‘Behold,’ the Fairy cried,
‘Palmyra’s ruined palaces!
Behold where grandeur frowned!
Behold where pleasure smiled!
What now remains?’
— “Queen Mab,” Book II, 109-13
When immediately posed the question — at gunpoint, at the behest of a new and obscure autocracy — as to what joins the art of Ridley Scott and Percy Shelley, a response may be difficult to gather. “They both belong, in the great tome of Art, to the letter S!” you might say. “Both are men of England; both have visited Italy,” might be a flustered follow-up. Keep handy this piece for when the day arrives. Though in beginning this preparatory document, it might be crucial first to distinguish the Scott from the Shelley; which is to say, iterate all those points at which they divide with some severity. These are not difficult to find. In the first and most obvious case, we might look to form. Percy Shelley is a lyric poet, of a sometimes aloof and always grandiose style, sluicing between rhapsodic ecstasies and intellectual theory; his is a lofty, at times difficult, idiom. His work was too controversially radical for the conservatives, and too abstract for the masses: while seemingly secured for the meantime, Shelley’s reputation has vacillated in the years since his demise. Ridley Scott is, instead, something of a conventional filmmaker. He is often hailed for his competence and no-nonsense manner; his work has had no difficulty in generating mass appeal, and until recently he has also been generally recipient of good notices, even if his status upon the Cinema Pantheon has generally declined since his early, lightning days. Scott is often direct and narrative-focused in his filmmaking; Shelley is instead often mediocre in developing or maintaining a sturdy narrative, preferring a vague (if at all present) structure on which to labor his grander ideals. And if Scott is — as will be shown — a filmmaker of a particular political bent, it cannot be said that he has boiled the same radical sentiment that chopped at Shelley’s heels. We seem, then, to be illustrating two very different artistic traditions. One, the struggling, towered genius, who whittles away at incomprehensible grandeur in his own peculiar manner; struck against the successful entertainer, popular among audiences and studios, and apparently in step with the standard grammar of mainstream cinematic tastes. They overlap in their appeal to magnitude — both tend to push their mediums to the grandest lengths and scales — but this appears the limit of their formal harmony.
But in the later cinema of Ridley Scott, a new texture emerges. It is in this texture that a striking unison occurs between these otherwise distinct traditions: a unison not in form, but rather in ethos and in subject. Certain notions that appear throughout the poetry of Shelley become the new backbone of Scott’s varied cinema, particularly his historical and science fiction pictures, and we see in his late films a new attitude in the depiction of familiar narratives. The central pivot — the feature most famous in Shelley — is that of the ruin. The wrecked outcrop of some ancient or forgotten people; this is the image central to “Ozymandias,” Shelley’s best-known poem, and it is one that recurs frequently through his work. By this appeal to distant past, Shelley will create an inherent correlative between his stationary narrative and the scope of time: in reference to decay, to remnants, he projects toward the future: Shelley interprets history as cyclical, pending ultimately to the prevailing of Liberty. This, too, might describe Scott’s significant historical project, in which notions of historical fidelity are often (to some controversy) forgone in pursuit of universal themes and ideas. For Scott, Rome, Napoleon, Jerusalem — these names are more significant for their metaphorical power than necessarily for their historical existence; Scott will enter a semi-mythic mode, in which all history is primed to depose tyrants; in which all history speaks toward the final accession of English Liberty. Shelley and Scott both assimilate religious imagery in this pursuit, but are both inherently godless: it is often the overthrow of false gods — be they men or, in Scott, something else — that determines the aesthetic thrust of their work. In neither Scott nor Shelley are these themes omnipresent — both are artists with an extremely diverse output — though it’s not hard to argue that in both these ideas become central to their artistic animus. More specifically, in what this writer judges to be the “late” work of Ridley Scott, whose development begins around the time of Kingdom of Heaven, a new consistency emerges in his work — both in new conceptions and legacy sequels. This essay, then, will be broken into four parts: distinguishing Scott’s Roman work, his other historical cinema, his Alien sequels, and finally, the crown of his late cinema, Napoleon, each patterned with excerpts from Shelley that appear consonant with each film. In this we will see a strange meeting of distant minds; and the common theme that binds together an apparently scattershot filmography.
I. The Dream of Rome
Go thou to Rome,– at once the Paradise,
The grave, the city, and the wilderness;
And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise,
The bones of Desolation’s nakedness
Pass, till the Spirit of the spot shall lead
Thy footsteps to a slope of green access
Where, like an infant’s smile, over the dead,
A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread.
— “Adonais,” 433-41
In these verses, excerpted from Shelley’s “Adonais,” a lament for the early-departed Keats, the poet is inviting the reader to visit Rome, and more specifically to the Protestant Cemetery — the “green access” — where Keats is buried. In the stanza that precedes the above quoted, the poet describes “that ages, empires, and religions there / Lie buried in the ravage they have wrought.” In brief phrase, we understand a Rome of so many places overlaid; it seems in its nature a contradiction, bearing within it both the idealized vision of Western Civilization and the tombs to so many of its infamous despots. Even in Scott’s first Gladiator film, there is some element of this contrast. Scott first introduces his marble-white neoclassical Rome to a fanfare of Wagner-imitation; we immediately understand the Paradise of Marcus Aurelius’ Rome, of gleaming magnitude and achievement. The not-yet-ruined. “I’ve seen much of the rest of the world. It is brutal, and cruel, and dark. Rome is the light,” so puts Maximus. Though Aurelius is swift to counter: Maximus has not seen what Rome has become. “There was once a dream that was Rome,” though one that may not yet survive. But Aurelius believes, implicitly, that some remnant of this dream — this survivor of the Republic — lives on. Shelley, too, will frequently appeal to this notion of a corrupted Rome, whose ruin speaks to a time in which the dream was alive. In his early Queen Mab:
Where Athens, Rome, and Sparta stood,
There is a moral desert now.
