 |
| Conan the Barbarian (1982 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Warning: if it seems like I am getting away from Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief at times, please bear with me -- it'll all make sense in the end.
Okay, so now, what about pepla? I found a terrific article (citation below) by Robert A. Rushing, titled "Gentlemen Prefer Hercules: Desire | Identification | Beefcake." It looks like Rushing is talking precisely about what my mother meant by "gladiator movies." And he goes on to discuss them in a way that may be the reason my mom was kind of laughing when she talked about them. Apparently, the big deal about the Italian pepla is their homoerotic appeal. I haven't actually seen the movies he discusses, but he explains the genre pretty well, and I can see some/a lot of the elements in movies I have seen, like 300, Conan the Barbarian (the Schwartzenegger one), and The Scorpion King (you gotta love The Rock). Rushing points out that these films "appear to have been consumed primarily by heterosexual, adolescent male viewers, an audience that would seem to have needed some way of negotiating the highly visible and eroticized spectacle of the male body that these films traditionally presented" (162). So, the primary demographic here was not gay men, but homoerotic element does not seem to deter heterosexual males from watching them.
Naturally, after reading this, I had to talk to my mom again, and this time she was giggling. "I knew you'd figure it out sooner or later," she said, which wasn't exactly an apology.
Rushing, Robert A., "Gentlemen Prefer Hercules: Desire | Identification | Beefcake." Camera Obscura 23.69 (Sept 2008): 158-191. Print.
(note: still haven't figured out how to do a hanging indent here. Sorry for you MLA purists)
No comments:
Post a Comment