While in college, I took a couple of film classes. We studied movies, old and new, from all over the planet. I remember being struck by how attitudes and behaviors can vary so differently from one culture to another, and, yet, people seemed so basically the same in their needs and desires.
The first time I saw Fellini’s Satyricon, I came away depressed, and damned grateful that I didn’t live in Roman times. Even if Roman pansexuality now seems somehow liberated, their individual lives appeared lonely, aimless, and damned precarious from today’s perspective. (The actual Satyricon is available online, by the way. An interesting read.)
Sitting as we do, in the West, on this side of the Christian era, it is easy to forget how brutal the world has been, and can be, even today.
But Jeet is not about brutality, though it is about a different time and culture when men often were brutal. The Seleucid Empire – formed in Persia after the conquests of Alexander the Great – is in decline. Rome is rising to the West. There are power struggles in the capital; struggles that play out in the provinces.
Jeet is a story for “mature audiences.” By that, I do not mean that this story rises, even to a fraction, of the violence in today’s video games. I do mean, though, that Jeet is not for hearts that are too tender. It is a “hard” story in places, beginning with the first chapter. It is a story of power and ambition, of grace and kindness, of good and evil, of sex and love… especially, of love.
You may cry.
But stories like this should be told.