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  “hero” of Italy’s postwar reconstruction, which began with the European Recovery Program (ERP), the official name of the Marshall Plan, “the largest international propaganda campaign ever seen in times of peace” (Ellwood 87). For its specific geo-political and historical conditions, the Americans chose Italy as the focal point of the information campaign that accompanied the delivery of food aid, although not without some dissent. The Marshall Plan was a means of projecting American hegemony into Europe and exporting their economic policies.

  Most important is the extent to which the Marshall Plan’s reconstruction of Italian identity influenced the images of the sword and sandal movies. There are, in fact, various analogies between the vision of Italy assembled by ERP

  officials and the one constructed by the peplum genre. As David Ellwood affirms, the majority of ERP documentaries portray Italy as a small and simple country, mostly agricultural and oppressed by the weight of its history. This is contrasted with America’s dynamism and power to help, a notion which is predicated on the myth of ships arriving with loads of primary goods (Ellwood 100). For instance, in Goliath and the Dragon, Hercules returns home, where his wife and son are waiting for him. Along the way the hero visits his farm

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  properties and is greeted by his subjects, farmers, and shepherds, who are struggling with the hard work of the fields. A few sequences show Hercules intent on helping them. In one scene, Hercules helps some shepherds repair a beam that had fallen from the roof of their hut. In the next sequence, the hero uproots a tree with his bare hands, a tree that the farmers had been trying to remove in vain with oxen pulling ropes. Everywhere he goes, Hercules is always greeted and acclaimed by the people, who recognize him for alleviating their daily toils.

  Just as the Marshall Plan was presented as the only way to liberate Italy from poverty and backwardness, Hercules frees his subjects from the hardest physical labors and helps them rebuild their country.

  Hercules is the flaunted prosperity of the Marshall Plan, the attraction to new forms of consumption, the promise that one day Italians will all be strong and powerful like him, and like America. “You can be like us,” said the ERP

  (Elwood 113). It wasn’t so much actual prosperity as it was potential prosperity that was depicted in cinemas and contributed to shaping the American dream in Italy. Various studies have brought the Marshall Plan into question and put its economic significance into perspective, for it did not achieve all its aims, precisely due to a lack of analysis of the European context (Ellwood 100 –101).

  However, historians still concur on the political and psychological impact of this American influence in Italy, particularly at the level of popular imagination and mass culture. Among all European countries, Italy has been the leader in importing the greatest number of American films each year. In the postwar period, they were the principal means through which the American way of life penetrated the Italian imagination and dreams (Brunetta 9). With the economic miracle close at hand, it was precisely cinema that created a hybrid character of Italian origin with an American body, used American funds for Italian production, and depicted industrial ambitions against the backdrop of a rural landscape. For these reasons, the hybrid character of Hercules was able to negotiate for his audience Italy’s complex transformation during the boom.

  Hercules and Maciste appear in an environmental context that seems to belong, by right, to Italy’s cultural substratum and even to its landscape. However, the heroes are industrial products imported from a foreign and more developed civilization, beginning with their bodies, where artificiality substitutes nature. Rational muscle building, a high protein diet, and the new bodybuilding craze symbolize the prosperity imported from a society of mass culture and consumption (Salotti 151). The fact that the sculpted body became a “myth”

  is also proven by its depiction in the artistic trend which reflects and revises mass culture the most, Pop Art, which was born and developed roughly at the same time as the peplum genre. In fact, among the new myths of consumerism that Pop Art artists chose to represent, one that is depicted symbolically most often is the “new” body of the 1960s “modern” man and woman. Thus the body itself becomes a form of consumption, as evidenced by pin-ups and their male counterparts. Examples of the latter include the bodybuilder in Richard Hamil-

  Hercules, Politics, and Movies (D’Amelio) 25

  ton’s famous collage Just What Was It That Made Yesterday’s Home So Different, So Appealing (1956) and Italian artist Mario Ceroli’s Mr. Muscolo, a wooden sculpture of a man flexing his muscles in the classic bodybuilder pose, presented for the first time in 1964.

  The Herculean hero of the peplum is therefore a hybrid creation, born in the Italian film genre system from classical parentage, but with a body that belongs to the American bodybuilding culture. As with the cinematic Hercules, the peplum genre itself is a hybrid, situated between Italy and the United States.

