How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (55 page)

For the real reason that
Frogs
cannot, in any version, succeed as the liberal antiwar play that Lane and his cocreators want it to be is that it is a deeply conservative play, by a deeply conservative author: the conservatism is so intricately woven into the structure of the action, indeed—particularly in that final debate—that there's no way it could work in the way the Lincoln Center production wants it to work. The debate, of course, is the part Lane didn't even bother to freshen up, because although he was hell-bent on politicizing this old comedy, it never occurred to him that its politics lay in the debate about literature more than anywhere else. As Professor Dover observed, the “average
Athenian” would have immediately understood the conflict between Aeschylus and Euripides as a coded debate between two incompatible worldviews:

Frogs
, then, is a play that—because of the triumph of Aeschylus which is a deep part of its plot (and a deep part of Shevelove's adaptation, too)—inevitably exalts nostalgia over hardheaded confrontations with the present; that prefers to moon about past triumphs than to expose the causes of present anxieties; that, if anything, endorses the artist who will distract the people from solving their problems rather than force them to do so. If Lane and his collaborators in this superficially rewritten, superficially repoliticized adaptation of that play had thought hard about what it actually meant, they might have chosen another vehicle altogether for their rather woolly attempt to condemn the current political crisis. (
Trojan Women
, say—but then, you doubt that even Lane would have a go at Hecuba.) They might, at least, have rethought their approval of Aristophanes' “savage wit” and the way it punctuates the climactic exchanges between the two playwrights: for instance, when Aeschylus smugly boasts that drama ought to provide clean moral models for exemplary civic behavior, and “set…a standard of purity,” and Euripides desperately counters that tragedy must be subversive, that it should show “what really has happened” in order that audiences “come away from seeing a play / in a questioning mood, with ‘where are we at?,' / and ‘who's got my this?,' and ‘who took my that?'”

You'd have thought that such exchanges about purity and subversiveness in art would have rung some political bells in Mr. Lane's head;
but he merely blithely conforms to his model. What he doesn't seem to have realized—and what, in the end, makes his play such a mess—is that in siding himself with “Aeschylus” at the end of his own play (with “heart”) he has sided with the people whom, you suspect, he's voted against—the purity-in-art people, the family values people, the people who always go on about (and promise) the security of the golden past while vociferously despising subversive innovation (and nowhere more, as we know, than in the arts).

It is indeed odd that he should have ended up producing a play that everywhere values distracting pomp and sentimentality over rigorous intellectual engagement, a play that ends, however naively, with a call for more sentiment about the past and less braininess about the present—with, you might even say, an implicit endorsement of Romantic over Enlightenment ideals and values. Such a play (like its ancient model) could be said to serve the political aims of those real-life politicians who keep calling on us to be satisfied with the safe, grandiose nostrums of the past, rather than trying to see for ourselves what has really happened, and where we are at, and who got our this, and who took our that. In the end, Mr. Lane's failure to understand his own source material made his adaptation of
Frogs
not very funny at all; if you think deeply about politics and theater, it's actually pretty depressing.

 

This unhappy consideration put me in mind of another text having to do with the lives of the ancient poets. The
Vita
of Aristophanes himself is largely a drab list of publications; far more interesting are the comedian's cameo appearances in certain other works of the period. One is Plato's
Apology
, in which Socrates, on trial for his life, blames the average Athenian's bad opinion of him on Aristophanes'
Clouds
—a vicious lampoon of Socrates and of intellectuals in general. Another is Plato's
Symposium
, which purports to record a conversation that took place at a drinking party held in 416
B.C
. to celebrate the tragic victory of another of Aristophanes' victims—Agathon, whose effeminacy was so savagely mocked in
Women at the Thesmophoria
. The conversation in this dialogue is ostensibly about love, but like so many Athenian texts, it's really about a lot of things at once. Theater—inevitably, under the circumstances—is one of the things that come up.

