The woes of talking animals and some New Weird solutions

I have a hard-and-fast rule: no talking animals allowed in adult literature, unless it’s Orwell’s Animal Farm or Pierre Boule’s Planet of the Apes. Okay, add to that some of Kafka’s short stories, but that’s it. Seriously, if an anthropomorphic animal crops up in any other book, I’m liable to start groaning loudly before jettisoning it altogether. You could build a house from the number of novels I’ve purchased, started reading and then swiftly abandoned. Half of them have chatty animals in them.

This bête noire first reared its ugly head while reading Michel Houellebecq some years ago. The bad boy of modern French literature, his first novel Whatever (pithily translated from the French Extension du domaine de la lutte) had me hooked until … the anti-hero’s animal fables started popping up. I don’t know what Houellebecq was thinking, but these Aesopian interludes practically ruined the whole story for me of a depressed computer engineer unable to get sex.

Four legs good, two legs bad 

Reading Animal Farm for the first time at school and learning all about allegory and how to pick out the veiled references to Stalinist Russia – now that was a real trip. It got me reading Aesop’s fables and Golding’s Lord of the Flies and re-evaluating those old Loony Tunes cartoons. But as a literary device, the fable swiftly loses its lustre, and so by the time I got to Houellebecq’s animal allegories, all I could do was mutter under my breath, “merde” (admittedly, he did redeem himself with his nihilistic sci-fi tale of cloning in The Possibility of an Island).

It’s for similar reasons that I developed such schizophrenic feelings towards Adrian Tchaikovsky’s award-winning sci-fi novel Children of Time. On the one hand, the descriptive imagination behind the Gilgamesh spaceship had me in awe: its technological deterioration, the intergenerational evolution/ revolution of its human cargo, the endless odyssey in search of a habitable planet … all crisply written and well thought out. In a secondary plot, however, Tchaikovsky decides to construct a whole freaking world out of the Aesopian fable. Every time the story shifted to Kern’s World, where a failed terraforming experiment has given an evolutionary leg up to a population of spiders, I started sighing and losing interest. For all its imaginative power, the spidery storyline just got sillier and sillier; and by the time I
arrived at the climactic chapters, where little spider-astronauts are launching themselves into space and attacking the human-manned spaceship, I could read no more. 

Eight legs good, two legs bad  (Photo: David Mark) 

Personally, I prefer David Wong’s This Book is Full of Spiders any day of the week. But I’m sure fans of the children’s classic Charlotte’s Web absolutely adored Tchaikovsky’s planet of intelligent, emotional spiders. That sounds a bit snarky, but it’s an observation rooted in culture and history. Talking animals have always been the mainstay of mythology, folk tales, fairy tales and children’s literature. Three Little Pigs and The Golden Compass and all that. With this sort of baggage, it takes a talented writer like Tchaikovsky to even convince an old cynic like myself to at least try reading an animal parable set in outer space. Perhaps I’ve simply lost touch with my ‘inner child’ – the Id, the source of creative energy – and am thus not as predisposed to hi-tech fairy tales as some. Heck, maybe I’m more in touch with my ‘inner adult’, the conservative, responsible, anal part of your Psyche; the surly professor in your first creative writing class threatening to throttle the first student who writes anything remotely related to talking animals.

The glowing reviews for Children of Time do seem to put me in the minority, as do the praises for Tchaikovsky’s sequel Children of Ruin, with its uplifted octopuses and utopia of humans and spiders living in peaceful harmony. Or maybe, just maybe, I’m more of a hard sci-fi reader rather than an all-embracing devotee of the fantasy genre. Indeed, Tchaikovsky did cut his teeth in fantasy writing; and personally speaking, I can’t abide any dragons that speak in fantasy films while sword fights bore me to tears, unless of course it’s John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981).

Whatever my psychological issues, I had even graver misgivings about The Child Garden by Geoff Ryman. Supposedly it’s a dystopic sci-fi novel aimed at adults; only it’s muddied by too many childish notions that steer it towards the section for young adult fantasy (maybe there’s a lesson to be learned here: never trust a sci-fi book with any form of child or children in its title – except for P.D. James’ 1992 novel Children of Men and the movie of the same name). Similar to Children of Time and its Kern’s World seeded with a gene-editing virus that inadvertently uplifts a superior race of spiders, The Child Garden gives us a semi-tropical London of the future where young humans are raised and educated by a vaguely described virus technology (another pet hate of mine: sci-fi authors who squeeze in miraculous ‘virus technologies’ without any real clue about glycoproteins or RNA and DNA).

Fantasy writing loves a good polar bear  (Photo: Stefan Keller)  

The main protagonist is a musical teenage prodigy who’s resistant to these unexplained pedagogical viruses. But if I was frustrated by the author’s lack of microbiological research, I was completely bamboozled by his protagonist’s lesbian relationship with – wait for it – a genetically engineered opera-singing polar bear. I tried my darndest to plough ahead, suspending my belief beyond all reason. Only I kept being reminded of Kungfu Panda at an LGBT rally. Needless to say, I couldn’t take this novel too seriously and soon abandoned ship. I should mention, though, that it has a heap of adult fans out there and actually won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1990.

The polar bear itself is a popular motif in animal-talking fantasy worlds. Goodreads lists 37 such novels featuring this carnivorous white bear, the vast majority being children’s literature, such as the armoured polar bears of The Golden Compass. But there’s also the adult-oriented Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada, about three generations of polar bears who “tell the stories of their lives in this strange and enchanting novel”. I had enough trouble copying out that cloying blurb let alone even thinking about reading such a book. Again, just me. Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, on the other hand, has become something of a cult classic – a political satire of modern Soviet life that features an enormous demonic black cat that talks and walks on two legs, thus following in the footsteps of the anti-Stalinist Animal Farm.

For my money though, the true heir to Orwellian postmodernism is Art Spiegelman’s Maus, the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize. Not only does his literary device of anthropomorphising the mice (Jews), cats (Germans) and pigs (Poles) afford a strangely different perspective of a horrifying piece of history, but the comic strip form transmutes the silliness of these walking-talking animals while attracting a newer readership to this most essential history lesson. Moreover, just like the frame narrative – which switches between the horrors of Auschwitz and the banal American existence of the protagonist’s father following the war – the graphic form in itself provides a bridge between the unthinkable (the Holocaust) and the ordinary (reading a comic book).

Whatever its true secret, Maus briefly rekindled that long-forgotten wonder I felt upon reading Animal Farm for the first time. But Maus is a special exception to the golden rule of no talking animals in creative writing class. And despite everything, I was still emotionally scarred by that opera-singing lesbian polar bear. Hence, it was with great trepidation that I approached Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Borne, which features nothing less than a gigantic mutant flying bear.

The idea sounds preposterous, but the novel is anything but. Believe me, I started and restarted it on my mini-iPad without being able to commit for a long time, so put out was I by the idea of this colossal bear occupying centre stage. What got me to finally click on ‘continue reading’ were promises of another VanderMeer-esque postapocalyptic province, this time laid waste by biotechnical experiments gone awry. A scenario that goes even further than his superlative sci-fi novel Annihilation. But whereas the sequels within the so-called Southern Reach Trilogy were rather disappointing, Borne is the true successor, taking up from where Annihilation left off. Only this time VanderMeer voyages from an alien environmental disaster zone to the land of the New Weird where the tropes of science fiction and fantasy are turned on their heads.

