Setting the record straight (as it were) on "sex scenes" filmed on Acropolis of Athens
The salacious Internet goes goes nuts over what, exactly?
ATHENS—“Oh, grow up!” Joan Rivers’s signature snarl seems tailor-made for the noxious fuss caused by an inconsequential artsy-fartsy film filmed in part by the Parthenon. When media from Euronews to the Drudge Report by way of Greek Reporter and more than one Greek newspaper two distort the facts so grotesquely, you have to do two things: 1) adjust your definition of fake news to include crappy reporting and 2) do your best to set the record straight. As it were.
If nothing else, you gotta love the name: Departhenon is the title of the very briefly sexually explicit 36-minute art film that has been making the rounds of the Internet and that has raised the ire of the Greek cultural authorities because the slight work of art/political activism/whatever was filmed at the iconic archaeological site without permission. But to read the breathless reports in aforementioned media you’d think that Aphrodite had enlisted New York’s Michael Lucas to shoot a full-on gay porno in front of a gaggle of Japanese tourists—far from it.
Euronews falsely reported that the speck of a film “contains several explicit scenes involving male and female actors whose faces are not shown”—an interesting assertion given that there appears to be only one such scene, and it lasts for just a few seconds. Their “reporter” may have purloined some verbiage from Greek newspaper Kathimerini, which is also less than accurate. A bit of sex and everyone goes nuts? The gods of pearl-clutching must be losing their lunch.
There’s no surfeit of seriousness in journalism today as most media have either sold out or been bought out. The problem is that the lazy and misleading reporting contributes to the false impression that a full-on ‘70s-style pinkscreen pornfest was just filmed atop a UNESCO-listed monument which isn’t the case at all. That’s no defense of filming without permission—in fact, I would go a step further and ban photography in lots of places, not because it’s gratuitous but because it’s obnoxious. At a time when freedom of expression is under attack around the world and LGBTQs are still shamed and demonized around the world, reporters who switch out truthful reporting for clickbait are every bit as reckless as a few fleeting seconds of illicit foofoo in a public space.
Should rainbows the likes of which that briefly appeared over the Acropolis this morning be banned because some latter-day Puritans ascribe a homonormative (word?) meaning to it? Puh-leeze. This is again not to justify anything illegal but, nothing seems to have been damaged or defiled, and credit where it’s due: the Parthenon with the Acropolis may be a symbol of Athens but fundamentally too they are ruins of an ancient Greek culture that put sexual relations between men on a pedestal, so to speak. As Taylor Swift might say, you need to calm down.
According to the film’s creators, the Parthenon, which of course was erected in honor of the goddess Athena (Parthenos is Greek for virgin), is “symbolically charged with nationalistic and heteronormative elements” which is an interesting take on an iconic monument which less theoretically is now at the center of a heated dispute between Athens which owns it and Great Britain which stole big chunks of it and is too busy knocking over its own statues now to give them back.
Maybe if we gave New Jersey and half of Pennsylvania back to England (no one in Manhattan would raise an eyebrow) the British might budge, but I digress. "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto" as a great Roman writer said.
But this is also a cautionary tale: I recall a hot summer not too long ago when I found myself at a remote seaside archaeological site called Rhamnous, in Attica but far north of Athens. A beautiful spot every bit as enchanting as Macchu Picchu, and a lot older too. It was practically deserted, but that didn’t stop one of the site attendants on duty from chastening a tourist—a local Greek fellow—for taking his shirt off. In fact, I could plainly see that she made him put it back on.
Remember the Vatican! The Pontifice can sport a weird white robe but you, eager tourist beaver, still can’t wear shorts to the Sistine Chapel—and if your rebuke is that the guy who painted it was gay/hey, loosen up? Yeah, tell that to the Pope!
