The Tyranny of the Silver Screen

In the vein of most blockbusters, the trailer for Ridley Scott's Napoleon promise escapism: you are invited to step into the great man’s (smaller-than-average) shoes; you can be the granite-jawed general surveying his troops; you can be the dashing ballroom heartthrob. But audiences don’t just want goodies these days – they want antiheroes, and Napoleon is happy to oblige. Along with the typical battlefield and bedchamber scenes in the trailer, there’s a split second cut to Napoleon ordering his men to fire into an unarmed crowd. The trailer dashes on – the scene isn’t explained beyond Napoleon doing what Napoleon has to do. Is that healthy? Is this point we’ve reached, where we don’t just absolve evildoers, we actively glory in them, kind of messed up? Maybe it’s just harmless entertainment – it’s unlikely that many people are going to leave the iMAX and go lay waste to Europe. But we should also acknowledge that this judgement-free simpering over past despots does also inspire and embolden current-day despots from Moscow to the Gulf.

Take Putin – he is obsessed with Russia’s imperial past, Tsarist and Soviet, to the point that he called the collapse of the USSR in the 90s the “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”. The stance cannot be separated from his current nakedly imperial ambitions in Eastern Europe. Days after Ukraine’s invasion began last year, flabbergasted Russian elites demanded an explanation for the war from Sergei Lavrov, Putin’s foreign secretary and right-hand-man. “He has three advisers,” Lavrov is said to have replied. “Ivan the Terrible. Peter the Great. And Catherine the Great.”

This historical obsession was present in Fascist Italy too – Mussolini’s Italy was explicitly based on the ruthless autocracy of Classical Rome. Can we really separate Mussolini’s obsession from the pan-European obsession with the might of Roman antiquity? Mussolini just had to look to Paris’ Arc de Triomphe, explicitly modelled on the Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum – the latter erected to celebrate the Roman Empire ethnically cleansing the Judeans.

It seems a stretch, though, that 21st-century pop culture despot-core can be blamed for inspiring dictators. Maybe in Mussolini’s age, of militaristic European nation-states, he was just part of a broader trend of countries glorifying their despotic predecessors. But today, Western liberal-democratic states have learned their lessons, and if they are reluctant to fully apologise for the crimes of murderous past regimes, they also tend not to raise monuments to them. Power-fantasies are confined to the silver screen, and it’s unlikely that Putin takes his lead from Hollywood.

But even if despot-core doesn’t directly inspire dictators, it’s awkward that the West is prone to the same historical double-standards. And it’s hard to believe those double standards have no impacts at all. The world’s biggest art buyer, the Qatari government, need just to look to the tens of millions who flock to marvel at Medici palazzos and Medici-sponsored art in Florence to learn that a regime can be tyrannical, it can enslave and abuse to its liking – but so long as it leaves behind pretty things, posterity will absolve it.

It definitely sends a message: that no matter the atrocities a strongman commits, if they conquer enough land, build enough palaces, if they get the aesthetic right, then history will glory in their accomplishments and overlook their abuses. That is a powerful message.

But maybe I’m too harsh – maybe you can admire Michaelangelo and simultaneously condemn the despots who sponsored him; you can get your kicks from a gladiator film while thinking that trial by combat is a bad idea. It’s not like we aren’t going to keep on glorifying our past – there’s a reason people have been hiring Ridley Scott for the past half-century to make movies. He was perfectly capable of making Napoleon a nuanced, polyphonic critique of early 19th-century autocracy, but he knew that a Napoleon with explosions and ambushes and photogenic people getting guillotined would actually get people to watch it.

Illustration by Isabelle Holloway