The movie Ben Hur occupies a special place in my sister’s cabinet and her heart. Each time I try to watch it with her, I get excited and start screeching Judah! Judah!; alternately I push our couch around the house (like a chariot) with my sister still on it …
But even in my (vicarious) state of being Judah Ben Hur, it’s difficult to stomach the subtle but crappy propaganda that becomes blatant when the viewer is historically inclined, not yet retarded by the pervasive ever-present chemicals, or quite simply, someone with a weak digestive system (that would be me).
Ben Hur was written in 1880 by Lew Wallace, US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and released in 1959 as a must-see blockbuster; it is listed as one of the top 100 greatest movies by the American Film Institute and won a total of eleven Oscars matched only, I think, by Titanic; though I cried like a melting iceberg for James Cameron’s masterpiece — a labour of love which lost him his beautiful wife Linda Hamilton, for its period Ben Hur was a cinematographic spectacularity.
But like Troy, Alexander, Gladiator and other ‘Our Kind of Good will Triumph Movies’, Ben Hur was the product of US propaganda that contained a very political message pertaining to the geo-strategic status quo in the Middle East during Eisenhower’s reign as the 34th President of the US; as usual the thread connecting the movie to real life was rooted in foreign policy, the aim of which was to mould interpretation, discussions and perceptions of world events and to control and filter the various ways such events (read: wars) played out tangibly and in the collective psyche of the public.
Ben Hur is very indicative of the age: The old Anglo-French colonialists are in the process of being removed via Independence; New America — only recently freed from “distant shore” colonialism — rapidly developing into an economic mercenary, steps in to fill the vacuum by acting as a counterweight.

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