Gladiator and the Spectacle of Virtue

Popcorn and Circus: "Gladiator" and the Spectacle of Virtue Author(s): Amelia Arenas Source: Arion, Third Series, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Spring - Summer, 2001), pp. 1-12 Published by: Trustees of Boston University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20163824 Accessed: 11/03/2010 20:46 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=tbu. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Trustees of Boston University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Arion. http://www.jstor.org Popcorn and Circus: Gladiator and the Spectacle of Virtue AMELIA ARENAS JL/iKE many people of my generation, I owe my classical education to CinemaScope. I can trace the origins of my love of antiquity back to third grade, when I caught sight of a monumental close-up of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton frozen in an imminent kiss on a billboard announcing that Cle opatra was coming soon to a theater near me. And I say "me" because the conventional second-person singular didn't strike my nine-year-old mind as being merely rhetorical. Soon, the lovely queen and her rugged boyfriend seemed to follow me personally everywhere I went, and it kept me day dreaming in class and awake at night. Obviously, I had to see this movie. But there was a catch. I fell into utter despair one day, when I noticed that all these ads also included a sinister message: B-RATiNG. No one allowed under fourteen. Seeing my sorry state, however, my mother decided to break the law: she dressed me up, painted my lips bright red, cam ouflaged me under a pair of sun glasses, and took me to the movies anyway. We were already getting cozy in our seats at the theater when an usher approached us politely and asked for my age. I can still remember our indignation as we were escorted into the street by the manager, mother still ranting at the top of her lungs about how they dared keep her child from enjoying what she called "a perfectly nice tragedy writ ten by an immortal poet?and a lesson in ancient history, besides!" I did get to watch Cleopatra, after all?on TV, the follow ing year. Growing up in South America, I had many oppor tunities to indulge in my passion for such Hollywood extrav aganzas, especially during Easter, when all forms of public entertainment were officially banned, except for classical 2 POPCORN AND CIRCUS music and epic movies?"serious" art, supposedly suited to the spirit of contemplation demanded by this most mournful of Christian holidays. It was on Easter, for instance, that I was introduced to such masterpieces of operatic gravity as Cosi fan tutte and to that most chaste of love stories, the tale of the Egyptian Queen and her Marc Anthony. This early enthusiasm for the grandeur, the pathos, and the twisted eroticism of these old films led me years later to force my own nine-year-old daughter to sit through a whole week end's worth of epic movies I had carefully selected for her at the local video store, which is how I discovered that she was immune to Hollywood epic. These stories, which had made a precocious humanist of me and which had shaped my taste, my ethics, and, in all likelihood, my sexuality, were to her plain corny and phony, and, besides, too long. But it was more than maternal vanity that led me to suspect that this alarming disagreement between us was neither temperamen tal nor aesthetic, but rather historical, an insight I was able to confirm recently, when she cried her eyes out watching Gladiator. On the surface, Ridley Scott's Gladiator may seem like any of those movies I loved as a child. The story takes us to Germania during the last days of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, when the Roman army, led by Maximus, a provincial gen eral, puts an end to barbarian domination. Soon after the battle, Marcus expresses to Maximus his gratitude, as well as his wish to name him "Protector of Rome" after his death, so that Rome can become, once again, a Republic, in spite of the fact that all Maximus wants is to return to his wife and son in Spain, and that Marcus already has a rightful heir who can't wait to become Emperor, his son Commodus. In a moving scene, the aging emperor announces his decision to Commodus, who murders him, weeping as he crushes the old man's throat, and who soon afterwards orders his rival's execution. But Maximus escapes and manages to return home, badly wounded (incredibly, bleeding all the way from Ger many to Spain, but who cares?), only to find his farm burnt Amelia Arenas 3 to the ground and his wife and son crucified. Despondent, the Spaniard gives