AIMS Sponsored Issue of Journal of Pop Film & TV
In April 2023, AIMS’ Publications Committee released their first publication, a special issue of the Journal of Popular Film and Television co-edited by AIMS members, Sylia Magerstädt and Monica S. Cyrino.
This publication includes the following:
The ancient Mediterranean cultures of Greece and Rome. often referred to as classical antiquity, together with other celebrated ancient civilizations such as those of Egypt, Babylon, and Persia, frequently play starring roles as ideal sites for movie and television screens to depict the iconic characters and plots that emerge from the ancient world. The viewing audience is invited to experience the spectacle of ancient classical worlds deployed to accomplish a number of different objectives: screen images of antiquity can be used to support contemporary political goals, to interrogate current social issues, or to engage in cultural debates about the modern world’s connection to the ancient classical past. Viewers of films and television series about the ancient world remain engaged in a long and sometimes complex relationship with the representation of antiquity on screen, an engagement that has been well analyzed in the last few years by scholars and critics. Today, the study of films and television series that portray, adapt, and reinvent ancient classical worlds is a significant and rewarding critical subfield within the study of classical reception that seeks to partner with film and television studies for productive results. This special theme issue, Antiquity Now: The Ancient Classical World on Television, is—like the AIMS–Antiquity in Media Studies network from which it emerged—committed to the practice of reception studies as an interdisciplinary endeavor involving classics, film and television studies, and other related disciplines that study ancient worlds.
“Time-Travel Tragedy: Netflix’s Dark and Athenian Drama” by Dan Curley
The Netflix time-travel series Dark exhibits many motifs found in ancient Athenian tragedy, from themes to modes of presentation. These include the use of myth, emphasis on houses and family trauma, mirror scenes, and other techniques for showing parallel events across generations, acts of murder and incest, preoccupation with fate, and divine intervention in the form of deus-ex-machina appearances. Together these motifs encourage Dark to be viewed as a tragic enterprise for the twenty-first century.
“Oedipal Anxieties in HBO’s Westworld” by Kirsten Day
In recent decades, scholars have recognized close connections between Western film and Greek and Roman antiquity, a relationship HBO’s Westworld brings into sharp relief through classical themes, characterizations, and allusions. Two episodes from season 2 in particular have a heavy classical bent. Episode 4 (“Riddle of the Sphinx”) casts park owner James Delos as an Oedipus figure who, in attempting to avoid his fate, runs right into it, as he is confronted with the truth about his nature and identity. In episode 9, William too is identified with Oedipus, when his wife commits suicide after recognizing her husband’s true nature, and William murders his own kin through a failure of recognition, while quotations from Plutarch and Plotinus highlight the issues of identity, fate, and self-knowledge that resound throughout the episode. While the series more broadly is concerned with patriarchal overreach and issues of free will and identity, these two episodes, when examined through a classical lens, offer a concentrated view. In the end, much like its Sophoclean predecessor, Westworld works as an implicit criticism of unbridled ambition, patriarchal narcissism, and lack of self-awareness.
This article focuses on Black representations of Greco-Roman goddesses in film and on television, exploring the historical and ideological conditions which have allowed audiences to react neutrally or favorably toward such representations. Adopting the transmedial perspective, the intersecting forces that have gradually disjointed conceptions of the gods and goddesses of Greek mythology in popular culture and imagination are considered. Such forces include nonspecialist understandings of ancient gender and its artistic interpretation, race versus colorism, and the commodity culture of cinema. Some portrayals of Black goddesses examined in this article appear in works imagineered or influenced by Disney: Hercules (1997 film, 1998–1999 animated series), The Little Mermaid (1989 film, 2008 Broadway musical) and Once Upon a Time (2011–2018 television series), whereas others appear in Syfy’s The Magicians (2015-2020 television series) and Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson (2010 film and the upcoming television series). Casting Black women as Greek goddesses gradually weakens the conceptual entanglement between the Whiteness and the Greco-Roman divine, priming audiences to accept alternative representations of deities through cultural accretion.
“Heroes Never Sweat the Small Stuff: Fortuna in the CW’s Supernatural” by Jennifer Ann Rea
The TV show Supernatural (2005–2020) features itinerant brothers Sam and Dean Winchester battling pagan gods from ancient Greco-Roman mythology who pose a threat to the present-day American way of life. The show utilizes two key concepts to define perils to American culture and values: the frontier myth and the myth of American exceptionalism. In a remote town in Alaska (i.e., the frontier), the brothers encounter the Roman goddess Fortuna, who reveals to the Winchesters how they can protect America. Fortuna’s appearance signifies a shift in how the show’s heroes, Sam and Dean, see themselves: they are forced to experience the despair everyday Americans feel when their luck runs out. A critical analysis of several key episodes will demonstrate that as the series advances, the focus on the brothers’ erasure of pagan threats to America is replaced by a critique of monotheistic religion, a reexamination of the myth of American exceptionalism, and social commentary on the problems with a culture based on consumerism.
antiquityinmediastudies.wordpress.com 