Giornale Adriatico-Mediterraneo: Porto Ercole

photograph by Hallie Cohen

Porto Ercole is one of the resorts you reach when you pass through Tuscany on the way to the Mediterranean or Tyrrhenean Sea as its called at this latitude. It’s a sleepy little resort, with small yachts and boats moored in its harbor. Porto Ercole lacks the glamour of Portofino and other getaways on the Italian Riviera. It’s not the kind of place where myths are made. There’s an old expression. “They’re not doing it to you. They’re just doing it.” Caravaggio died in the seaside town of Porto Ercole in 1610. After the brawl in which he killed Ranuccio Tomassoni he’d been forced to leave Rome for Naples, but he received a pardon and was on his way home. “Not with a bang, but a whimper,” to quote Eliot. Porto Ercole is also around the corner from the Isola del Giglio, where in 2012 the captain of the cruise ship Costa Concordia carrying 4252 passengers made a fatal deviation from his course and crashed his ship into a reef resulting in the death of 32 people. Porto Ercole is the kind of place where life goes on and people make little mistakes that sometimes have larger consequences. The hotels along the mountainside leading to the shore look like they’ve seen better days. Yet there's something unique about the town’s failure to distinguish itself beyond coming in the way of accidents looking for a place to happen. Because of the internet, there's a ubiquitousness to sophistication. Little bohemias abound. However, Porto Ercole is free from the burden of its own history. It’s a relief to find an enclave where the inhabitants are not legends in their own minds. Not acquiescence, but a certain acceptance makes Porto Ercole the perfect place to end a journey from the Adriatic. No one recognized Odysseus when he returned to Ithaca, except for his dog, Argos. You will remain mercifully unconnected when you roll into Porto Ercole.

American Sniper

What’s a hero? Odysseus is one of the most famous heroes in literature and the complexity of his return might be said to be a metaphor for the perils of the calling. As you may recall when Odysseus returns, he’s only recognized by his dog Argos. Clint Eastwood’s adaptation of the story of navy seal Chris Kyle's (Bradley Cooper),  American Sniper: the Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U. S.Military History is curiously reminiscent of the Homeric myth to the extent that it’s on his return home that the shit literally hits the fan. Kyle did four tours in Iraq, starting in Fallujah and ending in Sadr City. He served for l000 days and picked off 160 enemy soldiers. Heroes might be said to be ideologically neutral to the extent that there are always soldiers who manifest heroic character traits, no matter which side they're on or how good or evil the cause. There were heroes on both sides of the Peloponnesian War just as there were heroes amongst both the Axis and Allied powers during the second World War II. The weakest points of American Sniper in fact result from the attempt to give Kyle a kind of moral superiority and the strongest come in the recognition of his humanity. There are two scenes when he has to take aim at a child. In one he shoots and in the other, he breathes a sigh of relief when his quarry puts down a weapon. And our latter day Odysseus is guilty of hubris too. In a scene where he finally shoots an evasive enemy sniper, who is his counterpart, he gives away his platoon’s position. American Sniper isn’t very forthcoming about matters of psychology. “We’re protecting more than just this dirt,” Kyle says at one point, but such high flown language doesn’t really distinguish him from cowboys like John Wayne. Significantly in real life Kyle was a cowboy before he became a soldier. He starts off as a bronco buster and good old boy and then war takes its toll on his personality (which may or may not have been evidenced by an incident recounted in the book and not in the movie for which former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura sued Kyle’s estate and won $1.8 million in damages). And that’s about as far as the film goes in exploring the subject of character or character building. There's also a tedium to American Sniper as it methodically makes it way through Kyle’s story. However that can be blamed on the nature of war itself, which is depicted to be as relentlessly repetitive as it is frightening to endure.

Helen

There is a woman who is a modern day Helen of Troy. She realizes the power she has over men, which is to get attention by giving it. Despite the transparency, her victims are totally prostrated by her dark gaze. There is a bit of mockery in that gaze, a sense of déjà vu, an unearned familiarity. Marlowe described Helen in The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus as “the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Illium.”  Men of great experience are willing to relinquish everything for nothing. They are totally conquered by her, and would easily make Paris’s mistake, sacrificing their own lives and those of their comrades for a phantom. They literally fall for her.

   

Helen travels up and down modern skyscrapers and plies her charms amidst jihads, health plans, and G20 talks, amidst sophisticated wine tastings and designer fittings, amidst Esalen hot tubs and wilderness rehab sweat lodges, amidst particle accelerators and Hubble telescopes, amidst securitized mortgages, TARP funds, and credit default swaps.  Her perfumed fingerprints grace the legacies of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses alike.

Wagner’s Bayreuth and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater are monuments to the power of the demiurge, what George Bernard Shaw called the Life Force. Goethe said at the end of his Faust, “the eternal feminine/ lures to perfection,” though this latter-day Helen plainly lures man to disaster, the same way the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis lured the unwary traveler in Odysseus’s day.

   

This Helen lives on among proficiently demystifying sexperts who ascend the mountain of safe sex, a testament that certain longings have not entirely passed from the world, that science is not totally triumphant, and that disenchantment has not overtaken the multiverse. Helen makes no sense, yet armies of her admirers still fall both for her and the Trojan Horse.