Thelma and Louise's death defiance of Patriarchal Rule
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The Roman Legacy
Annihilation of rebellious or haughty individuals is inevitable when civilization is at stake, regardless of our personal sympathies.
In the Iliad, Homer does not portray Aeneas as a great Trojan hero, but Poseidon does predict that he will eventually rule over the Trojans. With his father and son, Ascanius, and the Trojan survivors, Aeneas leads the flight from the ruins of Troy. The Roman poet Virgil transforms this legend into a political epic, linking blood Roman origins with the Age of Heroes and the ancestry of Troy. Virgil mimics Homer's two epic poems; yet The Aeneid is permeated with patriotic values, most strikingly a devotion to duty. Virgil tells Homer's stories but modifies the ideological implications to shape and define Roman distaste for sagas of individualism--the absolute sovereignty of the State is the paramount goal. The Greek hero, driven by his own ego and his own notions of self-gratification, establishes the dictum, "know thyself." For the Romans, the Greeks were too likely to commit reckless and antisocial acts; in general the Greek hero was too prone to all kinds of excessive behaviors. In the Odyssey,Odysseus' shipmate Elpenor gets drunk, falls off Circe's roof, and breaks his neck. His shade wings off to the underworld. Oddly enough no one seems to notice he is missing. Odysseus later discovers Elpenor's shade in the underworld. By code, he promises Elpenor he will return to the island of Circe and give him a proper burial.
In The Aeneid, we have the same narrative situation. Aeneas enters the underworld and encounters the shade of his former helmsman Palinurus. Aeneas also promises to give Palinurus a proper burial, but the difference between these two helmsmen exposes Virgil's intention of redefining heroic immortality or fame. Palinurus, it seems, dies at the hands of the Italians after being swept overboard during a storm with the ship's tiller in his hands. As helmsman, his concern for his own life is secondary to the concern he feels for Aeneas' ship and crew: "I swear by those harsh seas that no fear which gripped me on my own behalf was so strong as the other fear, that your ship, robbed of her steering gear, and wrested from her helmsman's hand, might founder. . . ." Virgil transforms the hedonistic Elpenor into a duty-bound soldier of the State. Virgil's characters sanctify Rome's destiny to conquer and rule, and emphasize duty as the quintessential quality of heroic behavior.
Yet Duty does not come easily. In Book IV of The Aeneid when Dido confronts Aeneas about his plan to abandon her, he replies that he has no choice and must go to Italy. On the surface, Aeneas appears to sacrifice his one true love for the noble emperical cause. Still, the love affair between Dido and Aeneas is difficult to summarize. While enlisting sympathy for the Carthaginian Queen, Virgil gives us a shabby portrayal of Aeneas sneaking, almost without nerve, out to the fleet to get away from Dido and his romantic involvements. In fact, some readers may feel that Dido is a great deal more likable than duty-bound Aeneas, because of her genuine or authentic portrayal of human passion and risk. But this is the point! In a world where the Myth of State has dominion, we may find ourselves loving and identifying with colorful and charismatic individuals, but ultimately such love affairs and sympathies are shown to be misguided. Annihilation of rebellious individuals is inevitable when civilization is at stake, regardless of personal sympathies. This is the Roman saga.
These are the tales of law and its transgression.
In contemporary Hollywood mythopoeia, we see this played out in films like Thelma and Louise, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Bonnie and Clyde. We may cheer for these characters and the freedom they come to represent; we sympathize with their actions and situations, but in the end these heroes cannot stand against the ultimate power and authority of the State--they are brutally "brought low" more or less by the soldiers of government. Hence, ancient prototypes remind us of the futility of individual agendas, the futility of investing emotional energy into the illusion of egocentrism; the ultimate goal is the triumph of law and order--the fundamental principles of eternal civilization.
Paul Newman plays characters like Cassidy and Cool Hand Luke, an individual's rebellion against all forms of law--the best of mythology of self. But again most of these characters suffer a kind of agony that seems to suggest the futility of individual rebellion against absolute authority. Or in the more notorious case of mythology of self as Patriotism and rebellion, we can suggest that death is preferable to a loss of liberty. This notorious idea is of course immortalized in Patrick Henry's Speech on March 23, 1775.
