Movie Review: Agora
May. 27th, 2012 02:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sunnyskywalkerVery appropriately, I watched this movie on the day of a partial solar eclipse, which made the eclipse oddly emotionally moving.
I knew the movie wouldn't have a happy ending, since Hypatia herself didn't, but I didn't expect it to be so heartbreaking right from the start.
The movie follows Hypatia from her time studying and lecturing at the Great Library of Alexandria to her end as an enemy of the state doomed to a violent execution, and her (fictional) slave Davus. Right from the beginning, the movie establishes the theme of the agora, where everyone meets to debate philosophy, religion, and so forth - and the threat to this open discussion. A Christian and a pagan are arguing in front of a crowd, standing near a firepit. The Christian "proves" his god is best by walking through the fire without burning up... and then not only challenges his opponent to try it, but actually throws him into the fire. The results looked fatal. Discussion terminated. This threat of violent solutions to debates only grows throughout the movie, moving from the siege and then looting of the Serapeum Library to the slaughter of the Jews to the purge of even relatively harmless individual dissenters like Hypatia, once there were no large groups left to kill. (The Christians quickly get the upper hand in the movie, but it is clear that they aren't the only ones who would like use violence to shut down debate - they just win. The pagans start a fight when the Christians defile some pagan statues, and plenty of characters express a wish that Christianity were still illegal and persecuted. Late in the movie, a group of Christian... well, enforcers/thugs essentially... are lured into a room and most are stoned to death, iirc by the Jews, who are angry about a not-so-deadly Christian attack on their theater.)
External violence isn't the only threat to the agora. Hypatia, though she obviously tries to be a decent person, is still very much of her time. She is able to recognize that Davus must have a decent mind when she discovers his model of the Ptolemaic universe and has him present it to her students, but she also takes him for granted and regularly makes disparaging comments about slaves. Watching Davus get jerked back and forth between Hypatia noticing him as a human being and dismissing him as moving furniture or violent riff-raff makes for constant "ouch, that's awful" moments. A lot of people are being shut out of the discussion.
But the agora isn't the only major symbol in this film. Based on what little we know of Hypatia's work (she was apparently a polymath, but perhaps especially good at or involved in geometry and astronomy), the movie makes her quest for the true order of the solar system a major theme. Initially, she teaches the geocentric, circle-loving Ptolemaic model. An offhand comment by one of her students that all those epicycles seem so ridiculous and contrived, and another character's mention of Aristarchus's fringe theory of heliocentrism, gets her thinking. Realizing that the Earth might be just another "wanderer" and not the center of everything after all is a shock - and this loss of center reflects the loss of the center of her world, the Library and her position in it as her entire society convulses and changes. But when she tries to work out a viable heliocentric model with purely circular orbits, she runs into the same problem of needing complicated epicycles to account for all the movements - that, or possibly abandoning the idea of having any celestial body at the center, an idea which "breaks [her] heart" at first. One starts to think of that famous line of poetry, "The center cannot hold."
In the movie, she finally discovers the solution: not one center, but two foci. This duality, this idea of having multiple "centers" to things, runs throughout the entire movie. When a Roman official comes to break up the library siege, the besieged pagans at first assume the rebels he means are the mob outside, when in fact he means the pagans inside. Suddenly the pagans are displaced from the center and find themselves one of two factions - and right now, things are "orbiting" closer to the other one. Hypatia is both a freethinker who questions authority and an unquestioning slaveowner. The Christians Davus meets both feed the hungry (the scene where Davus helps give away bread is very moving, and you can see why he sees this as representing greater freedom and compassion) and slaughter pagans and Jews. Davus is both in love with Hypatia (and classical learning) and drawn to the Christian movement and the particular manifestations of it that encourage smashing up the society that keeps him down. There's a moment during the looting of the Serapeum when Davus stands for a long moment, watching others smash the pagan statues. We don't know whether his instinct is to defend the library that he seems to love, which has effectively been his home, or to destroy it as a symbol of oppression and the weight of tradition. He may not know himself which impulse is stronger, at first. (He chooses "destroy.") Alexandria starts off with both Christians and non-Christians living together. But inexorably, the geometry of Alexandria shifts, the mobs destroying foci until only a single center is left.
