An updated reason for why I didn't like "Troy"
Brad Pitt, English accents, Isabel Wilkerson, and Greek mythology
I never liked the 2004 movie Troy with Brad Pitt as Achilles.
And you’d think it’d be water under the bridge. After all, the film is going on 20 years old.
But for an old mythology buff like me, 20 years is yesterday, and the memory of Brad Pitt and his gym-induced muscles is evergreen.
So when I read Isabel Wilkerson’s thought-provoking book Caste this summer for my school’s summer read book discussion, it didn’t surprise me that I made a connection between the book and the movie.
Caste, in fact, gave me an updated reason why I hated the 2004 movie Troy and, more specifically, why I so loathed Brad Pitt’s fake British accent in it.
But first, some background on the movie and why it’s easy to hate on Troy (and Pitt’s role in it) if you are a Greek Mythology purist like I am.
Troy…blegh
The film is sorta kinda based on Homer’s Iliad. It has all the same characters, and the plotline is somewhat similar, though it takes stupid and unnecessary liberties with the original, such as killing off a character who needs to stay alive for the sequel.
But Brad Pitt and his stinky British accent made me detest Troy all the more.
I first saw Pitt onscreen as a sexy, charismatic, and ultimately no-good drifter in the movie Thelma and Louise. Someday I might write something about that picture and Homer’s Odyssey, which it very much resembles.
(Let me know in the comments if you’re interested in that topic.)
Pitt was perfectly cast as a Circe in a cowboy hat, a dangerous person who offered sex but also useful knowledge. I adored him in that role.
In Troy, Pitt gets to play the lead, Achilles. It makes sense from a financial standpoint: at the time, Pitt was a huge box office magnet. Pitt playing the most famous character from Greek Mythology must have seemed like a no-brainer to the backers of the film.
But Pitt was hopelessly miscast from the point of view of the story.
First, Pitt is much more a Circe than an Achilles. He dutifully lifted weights for the film and became more muscular, but all that bulk looked totally unnatural. Pitt is, according to the internet, 5’11” and 172 lbs. His frame is not exactly slight, but it isn’t warrior-sized.
It was a neat trick to get Pitt to go flying through the air to stab his enemies, like some Greek martial artist.
But you really wanted someone like Vin Diesel or Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson to fulfill the role of Achilles as “The Best of the Greeks,” a tall, muscular, domineering—in a word, convincing—fighter.
Someone invincible except in their heel.
Still, that wasn’t the worst thing about Pitt’s performance.
The worst thing, as I mentioned above, was the accent.
I shouldn’t have been surprised that the producers would make Pitt take elocution lessons. The whole movie is riddled with British accents, on both the Trojan and the Greek sides. Peter O’Toole as Priam, Oliver Bloom as Paris. The list goes on.
And why, oh why, does nearly everyone (except, notably, Diane Kruger as Helen, because she is German) have to speak in terribly dramatic, enunciated British English?
Because, so the lie goes, the Iliad (and Greek Mythology) is the height of European civilization, and British English is the height of the English language.
(By the same flawed logic, northern European blue-eyed blondes like Diane Kruger are the most beautiful women in the world.)
That is the expectation. It is unstated, but perfectly understood by everyone.
No matter that the Greeks themselves were dark-skinned, dark-haired people who never considered their myths to be pristine high literature.
No matter that they never considered that their stories should speak for all of Europe and light-skinned folk eager to validate their superiority over the other peoples of the world.
In fact, as I will argue in THE INVENTION OF GREEK MYTHOLOGY, scholars have realized that the Iliad is a mashup—an absolutely brilliant one, I should say—of Greek Bronze and Iron Age battle poetry and the brilliantly existential Epic of Gilgamesh, which originated in the ancient civilization occupied now by the modern nation of Iraq.
So it’s not purely European at all.
Caste and Anglo-Saxon identity
And this is where, finally, that provoking thought from Caste comes in:
Once, at the end of a meeting in the Northeast a few years ago, a young, white assistant in a room with black professionals was asked the routine question of how her name was spelled, which could have been Kathryn, Catherine, Katherine, or maybe Katharine. She straightened her back and answered pertly, “The English spelling,” which seemed no answer at all and a curious bid to set herself apart from everyone else in the room, to pull rank with Anglo-Saxony, which no actual Anglo-Saxon would need to do.
All I have to say about this anecdote is that I’m glad I wasn’t the one with the pert answer. She probably meant nothing consciously offensive by it. I probably have said similar things. I sure hope not.
But now it makes a bit more sense to me why someone like Vin Diesel or Dwayne Johnson wouldn’t have been appropriate for a movie about Greek Mythology that was trying to use, so to speak, “the English spelling” for the performance of its script.
Even though Brad Pitt is just an ordinary dude from Shawnee, Oklahoma, whose parents have a “mixed European heritage,” he is at least light-haired and light-skinned, which qualifies him for inclusion in the dominant caste’s rendition of the dominant document of Western Civilization.
Diesel and Dwayne Johnson are definitely not in that category.
And it’s probably my bias that I consider the definitely non-patrician Brad Pitt unworthy to be in a film with a bunch of English actors.
An authentic filmed Iliad
It’s possible I would have hated Troy just as much if the producers had cast a person of color in the role of Achilles. I’m still as purist about Greek Mythology as I can be.
But I’ve always thought the best way to make a movie that is faithful to the Iliad would be to cast all the Greek characters as white and all the Trojan characters as Black. So you’d have a Black Paris stealing a white Helen, something about which white people historically have gotten insanely enraged; the same rage got stirred up on the Greek side in the original myth, though the point was never about race or caste.
Such an Iliad would be a powerful picture, because Homer, even though he is Greek, does not portray the Trojans as inferior or evil, though Paris did the original stealing. In fact, Homer takes pains to emphasize the Trojans’ humanity. What an opportunity to show how, even though white folk have traditionally attacked Black folk at every turn, we are all human and flawed in the end.
I think such a movie would be a box office flop, because it does not reflect American mythology. But maybe we have come farther than that. Spike Lee might be interested. Call me. I could write the screenplay.
Trojans were BIPOC?
Also, have you seen the Dwayne Johnson 'Hercules?' It might be less offensive than Troy (I'm guessing, I've never seen Troy but you're not making me too enthused to even consider watching it). But it was a so-so film, held back a bit by his acting (though I'm very glad he did not have a fake British accent). He's a favorite of mine (I was a fan of his dad as a child) but Hercules was not a great role for him.
(and yes, it should have been 'Heracles')