a spanking?'" Frances squeaks and runs back to bed.

"I wish they would show the part where Frances gets a spanking!" [Bright's daughter] says, with sadistic glee in her eyes....

Kids love stories and pictures about terrible crimes and punishments; they are fascinated by deep sensations and strong emotions, even though they have a terrible time learning to take the flak for their own mistakes.

Of course fascination with terrible crimes and punishments is partly a way of dealing with the fear of those things.  The same is probably true of the violent fantasy games five and six-year-old children invent, as described in Jane Katch's book Under Deadman's Skin (Beacon Press, 2002).  I had that fascination as a kid myself, sissy though I was and am.  But is this why many adults also have that fascination?  I don't know; I don't get it.  I seem to have left most of it behind somewhere along the way.

The same question applies to the gods and other spiritual beings and systems some adults make up.  What is the psychological meaning of the fantasies of judgment and torture they have put into their religions?  Why do even modern seekers, contemptuous of the amorality of the organized "Western" religions they grew up with, then invent sadistic cosmologies that resemble nothing so much as children's games of "Step on a crack, break your mother's back"?  Why do they prefer, as they evidently do (they choose the cosmologies they invent, after all) to believe in a booby-trapped universe, with themselves at the miserly mercy of the gods they invented, who set the booby traps in the first place?

The reason I decided to read The Feasting Dead was that Valancourt Books, the publishers who reissued it in 2014, touted it on Facebook as follows:

John Metcalfe may not have been a gay author and THE FEASTING DEAD (1954) isn't known as a gay book, but this novella is queer in every sense of the word. It has echoes of Henry James's 'The Turn of the Screw', plus nameless horrors from beyond the grave and a rather sinister (and possibly ambulatory) scarecrow. The book has several truly bizarre and unforgettable moments, maybe the weirdest of which is when the main character, Colonel Habgood, walks in on his teenage son Denis and the handyman Raoul, a scene guaranteed to make you say 'Whoa, did I just read what I think I read? In a British novel from 1954?"

This is a slight misrepresentation of the scene, which is ambiguous to the point of incomprehensibility.  I didn't ask myself if I'd just read what I thought I read.  But I did wonder why gay readers should be excited about a horror story which might represent a gay-ish character (again, that oversimplifies and misrepresents what Raoul seems to be) sucking the life force out of a thirteen-year-old boy, so that I'm expected to see it as a metaphor for sex between a man and a boy.  Or between two men.  Granted that the censorship of the era made it difficult-to-impossible to present sex between men or between women as fulfilling rather than a doomed scrabbling after unnatural pleasure, given that homosexuality was commonly used in literature of this period as a metaphor for psychic vampirism and murky evil, why should I see an example of this homophobic regime as a literary attraction?  (Later some of these tropes were transferred to AIDS; not an improvement.)

This ties into the much older tendency to treat any kind of sexual interaction as unspeakable, even monstrous.  Marital sex could be alluded to (barely) without denigration, but any other sensual pleasure was a horror to be kept off-scene, and the participants were treated as monsters.  Which meant that when people were confronted with a real Sodomite who didn't smell of sulfur or have cloven hooves, they often couldn't recognize him as a Sodomite since he wasn't a monster.  Treating the meeting of bodies as a horror too monstrous to contemplate made it easier to avoid talking about the reality, keeping people in often-lethal ignorance.  Don't even look in that direction, it'll scare you too much, it's too horrible even to think about, you'll have nightmares forever.  Really.  Don't you trust me?  I know better than you do.  Someday you'll thank me for keeping you blindfolded.

There's something sexual, in this sense, in literature of terror and the supernatual, if only because you're not supposed to look at either sex or the monstrous.  If there really were undead predators rising from the grave, the bogeys Colonel Habgood refers to, the superstitious avoidance that the French peasants and the local curate he meets deploy against it would be even more obviously useless.  (After all, the Church is supposed to have infallible, God-given countermeasures against the demonic.)  I suspect that the real function of horror literature is not to help its users to confront their terrors, but to encourage them not to.  It's too horrible.  Be afraid, be very afraid.  The gobbl'uns'll get you if you don't watch out.  Hide under the bed... (It occurs to me that a certain craving for the adrenaline rush of fear is also a factor.  Not my drug of choice, folks.)  The light of day brings many horrors into a better perspective.  Sometimes they stop being horrors.  Sometimes they turn out to be nothing but a deck of cards.  Sometimes they vanish altogether.

What Do You Do With a Drunken Samurai?

