Recycling Medea – Spyros D. Orfanos

Recycling Medea

I have a thing for Medea. I have a thing for most mothers, and my mother in particular, but that we’ll save for another time. Medea was represented by the Greeks as a complex figure, fraught with conflicting desires and exhibiting an extraordinary range of behavior. This is what grips me about Medea.  Perhaps that is why she has had such a hold on our imaginations for almost three millennia – her complexity. Her mutually contradictory traits are an ideal vehicle for grappling with the problems of “self” and “other,” maternal subjectivity and agency, Eros and violence. The story of Medea is a story about maternal violence, and it directs our attention to the relationship between destructive individual, family, and cultural patterns that are trans-generational. Its popularity has outlasted antiquity and found expression in a variety of forms, including opera, paintings, ballet, contemporary theater, and even pop art.

Recall that Medea was a princess from the now regions of Iran – some classists say the current region of Georgia. She gave up everything to help Jason grab the Golden Fleece and fled to Greece with him. She basically saved his life and bore him children. The children of foreign wives, however, were not regarded as legitimate Greek citizens. The myth tells us that Jason deserts her to marry a Corinthian princess. Medea is enraged and heartbroken at this betrayal. His response is that bringing her to Greece and its civilization, and making her name known there is adequate compensation. In her rage, Medea plans to kill their children to avenge herself since she knows that not having any progeny or kinship is a major blow to a proud Greek warrior, and perhaps the worst form of revenge. At one point, Medea says to Jason, “How does it feel to have my teeth on your heart?” 

Euripides brings his poetic vision to the myth of Medea in part to attack injustices to women and especially to foreigners. Euripides was the bad boy member of the famed trio of Ancient Greek tragedians; Sophocles and Aeschylus were the other two. He wrote and produced his Medea play in 431 B.C.E for an increasingly xenophobic and racist Athenian audience. Medea was the foreigner within Greek society. She often wore oriental dress. She was the paradigmatic outsider. This fact is often lost on modern audiences. Say the name Medea and most think of infanticide. Back in the fifth century, Euripides argued that she was driven to madness by discrimination and humiliation.

In ancient Greece, a woman was a maiden, a bride, and then only after childbirth, a mature woman. Motherhood allowed  women to enter into the community and participate in religious ceremonies. Established as a mother in her own household, a woman gained new economic and emotional rights, and acquired power that could determine the fate of nations. As a mother, a woman could cease to be an object of exchange.  Yet, only by becoming a mother could a woman’s destiny be fulfilled. Motherhood ascertained her engagement in the polis (the city state), and insured access to something other than motherhood itself.

The fact that women on the Greek stage also had the ability to destroy the polis bears witness to the power that mothers could wield over the fate of nations. Remember that Clytemnestra, around whose death the royal household rebuilds itself, failed to destroy the polis; Medea murders her children by Jason, as well as Jason’s new princess bride, and thus succeeds by wiping out any future progeny of Corinth. Infanticide is thus becomes a political act  as well as a personal act of revenge.

Passion, sexual betrayal, conflict, revenge, and infanticide are boiler plate themes for opera. The eminent Greek composer and political activist Mikis Theodorakis premiered his opera Medea in 1991 at Teatro Arriaga in Bilbao, Spain. Theodorakis, now 95 years old and still a radical, emphasizes the humanity of the myth, particularly with the themes of passion, dignity and loss. The last aria of the opera is, in my estimation,  one of the most beautiful ever composed.  In an earlier 1969 iteration as a song, Theodorakis had called it “The Oracle.” 

Two decades later, Theodorakis’ Medea is choreographed into an emotionally charged ballet by Renato Zanella. And shortly after, the East German Greek Asteris Kutulas is inspired to create a filmed collage entitled Recycling Medea: Not an Opera Ballet Film.  Thus, we have a composer, a choreographer, and a filmmaker collaborating with vocalists and dancers to give the viewer an aesthetic and moral experience of the highest order. This is what great art can do for us. It doesn’t help us forget; it helps us remember to empathize with the other.

Recycling Medea is a passionate and poetic cinematic essay. While not released in the United States, it has had worldwide distribution and in 2014 it won the Cinema for Peace Most Valuable Documentary Film Award at the Berlin International Film Festival. It is a striking visual collage integrating scenes of protest marches, Theodorakis in a gas mask and stomping police boots in the burning streets of modern Athens with the passionate choreography of Renato Zanella.  The exquisite prima ballerina Maria Kousouni portrays Medea. She manages to amaze the spectator with her sublime movements and the reach of her limbs. Her movements are immensely more expressive than the libretto. They represent a Medea we pity and fear – a woman and mother who is more than vengeful, she is tender, frightened, loving, heartbroken, mad. The music and the dance combine to both reassure and haunt my dreams. The contradictions in mood are stunning. Mother and society have betrayed the children. They have killed their future, and perhaps ours.  

 * I am grateful to Asteris Kutulas for permission to use portions of Recycling Medea.

Spyros Orfanos, PhD, ABPP – Director, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; Senior Research Fellow, Center for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, Queens College, CUNY; Fellow, American Psychological Association; Past president of the International Association of Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP), the Society of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (39) of the American Psychological Association, and the Academy of Psychoanalysis of the American Board of Professional Psychology. He maintains an independent practice in NYC.