Rome, season 2 revisited
Oct. 6th, 2007 07:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakI've been rewatching season 2 of Rome. Which has the advantage that knowing the entire story, there are almost no inner shouts of "but what about *insert historical event* and where is *insert historical person*?" anymore; instead, I can enjoy the rich tapestry the show gives us. Which is very enjoyable indeed. It's even, dare I say, an improvement over the first season; I'll elaborate on that later. Mind you, what didn't work for me the first time around still doesn't, but those minuses are far oughtweighed by the pluses. The most major plus being: this is one of the few on screen treatments of a specific time in history which actually gives you a sense of period, of a mentality and emotional make-up different from our own. The contrast to its wannabe successor, The Tudors, is startling, but then, The Tudors fails in most other respects as well. Rome - upon first time viewing - makes you occasionally go SAY WHAT?!? when making certain changes, but a) they're mostly caused by storytelling necessities, and b) they're not at the expense of that alienness, that genuinenly different world created on screen. Which occasionally breathtaking cinematography.
Images like Caesar's triumph over Vercingetorix in the first season, specifically the scene where Octavian annoints him with bull's blood - and the symbolism of the dying and rising sun is there for the viewer without it being pointed out verbally as the characters don't know yet -, the rendition of Caesar's assassination which gets the visceral brutality of it across in a way I haven't seen in any of the other countless reinactments on screen, or in the second season that shot of Cleopatra's bare feet walking stepping in to the blood left by a dying Antony, Servilia, covered with ashes, a grey nightmare, cursing Atia, Atia's face watching Octavian's triumph in her very last scene, the bright, sterile colours of said triumph, announcing the start of the Augustan age, contrasting with her rich red - are so haunting not just because they're gorgeously shot but because they're layered with meaning. On a general sidenote, this is also finally a show where Rome or the ancient world in general isn't rendered in white but where someone remembered that it was multicoloured, outrageously so. Thank you, show.
The heart of the show were of course our two original characters, Pullo and Vorenus, quite splendidly so, but if their storylines had never touched those of the historical characters but had run solely parallel, the show wouldn't have felt as complete. As it was, the connections between the two plotlines were carefully made and paid off. The connection formed in the first season between Octavian and Pullo means that in the second season, not only is the affection Octavian has for Pullo one of the few remnants of the humanity he increasingly loses as he rises in power but also makes it believable he trusts Pullo at the crucial moment in the finale. Similarly, the debt Vorenus owes Antony from the first season makes it possible for Antony to call him back from death early in the second season, and makes it believable that as they both go to their respective doom in different ways over the course of the second season Vorenus chooses to go with Antony to Egypt, placing him believably and infinitely movingly at the scene of Antony's suicide. If the first season had Vorenus ascendant, only to destroy his life and happiness at the same time Caesar is killed in the senate, while Pullo was once the war was over, descendant, only recovering in that last episode and finding a peaceful resolution with Eirene, the second season made the contrast even greater, between Vorenus as the main character of a tragedy - whose tragedy, as Aristoteles demanded, was partly caused by his own flaws and partly by circumstance and fate - and Pullo as the main character of - no, not a comedy, but a satiric epic of the likes written in the later Empire, by Petronius, for example. He's Everyman, not guiltless by any means or free of his own tragedies (see also: Eirene and Gaia), but with an irrespressible vitality that allows him to bounce back from everything and survive into another age.
Some examples of that difference of mentality I mentioned: the way this show uses curses and religion. When a grief-stricken, raging Vorenus in the first episode of the second season curses his children, it doesn't matter that one of his enemies is the one who abducts said children and inflicts the horror of slavery on them - as far as Vorenus and the children are concerned, he's the guilty party. This is what he believes, and what he spends the rest of the season paying for. Similarly, Servilia isn't the one responsible for what happens in the second half of the season; she's dead. But her curse, spoken in public and sealed with her death, is taken by Atia as truth. And finally, there are Cleopatra's dying words to Octavian, which not even the loyal Agrippa bothers to refute. There is a sense of numens about this - numinosity indeed - about all of this which is entirely without post modern irony or, as would have happened in movies dealing with Ancient Rome in the 50s and 60s, Christian patronizing (i.e. the Roman religion depicted as hollow and the sympathetic characters as proto-Christians, if they can't be actual Christians; Spartacus comes glaringly to mind).