The dialogue ends with all the revelers passed out except for Socrates, Aristophanes, and Agathon—the philosopher, the comedian, the tragedian. The first of the three, Plato tells us, “was trying to prove to them that authors should be able to write both comedy and tragedy.” You have to wonder whether Plato, given the terrible hindsight he had—the dialogue was written long after Socrates' execution, a fate his “apology” failed to prevent—had Aristophanes in mind, the comedian whose savage wit did so much damage. In the dialogue, you never find out, since just as Socrates was “about to clinch his point,” his interlocutors—unwilling, no doubt, to contemplate this intrusion into their respective turfs—lost interest and drifted off. He undoubtedly thought he was offering a comic solution to the world's woes; and yet everything about the way he has approached his play—not least, the total failure to comprehend what history tells us, and the rather hopeful substitution of woolly sentimentality for the hardheaded critique—is, if anything, chasracteristic of the tragic problem.

—The New York Review of Books,
December 2, 2004

A
t a quarter to nine on the morning of September 11, 2001, I was driving down the West Side Highway in Manhattan in a car filled with scholarly texts about Greek tragedy. It was a Tuesday, and the first session of the seminar I used to teach each fall at Princeton, “Self and Society in Classical Greek Drama,” was scheduled to meet on Thursday. Because I'd recently been given a big new office, I had decided to move all of my classics texts from my apartment in New York down to Princeton; which is why, at around eight that morning, I could be found in front of my building on the Upper West Side, loading boxes of books with titles like
Tragedy and Enlightenment
and
The Greeks and the Irrational
into a friend's car. After I'd finished, I got in the car and headed south toward lower Manhattan, where the friend who was going to accompany me to New Jersey lived.

My friend and I had agreed to meet at her place at nine, but traffic on the highway was surprisingly light and I reached her neighborhood early. I picked up my cell phone—the display on its exterior said 8:45—to warn her that I was going to arrive momentarily. “Don't be mad,” I said, “but I made good time.” I flipped the phone shut, looked up, and a dark flash of something darted into the building that loomed directly before
me, which was the north tower of the World Trade Center. A gigantic ball of bright orange fire ballooned out of the tower, followed by vast plumes of dense, black smoke.

Today, when I tell people this story, I say it was like Vesuvius; there was, indeed, something volcanic about the quality of fire and smoke pouring out of the huge black gash in the building's side, which directly faced those of us who were looking at it from the north. But at the time, the first, irrational thought that came into my staggered mind was that someone was making a blockbuster disaster movie. What I thought, in fact, was this: In this day and age, with its sophisticated digital special effects, why would anyone use real planes?

After a stupefied moment, in which the realness of the accident (as I then thought it must be) became apparent, I swerved my car onto a side street, where already clusters of people had stopped to stare and cry out in awed horror. Shaking, I reached for my cell phone and hit redial. “What's up?” Renée asked. “Turn on the TV, turn on the TV,” I said, a little hysterically. “The World Trade Center blew up.” But of course there was nothing to see on the TV yet. The amazing thing had just taken place; there was no coverage yet, no media, no commentary, no evaluation, no interpretation. It was just the raw event. What had just happened had not yet become the story of what happened.

 

By coincidence, the way in which what happens becomes the story of what happens—another way of putting this is to say, the way in which history becomes drama—had been much on my mind earlier that morning, because the play I was going to be teaching on Thursday that week was a work I typically teach when introducing students to the subject of Greek tragedy, Aeschylus's
Persians
. First produced in the spring of 472
B.C
.,
Persians
is noteworthy in the corpus of the thirty-two extant Greek tragedies in that it is the only one that dramatizes an actual historical event. That event was the improbable and glorious defeat, by a relatively tiny force of Greek citizen-soldiers, of the immense expeditionary force sent by the Persian monarch Xerxes to conquer Greece: the first global geopolitical conflict between East and West that the world would see.

