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Helen of Troy Reloaded

Helen of Troy Reloaded

By Lisa George and Anne Duncan

Diotima: Materials for the Study of Women and Gender in the Ancient World (2004)

Helen of Troy

Introduction: Helen of Troy, epitome of feminine allure and the devastation it can wreak on society, had a face that launched a thousand ships and nearly as many variations on her life story. Her eerie glamour, her magical birth with its avian overtones and her supernatural charm inspired dozens of ancient authors and storytellers to amplify the mythology of Helen with ever more fantastic tales of her loves, schemes and adventures. 1 A variant of her departure from Sparta with Paris, put forth by Steisichorus and followed by Euripides in his Helen, even questions the very reality of her being: was it actually she at Troy, or a mere eidolon of her watching from the walls of Troy? Where, or more importantly, who is the actual, visible, tangible Helen? This question is echoed throughout the many tales of her life. Helen’s visibility is the ultimate mystery, and the desire to reveal her—not only to possess her, to own her, but also to know her in every sense—is often the driving force of action in stories about her.

It is a fascinating process to pick out the threads of her complex history as used by Adam Shapiro (producer of other television epics like “Attila” and “Dune”), screenwriter Ronni Kern, and director John Kent Harrison for the 2003 USA Network television miniseries “Helen of Troy.” The film’s jacket touts it as “inspired by Homer’s Iliad” and “one of the most epic adventure stories of all time.” Surprisingly, perhaps, this made-for-TV version of Helen’s life is by no means ignorant of some of the more obscure variations in her life story. “Helen of Troy” seeks to provide a modernized, accessible, yet authoritative version of the story of Helen and the Trojan War she launched. The opening credits of the film feature a male voiceover telling viewers that they may have heard of Helen, of the assembled cast of characters who attacked Troy, and of Troy’s eventual fall, but “that is not the way it happened. Let me tell you the real story. I know. I was there.”



The voice is revealed to be Menelaus’ and thus the filmmakers attempt to invest their alternate – and emphatically non-Iliadic – version of Helen’s story with “eyewitness” authority. But Menelaus is an eyewitness to only part of the story in any version, and thus his claims to authority as a narrator are moot. It is significant that the filmmakers do not have Helen narrate her own story. Although it would pick up on the tradition of Helen as a poet-figure, such a move would be impossible, for the premise of Helen’s myth – and Helen’s appeal – is that no one has full access to her consciousness.

As virtually every text before it has tried to do, this film attempts to fix Helen’s notoriously ambiguous character. This version presents us with an innocent girl unaware of her uncanny beauty, who falls in love with Paris and flees an abusive home life in order to be with him. But in its attempts to clarify and explain Helen’s story, the film is pulled in opposite and conflicting directions. On the one hand, it studiously mines the mythological tradition for stories of Helen’s and Paris’s lives before the Trojan War; on the other hand, it invents episodes and introduces modern, rationalizing explanations in order to fully “motivate” the story for a contemporary audience. It emphasizes her innocence and victimization, but at the same emphasizes her active agency. The result of these two strands of storytelling, ironically, is an epic that is as over-determined as the Iliad itself: in attempting to eliminate conflicting elements in Helen’s character and multiple causes for the war, the film replicates the over-determination of ancient epic, suggesting there is an irreducible indeterminacy in Helen’s character and in the story of the Trojan War.

Click here to read this article from Diotima: Materials for the Study of Women and Gender in the Ancient World

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