in to his wounds and is found barely alive on the road, and eventually sold as a slave in Zucchabar, where he's trained as a gladiator. What follows is the story of the hero's return to Rome, where Commodus reigns, unaware of his rival's survival, and where Maximus finds fame, revenge, and death at the Colosseum. Indeed, to read this summary, Gladiator may sound like any of those old epic movies long outmoded by the time my daugh ter was born. The story brings to mind such memorable pred ecessors as Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (i960), the saga of the real-life gladiator who waged war against Rome during the last years of the Republic, as well as Anthony Mann's ele gant epic, The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), which also develops during the chaotic reign of Commodus. All the essential elements are there: Gladiator too is a tale about the clash between the forces of good and evil embodied in two archetypal characters, an anonymous, righteous underdog and an all-powerful adversary, predictably a depraved, demented villain, and their match is set against breathtaking reconstruc tions of ancient sites and life and drenched in as much blood as can possibly be poured into two-and-a-half hours of film. As with all great movie epics, the public's viewpoint in Glad iator moves swiftly from the private sphere where passions brew (the tent, the prison cell, the bedroom) to the vast back ground where public life and ancient history unravel (the bat tle field, the city, the Colosseum)?a grand stage, which lends its weight and scale to the minutiae of the personal drama. And, like Quo Vadis? (1951), Ben Hur (1959), and virtually every other of these Hollywood fantasies, Gladiator, too, involves a tense love triangle, in this case, between Maximus and Commodus' sister, Lucilla, who was Maximus' lover once and still loves him, and between Lucilla and her brother, who burns with an old incestuous passion for her, and whom she fears, on account of her complicity with Maximus and her al legiance to her son, Lucius Verus, who happens to be unwit tingly?poor kid!?a fan of his uncle's rival, the mysterious glad iator who has become the talk of the town. 4 POPCORN AND CIRCUS From the purely visual point of view, Scott's movie is firmly placed within a tradition that goes back at least as far as D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), grand spectacles where antiquity comes to life through extravagant productions and stunning special effects. If anything, the impressive com puter-generated reconstructions in Gladiator strike one as a logical development of such technological breakthroughs as Technicolor and CinemaScope. Indeed, the uncanny image definition made possible by computer generation compen sates at least in part for the effect of sheer scale that made those earlier films so powerful at the theater, lending the movie a respectable afterlife in the world of home videos. I would even argue that, in some cases, Gladiator fares better in this humbler, domestic form. At times the level of detail is so exhaustive as to be optically implausible, especially in those vast panoramic views where it tends to flatten space, and where the effect is often more hallucinatory than realis tic?a shortcoming of hi-tech illusionism which is curiously neutralized when the cinematic image is squeezed onto a tv screen. But the formal differences between Gladiator and its pred ecessors are more significant still than its similarities. Let's begin with this. Although Gladiator at least feels to be as long as Ben Hur or Quo Vadis?, its script must be at the most only one third of theirs. The story is told less through speech than through images, which dramatically reduces the rhetorical weight of its predecessors. The text is specially scanty when it comes to the hero, a man of few words, a striking depar ture from the older epics, where everyone, whether consul or slave, sounds like an orator even during the most intimate love scenes. In fact, whenever Maximus appears on the screen, he's either fighting or brooding. And when he does speak, his words are at times surprisingly casual, even when he discusses conspiratorial plans with a senator or the after life with a fellow slave. In fact, I would argue that, for all the spectacular historical reconstructions and the predictable gore, Scott has managed to create an internal story set in ancient times?a quiet epic. Amelia Arenas 5 Consider, for instance, the visual foils for this peculiar nar rative inwardness. Incongruous dreamlike images pop out often during the most brutally vivid scenes in the battlefield or the arena: