The first was Breaking Bad, which I'm sure most of you have heard of. I didn't watch the show itself, but I know the third-to-last episode is titled "Ozymandias" after Shelley's poem. Basically, Breaking Bad was about Walter White, who went from an ordinary chemistry teacher to a meth kingpin. In "Ozymandias," the show's getting down to the wire, and Walt has just about lost everything in his pursuit of--I guess, power?
That was my main point of interest with this poem. The Ozymandias referred to in the poem was Pharaoh Rameses II, who was apparently one of the greatest and most powerful pharaohs. Once he died, the Egyptian Empire sort of fell apart, including, I'd assume, many of the things he built up during his reign. The trace of Ozymandias that's seen in the Shelley's poem is "Half sunk, a shattered visage"--what was once powerful and great is now crumbling into dust. In other words, there's very little left of his works to look upon and despair of.
With this in mind, the second thing I thought of after reading "Ozymandias" and thinking through these ideas was the music video for the Johnny Cash cover of Nine Inch Nails' song "Hurt." In the video, Cash wanders around his home, and there are many images of royalty and the idea of legacy if you watch closely. (For reference, Cash died not long after the video was filmed, and the song contains ideas of drug addiction etc., which he struggled with earlier in his lifetime. It's pretty poignant.) The lyrics that tie closest to the ideas I'm seeing in "Ozymandias" are as follows: "Everyone I know goes away/in the end/and you could have it all/my empire of dirt/I will let you down/I will make you hurt." Here, the man with the power has realized soon enough that his empire is fading into worthless nothing. In "Ozymandias," however, the inscription lives on long after its speaker, carrying all the bravado of a statement like "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" far into the future, where they're now ironic.
I think that popular culture is still pretty enamored of the idea of someone building up an "empire," some sort of greatness that they believe will make them eternal in some way; I think popular culture is also interested in watching that empire burn to the ground. It doesn't necessarily matter whether the person survives long enough to see it. In any case, I'd say all three of these men I've used for examples end up with "empires of dirt."
Bret Easton Ellis constantly refers to the present as "post-empire." Thomas Cole did a series of paintings depicting "The Course of Empire" from its beginnings to its vast ruins. Edward Gibbon's book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire also has had fascination throughout history. Even Oedipus Rex deals with the fall of an empire. The fall is almost more anticipated than the rise by many (especially today).
ReplyDeleteThe recent-ish pop culture fascination with post-apocalyptic images (New York destroyed, carnival rides overgrown with plants, etc.), I believe, falls into this phenomenon of our (naturally human?) interest in the inevitable fall of empires.
ReplyDeleteI also had the same thoughts about the episode. Ramses was almost entranced with the idea is power, but all that is left of him is his legacy, nothing that he could take with him after he was dead, yet even after some time that remains, even if fractured.
ReplyDeleteGreat post! This makes me think about how to read this poem in an eco-critical commentary: if all products of human power are inevitably going to turn back into dirt, the poem may be thinking about not just the fall of empires, but the fall of humanity. This would connect with Mary Shelley's novel, The Last Man, which imagines the end of human civilization and the reemergence of nature. All this got me thinking about a PBS documentary, "Life without People" in which the plants take over, tumbling skyscrapers and bridges.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1g5g09_life-after-people-episode-1-life-after-people-discovery-history-science-documentary_tv