A few words of praise for Oliver Stone’s vision of Alexander

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!