  It is characterized by a double dialectic of a “meager” budget and production, on the one hand, and “noble” intentions on the other. For Italian producers, directors, and scriptwriters, producing peplum movies meant spending an “Italian” low budget, while trying to convince the audience that they were watching an expensive American epic. As Stefano Della Casa explains in Una postilla sul cinema mitologico, the peplum genre’s main characteristic is indeed “the will to be something it’s not” (163).

  Is Hercules, thus, America? He is, yet more. The superheroes of Techni-color cinema embody the memories of silent film’s athletes and acrobats, a manager’s bourgeois desires, the heroic dimension of American comics, memories past, and the present desire for release. The American dream is literally materialized in the artificial, health fanatic, and consumerist physicality of the bodybuilder starring in Italian films. In the peplum, fantasy prevails over realism, and the desires imported from another culture are embodied by a hero from Italy’s literary and cinematic past. Perhaps this is why the mythical hero has traveled from Italy to the United States, from the wonderful Cinecittà of the 1960s to the frenetic Hollywood of today. A guiding thread composed of

  “Classicism, Californianism, barbarianism and crucifixionism” ties the Mediterranean Sea with the shores of the Pacific, transporting the heroes of the Italian sword and sandal genre into the cavern of wonders of contemporary Hollywood, a Vulcan’s forge of new deities and new universal mythologies (Dyer 150). Cinema has the technical capacity to either resuscitate a world that no longer exists, or to imagine one that never existed. As memories can be real, so, too, can an audience reinvent themselves and their past.

  The Hercules series helped to negotiate the difficult transition from the fascist dictatorship to democracy in Italy after the war, and the relations with the American lifestyle and the upcoming economic and cultural changes of the Sixties. It accomplished this task in three distinct ways. Firstly, its main hero is a fearless strongman who— although devoted to restore a peaceful and rightful government threatened by tyrants— never identifies himself with any political leadership, as this would be a painful and disturbing reminder of Mussolini, the “strongman” of the past fascist regime. Secondly, although the hero does defeat the tyrant, he generally does not kill the antagonist by his own hands. It is the villain who pays on behalf of everyone, symbolizing the Italians’ common view of Fascism as a “digression” in Italian history, and the essential blameless-

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  ness of Italians during the twenty years of dictatorship. The Herculean character embodies a concept of conservative democratic “freedom,” which is able to avoid both the absolutist trap of the Fascist past and the highly feared drift toward a communist government. Lastly, the American body of Hercules is the semantic sign that negotiates the contradiction between Italian national identity and desire of the Other. It relates to the new myth of American mass culture and consumerism, which Italy eagerly embraced after the w
ar and, in turn, helped shape cultural changes during the Italian economic boom. Thus, by shifting the emphasis from national cultural matters to industrial and sociological issues, the peplum opens up the possibility of further exploration of the connections between Hollywood and Cinecittà regarding genre, masculinity, and the transnational — a possibility bound together by the brawny, muscular form of Hercules himself.

  WORKS CITED

  Abruzzese, Alberto. “Mito della violenza e pistole scariche.” Cinema 60 54 (1985): 2–

  10.

  Blanshard, Alastair. Hercules: A Heroic Life. London: Granta, 2007.

  Boschi, Alessandro, ed. I Greci al Cinema (The Ancient Greeks at the Theater). Bologna: Digital University Press, 2005.

  Brunetta, Gian Piero. Storia del Cinema Italiano (History of Italian Cinema). Vol. III.

  Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2001.

  Canfora, Luciano. La Democrazia. Storia di una Ideologia (Democracy: History of an Ideology). Bari-Rome: Laterza, 2006.

  Della Casa, Stefano. “Una postilla sul genere mitologico.” Sull’industria cinematografica italiana. Ed. Enrico Magrelli. Venice: Marsilio, 1986. 171–179.

  Dyer, Richard. White: Essays in Race and Culture. London: Routledge, 1997.

  Ellwood, David W. “L’Impatto del Piano Marshall sull’Italia, l’impatto dell’Italia sul piano Marshall.” Identita’ italiana e identita’ europea nel cinema italiano. Ed. Gian Piero Brunetta. Turin: Agnelli, 1996. 87–110.

