Ridley Scott's "Napoleon" and Prosaic History

Real-ism versus truth

A month or so after the dire reception of Ridley Scott and David Scarpa’s Napoleon, the nattering has died down. The true fixture of our time is not the “big film” or “big episode” of a TV show, but rather the torrent of reaction that tears across the online space in the wake of the release itself. As Owen of the Infinite Review put it so well a few years back, what takes place is more of a reaction to the reaction to media than it is a straightforward impression left by art. Perhaps even more troublingly, this attitude that tends inexorably towards an “it’s shit” conclusion as this makes for better content, is often formed among specific online cohorts weeks before the actual piece of media is released. It often becomes yet another badge in the neurotic conversation of implicit politics that has all but replaced our culture. I’m sure we all remember 2019’s Joker, and the actual disappointment felt by many on both sides of its controversial hype when the would-be incel manifesto proved to be an uncharismatic redux of Taxi Driver.

Playing to his strengths, Joaquin Phoenix brings the very same void of charisma to the role of Napoleon as he did to 2019’s Travis Bickle in facepaint. I went into Napoleon with extremely low expectations. Along with other lovers of history I braced myself to feel plain insulted - and I only wish I had braced harder. Naturally, the internet has long since eviscerated the film to the last inaccurate detail: like the brief ecosystem born around the death of a whale, it was a content-feast that could not last. Here are some of the dissections I enjoyed the most:

• Accademia dei Pugni

• Historylegends

• Pietro Pinna Pintor

• Apostolic Majesty

The carcass is, by now, picked clean and I won’t bore you by scouring the bones. I will not look at how the film failed to communicate what it meant to, which is arguably the case, but at the ugly philosophy underneath it. At why what it meant to put across in the first place is really quite vicious.

False Realism

Napoleon seeks to demonstrate, as the consensus review on rotten tomatoes wittily puts it, that the emperor has no clothes. The prevailing attitude in our society towards the past is, as I looked at in my articles The Whitewashed Classical World and A Beaker-Full of the Warm South, to attempt to pull it down. That is - we see former ideas of history as santised and idealistic; as maintaining a poetic narrative that distorts truth. It is seen as a noble pursuit to uncover the past “as it really was”, without that filter that we so expect to find and wish so strongly to cast off that we start to see it and assume its presence without the revelations that would naturally lead us to question what was thought before.

It forms a part of the spirit of our times, the prosaic attitude that manages to turn philistinism into smug refinement. Poetry and art and the love of civilisation; the values of a classical education; can be dismissed as “pretentious”, or worse upholding and reinforcing an unjust social order built on a veneer of sophistication. Ironically enough, the art and poetry that eschews and rebels against classical notions of art and poetry for the same venomous reasons, ends up being twice as obscure, pretentious and exclusive (for its own sake) than classical works of art ever will be. Napoleon aims this very same contempt, what one reviewer named “disdain for history”, at the figure of Napoléon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French.

The consensus critique of the film is that it unwisely tries to be a historical epic à la Scott’s much loved Gladiator, as well as a domestic drama / character study revolving around the turbulent relationship between Bonaparte and Empress Joséphine. There is merit to this analysis, but I disagree that this necessarily dooms the film, or that it is the main issue. Interpersonal drama and big setpiece battles are more than capable of coexisting and can be complementary. The main problem is that Scarpa and Scott take the same cynical hammer to both sides of Napoléon’s life. To return to a quotation used in an earlier article, J.A. Froude has this to say about a “prosaic” attitude to history.

The prose historian may give us facts and names; he may catalogue the successions, and tell us long stories of battles, and of factions, and of political intrigues; he may draw characters for us, of the sort which figure commonly in such features of human affairs, men of the unheroic, unpoetic kind -the Cleons, the Sejanuses, the Tiberiuses, a Louis Quatorze, or a great Frederick, in whom the noble element died out into selfishness and vulgarity. But great men, and all men […] lie beyond prose, and can only be really represented by the poet. This is the reason why such men as Alexander, or as Caesar, or as Cromwell, so perplex us in the histories, because they and their actions are beyond the scope of the art through which we have looked at them. We compare the man as it represents him, with the track of his path through the world. The work is the work of a giant; the man, stripped of the vulgar appendages with which the stunted imagination of his biographer has set him off, is full of meannesses and littlenesses, and is scarcely greater than one of ourselves. Prose, that is, has attempted something to which it is not equal. It describes a figure which it calls Caesar; but it is not Caesar, it is a monster. For the same reason, prose fictions, novels, and the like, are worthless for more than a momentary purpose. The life which they are able to represent is not worth representing, except to itself. There is no person so poor in his own eyes as not to like a looking-glass; and the prose age may value its own image in the novel; but the value must be contented to be ephemeral. Thus it is with the poet's art as with the sculptor's: sandstone will not carve like marble, its texture is too loose to retain a sharply moulded outline. And so it is with men, and with the doings of men, which are the poet's materials-if they are true, noble, and genuine, they are strong enough to bear the form and bear the polish of verse; if loose or feeble, they crumble away into the softer undulations of prose.¹

