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selenakStarted but won't finish: the latest miniseries take Great Expectations, starring Olivia Colman as Miss Havisham. It's one of those productions which in theory sound good - colourblind cast, scriptwriter coming from successful original show (Steven Knight) - and in practice is just a mess. Also one that's mostly filmed in grey, both the marshes that form the landscape of the early episodes and London (the end of the first London based episode is where I stopped). Estella's dresses are sometimes the only dots of colour.
Now, Great Expectations the novel, being late Dickens, is actually a subversion of one of his former tropes; as George Orwell pointed out, if earlier Dickens from the Pickwick Papers onwards features a rich person (usually but not always a kindly rich old man) coming to the aid of the poor, Great Expectations is if anything an attack on patronage; Miss Havisham's adoption of Estella and later use of Pip is about revenge, not benevolent help, and Pip's belief that she's his benefactor and in the end intends him to get Estella and her money is actively harmful to his character and life. Another subversion is the figure of the angelic innocent orphan. Pip is a first person narrator like David Copperfield, but where David maintains his closeness so his lower class childhood friends and helpers like the Pegottys or the Micawbers, Pip is embarrassed by and ungrateful to Joe (and the narrative punishes him for it), and even after the Magwitch-as-his-benefactor reveal and while helping Magwitch feels a deep social horror of the ex con. But even late Dickens is never a glum fest; he's as famous for his comedy as for his melodrama, after all, and never more than when he's satirizing.
This latest tv take on Great Expectations prides itself on being massively British Empire, capitalism and British class structure critical, and then some. Miss Havisham's inherited family fortune is spelled out to be based on opium and slave trade, and opium consumation (first by Miss Havisham and Estella, but our hero will go there, too) is a plot point. Mr. Jagger the attorney presents himself as "evil", blackmails judges by their secret homosexuality and uses Pip for insider trading while he's at it. Pip's sister has a secret arrangement with Mr. Bumblechook where she plays the domina and whips him. For his eighteenth birthday, Miss Havisham and Estella present Pip with the local prostitute as a present. Miss Havisham is incredibly creepy with Pip (and to lesser degree with Estella) herself. Basically, it feels like Knight has a checklist of "the seedy underbelly of Victorian society exposed" he goes for, along with "Why the British Empire was a bad, bad thing". I mean, I'm on board with these messages, but they're presented with such stern and joyless relentlessness that I feel like I'm attending a Victorian school, getting hammered with moral lessons. See, Dickens is anything but subtle with his own moral lessons, but he knew how to interweave them with compelling characters and a good yarn. Removing the vitality of the characters in favour of "here are the evils of 19th century British society in human form" in overdrive does this adaption no favours, and there's only to much leisure time I have, so, goodbye, tv series (despite Colman being excellent as the creepiest, most predatory of all Havishams).
Whereas what I go through at quick pace because it's compellingly, emphatically and wittily told while being no less critical of the society it describes (and ours): A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, by Emma Southon. As with Southon's biography of Agrippina the Younger, I consumed it in audio form, not least because that struck me as eminently suited to her style of writing, which is very conversational . This book basically uses murder in its many many aspects as a read thread through several centuries of Roman history (from the 2nd century BC to the end of the Antonine period, to be precise - Southon stops before the Third Century Crisis) to provide us with a social history of Rome. Individual chapters: "Murder on the Senate Floor", "Murder in Roman Law", "Murder in the Family", "Murder in Marriage", "Murder in the Slave State", "Murder by Magic", "Murder in the Imperial House", "Murdering an Emperor", "Judicial Murder". Behind those chapter titles hides a clever, somewhat surprising and incredibly effective structure, as Southon starts her book with the most prominent asassination (Caesar), then goes back to the Gracchi, and forward again, instead of building up to it. The reason why this is effective is because it's not actually the prominent murders among the elite that lie at the heart of the book, but the wives getting killed by their husbands who weren't part of a ruling family, the every day violence against slaves on whose backs the entire system was built, and the gruesome executions (be they in the arena or by cruxifiction) that remind one all over again what inspired Collins' Hunger Games.
(Of course, the written sources mostly were written by and focused on the Senatorial class, but for example tombstones manage to provide glimpses of other stories, like the couple of Imperial slaves who managed to get permission to have a tombstone for their infant baby son, or the freedman mourning his wife who like him started out as a slave.)
