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

“AND YOUR FATHER SEES YOU” 223
baggage of Stone’s protagonist—and might even be applied, albeit
with tongue in cheek, to Stone himself in his self-fashioning as
Hollywood’s heroic maverick director. 11 Even given its genre, though,
Alexander’s ongoing crisis of paternity is particularly overwhelming.
The plot is never allowed to get out from under the long shadow of
the protagonist’s confl icted feelings for his father. This is an anomaly:
a phenomenon not apparent in Stone’s earlier oeuvre (e.g., Platoon),
or, for that matter, in previous historical “male epics,” no matter how
serious and sustained their engagement with father/son relationships
(e.g., El Cid). We may legitimately dig deeper.
One potentially productive explanation would read Alexander’s
father/son dynamic as refl exive allegory, dramatizing the fi lm’s awkward
relation to its own unacknowledged parent—Rossen’s fi lm of
1956. This is extremely unlikely to have been Stone’s conscious
intention—as if we could ever really know that, and as if we need
care, in the age of the Death of the Auteur. 12 Regardless, it is how the
fi lm plays out, for an audience that comes to it with knowledge of the
earlier version . . . or even just with the awareness that there has been
a previous version. In the words of Ptolemy’s voiceover (0h07m),
“truly there was not a man in Macedonia who didn’t look at father
and son side by side, and wonder.”
In the remainder of this chapter, I examine three further important
scenes, presenting a transcript of the dialogue of the fi rst and third
(the second has minimal verbal content). My aim is to develop a
“thick” explanation that reveals the fi lm’s father-son fi xation as
multiply overdetermined. That is, Alexander’s status as a remake-indenial
amplifi es the source anxieties already implicit in the paternity
discourse of the historical epic genre; and its own fi gurations of
dunasteia additionally speak to the fi lm’s struggle to defi ne itself
against the spin and panic of rival cinematic Successors in the 1990s
and early 2000s.
“One Day I’ll Be on Walls Like These”: A
Father’s Shame
My starting point (0h21m–0h25m) is a scene much mocked by the
reviewers: Philip and Alexander in the (archaeologically nonexistent)
caves below the palace in Pella, complete with thrillingly primordial
cave-paintings of fi gures from Greek myth—Achilles, Prometheus,
Medea, and Heracles. Philip uses these mythic scenes as primitive
PowerPoint in a pep talk that aims to distance Alexander from his
overprotective mother. These strong masculine role models will
toughen up a sensitive son in readiness for the day when he will take