What Napoleon does is something far more sinister than a simply prosaic retelling of events, though. The film is still unquestionably in the style of a historical epic, replete with grand battle scenes and idealised visions of war that, in ordinary films of the genre, build towards an image of glory - the “epic”. Napoleon uses its artistic license to actively undo this image. Far worse than being simply unpoetic, it presents a kind of antiheroic myth.

In its determination to present a “warts and all” picture of a man that defined decades of history and reshaped an entire continent, we catch the filmmakers actively adding warts and staining the pages they’re reading from. To demonstrate, I’ll inspect both halves of the film’s narrative, Napoléon the lover and Napoléon the commander, and how the same error, or perhaps malice, hamstrings both of them, leaving the film deflated, uninteresting and incoherent.

Napoléon the Unloveable

Perhaps feeling that he let the world down in their hot anticipation of a mass-shooter incel messiah in Joker, Joaquin Phoenix (whose apparently boundless talent has never left me convinced) portrays the French Emperor as a simpering slave to the love of French aristocrat Marie-Rose de Beauharnais,² whom in real life he gave the name “Joséphine”. While this is the name that she is known by in history, she received it from Napoléon. This fact is not presented at all in the film and this is representative of the absolute lack of agency or power Napoléon is shown to have in the relationship.

Napoléon’s own mistresses are not mentioned at all and he is shown to abandon the campaign in Egypt not for the destruction of the French Fleet by Nelson, but upon learning of his wife’s affair with an attractive young cavalry officer back in Paris. He storms back to France in an autistic huff and overthrows the government. That’ll show her, the little tart…

Theirs was a complicated and chaotic dynamic. Napoléon had his fair share of infidelities, as was common among the aristocracy of the day. This dynamic could itself make an interesting story if its characters were respected and not slandered - if it were given the true sense of poetry that would be the only way to do it justice. After all, what is more deserving of poetic treatment than love? Than the calamitous love of a man that broke an entire continent? Instead we are greeted with a sad, unrequited obsession. While contrasting Scott’s Napoléon from the great man of history I was reminded of Kierkegaard’s remarks on our “age without passion”:

Let others complain that the age is wicked; my complaint is that it is paltry; for it lacks passion. Men's thoughts are thin and flimsy like lace, they are themselves pitiable like the lacemakers. The thoughts of their hearts are too paltry to be sinful. For a worm it might be regarded as a sin to harbor such thoughts, but not for a being made in the image of God. Their lusts are dull and sluggish, their passions sleepy [...] This is the reason my soul always turns back to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. I feel that those who speak there are at least human beings: they hate, they love, they murder their enemies, and curse their descendants throughout all generations, they sin.³

The irony of the prosaic attempt to “humanise” historical men is that it instead collapses their true humanity and fails to capture it. Disastrous love and damaging passion are treated of in Shakespeare in a far more truly human way because they are given proper poetry. They are a far more lasting and true statement on human love than the utterly forgettable display of tawdriness you will find in this film.

Of course, this is only half of the problem. Not only are we left with a sordid picture of a wholly domestic, wholly average, “toxic” relationship, but this image is itself a lie, or at the very least curated with disregard for true history. It’s one thing to say the emperor has no clothes, quite another to pull them off.

Not stopping at Napoléon’s turbulent love life, Scott and Scarpa take aim at Napoleonic military history with equal fervour - firing directly into my back garden!