One of the reasons why I think the second season is better than the first: the first one goes over the top early on in regards to Atia, who only thanks to Polly Walker's performance doesn't come across as something straight out of Tacitus - A Bad Woman The Way The Roman Imagined Bad Women, oversexed, completely willing to prostitute her children (to the right people, of course), and over ambitious. I'm thinking of such clunkers as letting Atia shove Octavia into Pompey's bed here (which isn't the way an ambitious Roman mother would have handled the marriage gamble AT ALL), or her hope that young Octavian had sex with Caesar. (Again, the problem here isn't the morals, it's that having homoerotic sex as the penetrated party was regarded as humiliating for the Romans, which is why in propaganda wars in politics it was one of the first slurs to come up. It happened to Caesar - which Atia, as his niece, would have known - when he had his own election campaign for consul, and of course Cicero used it in the Philippika against Antony (we even hear the relevant excerpt in season 2. As Atia is planning for her son to become the next head of the Julian house, this would have been a bad start.) By contrast, in the second season, Atia is still ruthless in her Senecan feud with Servilia, but nothing she does comes across as stupid or gratitious on the part of the writers. The emotional loss of her son is balanced by her increasing closeness to her daughter, and the relationship with Antony is believable emotional as well as sexual, so Atia's reaction to its ending is believable as well.
(Indeed, the Atia/Antony relationship is both one of the virtues and problems of the show in its entirety. It replaces Antony's marriage to Fulvia - who went the way of excised historical characters along with a lot of other folk - and is shown to develop from a fun coupling between two people who like sex and power into a love affair in the Tennessee Williams vein. This posed a two fold problem for the last third of the season, as the show first had to explain the Antony/Octavia marriage - i.e. why, if there is a necessity of a marriage to seal the alliance with Octavian, doesn't Antony marry Atia given the show has established them as a couple since many years by then - and then had to sell us on Antony/Cleopatra as not just another power & sex combination but the grand obsessive love. The first problem was solved by making the insistence on Octavia the direct result of Octavian's spite and unforgiving grudge against his mother (and Antony) as well as a ploy - he doesn't want that marriage to succeed, given that he needs to get rid of Antony sooner or later, and he definitely doesn't want his mother happy with Antony. The second problem wasn't really solved, especially given that the last but one episode which was the only one to show Antony and Cleopatra as a couple before things got doomed took its page directly from Augustan propaganda with its negative depiction of both, though the very last episode turned things around somewhat by giving both of them tragic greatness. Still, as far as couples go, Atia and Antony always came across as adults, and Antony and Cleopatra as naughty children, which wasn't helped by the actress for Cleopatra not being allowed to age visually from her first appearance as a teenager in season 1.)
Atia in the end is shown as the core character as far as the "historical" plotline is concerned (as opposed to Vorenus and Pullo who are the overall heart of the show, as mentioned, and their own core characters in their fictional storyline), and the end sequence of her story more than justifies her survival beyond all historical dates. In one way, Servilia's curse has come true - her triumph, seeing her son as the first man in Rome, the Juliii triumphant, has become ash in her mouth through the way it happened. In another, Atia has grown beyond this, because like Pullo in his storyline, she does survive, and has come back to life again. Her dressing down of Livia - the next woman of power in training - and that close up of her face as she watches the triumph, with both grief, awareness of all that brought this to pass and survival written in her face is a great way for the character to go out, and the "history" part of the show to end.
