Cleopatra – Lee Duigon

As she really was…

Cleopatra, last of the Ptolemy family to rule Egypt, lover of Julius Caesar, then Marc Antony, who moved Shakespeare to write, “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety,” is going to be the subject of a brand-new remake of the 1963 epic starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

And the producers have promised to make the new Cleopatra “dirty, bloody, and [with] lots of sex.” (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2018/01/02/dirty-bloody-lots-sex-denis-villeneuves-cleopatra-will-rip-hollywoods/)

You wonder where your audience went…

Gee, a dirty movie full of sex and violence! Whatever will they think of next? You just gotta had it to them “creatives” in Hollywood–always five steps ahead of the curve.

Cleopatra was a fascinating figure in history, a woman who inherited a virtually impossible political situation and yet aimed high, so very high, gambling to win: a character in which shrewdness and folly dwelt together: whose legend moved Plutarch to write that a woman doesn’t really show her best stuff until she’s over 50. I would love to see a movie or a series that took her seriously, and conscientiously tried to tell her story: because it’s a great story.

But trust Hollywood to soil anything it touches.

Some years ago, a friend of ours decided to stop being a chiropractor and become a public school teacher. At the time, I was still dabbling in what we like to call “education,” serving here and there as a substitute.

One day I mentioned to him some of the untruths, false facts, and lies included in the curriculum. Stuff like “Contrary to what is often said, Queen Cleopatra was a pure black African.” Uh, no, she wasn’t: she was Macedonian, the last of the Ptolemys to rule Egypt.

The ex-chiropractor, who was coming down the home stretch of his teacher training, replied, “You don’t understand. It’s all right to teach children things that aren’t true, as long as it makes them feel good about themselves.”

Nice. Pile up some self-esteem built on a lot of easily-refuted falsehoods. When individuals did that on their own, it was considered a character defect. A lot of technical terms were invented to describe this: “liar,” “B.S. artist,” “self-deluding ninny,” etc.

If you need lies to feel good about yourself, how do you feel about yourself when you finally find out that those things that made you feel so good were only… lies?

Education marches on.