the hero's rugged hand tenderly caressing a field of wheat; his inert body levitating across a dry, rocky land; a heavy wooden door slowly opening against a back drop of swift, stormy clouds?images suggesting, first, the hero's yearning to return home and, later, to die. A similar lyricism informs even the most generic epic scenes. I must admit that, being an art-historian, the idea of war between Romans and barbarians or the gladiatorial games immedi ately conjures up scenes from the column of Trajan or the arch of Constantine and the mosaics of ancient villas, images where idealization never loses an inch to realism. So perhaps for that reason I was overwhelmed by the battle scenes in Gladiator. The riveting images from Germania, for instance, have all the rawness of World War 11 films. One thinks of the stunning opening scene in Saving Private Ryan, for instance. But, in its tone, Gladiator is a lot closer to The Thin Red Line, arguably the most realistic war movie ever made, but also the most poetic. Or else think of the flock of birds that Scott adds to the breathtaking, computer-generated view of Rome seen from the Capitoline Hill at dawn, or the veils of snow flurries and fire that envelop the German forest as the battle rages, like a doomed Valhalla. The same goes for the score. The grandiose symphonic com positions that are the musical staple of the genre are largely absent here. For the most part, the score is as eerie as those images I described before. On and off, a haunting contralto voice sings in yearning, mournful tones, like the restless ghost of Maximus' wife calling him from the underworld. But the most significant differences between Gladiator and its earlier counterparts are to be found in the story itself. Epic movies of this sort offer the enthusiast many kicks, starting with the obvious, the thrill of watching the grand cat-walk of golden-clad emperors and bejeweled courtesans, and the parade of armored soldiers, sci-fi-hero-like gladia tors, wretched paupers, and exotic types in colorful tunics 6 POPCORN AND CIRCUS and thread-bare rags, all of which feeds on the decidedly mod ern habit of judging people by what they're wearing. Yet watching my favorite epic movies again while preparing for this essay, I could almost smell the mothballs. Think of Kirk Douglas's minute costume in Spartacus, for instance, seem ingly spotless and freshly ironed at all times, and functional only as a means to highlight the hero's heavily oiled, health club physique. Or else, think of Tony Curtis' dainty slave mini-skirts, or the magnificent togas worn by the oversexed aristocrat played by Lawrence Olivier in the same movie, more reminiscent of the stiffness of the operatic stage than of the privilege of the villa. By contrast, the costumes and makeup in Gladiator are so evocative one could almost smell Lucilla's perfume and the pus in Maximus' maggot-infested wounds. Largely wrong by archeological standards (think of the Victoria's Secret-like corset that Lucilla wears over her tunic in the movie's last scene), the costumes in Gladiator convey the range of styles, and, most importantly, the per sonalities of these ancient people. The soldiers' costumes, for instance, are a far cry from the sparkling, polished image of the generic epic-movie warrior. They wear coarse woolen clothes and heavy armor (cast in rubber, really, and painted) and filthy scarves around their necks to soak up their sweat, and are, just like the barbarians and the gladiators, covered in generous mud and faux-blood baths. Lucilla's outfits, on the other hand, convey a level of luxury unimaginable in the modern world, where the dominant aesthetic, even among the very rich, is best illustrated by the democratic, puritani cal clothes sold by The Gap and Banana Republic, and even by pricier counterparts, such as Donna Karan or Calvin Klein. In this context, Lucilla's outfits are apt to arouse in the likes of me a serious case of wardrobe-envy. In every scene, her body is wrapped in as many layers of texture and hue, and in as much jewelry and makeup (witness the dainty, tattoo-like pattern she often wears in between her eyebrows) as is practi cally possible to maintain one's sense of her irresistibly casual flair. Seeing the beautiful Connie Nielsen in her role as Marcus Aurelius' daughter, regally carrying her imminent mid Amelia Arenas 7 die age amidst the flutter of her veils, I couldn't help but think of Catullus' Lesbia. The costumes worn by Joaquin Phoenix in the role of the young emperor, on the other hand, outlandish and uncomfortable as they look to be, owe less to the generic theatricality of the epic-movie