if you could spawn your perfect work of fiction into the world (fully formed from your skull a la athena), what would it be?
hour-long prestige tv show with a double digit number of seasons, >10x the budget of game of thrones, telling the story of the House of Atreus.
you start from agamemnon's ascension to the throne, through the courtship of menelaus (side plot here for the courtship of odysseus & penelope), the pledge of helen's suitors, the judgement of paris, the call to war, agamemnon's sacrifice of iphigenia, the entire mother fucking trojan war including the entire story of achilles / patroclus / hector, and then we get to follow the aftermath of everybody who was at troy coming home while simultaneously telling the entire odyssey as the other plot. agamemnon comes home with cassandra and gets murdered by clytemnestra, orestes gets spirited away, menelaus flies off the handle, meanwhile we're B-plotting with odysseus and C-plotting with telemachus and penelope on ithaca. by the time telemachus is done traveling & odysseus actually gets home we're watching orestes struggle with the furies and fail to recognize his sister iphigenia alive in tauris, and when athena appears to finally be like "ENOUGH ALREADY. BLANK SLATE. IT'S OVER NOW" the show finally draws to a close.
and then you do a house of the dragon style spinoff that's just the aeneid
when i say double digits i mean an absolute minimum of 12 seasons and maybe as many as 20. we are talking about a period of in-story time in the neighborhood of 30 years. there are periods in many of these characters' stories where they are stuck with not much changing for years at a time, but if your ensemble cast is "pretty much everybody ever mentioned in the iliad, odyssey, and orestia" then you can be jumping around and also ideally remaining more or less fully chronological at all times
anon if i could beam into your head the sequence i already have in my head, shot edited and directed, of odysseus' ship passing between scylla and charybdis, you would shit. i can SEE it
the idea is to do this as one of those insane The Actors Really Age things. you just make the show for twenty five fucking years and when odysseus recognizes telemachus, the splendid young man that is telemachus, we cry too because we watched that kid grow up like he was AJ soprano. iphigenia is sacrificed at aulis as a child and we are looking at some brilliant under-10 actress like they sometimes find and two-plus fucking decades later a half mad orestes stumbles into the temple at tauris and the young head priestess looks up and he doesn't recognize her but we do. do you see it? it's impossible but do you see it??
i have always been firmly of the camp that achilles' invincibility was not of the "he's swordproof" kind but rather the "it doesn't matter where you swing, he will always just happen to not quite be in the way" kind, and if they would let me i would do a close-follow steadycam one-shot of him cutting his way through the battlefield seamlessly and in such a spray of horrific violence as to sicken the viewer for 4-6 uninterrupted minutes, one of those true detective season one episode 4 one shots that make you say holy fucking shit that was one shot.
and then episodes later when patroclus takes his armor and impersonates him on the battlefield you start with a shot just like it, that's done just the same way at first, one shot, and then the first time a sword nicks him the shot cuts and we see his reaction, his tiny flicker of uncertainty, the catch where he doesn't stumble. patroclus continues leading the achaeans to victory but as he gets scraped and battered and injured and worn down the editing gets choppier and we start intercutting with achilles realizing his armor is gone and patroclus is gone and patroclus fighting with blood caking the dust on his legs now and achilles frantically searching the almost empty camp and by the time hector finds patroclus who he thinks is achilles in the crowd, the moment where he cuts him down is like something from the fight choreography era of batman begins & the bourne identity. quick and brutal and close and choppy and frenetic and then suddenly we're on hector, watching his surprise because he was expecting a duel of champions, watching him realize he's killed some other man. do you see it?
prev you must be out walking the fucking dog if you think we're skipping the catalogue of ships. we are doing the entire catalogue of ships. i don't fuckin know how we're doing it but we're doing it.
no offence intended i was just sitting there on the same point as your last sentence. in that i think one of the thing that tends to make classical epic as effective as it is its ability to balance between the absolute grim dark bloody emotional horror of war and its impact on the participants and the sort of more banal or expositional or logistical components of. war. <- unfortunately this description is making me picture a catalogue of ships filler episode.
I´d definitely watch this, but would argue for the version of the story, where Achilles agrees to let Patroklos impersonate him, because he´s just too damn stubborn to go himself. To me that´s a much better flavour of ouch.
(That part in the Iliad where he sends Patroklos off with a libation and a prayer for his safe return, while the poet tells us very explicitly several times over that that´s not going to happen? Arguably so much of Achilles´ rage afterwards is guilt, not only that Patroklos saw a need to take that step, but also that he actively participated in this plan).
you know, you're right. it's been too long since i've been back to the iliad and i had conflated versions of the story where achilles doesn't know. unsurprisingly, the original version is better.
correction: the above sequence would be intercut with achilles watching the fighting from afar and slowly realizing patroclus isn't retreating like he promised, he's going to try to fight them to the gates, and achilles starts panicking and we cut back and forth to him running unarmed across the fields of dead to get there in time, to reach, to help, to see — too late. as hector looks up from the body of the dead man he doesn't recognize in the armor that he does, the first eyes he meets from over top the heads of hundreds of fighting men are achilles' eyes, staring at him, wild & red
the cold open of the episode right after patroclus dies is a flashback to his youth. we watch him kill a boy -- a friend, a playmate -- by accident. we know already that to spare him from his guilt his father sent him to achilles' father to be raised. but we don't see that. we just see the young patroclus confused and scared and kneeling and trying to pull up the limp body of his friend, trying to look him in the face as his head lolls back, trying to understand. we hear the agonized scream of a man and we smash cut to achilles kneeling in the dust cradling patroclus' body in exactly the same position, as achaeans and trojans alike stand back terrified of what they know will surely follow now. exchanging identical looks of trepidation. we see hector returning to the city with achilles' stripped armor, being showered with flowers by ladies and celebrated in his victory. with his black helmet on no one but us, close, can see that he looks like a man walking into his own grave. as the gates close behind him we hear achilles wailing inhuman sounds of grief in the distance. titles.
(it's one of those yes flashbacks but only as cold opens shows)
