Following a train of thought, I thought I’d expand on the previous post concerning the new movie “Hercules.”

I suppose there is a segment of society that won’t see it – or admit to seeing it. But to me pop culture is culture, too, and thus a starting point for intellectual discussion. Indeed, the film sent me scurrying to my bookshelves for a childhood favorite, Philip E. Slater’s psychoanalytic “The Glory of Hera” (Beacon Press), a book so old that it cost $3.95. (Actually, it’s not that old. It was published in 1968.)

Slater paints a portrait of a complex character – a man who is at once gay and straight, masculine and feminine, a lover of family and its destroyer, mother-identified and mother-loathing, victim and victimizer, monster and martyr, all-too-human being and transcendent god. Hercules – Heracles in Greek – is all this, because his myth changed as Greece evolved. He is a metaphor then for the birth of a nation. And more...