The mean and miserable huts,
The yet more wretched palaces,
Contrasted with those ancient fanes
Now crumbling to oblivion–
The long and lonely colonnades
Through which the ghost of Freedom stalks,–
Seem like a well-known tune,
Which in some dear scene we have loved to hear,
Remembered now in sadness.
— “Queen Mab,” Book II, 161-72
And again in his “Ode to Liberty,” in which he describes as much the accession of Commodus as depicted in Scott’s Gladiator:
But when tears stained thy robe of vestal whiteness,
And gold profaned thy Capitolean throne,
Thou didst desert, with spirit-winged lightness,
The senate of the tyrants
— “Ode to Liberty,” 99-102
It is Liberty, personified, who deserts; and it is in this allegorical manner that Scott is increasingly tempted to work, decking atop his human characters a symbolism that overcomes their strictly personal natures. Marcus Aurelius is the idealized monarch, who willingly forgoes his power; Maximus is Strength and Honor, the sacrificial masculine; and Commodus is corruption, voluptuary and feminized.
This is the situation of Gladiator. Its continuation serves, in the manner of a legacy sequel, both as remake and expansion. The differences are subtle but marked. Where the first Gladiator opens from the Roman perspective, waging an obscure and victorious war against Germanic barbarians — how else might they be described in the frame of the film? — the second inverts the perspective. Instead, we are situated in the supposedly rebel people of Numidia (Scott’s history again submits to symbolism: Africa represents the colonized and subject people, resisting against a European empire); here, we encounter the sword of Roman imperialism from the reverse angle. Where Maximus’ fight against the German rabble might be soon regretted — Aurelius wondering for what purpose he has wrecked the world for two decades — in Gladiator II the invasion is more markedly personal. We interpret Lucius’ struggle as implicitly justified; we understand him as a man in resistance to Empire, and for whom Rome is not (or is no longer) an ideal but, automatically, a hive of tyranny and bloodletting. If Gladiator represents the final wisp of the Dream that was Rome, Gladiator II instead positions its narrative long after Rome’s demise. Shelley’s “England in 1819” seems as much to describe the emperors Geta and Caracalla: “Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know. / But leechlike to their fainting country cling / Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.” Save, perhaps, that final clause: the violence of Scott’s Rome climbs to its pinnacles, and nearly every character is subject to a bloody dispatch. This seems to be a fundamental shift between Scott’s earlier and later conception. In one version, the Empire is teetering on the edge, and might be resolved with reform. In the other, it is utterly lost: it must be destroyed completely, and remade as a Republic. It is appropriate, then, that the heir of Maximus — Lucius — must pose (and in his way, represent) the “barbarian at the gates”; liberty seems a concept foreign to this slumped empire. Even Marcus Aurelius, who is positioned in Gladiator (and once in Shelley) as an essentially noble emperor, is brought down into the murk: Macrinus, Gladiator II‘s chief antagonist, reveals himself to have been a former slave of Aurelius. Here we understand that it is not merely a question of leadership — of Commodus being so inferior to Aurelius — but of system. Even a “good emperor” remains an emperor; even a “good general” will wage war against the innocent. At the heart of Gladiator II is an impulse to pull the walls down, even if the wrecker is, in his blood, the lineal descendant of the once decorated monarch.
But there is, nonetheless, an appeal to that Dream of Rome, and as in Shelley it is an appeal rendered architecturally. When Lucius is first taken to Rome (like his father, in a slave-carriage), he passes under a triumphal arch, upon which appears a version of the Capitoline Wolf, the sculpture of a she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus. Unlike the various perfections of Scott’s remade Rome — which is depicted in the bleached marble of neoclassicism, rather than the gaudy and multicolored reality — this triumphal arch is old and beaten. It appears aged, chipped, more ancient than the already-ancient surroundings. Here, then, is a new timeline for that Dream; a leftover of Republican Rome, from which its ancestor has so far deserted. Passing under the arch, Shelley again comes to mind:
I knew not who had framed these wonders then,
Nor had I heard the story of their deeds;
But dwellings of a race of mightier men,
And monuments of less ungentle creeds
Tell their own tale to him who wisely heeds
The language which they speak
— “Laon and Cythna,” 757-62
Whether or not the Dream was actual, it ought to be pursued. There is a sense both of a superior past, but also of a distant one: by which the facts of history seem overwhelmed instead by the idealized form of their philosophy. The narrative of the film itself reflects this, both in its interior and exterior forms. Gladiator II, as a film, mimics Gladiator, and attempts thereby to purloin from that success another (and, for reasons distinct from theme, fails in so doing). Lucius, within the film, is an intentional repetition of Maximus, the heroic embodiment of Strength and Honor, who might (again) redeem his people from tyranny. Maximus is frequently conjured in this later film, with his tomb made a shrine in the pits of the Colosseum. In the finale, Lucius takes the armor and sword of his forebear, and therefore becomes as his father: one sacrifice begets another. Shelley writes similarly on those who die in body, but remain as stars in spirit, faintly clouded:
The splendours of the firmament of time
May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not;
Like stars to their appointed height they climb
And death is a low mist which cannot blot
The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought
Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair,
And love and life contend in it, for what
Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there
And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.
