Editor’s Note: For our review of Hercules we asked Dr. John Rundin, a University of California at Los Angeles Classics Professor, to compare this beautiful Disney romp to the ancient classic tales.
If the film Hercules had told the story of Hercules as it was known to the ancients, the Disney Corporation would be in far more trouble with the Southern Baptists than it is now. Perhaps the Baptists might have over-looked Hercules’ vocation for homicide. In the course of his life, he was responsible for the death of, among others, his first wife Megara, three of his children, his girlfriend Hippolyta, his martial arts instructor Chiron and his music instructor Linus. Conservative eyebrows might have been raised, however, at the circumstances of Hercules’ conception. He was conceived when Zeus, though married to Hera, made love with Alcmene in one of his numerous adulterous dalliances; Alcmene was a happily married woman, and to overcome her scruples Zeus had to fool her by disguising himself as her husband. Hercules’ own sex life would certainly have been found objectionable. In one exploit, he is reported — while drunk, yet —to have impregnated the fifty daughters of Thespius in a single night. Certainly the Baptists would have felt obligated to censure his transvestitism while he served as the boy-toy of Queen Omphale, not to mention his enthusiastically pederastic affair with the boy Hylas.
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The aesthetic and marketing choices of Hercules’ makers have apparently led them to pander to the values of white suburbia with its Leave to Beaver family values, its distrust of big-city minorities and its large disposable income. Hercules winds up an entertaining, witty and safe children’s tale of male adolescence in the suburbs. It even features what appears to be the film-makers’ anachronistic vision of an ancient shopping mall — a colonnade where ancient Greek youths, who, strangely, toss around a discus as if it were an archaic frisbee, hang out like their modern suburban counterparts. The film’s background music, provided by the gospel chorus of Muses, is as modern in spirit as any that could be heard in middle-class America. If one excepts centaurs and satyrs, the Muses are the only patently identifiable members of ethnic minorities in the film. They’re African-Americans, and they’re neatly segregated into their familiar niche in the suburban landscape —they’re entertainers. Which is just fine. You wouldn’t want Hercules to marry one of them, would you?