tradition than to the designers' astute effort to capture the personality of a man who must have been childish and fatuous, a man whom posterity will forever remember in his preposterous official guise as Hercules, a marble now at the Capitoline Museum? a sort of Roi Soleil at Halloween, his head dripping with ringlets, wearing a lion's skin, and holding his club as force fully as Marlene Dietrich would carry a feather boa. Like the costumes, the story in Gladiator is as historically unreliable as it is poetically plausible. (Does anyone mind that, strictly speaking, Shakespeare's Macbeth is an artful cal umny?a most unfair representation of a man who was, after all, not a bad king?) Maximus is a fictional character con cocted from a few real-life people who lived across several centuries of Roman history. Lucilla did plot against her broth er and Marcus Aurelius might have been murdered, though the details in each case vary according to what Roman histo rian you choose to believe. But the wacky Commodus, by all accounts, indeed, an amateur gladiator, did not die in the Colosseum, as the movie has us believe?the only significant departure from historical fact, and, in my view, an infelici tous happy ending to what is otherwise an exceptionally evocative story about a long-gone era. Consider, for instance, Maximus' attachment to his little lares?inaccurate in that they represent not his clan's ancestors, as they should, but his wife and child, but very effective in conveying the sense that the daily religious life of the ancient Romans was a lot more tribal than the magnificent temples to the Olympian gods and deified emperors would have us believe. Or details like the glasses from which aristocrats drink, filled with aromatic herbs, which remind us that, for all their hydraulic engineer ing marvels, by and large, the ancient Romans drank foul water. More important, perhaps, Scott's movie, even more than 8 POPCORN AND CIRCUS Spartacus, conveys to the modern public the sense that the gladiatorial games represented not only the most inhumane, but also, potentially, the most upwardly-mobile of all ancient professions: if most gladiators ended up as nameless carrion in the arena, a few of them became as outrageously famous as today's rock stars. But Gladiator expresses something far more important. If the pleasures of gladiatorial games seem unthinkable today, to a people raised on the bitter milk of war in far-away lands, disdain for pain and death and humil ity in the face of the unexpected were precious virtues: audaces fortuna iuvat. In the Roman imagination, the bold were Lady Luck's sweethearts. Yet perhaps the most relevant departure from the epic tra dition in this case lies in how the hero's story is told. Let's back up for the sake of context. Epic movies offer the public an ambivalent thrill. They take us into a vertiginous journey to remote and grand worlds entirely unlike our own, yet deeply rooted in the pop ular imagination?the world of Sodom and Gomorrah, of Pharaohs and prophets, of gladiators, martyred Christians, and exquisitely depraved villains clad in shimmering tunics and nibbling on grapes?images which are part of the myth ology of Western civilization's origins. They are tales about virtue, engrossing moral dramas made all the more effective precisely because they are presented against a backdrop of exuberant brutality. And here lies the complication: shot in extreme close-ups and explicit, breathtaking detail, these movies give us all a privileged chance to be morally out raged, but also to enjoy the carnage and to do so at a level of proximity unimaginable even to the most depraved of Emperors presiding over the games. And if the trick works, it is because these antiquarian extravaganzas are ultimately not about Abraham or Ben Hur, Spartacus or Maximus, or about anonymous Christian martyrs and converted centurions, but about ourselves, or, more precisely, about our ideals, conve niently presented in the flattering but distancing guise of armor and toga and confirmed by the authority of the past. Amelia Arenas 9 And this strategy is pointedly modern. The most signifi cant example of this use of the past in pre-filmic art comes from the work of neo-classical artists such as Jacques-Louis David, who mined ancient Greek and Roman history for effective vehicles to promote current ideals, first, the Republican values of the French Revolution, and later, the imperialist hype of Napoleonic times. The strategy proved ideally suited after the rise of the bourgeoisie, a time when class and faith could no longer provide sufficient fuel for ideals, and when people didn't really have "a pas