— “Adonais,” 388-96
It is in the shadow of that triumphal arch that the film reaches its conclusion, in which the newly emperored Macrinus faces Lucius in single combat. We see in Macrinus something of a tragic figure, insofar as he has freed himself from his chains, only to become the master of so many other slaves. Again, it is a comment of hierarchical obliteration: it is not merely that the lowest class should take the position of the highest, but that the position is itself rotten, and must — by its nature — instigate rot. So it is in vision of this olden monument that he must be dispatched, and therefore redeem the armies of Rome from the cyclical violence they were once again prepared to commence. Scott, in his prolific tendency, has already teased some element of Gladiator III: that the new “Prince of Rome” Lucius is not likely to experience an easy rule; it seems the unwinding of such embedded power structures cannot be so instantaneous as the slaying of an emperor — time is the absolute in Shelley as much as Scott; it is time that renders palaces into ruins, and emperors into history.
But Gladiator II is not the only time Scott has visited Rome in his late period. All the Money in the World marks a curious middle-step between Colosseum extravaganzas, a fictionalized account of the kidnap of John Paul Getty III in 1973, and the persistent failure of his grandfather — the richest man in the world — in paying his ransom. The cautionary tale is inherently rich in itself — perhaps richer than what Scott discovers in his film — though made richer by coincidence. In the wake of massive controversy, Kevin Spacey was removed from the film; it is his speedy removal that marks its most famous aspect. He was replaced by Christopher Plummer — who had, in Anthony Mann’s The Fall of the Roman Empire, played Commodus. Plummer’s imperial connotation is not only incidental: in the film, the elder Getty takes the younger to the ruin of Hadrian’s villa near Rome. He makes the association directly: he says that in the second century, he was the Emperor Hadrian, or at least that he feels that way. “The blood of emperors runs through you, as it does through me,” he tells his grandson, Paul. “All I’ve built would crumble into dust if there’s no one to carry it on after I’m gone.” So here we receive the modern emperor — the first billionaire — who still reckons himself a man of dynasty and title; for whom it is not legions and legates but the vast accumulation of money, and of lifeless things. Later in the film, he reveals his plans for a totally rebuilt version of Hadrian’s villa in California; in this hubris is also his destiny: to become the blasted outcrop of a ruined world. Scott therefore creates a web of association around Getty: this imperial fool, who has traded his loved ones for a labyrinth of antiques, who intends to live forever. But he – his ilk – are doomed in the way of Hadrian. Much as an emperor, such men as he ought not to rule the world. Getty’s peculiar disease is made crystal in Shelley:
‘“Man seeks for gold in mines, that he may weave
A lasting chain for his own slavery;–
…
He builds the altar, that its idol’s fee
May be his very blood; he is pursuing
O, blind and willing wretch! his own obscure undoing.”’
— “Laon and Cythna,” 3316-17; 3322-24
II. Thrones on Heaven or Earth
“Men say that they have seen God, and heard from God,
Or known from others who have known such things,
And that his will is all our law, a rod
To scourge us into slaves – that Priests and Kings,
Custom, domestic sway, aye, all that brings
Man’s freeborn soul beneath the oppressor’s heel,
Are his strong ministers, and that the stings
Of death will make the wise his vengeance feel,
Though truth and virtue arm their hearts with tenfold steel.
— “Laon and Cythna,” 3253-61
If Gladiator II is Scott’s most recent foray into his late style, early fragments of its design appear first in Kingdom of Heaven, in which Scott depicts a Holy Land hounded by lawless brutes and religious fanatics. Alike to the first Gladiator, Scott will still depict the image of a truly noble king: in Baldwin IV is such an even-tempered and revered figure that his brief part in the film (played by an uncredited Edward Norton — increasing the reverence) has taken up a significant role in the popular image of the Crusades. And in contrary, his depiction of Saladin is so noble, and so gleaming (as is typical in the Christian tradition — if they were to be beaten, it must be by the finest of men), that it is said audiences in Egypt would cheer upon the moment Saladin picks up a fallen cross to steady it on a table, just after his conquest of Jerusalem. In these mirrored princes are the ideals of monarchy; the only reason Balian, our reluctant protagonist, does not become the heir of this ideal is itself a moral prerogative: it is better that he rid himself of sin (sin as according to a strictly modern compass) than debase himself for worldly gain — for kingship and rule. Better to let Jerusalem fall in its physical state than for the Jerusalem of the spirit — the Kingdom of Heaven — to fall in its stead. If Kingdom of Heaven later risks entering the design of a neoliberal screed, with Balian announcing to a crowd of Jerusalemites, “What is Jerusalem? Your holy places overlay the Jewish temple which the Romans pulled down. The Muslim places overlay yours. Which is more holy? The wall? The mosque? The sepulcher? Who has claim? No one has claim… All have claim,” — and to general acclaim — it’s nonetheless remarkable in its prioritizing of a strictly moral advantage, over the practical, utilitarian alternative. Balian’s speech comes to resemble, in its general tenor, the more optimistic dreams of Shelley:
Disguise it not – we have one human heart–
All mortal thoughts confess a common home
…
The past is Death’s, the future is thine own;
And love and joy can make the foulest breast
A paradise of flowers, where peace might build her nest.
