(This review of Disney's Hercules originally appeared in Interzone.)
My daughter's first doll was a naked, degenitalled male abandoned on the street, the only clue to his identity - later confirmed by forensic research as Prince Eric from The Little Mermaid - the word DISNEY stamped on the back of his neck. She called him Man, which struck me as rather profound. "Man's leg fall off," she would observe, with a note of sorrow for us all.
These last times are certainly a new dawn for Disney, as befits an organisation which positions itself increasingly as the first fully-secular world religion, with the canon of animated features its sacred texts. If you put your ear to the future, you can already hear the inspirational theme song of Hercules chirping out from school assemblies in the post-denominational multiculture that is part of our millennial Disney World. (Why, this is Disney World, nor are we out of it.) "I can beat the odds/I can go the distance/I don't care how far/I can be so strong..." Ask not what this stuff is doing to our young people's heads, or what kind of depressive baggage for later life is being deposited by this relentless assurance that nobody has limitations, that everyone is entitled to everything and capable of gratifying their most inflated fantasies. This is a call to faith, and to suffer the little children when the plate comes round.
Like any religious organisation, Disney has a covenant with its constituents and a need to reach out to the masses. All Disney offerings since its own Renaissance have been anxious about their material, and painfully keen to avoid construable disparagement towards such powerfully plutopsephic interest-groups as women, Islam, native Americans, and the differently-shouldered. As such, though Hercules is New Disney's least embarrassed feature, it's still eager to reassure all those disenfranchised by the white imperialists' classical tradition that its subject matter is now free of any previous owners. The first players on the scene are the very, ahem, red-figure chorus of Muses, whose African-American narratorial frame reassures us that, whatever palefaced European élites may have done through the old millennia to appropriate Herc and his buddies for their own interests, today it's Black Athena who's ultimately whooping the tunes. And at least Hercules, unlike any other classical figure bar Cleopatra, can draw on a long and jolly postwar tradition in popular culture, ever since Joe Levine's 1958 vehicle splashed out an incredible $1M on publicity to make Steve Reeves a star, a cheesy dubbed Italian beefcake movie an international blockbuster, and Cinecittà sword-and-sandal movies a picabudget production line that eventually killed off the Hollywood classical epic altogether.
And yet, Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit. "Wouldya listen to him?" a choreutes complains of Charlton Heston's prologue. "He's makin' the story sound like some Greek tragedy!" But it's one of the delicious inexplicables of modern cinema that every film to come out of Hollywood is openly, systematically modelled on a standard template (diagrammed repeatedly in standard works like Syd Field's Screenplay) that derives directly, though in a weirdly-garbled form, from a 4th century BC tutor on how to write Greek tragedies. As Francis X. Feighan, author of the screenwriting program Collaborator, once memorably said on a Moving Pictures: "You get your character up in a tree, you throw rocks at him for a while, and then you get him down. And that's your basic three-act structure in the Aristotelian terms". It's just a shame that books III and up of Aristotle's Poetics - which dealt originally with explosion movies, screwball romances, John Grisham adaptations, relationship-oriented chickflix, and coming-of-age comedy vampire westerns - were all destroyed at the end of The Name of the Rose II, leaving only a few scattered fragments preserved in late glossographers to bear witness to the original screenwriting guru's seminal discussion of why pirate movies flop, and his startling messianic prophecy of the coming of Jennifer Jason Leigh.