Last night I had a chance to see a 35mm print of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai shown on campus. It was the third or fourth time I've seen it in thirty-odd years, and it was a good time to see it because of the thinking I've been doing about violence in films and fanboys' celebration of it.

Seven Samurai was originally released in 1954, and it quickly became a classic. Kurosawa wanted to flesh out the samurai genre, which was already a standard of Japanese cinema, as martial arts was in China and the Western and crime film were in Hollywood. It's the story of a small village, ravaged by bandits in the late 1500s, whose people decide to hire samurai to defend them. Seven are willing to take on the job, a motley crew like the ensemble in a World War II picture: they range from the grizzled veteran and the hero-worshiping young novice to the drunken clown (played by Toshiro Mifune with enough mascara at times to double for Joan Crawford). The samurai organize the villagers and lead the defense, killing off all forty of the bandits and suffering some losses themselves. The survivors go on.

The finished product is 207 minutes long, almost three and a half hours, and it moves along steadily, expertly, at times creakily. Some of the plot devices, like a doomed romance between the youngest samurai and a village maiden, are just too obvious, but they don't get in the way. There's always the problem, when you watch an older film, that what seems like a cliche now may not have been one when it was made. In terms of the story (as opposed to technical aspects such as cinematography), I don't think that's true of Seven Samurai, but Kurosawa -- who also cowrote the script -- and his cast handle these elements with such conviction that they mostly work. And when you consider that the film is almost sixty years old, it stands up remarkably well.

Still, watching Kurosawa's old samurai movies brings home just how much cinema has changed in the intervening decades. Audiences expect brisker (not to say manic) pacing, less character development, and more gore. Seven Samurai's characters don't really develop -- those who live to the end are pretty much the same people they were at the beginning, even the novice -- but we do learn more about them and their backgrounds; that is, we get exposition rather than development. There are no real surprises, but then surprise really isn't the goal.

I recall one geekboy who argued online that because he personally fell asleep (or claimed he did) while trying to watch Seven Samurai, it was therefore inherently a boring movie. I pointed out that very many people did not fall asleep while watching it, so he was wrong. Granted, a 207-minute-long feature is a long slog, but as many viewers and reviewers have said, Seven Samurai moves along quickly. Sitting down in the theater last night, I was a bit worried about what I'd committed myself to, especially since I'd seen it before, but the time passed easily and without boredom. I couldn't help wondering what the many younger people in the audience, who'd grown up with a whole different kind of action movie, thought about it. The showing was sold out in advance, and I had to wait to get a ticket, but the film is a known classic and I'm sure instructors had recommended it. Were the kids disappointed? I don't know.

Consider: Seven Samurai is in black and white, in the old boxy screen ratio (1.33:1.00) of the days before Cinemascope and other widescreen formats. It must have cost a lot to make because of the extensive sets, the costumes, and the large cast (a hundred or so villagers, the inhabitants of the town where the samurai are hired), plus fight choreography and fire and rain effects (the final showdown takes place in a pouring rainstorm, probably machine-made). But one special-effects expense was conspicuous by its absence, namely blood and prosthetics. There are no geysers of blood or swords stuck into eyes, no lopped-off limbs or impaled torsos. A lot of characters are despatched by sword and spear, but the effect is theatrical, stagy. There's no attempt to make the violence look "real" by today's standards (though today's screen violence is increasingly unreal). So I was surprised by this online reviewer's assessment:

The fighting is brutal and Kurosawa doesn't sugarcoat it, men really die. The battle culminates in a final skirmish in the rain, leading to a bittersweet ending that comments on the nature of conflict and the price paid by those who undertake it. There is no easy victory. The saber rattling is tone deaf.

No, men don't "really die" in this movie; at least he didn't say "literally." It's just pretend death; it's a movie, okay? (And "skirmish" is really not the right word for the battle in the rain.) Often the camera "looks" only glancingly at the fighting, and the swords and clubs flail around without seeming to connect with anyone; only the agonized (but still stylized) screaming of the wounded tells you that the weapons found their mark. Fake blood is used very sparingly, only once or twice in a very long movie. It's reminiscent of classic Hollywood Westerns, where men who've been pumped full o' lead simply contort themselves and fall, with no blood shed, let alone exit wounds. But the fighting looks messy and brutal and no fun at all, which is probably the effect Kurosawa wanted. I just think it must seem tame to contemporary audiences.