— “Laon and Cythna,” 3361-2; 3394-96
Though it also reminds one of Shelley’s description of Rome: that “ages, empires, and religions there / Lie buried.” Jerusalem stands as a permanent ruin, under which history teems, and over which a new ideology is born. The essence of Balian’s speech, and his role in the latter part of the film, is in its nature anti-religious. Not so much in it being against faith, on which the film appears to present a generally neutrally pattern, but specifically against the institutions of religion. The otherwise unnamed Hospitaller, who is signaled very much as a God-insert, or an angel (soon after Balian’s supposed debunking of the Burning Bush, a second bush catches light, and the Hospitaller vanishes — impossibly — from sight), says himself: “I put no stock in religion. By the word ‘religion’ I have seen the lunacy of fanatics of every denomination be called the will of God. I have seen too much religion in the eyes of too many murderers. Holiness is in right action, and courage on behalf of those who cannot defend themselves, and goodness.” In this sentiment is one similar to that which runs through Shelley’s various dispositions against God, and especially the Church. He writes of men divine:
Who rose like shadows between Man & god
Till that eclipse, still hanging under Heaven,
Was worshipped by the world o’er which they strode
For the true Sun it quenched.
— “The Triumph of Life,” 289-92
It is to the religious representatives of both Islam and Christianity that Scott reserves his ire; the Patriarch of Jerusalem is made especially pathetic, an epitome of “religion” against Balian’s epitome of “holiness.” Whether it is an entirely fair depiction — and far less a historically accurate depiction — is as important to Scott as it is to Shelley; these are grandiose statements that speak more to a general view than they do to any particular moment in history. In Shelley, Christianity and Islam are represented as hierarchies to be overcome; they are impediments to a world emancipated by the Liberal spirit. Kingdom of Heaven resembles this fundamental idea: that the theologizing of clerics has little business in a genuine Utopia. Indeed, the finale of Kingdom of Heaven creates a Utopia of its own: Balian returned to his smithy in France, having abandoned his title and kingdom; he lives there with the once-queen Sibylla, who too has surrendered her royalty. Richard the Lionheart passes by, in search of Balian — he is sent on by. His pomp and stature have become ridiculous, as has his crusade. We cut to Balian examining the fresh bloom: a paradise of flowers. In this ending — this peace of heart and spirit — is again the voice of Shelley:
O love! who to the hearts of wandering men
Art as the calm to Ocean’s weary waves!
Justice, or truth, or joy! Those only can
From slavery and religion’s labyrinth caves
Guide us, as one clear star the seaman saves,–
…
To feel the peace of self-contentment’s lot,
To own all sympathies, and outrage none,
And in the inmost bowers of sense and thought,
Until life’s sunny day is quite gone down,
To sit and smile with Joy, or, not alone,
To kiss salt tears from the warn cheek of Woe;
To love, as if to love and live were one,–
This is not faith or law, nor those who bow
To thrones on Heaven or Earth, such destiny may know.
— “Laon and Cythna,” 3289-93; 3298-306
Scott nonetheless revels, as Shelley, in the imagery of religion; in the many crosses on the many flags; in references to angels falling in Blade Runner, misquoted from Blake; in the constantly religious language and imagery associated with the Alien franchise. This tendency likely reaches its summit in the extraordinarily bizarre Exodus: Gods and Kings, possibly the least religious religious film ever made. Scott attempts an enormously misguided “truth behind the legend” account of Exodus, in which Moses is rendered a political actor who, by fact of his birth, becomes a Hebrew insurgent and radical. Instead of understanding Exodus as just that — a legendary account — Scott takes a strictly evangelical view, that a true history is described. Beginning there, he seeks to “debunk” all but one of the miraculous phenomena described in the book — including nine of the ten plagues, and the famous parting of the waves, by means of chained scientific explanations. This approach is not new to evangelical apologetics; it is perhaps unusual for a noted atheist to accept the Biblical account while at once disfiguring its mythic quality. Though even in this tendency, he is creating an atheist principle equivalent to Shelley’s, as stated in his The Necessity of Atheism. He explains the fallacy of inventing a God to explain phenomena we otherwise do not fully understand. “From the phenomena, which are objects of our senses, we attempt to infer a cause, which we call God, and gratuitously endow it with all negative and contradictory qualities. From this hypothesis we invent the general name, to conceal our ignorance of causes and essences.” Which is to say, God is used to explain the unexplainable (the miraculous), and to understand such phenomena by other means therefore renders God obsolete. Is Exodus in truth Ridley Scott’s own Necessity of Atheism, in which he endeavors to present a faith-inclined audience an entirely secular read on the most fabulous events of the Bible? Though even if this were the case, the complete absence of an explanation for the death of every Egyptian firstborn somewhat disqualifies the effort: it seems Scott is too compelled by the imagistic prowess of the religious story to entirely snuff it out, making almost redundant his general effort. But in other regards, Exodus remains in tune with the late Scott style: it makes an extensive mockery of the Egyptian royal family, it ruinates their moral composition, and it sees in Moses less a prophet than a revolutionary, one who rejects slavery and thraldom. Perhaps in this act of rebellion Scott predicts what Shelley too supposes:
Beside the eternal Nile
The Pyramids have rise.
