February 4, 2024

Lost History

The nightmare from which I am trying to awake...

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” Winston S. Churchill

Sir Ridley Scott is a whore. There, I said it and mean it in quite a literal sense. No, not that literal, but he is more than happy to sell his talent and his soul for a few coins. I write this after having suffered through 2 hours and 38 minutes of watching Napoleon. Which seemed like an eternity: a grotesque collection of unrelated grandiose set pieces and supposedly a sad romantic tale of a man longing and burning the world for the woman who could not give him an heir. Yes, it does not make much sense even if you are not familiar with the actual history of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Scott is a genius who legitimately has at least half a dozen truly iconic works to his name. He is a wizard of extravagant imagery that is often not only visually striking but simply trendsetting for decades of Hollywood copycats painfully failing to replicate the master’s vision1. When Blade Runner came out it was quite misunderstood and yet the futuristic sensual sci-fi opulent expressiveness has created a stylistic genre. Alien broke multiple conventions and genres, but most importantly firmly established that a film catering to predominantly male audiences can be good and successful while featuring a strong female lead who “arguably birthed the female action hero. Her character’s ferocity rejected tired stereotypes. Perhaps that’s because the role was originally written for a man, and director Scott Ridley has said little changed about the character after Weaver was cast.2”

However, it was the realm of commercialized artistic expression that truly displayed Scott’s genius and established him as a groundbreaking filmmaker. Film was always in Scott’s life, a dream destination that he always envisioned for himself. His great-uncle, Dixie Scott, was a local cinema mogul in Tyneside, and Scott went on to study at the Royal College of Art in London, where he helped create film department.

After briefly working on various series for the BBC, Sir Ridley founded the Ridley Scott Associates with his late brother, Tony, and over the next two decades created well over 2,000 commercials. In a way, “I was out of the era of ‘Mad Men'”, Scott later told Variety:

“We were really inventing modern advertising and modern communications. The big question always to me when making a movie now is, ‘Am I communicating?’ And if you’re not communicating you won’t have a film do business and our business is about commerce, not art. People at that time said TV commercial breaks were better than the programs. In doing that, I learned to address the most basic question: Am I communicating, or am I going over your head? And that’s what all filmmakers face”.

You would think that it’s hard, if not impossible to make a commercial into a cultural phenomenon, one that lasts for generations and yet, this is exactly what Scott has done, actually, he made it look easy. Almost half a century later, Scott’s Bike Ride commercial for Hovis remains more memorable than any other advert in British history3.  

With the success and fame from Hovis and other ads, plus Alien and Blade Runner, the value attached to Scott’s name meant that he had international interest, with major companies offering him work. Chanel, serendipitously, was searching to rebrand itself away from the plebs. Scott’s genius vision was exactly what Chanel needed, however, it was also exactly what has made him into a whore, the offer was too good to turn down.

While the clip follows the pastiched tropes of the sub-genre of advertising, that’s only because the short film built the blueprint for every perfume advert that has ever aired since. The ad’s tag-line, 'Share the Fantasy’ was conveyed with so much finesse that an unconventionally sensuous spot was also appreciated across the industry and outside4.

Then, five years later Scott had asserted himself as one of the top names in filmmaking by creating arguable the most famous and memorable commercial ever. By now, he was an established, successful filmmaker, so deciding to do an advert had to be a monumental deal.

The famous ad based on George Orwell’s 19845, premiered during the Super Bowl for then-unknown technology company Apple and instantly, Apple became a national brand. It is quite ironic that, it is Apple that’s one again came a-knockin’ to seduce Scott’s desperate need for lavish spectacle.

