The unexpected return of Lucan’s Pompey to civil war as a ghost (9.1–18) leads to newfound success vis-à-vis enemies and allies alike. The language and imagery of this postmortem narrative revisits the portrait of Pompey’s decline in Books 1–2, where it activates a latent theme of victorious return in spite of death. Pompey’s acts of possession…[Read more]

Writer-director Terrence Malick makes the character of Pocahontas in The New World (2005) deliver several lines from Sappho as her own thoughts and words. These quotations, in conjunction with allusions to Vergil and other sources, open narrative directions that enable Pocahontas to emerge within a film that begins as an epic of European…[Read more]

‘Seconds’ (1966) is the third film in what has been called John Frankenheimer’s paranoia trilogy, the first two installments of which are The ‘Manchurian Candidate’ (1962) and ‘Seven Days in May’ (1964). It is the story of a middle-aged banker who abandons family and career, purchasing from the secretive Company a new identity, vocation and…[Read more]

The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, serves as a template for George Nolfi’s story about the tensions surrounding fulfillment in private versus public life. A romance-thriller with science fiction overtones, the film is a loose adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s short story, The Adjustment Team. In Nolfi’s version,…[Read more]