  The Giant of Marathon [ La Battaglia di Maratona]. Dir. Jacques Tourneur and Mario Bava, 1959.

  Ginsborg, Paul. Storia dell’Italia dal dopoguerra a oggi (A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943 –1988). Turin: Einaudi, 1989.

  Goliath and the Dragon [ La vendetta di Ercole]. Dir. Vittorio Cottafavi, 1960.

  Günsberg, Maggie. Italian Cinema: Genre and Gender. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

  Hercules [ Le Fatiche di Ercole] . Dir. Pietro Francisci, 1958.

  Hercules and the Captive Women [ Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide]. Dir Vittorio Cottafavi, 1961.

  Hercules and the Tyrants of Babylon [ Ercole Contro i Tiranni di Babilonia]. Dir. Domenico Paolella, 1964.

  Hercules in the Haunted World [ Ercole al Centro della Terra]. Dir. Mario Bava, 1961.

  Hercules Unchained [ Ercole e la Regina di Lidia]. Dir. Pietro Francisci, 1959.

  The Loves of Hercules [ Gli Amori di Ercole]. Dir. Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia, 1960.

  Locatelli, Ludovico. “Come ai tempi di Cabiria” (As at Cabiria’s Time). La Fiera del Cinema 2.2 (1960): 12–15.

  Luzzatto, Sergio. Il corpo del Duce (The Body of the Dux). Turin: Einaudi, 1998.

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  Maciste, Gladiator of Sparta [ Maciste, Gladiatore di Sparta]. Dir. Mario Caiano, 1964.

  Pasolini, Pier Paolo. Scritti Corsari. Milan: Garzanti, 2001.

  Pavone, Carlo. Alle origini della Repubblica (At the Origins of the Republic). Turin: Bol-lati Bordighieri, 1995.

  Salotti, Marco. “1957–1964: L’industria cinematografica italiana gonfia i muscoli.”

  Sull’industria cinematografica italiana. Ed. Enrico Magrelli. Venice: Marsilio, 1986. 149 –

  156.

  Savinio, Alberto. Alcesti di Samuele (Samuel’s Alcestis). 1949. Milan: Adelphi, 1991.

  Son of Samson [ Maciste nella Valle dei Re]. Dir. Carlo Campogalliani, 1960.

  Spinazzola, Vittorio. Cinema e Pubblico (Cinema and the Audience). Rome: Bulzoni, 1985.

  The Two Gladiators [ I Due Gladiatori]. Dir. Mario Caiano, 1964.

  Hero Trouble

  Blood, Politics, and Kinship

  in Pasolini’s Medea

  KRISTI M. WILSON

  Following upon a tradition that began in the 1920s in Italy, American producers became interested in the revival of mythological epics in the 1950s and saw Italy as an appropriate venue for the production of these films. Pietro Francisci’s The Labors of Hercules, the first in a series of high-grossing mythological films, made an unheard of 900 million lire in Italy, a huge profit in the United States, and brought the Italian film studio Cinecittà to the forefront of the international film scene.1 In the years 1957 to 1964, 170 mythological films were made with stories drawn from the ancient Greek, Roman, Christian, Incan, Egyptian, Hungarian, Arabic, and Amazonian (among others) traditions. Vittorio Spinazzola suggests that the social impact of these mythological “blockbusters” is one of spectator identification with and desire for an altruistic, protective, larger-than-life force:

  Hercules invites the spectator to abandon completely the world of reality and human logic. On the other hand, he is not inaccessible, like a divinity, nor is he, like prophets, a mere reflection of divinity. In spite of his superhuman qualities, he remains an earthly hero and as such demands from the spectator not a passive adoration but an active process of identification. This duality is quite important for a sociological identification of the character. Hercules is the incarnation of a noble hero who does not come from the people but who is ready to fight for them, to protect the poor, and to restore order and social peace. He brought back to the screen the eternal tale of the knight errant, challenging his own class in the name of justice [qtd. in Liehm 184].

  Although the genre of the mythological epic died out in 1965, desire on the part of spectators for formulaic narratives about omnipotent heroes did not.