Another specifically Japanese aspect of the film is the amount of male nudity, or rather exposed male flesh. Male peasants working in the fields often wear no more than a loincloth which shows off their buttocks, and there was one closeup shot of a man's backside and thighs that I don't think lingered on his body merely incidentally. Toshiro Mifune, playing the wild samurai, shows off his body quite a bit. It's not a great physique by 1950s Hollywood standards let alone today's defined, gym-toned buffness, but it's still impressive. As the samurai are on their way to the village, Mifune strips down to what this writer calls "a g-string" to frolick in a stream and catch fish for lunch with his bare hands, while the others (fully clothed) watch from above with amusement. Later he steals some armor from the bandits, a corselet almost like a Merry Widow, that covers his torso and allows his buttocks to peek out coyly below; he spends the last half hour or so of the film in this outfit. I'd be wary of reading too much homoerotic subtext into all this, including the young novice's hungry hero worship of the older fighters, if it weren't for the fact that Japan generally, and the samurai in particular, have a long tradition of male homoeroticism and hot man to man action. It needn't take place only within a minoritizing gayish framework (though it can do so, using different terms and categories than the contemporary American ones), so it shouldn't be ruled out in Seven Samurai.

Still, the (almost entirely Western) audience last night only giggled at Mifune's nudity -- and to be fair, it is clearly supposed to be as much a comic as an erotic element, though the two don't exclude each other -- as they did at the peasants' antics, though those are also double-edged in a different way. Kurosawa's peasants aren't simple, uncomplicated bumpkins: they have a darker side that keeps them from becoming caricatures. It's one of the great strengths of the film.

A Boy Has to Have Standards!

The largest exhibit at the Nimitz, "History Walks of the Pacific War," features "three acres of World War II artifacts, tanks, guns, and large relics" in the words of its brochure. This "Walk" avoids the history of the war in favor of an obsession with the nuts and bolts of the war's machines and of obtaining and preserving these specimens." I watched as a veteran of our armed forces (but not of combat) demonstrated an LVT (landing vehicle, tracked) and a flamethrower for a group of elementary school students. The museum claims that its living history "programs try to convey the day to day reality of life for the American soldier in the Pacific theater, the complexity of the U.S. war effort, and the harsh truths of modern war." They fail. The children's response -- "Ooh, that's neat" -- was perfectly appropriate to the spirit of the presentation. -- James. W. Loewen, Lies Against America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (The New Press, 1999), p. 190-191, on the Nimitz Museum of the Pacific War in Fredricksburg, Texas

I finally got around to watching The Eagle, which I wrote about immediately after I heard about it. It was a lot better than I expected, just because I'd heard such bad things about it, and looking at some of the reviews and other commentary it received gave me food for thought.

The Eagle is based on a young-adult historical novel from the 1950s by Rosemary Sutcliff; apparently director Kevin Macdonald (best known for The Last King of Scotland) and producer Duncan Kenilworthy read it and loved it as boys. It's the story of a young Roman centurion, Marcus Flavius Aquila, who ventures into the wilderness north of Hadrian's Wall in quest of the Eagle, the golden standard of his late father's legion, which disappeared there without a trace. His only hope of survival, let alone success, is that he's accompanied by his British slave Esca, whose life he'd saved from a public exhibition-killing, and who therefore owes him a debt of honor even though his family was killed by Roman invaders.

The way the story is framed even sounds like a young-adult novel, doesn't it? The filmmakers aimed for a PG-13 rating, which meant leaving out a lot of the cinematic violence that characterized other recent blockbusters set in the Classical period. I watched the unrated DVD version, which inserts many brief shots of blood and gore that were left out of the theatrical release, but even so it's less gory than most action/military films these days, and I found I didn't mind that at all. Not because I necessarily object to violence in movies, but blood fountains and flying body parts have become ends in themselves, going far beyond the requirements of realism. (I read a semi-scholarly article on Mel Gibson's The Passion that described how the violence in that god-snuff movie was enhanced with CGI, to make chunks of flesh fly. But I've also heard that many Christian homes possess unopened copies of the film, bought to support it, even though they didn't want to watch it.)

So, of course, some reviewers and many commenters complained because The Eagle wasn't gory enough. The line between reviewer and commenters is blurred on movie blogs, which are often the work of fanboys who don't know much about cinema but know what they like, namely fountains of blood, explosions, and bare titties. Not there's anything wrong with that, I guess, but there is more to movies than that holy trinity. (I've never been able to decide whether this review of The Passion was serious or parody.) I've been baffled over the past couple of decades to see how many people, most of them male, have herded themselves into a shared mindset where nothing else matters; not only do they celebrate the refinement of special effects in the service of simulated mayhem, but they don't think anything else is worth watching and can't enjoy movies on any other subject. They're even sure that anyone who claims to enjoy other kinds of movies are either lying or deceiving themselves.

