Agora: Impurity, thy name is knowledge

This is a movie review, and it has spoilers. Cross posted at The Valve.

As fate would have it, and along with Nina Paley and two other members of her free culture posse, Barry Solow and Clyde Adams, I went to see Alejandro Amenábar’s Agora last evening. Yes, there were moments during the film where I was thinking, ‘come on guys, can we just move it along.’ But at the end I was in a pensive mood, the kind that comes over me when a film has, in whatever way, marked me. And so I really wasn’t into the after-movie debriefing session that Nina, Barry, and Clyde held in the downstairs lobby of the semi-ratty little movie house in the West Village. I did manage, however, to get in a word for menstrual symbolism, about which more later.

The film is set in ancient Alexandria during the rise of the Christians and centers around the philosopher Hypatia. It ends with Hypatia’s murder by a Christian mob. According to this post at Armarium Magnum it makes a hash of the history, a time-honored tradition in historical flix. In sum, this is what got botched:

Over and over again, elements are added to the story that are not in the source material: the destruction of the library, the stoning of the Jews in the theatre, Cyril condemning Hypatia's teaching because she is a woman, the heliocentric "breakthrough" and Hypatia's supposed irreligiousity. And each of these invented elements serves to emphasize the idea that she was a freethinking innovator who was murdered because her learning threatened fundamentalist bigots. The fact that Amenábar needs to rest this emphasis on things he has made up and mixed into the real story demonstrates how baseless this interpretation is.

OK, Amenábar blew it. I wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t read that post, which I did before I went to see the film. Now that I’ve seen the film, you know what? I don’t give a termite’s ass. That is, assuming termites have asses, or what will pass for one.

I figure that when film-makers, or novelists for that matter, botch the history they pretend to be telling us, they do so because they want to tell us something other than history. They’re just using historical material to give us a myth dressed up to look like it really happened out there in the world. But that’s not where myths happen, ever. They happen in the mind and in the heart.

So what’s Amenábar’s myth about? Yes, it’s about knowledge and religious fundamentalism and intolerance and you can certainly read those Christian thugs as Taliban thugs if you wish nor am I going to try to stop you from doing that because you know your mind. But that’s not the part of the myth that interests me, that’s not what drove me to silence by movie’s end.

The myth that held me is one about the deep nature of knowledge. Hypatia was a philosopher and a teacher. We see her in the classroom several times and listen to long disquisitions and demonstrations on matters mathematical and scientific – way more than would be necessary to a movie content and eager to score points against fundamentalist Christians. One of Hypatia’s students, Orestes, falls in love with her and declares his love publicly. She answers him the next day in class by presenting him with a handkerchief stained with her menstrual blood.

Now, imagine that you are a high status young male, alpha type, and your chosen mate hands you, in front of all the other young high status males, and a few slaves as well, hands you a used menstrual pad. Whoa! Insult City! Sound the alarms! Start planning vengeance, show the bitch who’s boss.

But that’s not what this Orestes does. Actually, we don’t see what he does, not immediately. But when the film zooms forward to the time when Orestes is Prefect of Alexandria, a converted Christian too, he does his best to protect this woman philosopher who publicly humiliated by giving him her stained rag. She is his most trusted adviser. Does this make sense? Would any rational man turn the other cheek rather than holding a grudge? No. But then Agora is not a puff piece for the primitive wing of evolutionary psychology.

Let’s go back to that kerchief. When Hypatia presents it to Orestes she tells him what the stain is, otherwise, how would he, how would we, know? I forget just exactly what the line was, but the crucial word was “cycle,” so the line was something like this: “This handkerchief is stained with the blood of my cycle.” Such phrasing is a bit odd, not deeply odd, but a bit, enough so that one notices. It sounds a bit coy, a bit euphemistic. Why not be straight-forward and call it menstrual blood?

Because the word “cycle” and the concept are important in this film, very important. That’s why.

Hypatia is depicted as a geometer and astronomer. She’s puzzled about the movements of the stars and planets. Her puzzlement is the standard one about all this junky mess of cycles and epicycles needed to reconcile the observed motions of the heavenly bodies with the mathematical requirements of a model based on perfect circular motion in a geocentric universe. This is much discussed in the film. Orestes himself remarks on how junky the model is. And one of Hypatia’s slaves, Davus, has built a model of the system, which earns Hypatia’s praise. He falls in love with her, though that may well have happened before this incident.

The word “cycle,” then, connects Hypatia’s biological sex, female, with her intellectual vocation, mathematics and astronomy.

Later in the film we’ll hear how Aristarchus had already proposed a heliocentric model of the universe, which cuts down on the number of cycles needed. And we’ll see Hypatia test an implication of that model aboard a ship, accompanied by Prefect Orestes. There’s no reason to believe that any of this actually happened, but it’s in the movie. For some purpose. It’s one of many little vignettes exemplifying rational thought, making it real and palpable, giving it weight and mythic dimension. We’re not simply told that Hypatia’s a woman of reason and learning, we’re invited into her workshop to see and experience her reasoning directly.

The word “perfect” keeps coming up in the astronomy talk. The circle is the most perfect curve. That’s why it’s central to thinking about the cosmos. For some unexplained (and undoubtedly neo-Platonic) reason, it’s important that the motions of heavenly bodies be perfect, be circular. Amenábar didn’t invent this mode of thinking and then foist it upon his fictional ancients. Such considerations were real and powerful.

The Keplerian breakthrough (a millennium later), then, was to get beyond this misplaced veneration of perfection, and use the imperfect ellipse as the curve that best fits the data. Here’s where, in my reading, Amenábar makes a false move. No, it’s not that he has Hypatia anticipating Kepler, about which we know nothing. I don’t care about that. No, the problem is in how he presents the final breakthrough. He frames it as one of mathematics, of simply realizing that the ellipse fits the data better than any claptrap construction of circles and epicycles.

He should have framed it as simply getting over this need for circular perfection. And that’s what he seemed to be doing, what with all that talk of perfect circles, and that talk coming from a cyclic-bleeder (symbolically apt, if otherwise terribly reductionist). Once you drop the need for perfect circles, then the math of ellipses just falls into place. No big deal.

In this reading, then, Hypatia is killed, not simply because she refused to convert to Christianity, nor even because she is a person of knowledge. No, she’s killed because she is a woman, and impure as such — a witch — and because knowledge too is impure. No perfect circles in the heavens. Sorry.

I find that to be a rather stunning conception: Knowledge, thy name is woman.

But then we live in an age of impure knowledge. The biological species conception, whatever it is, is a statistical one. No pure essences needed here. Quantum mechanics is statistical, impure, messy. But the math fits the data very nicely, thank you. Emergence, complexity, fractals, chaos, whatever they are, they’re messy, monstrous, statistical. That’s the contemporary intellectual world. Platonic perfection be gone.

* * * * *

Which leaves us with Amenábar’s depiction of Hypatia’s death. Historically, she was stoned, then dismembered and the pieces burned. He spares us most of the stoning and all of the rest. And he spares Hypatia herself the stoning. Rather, by her consent, she is throttled by that slave, Davus, who’d once fallen in love with her.

There was a point in mid-film when Davus came close to raping his beloved Hypatia. He relents, and she frees him. He leaves her service and joins up with the Christians. At the end, when the Christian thugs set out to get her, he tried to find her and save her. Instead, he meets up with the thugs just as they find her. He’s at the back of the pack when they drag her into the (now sacked) library to kill her. They strip her and leave her standing there while they pick up the stones. Davus comes up behind her, puts his arms around her, and glances at her face. She nods assent. He strangles her and then leaves, her body falling to the floor.

She’s mercifully dead, the stoning begins. And the movie’s over. Amenábar allowed Hypatia to choose her death. It’s a small thing, such redemption of an ugly history. But a mythology of truth as impure and female, that’s no small thing. It’s a wonder.