Sidenote: I am sorry though that Octavian's marriage to Scribonia and thus his daughter Julia from said marriage went the way of Fulvia, Octavia's first two marriages and various offsprings of Antony in being excised, because otherwise you could construe a great parallel between Julia and Atia, and Octavian's /Augustus' behaviour towards both. The script even has Atia say that she won't end up on some Greek island, which is of course what Augustus did to Julia later.
The fictional part finds a similar satisfying ending in Pullo gambling on a lie to Octavian, pulling it off, and thus saving Caesarion from his historical fate and vanishing with him in the crowd of the living. And may I say that giving Caesarion the name "Aeneas" was truly inspired? Before that, and before the triumph scene, we get the scene of the dying Vorenus achieving grace and resolution when his children, especially his older daughter, forgive him. Honestly, I can't see Vorenus' storyline ending any other way, and I would have felt cheated if he had made a miraculous recovery at that point, for all that I loved Antony telling him not to die in their final scene and Vorenus saying he wouldn't. His act of redemption - saving Caesarion, as Pullo had saved his children earlier - was done, but all through the season, the loss of Niobe had never stopped haunting him, and as he said to Antony earlier, they both had the same sickness to the death.
Which brings me to yet another thing Rome does well: emotional ties. The friendship between Vorenus and Pullo, without which this show would not work, is love stronger than any of their other ties, but - sorry, slashers - it strikes me as a completely non-sexual, fraternal one. On the other hand, I'd believe slash stories between Antony and Vorenus completely, because of the very different chemistry and two scenes that are basically bookends of each other - Antony pulling Vorenus out of his "Son of Hades" stupor in the second episode of that season, and Vorenus assisting Antony's suicide in De Patre Vostro, both of which are fairly rife with subtext. Agrippa and Maecenas not withstanding, the relationship with Pullo is the closest Octavian comes to friendship, and it's also the only one where you get the idea Octavian believes the other party actually and disinterestedly likes him. And lastly, we have the relationship between Atia and Octavia, which gains a new equality and the same quality of comradery through shared loss which the male relationships have. "I don't know what I'd do if you give up," says Octavia to Atia, and it's a testimony to the show that this is entirely believable, when the contrast to her relationship with her mother at the start of the series could not be greater. Theirs is also the only family relationship within the Juliii that got better and thrives when we leave that doomed clan. Octavian has managed to estrange both his mother and sister, and his marriage with Livia, even without Robert Graves in mind, shares that inhuman quality that dominates him now. Meanwhile, that other family, the Vorenii and Pullo (plus "Aeneas"), having gone through hell before, are flourishing, not least because as opposed to the Juliii, they were able to forgive each other. Salve atque vale.
Images like Caesar's triumph over Vercingetorix in the first season, specifically the scene where Octavian annoints him with bull's blood - and the symbolism of the dying and rising sun is there for the viewer without it being pointed out verbally as the characters don't know yet -, the rendition of Caesar's assassination which gets the visceral brutality of it across in a way I haven't seen in any of the other countless reinactments on screen, or in the second season that shot of Cleopatra's bare feet walking stepping in to the blood left by a dying Antony, Servilia, covered with ashes, a grey nightmare, cursing Atia, Atia's face watching Octavian's triumph in her very last scene, the bright, sterile colours of said triumph, announcing the start of the Augustan age, contrasting with her rich red - are so haunting not just because they're gorgeously shot but because they're layered with meaning. On a general sidenote, this is also finally a show where Rome or the ancient world in general isn't rendered in white but where someone remembered that it was multicoloured, outrageously so. Thank you, show.
