The Perfect Woman

My family and I watched Agora, the new movie about Hypatia of Alexandria, over Thanksgiving weekend. We were all very excited about this, having been intrigued by Hypatia ever since we watched the segment of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos on her - the same clip which apparently inspired Alejandro Amenábar, the director of and force behind Agora.

I have to say, I was a little disappointed.

The Hypatia of this movie was beautiful, intelligent, wise - and completely opaque. Surrounded by religious and political conflict, change and creation, violence and destruction, she is not a player or a force or even a victim, but rather a symbol, perfect and unchanging, like the circles and numbers she studies. She has no inner conflict, no regrets or unfulfilled dreams, no strong connections. She retains her poise as everything she has ever known or cared for burns around her.

Others have pointed out that Hypatia is the only female character with any spoken lines. While this is frustrating, what bothers me more is how often her own issues are given voice by men. Early on, Hypatia’s father Theon explains to some unnamed men that he hopes she does not marry, because she would become the property of her husband. Why does Hypatia never mention this? Why don’t we get to see her struggle with or even reflect on the choice between philosophy and love? Why don’t we see her gratitude towards her father for letting her study philosophy, or her resentment that his permission is necessary?

Near the end of the movie, Hypatia’s would-be husband and greatest political ally, Orestes, breaks down into tears as he explains that he can’t protect her anymore. She calmly tells him that she’s known what was coming for a long time. Shortly thereafter, she is surrounded by a mob of Christians and walks to her death unflinching. Why don’t we ever see her afraid? Why don’t we see her angry with her attackers, her detractors, or the supporters who let her down?

Hypatia does occasionally show some emotion - as the Serapeum and its thousands of priceless manuscripts are destroyed, when her father is near to dying, as she makes the astronomical breakthroughs for which she lives. (The astronomy scenes are especially lovely.) And she does attempt to influence events around her, first preventing her students from taking part in the pagan attack on Christians which provokes the Serapeum’s burning, then later warning the political leadership of the city against requiring that all magistrates be Christians. But her involvement in the political and religious conflicts of the times is limited, her counsel almost always unheeded, a fact which she accepts with grace. Even when her slave attempts to rape her, she does not seem upset. When he stops of his own accord, Hypatia, looking relieved and exhausted, frees him.

Which brings me to my biggest complaint about this movie. The promotional blurb for the movie goes:

A historical drama set in Roman Egypt, concerning a slave who turns to the rising tide of Christianity in the hopes of pursuing freedom while also falling in love with his master, the famous female philosophy professor and atheist Hypatia of Alexandria.

The movie is not, thankfully, as focused on the entirely fictional character of the slave Davos as the blurb might suggest. Nor is his story boring or irrelevant - the movie does a wonderful job of showing the grievances of all sides, including how Christianity appeals to the starving, oppressed slaves. But when so much of Hypatia’s character remains hidden to the viewer, it’s frustrating to spend all that time watching Davos. In the first half of the film, he struggles to reconcile his gratitude towards and admiration for Hypatia, who has gone out of her way to educate him and encourages him to think about philosophy, with the way she unthinkingly orders him around and takes his feelings and loyalties for granted. In this way, he is a very clear mirror for Hypatia, who surely felt similarly mixed about her father and other tutors. So why do we linger on Davos’ story, instead of exploring Hypatia’s?

In the end, it is difficult to see Amenábar’s Hypatia as a real person. She seems more like a muse or a symbol, a walking representation of the idea “female philosopher”. In some ways, that’s appropriate - with so few female philosphers emerging from the deeply misogynist classical society, she has long been a muse and a symbol for our society. But in a feature-length film ostensibly devoted to telling her story, I was expecting more.