This remarkable event had taken place a scant eight years before
Aeschylus's drama was staged, and it is tempting to wonder just what the Athenian audience was expecting, that spring day, as they walked in the predawn light to the Theater of Dionysus. The treatment of historical material on the tragic stage had, after all, brought disaster to playwrights in the past. In 494
B.C
.—in an incident that marked the beginning of the conflict between Europe and Asia whose ending, triumphant for the West, is celebrated in
Persians
—the culturally Greek city of Miletus, on the Asia Minor coast, was brutally occupied by the Persian emperor Darius. Two years later this disaster, awful for the Greeks, was dramatized on the tragic stage in a play called
The Capture of Miletus
, by a playwright called Phrynichus. It quickly became evident that it was still too soon to turn history into drama, as Herodotus's account of that ill-starred production suggests:

We know next to nothing about Phrynichus's play—the ban on the work was, alas, all too effective—but the historian's description is suggestive. It would appear that Athenians were responding so strongly not so much to the drama itself (to the story of what happened) as to the memories of the real event (which is to say, to what happened). Their reaction, in other words, was not an
aesthetic
response. The emotions produced by the event itself—sorrow over the death and enslavement of fellow Greeks—seem, in this case, to have taken the place of the emotions—the catharsis that seeks to cleanse the mind, let's say—which drama seeks to elicit. You wonder, indeed, whether the Athenians' ban on
The Capture of Miletus
was necessary: the feelings aroused by Phrynichus's work were tied so specifically to the incident it depicted that, twenty years later, no one would likely have been moved by it all that much.

Twenty years later, Aeschylus was in the happier position of dra
matizing a historical event that had turned out triumphantly for the Greeks. It's hard not to think that at least some Athenians, that long-ago day, gloated a bit as they watched
Persians
. Set in the imperial capital of Susa, the drama focuses on the grief of the Persian court as it awaits the return of its defeated emperor, Xerxes, following the Greek victory at Salamis. It must be said that to the eyes of anyone who didn't have the personal pleasure of defeating Xerxes' overweening invasion, the play's pageant of humiliation often feels rather too much like—well, like a pageant, to be what we think of as great drama. The play consists of a series of fairly static tableaux in which, one after another, anxious courtiers and royals—among them, Xerxes' mother and the ghost of his father, Darius (who, we are meant to understand, was a less foolhardy, sager autocrat)—express their fears about the fate of the Persian army. These tableaux culminate in the appearance of the ill-starred emperor himself, dust-covered, despairing, defeated. (Still, we're told that the fact that he's led his nation to ignominy will not affect him personally; he is, after all, the king.)

Before September 11, I liked to put
Persians
first on the syllabus of my tragedy seminar because this somewhat clanking play, with its stodgily predictable lessons about a bloated empire unexpectedly humbled by a tiny but fervent foe, seemed the best-available vehicle to show students that not all tragedies were structurally perfect; that not all tragedies were great, or—in the way we expect the greatest works of art to be—relevant.

 

Five years after that morning in 2001, I am once again put in mind of Aeschylus and Phrynichus, now that the first major Hollywood entertainments about the events of September 11 have appeared in theaters: Paul Greengrass's
United 93
, whose subject is the hijacking of the flight in which the passengers rebelled against their al-Qaeda tormentors (with the result that the plane crashed in a field in rural Pennsylvania and not, as is thought to have been the terrorists' plan, into the Capitol);
and the rather more conventional
World Trade Center
, directed by Oliver Stone, which treats the stories of two Port Authority police officers who were trapped in the rubble that day and eventually rescued. Both films, in different ways, raise interesting questions about the complicated relationship between history and art, fiction and—an increasingly vexed word, these days—“reality.”

Reality, after all, was an obsessive concern of the makers of both movies. Both works are characterized by a severe sobriety of tone, as if to acknowledge that these are no mere entertainments; we are told that the families of victims (and, in the case of
World Trade Center
, the survivors themselves) were constantly consulted during the making of both films. Indeed, in the case of
United 93
, there is no apparent “dramatization” at all: as far as the audience knows, the film, which often has the flatly passive, affectless feel of home movies, simply, and with apparent scrupulousness, reproduces what we know of the sequence of events that day. Apart from a brief prologue sequence showing the hijackers apparently preparing themselves for the attack by praying in their motel room (that they said their prayers is, you suppose, a reasonable enough inference), most of the action takes place first in the airport—the humdrum, bored preparations for boarding and departure are nicely captured—and then in the airliner itself, before and during the violence.

