An Introduction: Serving a Purpose

An Introduction: Serving a Purpose

Let’s begin our analysis by making a simple statement – both Homer’s Iliad and Petersen’s Troy were created to a serve a purpose – entertainment. However, how entertaining something is relies on a viewer – and further still, is the film or poem created for entertainment’s sake, or an ulterior motive?

The key factor is, as always, money. Petersen’s Troy is supposed to be entertaining so people will pay their money to watch it – it’s a job, a source of income. Similarly with the Iliad, most people who managed to memorize the entirety of the epic poem were travelling bards – earning their living off telling stories to small populaces. So, if your livelihood relies on your film or poem being entertaining, how are you going to ensure that it...entertains?

Since time began, things that excite us as sentient beings are new. Something we haven’t yet seen is going to pique our interest – the flipside is that something we continue to see, do or listen to will eventually become boring to us – So how does the $175,000,000 budgeted film, and the poem that is thousands of years old manage to excite their audience?

Technology of course plays a part. The film is a film – it operates in both visual and audial mediums, whereas the poem, being told orally, only engages the ears. Coupled with modern technology and a ridiculous budget, the film enters the realms of blockbuster FX, allowing it to re-enact battles of ridiculous size – giving a distinct air of what can only be described as ‘epic’ – something both the film and the poem strive hard to achieve.

The contrast exists in how the texts achieve this – both are excessively violent, but that wasn’t much of a shocker in greek society, however, blood, sweat and gore, decapitations and intense sword fights are eaten up by our relatively sheltered modern society. The film misrepresents the Trojan War as only lasting seventeen days – where the poem gives it its full credit of ten years, although only going into detail in the last few weeks. The awe that comes from the poem comes from the fact that, to the greeks, a war has never been fought on that scale or size. While a fleet of a thousand ships doesn’t raise any eyebrows for anyone schooled on 20^th century history, to the nine year old Greek farm boy, such a number is simply uncountable.

In this way, both the film and the poem seek to entertain by wow-ing the crowd, the poem reinforcing the size and scale of the conflict whereas the film centres on the medieval violence, with both texts propping up the conflict, perhaps not accurately, with seeds of romance.