A list of articles about classically-relevant film and television, with viewing suggestions that link to information on where to watch online. Perfect pandemic activity: reading counts as productive, so then you can watch TV afterwards without guilt!
Horror
Watch with: the Halloween movies, Us, Scream, The Walking Dead
When the Classics Won’t Stay Dead
E.D. Adams and T.J. Bolt on how ancient and modern storytelling handles sequels:
By looking at the ways in which modern horror’s propensity for sequels mirrors ancient literary practice, we can enrich our understanding of horror sequels and appreciate the sequel as a pillar of the horror genre.
The Undead in Bed
Ken Tully on ancient and modern zombie lovers:
Our own society expresses fears not through myth, but through media. Could it be that the stigma of aging and ugliness of death have nurtured a genre of the undead?
Horrific Catharsis
E.D. Adams and T.J. Bolt on modern horror’s ancient pedigree:
Both the structural and the thematic similarities between tragedy and horror suggest that horror films are inheritors of the tragic tradition. The Scream franchise reveals its interest in this inheritance through its occasional direct references to the classical tradition and its clear familiarity with the tropes of the tragic genre.
The Uncanniest of Valleys
T.H.M. Geller-Goad on ancient and modern dopplegangers:
When we tell stories about meeting our doubles, they are not usually happy stories. Think of the myth of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection and wasted away. On some level, we must fear self-knowledge, and suffer from a fragile sense of self. Who are you? How do you know? What makes you you? Are you replaceable?
Classics-themed
Sing, Goddess, the Story of Tonight
Mark Buchan on straight-washing in Hamilton and Troy:
Indeed, the central dramatic dilemma Achilles and Alexander Hamilton face down, and which anchors the plot, is: should love be between equals, or is it part of a social, domestic arrangement, embedding a man in the family he ultimately controls? The similarity in plot of both is tied to how the central characters construct their erotic identities.
Sing, Goddess, the Story of Tonight
Love Triangles and Narrative in Hamilton and the Iliad
eidolon.pub
This Is Not Sparta
Sarah Bond on why white supremacists love Sparta:
While the movie 300 focuses on the fight for Greek liberty in the conflict with Persia in the early 5th century BCE, it also neglects to tell the audience that Sparta also took liberty from others.
(Sex) Striking Out: Spike Lee’s Chi-raq
Helen Morales on Spike Lee’s adaptation of Lysistrata:
The key problem is the movie’s failure to provide a feasible solution to the violence. It is a mistake that Aristophanes did not make.
Hip-Hopera Americana
Matthew Wellenback on Hamilton and Chi-raq:
Even as Hamilton and Chi-Raq move modern dramatic story-telling in new directions, they thus return to some of the oldest practices of the theater and reignite long-standing debates about the relationship between art and real life. Greek tragedy, meet your latest successor, American hip-hopera.
Sci-fi
Watch with: Blade Runner, Star Wars, Westworld
Do Androids Dream of Electric Greeks?
C.W. Marshall on Blade Runner 2049:
This isn’t a review of 2049. I want instead to discuss the three most prominent classical images of the film — the wooden horse, Oedipus, and Pygmalion’s statue, Galatea.
How Epic is Star Wars?
Rachel Lesser on the Star Wars franchise and epic successors:
What in particular defines a “classical epic,” and how might The Force Awakens or the other Star Wars films fit into this category? And what exactly is the Aeneid’s relationship with its Homeric precedents, and is the new Star Wars movie really responding to the earlier movies in a similar way?
Virgil in Westworld
Columnist Nandini Pandey on Westworld’s katabases:
Via and beyond their complementary visions of the afterlife, the Aeneid and Westworld together raise enduring questions about freedom, heredity, and creative violence as they apply to artists’ quests for originality as well as the universal human struggle to exert agency within the storylines of our lives.
Levity
Watch with: Mean Girls, Love Actually, How I Met Your Mother, Bromans
If Classics Were High School
Michael Mignanelli imagines Mean Girls quotes in the mouths of classical figures:
“You all have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores. It just makes it OK for guys to call you sluts and whores.”
— Lucretia to the other women in Collatia
Legendary! The Aeneid’s Tapestry of Lies
Ayelet Haimson Lushkov on the similarities between Aeneas and … Barney Stinson from How I Met Your Mother:
These superficial characteristics, however, fail to explain why the figure of Barney Stinson really appeals to us, especially in conjunction with Aeneas. What intrigues me in both characters — and what makes a comparison of more than passing critical interest — is their common role as masterful storytellers, and the female audience of their stories.
To Me, You Are Creepy
Assistant Editor Tori Lee on the exclusus amator trope:
As the rom-com as a circumscribed genre continues to lose popularity (I did manage to persuade one person to accompany me to Bridget Jones’s Baby, which was generously deemed “not as bad as you might imagine” by, of all sources, The Financial Times), the excluded lover trope is also losing some of its formerly defining characteristics.
Bromani Ite Domum
Editor-at-large Yung In Chae offers scathing and hilarious recaps of the Bromans reality tv show:
The contestants are eager to show off their knowledge of the civilization (or is it just civilization?) that they are here to honor. Modina claims to know about Caesar. “Caesar salad?” Kai asks. “No, just Caesar,” she says, giving him a look. Brandon marvels at how they’re going two thousand years back. “I’ve never been that far back!” he exclaims. Has he been any number of years back?
