“Harken ye noble denizens, Romans all. We humble players ask you to lend us your eyes, your ears, a tenner, and marvel on our retelling of Julius Caesar and his comely downfall.”
-The Last Dinner Party,
in release announcement for “Caesar on a TV Screen”
“Caesar on a TV Screen” is a song by the band The Last Dinner party, written and sung by Abigail Morris. The song is dramatic, sweeping, and utterly captivating, exploring what it means to be a man in power.
The song was originally inspired by a boyfriend of Morris’s during the COVID-19 pandemic. “When I met him, I didn’t just find him attractive, I wanted to be him—he was also a singer in another band and he had this amazing confidence and charisma in a specifically masculine way,” said Morris in an interview with Apple music. She uses the character of Caesar throughout the song to reflect this idea of masculine power. The music video is an interpretation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, showing the first three acts accompanied by three sections of the song.
In the first act of the video, Caesar (played by Morris) is characterized as being full of bravado and acting like he is the king of the world. However, he seems to crave adulations from the side characters, looking over his shoulder to check whether they are cheering for him. This shows that his confidence is somewhat staged, as he is reliant on other people’s validation. Dependence on other’s approval is something that I’ve noticed more often in men than in women in the real world, perhaps because men are more often celebrated and reliant on validation while women have to be more self-sufficient.
Morris depicts Caesar as boyish. He acts more like a popular kid in school than a Roman emperor, confident and commanding but lacking real leadership and maturity. During the
bridge, Morris sings, “When I was a child / I never felt like a child / I felt like an emperor with a city to burn,” which further ties together this idea of masculine power and childishness. Caesar is metaphorically the child, playing with power and other things he is not mature enough to understand.
In the final act, Caesar faces betrayal by his peers. The fatal moment is shown alongside the lines of the song: “I am Caesar on a tv screen, champion of my fate / No one can tell me to stop / I’ll have everything I want / Anyone / And everyone will like me then / Everyone will love me!” Caesar is stabbed on that last line, contrasting his bravado and hopes of greatness with the cold, hard reality that he is not a god, and that there are some who would oppose him. His illusions of grandeur were just that-- illusions. The power he thought he had was only based on other’s belief in him, and because he was too cocky, he didn’t realize how unstable that foundation was. He was really just a fragile man underneath all of his false confidence.
Though the song originated from Morris’s envy of masculine power and charisma, it became a reflection on downfall caused by male bravado. She cuts past the flashy exterior of masculinity and explores its fragile interior, showcasing the perils of misplaced power.
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