started watching 1979′s Caligula for the first time last night… a film famous, of course, for its orgy scene/s. though it’s Tiberius, not Caligula, who orchestrates the first of these scenes in the film, the centerpiece of Tiberius’ orgy palace is a vast swimming pool surrounded by a body of virile “nymphs” and “satyrs” Tiberius affectionately refers to as his “fishes”. ample cause to wonder if “Caligula’s Aquarium” might be a deliberate reference to this?
as malo points out, the emblem associated with the film is a relevant detail. the bleeding-eyed Caligula coin slots in with a loose motif of Roman emperors in Hivebent, calling to mind Terezi’s scratched-eye coin, which in turn seems to evoke Dualscar’s eye scars.
malo asks, then, if anything else in the film could be pertinent to Dualscar, so I promised i’d keep my two eyes peeled into the second half… and I think there are grounds to think that the story of the mythological Cronus might be a theme at play?
the Caesars claimed divine right through descent from the Roman ancestral goddess Venus, a fact which Caligula addresses directly in the film:
Lucky girl. To lose one’s virginity … to a direct descendant of the goddess Venus.
to us, pop culturally, Venus is the girl Botticelli depicts as rising fully-formed from the sea on a clam shell; born from the foam of Uranus’ manhood, torn from his body by his son Cronus (the very name “Aphrodite” means born from sea-foam, “aphros”).
and while the removal of eyes can itself be taken as an act of castration, the act is depicted in a far more explicit way shortly after Caligula’s declaration of divine descent, with the order of a man’s cruel emasculation and the feeding of his removed parts to dogs (with the remainder of his body sent to his wife Livia; the very woman whose virginity Caligula claimed in the name of the gods). the birth of Caligula’s daughter immediately follows.
soon enough we’re treated to another orgy - Caligula’s whoring of the senators’ wives - this time with emphasis on fellatio; cuts of a man being brought to completion are interspersed with soldiers gaily prancing around the brothel at Caligula’s invitation. Caligula’s descent into madness comes to a head at a symbolic ejaculation, surely calling to the “foam” of Uranus’ loins which led to the genesis of his bloodline. following, at the very peak of his insanity, Caligula has a legion of naked spearmen attack the sea in a symbolic invasion of Britain, doubly serving as a symbolic sexual conquest of the sea of the sort that might lead to the birth of a Venus.
(in some retellings of this myth, Caligula had his men take clam shells - “conchiglia” in Italian, and a euphemism for the vulva in some Latin languages - as plunder to prove the conquest, though the film instead has papyrus reeds as Caligula’s preferred loot.)