| Veda Lawerence |
The Warriors plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, January 31st, through Sunday, February 2nd. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
The Warriors is based on a book (The Warriors, by Sol Yurick) which is based on a work by Xenophon (Anabasis) that details the journey of an army of ancient Greek mercenaries. Xenophon recorded the tales of his battles as a soldier in the Greek army around four hundred years after Homer memorialized the tales of the warriors who laid siege to Troy and forever shaped the way the West would view honor on the battlefield. Nearly 2500 years later, The Warriors continues to grapple with what happens when people are faced with upholding these virtues. At the core of all these works is the question, what does it mean to be a warrior?
In the Iliad, we are given many examples of men who demonstrate what the ancient Greeks meant by a “warrior.” Perhaps the most heartbreaking example is Hector. When Hector goes into the city of Troy, from the battlefield, in order to see his wife and son, the distinction between warrior and civilian is made temporally distinct. Hector cannot even accept a drink of wine from his mother, because his hands have been sullied by war, and so he cannot pour out the appropriate libation to Zeus before drinking. He is a ritual outcast in his own city. Of course, this is not a permanent state. A warrior can purify himself and rejoin society. But as Emily Wilson says in her introduction to the Iliad,
“You already know the story. You will die. Everyone you love will also die. You will lose them forever. You will be sad and angry. You will weep. You will bargain. You will make demands. You will beg. You will pray. It will make no difference. Nothing you can do will bring them back. You know this. Your knowing changes nothing. This poem will make you understand this unfathomable truth again and again, as if for the very first time.”
We all know Hector will never be purified, that he will die in this state of being a warrior. And yet, when he is buried, the last line of the poem will say,
“ὣς οἵ γ᾽ ἀμφίεπον τάφον Ἕκτορος ἱπποδάμοιο.” (Such was their burial of Hector, breaker of horses” [Lattimore trans.]). There are two epithets that are used to refer to Hector, “breaker of horses” and “shining helm.” A metric trick designed to give the poet flexibility to fulfill the meter? In part, yes. But more importantly, these epithets perfectly encapsulate the dichotomy of Hector’s character. On the one hand, he is a warrior, recognized by his shining helmet. On the other, he is a man who has spent his life breaking horses, an epithet which speaks to the Hector who is not a warrior. And he is buried with that epithet. What does this say about heroic memory? The Iliad is a war narrative in the sense that it takes on the intense repugnance of war while in the same breath detailing a sort of terrible beauty. Achilles at once repels his warrior death in favor of a life of slavery, even as the poet describes his feats on the battlefield with an almost bloodthirsty adulation.
There is also perhaps the most heartrending scene in the entire poem, the last conversation between Hector and his wife, Andromache, and son, Astyanax. As he approaches his young son, the boy cries in fear and hides from his father, terrified of the plumed helmet he wears. It isn’t until Hector discards his helmet, in effect, removing the warrior and becoming the father, that his son will go to him. This is a powerful moment—Hector is unable to be both a father, a husband, and a warrior. Andromache beseeches Hector to stay with her and their son, to abandon the battlefield and come home to his family. But this is the Iliad. Hector, Andromache, and every single person who has ever read or heard the Iliad knows that he is going to die. Why does he fight, then?
“All these things are in my mind also, lady; yet I would feel deep shame before the Trojans, and the Trojan women with trailing garments, if like a coward I were to shrink aside from the fighting; and the spirit will not let me, since I have learned to be valiant and to fight always among the foremost ranks of the Trojans, winning for my own self great glory, and for my father. For I know this thing well in my heart, and my mind knows it: there will come a day when sacred Ilion shall perish, and Priam, and the people of Priam of the strong ash spear.But it is not so much the pain to come of the Trojans that troubles me, not even of Priam the king nor Hekabe,not the thought of my brothers who in their numbers and valour, shall drop in the dust under the hands of men who hate them, as troubles me the thought of you, when some bronze-armoured Achaian leads you off, taking away your day of liberty, in tears; and in Argos you must work at the loom of another, and carry water from the spring Messeis or Hypereia, all unwilling, but strong will be the necessity upon you;and some day seeing you shedding tears a man will say of you: “This is the wife of Hektor, who was ever the bravest fighter of the Trojans, breakers of horses, in the days when they fought about Ilion.” So will one speak of you; and for you it will be yet a fresh grief to be widowed of such a man who could fight off the day of your slavery. But may I be dead and the piled carth hide me under before Ihear you crying and know by this that they drag you captive.” (Benner trans.)
