Akhenaten

I am sure that Jarman was being ironic when he said that Akenaten was to be 'no Cleopatra', for the screenplay is full of the exotic trappings the film Cleopatra evokes. In Akenaten

the Egyptian royal family lounge around in typical Orientalist passivity and decadent, self-obsessed leisure. Tiye makes her first appearance in the harem reclining on a golden leopard bed (obviously the one from Tutankha- mun's tomb) and guarded by a panther. Her association with predatory animals recall the man-eating Cleopatras of nineteenth-century paintings. Akenaten s set­ting in this vague, eternal east is also a suitably homocrotic space for exploring the gay themes and tableaux that so interest Jarman. For one thing, the eastern setting gives him opportunities to place the male body on display. Scenes of indolent life at the palace arc intercut with homoerotic glimpses of a band of nomad youths exercising naked, riding in the desert or swimming in the Nile. Towards the end, Smenkhkare' performs a Salomc-likc striptease before marry­ing Akhenaten, the semi-transparent veils gradually removed to reveal him naked. The male-male wedding, with all its transgressive connotations of the world turned upside down, is a classic symbol of destructive exccss. It recalls the marriages of 'bad' Roman emperors like Nero and Elegabalus to their male lovers, but Jarman's reference to Salome's dance of the veils puts an Orientalist complexion on this trope - especially by having the striptease performed by a man. When Jarman wrote the scene, he may even have been thinking of Oscar Wilde's drag performance in the title role of his own Salome (1891). Orientalism was, of course, a classic strategy for outing same-sex relationships and perform­ing the slippage of gender identity. More recently, films like Stargate (1995) have recycled Orientalist tropes and exotic Egyptian stereotypes to project sexually ambivalent images of pharaohs.[1]'

It is difficult to know how far to read Akenaten

as an erotic jeu d'esprit born out of Jarman's fascination with ancient Egypt, or something more political. Wisely, Jarman himself refused to pin down his screenplay. In 1993 he wrote, 'I think if I made it now it would have no real necessity and would be merely decorative - perhaps not.'¹⁸ Akenaten might have passed its cultural sell-by date, or it might not.

On the one hand, it certainly has plenty of the 'decorative' decadence, flamboy­ance and gay masochistic displays that have led to his films being criticised for 'conveying little more than a haze of homosexual absorption' and being 'separat­ist, magnifying his own gay sensibility'.¹⁹

On the other hand, this sort of criticism can itself be seen as homophobic and insensitive to Jarman's own project of reclaiming cultural icons from the past in the sendee of legitimising gay identity in the present. In her acute discussion of Jarman's appropriations of Shake­speare, Kate Chedgzoy writes that Jarman 'saw the present as the culmination of the past, and modern gay identity as the accretion of long centuries of desire and oppression'.²⁰ The trajectory of homosexual desire and oppression is certainly a central theme of Akenaten, and perhaps it makes sense to see it as the forerunner of Jarman's films based on historical characters such as Sebastiane (1976), Caravag- gio

(1987) and Edward II, all of which explore some of the same issues as Akenaten. The ambiguous ending of Akenaten, which may offer hope for the future rather than a masochistic image of internalised oppression, pain and loss, also echoes the messages of Jarman's other films. 'Without our past our future cannot be reflected, the past is our mirror', as Jarman himself wrote.²¹ I see Akenaten as a successful example of the breadth and scope of Jarman's artistic vision, through which he rose above the essentialism of other gay Akhenatens to comment on the relationship of the past to contemporary sexual politics in a radical and spectacular way.