Hercules Unchained: Contaminatio, Nostos, Katabasis, and the Surreal

Abstract

The film Hercules Unchained (1959) is often reviled as a cheesy sword-and-sandal film, incapable of being rehabilitated. " Hercules Unchained: Contaminatio, Nostos, Katabasis and the Surreal" argues that, despite the banality of the film, the sum of its various parts presents a coherent and suggestive narrative whose bizarre articulation parallels, albeit unwittingly, the absurdist productions of the post-WWI Surrealists. The fantastically grotesque and literarily impossible combination of Hercules, Ulysses, and Oedipus ultimately resolves, mirabile dictu , in the theme of loss of identity. Set within a context of coming home from war, this extraordinarily kitsch "descent into hell" offered its contemporary audience a looking-glass reflection of the anxieties of the soldiers who were still coming home from WWII and Korea.

European Literatures of Military Occupation

“…18 The appeal of ancient terminology in discussing 20th-century wars is highlighted by historical events such as the Siberian anabasis ('deployment') of the Czechoslovak Legions (1918Legions ( -1920, 19 but also by texts such as Rudolf Borchardt's Anabasis (addressed by Jan Andres in his chapter in this volume), and by historical research such as Kenneth Estes's monograph A European Anabasis, which studies foreign units in the ranks of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS (2015). Moreover, several publications (Clauss 2008;Martiny 2010;Gardner and Murnaghan 2014;Riley 2019) have convincingly demonstrated that including the nostos category in the study of modern literature and film can promote new understanding.…”

Hercules’ Choice: Virtue, Vice and the Hero of the Twentieth-Century Screen

“…), Popular European Cinema (London and New York: Routledge 1992) 163-80; Richard Dyer, White (London and New York: Routledge 1997) 145-83; Maggie Günsberg, "Heroic bodies: the cult of masculinity in the peplum", in Italian Cinema: gender and genre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2005) 97-132; Robert Rushing, "Gentlemen prefer Hercules: desire/identification/beefcake", Camera Obscura 23.and 306-approaches, and one might add the further categories of the catalogue,20 and of 'scholarly journalism', not aimed at an academic audience though replete with useful detail 21. Despite this wealth of discussion, however, very few commentators make explicit reference to the Prodikean Choice: apart from Shahabudin (above), I have only found one brief reference in a footnote of James Clauss' paper on Hercules Unchained, and Luigi Spina's comment on the significance of the Choice as "a crucial feature" of the hero's ancient career, which is not developed by any specific reference to the films 22. Indeed, some commentators appear to be unaware not just of the particular story, but of the whole tradition of a more reflective, even philosophical hero -Bondanella, for example, summarises the mythological background by listing the twelve labours, concluding that Hercules was "considered to be more brawn than brain" 23.…”