Lies and distortions fuel anti-Christian screed "Agora."
By Govindini Murty. Alejandro Amenabar’s anti-Christian epic Agora, starring Rachel Weisz, is opening this weekend in the U.S. As reviews and the film’s trailer (see here) make clear, Agora is just the latest and most hypocritical attempt yet of the Western cultural establishment to evade the real dangers that radical Islam poses to women and secular knowledge – and shift blame instead onto Christians of 1600 years ago.
Agora is a $75 million dollar historical epic set in 5th century A.D. Roman Egypt that tells the story of the philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria and her murder at the hands of Christian mobs. The film is directed by Alejandro Amenabar, best known for his pro-euthanasia film The Sea Inside.
Reviews of the film thus far have been poor. Eric Kohn notes in his IndieWire review that “[t]he religious battles … suffer from incredulous and half-baked exchanges (“You’re not a Christian!” “I’m as Christian as you are!”).” Jason Anderson on Eyeweekly.com notes that “Amenabar’s efforts to align the era’s religious conflicts and culture wars with those of our own become thuddingly obvious.”
Agora takes what could be the fascinating story of the pioneering philosopher-scientist Hypatia (a figure I admired growing up) and apparently reduces it to a dull, anti-Christian political screed. The film revolves around scenes in which Hypatia faces off against local intolerant Christians in Alexandria, who are angry that a pagan woman like her should have influence in the city. The film features a large, elaborately-staged sequence in which Christians burn down the Library of Alexandria (not true – see below), and ends with the murder of Hypatia at the hands of fanatical Christians.
Christian mobs depicted as burning, raping and looting.
According to the numerous audience reviews on IMDB, the Christians in Agora are depicted as being keen to kill and rape in the name of Jesus (with overt parallels to Islamic radicals today), and the only positive scene of a Christian in the film is one in which a slave distributes bread to the poor. (It’s interesting, incidentally, that on IMDB all the bad reviews of Agora are put at the back – so you have to wade through all the positive reviews by supporters of the film first.) A reviewer on IMDB who saw Agora at the Toronto Film Festival states of Amenabar: “He spoke before the film that he wanted to make a work that tackled the subject of intolerance, to fight ‘against anyone who uses violence to prove his ideas.’” One has to ask, then, the obvious question: if that is really Amenabar’s aim, why didn’t he make a movie about radical Islamic religious intolerance instead?
Agora is being promoted as a cautionary tale about the dangers of religious fanaticism. However, as anyone who reads the audience reviews on IMDB will notice, it has instead stirred up a horrifying degree of anti-Christian hatred among the people who’ve seen it. This hatred is all the more reprehensible because it’s seemingly based on a biased and distorted vision of history – as this New York Times article from May 21st makes clear:
“Because there are so many holes in the story, you have a lot of scope for putting in your own drama,” Mr. Pollard [a historical consultant who worked on the film] said. ‘No works of Hypatia survive, and her story is one told in fragments written by various authors in smaller pieces in other books that are now lost, translated into Arabic and which then came back to the West. So you have to take it all with a pinch of salt.’”
The film also glosses over some of the distinctions between the library and museum of Alexandria, founded in the third century B.C., and what befell them afterward. Roman-era chronicles, as well as later works, suggest that at least part of the library was destroyed when Julius Caesar invaded Egypt in 48 B.C., and that Christians were responsible only for the damage done in Hypatia’s time to a secondary “daughter library,” which may also have been attacked by Muslim conquerors in the seventh century A.D.
“There is always license,” Mr. Amenábar said when asked about his focus on Christian depredations.
Agora has other glaring historical inaccuracies. For example, Hypatia’s murder in the film is blamed on Bishop Cyril of Alexandria (who is depicted as a monster in the film, even stealing a ring from his dead predecessor), even though there is only one historical source for this – a writer who was an opponent of Bishop Cyril. The film takes great relish in noting at the end that Bishop Cyril was made into a saint by the church – in order to underscore for us the horrible irony of an inciter of murder against women being canonized.
Hypatia depicted inaccurately as an atheist.
Further, the film makes a fuss over Hypatia being an atheist who stood for secular learning in the face of religious intolerance – while completely ignoring the fact that as a Neoplatonist, Hypatia was not an atheist but actually a religious mystic. The Neoplatonists, starting with Plotinus and Ammonius Saccas, imported religion into Platonism in late antiquity – and the resulting religious-philosophical hybrid would go on to have a significant influence on early Christianity.
Despite these distortions, however, Todd McCarthy in his Variety review praises Agora for its “intellectual seriousness.”
The New York Times article continues to reveal the bizarrely inverted world-view of those involved in the film. As Agora’s lead Rachel Weisz states:
“The hot topic these days is Islamic fundamentalism,” Ms. Weisz said recently over tea at an East Village restaurant near her home. “But in ‘Agora,’ it’s the Christians who are the fundamentalists” whose zealotry leads them to destroy one of the libraries of Alexandria, perhaps the greatest center of learning in the ancient world.”
“Some of those scenes evoke the Taliban’s demolition of statues of Buddha in Afghanistan in 2001, and Ms. Weisz, British born and educated at Cambridge, said such parallels were deliberate. In another scene, Hypatia has a veil put over her head, “and it said in the script that this should be reminiscent of the burqa,” she recalled.
Memo to Ms. Weisz: women in societies that wear the burqa – such as in the Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan – are not even allowed to go to school. As for deliberately invoking the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban in order to make an anti-Christian point, I can’t even express how disgusting this is.