Make no mistake, for Apple, Napoleon, just as much as Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is a marketing strategy of original content with a theatrical window where it doesn’t matter if they lose money. I’ll let Anthony D’Alessandro at Deadline explain:

“Wake up to the fact that Apple and Disney’s goals couldn’t be more separate. One is a tech business with a streaming service, and the other is a content-driven conglomerate that extends into travel lifestyle and merchandising. Two very different businesses. Film finance sources tell me that a $200M production cost on Killers of the Flower Moon is literally an advertising expense for Apple, and its P&L is different from the way that The Marvels would be assessed. At the end of the day, it’s not Apple’s goal to make money in the theatrical business. They don’t care about profit in TV and motion pictures. Disney’s goals and plans are similar to Max, Paramount+, Peacock, etc., and they’re beating the aforementioned. However, all streaming services associated with the majors are still losing money. For Apple, theatrical is a bonus on Killers of the Flower Moon, and they didn’t make the movie for theatrical, rather, locking people into their ecosystem.”

In other words, here’s a groundbreaking, visionary director who owes his career to the realm of advertising is literally being used by the company that he made famously prominent as a visually-pleasing prop to make more money from their core business. Oh, the irony!

Scott would not be the first artist to sell his soul for a pretty penny, but I struggle to think of any others who have managed a complete one eighty on the hypocrisy scale. The man who gave us Ripley, recently went off on super-hero movies, Marvel in particular. In the same interview with Deadline, Scott did not mince words in expressing how he feels about blockbuster hero flicks. “Their scripts are not any fucking good,” he candidly told the publication. “I narrowed it down to this, almost always, the best films are driven by the characters, and we’ll come to superheroes after this if you want, because I’ll crush it. I’ll fucking crush it. They’re fucking boring as shit.” Martin Scorsese abhors the superhero genre so much that, in one 2019 interview, he told Empire he doesn’t even watch them anymore: “I don’t see them. I tried, you know? But that’s not cinema; honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”

The Marvels

Budget: $220 million
Opening U.S. weekend: $46 million
Global Box Office: $197 million

Killers of the Flower Moon

Budget: $200 million
Opening U.S. weekend: $23 million
Global Box Office: $156 million

Napoleon

Budget: $200 million
Opening U.S. weekend (+Thanksgiving): $32 million
Global Box Office Narrative: $218 million”

Seems that the lowest grossing Marvel movie facing backlash from incels and racist gamerbros managed to hold it’s own. Scott may think that Ripley is a superhero, but his arguments against Marvel and other superhero movies rings hollow and extremely hypocritical once measured against his own recent works. Imperator Furiosa, with nary a plot carried a visually stunning Fury Road to $340 million box office, Sir Ridley, has never grossed more than $230 million6.

The argument against women-led superhero and action films is based on alleged lack of audience interest, with “The Marvels” box office, the same metric that shows similar performance for the similarly budgeted “Killers of the Flower Moon” and “Napoleon.” There’s plenty of internet fodder on this. Yet, it’s simply not true and even if it was, many other movies with great female leads and successful box office has shown time and again that it’s not. Having two aging white men essentially yell “get off my lawn” because they once done something that shaped our cultural norms should not be waved off and dismissed. The hypocrisy only feeds into the toxic far right information take over, from Gamergate to Claudine Gay resignation.

I don’t know whether Scott or Scorsese even realize it, but they are normalizing the discourse that at least Scott used be firmly against. They do it in the most accessible mainstream medium and ultimately, every time they collaborate and enable forces of evil7.

Why am I writing this? Because it pisses me off that prominent figures like Scott and Scorsese get away with literal shit for decades, while feeding into the far right narratives and so many amazing women and minorities at most given one chance to fail. Scott can and has failed hard and repeatedly and yet he is praised and rewarded and given more chances, even if it’s simply using him as a marketing ploy, and no movie has displayed his failure more than Napoleon.

The French critics have been polite in their scorn, or as polite as Ridley Scott believes the French to be; Le Figaro said the film could be renamed "Barbie and Ken under the Empire," French GQ said there was something "deeply clumsy, unnatural and unintentionally funny" in seeing French soldiers in 1793 shouting "Vive La France" with American accents; and a biographer of Napoleon, Patrice Gueniffey in Le Point magazine, attacked the film as a "very anti-French and very pro-British" rewrite of history. Scott’s response? "The French don't even like themselves. The audience that I showed it to in Paris, they loved it."

Scott’s visual artistry, that I mentioned earlier, makes him a consummate creator of the worlds, and it is true here, yet, as visually striking as the movie is, it is just another exceedingly long, dull and boring attempt to tell Napoleon’s story8.

The most visually striking scene was the battle of Austerlitz, which I thought Scott may simply skip, like he skipped Marengo, Jena, Wagram, Dresden. Oh no, Scott could not resist a large-scale set piece with the French army cannons firing at Russian soldiers on a field of ice, the explosions plunging them into the water.

I could hardly sit through Ridley Scott’s Napoleon with my eyes open and I’ve eagerly consumed the director’s cut of Kingdom of Heaven multiple times. The movie is not just a colossal bore that lacks passion, excitement, or hardly sense of entertainment, it lacks coherence, a plot or even a premise besides Scott wanting to do another epic. The most and arguably, the only, entertaining moment in the movie was when Napoleon meets Josephine, who spreads her legs and says, “If you look down, you’ll see a surprise. Once you see it, you’ll always want it.”  I guess she knew what she was talking about, because according to Scott, Napoleon abandoned his Egypt campaign and later returned from exile in Elba only because of his love and affection to Josephine.. or whatever it is he saw on that fateful day.

The movie is a dull history lesson, a series of highlights from an abridged version of “European History 101:”

• Marie Antoinette gets beheaded with Bonaparte personally witnessing it (!!),

• the Reign of Terror with a caricature of Robespierre running and begging for his life,

• the siege at Toulon, the excursion into Egypt,

• the battle of Austerlitz which I thought would not even be shown…

Each scene is an director’s triumph rather than the historical revelation, because Scott reduces the moral complexity of the story to the same easy consumption we get from a television advert. Yet, unlike any TV ad, Napoleon is protracted, as if running time and rambling narrative incidents (the back-and-forth from battlefield to Josephine) amounted to substance, it is an empty spectacle for the market audience unaware of and uninterested in learning from history and Scott’s indifference encourages that disinterest.

Screen titles inform us what battle we are watching, similarly we are told names and titles of people discussing fates of countries, but we never really know or understand who Napoleon is fighting or why. To make it worse, Joaquin Phoenix, aside from being an incredibly bad choice for the titular character, seems exasperated and emotionally uninvolved. Phoenix presents Napoleon as idiosyncratic, pervy, brutish; it’s almost like he plays a stoned Joker in a funny hat.

Phoenix’s caricature reflects today’s popular disdain for colonialist Europe. Napoleon’s bravado and military cunning are juxtaposed with personal quirks seen in his relationship with Josephine. The pace of the movie, switching between epic battle scenes and TMZ worthy lurid “romance” are reminiscent of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, in as much as it challenges the very idea of storytelling by packing too much sheer volume without any unifying theme or so much as a plot or even a clear point.

Part of the problem is that despite having two actors with plenty of ability, Scott’s leads lack any energy or vitality; there is no growth to either of their characters9 or their roles. The Napoleon we meet in 1789 is the same Napoleon we bid adieu in 1821. It’s that nothing that happens in the movie seems to impact him in the slightest, even the rumored infidelity of Josephine, when he leaves Egypt, barely gets an emotion from Phoenix.

Vanessa Kirby, tries, but can’t avoid the fact that she too is stuck in a role without room for growth, she is a scandalous trollop who seeks to secure her position in the dangerous times and that is exactly how we find her at the end, when she is dying of syphilis. Her acting is mostly muted and forgettable, except for the eye-rolling and over-emoting. For a dude who managed multiple profanities into a couple of sentences criticizing lack of plot or character development in Marvel movies, Scott gives us a dreary and turgid story without any character development and evoking only a sketchy picture of Napoleon’s historic rise and fall and his nasty, violent marriage to Josephine. There is nothing here to engage the heart or mind of the audience. Nothing to explain or demonstrate the qualities that made him charismatic enough to captivate France and the longer it goes on the more stale Joaquin Phoenix becomes, even the Napoleon’s legendary boast “I found the crown of France in the gutter and placed it atop my own head” to convey the deadly egotism falls flat and empty.