'Borne' features a gigantic flying bear - oh yeah

The giant flying bear known as Mord rules over a town devastated by the “Company”. The few human survivors must eke out an existence amongst ruins inhabited by mutants and hybrid creatures; the aborted biotech experiments of the Company, including Mord himself and his proxies: regular-sized transgenic bears who lust for blood and who view Mord as their god (stay with me here). Key to the narrative is the novel’s namesake, Borne, which is supposed to be neither human, nor animal, nor plant, but which inadvertently evokes memories of that giant talking carnivorous plant in Little Shop of Horrors. In any event, Borne starts out as this small hybrid squid-cum-sea-anemone before growing into an enormous protean creature that can turn itself into just about anything. Naturally, there’s a final showdown between the two titans of Mord and Borne, and a perilous journey to the wreckage of the Company where our human protagonists learn the secrets behind the biotech horrors unleashed upon their town; all of it described in lush, postapocalyptic detail.

Borne is considered emblematic of the New Weird, a literary genre that’s a bit tricky to pin down. In the introduction to Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s anthology The New Weird, it’s described as “a type of urban, secondary-world fiction that subverts … traditional fantasy, largely by choosing realistic, complex real-world models as the jumping off point for creation of settings that may combine elements of both science fiction and fantasy.”

With his wife, Ann, Jeff VanderMeer also edited The Big Book of Classic Fantasy (he’s a busy man) and it’s probably from this big book chock full of talking animals whence sprung inspiration for Borne and Mord. But where Ryman’s opera-singing polar bear fails, VanderMeer succeeds with his giant transgenic bear and its fanged proxies. Most likely because 1) Mord never actually speaks despite his über-intelligence and aerial abilities 2) the apocalyptic setting of bioengineered mutation and failed experimentation lends the story scientific credence in the vein of The Island of Doctor Moreau and 3) like Spiegelman’s Maus, the complexity and baroque violence of the New Weird transcends anthropomorphic animals and fairy tales to depict a hideous new reality. It doesn’t hurt either that VanderMeer’s writing knocks it out of the park on just about every page.

Another exponent of the New Weird is China Miéville. Like VanderMeer’s Borne, Miéville’s novels cannot be neatly slotted into one specific sci-fi or fantasy subgenre. For writers like Miéville, every story is an exercise in destroying a genre’s traditional conventions, breaking down boundaries and messing with stereotypes. This is why a giant spider with the hands of a human baby and which likes to spout poetry while travelling between dimensions works quite well within Miéville’s convoluted Bas-Lag series, whereas the spidery planet in Children of Time trips over itself in its emotional earnestness. David Wong’s sci-fi/ horror-comedies probably fall somewhere between the New Weird and bizarro fiction, although Wong is usually less interested in fantasy and more into sci-fi and cosmic fart jokes.

But if I can chuckle over a David Wong novel and accept the fantastical contortions of VanderMeer or Miéville, then perhaps I haven’t completely lost touch with my inner child. I’m not sure I could read something like Lord of the Rings again, but I did enjoy watching Game of Thrones as much as the next person. The dragons didn’t bother me either and I even developed a soft spot for that undead ice dragon in Season 7. But I swear, if those dragons ever started speaking I would have groaned so loudly before turning off that show for good.

© Tony McGowan

Separating the science fiction from Chinese censorship and Mad Sheila

China banned the popular video game ‘Plague Inc.’ in February 2020 because of uncomfortable parallels with the growing pandemic. Considering China’s ongoing paranoia over the origins of covid-19, it’ll be interesting to see how its burgeoning crop of sci-fi writers come to grips with this topic in coming years. Or how Hollywood, so eager for access to China’s lucrative movie market, will tap dance around the pandemic in its own sci-fi blockbusters. 

Chinese dystopian novels such as Chan Koonchung’s ‘Fat Years’ – which makes veiled references to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 – and Yan Lianke’s political satires are already banned. Likewise verboten is Max Brooks’ apocalyptic zombie novel ‘World War Z’, where a mysterious new disease shows up in China; and the government responds by suppressing news of the infection, threatening several doctors who try to sound the alarm, all of which allows the virus to spread beyond its borders. Sound familiar?

Surprisingly though, you can buy a copy of Orwell’s ‘1984’ or ‘Animal Farm’ in Shanghai, or even Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ in spite of those obvious parallels, at least to Western observers, between modern-day China and the totalitarian surveillance state. There’s even a Chinese edition of Michael Crichton’s pandemic novel ‘The Andromeda Strain’ and Ray Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’. 

Chinese edition of Brave New World

Such foreign intellectual books are only read by a small elite in China and so they tend to fly under the radar. Yet the censors will surgically excise any references to Mao’s China … or Winnie the Pooh. At the moment, in fact, China is busy rewriting school history books in Hong Kong. Then you have the famous ‘Three Ts’: Tiananmen, Tibet, and Taiwan, all of which will end up in an Orwellian memory hole faster than you can say Richard Gere. Chinese writers themselves have to navigate a highly sensitive political and social landscape fraught with censorship, not unlike the novelists of the former Soviet Union. But if any genre has the versatility and innuendo of not being tied to any side of China’s political spectrum, it’s science fiction. Like Communist Russia, Chinese writers have found that the genre lends itself to futuristic imaginings and alternative universes that can circumnavigate or disguise prickly topics. Especially if those sci-fi writers or filmmakers include some nationalistic nuance while chasing their own creative dreams.

This nationalist strain first came to my attention while reading Liu Cixin’s otherwise incredible 2006 novel ‘The Three Body Problem’. It’s a sprawling, dazzling space opera that can be boiled down to a China-led planetary resistance against a pending alien takeover from afar, along the way discussing "dark forest theory" and dimension-destroying warfare. As I ploughed through all three tomes of this series, I was at once wowed by its sci-fi inventiveness and increasingly perturbed by its China-centric visions of the future. At first, I thought it was because I had spent a lifetime reading and watching American and British sci-fi. And indeed, there are enough American-led and American-filled spaceships in the genre to fill up the entire Andromeda Galaxy. Another example of American cultural imperialism, some might argue; while others might contend that American writers are perhaps entitled to populate their fictitious spacecrafts with their ilk, having landed the first man on the moon and now a crop of rovers on Mars. 

Ken Liu, translator of ‘The Three Body Problem’, was quoted in 2016 as saying that, “When you go into space, you become part of this overall collective called ‘humanity’. You’re no longer Chinese, American, Russian or whatever. Your culture is left behind.” For a preeminent translator of science fiction, it’s ironic just how wrong Ken Liu was about the near-future of his genre, not to mention the evolving space race between the U.S and China. For it appears the Chinese are taking a leaf out of the American playbook by rushing to assert their own brand of sci-fi nationalism alongside real-world advances, such as their landing a rover on Mars and another on the dark side of the moon. Those lingering suspicions about Liu Cixin, meanwhile, were finally borne out by the transformation of his novella ‘The Wandering Earth’ into China’s highest-grossing science-fiction film of the same name in 2019. Once again we have the scenario of a China-led planetary resistance, this time against a future global catastrophe rather than aliens, which brings nations together in a herculean effort to save mankind by rocket-boosting Earth all the way to Alpha Centauri. 

Wandering Earth's brotherly love vs. communist propaganda poster

Whatever the naivety of Cixin’s cultural viewpoints within this far-fetched story, the Chinese scriptwriters made sure to excavate and amplify the story’s nationalistic undercurrents, so much so that China basically becomes the saviour of the universe (cue Flash theme song). For all its spectacular effects, the movie’s Sino-jingoistic perspectives are worrisome at times, above all that climactic scene where diverse nationalities, including Russia and even Japan, all come together to selflessly work as one – under Chinese hegemony, naturally – to get some thruster or other restarted. All that brotherly pushing and grunting for one common goal is like something out of a propaganda poster for the Cultural Revolution.  

Still, it’s a far cry from China’s recent past when you couldn’t direct or show any films about ghosts, zombies or ‘un-scientific’ subjects. The Chinese government’s aversion to zombie films, in fact, was supposedly the main reason why Paramount cancelled a planned sequel to ‘World War Z’. Beijing has apparently taken a more lenient attitude in recent times, yet the sex and violence of ‘Game of Thrones’ remains heavily censored while seven minutes of blood and guts was cut from the cinematic release of ‘Resident Evil: The Final Chapter’ (2016). It’s a small wonder that the latter made it into any Chinese cinemas at all, since the South Korean zombie sensation ‘Train to Busan’ (2016) had to be illegally downloaded by China’s millennials.

Censorship rules are as murky and arbitrary as ever in China; and of all the sci-fi tropes, it’s not zombies but time travel that has been the stickiest of all. The censors claim that the subgenre disrespects history, when in reality they fear its potential to comment upon past and present. Despite the franchise of ‘Back to the Future’ being banned for years in China, the makers of ‘Looper’ (2012) overcame such antipathy with a neat trick: showcasing a flatteringly futuristic China within the time-travel plot. The producers of this Bruce Willis sci-fi adventure even went so far as to add a scene in which a character says, “I’m from the future. You should go to China.” But after years of suspicion and vilification, sci-fi is starting to establish itself as a rare exception to creative expression in China, as Jing Tsu recounts in the Financial Times. China, in fact, is already cementing its position as a sci-fi powerhouse, with its growing army of sci-fi nerds now seeking to host the World Science Fiction Convention in 2023. From the perspective of earth’s Star-Wars-quoting geeks, this is like bidding for the Olympic Games. As such, Chinese science fiction is emerging as “an unexpected element in a broader initiative of cultural diplomacy aimed at projecting a positive and engaging impression of the country abroad,” Jing Tsu informs us, somewhat in the tone of Stan Marsh in his South Park bedroom trying to write his death-metal biography while a Chinese censor stands over his shoulder (in response to the scathing ridicule of this episode, South Park has been entirely ‘band’ in China).    

Mad Sheila riffs off Mad Max

The world’s nerds are only now waking up to just how much influence China is exerting over the future of science fiction. For fear of offending the Chinese, a Tibetan character in the Marvel comics ‘Doctor Strange’ was turned into an innocuous Celt for the 2016 film adaptation; whereas that outspoken Tibetan activist Richard Gere never got another decent gig after ‘The Mothman Prophecies’ in 2002. Michael Bay sucks up to the Communist Party big time in ‘Transformers: Age of Extinction’ (2014) while Paramount removed from the movie ‘World War Z’ (2013) any mention of the zombie plague originating in China, as is the storyline in the banned novel. ‘V for Vendetta’ (2006) was removed from iQiyi and other Chinese streaming platforms in August 2020 because of that damned Guy Fawkes mask being used as a symbol of resistance in the Hong Kong protests. George Miller’s Oscar-winning ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ (2015) failed to secure a theatrical release in China, largely to make way for an unashamed local rip-off, which is just another form of overt nationalism-slash-censorship. The cheap Chinese version translates as ‘Mad Sheila’, never mind that the Mad Max franchise stems from Australia where the term ‘mad sheila’ is likely to conjure up images of a drunken foul-mouthed female going berserk in a pub. From the poster to the trailer, to even the on-screen credits, the Chinese ‘Mad Shelia’ incompetently rips off Miller’s postapocalyptic universe, which is actually nothing new. ‘Mad Max 2’ (1981) spawned a whole subgenre of dystopian homoerotic road warriors, mostly Italian for some reason.

Since China’s box office is just too important, it is now commonly accepted that there will be no Chinese villains in any Hollywood film in the years to come. Quite the opposite in fact. Humanity is saved by the Chinese in the disaster movie ‘2012’ because the Chinese government had the foresight to build life-saving arcs. In ‘Gravity’ (2013), Sandra Bullock survives by getting herself to a Chinese space station. In the 2015 Ridley Scott film ‘The Martian’, China’s space program saves the day for Matt Damon marooned on Mars. ‘Arrival’, the unusual 2016 alien invasion film, also predicates its happy ending on Chinese forces coming to the rescue. In extolling the saving qualities of China in all of these sci-fi films, the writers probably didn’t imagine they’d also be extolling concentration camps for religious minorities (or ‘joycamps’ as they’re known in 1984 newspeak). Other minorities, such as gays and lesbians, are also singled out by the Chinese. As recounted in the PEN report, Beijing’s censors commonly demand that kisses between same-sex characters be removed, in movies like ‘Star Trek Beyond’ (2016) and ‘Alien: Covenant’ (2017). No place for gays in China’s utopic futures. Or as that mad sheila at the Aussie pub might say, no poofs allowed.

Hollywood studios have been accused of sending their scripts in advance to the Chinese censors so as to pave their way for cinematic release in the land of 1.4 billion potential viewers. U.S. producers are even now supposedly pre-empting the censorship boards by getting their scriptwriters to come up with films that they know will pass the Chinese litmus test, such as Godzilla vs. Kong (2021), where you’ll certainly see no same-sex tongue kissing between Tibetan monks. In addition to the ‘Three T’s’ of Chinese censorship, might we now already be dealing with the Three Ps: Pandemic, Poofs and Winnie the Pooh?

Chinese meddling in Hollywood, so astutely lampooned by South Park, is affecting all sorts of film genres and forms of pop culture. John Cena, star of the latest ‘Fast and Furious’ movie was forced to publicly apologize for casually referring to Taiwan as "a country”, lest he place in jeopardy the release of F9 in the biggest movie market of the world. As if a Chinese-made AK-47 were pointed at his head, musclebound John Cena issued this grovelling apology in Mandarin. Cena’s not the only Hollywood star to be co-opted into Chinese ideology. One has to look no further than Matt Damon in the big-budget, propaganda-riddled historical fantasy, ‘The Great Wall’ (2016). The James Bond film, ‘Skyfall’ (2012) was only allowed to open in China after a scene in which Bond kills a security guard in Shanghai was cut, as too references to prostitution in Macau. Subtitles were even changed to hide references to torture by Chinese security forces (remember, no more Chinese villains, aside from the loveable Mr. Chow in ‘The Hangover’ perhaps).

No Taiwanese or Japanese flags allowed

Because being excluded from China can be so costly, studios will alter their movies to avoid a temper tantrum from the censors. The Taiwanese and Japanese flags, for instance, were removed from Tom Cruise’s iconic bomber jacket in ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ (2021) while Lady Gaga and Just Bieber were cut from the Chinese airing of ‘Friends: The Reunion’ (2021) because this duo had offended Chinese sensibilities in the past (Lady Gaga met with the Dalai Lama, Bieber was photographed at a shrine for Japanese war dead). Chinese director Chloé Zhao incurred the wrath of the censors because of an old interview in which she was critical of China. In retaliation, Beijing blacked out news of her Oscar win for ‘Nomadland’ (2020) and then threatened to halt the release of ‘Eternals’ (2021), which she also directs. In this $200 million Marvel movie, an immortal alien race emerges from hiding after thousands of years to protect Earth from their evil counterparts, the Deviants. If only these villains were instead sexual deviants working for the Chinese board of censorship…  

Perhaps the worst consequence of current Sino-Hollywood relations is not what gets made but what doesn’t. In today’s climate it would be all but impossible to make something like ‘Seven Years in Tibet’ (1997) about China’s invasion of Tibet; or a remake of Terry Gilliam’s dystopian satire ‘Brazil’ (1985) set within Xinjiang, China. As the Washington Post and The New Yorker remind us, Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 saw Hollywood studios studiously avoiding films that would make the Nazis look like, well, like Nazis. American producers simply didn’t want to risk losing access to the German market, never mind Hitler and all that. Now history seems to be repeating itself, with Hollywood studios not only kowtowing to Communist China, but also indulging in self-censoring.

