37 to 41 as a tyrant who ultimately became a monster. The infamous emperor Caligula ruled Rome from A.D. A World Made Sexy is about power and pleasure, emancipation and domination, and the relationship between the personal passions and social controls that have crafted desire. He details how television advertising after 1980 constructed a theatre of the libido to entice the buying public, and concludes by situating the cultivation of eroticism in the wider context of Michel Foucault's views on social power and governmentality, and specifically how they relate to sexuality, during the modern era. In one case study, Rutherford pairs James Bond and Madonna in order to examine the link between sex and aggression. Starting with a brief foray into the history of pornography, Rutherford goes on to explore a sexual liberation movement shaped by the ideas of Marx and Freud, the erotic styles of Salvador Dali and pop art, the pioneering use of publicity as erotica by Playboy and other media, and the growing concerns of cultural critics over the emergence of a regime of stimulation. A World Made Sexy examines museum exhibitions, art, books, magazines, films, and television to explore the popular rise of eroticism in America and across the developed world. In this book, Paul Rutherford argues that this phenomenon is a product of one of the major commercial and political enterprises of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the creation of desire - for sex, for wealth, and for entertainment. The cult of eroticism is a pervasive force in modern society, affecting almost every aspect of our daily lives.
Caligula William Howard Pdf series#
The way in which sexuality and religion are dealt with in both series is also quite relevant to the times in which they were filmed but on the other hand, their representation of the role of women as, essentially, mothers, seems to conform to the same stereotype. This conception of Roman history is also built into Rome’s structure, as the lives of two common soldiers are intertwined with major historical events and characters, giving a fresh perspective on well-known occurrences. Whereas I, Claudius is set almost exclusively within the ruling Imperial family and considers history as that of “great men”, Rome on the other hand clearly plays on the fascination for class distinctions and more specifically on the division between Patricians and Plebeians. For example, the social and cultural background radically altered between two critically acclaimed BBC television series about Ancient Rome: the 1976 I, Claudius, an adaptation of Robert Graves’ novels, and the 2005 first season of Rome, a BBC-HBO coproduction. On top of its arguably philosophical and/or pedagogical intentions, the representation of Antiquity in literature and film has always conveyed much about the ideology of the periods in which it was written or filmed. People can briefly survey how screen depictions of Caligula integrated ancient scandalous rumours into their narratives, before turning to Caligula, which is ‘a dramatisation of all the most scurrilous stories in Suetonius'. Surprisingly few biopics have been made about either them or indeed other major Roman figures. In truth, Caligula's depiction within fictional screen adaptations as villainous sideshow rather than leading man is not so very different from the other emperors’. Caligula's notoriety inspired numerous low‐budget and strictly fictional 'sexploitation' films, mostly Italian, in which his partner in sexual misdeeds is often Messalina, his uncle Claudius' proverbially lascivious fourth wife, 'one of the most notorious aristocratic sluts in history' and 'a cinematic natural'. This chapter offers a brisk summary overview of how the screen portraits, drawing primarily on ancient sources and modern novels, led the way to Caligula.
Caligula would seem obvious material for a lusty Hollywood biopic.