Drama
Watch with: First Man, My Brilliant Friend
Elena Ferrante Is My Mother
Barbara Graziosi on outing authors:
Still, it is also true that literature enables us to feel ourselves into others — others who are not like ourselves. If there is one good thing about Gatti’s revelation, it is this reminder: Ferrante is not, and need not be, exactly like her characters in order to write authentically about them
Elena Ferrante’s Virgil
Stephanie McCarter on the Aeneid and Ferrante:
Neither Elena nor Aeneas ultimately restrains the shadow of the feminine. Aeneas submits to fury as war embroils him in the epic’s second half, and he perpetrates death with gruesome impiety. Lila’s reading in fact prioritizes this furious Aeneas, whose moral ambiguity disquiets readers and undermines the easy simplicity of a pious hero.
Heroes Are A Virus From Outer Space
Columnist Nandini Pandey on First Man:
Take a breather from the virulent rhetoric on display in the news and our annual conference and let me show you how we harbor and honor the mental infections that kill us, from the first epic to First Man.
Adventure
Watch with: The Harry Potter movies, The Lightning Thief, Coco, Wonder Woman
Crossing Cultures as a First-Generation Classicist
Columnist Nandini Pandey on first-generation experience and Coco:
Growing up, books were my marigold bridge to a wider world. They were all the more a lifeline as the walls of my house began closing in, as my family’s differences from others loomed larger in my mind. All my parents’ friends looked like them. None of the kids at school looked like me.
The Whitening Thief
Maxwell T. Paule on Percy Jackson’s white supremacy:
That said, Riordan’s later growth doesn’t excuse The Lightning Thief’’s problems. A the end of the day, it’s still a text rooted in white supremacist ideology, and I’m not going to rush out to buy it for my niece. On the other hand, I’m not going to tell you to skip it, either. In fact, you probably should read it.
Wonder Woman and Her Influence
Michele Kennerly and Carly S. Woods on Wonder Woman and the persuasive power of women:
So we stake our claim in the old: the story and history of Wonder Woman are suggestive of the ancient (yet enduring) habit of talking about influence, obedience, and persuasion through a gender-based idiom of power.
Epigraphs and Epitaphs
Mitchell Parks on the Aeschylean epigraph on the final Harry Potter book:
While some might see it as mere classical window dressing — a quick dash of ancient literature meant to add the kind of unexamined “prestige” that can become odious, if not downright harmful — I believe that the quotation is part of a consistent and, as near as I can determine, intentional network of borrowings closely tied to the themes of the series.
Report of the Tenure Committee of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry Regarding The Tenure Application of Minerva McGonagall
Eric C. Smith with some levity:
Tenured members of the Hogwarts faculty should be pushing the boundaries of their disciplines; they should be magical innovators, and not simply tradents for old knowledge. Since only one professor per department may hold tenure, would not Hogwarts have been better served by hiring a more senior Wizard, and allowing Professor McGonagall to continue on in the junior role?
Up to No Good
Liz Butterworth on Hogwarts’ terrible pedagogy:
But it seems, after twenty years of Pottermania, high time that we tickle the sleeping dragon, interrogate our celebration of how Harry Potter shaped a generation’s collective imagination, and face the fact that the magic of Harry Potter bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the processes by which academic institutions discriminate and exclude.
The Greek Tragedy of Tom Riddle Tyrannos
Brett M. Rogers on Voldemort’s tragic and tyrannical elements:
Dumbledore’s lecture is perhaps the series’ most complete statement on the nature of tyranny and seems to point to the question — or, if you will, the riddle — at the heart of the Harry Potter story: “What makes a man become an evil tyrant?”
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Return Them
Margaret Day Elsner on issues of repatriation and appropriation:
So the issue of reception and cultural appropriation and its connection to Fluffy, the Parthenon Marbles, and Native American religion begs a broader question, one of ownership. Who decides when something is taken from its native setting, and more importantly, who gives permission?
Harry Potter and the Undead Author
Caroline Bishop on JK Rowling and Cicero:
In much the same way, Rowling challenges the image of the well wrought urn produced by an artist who politely plays dead. But she is not the first to have done so: it was challenged long ago by the very existence of Roman literature, which made a virtue out of unoriginality. And when we look at Roman literature and the tradition it inspired, we can see that authors have not always been forced to play dead for their works to be appreciated.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phaedrus
Caroline Bishop reimagines the Phaedrus as a Hogwartian dialogue:
Socrates
My good Harry, where are you rushing off to, and where have you come from?Harry
I’ve come from the Headmaster’s office, Socrates, son of Cephalus, and I’m going for a walk through the Hogwarts grounds. I’ve spent a long time with Dumbledore today, since early morning.
How Harrius Potter Helped Me Read More Latin
Justin Slocum Bailey on the joys of reading Harry Potter in Latin:
Of course, you might worry whether the Latin of Harrius Potter is such that you would even want to soak it up. It’s not the nimblest Latin, and the English sentence structure underlying the Latin frequently seeps through.
The Boy Who Was A Fox
Managing Editor Sarah Scullin offers some not very accurate translations of the Latin Harry Potter book:
Master and Mistress Dursley, who used to live in the temples of Ligustrorian Childbirth with a number of signs (four, in fact), not in the suburbs, used to say with a normal amount of reason that to live without a UTI meant they themselves didn’t feel pain for any reason.
