Philip II and Alexander the Great: Father and Son ... - Historia Antigua

220 RECEPTION OF FATHER AND SON
As these excerpts indicate, paternity is an idée fi xe of Stone’s Alexander
and saturates the dialogue of its characters. The protagonist’s struggle to
come to terms with his dead father structures and infl ects the entire fi lm
narrative as a direct consequence of its nonlinear storyline. Rossen’s
fi lm at least got Philip permanently out of the way at the halfway point;
but Stone intercuts the adult conquest of the East with the early years in
Macedon. When we are not fl ashing back, the paternal past is teleporting
forwards—twice in India Alexander literally sees Philip in the
crowd at moments of crisis in his personal journey.
The fi rst of these posthumous, magic-realist cameos is the catalyst
that aggravates a drunken quarrel into the killing of Cleitus by Alexander
at the banquet in India (1h47m–1h51m; timings refer to the standard
cinematic cut, released on DVD in 2005). Cleitus’ toast is to Philip, “a
real hero”—and he taunts the son with comparisons to the father: “Is
his blood no longer good enough? Zeus? Ammon, is it? . . . Never would
your father have taken barbarians as his friends.” He threatens revolt,
in terms that predicate the legitimacy of Alexander’s Eastern campaign
on his questionable status as Philip’s biological son and heir: “This
army is your blood, boy!” And he is not alone. An equally drunken
Alexander is now struck dumb (1h50m) by a hallucinatory vision of
Philip—coughing up red arterial blood as at his own murder.
Stone’s intercutting heightens the shock effect; we have not yet seen
Philip’s assassination, although we know that something must have
happened to remove him from the story, so this vision is as disturbing
and unexpected for us as it is for Alexander himself. The interleaved
narrative of Alexander will in fact show Philip’s death (1h58m) in the
course of the extended fl ashback which immediately follows (1h53m–
2h04m), retrospectively clarifying the subtext of the present scene.
Endorsing Cleitus’ assertion (“This army is your blood”), the apparition
at the Indian banquet bellows: “Without it, you’re nothing!”
The ghost-Philip’s “it” is productively ambiguous, blurring the
distinction between army and blood. The army is Alexander’s blood
in two important and inseparable fi gurative senses: his source
of strength and his birthright as Philip’s purported biological heir.
Dialogue and mise-en-scène blur into each other in a violent image
that aggressively merges and concretizes paternity and power: the
“blood” that fl ows in Alexander’s veins (or does it?), Philip’s blood,
literally drenches the Philip-apparition as he delivers his line. In the
extended fl ashback immediately following the Indian banquet, we
learn that Alexander’s panic and self-loathing at his own drunken
killing of Cleitus are primarily driven by his love/hate relationship
with his father. In the fl ashback to Alexander’s youth in Macedon,
Philip—immediately before his own murder—commends his boy to