Jarman's Akenaten is difficult to categorise. A friend who read it said to me that it was like waking up in someone else's wet dream. It is simultaneously a vision of Orientalist excess, a homoerotic fantasy, and the first entry in Jarman's personal register of gay history - he went on to write and film screenplays about gay figures like Saint Sebastian and Edward II. Shortly before his death, Jarman wrote that he had been 'cursed with curiosity' about ancient Egypt. He started to research Akenaten in the early 1970s, at the time of the Tutankhamun exhibition in London, and eventually amassed his own Egyptological library. The Egyptian background of Akenaten also appealed to Jarman's interest in the occult - at the same time he was preoccupied with the Elizabethan astrologer and Hermetic scholar John Dee (1527-1608). Although Jarman never managed to finance the filming of Akenaten and eventually lost interest in it, he had considered the casting. David Bowie, androgyne of the 1970s par excellence, was to play Akhenaten. Jarman wanted the production to be 'no Cleopatra' (referring to the notoriously extravagant 1963 film with Elizabeth Taylor) but 'as simple as butter muslin with fine white limestone walls, sand and perhaps a gold bracelet or a scarlet ribbon'.1:1 The simplicity he wanted belies Akenaten s violence, sensuality and melodrama.
Jarman's films have been criticised for being so episodic that they are indifferent to narrative, but in fact Akenaten unfolds with the chronological sequence of historical events, and has obviously been carefully researched. The Sphinx provides a consistent narrative voice. Naturally the Sphinx is a suitable narrator for an Oedipal melodrama, but perhaps it is also a witty reference to the garish son- et-lumiere shows with voice-overs by the Sphinx that are still popular tourist attractions in Egypt. Akenaten has some set-pieces in common with the novels discussed in the previous chapter: a 'hymn' to the Aten scene, a boundary stela scene, and so on. However, the overall effect is very different, because Jarman gives these standard scenes an Oedipal or homoerotic gloss, and there is more violence and sex than usual. In Akenaten Tutankhamun and Smenkhkare' are Akhenaten's sons, born from his incestuous relationship with his mother Tiye, and Smenkhkare' becomes his lover as well. As usual in gay versions of Akhenaten, the heterosexual love story is downplayed in favour of the homosexual one. Nefertiti plays a subordinate 'wifely' role (at one point she is seen making bread), and her daughters by Akhenaten do not appear at all. Like other gay redactors of Akhenaten, Jarman presents him positively, characterising him according to very conservative and romantic ideas about genius. He is a transcendentally gifted poet and a visionary with a radical view of sexual politics, and the end of Akenaten is ambiguous as to whether his cultural and sexual revolution is defeated or not.
The screenplay begins with Akhenaten's return to Amunhotep Ill's palace after being exposed in the desert as an infant. Short scenes narrate his marriages to Nefertiti and Tiye, his accession to the throne, conflict with the priests of Amun, and the founding of Akhet-aten. The focus then moves onto Akhenaten's infatuation with Smenkhkare', their love affair and eventual marriage. Jealous of Smenkhkare', Nefertiti commits suicide and is cremated at one of the Akhet-aten boundary stelae. Over her ashes, Akhenaten intones a poem very like the Song of Solomon. At the devastated Thebes, Tiye decides that things cannot go on this way any longer. Enlisting Amun as a spiritual authority, she incites her younger son Tutankhamun to murder Smenkhkare' and dismember his body like that of Osiris. Tutankhamun obeys his mother and is duly recognised as king. Akhenaten flees into the desert, and is last seen with the butchered remains of Smenkhkare': he has reassembled them, as Isis reassembled Osiris in the myth. Jarman had obviously read a translation of a famous Egyptian magical papyrus now in Leiden, several spells of which relate to Isis mourning over Osiris' corpse.) Over Smenkhkare''s body, Akhenaten recites a poetic version of a funerary text found on the coffin from tomb 55 in the Valley of the Kings (see Plate 2.4). The original editor of this text thought that it was spoken by Nefertiti to Akhenaten, but Jarman puts a characteristically gay spin on it by having Akhenaten speak it over Smenkhkare'. He quotes it almost verbatim from Velikovsky:
soul. I will embrace you. Call me by name again and again, for ever, and never will you call without response."'
As he speaks, Akhenaten stares at the dazzling sun to blind himself, like Oedipus in Sophocles' play (although by different means). Jarman thus identifies Akhenaten with Isis and Oedipus simultaneously, apparently as stricken images of mourning. Yet when the mythical intertext is supplied, what Jarman implies by these identifications seems more complex than is obvious at first. In the myths, Isis revivifies Osiris' mangled body with her magic, and Oedipus eventually finds peace and reconciliation after blinding himself and fleeing from Thebes. Akenaten's ambiguous end simultaneously stages defeat and continuing resistance. It allows for the inspirational possibility of a gay world surviving rather than being wiped out by the repressive political forces, as personified by Tutankhamun and Tiye in Akenaten. Such endings also feature injarman's later films, such as Edward7/(1991).
I am sure that Jarman was being ironic when he said that Akenaten was to be 'no Cleopatra', for the screenplay is full of the exotic trappings the film Cleopatra evokes. In Akenaten the Egyptian royal family lounge around in typical Orientalist passivity and decadent, self-obsessed leisure. Tiye makes her first appearance in the harem reclining on a golden leopard bed (obviously the one from Tutankha- mun's tomb) and guarded by a panther. Her association with predatory animals recall the man-eating Cleopatras of nineteenth-century paintings. Akenaten s setting in this vague, eternal east is also a suitably homocrotic space for exploring the gay themes and tableaux that so interest Jarman. For one thing, the eastern setting gives him opportunities to place the male body on display. Scenes of indolent life at the palace arc intercut with homoerotic glimpses of a band of nomad youths exercising naked, riding in the desert or swimming in the Nile. Towards the end, Smenkhkare' performs a Salomc-likc striptease before marrying Akhenaten, the semi-transparent veils gradually removed to reveal him naked. The male-male wedding, with all its transgressive connotations of the world turned upside down, is a classic symbol of destructive exccss. It recalls the marriages of 'bad' Roman emperors like Nero and Elegabalus to their male lovers, but Jarman's reference to Salome's dance of the veils puts an Orientalist complexion on this trope - especially by having the striptease performed by a man. When Jarman wrote the scene, he may even have been thinking of Oscar Wilde's drag performance in the title role of his own Salome (1891). Orientalism was, of course, a classic strategy for outing same-sex relationships and performing the slippage of gender identity. More recently, films like Stargate (1995) have recycled Orientalist tropes and exotic Egyptian stereotypes to project sexually ambivalent images of pharaohs.[1]'
It is difficult to know how far to read Akenaten as an erotic jeu d'esprit born out of Jarman's fascination with ancient Egypt, or something more political. Wisely, Jarman himself refused to pin down his screenplay. In 1993 he wrote, 'I think if I made it now it would have no real necessity and would be merely decorative - perhaps not.'18 Akenaten might have passed its cultural sell-by date, or it might not.