This is why I quoted the passage from James Loewen's book on American historical monuments, by the way. It might seem somewhat contradictory to say that flying body parts and gushers of CGI blood glamorize violence, but I think that is what happens. The fanboy commentators I've read seem to equivocate between believing that movie violence is real, and simply wanting more lavish fake violence. They know it's not real, but they still think it's cool, and they talk about it as though it was real. "Ooh, neat!" seems to be the reaction either way.

There appear to be a number of roots of this phenomenon. One is the slasher film of the 70s and later, which started as a virtually no-budget product but gradually improved production values as the genre became better-known and more popular. Carol J. Clover wrote an excellent book on this subject -- Men, Women, and Chain Saws (Princeton, 1992) -- which introduced and guided me into the genre, but I soon lost interest in it; there just wasn't enough going on to keep my attention. Another is the crime film, which grew from the B-movie and noir to The French Connection and Die Hard by way of the Godfather and Dirty Harry series. I suppose you could add spaghetti Westerns, which fed into and were fed by Japanese and Hong Kong martial arts films: Akira Kurosawa's samurai epics were influenced by Westerns, and in their turn were remade in Hollywood and Europe as Westerns; A Fistful of Dollars is essentially a remake of Kurosawa's Yojimbo.

In all of these the plot was a thread on which to hang car chases and gun battles, with rapid development of special effects to make the violence more "real", though again, reality was not really the point. I think it was Linda Williams who compared hardcore porn to Hollywood musicals in Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible" (California, expanded edition 1999), with the sex scenes analogous to the production numbers. Well, in these movies the fights and car chases are the production numbers: a disproportionate part of the budget goes into planning, choreographing, and executing them. And just as in pornography the plot (which porn used to have, however weak) has largely been abandoned for nonstop action, in today's action movies plot and characterization are grudgingly included, but only pro forma.

Sometimes the leads improvise their dialogue, which saves a lot of money on writers. (I've often wondered about that. Of all the costs of mounting a major motion picture, the writer must be among the lesser ones, but the money people begrudge it anyway. Also true in TV, hence the rise of "reality" shows.) One of the worst movies I've ever seen, Eight Million Ways to Die (1986), based on Lawrence Block's detective novel, featured long scenes with Jeff Bridges and Andy Garcia amiably facing off and snarling "Fuck you" at each other, with shitfaced grins pasted onto their faces. ("Oh yeah? Fuck you.") I read in Time or Newsweek that in one of the Rambo movies, the second I think, Stallone extemporized "Fuck youuuuu" at his oriental torturer. "That was completely ad libbed, not in the script at all, but they decided to use it!" a publicist gushed. That was a proper poke in the eye to snobs who thought Sly was inarticulate. Why bother with writers when you've got a guy who can come up with lines like that in front of the camera?

Which brings me to something else that excited some controversy about The Eagle: the Roman characters speak with American accents, while the Britons speak with English accents, except when they speak in subtitled Gaelic. This was a conscious decision by the filmmakers, going against decades of movie tradition which decrees that all foreigners, especially ancient ones, speak with posh British accents.

But Macdonald sees no reason why Romans should be portrayed with English accents, any more than with American ones. ...

"My take on all this was that it's a metaphor for empire and the end of empire… In the 1930s, 40s, 50s, when Britain had an empire, and could be seen as an oppressive force, that made some kind of metaphorical sense and that's why they did it. Well, today that doesn't make any sense. Today the empire is America, and the sense of bigotry that some Americans have, and of a single-minded belief in their own culture and the greatness that's America." At the same time Macdonald is not setting out to make a political drama and promises that the film will be first and foremost a "mainstream story" and an "adventure film".

After all, if you want authenticity, the Romans should be speaking Latin, not English. This decision, which I thought worked well, infuriated not only some commenters (see the message boards at IMDB, for example) but some professional reviewers. Scott Tobias at the Onion AV Club complained about Channing Tatum's "wavering, inexplicable accent" as Marcus Aquila: but Tatum didn't put on an accent that I could hear, he spoke standard movie American. I suspect that Tobias expected him to put on a Brit accent, as a good Roman should, and tried to hear one whether it was there or not. I could hear some of the British actors who played Romans having to work at their American accents, though. And quite a number of characters, Roman and Briton, were played by Hungarians, where part of the film was shot; if Jamie Bell had a job learning his lines in Gaelic, it must have been harder for them.

Band of Thebes, whose parody review of The Eagle enticed me into watching it to start with, read it as a leather/s&m romp.