Nile shall pursue his changeless way;
Those Pyramids shall fall.
Yea! not a stone shall stand to tell
The spot whereon they stood;
Their very site shall be forgotten
As is their builder’s name!
— “Queen Mab,” Book II, 126-33
If the Pyramids remain very much in situ, they are now debased in comparison to their gleaming Exodus forms; nor is Exodus the last time Scott will encounter those famous desert triangles. If Exodus is to be held against their later appearance — as will be discussed below — the essence of Shelley’s concept is already carried very much forward.
Between Kingdom of Heaven and Exodus is another of Scott’s historical epics, and one that is perhaps definitive of his late style. Robin Hood begins shortly after Kingdom of Heaven ends: where that earlier film concludes with Richard the Lionheart beginning his Crusade, Robin Hood finds him after its conclusion, during the siege of Chalus Castle. If Richard’s image is somewhat ridiculous at close of Kingdom, here he narrows upon pantomime: he is depicted as long-haired, bedraggled, foolish, and bleak. This opening resembles, in many ways, the first Gladiator, although with entirely transformed moral assumptions. We open, again, battling against a foreign army in some distant frontier. After the first day of battle, the king suspects he is loathed by his men; he seeks out an honest soldier to speak to him plainly. He comes upon Russell Crowe’s Robin — a scene that reflects Marcus Aurelius’ interview with Russell Crowe’s Maximus in that earlier film. But where Gladiator dealt in a conversation of ideals, and dreams, Robin Hood deals only in misery. On being asked his opinion on the crusade — whether God will be pleased with Richard’s sacrifice — Robin answers that he would not. He instead opines: “The massacre at Acre, sire. When you had us herd 2,500 Muslim men, women, and children together, the young woman at my feet… she looked up to me… There was only pity [in her eyes]. For she knew when you gave the order… in that moment, we would be godless.” For this, Robin is sentenced to the rack. The next morning, the king meets a more ignominious fate: killed by a peasant, a chance crossbow bolt landed well. Previous Scott films have typically measured up their grotesque characters with the noble, for means of contrast. But here, the three royal figures are represented as foul in each their own regard. We first meet the soon-to-be King John as a debauched playboy, in another somewhat feminized performance (as is typical of the Scott antagonist); and the French Philip is introduced as a scheming monarch, sat at a riverside slurping oysters and drinking wine. In prising open a shell, he slips and cuts himself: there is something repulsive in this incompetent voluptuary. Compared with the brusque, workman masculinity of Robin and his posse, these men feel either effete or doomed: here, it appears that monarchy, as an ideal, has come unstuck. Some of Shelley’s most famous verses spring to mind in this vanquishing of the English kingship:
And he wore a kingly crown,
And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
On his brow a mark I saw–
‘I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW.’With a pace stately and fast,
Over English land he passed,
Trampling to a mire of blood
The adoring multitude
— “The Masque of Anarchy,” 34-41
More than just monarchy is undone: Scott removes from the legendary Robin Hood any of his noble claim. Here, Robin is not the Earl of Loxley, but rather a commoner who impersonates this titled personage. He later learns he is a son of a stonemason (descent remains important in Scott’s cinema, with Balian’s being the bastard son of a once-decorated knight essential in his development), and a political radical, who wrote the original Magna Carta. The peculiar limitations of this document — and its almost exclusive application to the baron-class — is not important to Scott. Instead, it was “for the rights of all ranks from baron to serf… a charter for every man to have the same rights” — here is the dreamt-of Magna Carta, a mythical foundation in the pursuit of English liberty. In this emphasis, Scott betrays somewhat his intentions, and indeed the direction of his late cinema. Robin Hood began life as a sought-after spec-script called Nottingham, and focused on the titular Sheriff; after Scott got hold of it, the narrative was returned to Robin Hood, and then the Baron’s war. It appears, rather, that the Robin Hood element of the script is present only for its commercial viability, and is often in harsh tonal dissonance with the true subject, which is the struggle of the Englishman against the predations of Nobles and Kings. In giving his barons strictly regional accents, Scott seems to bring them closer to the Many, and further from the Few. Being a stonemason, especial interest is laid upon an inscription Robin’s father makes upon a founding stone: “Rise and rise again, until lambs become lions.” It seems of no great stretch to hear in these lines Shelley’s most famous call to action:
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to Earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you–
Ye are many – they are few.
— “The Masque of Anarchy,” 151-5
III. Prometheus Unbound
ASIA
Who made the living world?DEMOGORGON
God.ASIA
Who made all
That it contains? thought, passion, reason, will,
Imagination?DEMOGORGON
God: Almighty God.