Notably, Hypatia never gets the chance to publicize her discovery of the elliptical universe. (She tells the slave who acts as her sounding board, and that this doesn't seem to "count" makes the movie seem to take Hypatia's perspective for a moment, where slaves aren't quite full characters. I think they only included him so she wouldn't be talking to herself in those scenes, but it's still a problem.) She tries to tell her friend, the prefect Orestes, but he cuts her off to deal with the more pressing matter of Cyril and many of his Christian followers being out for her blood. Finally, she is condemned to death by Davus's brothers-in-arms. He has started to question just how right all this killing in the name of a loving god is and hoped to warn her, but was too late. So instead, he talks his friends out of slicing her to bits ("don't stain your hands with impure blood") so they will be out of sight for a few crucial moments while they go to gather stones instead. Then he smothers Hypatia (which she kind of maybe agreed to, non-verbally, to avoid the longer, more painful death) as she looks up through the circular opening in the ceiling at the sun. The debate in the agora, the possibility of two foci rather than one center, has been smothered.
(They do note in one of those epilogue-y title cards that her body was dragged through the streets and torn to pieces afterwards - which in reality might have happened while she was still alive - but they don't make us watch it.)
Between these motifs, just about every scene in this movie left me feeling torn in two: between sympathy for Davus for wanting to be free and seen as human and horror at the means he uses to achieve that end, sympathy for Hypatia and her devotion to science (and, erm, not getting murdered) and sadness at her thoughtless bigotry, sympathy for the downtrodden in the crowds angry at their fat cat masters and horror at the destruction of the library in its role as scapegoat for all their society's ills, sympathy for the Jews (and a bit of shadenfreude at the thugs being on the receiving end of an attack for a change) and horror at the sheer brutality of the mass stoning, and on and on.
It's not a perfect movie, but it's very good and well worth watching. Just be prepared for two hours of heartbreak.
ETA: For a review with more characters and less geometry, see Abigail Nussbaum's take here. I agree that the movie could have benefited from the length of a miniseries to flesh things out, but I found it a bit better tied together than she did. I was a bit miffed that they didn't even try to age Hypatia up for a 24-year time jump too, though.
Daughter of ETA: For a happier coda, try listening to the Dar Williams song "The Christians and the Pagans" here. So the Christians and the pagans sat together at the table/Finding faith and common ground the best that they were able. (My favorite line is still "Now when Christians sit with pagans, only pumpkin pies are burning.")
I knew the movie wouldn't have a happy ending, since Hypatia herself didn't, but I didn't expect it to be so heartbreaking right from the start.
The movie follows Hypatia from her time studying and lecturing at the Great Library of Alexandria to her end as an enemy of the state doomed to a violent execution, and her (fictional) slave Davus. Right from the beginning, the movie establishes the theme of the agora, where everyone meets to debate philosophy, religion, and so forth - and the threat to this open discussion. A Christian and a pagan are arguing in front of a crowd, standing near a firepit. The Christian "proves" his god is best by walking through the fire without burning up... and then not only challenges his opponent to try it, but actually throws him into the fire. The results looked fatal. Discussion terminated. This threat of violent solutions to debates only grows throughout the movie, moving from the siege and then looting of the Serapeum Library to the slaughter of the Jews to the purge of even relatively harmless individual dissenters like Hypatia, once there were no large groups left to kill. (The Christians quickly get the upper hand in the movie, but it is clear that they aren't the only ones who would like use violence to shut down debate - they just win. The pagans start a fight when the Christians defile some pagan statues, and plenty of characters express a wish that Christianity were still illegal and persecuted. Late in the movie, a group of Christian... well, enforcers/thugs essentially... are lured into a room and most are stoned to death, iirc by the Jews, who are angry about a not-so-deadly Christian attack on their theater.)
External violence isn't the only threat to the agora. Hypatia, though she obviously tries to be a decent person, is still very much of her time. She is able to recognize that Davus must have a decent mind when she discovers his model of the Ptolemaic universe and has him present it to her students, but she also takes him for granted and regularly makes disparaging comments about slaves. Watching Davus get jerked back and forth between Hypatia noticing him as a human being and dismissing him as moving furniture or violent riff-raff makes for constant "ouch, that's awful" moments. A lot of people are being shut out of the discussion.