The big difference to the Dickens adaption cited above is that while Southon is no less dedicated to exposing the baked in injustices (seedy underbelly would be the wrong term, really, because there was nothing hidden about, not least because it wouldn't have occured to the Romans there was something to hide) of the Roman society, she does so while keeping everyone human, and sketches out the legal and belief systems for context really well. The generally flippant narrative tone comes with deep empathy that manages to keep it real that everyone killed was a person in their own right with a story and feelings, not a moral lesson or a joke.
Now, some of her takes I could argue with. (I mean, I agree that whether you're categorized as a good or a bad Emperor by historians who were senators definitely had to do with whether you managed to provide the Senators of your own time with the illusion that you cared about their opinion, or rubbed their noses into the fact they had no real power, but I wouldn't have chosen Caligula vs Hadrian to illustrate that point, because Hadrian, while counted among the Five Good Emperors by tradition, was very much disliked by the Senate of his time and had a very mixed press among historians.) And there's one big glaring mistake early on - Cicero didn't execute Catiline without a trial, he did this with several of Catiline's followers. Catiline himself died in battle against the forces led by Cicero's fellow consul Antonius Hybrida. (See also Sallustius for describing his last stand.) And Emma Southon doesn't just make this mistake once, she's referencing it two or three times. (Because these executions without a trial came back to bite Cicero big time, and played their part in the continuing decline of the Republic. But, again, Catiline himself wasn't among the executed.) (After this mistake, I wondered whether there might be others I missed, but as far as I could tell, no.)
None of these nitpicks take away from how immensely readable (listenable?), enjoyable and moving I found this book, though. And she may have swayed me on a couple of topics. (The question as to whether or not Livia arranged anyone's death, to be precise.) Plus, I really need to get around to reading Apuleius one of those days.
Now, Great Expectations the novel, being late Dickens, is actually a subversion of one of his former tropes; as George Orwell pointed out, if earlier Dickens from the Pickwick Papers onwards features a rich person (usually but not always a kindly rich old man) coming to the aid of the poor, Great Expectations is if anything an attack on patronage; Miss Havisham's adoption of Estella and later use of Pip is about revenge, not benevolent help, and Pip's belief that she's his benefactor and in the end intends him to get Estella and her money is actively harmful to his character and life. Another subversion is the figure of the angelic innocent orphan. Pip is a first person narrator like David Copperfield, but where David maintains his closeness so his lower class childhood friends and helpers like the Pegottys or the Micawbers, Pip is embarrassed by and ungrateful to Joe (and the narrative punishes him for it), and even after the Magwitch-as-his-benefactor reveal and while helping Magwitch feels a deep social horror of the ex con. But even late Dickens is never a glum fest; he's as famous for his comedy as for his melodrama, after all, and never more than when he's satirizing.
This latest tv take on Great Expectations prides itself on being massively British Empire, capitalism and British class structure critical, and then some. Miss Havisham's inherited family fortune is spelled out to be based on opium and slave trade, and opium consumation (first by Miss Havisham and Estella, but our hero will go there, too) is a plot point. Mr. Jagger the attorney presents himself as "evil", blackmails judges by their secret homosexuality and uses Pip for insider trading while he's at it. Pip's sister has a secret arrangement with Mr. Bumblechook where she plays the domina and whips him. For his eighteenth birthday, Miss Havisham and Estella present Pip with the local prostitute as a present. Miss Havisham is incredibly creepy with Pip (and to lesser degree with Estella) herself. Basically, it feels like Knight has a checklist of "the seedy underbelly of Victorian society exposed" he goes for, along with "Why the British Empire was a bad, bad thing". I mean, I'm on board with these messages, but they're presented with such stern and joyless relentlessness that I feel like I'm attending a Victorian school, getting hammered with moral lessons. See, Dickens is anything but subtle with his own moral lessons, but he knew how to interweave them with compelling characters and a good yarn. Removing the vitality of the characters in favour of "here are the evils of 19th century British society in human form" in overdrive does this adaption no favours, and there's only to much leisure time I have, so, goodbye, tv series (despite Colman being excellent as the creepiest, most predatory of all Havishams).
Whereas what I go through at quick pace because it's compellingly, emphatically and wittily told while being no less critical of the society it describes (and ours): A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, by Emma Southon. As with Southon's biography of Agrippina the Younger, I consumed it in audio form, not least because that struck me as eminently suited to her style of writing, which is very conversational . This book basically uses murder in its many many aspects as a read thread through several centuries of Roman history (from the 2nd century BC to the end of the Antonine period, to be precise - Southon stops before the Third Century Crisis) to provide us with a social history of Rome. Individual chapters: "Murder on the Senate Floor", "Murder in Roman Law", "Murder in the Family", "Murder in Marriage", "Murder in the Slave State", "Murder by Magic", "Murder in the Imperial House", "Murdering an Emperor", "Judicial Murder". Behind those chapter titles hides a clever, somewhat surprising and incredibly effective structure, as Southon starts her book with the most prominent asassination (Caesar), then goes back to the Gracchi, and forward again, instead of building up to it. The reason why this is effective is because it's not actually the prominent murders among the elite that lie at the heart of the book, but the wives getting killed by their husbands who weren't part of a ruling family, the every day violence against slaves on whose backs the entire system was built, and the gruesome executions (be they in the arena or by cruxifiction) that remind one all over again what inspired Collins' Hunger Games.
