The percentage of American dramas that are melodramas or melodramatic romances is so high it’s tempting to end the analysis of the dramatic genres here ... and hit the bottle that much sooner. But such movies are unimaginable without the physically active hero, which has enabled them to assimilate central aspects of the heroic epic, of which C.M. Bowra has written:

The heroic world holds nothing so important as the prowess and fame of the individual hero.... His chief, almost his only, aim is to win honour and renown through his achievements and to be remembered for them after his death.... In his more than human strength he seems to be cut off from the intercourse of common men and consorts with a few companions only less noble than himself. He lacks allegiance, except in a modified sense, to suzerain or cause. What matters is his prowess…. It is the reflection of men’s desire to be in the last degree themselves, to satisfy their ambitions in lives of abundant adventure, to be greater than other men in their superior gifts, and to be bound by no obligation except to do their uttermost in valour and endurance. 1 

The epic hero, with his sole allegiance to his honor, sounds like an American movie type: all the superhuman cops and soldiers who refuse to compromise with the system, all the lone men of few words who win just battles in their own way. The epic hero can easily exist outside heroic epic (many of the identifying aspects of which relate to verse forms), and so fits perfectly into the all-or-nothing law-versus-justice framework of American melodrama and romance as well. Epic heroes represent an eternal ideal of effective masculinity (not the only masculine ideal but an indispensable one nevertheless), but it’s easy to feel that American movies, especially those made for male audiences, have been overrun with them, perhaps because the action heroes aren’t very good actors (who persist in playing the part even when they no longer appear up to the physical demands--e.g., John Wayne accompanying his gut in The Searchers (1956)).

At the same time, the epic hero doesn’t bring his worldview into our movies intact. Jan de Vries has written, for instance, that such a hero’s "[t]hirst for fame is ... not a satisfaction of personal vanity, but a duty towards ancestors and descendants" 2  and that "the heroic song ... revealed to the warlike nobility an ideal that was bound to direct their own lives." 3  You get the duty to family in modified, sentimental forms (side by side with the feeling that children should not be held responsible for their parents’ actions, written into the Constitution in the prohibition against corruption of blood 4  ), but obviously not the sense that the work is directed to a noble caste or that the movie is a literal model of behavior. We want these heroes, in movies as in life, but we want their actions to gain meaning from narrative structures different from heroic epic.

Braveheart (1995) probably comes as close as any American movie to heroic epic, but the abstraction of the 13th-century hero’s goal as "freedom" is too clear an attempt to make his crusade against the English relevant for modern audiences. Of course, if they hadn’t done this the picture would scarcely have much resonance, except perhaps for nostalgic, bellicose Scotsmen. In the end, Braveheart sorts out as the usual blend of melodrama and romance, which functions by a series of contrasts between the noble hero William Wallace (Christian), tyrannical Longshanks (Obstinate), and the hesitating Bruce (Pliable), with a more brutal side glance at Longshanks’s effeminate son whose homosexuality cuts him out of the circuitry--his father throws his male lover out a window and Wallace later impregnates his untouched wife.

What our serious movies have taken over from the literary epic is more puzzling. When we hear "epic" we probably think mostly of scale and the first titles that pop to mind may well be monstrous overproductions, known by the hallmark of historic kitsch: adapting the period characters’ clothing and hair and makeup to modern tastes along with their motivations, usually what we mean by freedom, duty, or love. (A recent example: Marcus Aurelius saying to Maximus in Gladiator, "I will empower you to one end alone, to give power back to the people of Rome and end the corruption that has crippled it." Marcus Aurelius: emperor, soldier, philosopher, and, apparently, Jimmy Carter’s campaign strategist.) But there’s actually a great variety among such large-scale movies.

You can categorize them roughly as follows (with some overlap): political conflicts (usually armed) distinguished by historic era and geographical setting, including sci-fi forays into the future and outer space; the discovery, settlement, and administration of colonies or new territory; natural and manmade disasters; the development of industries, and sagas of the magnates and their families. There are even literary adaptations so broad in scope over so long a time span you might call them epics of manners. But none of this tells you what narrative form any individual movie will have. Although it contains variations on many of the elements of Braveheart (e.g., the sexual perversity of the ruler’s son whose female consort serves as a sympathetic emissary to the hero), the less expansive Gladiator is pure melodrama--the villain literally stabs the hero in the back.

This isn’t the case with the literary epic, which, according to Bowra follows the model created by Virgil, who "abandons the scheme of life by which the hero lives and dies for his own glory, and replaces a personal by a social ideal. The old concept of a man’s honour is merged in a scheme of morality where duties are laid down with precision and must be fulfilled if the gods’ will is to be done." 5  Virgil and his followers seek "to make the most of the secular glory which their age valued so highly and to see in it symbols and signs of something spiritual and eternal." 6  The epic poet’s "first aim is to praise the present, but the present is too actual, too complex and too familiar to provide the material of his poem. So he joins it to the past and exalts it as the fulfilment of a long, divinely ordained process." 7  This expansion of temporal scope "means that enormous issues, not immediately relevant to the story, are sooner or later introduced, and the poet attempts to convey almost the whole duty and the whole circumstances of man." 8 

The elevated aims of literary epic--the whole duty and the whole circumstances of man--fly higher than almost anything found in even our most grandiose movies, which could more precisely be called spectacles rather than epics. It is true that American movies have the habit of depicting in our secular glory the symbols and signs of something spiritual and eternal. In World War II pictures of the ’40s, for instance, you feel that our victory is inevitable, that we are a justified people. They also fit what Thomas Greene has written about the epic, that as between "the two-fold concern of politics--the establishment of control through violence and the right use of control in government," the focus in the epic is "upon violence rather than administration." 9  However, World War II movies are alive with the sense of a defensive war, that we had been attacked and were fighting only in order to set the world right, which feels more administrative than purely martial.