Look, nobody likes being compared to the Nazis, but it’s hard to overlook China being accused of genocide against the Muslim Uyghurs at its ‘joycamps’. Not that this stopped Disney from shooting the live-action version of ‘Mulan’ (2020) in Xinjiang, a region in northwest China where China has been accused of carrying out these human rights abuses, including execution, torture and sterilisation of Uyghurs. If that’s not enough, Disney thanks no less than four different propaganda departments in the end credits to Mulan. And just to show that I wasn’t completely off the mark about my suspicions of Liu Cixin and his ‘Three Body Problem’, when asked during an interview with The New Yorker in 2019 about the Chinese government’s inhumane treatment of Xinjiang’s Uyghur community, Liu Cixin replied: “Would you rather that they be hacking away at bodies at train stations and schools in terrorist attacks? … If anything, the government is helping their economy and trying to lift them out of poverty.”

Yeah, put that in your pipe and smoke it, South Park.

China disliked Tarantino's depiction of Bruce Lee  

Occasionally there are happy endings. ‘The Three Body Problem’ is being adapted for the screen by Netflix; and since Netflix isn’t allowed in China anyway, their writers are free to throw in a Tibetan or Uyghur character just for the hell of it. And Quentin Tarantino, bless his soul, refused to modify ‘Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood’ (2019) for release in China. Shannon Lee, Bruce Lee’s daughter, complained to Chinese officials about the film’s representation of her father as a boastful fool being fought to a standstill by a mere stuntman. It’s one of the funniest scenes in the movie, but an overly sensitive Beijing demanded it be cut. Tarantino said no thanks. In the main though, Hollywood producers are still desperately eager to please Beijing, as there are still trillions of Yen to be made at the box office. This dynamic doesn’t just keep new science fiction ideas away from Chinese consumers, but is allowing an authoritarian nation-state to insert elements of its own propaganda into American and international pop culture. So again I ask, how will big-budget science fiction in China and abroad treat the covid-19 pandemic in years to come?

©Tony McGowan

The cinematic folly of Zack Snyder’s alpha-zombies

Zack Snyder commits a cardinal sin in his latest offering, Army of the Dead, by giving his zombies, well, brains. It’s not his only sin though.

The movie welds together two hackneyed genres – the heist film and the zombie flick – in a postapocalyptic Las Vegas walled off from the rest of America. None of this stops a brazen band of go-getters from sneaking in and trying to make off with millions, right under the rotted noses of all those shambling bodies. Basically Ocean’s Eleven with a ton of gore and an ex-pro wrestler in the lead instead of George Clooney.

Aside from the screenplay in general, the biggest weakness of Army of the Dead (2021) is its zombies. The movie pretty much forfeits its ‘scare impact’ the moment its alpha-zombies display the first hints of intelligence, which is essentially in the opening 15 minutes. Yep, Snyder has fallen into the same trap as so many other horror film failures, including George Romero’s later sequels: Zack made his zombies too emotional.

You only have to lack a social life and to have watched enough old zombie flicks to instinctively know what works and what doesn’t. The zombie genre has been done to death

Guy with no social life watching a zombie romance

(sorry) and each new filmmaker is looking for an edge that will reinvent this hackneyed horror trope. But this path is fraught with many pitfalls. Successful franchises like AMC’s The Walking Dead got around it by inventing ever more gross-out special effects each season, although the real secret to its success was having its zombies remain mindless killing machines to the very end. Just as important, the show’s human characters remained believable and/or sympathetic until the end, too, at least until the end of Season 5.

That’s another related flaw of Army of the Dead: it’s difficult to invest too much in its bland characters and cartoonish stereotypes. Except perhaps for Nora Arnezeder, who plays the kickass female French soldier with such conviction. Naturally, there’s also a kickass Mexican soladara with a mandatory bandana, a goofy German safecracker who’s not very funny, a conniving corporate villain, and a bunch of other forgettable characters who get eaten anyway.

But it’s the zombies that let Snyder down. His walled-off Las Vegas is described by the kickass Frenchie, Lily, as being not so much a prison as a “kingdom” of the zombies. And indeed, the film’s numero uno alpha-zombie poses and struts about like the king of the underworld; or rather, a second-rate Phantom of the Opera who works out. Besides his metal mask, he also wears a cape, carries a spear and enjoys contemplating a statue of Zeus in front of the Olympus casino, seeing perhaps a demigod reflection of himself. Seriously, how un-zombielike can you get?

Meanwhile, his consort – yes, Zeus-zombie has a love interest – is forever bouncing about and landing in these wide-legged squats and grimacing her guts out like a Cirque du Soleil acrobat crossed with the vampire queen from an Anne Rice novel. Worst of all, these two reanimated demigods have somehow conceived a child – don’t ask me how – and alas, when Anne Rice’s queen of the damned is decapitated, our heartbroken Zeus literally tears the foetus out of his dead-again wife, holding it aloft before his loyal corpse subjects like a sovereign who has lost an heir to the crown.

It’s all very silly, and something of a head-scratcher why in the world Zack would return to this theme of the zombie miscarriage when a similar scene was heavily redacted from the cinematic release of his previous zombie outing, Dawn of the Dead (2004), an otherwise superb reimagining of the George Romero classic. Snyder’s early cinematographic brilliance
of that remake shines through more strongly in Army of the Dead, but not much else shines, apart from perhaps the meticulous CGI destruction of Las Vegas. 

Dawn of the Dead action figures selling online

The promo documentary Creating an Army of the Dead informs us that Zack wanted to make a fun film that simultaneously evolves the zombie genre. But providing his two dead honchos (sorry) with brains was actually a step backwards, making Army of the Dead a lot cheesier than what Zack probably had in mind. There’s a reason why such rose-tinted zombie shows as the Santa Clarita Diet and iZombie function only as mediocre, female-friendly comedies. Or why the TV series Z Nation is such a B-grade stinker (he’s half-man, half-zombie – please, no). Z Nation and a million other zombie movies have all been trapped by the same ‘reinventive fallacy’ of giving their living dead too much wit. Fools’ gold, baby. In contrast, classics such as 28 Days Later (2002) or REC (2007) or Romero’s original Dawn of the Dead (1978) are able retain their shock-and-awe value on the strength of the horrific implacableness of their legions of the undead.

It’s worth noting that Zack Snyder has a track record for staid hero-worship movies (300, Watchmen, Batman v Superman) and that Army of the Dead is perhaps his first stab at horror comedy. Sadly, it’s not always pleasant viewing. The film is deliberately cheesy, yet it lacks the fine balancing act of a good horror comedy or tongue-in-cheek grindhouse. In fact, the movie seems to lack all comical awareness, with its few blatant jokes falling dead flat, like that two-ton container crushing to death a heroic soccer mom and her young daughter during the film’s montage. Not funny, dude. Even poor kickass Lily is forced to deliver a wretched one-liner before her own illogical death. On the other hand, a strutting Zeus-zombie is funny.