But the agora isn't the only major symbol in this film. Based on what little we know of Hypatia's work (she was apparently a polymath, but perhaps especially good at or involved in geometry and astronomy), the movie makes her quest for the true order of the solar system a major theme. Initially, she teaches the geocentric, circle-loving Ptolemaic model. An offhand comment by one of her students that all those epicycles seem so ridiculous and contrived, and another character's mention of Aristarchus's fringe theory of heliocentrism, gets her thinking. Realizing that the Earth might be just another "wanderer" and not the center of everything after all is a shock - and this loss of center reflects the loss of the center of her world, the Library and her position in it as her entire society convulses and changes. But when she tries to work out a viable heliocentric model with purely circular orbits, she runs into the same problem of needing complicated epicycles to account for all the movements - that, or possibly abandoning the idea of having any celestial body at the center, an idea which "breaks [her] heart" at first. One starts to think of that famous line of poetry, "The center cannot hold."
In the movie, she finally discovers the solution: not one center, but two foci. This duality, this idea of having multiple "centers" to things, runs throughout the entire movie. When a Roman official comes to break up the library siege, the besieged pagans at first assume the rebels he means are the mob outside, when in fact he means the pagans inside. Suddenly the pagans are displaced from the center and find themselves one of two factions - and right now, things are "orbiting" closer to the other one. Hypatia is both a freethinker who questions authority and an unquestioning slaveowner. The Christians Davus meets both feed the hungry (the scene where Davus helps give away bread is very moving, and you can see why he sees this as representing greater freedom and compassion) and slaughter pagans and Jews. Davus is both in love with Hypatia (and classical learning) and drawn to the Christian movement and the particular manifestations of it that encourage smashing up the society that keeps him down. There's a moment during the looting of the Serapeum when Davus stands for a long moment, watching others smash the pagan statues. We don't know whether his instinct is to defend the library that he seems to love, which has effectively been his home, or to destroy it as a symbol of oppression and the weight of tradition. He may not know himself which impulse is stronger, at first. (He chooses "destroy.") Alexandria starts off with both Christians and non-Christians living together. But inexorably, the geometry of Alexandria shifts, the mobs destroying foci until only a single center is left.
Notably, Hypatia never gets the chance to publicize her discovery of the elliptical universe. (She tells the slave who acts as her sounding board, and that this doesn't seem to "count" makes the movie seem to take Hypatia's perspective for a moment, where slaves aren't quite full characters. I think they only included him so she wouldn't be talking to herself in those scenes, but it's still a problem.) She tries to tell her friend, the prefect Orestes, but he cuts her off to deal with the more pressing matter of Cyril and many of his Christian followers being out for her blood. Finally, she is condemned to death by Davus's brothers-in-arms. He has started to question just how right all this killing in the name of a loving god is and hoped to warn her, but was too late. So instead, he talks his friends out of slicing her to bits ("don't stain your hands with impure blood") so they will be out of sight for a few crucial moments while they go to gather stones instead. Then he smothers Hypatia (which she kind of maybe agreed to, non-verbally, to avoid the longer, more painful death) as she looks up through the circular opening in the ceiling at the sun. The debate in the agora, the possibility of two foci rather than one center, has been smothered.
(They do note in one of those epilogue-y title cards that her body was dragged through the streets and torn to pieces afterwards - which in reality might have happened while she was still alive - but they don't make us watch it.)
Between these motifs, just about every scene in this movie left me feeling torn in two: between sympathy for Davus for wanting to be free and seen as human and horror at the means he uses to achieve that end, sympathy for Hypatia and her devotion to science (and, erm, not getting murdered) and sadness at her thoughtless bigotry, sympathy for the downtrodden in the crowds angry at their fat cat masters and horror at the destruction of the library in its role as scapegoat for all their society's ills, sympathy for the Jews (and a bit of shadenfreude at the thugs being on the receiving end of an attack for a change) and horror at the sheer brutality of the mass stoning, and on and on.
It's not a perfect movie, but it's very good and well worth watching. Just be prepared for two hours of heartbreak.
ETA: For a review with more characters and less geometry, see Abigail Nussbaum's take here. I agree that the movie could have benefited from the length of a miniseries to flesh things out, but I found it a bit better tied together than she did. I was a bit miffed that they didn't even try to age Hypatia up for a 24-year time jump too, though.
Daughter of ETA: For a happier coda, try listening to the Dar Williams song "The Christians and the Pagans" here. So the Christians and the pagans sat together at the table/Finding faith and common ground the best that they were able. (My favorite line is still "Now when Christians sit with pagans, only pumpkin pies are burning.")