(Of course, the written sources mostly were written by and focused on the Senatorial class, but for example tombstones manage to provide glimpses of other stories, like the couple of Imperial slaves who managed to get permission to have a tombstone for their infant baby son, or the freedman mourning his wife who like him started out as a slave.)
The big difference to the Dickens adaption cited above is that while Southon is no less dedicated to exposing the baked in injustices (seedy underbelly would be the wrong term, really, because there was nothing hidden about, not least because it wouldn't have occured to the Romans there was something to hide) of the Roman society, she does so while keeping everyone human, and sketches out the legal and belief systems for context really well. The generally flippant narrative tone comes with deep empathy that manages to keep it real that everyone killed was a person in their own right with a story and feelings, not a moral lesson or a joke.
Now, some of her takes I could argue with. (I mean, I agree that whether you're categorized as a good or a bad Emperor by historians who were senators definitely had to do with whether you managed to provide the Senators of your own time with the illusion that you cared about their opinion, or rubbed their noses into the fact they had no real power, but I wouldn't have chosen Caligula vs Hadrian to illustrate that point, because Hadrian, while counted among the Five Good Emperors by tradition, was very much disliked by the Senate of his time and had a very mixed press among historians.) And there's one big glaring mistake early on - Cicero didn't execute Catiline without a trial, he did this with several of Catiline's followers. Catiline himself died in battle against the forces led by Cicero's fellow consul Antonius Hybrida. (See also Sallustius for describing his last stand.) And Emma Southon doesn't just make this mistake once, she's referencing it two or three times. (Because these executions without a trial came back to bite Cicero big time, and played their part in the continuing decline of the Republic. But, again, Catiline himself wasn't among the executed.) (After this mistake, I wondered whether there might be others I missed, but as far as I could tell, no.)
None of these nitpicks take away from how immensely readable (listenable?), enjoyable and moving I found this book, though. And she may have swayed me on a couple of topics. (The question as to whether or not Livia arranged anyone's death, to be precise.) Plus, I really need to get around to reading Apuleius one of those days.
no subject
Date: 2023-07-17 11:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-17 05:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-17 05:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-18 04:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-17 06:44 pm (UTC)I went to an excellent museum exhibit which, whether you agreed with the main argument or not (Nero: not actually terrible) made the very good point that we have no strictly contemporary sources for Nero. Everything we have is a) from Domitian and his own purges b) from a senator, where Nero was all about restricting senatorial power. (And c) as in the death of Agrippina, contains cultural references we don't have access to)
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Date: 2023-07-18 04:17 pm (UTC)All this said, it's always worth painting out that many of the "bad Emperors" who get a terrible image from our senatorial historians (Caligula, Nero, Caracalla etc.) seem to have been very popular among the lower ranking people. All those fake Neros popping up in the East after his death would not have worked if he hadn't been wildly popular there. All this said, this argument used to work better for me pre 2016. The combination of Johnson, The Orange Menace, Bolsanaro et al is a rather grim illustration that you can be a horrible incompetent dangerous mess and still have a lot of your people sing your praises and refuse to hear any criticism.
no subject
Date: 2023-07-18 04:52 pm (UTC)I apologise to Flavius Josephus!
The exhibit was interested in terms of contextualisation, though I confess I didn't check their numbers: they suggested that Nero and Claudius were actually about equal in terms of senatorial executions and exiles, Claudius just got the Robert Graves treatment. They also noted that Nero's famous Domus Aurea compulsory purchases were part of a much larger scheme following the Great Fire, on the grounds that it had spread so quickly because streets were narrow and buildings close together, so they were changing the size of land plots. (The same thing happened in Lisbon following their earthquake. Luckily I resisted the urge to compare Nero to the Marquis de Pombal in public)
It benefited a great deal from being seen immediately after I saw a man hagiography of Thomas a Becket. I was just relieved no one was attributing miracles and there was some contextualisation.
no subject
Date: 2023-07-19 07:58 am (UTC)