Those rare zombie horror comedies that do work, such as Planet Terror (2007) or Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive (1993) or Re-Animator (1985), are successful because they leave the audience torn between two conflicting emotions, revulsion and nervous laughter. But this only really works if a certain distance is guarded between the living and the dead; between the animalistic killing machine and the thinking loving human you can relate to and laugh at. Otherwise, your movie ends up being funny in all the wrong places, like Army of the Dead, which functions neither as a scary film nor as a horror comedy, not least because its Zeus-zombie retains too many human emotions, including an undying love for his beheaded queen (the zombie romance subgenre – please god, nooo!)

From the director who wowed the pants off us with his recreation of Dawn of the Dead, Zack’s encore performance is quite disheartening (then again, he did make us sit through a four-hour remake of Justice League). On top of its lame humour, Army of the Dead is just lazy and derivative. Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016) kicked off with a postapocalyptic Washington followed by an alpha-zombie attack. Zack gives us an alpha-zombie attack followed by a postapocalyptic Las Vegas; while his introductory montage, which is overlaid with a schmaltzy version of Viva Las Vegas, is simply way too long, relying on cut-and-paste MTV storytelling – a far cry from his supremely terrifying opening sequence to Dawn of the Dead 2004.

The opening act to Army of the Dead, where Mr. Alpha-Zombie busts out of a steel transport container, has a little too much in common with a similar scene in Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010). The scene shortly thereafter of the two U.S. soldiers fleeing across the grasslands,

Army of the Dead vs. Resident Evil: Afterlife (screenshots)

one of them falling, the other giving him his hand before being attacked, has been lifted almost frame by frame from American Werewolf in London (1981). A sly wink from Snyder, maybe, since some of the dialogue is even similar; if so, it’s a rather feeble homage. And what about the sequence where our motley crew is creeping through those darkened rooms full of hibernating zombies and the slightest sound or bump will set them off? Seen it all before, dude. As too the corporate villain in the group who locks out or leaves behind the valiant hero, only Paul Reiser does it so much more unctuously in Aliens (1986). There’s even that most cheesy climax of a one-on-one fistfight between the goodie

      Army of the Dead vs. American Werewolf in London (screenshots) 

and the baddie atop a precipice, in this case a helicopter, albeit devoid of some necessary satire. And all those impressively gory CGI-generated headshots? They leave you feeling numb by the end, whereas the coup de grace upon Zeus-zombie from a small-calibre round leaves you flummoxed. Throughout the movie he absorbs a barrage of firepower yet this tiny single shot causes his entire head to blow apart. Huh? Was this supposed to be some sort of smug Tarantino-esque parody?

Zack’s script is dreadfully shallow; and declaring afterwards that you intended all along to make a cheesy B-grade film seems disingenuous. It was actually co-written with Shay Hatten, whose major claim to fame is John Wick: Chapter 3 (2019). Whether because of lazy storytelling or lack of budget, all those little realistic details are missing, such as drones hovering above the ruined city, or satellite tracking of this disaster zone, or military helicopters zipping back and forth; nor is there the kind of media frenzy and intense public interest such a catastrophe would provoke, to speak nothing of the outcry over the nuking of Las Vegas, protests from nearby Los Angeles or from relatives of those zombified hordes locked inside. Apparently, this same Shay Hatten has already written the prequel, Army of Thieves, a “romantic-comedy heist film with zombies”, and which has already been directed by that goofy German safecracker, Matthias Schweighöfer and produced by Snyder. You’ve been forewarned.

Aside from a cameo by Elvis zombie, the only real spark of imagination in Army of the Dead is the walking-dead white tiger. It’s clearly designated as the ex-feline from the Siegfried and Roy magic show, never mind that this show closed well over a decade ago due to a tragic mishap. Indeed, one might argue that having this reanimated tiger attack and maul to death the corporate villain is in poorer taste than that zombie foetus, given that Roy Horn

Roy Horn and Siegfried Fischbacher photo:  Carol M. Highsmith

was attacked by his white tiger Montecore in 2003, bitten in the neck and dragged offstage in front of spectators, bringing an abrupt end to his distinguished career. Despite the offensiveness to the memory of Siegfried and Roy, some more zombified animals might have been the way to go for Zack if he really wanted to put a new spin on the genre. The TV series Game of Thrones absolutely floored audiences with its white-walker polar bear and undead dragon, not to mention a monstrous zombie giant pounding at the gates. Up until then, mainstream horror had been content with a few zombie dogs accompanying their walking cadavers, or perhaps a creepy cat, such as in the Pet Sematary movies. The white zombie tiger or even that useless zombie horse of Zeus should have piqued Snyder’s curiosity. He could have had lions and apes and circus elephants all turning into rampaging, flesh-eating monsters; a plague of CGI rats and crazed birds, a pack of demonic coyotes and frothing Cujos. Anything – anything – would have been better than his king and queen zombies with their endless love (now I've got that song in my head).

©Tony McGowan

Stephen King as Mark Zuckerberg's butler?

While writing The Swimming Pool from Another Freaking Dimension (a bizarro-esque parody of a dystopian Australian near-future), it got me thinking about the kind of pop culture that’s going to survive into the future and the other kind that’s

already sinking into oblivion (like my novel). Most people these days would be hard pressed to name the biggest-selling novelists of the early 20th century, let alone the dilettantes of the 19th century, aside from those they were forced at gunpoint to study at school. Patrick Dennis was a best-selling novelist in the 1950s, but by the

time the 1970s rolled around he was already a nobody, or rather, a forgotten butler for the CEO of McDonalds. And in spite of Stephen King’s colossal output and millions of copies sold, he could well go the same way. Maybe not as a butler for Mark Zuckerberg, yet those 82 or so novels of his and those countless film adaptations could be all but forgotten in a soon-ish Future World preoccupied with a completely different species of pop culture.

Ernest Cline resurrects the glories of early video games in his novel Ready Player One, which was adapted by Steven Spielberg. In this dystopian, if not prosaic future, video games and other pop culture of the distant past are something to be idolised and avidly memorised. Cline lays on the references thick and fast and just doesn’t let up. The cinematic version is fairly slick and a lot of fun, yet upon reading the novel I found myself sometimes drowning in these pop culture references, like I was wading through some bloated cut-and-paste Wikipedia nerd-school assignment. Yeah, I admit it, I’m jealous of his success. Then again, according to Wikipedia the novel did receive quite a few scathing reviews for its poor-quality writing and the book’s “Peter-Pan-ish infatuation with childishness, which comes coated in a stench of stale Doritos, Jolt Cola and lowbrow smugness”. The Daily Beast doesn’t pull its punches.

All sci-fi stories set in the future must forge their own path when dealing with pop culture of the current times. In Star Trek Beyond (2016), Simon Pegg and friends are able to work into the plot the Beastie Boys’ hit song Sabotage by joking about it being classical music. Still, die-hard trekkie fans complained that the rap song was woefully out of place. But it’s actually a common trope in sci-fi: misconstruing a piece of ancient pop culture for something else and making a joke out of it. The list of novels and films that get away with this trope in one form or another is as long as a Star Wars prequel with a young Darth Vader in love. Sometimes the joke is lost on reviewers though, even outside of sci fi. Bret Easton Ellis, for one, was slammed for getting his music references all wrong in his controversial novel American Psycho (spoiler: he did it on purpose to show what a vacuous shit his serial-killing yuppie was).