The representation of the hijacking and of what we know to have followed—the murder of the pilots, the frantic, furtive cell phone calls by passengers to loved ones, the decision to fight back, the brief, horrific struggle for control of the plane ending in its plummeting into the field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania—occur in “real” time. (After the crash, as if in homage to the fact that real people perished in the calamity being portrayed, the screen simply goes black, as if to say that there can be no dramatic “ending” here, no authorial editorializing.) In that real time, there is some degree of cross-cutting between what's taking place in the air and the confusion on the ground, particularly in the air traffic control centers, where a horrified realization of the nature of the day's events gradually dawns—and where a frustrating inability to get the United States government to react intelligently is soon felt.

As if to underscore this almost documentary approach, the director chose to have members of the air crews depicted in the film played
by real pilots and stewardesses; and certain other characters, including some of the air traffic controllers and air traffic control officials who were on duty that day, played themselves. Much was made of this remarkable gesture in the admiring press at the time. Furthermore, the director avoided using well-known actors; the faces you see on screen could be anyone's faces. The kinds of faces you see, without really seeing them, in airports.

Overall, this approach to the material was thought to be an appropriate one. “As far as possible, the movie plays it straight,” the enthusiastic critic in
The New Yorker
wrote. “As far as possible” covers some noteworthy exceptions, naturally; there was not, presumably, a throbbing sound track playing before and during the real-life hijacking, as there is in the film.

 

The presence of a good deal of material that is not, strictly speaking, “authentic”—that sound track, marking moments of high drama; the inevitable approximation of what was said, what people did, things that can never, really, be known—raises the question of just what kind of film this is, and what it thinks it's doing. Audiences and critics were so swept up in the ostensibly reverent gesture of using “real” people in the cinematic re-creation of the events of that day, for instance, that nobody bothered to wonder what purpose, precisely, using those people in a film was meant to serve. Apart from the relatively few people who knew them, no one watching the movie could possibly know or care what, say, this or that air traffic controller looked like or sounded like; artistically or dramatically speaking, there is no difference whatever if the person saying “There's nothing on the screen” in the movie is the person who actually said it, or a well-trained actor doing a reliable imitation of a functionary in a technical job. (Except that the actor will probably seem less stiff and unrealistic.)

Using the real-life people in the movie is a showy but ultimately hollow gesture; it advertises a certain kind of solemnity, even piety, about “authenticity” that has great currency in an era in which, in so many popular entertainments, a great premium is placed on getting as close as possible to “reality”—although in such entertainments the reality, of course, is an artfully constructed one. (An apparently growing
confusion in mass culture about the differences among reality, truth, “truthiness,” and fiction has, as we know, had effects beyond the world of entertainment. The evidence is now overwhelming that an artful admixing of reality and invention, never acknowledged as such, characterized the government's attempt to “sell” its response to the events of September 11.) There can, therefore, be no useful aesthetic value in the decision to use real people, only a symbolic and perhaps sentimental one: by emphasizing such authenticity and realism, the film reassures its audience—which may well be anxious about its own motives for paying to see a film about real-life violence and horror—that what they're seeing is not, in fact, “drama” (and therefore presumably mere “entertainment”), but “real life,” and hence in some way edifying.

The problem with all this realness is that the film itself—like reality—has no structure: and without structure, without shaping, the events can have no large meaning. When
United 93
first came out, I was struck by one enthusiastic critic's glowing comment, in a London
Observer
review entitled “Brilliant, Brutal and Utterly Real,” that Greengrass's movie was “gripping from first to last, partly because, like a Greek tragedy, we are only too aware of where everything is heading….” But what makes Greek tragedy significant as art is precisely the way in which the foreordained trajectory of the events that take place onstage is made to seem part of a larger moral scheme; when (for instance) we see the horrible spectacle of the humbled king at the end of
Persians
, we know why he has been humbled (his greedy overreaching) and who has humbled him (the gods, the moral order that obtains in the cosmos).