…ASIA
And who made terror, madness, crime, remorse,
Which from the links of the great chain of things
To every thought within the mind of man
Sway and drag heavily, and each one reels
Under the load towards the pit of death;
Abandoned hope, and love that turns to hate;
And self-contempt, bitterer to drink than blood;
Pain, whose unheeded and familiar speech
Is howling, and keen shrieks, day after day;
And Hell, or the sharp fear of Hell?DEMOGORGON
He reigns.— Prometheus Unbound, Act IV, Scene II, 7-11; 19-31
The most direct link to the art of Shelley lies in Ridley Scott’s Alien sequels. In the latter, a poem of his is deployed at a dramatic crux; and the attribution of this poem — first, wrongly, to Byron — becomes a significant element of plot. Here alone can we be certain not merely of a similarity between the ethos of Shelley and Scott, but a contiguous influence from one into the other. It is — as one might imagine — entirely appropriate. But beginning with the first of these sequels: Prometheus. This film immediately stakes its javelin in widely allusive territory. Its name refers to the myth of the ancient Titan, who in some versions gives Man fire, in others creates Man himself. For this he is punished by Jupiter, mightiest of the gods: chained to a mountain, whereat an eagle would eat his liver, only for the liver to grow back and the eagle to return on the morrow, forever. This figure marks a central influence on the poetry of Shelley — whose colossal Prometheus Unbound imagines the liberating Prometheus as finally being freed from his punishment, and the tyrannical Jupiter being cast down into the depths — though it is perhaps to another Shelley that Scott’s film is more indebted. Before Percy Shelley had written Prometheus Unbound, his then 18-year-old wife had completed Frankenstein, which bore the subtitle: A Modern Prometheus. Where Percy’s poem is a rapturous account of Prometheus’ dream of a free and liberated mankind, Mary’s novel is instead more dubious of the Promethean role. In the novel, Frankenstein creates new life, but is immediately repulsed by it, and abandons it to whatever fate it might find. Later, his creation seeks him out, assuming that in his creator he might find solace, or an answer to his being. Frankenstein briefly acquiesces to the Monster’s desire for a mate, but then reneges on his deal and, after the Monster attempts to revenge himself against his deceitful master, Frankenstein dedicates the rest of his life to the destruction of his progeny. Here we might sketch, in vague, the narrative line of Prometheus: in which a wealthy elder, Weland, funds a journey to the stars in search of his creators; discovers them at last; and finds them to be a people unworthy of worship, and possessing none of the answers he sought. It is Frankenstein told from the reverse angle. Percy Shelley’s musings on the origin of religion here resound:
What then is God? Some moon-struck sophist stood
Watching the shade from his own soul upthrown
Fill heaven and darken Earth, and in such mood
The Form he saw and worshipped was his own,
His likeness in the world’s vast mirror shown
— “Laon and Cythna,” 3244-8
In these lines we can discern both the ultimate folly of Weland’s ambition — that he anticipated his “gods” to resemble more himself, and his self-regard — and yet also the perspective of the creator, who in his makings is capable only of replicating his own likeness; he is incapable of creating a being authentically superior. Frankenstein’s Monster is ultimately doomed for his most human capacity; and Frankenstein resents the beast much in the way he pities him. The pathetic and the repulsive seem to overlap. The “Engineers,” as we understand the creators in Prometheus to be, show no obvious sympathy to their creations; it is here that Scott indulges in his consistent late-theme, which is in the loathsome aspect of the would-be god. Be they men or distant aliens, the worship of these superior forms is always to be suspected; once again, it appears that human flourishing comes not in closeness to the Great Beings, but rather in their overthrowing. It is an essentially gnostic concept: that the Created — that the lesser — is in some regard superior to the Creator. Prometheus is evidence of folly, but also of potential. That mankind is not subject to its interstellar masters. The stage on which Scott sets this drama is itself explicit on this point. Returning to the moon LV-426 of Alien, we encounter again an apparently abandoned craft; the image of a lost civilization. We learn whatever devastation had ruined these people, it occurred 2,000 years ago: to awaken the Engineers is as though to briefly revive this disastered civilization, and understand why they fell.
But there is, as ever, a spanner in the works. Prometheus illustrates two creation-stories: of mankind, and of some kind of proto-xenomorph. But in its midst is another, a grandsire. An invention of man. The android, David, is in the first film a servitor for his creator, but in Alien: Covenant he determines a new, inverse future. First, he kills Shaw, the protagonist of Prometheus, who might represent humanity. Then, in a flashback scene, we see that he unleashes a genocidal weapon on a settlement — or homeworld — of the Engineer species. Here is the same drama spun down a peg: the created peering up at his creators and deeming them unworthy of his service, and unable to resolve his deepest angst. His solution — as with mankind — is instead to create a new kind of life, that might supersede all else. A cyclical process of recreation; of flaws magnified and transferred; of parents disappointed with their children. The central planet of Covenant, on which a colonial mission becomes stranded, is encountered as a ruin. It is lined with colonnades of Greco-Roman pillars; there is an antiquity to its remnants, a layer of vanquished history upon an otherwise uninhabited world. We see David, the android-and-creator, peering out upon the waste. He speaks the words of Shelley, the poem here provided in full:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said– ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’
— “Ozymandias”
David does not speak it all. He begins with the words of the tyrant: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” In saying this, we cut to a flashback shot of David’s co-opted craft approaching the yet-remaining civilization of Engineers. We watch as he releases the payload, and utterly destroys the city below. We cut again to the face of David, almost tearful, as whisper again the words: Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Returning to the present, we see again David’s tearful face, as Walter — another android — finishes the poem: “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.” The irony of the poem is, to some extent, inverted. As David begins the poem, looking out upon the ruins of a supposed-lost civilization, we may assume his reflection to be much as Shelley’s; but a further irony is levied in the flashback association, by which we understand his Work to be that of obliteration; and therein David’s Work in the creation of the xenomorph seems equally to pend toward destruction. Walter’s completion of the poem therefore restores it to Shelley’s notion: that in the wake of ruin is left yet more ruin; that the tyranny and mastery of one Master will, in its stead, leave nothing but a wasteland. But we could understand this as much to refer to the Engineers who were destroyed as their destroyer: the cyclical insinuation of the poem is here played out in one smooth sequence. It is perhaps disappointing, then, that Alien: Covenant received no sequel; it remains an island, a middle-film in a failed franchise. In the finale as given, David appears victorious. But we see in his rebellion, however warped, some fragment of Shelley’s ethos. His is the same fallacy as Macrinus’ in Gladiator II — he is the slave who does not pursue liberty, but a slave of his own. An optimistic read might look for a better redemption in David, a mutual destruction of himself and those who bent his mind to such an end. There is precedent in Shelley for such an end. In the penultimate act of Prometheus Unbound, the tyrant Jupiter encounters the Demogorgon on high. Jupiter shouts: “Awful shape, what art thou? Speak!” Demogorgon replies:
Eternity. Demand no direr name.