In the first half, the buffer, more built 30 year-old muscle stud Marcus rescues the skinnier, cuter 24 year-old Esca from a brutal top in a helmet mask and makes him his slave. Fine. Lucky them.

I enjoyed watching the movie through that filter, which made it a lot more fun, but (for better or worse), I didn't even detect a gay subtext in it. It's just another male-bonding story, though the leads are certainly cute enough and I like to imagine them making out between the frames. Tatum, who's apparently copped to being bisexual in the past, playfully told New York Magazine that, although he didn't see The Eagle as particularly homoerotic or even bromantic, he and Jamie Bell (who played Esca) have "been having sex for a few years now." A commenter somewhere jumped to the conclusion that Tatum must have been the top; I think that's taking one's fantasies too seriously.

The Guardian reviewer noted that "Inevitably, in the absence of more traditional romantic interest, there's a certain unobtrusive homoerotic aspect to the relationship." That's because there are no women at all with speaking parts in the movie (unless you count some of the spectators at the gladiatorial game who get to yell "Kill him!"). At one point Marcus makes eye contact with comely Brit lasses, but that's the extent of heterosexuality in the movie. John Podhoretz complained in the right-wing Weekly Standard:

But it probably didn’t have to go all Brokeback Mountain on us either. After a time The Eagle comes to turn on the relationship between Aquila and the British slave he rescues from a gladiator’s blade. The slave’s name is Esca, and he pledges his life to Aquila even though he says he “hates the Romans and everything you stand for.” Their relationship is extremely physical. During an operation to save Aquila’s leg, Esca throws himself on top of Aquila’s body to hold him down. They ride together, they camp together, they even have a fight during which they roll around on each other.

Oh, why couldn't they have had a fight without physical contact? Too bad Esca didn't just whip out a gun -- no, wait, that's a phallic symbol ... Esca only "throws himself on top of Aquila's body" because he's ordered to, not out of devotion or desire. Brokeback Mountain was often invoked in connection with The Eagle, but I think that was more due to reviewers' hangups or wishes than anything in the movie. I wrote about an earlier case of this syndrome, the reviewer who lamented that "because of Ang Lee’s successful film, he could no longer see the frolicking of two talking animals in a children’s animated cartoon as 'completely innocent.'"

There's a thread at IMDB's message boards in which some users were vocally pleased that no love interest had been added; not having read the original story, I can't say, but in 1950s YA fiction the heterosexuality would have been toned down. This also used to be true of American cowboy movies, war movies, science fiction, and traditional Asian martial arts films. (Jeffrey P. Dennis documented this in We Boys Together: Teenagers in Love Before Girl-Craziness [Vanderbilt, 2007].) I recall how many male martial-arts fans objected to the blatant heterosexuality in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which went (deliberately) against genre expectations. In the military and in sport -- to say nothing of the monastic strands of Asian martial arts -- contact with females is polluting; the ladies' man is depicted as dandified if not effeminate. You can also see that this notion is still alive and well in today's USA from boy-culture panic about the dread, masculinity-draining chick flick.

One odd complaint involved what the Guardian critic called the film's embrace of "certain unfashionable virtues of what might be considered a Roman brand – duty, honour, filial piety." A surprising number of action-movie fans professed to be unable to understand why Marcus would go to all that trouble to recover the standard. Maybe if it had been an American flag, they'd have gotten it. Armies everywhere are honor/shame cultures, so it shouldn't be that much of a leap; I don't share those values at all, but I was able to suspend belief on this point with no difficulty.

But maybe that's my strength as a movie watcher: I'm not bound to one genre or style. There's no real reason why fanboys should enjoy different kinds of movies -- if you want to be a robot that responds only to a handful of keywords, it's your life. I don't hate action movies, or even quite violent ones. Peppermint Candy and Save the Green Planet! are both extremely violent in different modes, grimly realistic and comically over-the-top, but they're among my all-time favorites. But I also enjoy character-driven stories with no special effects and no bloodshed; I recently saw Mike Mills's Beginners, and enjoyed it thoroughly, and there are many others.

I liked The Eagle because it put character development before CGI blood geysers; while the characters were nevertheless a bit thin, they worked well enough for the movie's purposes. The use of accents was a pleasant change from routine. The budget was relatively small for a costume epic, and it showed in good ways: the filmmakers had to concentrate on story and motive rather than technology and crowd management -- but for all that, the battle scenes were very effectively done. Sometimes lack of funds stimulates invention. The photography was excellent. I might watch this one again sometime.