Responses to Oliver Stone’s Alexander: Film, History, and Cultural Studies

Alexander on Stage: A Critical Appraisal of Rattigan's Adventure Story

Alexander on Stage A Critical Appraisal of Rattigan’s Adventure Story robin lane fox D uring filming Oliver Stone described his film to me as a wheel with five spokes, moving in three different times. The “spokes” are the five main settings: Alexandria in Egypt, Macedon, Babylon, Bactria, and India. Each of them is distinguished by distinctive coloring and light exposure: a crisp contrast of gray and white for Ptolemy’s Alexandrian palace as the new future after Alexander ’s death; sunny sky blue with clean white clothes to evoke the distant past world of Macedon as remembered from childhood and youth; blue, above all, for the Babylon palace and an enhanced splendor, including much more gold (with a chillier exception for Hephaestion’s final bedroom); muted reds, blacks, and a sandy brown interior for Roxane’s Bactrian castle; pinks and greens for the Indian warriors, enhanced by the silvering effect of the bold use of special film that was risked for the elephant battle and by the orange-yellow canopy for the drinking party in the Indian palace. The color coding marks off each “spoke” from the others. The “three times,” meanwhile, are the period when the old Ptolemy is dictating his memoirs (283/82 B.C.E.), the main events of Alexander’s adult life (336–323 B.C.E.) as remembered 55 (and mis-remembered) by Ptolemy, and Alexander’s childhood and youth (ca. 352–336 B.C.E.), partly evoked by Ptolemy but mainly evoked mentally by Alexander himself within his later career. As the film goes on, the scenes from these earlier years are not simple flashbacks . They are “parallel stories” that return to Alexander’s consciousness at particular moments. They are placed (particularly in the Director ’s Cut and Final Cut DVDs) at what Stone interprets as parallel moments in Alexander’s adult life. Film can exploit color, light, and texture in a way that a text, even a drama, cannot. These elements direct or orientate viewers, but they should not be so obtrusive that they overwhelm them: Stone’s elements worked excellently, almost too well for many film critics to notice them. The changing times in which the “wheel” moves, their intercutting (less pronounced in the first cinema version), and the implicit indication of “parallel stories” make Alexander’s structure quite unlike that of any previous epic narrative based on ancient history. The first cinema audiences were not expecting this structure after Gladiator or Troy, nor were film critics, who fastened on Ptolemy as if he were simply a narrator, violating rules of film that Stone knows as well as (or far better than) any of them and expressing views that they took rather crudely to be Stone’s own. When the final turnabout comes and Ptolemy says that he “never believed in Alexander’s dream,” a simplistic reception of the film is cut down, leaving viewers to rethink (Stone hoped) the point of view that had previously been leading them on. Ptolemy then tells his scribe to replace the words with something else. Implicitly a point is made here about the written evidence that survives, often to mislead future historians. The five-part structure, the color coding, the interrelating times were all devised to give form and drama to a long life that in reality was more an epic of deeds and failures than a plot with its own self-evident shape. During and after filming Stone observed to me how striking it was that Alexander had never been a subject for dramatists. The search for a dramatic structure had occupied Stone and previous scriptwriters for more than seven years of intermittent attempts at the project. The disastrous march through the Gedrosian desert was tried in the foreground for the opening scenes in 2002; the first big battle scene, in one version, was supposed to be Chaeronea in 338 B.C.E. Meanwhile the struggle to write a concentrated but comprehensive script remained an unsolved problem for the rival Baz Luhrmann and De Laurentiis project: they even favored versions in which Alexander died, preposterously, in India. 56 robin lane fox There are, in fact, two significant dramas about Alexander in English , neither of which was known to Stone and his scriptwriters. One is Nathaniel Lee’s Rival Queens of the 1670s, which was still being staged and rewritten a hundred years later. An echo of it did find its way...