Rachel Weisz continues:
“The very first thing I thought when I read the script was that this is a story about today, a very contemporary, 21st-century story,” she said. She mentioned opposition to stem cell research and to the teaching of evolution as examples of “a wall between science and religion” that still stands, and then concluded her thought: “That we’re still killing people in the name of God is primitive but true.”
Actually, a lot more people – well over 100 million – have been killed by atheistic totalitarian ideologies like those of Communism and Nazism in the 20th century than any organized religion in the history of humanity. And of course, the only people who are working in a large-scale, organized fashion today to kill anyone in the name of religion are Muslim terrorists – yet they’re the subject of these filmmakers’ sympathy, not scorn. As for embryonic stem cell research, many people who aren’t even Christian (such as myself) oppose it because it involves the cloning of human beings who are then killed for scientific research. (And yes, a human embryo is a human being.) Why do liberals claim to be concerned about human beings being killed in the name of religion, but aren’t bothered by human beings being killed in the name of science?
Rachel Weisz, fleeing Christian mobs.
Weisz also makes the peculiar statement that the only way she could understand Hypatia was to think of her as being sexually turned on by her studies. Weisz states: “She is in love with science, with learning. It turned her on; that was the only way I could think of it.” Really? Was there no other way to think of the character of Hypatia? Is the thrill of intellectual achievement – the life of the mind as separate from the life of the body – so completely foreign to the cultural left? If that’s the case, then who are the real anti-knowledge barbarians here?
By distorting and rewriting history, leftist filmmakers like Alejandro Amenabar are the real radicals who do violence to knowledge. It is hard for me to believe that the left cares so much about secular knowledge (look at what they’ve done to our universities), when they’d rather make films denouncing Christians than denounce the Muslim radicals who murder women and destroy secular culture.
Agora was released late last year in Europe, but due to the controversial nature of the story and mixed reviews it’s had a significant delay in opening in the US. Agora opens this weekend (5/28) in New York and the following weekend (6/4) in Los Angeles, with other US cities presumably – and regrettably – to follow.
“Actually, a lot more people – well over 100 million – have been killed by atheistic totalitarian ideologies like those of Communism and Nazism in the 20th century than any organized religion in the history of humanity.”
Many more people sure were killed in the name of Islam and according to its core principles. It just took more time, because they had only knives… And, just like Communism, Islam still is not openly recognized as the catastroph it has been.
Thank you Alain – that’s an interesting point. Few people realize that from the Middle Ages on that the Islamic Ottoman Empire and the pirate areas controlled by the Islamic Barbary pirates held over a million white Christian slaves and engaged in extensive human trafficking. If you travel along the coasts of Italy, you will see numerous “Saracen” watch towers that were specifically built by the Italians to watch out for Saracen/Arab ships that would come to raid their villages and carry away their residents to be slaves. Another story that would make for a great movie today. I believe in the classic Hollywood era the Barbary pirates’ kidnapping of Europeans to be slaves was depicted in the silent version of “The Sea Hawk” (a wonderful lavish early Warner Brothers film) and in the Yvonne DeCarlo film “Slave Girl.”
Well Europeans have suffered indeed, but endlessly less than Africans. Because our ancestors found the courage and cohesion to successfully reject Muslims, whereas Africans never could gather a force strong enough. So from the 7th century on, they were systematically enslaved by Muslims, first Arabs than African Muslims, from the East to the West. Many more of them (some 18 millions) were actually deported to Arab countries rather than to the American continents (some 12 millions). And if the formers have no offspring to speak of, whereas the latter have now some 70 millions descendants, it is because Arabs wanted their slaves castrated (up to 75pc death rate in the process). So that’s a movie the world really needs, if you ask me. It would be the most horrifying thing Hollywood ever dreamt of, the longest and cruelest series of genocides of history. Fisabilillah.
And then we could tell the story of the Eastern Jihad, with an estimate 80 million dead among Hindus alone.
Weisz also makes the peculiar statement that the only way she could understand Hypatia was to think of her as being sexually turned on by her studies. Weisz states: “She is in love with science, with learning. It turned her on; that was the only way I could think of it.” Really? Was there no other way to think of the character of Hypatia? Is the thrill of intellectual achievement – the life of the mind as separate from the life of the body – so completely foreign to the cultural left
Not necessarily. Remember, she’s an actor! They are mostly not intellectual giants. Or intellectual anythings.
Weisz didn’t mention being turned on ’sexually’ by the desire of knowledge. Let not put words into somebody else’s mouth, worse yet, spread misinformation.
They are mostly not intellectual giants. Or intellectual anythings.
Present company excluded, of course. My apologies.
Thank you Kishke!
I appreciate your comments! Though to defend my fellow actors and actresses, I will say they used to be a lot better read in the classic Hollywood era than they are today – actors like Errol Flynn wrote books, actress Hedy Lamarr was an inventor who helped develop wireless technologies that are used in everything from cell phones to missile guidance systems, Orson Welles was a brilliant adapter of Shakespeare – and of course Ronald Reagan was a genius with an amazing grasp of history and politics who could debate anyone into the ground. Look at his debates in the ’60s when he completely bests people like Bobby Kennedy.
Well, sure, there were certainly some educated, well-read actors. But most of today’s crew, judging by what’s reported about them, don’t have a lot upstairs.
The other side of that coin, though, is that it doesn’t bother me all that much when actors say something dumb. I don’t expect anything better. All I expect from them is to do their job well, and in that department, Rachel Weisz is fine.
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