Now, it has to be conceded right off that, even by Hollywood's own classical standards, Hercules is phenomenally well crafted. For this decisive rebel assault on the cultural fortress, Disney has sent in its A-team of Musker and Clements - now the most successful, and maybe the best, feature-animation directors in history - and even after Little Mermaid and Aladdin this is easily their finest hour. Though there are still technical wrinkles in the blending of CG and cel animation, particularly in the hydra sequence, Hercules is generally state-of-all-its-arts: tightly-scripted, unusually funny, and completely disarming even during the feeble musical numbers, which certainly aren't much threat to The Jungle Book. Above all, it's simply beautiful to look at, with stunning backgrounds, some exquisite colour paletting, and some astonishingly-nuanced character rendering that fully-justifies the new-style end credits (where voice and animator are bracketed side-by-side). Though Scarfe's designs absolutely deserve their accolades, it's in the execution that the full virtuosity lies. It's easy to admire the performance of James Woods as Hades - or rather, of course, vice-versa, with the animator's delicate recreation of Woodsian moues and mannerisms you only recognise when you see them caricatured. But there's arguably even better work in the visual characterisation of Susan Egan's Meg, where they don't seem to have used the actress so closely as a template; and even the hero is the nearest thing yet achieved to an appealing Disney human-male lead.
At the same time, it's pretty radical stuff for Disney. The studio's creative trough in the seventies and eighties is often blamed on the way that, in the dark days following the founder's death, the apostles would gather in the boardroom and make decisions by asking, "What would Walt do?" And not the least impressive thing about Hercules is that it's hard to imagine Walt doing anything remotely like it. Certainly it's the first Disney feature to acknowledge that the world of animation has been changed by MTV, Nickelodeon, and Spumco: that the plump, cute look of traditional Disney characters has come to seem stilted and outdated, and that the kind of plasticity achieved in Aladdin's genie can sustain an entire movie. Not only that, but it's confident enough of its style to poke fun at Old Disney through the incongruous disguises of the Scarfean demons of Pain and Panic as stubby, big-eyed Art Babbitt kids spouting golden-age dialogue like "Jeepers, Mister!"
Yet this very iconoclasm is unexpectedly true to the spirit of its mythic matter. It goes without saying that there's no such thing as authenticity in Greek myth; or rather, the only true authenticity is radical departure from all known previous variants. Before its rapid ossification in the fourth century BC, myth is a dynamically recombinant and mutational memetic lifeform subjected to one of the most intensive hothouse breeding programmes in the history of the west: the fulfilment of quotas for the Athenian dramatic festivals with up to two dozen new tragedies and satyr-plays a year, out of the same pool of 200 or so recycled stories. There are no correct versions; the only thing that fixes one variant as definitive for later ages is canonisation in a literary text so famous that it fossilises the story against any further mutation. But there are no such works in the Hercules myth-system: no canonical, A-list classical texts dealing directly and extensively with the hero's career, despite walk-on parts in drama and epic, and a couple of tragedies on darker versions of the closing phases of his career. And it's this memetic adaptability that makes myth interesting in the first place. The process is driven by environmental factors: new variants arise, compete for resources, and succeed in reproducing because they fill a niche in the cultural ecology that supports them. Movies are just the same: a chaotic, unpredictable form of memetic engineering in which stories are remade, updated, cannibalised and recombined in a relentless struggle for existence in a world of finite capital. Successful narrative clichés propagate through the meme pool like plot viruses, gobbling up cash from the surrounding ecosystem because they're ideally adapted to the efficient exchange of desire for money that sustains the cycle of growth.
Certainly Disney's own mutations offer a fascinating case study. Herc's best girl Megara is more familiar to the classical tradition as the wife the hero kills ap. Euripides and Seneca in a frenzied massacre of his family. In Disney World, such distasteful matters are image-edited out of the picture - though you have to wonder about the motives behind the inclusion of a line like "Meg, I would never ever hurt you". By comparison, in the network-primetime universe of The Legendary Journeys, the victim is wife no. 2 Deianeira (who in Sophocles kills him slowly and painfully in a 300-line death scene, topping herself along the way), and the offender is not the peaceable, unpsychotic hero himself but his divine nemesis Hera, jealous (as in ancient sources) of Zeus's extra-hierogamous mortal nookie with Alcmena. Unfortunately, this begetting, though canonised over and over in fifty versions from Plato Comicus to Cole Porter, is itself something that nice Disney people just don't do. So in this version, Herc is - amazingly - conceived and born in legal divine wedlock, and the equally-monogamous Alcmena and Amphitryon merely adopt him. (Brisk sounds of subterranean gyration from Plautus, Molière, Kleist, Giraudoux, &c. &c.)
