It’s not as hot and humid as when I stacked hay bales in the loft of my dad’s barn back in 1960, but it’s pretty stinking swampy out there. The weather forecast said 70% chance of thunderstorms this afternoon, but when I got home the sky was clear and blue, and I took my walk anyway. It rained this morning, and will likely rain again tonight, but for now the only moisture is suspended in the air, in molecule form, in high concentrations.
Last night I watched another new DVD acquisition, Robert Altman’s “Popeye.” What a strange movie. Awful script. The songs are just an embarrassment. But the actors seem to be having fun playing cartoon games, and the visuals are great, and Robin Williams sings the Popeye song all the way through at the end. It always leaves me feeling better when I’m done with it.
A Norwegian relative wrote me years ago from a vacation in Malta, saying he’d toured the Sweet Haven set, which apparently is (or was at the time) still standing as a tourist attraction.
Speaking of DVDs, I’m on the cheap plan with Netflix now, and I’m taking the opportunity to view some of the cable series everybody’s been raving about. This weekend I finished the final episode of “Rome.”
I’m conflicted about “Rome.” Great writing. Top-drawer acting. A compelling historical re-creation of the imperial city. Fascinating, multi-faceted characters. People you admire or pity in one episode become monsters in another. And the other way around.
But I keep wondering (moralist that I am) about what all this is in service of. I’m not sure the point of the exercise was to show that there’s good and evil in all of us. I have a nagging suspicion that the point was (to quote the preacher in The Grapes of Wrath), “There ain’t no right, and there ain’t no wrong. There’s just things folks do.”
Maybe I’m overthinking it. But I note (from what I’ve read; I’m no expert on the Roman period) that characters whom it might have been possible to portray as mostly admirable are purposely dragged down. Cicero’s and Brutus’ high-minded defense of the Republic is portrayed as just opportunistic political squabbling (though they are granted noble enough—if historically inaccurate—deaths). Atia, the mother of Octavian, is portrayed as the very opposite of her true character. Contemporary chroniclers say she was a woman of the highest morals and decorum. She’s portrayed here as a scheming, selfish, vindictive nymphomaniac.
Which brings up the nudity and sex. I understand that the producers wanted to present an authentic portrayal of a society in which, by all accounts, nudity meant nothing and there was no shame about performing various natural acts in public view. But is it impossible to communicate that without at least one naked sex scene per episode? At what point does it become soft-core porn?
Perhaps part of their point is to make us ask whether soft-core porn is a meaningful concept anymore.
And that’s just what bothers me.
I appreciate your thoughts about Rome, specifically the paragraph about the nudity in movies. Too little is said about this anymore. Every time I choose a movie off of netflix for my wife and I to watch, I have to ask my self, why do I really want to see this movie? My honest answer to that question has kept a lot of trash out of the house.
Peak of the hay mow in July. 95 degrees with humidity to match. Chaff mixing with sweat collecting in a thick paste on all exposed skin. Hawking up gobs of chaff filled phlegm. Oh, yes, that brought back some pleasant memories.
The nudity issue has kept me away from Rome, as well as The Tudors and other interesting dramas. I’m really not sure that they’re “saying” anything as much as “doing” something–providing titillation along with the serious drama. (The PG-13-level Battlestar Galactica is an interesting case in point–it is far more risque in the first season or so, while they are trying to lure viewers in. Once they’d gotten the viewers interested in their political/philosophical questions and character drama, the sex tapered off. Most such scenes in the later seasons had far stronger dramatic justification, and were filmed less suggestively.)
As per the admirable characters, I at least have no problem with dragging Cicero down. He provided his own historical precedent. There was actually a huge crisis of faith in his ideas in the early Italian Renaissance, when they discovered his letters and had to rectify his lofty moral claims with the self-interested back-stabbing his letters evidenced.
I like this line I saw somewhere: “Sex sells, but we aren’t selling sex.” Now that I’ve written it, the line may be “Sex sells, but we’re selling floor cleaner” or something like that.
I don’t think the producers care what is hard or soft-core. I doubt they think of it except when faced with rating boards. They show it, write it, and encourage it because they want it and think about it themselves. They are their own morality.
I always felt he nudity is just HBO showing off that they are HBO.
Even BAND OF BROTHERS could not get away without any nudity. However (not counting the death camp scenes) it was only one quick scene in one episode.
Now, some of it may have been necessary for story, but HBO does like to show off that they are HBO.
PS. BAND OF BROTHERS remains the best mini-series ever made.