In sum, to be a hero means that Hector will fight a battle that he knows he is going to lose, as part of a war to protect a home that he knows will be laid to waste, and not even to protect his home or his family. In fact, his greatest wish is to die before he can hear his wife’s cries as she is kidnapped and made to marry an enemy soldier (what a heartthrob). And yet, in spite of this, Hector refuses to lay down his arms, or even to consider an alternative. Bereft of all the motivations we assume a warrior must have (bloodlust, a desire to win in battle, a desire to protect those whom you love and who depend on you), we are left begging Hector for answers, just as Andromache does. And the answer must lie with the fact that Hector is a warrior, and for him, the identity of warrior, no matter the fate it will bring him, is what compels him to fight. For as he says, he has learned “to be valiant always and to fight amid the foremost Trojans.”
This makes Hector the perfect example to analyze the warrior identity in, well, The Warriors. Unlike Achilles, who simply cannot be bothered to actually fight until he has the motivation of vengeance (and himself a wholly different, yet fascinating and complex case study of warrior identity and perhaps its human form), Hector fights because he is a warrior. In the film, we see a similar attachment to this identity at all costs.
The clearest example of this is the scene where the gang comes across The Orphans after being stranded by the fire on the subway. The Orphans offer them safe passage through their territory, if only the Warriors agree to remove their vests (the identifying feature of their gang affiliation) and pass through as “civilians.” To the Warriors, this is not an option, even though it arguably would grant them safe passage through most of the city, allowing them to pass through enemy territory unnoticed. In fact, Mercy actually gains a jacket after the cops start looking for a girl in a pink shirt. True, her shirt is not a symbol of gang affiliation, but the fact that such a simple change to her appearance can allow her to travel undetected shows that the Warriors could, practically speaking, easily change their appearance and escape notice.
But just as Hector will always die a hero, the Warriors refuse to give up their identity at the very real risk of their own lives. To them, dying a Warrior is more important than making it home alive. Indeed, when they finally do arrive home to Coney Island, they remark, “we came all this way for this?” They lack the necrotic precognition that Hector has, to them, there is still a possibility of victory. But I doubt they would remove the vests even if they knew they would be their undoing. The Warriors in this film do not come to Achilles’ conclusion, that it is better to live a long life as a peasant than to be a great warrior on the Elysian Fields. They take the approach of Hector, which is to hang onto their warrior identities at all costs.
The work that the film is based on, Anabasis, also has a unique struggle with identity. But the identity at the forefront of this work, is the Greek identity. The warriors in Anabasis are Greek mercenary soldiers fighting on behalf of Cyrus the Younger, to help oust his brother, Artaxerxes II from the throne. Strange to see Greeks fighting on behalf of Persians? Perhaps, given the whole Greco-Persian war thing.
However, “anabasis” in Greek meant literally “a going up.” The term was commonly used to refer to military expeditions going “into” somewhere, an advance, an invasion. What then, do we make of the second half of the narrative, which in fact details the retreat of the Greek soldiers after the death of Cyrus and their subsequent flight out of the Persian empire? Combined with the fact that the narrative describes a band of Greek soldiers successfully maneuvering their way backwards along the path that they could feasibly take in the other direction, into the empire, Anabasis could feasibly be read as a panhellenic call to arms, mocking the Achaemeid empire’s inability to stop a band of Greek mercenaries. If they cannot stop Xenophon and his compatriots, how could they hope to repel a panhellenic army, unified in their efforts to properly invade the Persian empire?
Why would the Greeks require a call to panhellenistic unity? Well, though the Greeks were (maybe) all “Greek” in that they shared religion, culture, and language, the various Greek city states invariably faced inter-state conflict (Athens v. Sparta, sound familiar?). It would require a union on the basis of their shared identity as Greek, to truly overthrow the Achaemenid empire.
Sound familiar? Look to the opening scene of The Warriors, where Cyrus is calling for the gangs of New York to overlook their conflicts with each other, the tension over their territorial boundaries, and instead to unite against a common enemy—the police and those who try to stop them. In the same way as the Greeks could call on a shared identity as Greeks, that went beyond their struggles with each other, the gangs, for one brilliant second, stood together for their common identity as gangs. One has to wonder whether panhellenic unity would have ended similarly.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon