Oliver Stone’s Unmanning of Alexander the Great in Alexander (2004)

When the film Gladiator hit the big screen in 2000, its financial success began a revival of the sword-and-sandals epic that had been defunct since the last major classical-era film, Anthony Mann’s The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), spurring production of stories ranging from the fall of Troy to the battle of Thermopylae to the conquests of Alexander the Great.1 While Gladiator, Troy (2004), and 300 (2007) tend to share a common patriarchal characterization of the male protagonist as a hero who is strong, active, and above all, heterosexual, Oliver Stone’s film Alexander (2004) presents the Macedonian general as excessively emotional, under the sway of his overbearing mother, and, unlike the male leads in the other films, sexually ambiguous: bisexual if not homosexual. Ancient epic films, in general, often use the male lead to represent a powerful standard of masculinity through the main characters’ familial and/or sexual relationships, their agency, moral fortitude, and the “safe” hetero-sexualizing of their bodies.