Rehash of the Titans: Sequels to the Titanomachy on the American screen (part 2)

There’s a pattern to these stories. In all of them, the Titans are reawakened and they are opposed by a half-god protagonist: Perseus, Hercules, Percy, Theseus, Kratos (sort of). In each, the protagonist has a history of family loss. Perseus in Wrath of the Titans is a widower. The Disney Hercules is estranged from his birth parents, while the Kevin Sorbo version lost his wife and children to a fireball sent by Hera. Percy Jackson feels abandoned by his father Poseidon. Theseus in Immortals endures the death of his mother during the film. Kratos accidentally killed his family and is killed by his own father. Most of the protagonists are soldiers — Percy Jackson, for instance, is a teenager at a “camp” filled with what are essentially child/teen demigod soldiers. The Titans themselves are generally either monstrous or demonic in appearance, in contrast to the ancient Greek depictions of them as essentially anthropomorphic (as in the vase painting to the right).​

So what’s the meaning behind all these modern Titanomachies? The surface explanation — that gods fighting gods makes for cool action scenes — isn’t all there is to it.

A basic element in both the original Titanomachy and these motion-picture reimaginings is generational conflict and change. The Olympians’ victory over the Titans represents the passage of power from parent to child, and the battle may represent the intra-familial and whole-society power struggles that mark the transition. From an American political perspective, the 1990s Hercules movies came out during the administration of Bill Clinton, the first president born after World War II and the first since then not to have served in the military, while the more recent Titanomachy films have been produced during the first post-Baby Boomer presidency.

Moreover, the Titanomachies we’re talking about focalize the conflict through a third generation, the half-mortal age that will presumably inherit the earth from the Olympians. Linked to this focal point is the fact that in all of my examples, the Olympians are portrayed as weak and flawed — whether it’s mere absenteeism (Disney; Percy Jackson), powerlessness or cowardice (Disney; Hercules and Xena), treacherous cruelty (Hercules and Xena; God of War), or even mortality (Wrath of the Titans; Immortals; God of War). The concept of the death of the gods fits well with the current moviemaking trend of demystifying our heroes, just like the grim Superman of the 2013 Man of Steel, the gratuitous violence and abusive sexuality of the HBO series Rome and Game of Thrones, and even the reduction of the Minotaur of Immortals to a bodybuilder with a bull helmet. The death of the gods — who are themselves shown to be corrupt — can also symbolize the fact that we, the current generation of humankind, must deal with the “sins of the father” we have inherited from our forebears.

In Terry Castle’s view, the lesson of the (original) Titanomachy is “that individual human beings are endowed with critical faculties and powers of moral discernment, and as a result, have a right, if not the obligation, to challenge oppressive, unjust, and degrading patterns of authority,” particularly parental authority. Applied to the Titanomachic sequels that have captured American storytellers’ imagination, Castle’s reading might suggest a growing lack of confidence in those very critical and moral capabilities that have led us to challenge the status quo.

The fact that these gods-against-Titans battles are second Titanomachies in particular underscores also an ongoing anxiety about enemies imprisoned. Most of these stories postdate the establishment of the American prison at Guantánamo Bay and the larger issues of terrorism, prisoners of war, and national security that it entails. (American anxiety about how to deal with global, grassroots enemies predates Guantánamo and September 11^th; and both the Xena TV series and the Disney Hercules spinoff series have episodes involving Titans getting free and wreaking havoc.) Unlike Hesiod’s Titans, not all of America’s enemies can be met on an open battlefield or sequestered securely underground — and unlike Hesiod’s Titanomachy, the real-life modern struggle is neither simply two-sided nor merely black-and-white.