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Dreadful "essay" about Cartagia, and a response
Found this via the Babylon Podcast, and had to post. At first I was interested - both my girlfriend and I are fascinated by the Romans (for her birthday, almost everything I bought her was about Rome - Tacitus, Gibbons, that sort of thing), and the parallels between the Centauri Republic and Rome are a fun topic.
But this... "essay" is quite simply dreadful.
Let us ignore the grammatical errors. They are embarrassing, but well, no-one's perfect. So let us talk about content.
The essay begins by trying to present similarities between Cartagia and other portrayals of mad emperors in film. At first, this seems to make sense; the parallels to I, Claudius are quite resonant (as has been discussed in the forum). But then it goes on - and on and on and on, trying to tie the portrayal of Cartagia to a long series of other portrayals. And one begins to wonder... why? It's all more or less arbitrary; there's nothing in Babylon 5's portrayal of Cartagia, aside from the I, Claudius connection, to tell us that it is meant as a clear reference, or that it has somehow been inspired by some other portrayal. Yes, there may be similarities, but these do not necessarily constitute references. They are not necessarily relevant.
With the kind of logic followed here, you could take apart any performance by any actor and claim that every tiny bit of it is inspired by a similar tiny bit in a performance that has some kind of conceptual relation to it (the same, of course, goes for the writing). By insisting on this ridiculous "intertextual" approach, the author of the essay utterly disregards the possibility that these similarities of form may derive from similarities of concept, thus denying the character any originality from the get-go. (He also misses a wonderful performance by Wortham Krimmer, but that's another aspect.) If you can only look at a character in terms of how he reminds you of other characters, you are bound to be disappointed - because you have never seen the actual character.
The whole thing becomes utterly ridiculous when, in a desperate attempt by the author to appear modern, Cartagia is related Gladiator's Commodus.
It is therefore not surprising that the Hollywood emperor Cartagia most resembles is one who actually postdates him, Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus in Gladiator (2000), as both are conglomerations of previous imperial depictions.
Ultimately Cartagia not a very cleverly-drawn character, ending up as rather a cardboard cut-out. As noted, he is a conglomeration of many previous depictions of emperors, with the only absent theme being incest.
Because the point is that sometimes there is a monster on the throne, as history has shown us more than enough times. And that is why Cartagia is well-drawn and frightening: because he really is mad and dangerous, and because his threat to the characters and their world is real. When Straczynski says that the character is unpredictable, that doesn't mean the audience is supposed to spend their entire time wondering what will happen next - we know Cartagia is insane, we know he is murderous; the death of the jester isn't meant to come as a surprise, it's a confirmation of his madness. His unpredictability is important because we don't know what form his madness will take, and especially because the characters do not know.
Which brings me to what I mentioned before - that the author of the essay does not understand the function of Cartagia. Cartagia, despite his madness, is a straight man. He has a clear purpose to fulfill and does not question it or deviate from it. His true importance is in how he affects all those around him: mainly Londo, Vir, and G'Kar. Londo shows his true face as a patriot; G'Kar shows his true face as a champion of his people, and finds some manner of enlightenment in the darkest of moments. The loss of his eye is a powerful symbol and central to the series - and it is Cartagia that causes it (the fact that he does so without realizing the weight of his action - only the viewers understand the connection to future events - is particularly important). As for Vir, he has some of the most powerful moments in the whole story - not only killing Cartagia, but also deciding to kill him. When Cartagia's torture of G'Kar drives Vir to say "kill him", we truly understand the horror the emperor represents; this is innocent, bumbling Vir, after all. The same Vir who will some day occupy that throne, after Londo is dead - and here, in a way, he is taking one of his first steps towards that future, because of Cartagia.
That is the point of Cartagia. He is a real threat, a real villain, and not an unrealistic one at that; and it is fitting for a show as complex as Babylon 5 that he does, in fact, have a moment of humanity (or at least sadness) at the end.
I believe this illustrates one of the flaws of Straczynski’s writing. Though he is certainly historically aware as a writer (James and Mendlesohn, op. cit., pp. 1-10), sometimes he is not very historically sophisticated. This is perhaps shown at its worst in the fifth season episode ‘A Tragedy of Telepaths’. In this episode, it is discovered that the Narn Na’Toth, former aide to G’Kar, continues to be imprisoned on Centauri Prime after all other Narns have been freed. This is because her imprisonment was by the specific order of Cartagia, and Mollari explains to G’Kar that ‘this sort of thing happens in a monarchy’. It might be the sort of thing that would take place in a mediaeval autocracy, but it seems less likely to occur in a bureaucratic constitutional monarchy such as the Centauri empire is supposed to be.
Russia was described in the Almanach de Gotha for 1910 as "a constitutional monarchy under an autocratic tsar." [...]The imperial style is still "Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias"; but in the fundamental laws as remodeled between the October Manifesto and the opening of the first Imperial Duma on 27 April 1906, while the name and principle of autocracy was jealously preserved, the word "unlimited" vanished. Not that the regime in Russia had become in any true sense constitutional, far less parliamentary; but the "unlimited autocracy" had given place to a "self-limited autocracy," whether permanently so limited, or only at the discretion of the autocrat, remaining a subject of heated controversy between conflicting parties in the state. Provisionally, then, the Russian governmental system may perhaps be best defined as "a limited monarchy under an autocratic emperor."
All in all, the essay contributes nothing to our understanding of Cartagia as a character or a storytelling device; it attempts to find intertextual connections to other characters, but - aside from the obvious - gives us mostly nonsense and name-dropping. It displays a lack of understanding, both in terms of history and of storytelling structures. In the end, it falls flat, showing itself to be little more than a vain attempt to sound intellectual by creating irrelevant connections and irrational points of criticism.
Like every great work of art, Babylon 5 has its flaws - but it certainly deserves better academic work than this.
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