Like the hero of Ready Player One, the main protagonist of The Swimming Pool from Another Freaking Dimension has one foot in the future, another in the pop culture of the past. Rather than video games, Dezzy’s weakness is for horror movies of the 1970s and 80s. Set in the 2040s, the novel gets around a lot of its references simply by attributing them to Dezzy’s quirky father, who has passed away and left him with a whole lot of 80s baggage. Other references are justified by Dezzy’s film academy days or his hazy knowledge of these old movies, similarly to the way that Sabotage is viewed as classical music in Star Trek. And a little like American Psycho, Dezzy’s misinterpretations of past movies is sometimes intentional, just to make a crappy joke. Other times the misunderstanding is genuine, such as when Dezzy and Sonia first discover those steampunk smartglasses. Thus, I’ll leave you with a quote from that passage to finish off with:

“What spectrum are these things working in anyway?” Sonia had the headset in her hands, inspecting the various lenses in the weak light of that UV cluster. “It can’t be

just infrared. Maybe it’s some other wavelength reacting with the UV, creating this optical illusion. Because that’s all this is, a clever optical illusion, right?”
“This is no illusion,” I said, actually afraid to approach that black archway, which seemed to be vibrating ever so minutely within my granulated vision.
“Okay, not really an illusion,” she conceded. “But maybe these goggles function like the viewfinders in one of those hidden object games my grandfather used to play on his old iPad. You know, if you got stuck you got to use a magnifying glass or something similar to find the last hidden objects.”
“Viewfinders,” I echoed, amused by the name. “My dad, too, played those early detective games, along with some first-person shooter called Candy Crush.”

Ben-Hur and the eternal myth of the galley slave

Just before he was thrown to the lions, Michael Flynn, Trump’s first choice for national security advisor, likened the newly elected US president to a chariot driver in Ben-Hur. Donald Trump cracking his whip and impelling his team of Republican warhorses ever forward. Given Flynn’s age, he probably had in mind the 1959 movie of Ben-Hur starring Charlton Heston. Yet his choice of metaphor had to have been swayed by the latest remake of Ben-Hur, released to great fanfare during the 2016 election campaign.

Eager to draw in audiences younger than General Flynn, the 2016 MGM and Paramount coproduction hired director Timur Bekmambetov, famed for such teen flicks as Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Bekmambetov’s film would be the fifth or sixth adaptation of Lew Wallace’s novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (and in a trivial coincidence, Lew Wallace was actually a member of the court that tried the persons charged with assassinating President Abraham Lincoln).

Lew Wallace as a Union General (circa. 1862-65)

Published by Harper and Brothers in 1880, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ went on to become the best-selling book of the 19^th century. This novel would inspire a stage play that would run for twenty-one years, and the success of both the novel and play would persuade MGM studios to bank everything on the most expensive and difficult film shoot of the silent movie era. MGM would then remake this same movie on an even more colossal scale in the late 1950s, with the Wyler extravaganza going on to win eleven Academy Awards. Film historians still regularly rank Wyler’s Ben-Hur in their top-ten American films of all time.

The proudly Christian producers of Ben-Hur 2016 made no secret of the fact that they were out to attract younger, secular audiences and “bring them to the story of Jesus, bring them to the foot of the cross”.

There was also money to be made.

The marketing machinery of MGM and Paramount pandered to the same Christian audiences who had made Mel Gibson’s gore film The Passion of the Christ such an unexpected hit. The commercials which aired on Christian broadcasting networks highlighted the fact that this Ben-Hur was more heavily inspired by Wallace’s original book. Jesus would even have a speaking role this time round and a higher per-minute-ratio appearance than in Wyler's film. The Christian Right have always viewed Ben-Hur as their own holy relic within popular culture. The 1925 silent movie of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ was publicised with the slogan, “The Picture Every Christian Ought to See!” When General Flynn casts Donald Trump in the role of conquering charioteer, it’s also a sly wink to those evangelical Christians who voted for Trump and who watch Wyler’s 1959 Ben-Hur every Easter when it’s rolled out like clockwork by the television networks.

Ben-Hur 1959 film poster 

The producers of Ben-Hur 2016 expected from Bekmambetov an epic summer blockbuster that would introduce a whole new generation to one of the most famous action-bible fictions. Something bigger than Ben-Hur, so to speak. What they got instead for $US100 million was a pale imitation of William Wyler’s 1959 classic. Not even a miracle could save it. Panned by critics and shunned by the Instagram generation, it would become one of the biggest box office losers of 2016. In the wake of this disaster, all sorts of critiques and excuses have been offered up, yet one thing has been largely overlooked: the bible angle was never going to bring home the bacon.

Gore Vidal, an unaccredited screenwriter for MGM’s 1959 Ben-Hur, saw the writing on the wall. Ben-Hur was never about Christ, he said, but “a tale of war between a Roman boy and a Jewish boy” (Vidal actually wanted them to be homosexual lovers). Wallace may have set out to write Ben-Hur with the purpose of exploring the “religious and political conditions of the world at the time of the Coming”, but his novel took on a life of its own and the end result is an historical potboiler far removed from that mawkish literature of the 19^th century that revolves around Christian conversion.

The enduring success of Ben-Hur has never been about those snippets of Jesus Christ’s life, nor was it ever about the rivalry between Judah Ben-Hur and Messala, or Judah’s conversion for that matter. In actuality, it’s always been about those savage customs of the Roman Empire, so cunningly plotted by Wallace and so vividly brought to life on the big screen. Pagan cruelty has been capturing the public’s imagination for nearly 140 years, not Christian values. Like St. Augustine’s reluctant Christian visitor to the Colosseum, who at first closes his eyes to the gladiatorial spectacle but as soon as he does venture a glance is instantly hooked on the sight of blood, Christian viewers and readers have been barely able to contain their enthusiasm for the sadistic elements of Ben-Hur (or for that matter, the blood and guts of Mel Gibson’s bible classes).

All the big budget film adaptations of Wallace’s work have pivoted on two set pieces: the chariot race and the galley fight. Indeed, these two episodes of Ben-Hur have earned almost permanent places on the fringes of Western culture. Without these two action sequences the story of Ben-Hur would be just a hollow shell. The fame of the original novel also rests heavily on those chapters describing the chariots and triremes. Writing to congratulate Wallace just one month after the book’s release, the Confederate poet Paul Hamilton Hayne, Wallace’s enemy during the Civil War, gushes: “Pages in it have thrilled me through and through … Ben-Hur’s misfortunes, and the disappearance of his family, and the grand sea-fight and its results, struck me especially…”  

Publicity photo of the chariot race for the 1925 film Ben-Hur  

It’s the chariots though, which have always been the most potent marketing tool for the film adaptations of Ben-Hur. The mould was cast in 1925 by the inaugural silent epic, which set up the chariot race as the climax and consigned the crucifixion to the role of sombre epilogue. William Wyler’s 1959 chariot race, shot in 65mm over five gruelling weeks, still holds legendary status in Hollywood today, with George Lucas paying homage to it in one of his more puerile Star Wars sequels. The producers of Ben-Hur 2016 placed their bets on the same horse, putting the chariot race up front and centre on their movie posters, billboards and websites (although adding a few crucifixes in the background for the Bible Belt and Italian markets). At the same time, Bekmambetov was telling journalists that he had filmed his chariot scene in 3D with all the high octane intensity of a Grand Prix race. Jesus meets the Fast and Furious, read the title of one particular movie review.

Yet Charlton Heston, who will always be remembered as the Ben-Hur, was once quoted as saying that the galley scene was the best sequence of the entire movie. Okay, Chuck may have been a gun-crazy NRA stooge, but he still expressed what’s been at the back of many a cinephile’s mind all along, including Oliver Stone, who uses the galley sequence in his paean to professional sport, On Any Given Sunday. 

Ben-Hur 1959 galley scene (screenshot off YouTube)

Despite all the legends about how those chariot races were filmed, it is the sea fight which has had a far greater and lasting impact on the collective unconsciousness. The main reason for this is that Ben-Hur is one of the few prisms through which the masses have glimpsed the vast history of the oared ship. Modern man has, in the main, forgotten that the world once turned on the blade of an oar. It was Lew Wallace who rekindled dusty memories of ancient history lessons at school; and who opened the eyes of others to a strand of history they never knew existed. Wallace achieved this by breathing new life into the dry descriptions of naval battles scattered through the ancient classics. Our poet from the South, P. H. Hayne, enthuses in his letter to the General: “… nor can I fail to perceive how conscientiously you have worked up all its details. I have learned more (among other things) of the minutiae of the discipline in the Roman navy from your narrative of the sea-fight, and conquest of the pirate fleet, than ever I could gather from the lumbering prosiness of orthodox historians.”

Wallace’s research and erudition shines through his accessible prose, and whenever his research material fails him, his powers of imagination take over with admirable effect. His reflections on the mind-set of the rower may teeter towards the mentality of the galley slave – or more likely for his era, the condition of the African slave – but Wallace nonetheless manages to identify with the feelings of dehumanisation and mechanisation felt by all oarsmen throughout the ages: “…obedient-creatures of vast muscle and exhausted intellects, who lived upon recollections generally few but dear, and at last lowered into the semi-conscious alchemic state wherein misery turns to habit, and the soul takes on incredible endurance.” His lead-up to the sea fight builds up the suspense nicely while the battle itself borders on the type of sadistic writing Flaubert was accused of: “Ben-Hur knew they were passing through the cloud of a ship on fire, and burning up with the rowers chained to the benches.”

Wallace’s prose and all those subsequent stage and film adaptations brought to the masses a branch of history that had previously been the domain of the educated aristocracy. Wallace accomplished this by taking the revolutionary step of presenting life aboard a galley from the perspective of a lowly rower rather than the conventional viewpoint of omniscient battle tactician. The irresistible vigour and originality of the galley fight convinced Harper and Brothers to distribute excerpts of these chapters across American schools as a means of whetting students’ appetite for more. Lord Dufferin, a British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and former student at Eton College, where you had to study the ancient texts in original Greek and Latin, was just as thrilled by Wallace’s ‘first-person’ account of life aboard a Roman trireme. He wrote to Wallace in 1882 when the author himself was based in Constantinople as the U.S. minister to Turkey: “My dear General Wallace, – I sat up the night before last to finish your beautiful book, and I assure you I find it difficult to express my admiration for it… Portions of the story are most affecting; and the sea-fight and the chariot-race are wonderfully dramatic. In fact, from beginning to end I read it with breathless interest and delight…” Wallace’s Roman warship had even more of an impact on later moviegoers. 

The panoramic 65mm cinematic version of Ben-Hur in 1959 blew audiences away. Viewers were able to imagine they were in that cavernous Roman galley rowing alongside Heston. The same can be said for the 3D version of Ben-Hur 2016 (whereas the galley scene in the silent black-and-white Ben-Hur 1925 is just plain creepy).

The ‘galley chapters’ comprise only a fraction of the entire novel, yet they have exercised an inordinate influence on our collective unconscious. As with Flaubert, Wallace believed that an historical novel should be historically accurate. And like Flaubert, who claims to have consulted 300 books in recreating ancient Carthage for his gruesome novel Salambo, Wallace prided himself on his own historical research. “Of the more than seven years given the book, the least part was occupied in actual composition,” he writes in his autobiography. The General didn’t spend those seven years reading the bible; he spent it ransacking libraries for hard historical detail. “After comparing authorities,” he stresses in his autobiography, “I had frequently to reconcile them; failing in that, it remained to choose between them. There is nothing, not even a will-o’-the-wisp, so elusive as a disputed date. Once I went to Washington, thence to Boston, for no purpose but to exhaust their libraries in an effort to satisfy myself of the mechanical arrangement of the oars in the interior of a trireme.”

In the century and a half since Wallace undertook his research our understanding of the ancient maritime world has expanded exponentially. And it has become painstakingly clear that Wallace, like Flaubert, got many facts wrong. Let’s merely illustrate this point with some of the most pertinent examples, keeping in mind that we are referring to the book only, not the cinematic versions of Ben-Hur, which would go on to further distort and magnify Wallace’s original boo-boos. 

Replica of ancient Roman trireme used in 1959 film Ben-Hur

Quintis Arrius is described as a tribune, yet fleet commanders in Imperial Rome were typically knights chasing promotion, and thus usually called “Prefect” (nauarchus princeps).  The vessel that Quintis Arrius commands in Ben-Hur, the Astraea, is described as a being a trireme; however, a sea-going flagship during the reign of Emperor Tiberius would have typically been a quinquireme or at least a quadrireme i.e. something grander than a mere trireme. The great crane described by Wallace could only be supported on a ship larger than a trireme and was certainly not designed, or able, to lift an opposing ship into the air. The rowing benches in Wallace’s trireme number 120, yet classical triremes typically had 170, one bench and one oar for each rower. More confusingly, Arrius is told that the ship has a total complement of 262 oarsmen, an unnecessary and impossible number for a single trireme. Wallace describes his trireme as being “of the class called naves liburnicae”, but the liburnian was not a trireme: it was a small, fast bireme customarily used for reconnaissance missions.

And the list goes on, becoming more and more pedantic.

But the error which overshadows the entire galley sequence is the portrayal of Judah Ben-Hur and his fellow oarsmen as galley slaves. The Romans rarely, if ever, used slaves as rowers on their warships. If there was a shortage of citizen-rowers, the Romans, like other naval powers of antiquity, preferred to employ mercenaries, that is, foreign freeborn rowers. True, slaves were commonly used on Rome’s sea-going freighters and merchant navy. But rarely, if ever, on its war galleys. Slaves might have been readily available, but they were expensive to maintain and the drowning of a slave was actually costlier than that of a mercenary. More to the point, slaves were unreliable and always thinking of escape. They could not be counted on to stick to their oars, let alone drive a vessel with all their might in the heat of battle. It was for similar reasons that the Romans were reluctant to allow gladiators to fight in their legions: it was nigh impossible to create an esprit de corps with the broken spirits of slaves or condemned criminals. Without a well-drilled rowing crew you could never hope to attain the speed and agility required for ramming manoeuvres. Even on those exceptional occasions when Sextus Pompey and Augustus drew on the slave class to fill the rowing benches of their warships during the strife of civil war, they made sure to officially free these slaves beforehand. And the Romans were as loathe to use condemned criminals and captives on their warships as they were slaves.

Wallace was obviously aware of the complications arising from having the broken souls of slaves powering a warship. For he tries to get around this quandary by having his slaves chained just before battle. In doing so, he commits another anachronistic felony. Battle fleets in ancient Greece, Rome or Byzantium would never ever chain their rowers, as often enough these rowers, particularly in the Byzantine navy, were expected to double up as warriors if need be. The Romans didn’t even distinguish between rowers and marines – they were all known simply as milites. Wallace understood that free-born Roman citizens manned their own warships in the early days against Carthage, for he writes, “When [Gaius] Duilius won the first sea-fight for his country, Romans plied the oars…” But then he commits the classic error of presuming that condemned criminals and war captives gradually took over the Roman galleys. This did not happen in ancient Rome, but in France and Venice towards the end of the Middle Ages. In the Roman Empire, it was paid provincials and freedmen who increasingly plied the oars of Roman warships.

Stacked oarsmen in 1925 Ben-Hur (YouTube screenshot) 

It seems Wallace’s chain-and-slavery lapse has forever muddied the waters. But there are good reasons for forgiving the venerable general.  