  Mythological films were quickly replaced with a new tradition of Italo-American co-productions about superman-like cultural heroes. As film historian and critic Toby Miller argues, such thematic transference —from mythological 28

  Hero Trouble (Wilson)

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  heroes to superheroes— is made seamless with the financial and distribution support of the Hollywood studio system. The blockbuster, thus, lends itself to the cultural colonization and domination of smaller national industries because of the familiarity of the stories and easy transferability of themes onto diverse cultural topoi.

  Pier Paolo Pasolini followed the mythological film genre in Italy with his own set of classically-themed films that resisted easy, “for export” escapism and critiqued, in part, the monolithic Italo-American cinematic powers that repeatedly portrayed absolute, mythological heroes. Pasolini’s 1969 adaptation of Euripides’ Medea deflates the heroic epic of Jason (itself part of an ancient Greek epic cycle that included the adventures of Hercules) and his 1967 postmodern version of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex refuses to separate the legacy of Oedipus’

  hubris from Italy’s Fascist past. His anti-heroes (Medea, Jason, Jocasta, and Oedipus) scramble heroic ideals and complicate spectator identification. They unveil a powerful critique of European colonialism and its lasting impact on popular, local, and sometimes subaltern cultural histories.2

  The story of Medea and Jason has long been a popular topic in feminist circles. A foreigner, part-witch, guilty of fratricide and infanticide, Medea has been described by feminist scholars as a heroine for standing up to infidelity, misogyny, and abandonment; as a criminal for murdering her children in a horrific act of revenge; and as the ultimate victim of western (Greek) colonialism. In his film adaptation of this tragic tale of blood vengeance, Pasolini articulates Medea’s potential as a queer rupturer of values in the context of western, normative kinship structures. His decision to cast Maria Callas as Medea bore particular relevance for queer culture as well as high culture. Following his principle of capturing “reality” on camera by filming people as they are, Pasolini cast Olympic athlete Giuseppe Gentile as Jason, making the character’s ultimate failure as a hero more noticeable and disconcerting.3 By casting opera diva Callas in a role already immortalized by her concert performances (Medea was her comeback role in January 1964), Pasolini contaminates his own depiction of Medea’s “barbarity” and alludes to her mythological history as a partial divinity. Callas’ status as a high-culture icon and her operatic legacy permeate the primitive theme music that underscores Medea’s scenes, just as
visions of adoring fans (who, in some cases, traveled the world to hear her sing) provide a mythical subtext for the action of the film. Pasolini refers indirectly to Callas’

  fame as a soprano during an early scene in the film in which Medea’s village prepares to sacrifice a young man. A close-up of the victim’s face as he is led to the slaughter shows him transfixed, gazing at Medea as if he is starstruck with happiness. In a different scene which occurs later in the film, Callas is depicted in a long, tightly framed shot underscored by the sound of women from her village singing about Jason’s invasion. The awkward quality of Medea’s silence during this scene draws attention to the actress’s alter ego as a soprano—

  as if she waits, in anticipation, for a cue to sing.

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  In “Callas and Her Fans,” Wayne Koestenbaum draws attention to the importance of Maria Callas to gay opera fans and addresses the historical links between opera and homosexuality. Koestenbaum argues that Callas’ vocal range (which includes sparingly applied vibrato) was at times “dangerously schizoid,”

  suggesting a wavering between one value and another: “much as the third sex, a fin-de-siècle image of the homosexual, was thought to hesitate, with an inde-cisive and uncanny shudder, between the two legitimate genders” (9). This inconsistency in Callas’ voice provoked a skepticism and curiosity about her womanliness, according to Koestenbaum, which carried over into speculation about her private life; she was perceived in the public eye as aristocratic and sexually troubled. He describes Callas as a queer icon, arguing that “the forces that shaped ‘Callas’ as a charged intersection of secret sadness and publicized splendor are the same currents that created the closet and its spectacular opposite, the scene of coming out; Callas and gayness are both symptoms of modern society’s pervasive split between silence and speech, secrecy and disclosure”

  (12). Similarly, Pasolini’s Medea is permeated with silences, queer moments of wavering inconsistency and troubled subjectivity.