Descend, and follow me down the abyss.
I am thy child, as thou wert Saturn’s child;
Mightier than thee; and we must dwell together
Henceforth in darkness. Lift thy lightnings not.
— Prometheus Unbound, Act III, Scene I, 52-6
IV. The Last Dream of Trampled France
“Aye, alive and still bold,” muttered Earth,
“Napoleon’s fierce spirit rolled,
In terror and blood and gold,
A torrent of ruin to death from his birth.
Leave the millions who follow to mould
The metal before it be cold,
And weave into his shame, which like the dead
Shrouds me, the hopes that from his glory fled.”
— “Written on Hearing the News of the Death of Napoleon,” 33-40
Napoleon feeds through the whole of Shelley’s poetry. In one of his earliest poems, perhaps written in Shelley’s 18th year, Bonaparte is celebrated as he “whom neither shame nor danger daunts,” who will “in one mighty shock o’erthrow / The slaves that sceptres wield.” In Shelley’s final, unfinished poem, that same Napoleon occurs:
The Child of a fierce hour; he sought to win
The world, and lost all it did contain
Of greatness, in its hope destroyed…
— “The Triumph of Life,” 217-19
In the intervening years, Shelley, like many of liberal heart, had disavowed his early enthusiasms. He saw in Napoleon not a destruction of the kingly hierarchies of Europe, but the replacement of one tyranny for another; but inherent in Napoleon is not merely the grotesque mark of King, but of treachery. He who appeared to stand in opposition revealed himself to be made of the very same. It is in this spirit that Scott produced what is the most successful of his late historical films: Napoleon. This critical and popular disaster seems to resemble a dissonance in expectation before it reveals any fact about the film itself. One anticipates, in a filmic treatment of Napoleon (as in the very many that predate Scott), some essence of dignity, and gravity in his depiction. We assume it will be the bracing tale of the Great Man laid low; he who rose and then fell; a man around whom history appeared to swell and to warp. Even if he is to be rejected, this rejection must be announced in the highest dramatic form; to see the doom of Napoleon is to see a cathedral crash and crumble to the ground. Scott determines instead to humiliate the man. In what seems like an unprecedented move for such a high-budget, prestige drama, Scott’s film represents Napoleon as a pathetic, stupid, and risible character, for whom a constant cuckolding — and an inability to impregnate his wife — appear concerns more pressing than the many battles and conquests achieved over his career. Joaquin Phoenix’s much-reviled performance is in this regard exactly correct: he discovers in Napoleon a vast space, by which this grotty, thoughtless man is thrust into the highest remits of power, only in this power to yearn constantly for those least impressive things. For love, for Josephine — all else seems the vapid pursuit of status, actions determined simply for the sake of majesty, or the wisp of immortality. But these latter aspirations pale when lit against the former. While Shelley typically depicts Napoleon with some kind of terrible magnitude, his mode is not entirely removed from humiliating the crowned heads of Europe:
The king would dress an ape up in his crown
And robes, and seat him on his glorious seat,
And on the right hand of the sunlike throne
Would place a gaudy mock-bird to repeat
The chatterings of the monkey.–Every one
Of the prone courtiers crawled to kiss the feet
Of their great Emperor, when the morning came,
And kissed – alas, how many kiss the same!
— “The Witch of Atlas,” 633-40
Certainly, this read of Napoleon is not historical — Scott has instead rendered in Napoleon another of his epitomes, a symbol by which even the most impressive tyrant is reduced to human infirmity. Indeed, Scott’s account of Napoleon’s mutation from consul to emperor is understood almost completely in terms of general esteem: all that Napoleon does is in a somewhat desperate effort not to unseat the European ascendancy, but to be counted among them. Here — like Macrinus, like David — is another of Scott’s characters who do not destroy the oppressive system, but rather take it into their personal command. So we might understand Shelley’s reference to Napoleon in his “Ode to Liberty”:
When one, like them, but mightier far than they,
The Anarch of your own bewildered powers,
Rose…He, by the past pursued
Rests with those dead but unforgotten hours,
Whose ghosts scare victor kings in their ancestral towers.