The Implausible Conqueror

As I quipped to myself on the walk back to the IMAX theatre from the loo (and afterwards to my friend over a pint), Napoléon was a man who inspired his soldiers to tremendous feats and led them through immense adversity to achieve great things. Phoenix’s Napoléon could not inspire anyone to do anything other than take an extended toilet break in the cinema. Legions of men are inexplicably loyal to him, which, just like his inexplicable and narratively unearned devotion to Joséphine, is left with no justification. The utterly uncharismatic and uninteresting character where Bonaparte ought to be (standing out even more for his being the only character with an American accent) happens upon military success through blind luck and “because plot”, leaving the film not only less interesting for its insistence on putting Napoléon and history down, but also leaving it utterly incoherent. Only a Napoléon with heroic qualities, the idea of which the film has philosophical contempt for, could have achieved what the real Napoléon did.

The character I struggle to call Napoléon takes command of armies that look fantastic (and period-authentic), but operate in ways that have zero relation to how Napoleonic armies fought, they are pawns at the mercy of directors that think they can improve on history - by making it less interesting. I can only assume that Scott and Scarpa think that historical films set in the era of line infantry and muskets are too sanitised and neat, depicting formations and tactics like some kind of model set, rather than the gruesome and brutal blood-and-guts reality that actually characterised them. This was the chance to put the true sense of that time to camera - to breathe life into it! Or indeed, to breathe lies through dirt.⁴

Reminiscent again of what I spoke of in The Whitewashed Classical World, what is usually presented could be seen as the colourless marble image of history, stripped of the vibrant and dirty reality of its day. War, we’re always told, can never be heroic in any respect - that is just a fantasy, retroactively applied to history. The problem is that the film’s own representation of Napoleonic war is inaccurate and nonsensical to the point of absurdity. Scott’s “grim reality” is itself the fiction. Napoleonic warfare was conducted with grand, organised formations and movements of huge groups of well-drilled men. It was fought with colours flying and fifes and drums playing. Brutal and horrific, of course, but not at all the self-proclaimedly⁵ “gritty and realistic” free for all that Scott puts to screen. The antiheroic conviction at the film’s heart precedes any actual evidence - this “gritty realism” is an ideal unto itself that is completely divorced from “truth”. Crucially, it is an ism - an aesthetic category that steps over the real altogether.

Spiritual Infidelity

The problems that stem from this attitude lead to a film that makes no sense. It isn’t just disappointing or irritating to see Napoléon presented with a mountain of added warts, it is competely incoherent. The world of the film is constantly reshaped around the phantom of the real Napoléon and his achievements, as if they are happening off-screen, while we spend endless nauseating scenes with whoever Joaquin Phoenix is supposed to be - Froude’s monster, but worse - not just a flat prosaic image of the man, but one who has been actively curated to fit a kind of strange fetish for the mundane and disappointing. The insistence on real-ism as we might call it gives the film an internal chaos and destroys any verisimilitude it could hope to have. The viewer is very conscious of watching a film - a very contrived one.

Mine is not the history enthusiast’s complaint of factual inaccuracy, but spiritual infidelity. To be clear, the film is woefully inaccurate and misrepresentary, but the one begets the other. The spiritual assault on history at the heart of the film leads the filmakers to fabricate and distort. The content mill can chatter for hours about every last wrong detail, but this misses the more crucial point. Behind it all is not a desire to display something poetic or noble or even interesting. Inaccuracies can be permissable if they are in service of a laudable goal. In this case any lover of history just ends up feeling insulted.

The conviction that history is unpoetic runs so strong in the DNA of the film that it fabricates a disappointing lie in history’s place. Scott and Scarpa think they can do better than what really happened: they can make it flatter, more mundane, its characters more pathetic and “human” than they truly were. I didn’t hate this film because it was inaccurate, I hated it because it was evil.

1. James Anthony Froude, “Homer and Homeric Life”, in The Dissolution of the Monasteries and Other Essays, p87-8.

2. Empress Joséphine’s name is interestingly complicated, commonly referred to as Joséphine de Beauharnais, with the first name given her by Napoléon and the surname of her late first husband, the reinstated Bourbons hesitated to refer to her by her Imperial name.

3. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life.

4. A variation on C.S. Lewis’s description of poetry as “Breathing lies through silver”.

5. To be clear, I am not aware of this claim being made by Scott or anyone who worked on the film. What I am driving at is the spirit that the film puts across, which it shares with a lot of media which makes this aim more explicit.