Movie 666

By Demon

Film buzz Hollywood types line up around the block at the Hollywood Cineramadome, eager as Romans to see the Gladiator spectacle unfold. The cheers of the cinema audience mirror the cheers of the screen audience watching the bloody fights. Maximus wields two swords, separating head from body to furied spectator approval (suburbanites rejoice as the lawn shear is vindicated as weapon). Never mind the fact that the hero is a Roman general who has spent his life conquering lands for no other reason than his servile devotion to a grizzled, sociopathic Caesar. Brutality and conformity, apparently, are timeless virtues. (article continues after ads)

Gladiator precursor, Conan the Barbarian (1982), likewise carved a niche for himself in the blood pits, but unlike Maximus, Conan was a genuine loner who bowed to no one (not even his god, Crom). Conan saw his parents put to the sword and followed nothing but his dream of vengeance. Unlike the purely fictional Conan, however, Maximus is caught between historical fact and Hollywood idiom, since Maximus is a brutal man who’s vocation is bloody glory and loyalty to the monarch. Maximus is the hero of a slave society, competing in an arena where humans are cut down with sword and spear for entertainment.

Gladiator, to be fair, confronts its contradictions by making Maximus best friends with an enslaved-black-hunter-turned-gladiator (played by just-played-a-slave-in-Amistead, Djimon Hounsou) and briefly comments on blood and circus politics as Caesar institutes gladiatorial games to distract the people from his tyrannical aspirations. Maximus also seeks vengeance for his murdered wife and son, who seem innocent enough in his hazy memory, wandering dreamlike in amber waves of grain. These moral gestures, however, seem hollow as they serve as sops to ease a potentially reluctant audience into a full blown blast of old school blood and iron. (An increasingly strange mix of violence and morality oozing from Dreamworks in recent years: Amistead, Saving Private Ryan, The Patriot, Gladiator).

Gladiator is a film like Starship Troopers that recognizes that violence, military conquest, and sycophantic loyalty to leader and cause are pleasurable to paying movie patrons on some level — in short, neofascism makes for good entertainment. Given the proper framework of moral posturing and historical amnesia, one can enjoy a movie about humans conquering the universe with nuclear weapons or Roman generals hacking apart slaves in the arena. In Hollywood, death is always thumbs up.

Related posts:

1. An Epic of iMac Proportions: Gladiator
2. Blood and Animation: Princess Mononoke
3. No Country For Old Genres
4. There Will Be Blood
5. Brutal Massacre: A Comedy

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