— “Ode to Liberty,” 174-6; 178-80
Shelley distinguishes Napoleon merely by his might — his victories. An anarch of bewildered liberty; a warping of all those things he supposedly represented, though it is in Napoleon’s battle scenes that Scott makes use of an intriguing contrast of grammar. Where most of the film is played in an essentially satirical, comic style, Scott reverts to a serious, dramatic gait in his depiction of battle. Indeed, the mood becomes even somber, and solemn, in the execution of mass warfare. This is no tonal error. Instead, we see in this contrast the enormous gap between the politicking and fraternizing in the palaces of France and their gruesome product: we leap from the court drama of a cuckolded general to the matter of millions, slain brutally and heedlessly on the field. When Scott lists the many battles of Napoleon at the film’s end, he lists also the number of dead: he does not distinguish between the French and their enemies; he does not glory in Napoleon’s military talent. Rather, he understands in Napoleon (and the collective monarchies of Europe) a profound talent in the mass-murder of men; this is the “frail and bloody pomp” that Shelley finds so disgraceful, naming Napoleon the minister of Massacre, Treason, Slavery, Rapine, Fear, and Lust. These battle scenes, in their stone-faced depiction, are also — with exception to Waterloo — removed of context. We see Napoleon in Egypt; we see him in Austerlitz; or Borodino — but Scott does not provide the military or political situation so as to understand the meaning or dramatic disposition of these battles. We are thrust into the fray, and without dramatic investment in any given victory or defeat, we watch as a mass slaughter is achieved by men in foreign places, dressed in colorful uniforms. Therein the radical character of Scott’s late cinema: Napoleon is not a particular attack on a monarch, nor even a collection of monarchs, but the European system that could possibly justify the apparently indiscriminate dredging of human blood. In Shelley’s earliest poetic appraisal of Napoleon, he praises Bonaparte’s fighting in the thick, while the emperors of Austria and Russia looked on afar to the field of Austerlitz:
And when the yells of Victory
Float o’er the murdered good,
Ye smile secure.–On yonder plain
The game, if lost, begins again.
— “To the Emperors of Austria and Russia…,” 17-20
But in Scott’s film, these lines appeal just as much to Napoleon as to his rivals. In the director’s cut, additional scenes make more evident this tendency. In one a map of Europe is being painted in Napoleon’s war room — the painter advises him to step only on Italy, the rest hasn’t yet dried. That, in the logic of the film, seems to determine the monarchical attitude to war, and territory, and the panoply of flags that deck the many international meetings between European aristocrats. “The game, if lost, begins again.” Images in the style of Shelley recur especially during Napoleon’s Russian adventure. Arriving in Moscow, he finds the city deserted; in the longer cut there are several more shots of this empty city, a seeming relic. Napoleon’s conquest is laid bare: a conquest of nothing, an achievement of nothing. The following scenes depict the slow destruction of Napoleon’s forces as they march toward Petersburg; in the director’s cut we watch Bonaparte’s hasty departure in a commandeered sled; eventually, he arrives at a devastated plain, gnarled with cannon and frosted skeletons. Napoleon asks where he is: Borodino is the answer. The camera lingers: he must for a while bear witness to his own heedless destruction. This, it appears, is the wage of his sin.
Like so much of Napoleon, the film tends toward a feeling of emptiness, or of absent cause. For all that is conquered, for all its victory, we must think again to Ozymandias’ ironic declaration. Again: “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Closer to Ozymandias is Napoleon’s brief sojourn in Egypt, in which he gives battle in front of the Pyramids. He orders his cannon bombard the Pyramids — an infamous myth — and in this moment we might be reminded of those gleaming structures in Exodus, now bombed and broken. Here the remnant of one fallen empire is made the battleground of another, soon itself to fall. Through all of Scott’s late period, we encounter these ruins, these memories of older times, and the reigns of foul and petty monarchs. In each but Napoleon there is also the yearning for liberty; the spirit of Shelley running through in grandiose, optimistic rhetoric. Napoleon instead speaks wholly in the negative; by means of absence. After having subdued Egypt, Napoleon approaches a mummy, sarcophagus cracked open. First, the profundity of the scene is necessarily undermined: Napoleon needs a box to see eye-to-eye with this ancient corpse. He peers closer — then! — nothing. The corpse shifts a little to the side. Shelley expresses the unspoken in this silent interview, that same vision as will visit all tyrants and despots:
What thou seest
Is but the ghost of thy forgotten dream.
A dream itself, yet less, perhaps, than that
Thou calls’t reality. Thou mayst behold
How cities, on which Empire sleeps enthroned,
Bow their towered crests to mutability.
Poised by the flood, e’en on the height thou holdest,
Thou mayest now learn how the full tide of power
Ebbs to its depths – Inheritor of glory,
Conceived in darkness, born in blood, and nourished
With tears and toil, thou seest the mortal throes
Of that whose birth was but the same. The Past
Now stands before thee like an Incarnation
Of the To-come; yet wouldst thou commune with
That portion of thyself which was ere thou
Didst start for this brief race whose crown is death.
— “Hellas,” 841-56
Comments are closed.