The heart of the show were of course our two original characters, Pullo and Vorenus, quite splendidly so, but if their storylines had never touched those of the historical characters but had run solely parallel, the show wouldn't have felt as complete. As it was, the connections between the two plotlines were carefully made and paid off. The connection formed in the first season between Octavian and Pullo means that in the second season, not only is the affection Octavian has for Pullo one of the few remnants of the humanity he increasingly loses as he rises in power but also makes it believable he trusts Pullo at the crucial moment in the finale. Similarly, the debt Vorenus owes Antony from the first season makes it possible for Antony to call him back from death early in the second season, and makes it believable that as they both go to their respective doom in different ways over the course of the second season Vorenus chooses to go with Antony to Egypt, placing him believably and infinitely movingly at the scene of Antony's suicide. If the first season had Vorenus ascendant, only to destroy his life and happiness at the same time Caesar is killed in the senate, while Pullo was once the war was over, descendant, only recovering in that last episode and finding a peaceful resolution with Eirene, the second season made the contrast even greater, between Vorenus as the main character of a tragedy - whose tragedy, as Aristoteles demanded, was partly caused by his own flaws and partly by circumstance and fate - and Pullo as the main character of - no, not a comedy, but a satiric epic of the likes written in the later Empire, by Petronius, for example. He's Everyman, not guiltless by any means or free of his own tragedies (see also: Eirene and Gaia), but with an irrespressible vitality that allows him to bounce back from everything and survive into another age.
Some examples of that difference of mentality I mentioned: the way this show uses curses and religion. When a grief-stricken, raging Vorenus in the first episode of the second season curses his children, it doesn't matter that one of his enemies is the one who abducts said children and inflicts the horror of slavery on them - as far as Vorenus and the children are concerned, he's the guilty party. This is what he believes, and what he spends the rest of the season paying for. Similarly, Servilia isn't the one responsible for what happens in the second half of the season; she's dead. But her curse, spoken in public and sealed with her death, is taken by Atia as truth. And finally, there are Cleopatra's dying words to Octavian, which not even the loyal Agrippa bothers to refute. There is a sense of numens about this - numinosity indeed - about all of this which is entirely without post modern irony or, as would have happened in movies dealing with Ancient Rome in the 50s and 60s, Christian patronizing (i.e. the Roman religion depicted as hollow and the sympathetic characters as proto-Christians, if they can't be actual Christians; Spartacus comes glaringly to mind).
One of the reasons why I think the second season is better than the first: the first one goes over the top early on in regards to Atia, who only thanks to Polly Walker's performance doesn't come across as something straight out of Tacitus - A Bad Woman The Way The Roman Imagined Bad Women, oversexed, completely willing to prostitute her children (to the right people, of course), and over ambitious. I'm thinking of such clunkers as letting Atia shove Octavia into Pompey's bed here (which isn't the way an ambitious Roman mother would have handled the marriage gamble AT ALL), or her hope that young Octavian had sex with Caesar. (Again, the problem here isn't the morals, it's that having homoerotic sex as the penetrated party was regarded as humiliating for the Romans, which is why in propaganda wars in politics it was one of the first slurs to come up. It happened to Caesar - which Atia, as his niece, would have known - when he had his own election campaign for consul, and of course Cicero used it in the Philippika against Antony (we even hear the relevant excerpt in season 2. As Atia is planning for her son to become the next head of the Julian house, this would have been a bad start.) By contrast, in the second season, Atia is still ruthless in her Senecan feud with Servilia, but nothing she does comes across as stupid or gratitious on the part of the writers. The emotional loss of her son is balanced by her increasing closeness to her daughter, and the relationship with Antony is believable emotional as well as sexual, so Atia's reaction to its ending is believable as well.
(Indeed, the Atia/Antony relationship is both one of the virtues and problems of the show in its entirety. It replaces Antony's marriage to Fulvia - who went the way of excised historical characters along with a lot of other folk - and is shown to develop from a fun coupling between two people who like sex and power into a love affair in the Tennessee Williams vein. This posed a two fold problem for the last third of the season, as the show first had to explain the Antony/Octavia marriage - i.e. why, if there is a necessity of a marriage to seal the alliance with Octavian, doesn't Antony marry Atia given the show has established them as a couple since many years by then - and then had to sell us on Antony/Cleopatra as not just another power & sex combination but the grand obsessive love. The first problem was solved by making the insistence on Octavia the direct result of Octavian's spite and unforgiving grudge against his mother (and Antony) as well as a ploy - he doesn't want that marriage to succeed, given that he needs to get rid of Antony sooner or later, and he definitely doesn't want his mother happy with Antony. The second problem wasn't really solved, especially given that the last but one episode which was the only one to show Antony and Cleopatra as a couple before things got doomed took its page directly from Augustan propaganda with its negative depiction of both, though the very last episode turned things around somewhat by giving both of them tragic greatness. Still, as far as couples go, Atia and Antony always came across as adults, and Antony and Cleopatra as naughty children, which wasn't helped by the actress for Cleopatra not being allowed to age visually from her first appearance as a teenager in season 1.)
Atia in the end is shown as the core character as far as the "historical" plotline is concerned (as opposed to Vorenus and Pullo who are the overall heart of the show, as mentioned, and their own core characters in their fictional storyline), and the end sequence of her story more than justifies her survival beyond all historical dates. In one way, Servilia's curse has come true - her triumph, seeing her son as the first man in Rome, the Juliii triumphant, has become ash in her mouth through the way it happened. In another, Atia has grown beyond this, because like Pullo in his storyline, she does survive, and has come back to life again. Her dressing down of Livia - the next woman of power in training - and that close up of her face as she watches the triumph, with both grief, awareness of all that brought this to pass and survival written in her face is a great way for the character to go out, and the "history" part of the show to end.
Sidenote: I am sorry though that Octavian's marriage to Scribonia and thus his daughter Julia from said marriage went the way of Fulvia, Octavia's first two marriages and various offsprings of Antony in being excised, because otherwise you could construe a great parallel between Julia and Atia, and Octavian's /Augustus' behaviour towards both. The script even has Atia say that she won't end up on some Greek island, which is of course what Augustus did to Julia later.
The fictional part finds a similar satisfying ending in Pullo gambling on a lie to Octavian, pulling it off, and thus saving Caesarion from his historical fate and vanishing with him in the crowd of the living. And may I say that giving Caesarion the name "Aeneas" was truly inspired? Before that, and before the triumph scene, we get the scene of the dying Vorenus achieving grace and resolution when his children, especially his older daughter, forgive him. Honestly, I can't see Vorenus' storyline ending any other way, and I would have felt cheated if he had made a miraculous recovery at that point, for all that I loved Antony telling him not to die in their final scene and Vorenus saying he wouldn't. His act of redemption - saving Caesarion, as Pullo had saved his children earlier - was done, but all through the season, the loss of Niobe had never stopped haunting him, and as he said to Antony earlier, they both had the same sickness to the death.
Which brings me to yet another thing Rome does well: emotional ties. The friendship between Vorenus and Pullo, without which this show would not work, is love stronger than any of their other ties, but - sorry, slashers - it strikes me as a completely non-sexual, fraternal one. On the other hand, I'd believe slash stories between Antony and Vorenus completely, because of the very different chemistry and two scenes that are basically bookends of each other - Antony pulling Vorenus out of his "Son of Hades" stupor in the second episode of that season, and Vorenus assisting Antony's suicide in De Patre Vostro, both of which are fairly rife with subtext. Agrippa and Maecenas not withstanding, the relationship with Pullo is the closest Octavian comes to friendship, and it's also the only one where you get the idea Octavian believes the other party actually and disinterestedly likes him. And lastly, we have the relationship between Atia and Octavia, which gains a new equality and the same quality of comradery through shared loss which the male relationships have. "I don't know what I'd do if you give up," says Octavia to Atia, and it's a testimony to the show that this is entirely believable, when the contrast to her relationship with her mother at the start of the series could not be greater. Theirs is also the only family relationship within the Juliii that got better and thrives when we leave that doomed clan. Octavian has managed to estrange both his mother and sister, and his marriage with Livia, even without Robert Graves in mind, shares that inhuman quality that dominates him now. Meanwhile, that other family, the Vorenii and Pullo (plus "Aeneas"), having gone through hell before, are flourishing, not least because as opposed to the Juliii, they were able to forgive each other. Salve atque vale.