In any case, if there ever were a time when our movies affirmed military glory as the sign of America’s high destiny, that time is past. The counterculture brought in a backlash starting in the ’70s, a decade that began with the ambivalent Patton and ended with Apocalypse Now, the trippy horror of which serves as an ironic anti-epic about inherent American corruption. Since Apocalypse Now the experience of war has continued to be portrayed as sensory chaos, but this doesn’t tell you everything. The movie may be against the government’s engagement in the war, as Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989) are, or it may use the chaos to establish the heroism of the boys under fire, as Hamburger Hill (1987), Saving Private Ryan (1998), and Black Hawk Down (2001) do. The last movie, in particular, which criticizes not the war but the government’s failure to give the troops the support they need, develops a band-of-brothers ethos that could easily recruit young men for the elite forces. To this extent war movies have contributed to an epic sense, but one more narrowly intense than in literary epic, centered on the experiences and feelings of the soldiers as an end in itself.

Our epic movies lack the distinctive "generic expectation ... that epic will contain the glorification of a national destiny of power and conquest, that it will conform to an aristocratic martial ethos" 10  perhaps because we are a (middle-class) people by consent without a root national, ethnic, religious, or, increasingly, racial identity. Most of the large-scale pictures we think of as epic are in fact romances. This would include the most influential of them, The Birth of a Nation (highly melodramatic in structure as well), Gone with the Wind, and the first two Godfather pictures (1972, 1974), which deal with subcagetories of the population (the Southern gentry and Italian-Americans, people who lost their defining war, who were displaced from their homeland) with increasing novelistic realism. (To the extent that Vito leaves his birthplace to found an empire on other shores, The Godfather, Part II resembles the Aeneid, but that empire can hardly be said to offer a social ideal.)

This would also include movies that deal with manifest destiny, an epic ethos if we ever had one, for instance, The Covered Wagon (1923), The Big Trail (1930), Cimarron (1931), and How the West Was Won (1963), and their correctives Broken Arrow (1950), Cheyenne Autumn (1964), Little Big Man (1970), and Dances with Wolves (1990). The fact that correctives have so long been felt necessary suggests that our culture is self-conscious of its failures in a way that undermines the authority of the epic outlook. Epic is about reception as much as production. No work can function as an epic in the Virgilian sense if the intended audience doesn’t take it that way (the corollary being that the Aeneid can’t function as an epic for Americans at all), and in the movie era only totalitarian ideologies have had the kind of conviction required.

Of course, the epic had been losing prestige long before movies were invented. Ian Watt has pointed out that Defoe deprecated Homer as moralist, historian, and credulous pagan, 11  and that Richardson felt even more strongly, working to replace the "epic’s false code of honour," which he saw as "masculine, bellicose, aristocratic and pagan," with "a radically different one in which honour is internal, spiritual, and available without distinction of class or sex to all who had the will to act morally." 12   By the time of Walter Scott’s 1816 romantic novel The Antiquary, the superiority of novel to epic is settled enough to be a running joke. 13  

All three novelists’ objections to the epic have persisted in the modern era of prose realism. The more exacting sense of historicity in the modern era generally, which Scott invokes, combines with the American sense that we go to war only when provoked (like the western hero who shoots only when there’s no choice) and preferably at the end of a Constitutionally-mandated deliberative process, to make the literary epic a highly dubious proposition. In any case, in as much as the literary epic tells a people where they came from and why they’ve been chosen by destiny to occupy the prominence they do, no society produces literary epic in its fullest sense as a mainstay form. It would defeat the purpose as much as having numerous Bibles would.

1. The heroic world: Bowra 9. (return to text)
2. [t]hirst for fame: de Vries 187. (return to text)
3. the heroic song: de Vries 189. (return to text)
4. U.S. Const. art. III, § 3. (return to text)
5. abandons the scheme of life: Bowra 13. (return to text)
6. to make the most of the secular glory: Bowra 14. (return to text)
7. first aim: Bowra 15. (return to text)
8. means that enormous issues: Bowra 16. (return to text)
9. Thomas Greene: 19. (return to text)
10. generic expectation: Quint 137. (return to text)
11. Ian Watt: 240-2. (return to text)
12. Richardson felt: Watt 244. (return to text)
13. Scott’s 1816 novel The Antiquary: The title character tries to enlist the young hero in taking up poetry, advising:
    

          "It should be something at once solid and attractive--none of your romances or anomalous novelties--I would have you take high ground at once--Let me see--What think you of a real epic?--the grand old-fashioned historical poem which moved through twelve or twenty-four books--we’ll have it so--I’ll supply you with a subject--The battle between the Caledonians and Romans--The Caledoniad; or, Invasion Repelled--Let that be the title--It will suit the present taste, and you may throw in a touch of the times."
          "But the invasion of Agricola was not repelled."
          "No; but you are a poet--free of the corporation, and as little bound down to truth or probability as Virgil himself--You may defeat the Romans in spite of Tacitus" (Scott, Antiquary 107; (ch. 14)).
    
    

    Twenty years later the joke was still good to Dickens:
    

          "My friend Mr. Snodgrass has a strong poetic turn," said Mr. Pickwick.
          "So have I," said [Jingle]. "Epic poem,--ten thousand lines--revolution of July--composed it on the spot--Mars by day, Apollo by night,--bang the field piece, twang the lyre."
          "You were present at that glorious scene, sir?" said Mr. Snodgrass.
          "Present! think I was; fired a musket,--fired with an idea,--rushed into wine shop--wrote it down--back again--whiz, bang--another idea--wine shop again--pen and ink--back again--cut and slash--noble time, sir..." (Dickens, Pickwick 11; (ch. 2)). (return to text)