Oliver Stone
received loads of criticism for his Alexander
movie, revisions, and comments as if he had it all wrong. Well, nobody from Alexander’s lifetime is still alive to
contest what’s right or not.
As said in my
earlier blog post about Stone’s book Responses
to Oliver Stone’s Alexander, it is so much easier to point out the
shortcomings than to consider the author’s considerable merit. The critics
seem to forget that Alexander’s
life was far too complex, too active, too magnanimous, and too genial to be
told in a movie of three hours for a public largely unacquainted with history
or Alexander the Great.
At the end of
his book, Oliver Stone added a highly interesting chapter “Afterward”, an
excellent explanation and justification for his vision of Alexander. I can only
admire his stamina. I saved this text
from some link back in 2006 and had a fresh look at it today. It is striking
to read how, nearly twenty years later, Stone’s approach to Alexander is still so close to the truth!
His plea for
humankind to understand Alexander
is worthy of Demosthenes, the great
Athenian orator. Here is an excerpt worth reading:
The response is in what Alexander did, and not his motives, which I
suspect were something like most of ours: highly ambivalent, at times glorious,
at times wretched. I sometimes feel professional historians, generally apart
from the human give and take of the marketplace, expect too much from their
leaders -- requiring them to act from abstract principles in a world harsh with
chaos, greed and infighting. We can certainly say in Alexander’s defense that he
kept the expedition marching eastward for 7 more years after Babylon, with
a greatness of vision that could motivate a 120,000-man army. By leading
from the front and sharing the burdens of his men, he showed himself above
the comfort lines of materialism, and as a known foe of official corruption, he
set high standards by punishing those found guilty of stealing, raping,
plundering (including his school friend Eumenes). From all accounts written of Alexander,
we see time and again, his great passion, pain, and self-torture in
incidents such as the murder of Cleitus, the burning of Persepolis, the mutiny
in India, the kissing of Bagoas in front of his men, and the bestowing of
official acceptance on Asian men and womenfolk. There is no ancient ruler,
outside of legend, that I have ever heard commit such potentially
self-incriminating actions. This is, of course, one of the reasons his name continues
to endure – who was ever remotely like him? ‘In the doing, always in the
doing’, Alexander.
Conquest is also a form of evolution. If Alexander
had a smaller vision, he would’ve retreated long before to Babylon and consolidated
his empire. He would’ve brought his mother, his sister and his entourage to the
Persian Court.
He would’ve made a stronger, more patient effort to combine Macedonian and
Persian custom. This unification of cultures would’ve been the lifetime
challenge for any emperor, and would’ve certainly changed the course of
history. Why did he not?
I see Alexander more as an explorer, like many others of
such a nature, not quite knowing what’s going to come up on the horizon, yet boldly
reaching for the new electrical charge of change. He stayed in motion until the
end, and never returned to his Rome, London, Paris, Berlin, or Mongolia, as other conquerors have.
He comes across in many ways as a man who was making it up as he went along
-- from Babylon through Afghanistan, Pakistan,
India, Bangladesh and back to Babylon -- where in the end, he remained unsatisfied, dreaming of his expedition to the West. I
would call him not an imperialist as present fashion would have it, but
rather a ‘proto-man’, an enlightened monarch naturally in search of one
land, one world -- the unity, so to speak, of the womb. Given that Alexander might’ve had a longer lifetime to develop
this experiment, his empire might’ve yielded perhaps six or seven centers --
such as Babylon, Alexandria, Athens, Carthage, Rome, South Spain, a world with
nerve centers that supposes, to a surprising degree, the global world centers
we have today – but with one world government, centered on enlightened
monarchy, or, barring that, some form of governing body.
In unconsciously pursuing this ‘one world’ concept,
under the guise of a personal quest, the Alexander of the drama we created
would have to be a man who believed he was the right force to bring the world
into a greater sense of unification and prosperity, that he was a step in the
evolutionary process. And given the cataclysms possible, I do think Alexander
ruled extraordinarily well for 12 years over men, both noble and bestial,
in a social fabric that not only maintained itself, but greatly expanded in
terms of culture, scientific discovery, and economic progress. It’s so easy
to dismiss this great effort, I think too easy, to declare it broken after 12
years of rule. But can we say it really broke apart? Even if dissolved in four
parts, the basic communal energies remained in place, and his creation
culminated shortly, within 150 years, in the burgeoning Roman
Empire.
I cannot agree more!