The practice of galley slavery as a governmental institution goes back no further than the 15^th century AD. But this was not the view of scholars in Wallace’s time, whose shared opinion was that galleys slaves were as old as the galleys themselves. Nautical studies of the 19^th century were tainted by the customs of the preceding centuries, where the use of impressed criminals and prisoners-of-war as slave rowers was most certainly common practice. The use of forçats, the French word for criminals forced to row, was ubiquitous in the Mediterranean during the 17^th and 18^th centuries; and this led many an intelligent scholar to tar antiquity with the same brush. Apart from the slave-and-chains motif, there are other telling signs in Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ that Wallace had conflated medieval and Renaissance practices with those of ancient times. The oars of his ancient Roman trireme, for example, are weighted with lead, a custom more suited to the huge, unwieldy oars of Renaissance galleys manned by multiple rowers, in contrast to the trireme of antiquity, which had one rower per oar.

Maritime scholarship in Wallace’s century wasn’t just clouded by the naval traditions of the 17^th and 18^th centuries; it was contaminated with the errors and misconceptions of a thousand years of misdirected scholarship. The reasons for this are twofold: all the direct evidence for ancient shipping had been swallowed up by the sea or dismantled on shore long ago, while the naval battles described in the classic texts offer few concrete details on how these oared weapons of war exactly worked. When Wallace was researching and writing his novel during the 1870s, the first systematic treatment of the history of the ship was still more than fifteen years away (Cecil Torr’s Ancient Ships); while underwater archaeology was still a sci-fi dream of his French contemporary Jules Verne.

One can therefore readily empathize with Wallace and his exasperating search for reliable library books. It’s actually a credit to his perspicacity that he’s able to portray the oar system of his trireme more or less accurately. No other element of ancient naval studies has proved more divisive than the disposition of the rowers. And yet, it’s tempting to wonder whether Wallace permitted some of these prochronisms to creep into his text under the auspices of poetic licence. For it’s hard to find a more riveting symbol of the powerlessness and humiliation of slavery than a chained rower, especially one vainly trying to break free as water rushes into his sinking ship. It’s certainly a trope that the cinematic adaptations of Ben-Hur have been unwilling to let go of in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary since Wallace’s novel was first published. Each new cinematic adaption seems to take at face value Wallace’s historical research and regurgitates it on the big screen. The 2010 television miniseries Ben Hur is also another slavish reproduction of century-old errors (although the low-budget ramming manoeuvres are surprisingly credible). 

Chains feature in nearly every Ben-Hur film adaptation

In terms of pure action, the gothic sea-fight of Ben-Hur 2016 is probably the most thrilling ever filmed. In terms of historical accuracy, it’s step down from the 1959 version. Not only is Judah Ben-Hur (Jack Huston) still presented as a pitiable slave chained to his oar before battle, but there is another slave pulling this same oar, as if we’re on a Renaissance-era galley. One might argue that the art directors were aiming for a Roman quadrireme, which had two rowers to an oar on two levels, if not for the fact that their galley interior is festooned with ridiculously symbolic chains while the actors and production crew in the behind-the-scenes making of Ben-Hur 2016 repeatedly refer to the ship as a slave galley. It’s no coincidence either that their scriptwriter, John Ridley, had just won an award for his screenplay 12 Years a Slave. Bekmambetov’s failed epic is not the only sinner in this respect though. 300: Rise of an Empire (2014) erroneously portrays the Phoenician and Greek naval contingents of the invading Persian forces as being whipped and shackled to their oars. Then again, this fantastic retelling of the Battle of Salamis also features Greek Fire and a panoply of other anachronisms.

Wolfgang Peterson’s Troy (2004) gives us Homeric ships fitted with what suspiciously look like rams, despite the fact that this most lethal of all ancient naval weapons was not invented until hundreds of years after the fall of Troy. Paradoxically, Homer’s magisterial works themselves are an ahistorical amalgam of customs and traditions spanning centuries of oral tradition. There appears to be an enduring tradition of superimposing contemporary traits onto the oared ships of previous eras. Virgil is guilty of employing this literary device for his galley-race scene in the Aeneid. 

Lorenzo A Castro's Battle of Actium

Painters of the early modern period habitually furnished the Graeco-Roman myths and ancient naval battles with the galleys of their own era. For instance, Lorenzo A. Castro’s interpretation of the Battle of Actium of 31 BC shows figures wearing 17^th century attire among squat galleys resembling the fluyts (Dutch cargo vessels) of Castro’s own age. George R.R. Martin continues this tradition today by cherry-picking naval elements from antiquity all the way to the Renaissance in constructing the monstrous oared galleys of his fantasy novel series A Song of Fire and Ice. That these scenes were dropped from the television series A Game of Thrones is testament to the expense and complexity of filming multi-levelled oared ships. Even so-called serious history books continue to perpetuate the fable of the ancient slave rower, or they simply thumb their nose at convention: the publishers of Steven Lattimore’s 1998 translation of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War adorned the award-winning book with a Renaissance-era painting of the Battle of Lepanto, which took place nearly two millennia after the bitter war between the ancient Greek superpowers of Athens and Sparta.    

The recorded history of rowing is but one long litany of anachronisms.

Yet even Shakespeare himself is guilty of introducing an anachronistic clock into Julius Caesar and billiards into Antony and Cleopatra. Unlike Peterson’s Troy, Shakespeare’s prolepses are deliberate. If deployed strategically, an ahistorical device can actually enhance the artistry of the work and prevent it from becoming dated. Anachronism can be used as a tool for highlighting universal verisimilitude and timelessness.  

First edition 'Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ’  

In rummaging around the libraries of Washington and Boston and consulting any book he could find on galleys, Wallace has inadvertently encapsulated the history of the oared ship in just a few chapters. His pseudo-Roman setting is a springboard for a gamut of other oared eras. The ram of his trireme sounds more like one from the 7^th or 6^th century BC, not the early part of the first century AD when the three-pronged ram was preferred. The Mediterranean place names – Naxos, Cythera, the Euxine Sea, Alexandria – likewise resonate with the early Greek and Hellenistic histories of oared battles. The religious persecution and enslavery of Ben-Hur evokes the 16^th century when French Protestants were sentenced to the infamous slave galleys of that era. Quintis Arrius’s desire to take some of the pirates as prisoner in order to replace his weaker rowers alludes to Christian war captives being impressed into the service of Ottoman galleys and Barbary pirates. The references to Byzantium and the Bosporus, along with descriptions of flaming oil and fireballs, speaks of the Greek Fire of the Byzantium navy which lit up the Dark Ages.

Here we are getting closer to subliminal mechanism of Ben-Hur which has imprinted its galley onto the subconscious of so many unsuspecting readers and moviegoers. Whether on the page and or on the big screen, the Ben-Hur sea-fight provides a thrilling first-person experience of life aboard one of history’s most uncanny ships. At a deeper level though, the sequence adumbrates the largely forgotten history of the oared ship – the dominant mode of war, trade and transport in the Mediterranean for thousands of years. Wallace’s anachronisms are most likely unintentional but they nevertheless create the undertone of a premeditated Shakespearean device. Like the maritime artists that came before him and the movie adaptations afterwards, Wallace communicates universal verisimilitude and timelessness through a multidimensional galley. His writing may fall short of the ahistorical grandeur of Homeric epics or Shakespeare’s histories, yet his galley sequence manages to transcend mere historical fiction to take on the attire of timeless myth. And herein lies the staying power of Wallace’s Roman slave galley.

©Tony McGowan