Descended from Hercules: Biopolitics and the Muscled Male Body on Screen by Robert A. Rushing (review)

"Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?"

—Captain Clarence Oveur, Airplane!

Robert Rushing makes the case that biopolitics are central to the peplum—a genre of sword-and-sandal films focused on muscular, male heroes—in his erudite and highly readable Descended from Hercules. Despite the peculiarity of the genre, the peplum is the focus of two other recent works: Michael G. Cornelius' collection Of Muscles and Men: Essays on the Sword and Sandal Film (Jefferson: McFarland & Company Inc., 2011) and Daniel O'Brien's Classical Masculinity and the Spectacular Body on Film: The Mighty Sons of Hercules (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). The focus on biopolitics distinguishes Rushing's study: specifically, Rushing investigates "the ways in which the genre has managed to create and in turn capture the spectator's fascination with the muscular male body—and the ways in which these points of fascination ultimately mirror Roberto Esposito's biopolitical 'immunity paradigm'" (5). Rushing examines three particular points of fascination in these films: slow or stopped time, a "queer" refusal of sexuality, and the films' haptic register. These recurring techniques entice the audience, making them receptive to the films' biopolitical message, that the "built," white male body can safeguard the body politic against threats of Otherness and degeneration.

Beginning with the debut of the genre's most enduring hero, Maciste, in Cabiria (1914), Rushing introduces readers to a genre that is remarkable for the persistence of its tropes. In each chapter, Rushing examines one of these trope as it has changed (or hasn't) over four eras of the peplum's popularity: the silent era, most associated with the Maciste films; the midcentury peplum, popular during the 1960s, such as Hercules Against the Moon Men (1964); 1980s barbarian films, most notably Conan the Barbarian; and the contemporary peplum, such as 300 (2006). In the strong opening chapter, for example, Rushing contrasts the peplum's use of slow or stopped time with film's (nominally masculine) kinetic register. Whereas Laura Mulvey famously argued that women in classical Hollywood cinema are the object of scopophilia, Rushing shows that the peplum uses slow or stopped time to subject the male hero to a voyeuristic gaze. Two close readings anchor the chapter: in one, from Maciste nella gabbia dei Leoni (1926), Rushing analyzes a scene in which a girl dances ballet on Maciste's muscular, extended arm; in the other, Rushing examines "rhythmic ramping" in 300, the technique by which almost every scene in the film is both slowed down and sped up. Despite an 80-year gulf, both techniques allow the films to balance filmic time between the kinetic and the static: in the earlier scene, the audience can contemplate the static figure of Maciste and the kinetic motion of the dancer; the latter allows the audience to enjoy the minute details of each Spartan's muscles when time is slowed down, and then thrill to the kinetic action when time speeds up.

The next two chapters, on the peplum's sexual and haptic dimensions, follow this same pattern, and are at their best when they focus on close readings. In chapter two, Rushing notes that the muscular male hero is always either childlike, and therefore pre-sexual, or has suffered through a traumatic loss of loved ones that renders him post-sexual, resulting in the genre's "queer" refusal of sexuality. This refusal jarringly contrasts with the films' sensual fixation on flesh. The chapter on the haptic (the way that film can appeal to senses beyond sight and sound) argues that the skin, not the phallus, symbolizes masculinity. However, the chapter seems to stray from the central argument when Rushing turns to Laura Marks' argument about the haptic, paralleling the skin, muscle, and viscera of the body to the surface of the film, its camera movements, and its internal mechanisms. Rushing does so to suggest that Lucio Fulci's Conquest (1983) uses fuzzy...