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Robert A. Rushing. Descended from Hercules: Biopolitics and the Muscled Male Body on Screen. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2016. xi + 210 pp.
"Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?"
- Captain Clarence Oveur, Airplane!
Robert Rushing makes the case that biopolitics are central to the peplum- a genre of sword-and-sandal films focused on muscular, male heroes-in his erudite and highly readable Descended from Hercules. Despite the peculiarity of the genre, the peplum is the focus of two other recent works: Michael G. Cornelius' collection Of Muscles and Men: Essays on the Sword and Sandal Film (Jefferson: McFarland & Company Inc., 2011) and Daniel O'Brien's Classical Masculinity and the Spectacular Body on Film: The Mighty Sons of Hercules (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). The focus on biopolitics distinguishes Rushing's study: specifically, Rushing investigates "the ways in which the genre has managed to create and in turn capture the spectator's fascination with the muscular male body-and the ways in which these points of fascination ultimately mirror Roberto Esposito's biopolitical 'immunity paradigm'" (5). Rushing examines three particular points of fascination in these films: slow or stopped time, a "queer" refusal of sexuality, and the films' haptic register. These recurring techniques entice the audience, making them receptive to the films' biopolitical message, that the "built," white male body can safeguard the body politic against threats of Otherness and degeneration.
Beginning with the debut of the genre's most enduring hero, Maciste, in Cabiria (1914), Rushing introduces readers to a genre that is remarkable for the persistence of its tropes. In each chapter, Rushing examines one of these trope as it has changed (or hasn't) over four eras of the peplum's popularity: the silent era,...