Book review - The Epic of Gilgamesh
Gilgamesh and half-movies
02-03-2025 • Ryan Prendergast
I read the Epic of Gilgamesh— the world's oldest story. There are different angles to approach an old story like this. You can analyze its themes: individualism, friendship, the relationships of man and god. You can reflect on broader questions: this story as an instance of growing up and maturing, for example.
I don't enjoy thematic analysis about art and literature. There is no generalizable, absolute knowledge independent from the particular: doing an integral teaches you how to do an integral. Curricula which emphasize "problem solving" and similar universal concepts inevitably produce students who pattern match universal language; they've never actually solved any problems!
I want applications. Applied classicism, if you will.
The simplest applications are snippets of language to memorize. The eloquent eulogy: "Your funeral is a precious gesture to hide my own guilt", or the cutting insults: "May all and any who can hurt you now often cross the paths you take". The applied classicist might memorize Gilgamesh, and then memorize the Odyssey, and then memorize Plato, and then… You'll run out of memory soon. The next step is to throw this story at other things in your life, and see how it would stick. What would it mean to Gilgamesh-ify?
Gilgameshification might work for screenwriting. Consider the traditional 3 part Hollywood screenplay. Act 1 introduces the world and the inciting incident, Act 2 rises the action until we hit an all-is-lost moment, until AHA!, Act 3, the Climax and the denouncement. The Hollywood narrative structure is a framework for describing movies. It's descriptive, not perscriptive: it works because that's a shape that good stories share, all the way back to Homeric epics and Greek tragedies.
Gilgamesh doesn't fit the 3 part story mold. Rather than an inciting action, we start with the introduction of a best friend, followed by episodic heroics, such as the killing of Humbaba. The death of Enkidu, the climax of the story, happens quickly. For the rest of the tale, we follow Gilgamesh moping, coming to terms with the loss of his friend. He listens to the story of the flood by Utnapishtim, resolves to live forever, but, having the life-plant stolen by a snake, returns home to Uruk, his problems unresolved.
To Gilgamesh-ify a story:
- Move the climax to the first half of the movie.
- Write a second half following the character mope or otherwise deal with the climax.
What movies are like this? What would a standard Hollywood movie (say "Ferris Bueller") look like if it were Gilgamesh-ified? Ferris's parents return home at the end of hour 1. We spend the next hour following Bueller's sister coping with her jealousy and acceptance of Ferris's arbitrary fame.
Call it a half movie: half Ferris Bueller, followed by the aftermath.
I can't promise the half-movie will be better than the original. But it is intriguing, and I hope to try it soon. I've daydreamed of life-after-act-3 since I was a kid, and it's nice to name and formalize the process which writes FOR that daydream.