Napoleon? Good guy or bad guy?

an abundance of Napoleons

Juaquin Phoenix as Napoleon

I would like to begin by saying that all that nonsense about the cinema industry (and more importantly, the act of moviegoing in American culture) being ruined because of the lockdowns, turned out to to be bunk. There was a full house for Napoleon on Saturday night. And sure, it was a Ridley Scott film. But, like, it wasn’t Barbie.

The Napoleon biopic didn’t feel like it was a thing. Not like Barbie was a thing. Or Oppenheimer was a thing; actually, Oppenheimer is a better example. Here’s what I mean: we go and see a biopic like that and we’re still thinking about it when we leave the theater, when we walk to our car and even when we climb in to bed.

So what do you do when you’re lying bed, enjoying that nice little headspace you get into after you come home from an evening movie? You pick up your phone and you read the Wikipedia page on J. Robert Oppenheimer. You want to know more about the story. You want to know precisely what happened, once upon a time, on the same rock your currently spinning aboard.¹

On the week Oppenheimer was released, 4.9 million people read the page on J. Robert Oppenheimer. It was the most-read page on the Wikipedia. There were numerous other Oppenheimer-related pages in the top-read. That wasn’t the case for Napoleon’s page — it was only at #10 on the day after Napoleon was released.²

regal and lush Napoleon. painted at his coronation.

Even if you’re reading for a few hours a day, at over 217k words, it would take you a week or so to get through Napoleon’s Wikipedia page. But you’ll get the facts there. You might learn that, during the Napoleonic era, one popular British nursery rhyme claimed that “Napoleon ate the naughty children.” Or that he was hoping to escape to the United States after his defeat at Waterloo.

You might also learn that — unlike in the film — Napoleon didn’t fire at the pyramids. The Battle of the Pyramids was about nine miles from the actual Great Pyramid. That whole scene with the pharaoh’s mummy is probably made up too. And, apparently, people are upset about this. (Ridley Scott has told the historical accuracy critics to shut the fuck up).

But anyway, the thing about the Napoleon biopic is that — unlike the Oppenheimer biopic — you’re never quite sure if you’re supposed to be rooting for him. Like, you know you’re supposed to be rooting for J. Robert Oppenheimer. But I spent about nine hours this weekend wondering, was I supposed to be rooting for Napoleon?³

Really, that’s not the actual question — the actual question is am I supposed to be rooting for this particular Napoleon? For Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon? The New York Times, says no, they say “this Napoleon, with his bloat, scowls and consuming needs, often resembles nothing as much as an angrily petulant baby, one whose cruelty and pathological vanity make the horror he unleashes unnervingly familiar.”

sad, fat Napoleon, painted after his abdication.

Okay, so fine, we don’t like this Napoleon. And it would be easy enough if there were only one Napoleon. But Napoleon the man — and what he represents — has so many personalities and is so many different characters. If you read Balzac, you’ll come across gushing descriptions like “it was made clear beyond a doubt that Napoleon bore the Sword of God in his scabbard.” And yet, in the first chapter of Tolstoy’s War & Peace, Napoleon is described as the antichrist.

Napoleon is a major character in Tolstoy’s epic and he’s just about always the bad guy. At times, he’s downright pathetic. Like when he’s dragged in a sled past his soldiers as they flee Russia. That’s Tolstoy’s Napoleon — cowardly. Joaquin Pheonix’s Napoleon rides out of Russia side-by-side with his men.

I guess I think a lot about Napoleon. You see, there’s this whole historiological theory — which you hear a lot from that whole “dark enlightenment” crowd — called the Great Man Theory, which posits that history is shaped by great men. Napoleon is frequently given as the example of a great man.

But the glaring fault in this theory is that it leads to rash justifications. It leads you to being an asshole without any self-reflection. You can justify anything by saying oh, the rules don’t apply to great men. This is a whole thing at the end of Crime & Punishment when Raskolnikov is reflecting on whether he was right to kill his landlady and he says:

“I worried myself all those days, wondering whether Napoleon would have done it or not, I felt clearly of course that I wasn't Napoleon. I had to endure all the agony of that battle of ideas.”

There’s the commonality between all these Napoleons: he doesn’t endure the agony of the battle of ideas. Napoleon — whether it’s Tolstoy, Dumas, Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Juaquin Phoenix or Victor Hugo — doesn’t weigh notions of morality. He takes what he wants. Or, more accurately, he takes what he believes is destined to him.

At one point in Napoleon, Juaquin Phoenix looks just off the camera and says something like, “my will cannot override my destiny.” And I got a bit jealous of him, just then. He was a profoundly miserable man but at least he believed he had a destiny and that it was driving him somewhere. At least he didn’t have endure the agony of the battle of ideas down here with the rest of us common mortals.

Napoleon in southern California circa 1989, once again taking what is destined to him — an entire bowl of ice cream

A few final observations on the film:

• the sex scenes in Napoleon are just hilarious. It’s all aggressive, bent-over pumping. Like it was so much that the audience in the theater was laughing

• Napoleon had this sexy general named Joachim Murat who should have been in the film, but was not.

1. For example, did J. Robert Oppenheimer read the Bhagavad Gita while he was lovemaking? Did General Lesley Groves actually look like Matt Damon?

2. Instead of Napoleon, everybody was reading about Dolly Parton this weekend. And who can blame them? the woman is a national treasure. We should put her on the hundred-dollar-bill.

3. I think that’s the power of Napoleon’s love with Josephine — you see him feeling passionately for her and you think, oh look, it’s true love. And, like it or not, we’re often under the delusion that only the good guys are capable of true love.