Then there is a litany of historical errors, misrepresentations and outright fabrications, as great as Napoleon personally leading cavalry charge at Waterloo may have looked, it simply made me laugh hysterically. If you care even remotely about the history of the Napoleonic era, this is not a movie for you. Scott is more than happy to agree. As Variety reported, “When asked to respond to such historical fact-checkers, Scott was blunt in his response: ‘Get a life.’”

Despite being a student of history, I love a good romp as much as anyone. Historical films are great vehicles for adventure, intrigue, and romance. I am even okay with minor historical inaccuracies or fabrications if these are meant to drive the story or increase the suspense. If Scott can make a movie that transcends minor complaints about historical accuracy, then we will tip our cap and move on. Was Gladiator historical? No, of course not. Not even close, but it had a great story, passion and fervor. Sadly, Napoleon is not Gladiator, it’s not even on the level of Scott’s other historical films like Kingdom of Heaven, American Gangster, The Last Duel, etc. Scott’s dismissal of the historical facts only makes the movie a slog. The lack of context, the absence of historical insight and understanding, means the viewer is given very little explanation for why things are happening. Events seem to follow in succession not because characters and events propel the action forward but because that’s what happens next. Nothing is ever said about the political or military context. There is no reason for the plot to follow the course it does other than the fact that it does. Scott simply takes the audience from one historical diorama to the next without bothering to bind them together with compelling narrative tissue.

What’s worse, there are hardly any secondary characters to speak of in the entire movie. Napoleon lived a life surrounded by a gallery of legendary figures, from Murat to Masséna to Bernadotte to Nay. Yet, if you watch the movie, Napoleon seemingly has no mentors, friends, or even acquaintances; nor are there any antagonists, rivals, or enemies, not unless you count Josephine’s inability to provide an heir as an antagonist.

Without any context we are left just with a lot of empty action, including outright remaking of historical events to suit Ridley’s commercialization. Some of these are simply inexplicable and outrageously stupid, like cannon fire knocking off the top of the Pyramids or Napoleon’s meeting with Wellington in Plymouth.

A Napoleon historian, Andrew Roberts has claimed Scott was wrong to depict the French leader as “a dictator who goes mad with hubris” and incorrect to imply Napoleon was defeated in Russia only because of cold weather. Another historian Zack White, has gone further, suggesting Scott has swallowed old British propaganda that painted Napoleon as a “Corsican ruffian”.

Like Napoleon himself, the film is rather casual about the sheer scale of loss of life, failing to develop any of the characters of the men in the infantry, the lowly, disposable cannon fodder in Bonaparte’s grand schemes. In fact, the only death that comes close to being mourned by Napoleon is the horse that takes a cannonball to the chest and is blasted from underneath him.

If this were all simply a matter of a filmmaker disregarding history for the sake of a big-screen spectacle, that would at least be understandable, again, as ahistoric as Kingdom of Heaven and Gladiator are, both are very good movies. Unfortunately, “get a life” was not Scott’s only retort to his critics. Asked in another forum about the issues historians have with the movie, he responded, “Well, I have issues with historians. I ask: Excuse me mate, were you there? No? Well, shut the fuck up then.” Scott is not just saying that it is silly to care about telling a fact-based story, but also that no one really knows what the facts are. More to the point: that Ridley Scott’s interpretation of Napoleon is as valid as any historian’s!!!

So what does Ridley Scott wants to say with Napoleon? When he announced the project, he released a statement. “Napoleon is a man I’ve always been fascinated by,” Scott says, “He came out of nowhere to rule everything — but all the while he was waging a romantic war with his adulterous wife Josephine. He conquered the world to try to win her love, and when he couldn’t, he conquered it to destroy her, and destroyed himself in the process.”

I guess, it is not an exaggeration to say that the entire film revolves around Josephine’s sex life. Everything else, even the epic set pieces, is shoved to the side to focus on this never-ending fixation. This was clearly at the heart of Scott’s interest in making the movie in the first place. I’ve mentioned already that two of biggest historical heresies in the movies were based on Napoleon’s unattainable goal of controlling Josephine’s sex life.. Both are unambiguously portrayed as the result of Napoleon’s learning that Josephine has been unfaithful. If true, these moments would have made for a powerful insight into Napoleon’s life as valid as any historian’s. But here’s the problem: This isn’t actually how it happened!