In the event, though, even the most rampant anachronisms and deviations in this Hercules looks rather sedate by comparison with the far cheekier Legendary Journeys, with their dotty onomastics (one episode of Xena sported a character called Twickenham) and roaming gangs of Mycenaean Maoris. Meanwhile, the copyright-free nature of the material is already breeding all-new memetic variants: Tor currently have a workgang of Star Trek novelists churning out an independent series of Hercules novels - "New Adventures of the Mightiest Hero of All!" - as a mischievous spoiler to the Boulevard TLJ spinoffs. What, rather, defines Disney's Hercules is its deeper, mythical authenticity: its respect for the meaning invested in the figure of the hero for each culture that retells him. For archaic and classical Greeks, Heracles was the embodiment of the mortal hero at the edge of mortality, the summit of achievement and pain where the mortal condition breaks through to the divine. For Stoics and Romans, he was a culture-hero and mythical model of ideologically-sanctioned behaviour. And for Disney, Herc is the human embodiment of the American hero we all aspire to become, whatever our ethnicity, trading status, or level of disposable income.
Despite its pagan setting and east-coast yiddishe repartee, Hercules is Disney's most openly biblical movie: a distillation of the most extreme of all neoChristian fundamentalisms, playing to every American male's instinctive knowledge that, however dysfunctional and pathetic he may seem to the outside world, he is in fact the Son of God and the indifference of the world to his unappreciated talents are merely part of His passion. "Sometimes I feel," says Herc to Ma and Pa , "like I don't belong here - like I'm supposed to be somewhere else" (raises eyes to heaven). ("Yes!" says the audience. "That's exactly how I feel too! Gee whillikins, I must be the Messiah! Golly, is this a feelgood movie or what?") The choral recitative openly describes this version of the legend as "the gospel truth", and the narrative dutifully chronicles His divine begetting and becoming man, skipping rapidly to His coming of age and setting forth to prove his godhead (dismissing his mortal parents from the rest of the movie with a perfunctory "Mom, Pop, you're the greatest parents anyone could have, but I've gotta know"), and culminating in his conquest of death, descent into hell, and rising again to sit at the Father's right hand.
And yet, like all true myths, it's very much a gospel of its time. This hero's enemy is not sin, or suffering, or the jealous celestial stepmother of ancient sources, but the one true nemesis of every American, personal Death. (Guess who loses.) Explicit religious teachings are confined to cracker-barrel platitudes like "a true hero isn't measured by the size of his strength but by the size of his heart" (a line the schoolboy-minded will already have completed elsewise). Most tellingly, though the gospel narrative has been composited with knowing grafts from Joseph Campbell by way of The Empire Strikes Back, young Whattageek Destructoboy Jercules' progress from zero to hero follows a uniquely American trajectory in which it's taken for granted that the deal includes celebrity, worldwide adulation, fabulous riches, and orchestrated global franchising of your name and likeness.
As in Jurassic Park, this is a complex kind of irony that tries to disarm you by nudging you that it's tongue-in-cheek: we have to understand that self-depreciating satire of the "I'm an action figure" kind doesn't actually depreciate the sales of, er, action figures. Rather, we should understand that these mass-produced plastic homunculi are not graven images but icons, a lens through which the soul can focus more truly on the divine. Ditto, of course, the lunchboxes, thick shakes, thermofibre pie-warmers, et cetera ad inf.: not just tools of merchandising, but instruments of contemplation and redemption to raise our eyes to the stars. So sing, you pathetic little runts: "I can beat the odds." (Whap.) "I can go the distance." (Smack.) I said SING.