Victor Davis Hanson: Gay Old Times? Oliver Stone perpetuates a classical myth

The consensus about Oliver Stone's Alexander is that the film's splashy gay motifs could not overcome the stilted dialogue, ludicrous Irish-brogue and Count Dracula accents, and excruciating minutes of dead screen time devoted to model-like poses, secretive eye contact, and soap-opera double entendres. Stone's apparent hope was that he could garner media hype by overt homosexual scenes of kissing and hugging, and by candor about same-sex relations: The world's first global conqueror was really more a sensitive and feminine creature of the bedroom and banquet hall than a great captain of blood and iron.

In reality, the movie proved not so much scandalous as boring. The problem with Stone's lurid sexual narrative is not his historical inaccuracies, but the movie's obsession with sexual intrigue, which causes much of Alexander's amazing story to be lost. The controversies that emerge from the extant historians of Alexander — Arrian, Curtius, Diodorus, and Plutarch — do not hinge on sex. Rather, the "good" and "bad" ancient and modern traditions of Alexander involve a number of far more fascinating issues — nearly all of them omitted by Stone.

Alexander helped to kill more Greeks at the victory of Chaeronea, the siege of Thebes, the campaigns in Ionia, and the battles of Granicus and Issus than the Persians killed in a century and a half of EastñWest conflict. The razing of Thebes — the dramatic setting of much of Athenian tragedy, home to Pythagoreans and Pindar — is ignored. The brutal siege of Tyre was considered a military masterpiece; it and the storming of Gaza go unnoticed. How or why Persepolis was torched is never really investigated, but has framed centuries of debate. …

The other Alexander the Great movie will be directed by a guy named Baz Luhrmann. If you loved what he did with Moulin Rouge you'll probable love his Alexander.

Personally when my wife and I saw Moulin Rouge I walked out about the first time they broke into a Madonna song.

Fortunately for wife we were watching it on pay-per-view so I just walked down the hall and surfed on Free Republic and she didn't have to walk home from the theater : )

That work and commerce are honorable endeavors when honest are indeed pretty unusual and therefore abnormal points of view from a historical viewpoint. But I'll stick with them anyway.

Aboslutely. And it concerns me that so many people seem to be drifting back toward the naive attitudes that don't understand why things like profit margins are necessary for investments and business to thrive. They are falling back toward the idea that profits are somehow "stealing" because the middleman isn't doing any "work" to "earn" them. In fact, I think it's the source of a lot of the hostility toward white color workers and small businesses in general and the wealthy, in particular and the whole idea that they don't deserve their money because they are simply taking it away from the people who do the real work. Ugh. That's the Cargo Cult mentality.

I've read Tom's book. As usual, excellent.

So I guess I'm not telling you anything that you don't already know, then. He writes good stuff. His books on Cosmic Justice and Visions are excellent, too.

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