So, what’s left? Sadly, not a lot. The movie suffers from a lifeless lackluster plot, wooden stale characters, and too much alternative history. As a discourse on the life and times of a great historical figure, the movie suffers from the directors open scorn to history itself - after all, what’s the point of making a movie about a historical figure when every single fact has been replaced by fiction?

There’s nothing wrong with taking some poetic liberties, but we know that such depictions of historical events ground or create our historical perspectives. A survey by the American Historical Association found that 66% of respondents used fictional movies and TV as sources of their historical knowledge and thus it is very likely that some, perhaps many people will believe that he fired canons at the pyramid and attempted to test his virility with a prostitute.

The quarter century of Napoleonic era forms, in my humble opinion, one of the most crucial historical episodes of the last three centuries. The French Revolution, and to a lesser degree, the American Revolution, turned the world, at least the Western part of it, upside down - modern democracies emerged out of the wreckage of medieval empires; capitalism supplanted feudal fealty, and individual rights started to be recognized over the aristocratic hierarchies, giving way to the rule of the middle class. This was the birthplace of the modern world. The movie could have been an epic and sad love story; it could have been a serious analysis of a man whose sweeping reforms changes history and effectively built the modern age despite his many failings.

Ridley’s Napoleon, is the epitome of such ignorance:

Scott’s focus on battles is hardly surprising. Napoleon fought numerous campaigns culminating in big set-piece battles, after which the defeated side sought peace; at the Battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon defeated the allied armies of Austria and Russia, forcing the former to sue for peace and the latter to retreat home. But the French emperor’s most celebrated victory—exactly 218 years ago today—was only an episode in a long war that did not end until 10 years later, after attrition and mutual exhaustion.

The focus on decisive battles orchestrated by a brilliant military leader such as Napoleon has been poisoning Western military thinking for centuries by suggesting that great power wars can be short affairs. The idea that an adversary can be decisively beaten in just one or a few engagements has incentivized political and military gambling: Think of the German Schlieffen Plan that bet on a single, decisive encirclement of French forces and their quick annihilation or capitulation in 1914, with the disastrous result of condemning much of Europe to four years of attrition with millions of soldiers killed. The idea of a quick, decisive battle inspired then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to invade Iran in 1980, which led to a horrifically bloody eight years of attrition.

More recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin thought one decisive push toward Kyiv in early 2022 would quickly and painlessly conquer Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands of deaths later, the grinding war goes on. For all the emphasis on Napoleon’s quick campaigns and decisive battles, his wars tell a similar story of long and painful attrition: More than 5 million European soldiers were killed or otherwise died during the Napoleonic wars, a level of carnage, relative to total population, on par with World War I. France alone lost around 860,000 soldiers, including 38 percent of all men born between 1790 and 1795.

That Napoleon is only a movie doesn’t make it better. There are documented cases of films influencing a policymaker’s decisions to go to war. In 1970, for example, then-U.S. President Richard Nixon repeatedly watched the film Patton during the decision-making process to expand the Vietnam War into Cambodia, taking inspiration from the movie general’s willpower and single-minded belief in U.S. military power. One academic study found that popular culture, including fictional films, can frame the way we think about a multitude of issues, and there is no reason to believe that military officers and policymakers are exempt from these effects. Movies can help prevent wars, too. Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan was inspired by the television film The Day After and Tom Clancy’s novel Red Storm Rising to push for nuclear arms control. But if decision-makers and military leaders are prone to fighting the wars of their imagination, then a popular culture that reinforces the idea that wars can be short and decisive may incentivize willingness to look for a quick military solution to a political problem10.

The 85-year-old director said he's always keeping the "bum ache factor" in mind while editing his films11. Well, my bum and my mind are still sore 24 hours later. Find something more worthwhile to do with your 2 hours and 38 minutes.

And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains.
Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias