Reception of the Ancient Myth of the Atreides in Woody Allen’s Cassandra’s Dream

Modern Western artistic culture receives the Antiquity as the ancient myth. The myth of the Atreides enjoys an increased attention of playwrights in Western Europe and the United States, since it raises the universal issues of crime and punishment, awareness of guilt and assertion of truth. This article focuses on the reception of the Atreides myth in Woody Allen’s Cassandra ’s Dream. The article analyses the cultural dialogue between Antiquity and Modernity: the director has transferred the ancient plot to modern reality and endowed the Americans with the features of ancient heroes. The plot of the film develops around a murder committed by the brothers for financial gain. It correlates with the murder of Agamemnon as well as his wife and Aegisthus. Ian’s determination is reminiscent of Elektra’s behavior: he incites his brother to commit a crime and feels no repentance after the murder has occurred. Like Euripides’s Orestes, the other brother, Terry, cannot calm down after the crime, saying that he repents and wants to open himself to the police in order to suffer a well-deserved punishment. In the conflict between the brothers, killing a brother is the only way out of the situation, although Ian says that he feels the same “strange vision”: he must kill again. While ancient heroes act under the will of gods, which gives the impression of conscious and controlled actions, modern heroes are driven by circumstances. While heroes of ancient literature take murders for granted, as a legitimate revenge or even a feat, modern artistic culture focuses on the ethical side of the bloodshed. A modern human is dominated by a new Christian morality, which though oftentimes unrealized, affects human desires and functions as a source of ethical reflections. The story of the heroes, consisting of a chain of uncontrollable events, would seem to confirm the unpredictability of life and the total dependence of people on circumstances. Fatalism is an integral part of the ancient worldview: it is not by chance that “Fate” is personified and becomes a separate character in ancient Greek tragedy. However, modern culture affirms human independence and freedom, which Terry discoveres at a moment of spiritual enlightenment after committing a crime, followed by utter repentance. The finale of the film is strikingly different from the ancient interpretations of the myth of the Atreides: the killer-heroes die. The reception of antiquity in American culture of the 21st century is a reflection on what determines the behavior of a modern person in a critical situation, similar to that in ancient mythology, as well as what is the modern attitude of a criminal to their crime. Appealing to the ancient myth, Woody Allen proves that Christian morality allows making the right, “human” decision even in the most difficult circumstances. At the same time, he shows the duality of modern culture: the imposed ideals of mass culture beguile a morally developed person, who gets illusory freedom for a lost self-identity. The author declares no conflicts of interests.