Anyone who has ever seen a sword and sandal epic from the great period of the 50s and 60s will know that at some point, someone camp and perverse like Nero, played by someone like Peter Ustinov, will appear, and be despicable. Wonderfully so. And we will clearly know, even see, that he gets up to no good.
In Gladiator 2, that person is two - two strange boyish Caesars with trembling lips and mad darting eyes, like teenagers trying out for a high school version of A Clockwork Orange. Their palpable barely controlled menace is, well, menacing, They seem poised...
To do what?
Unlike every previous Roman film, this one has been decidedly deloused and desexed. This is no doubt because to sell to the global markets, violence is a welcome entertainment, devoid of religious or moral content, whereas sex disturbs the fabric of societies. Therefore we have animal-biting, ear-stabbings, and beheadings - though little in the way of whippings.
What we have almost zero of is what Rome is infamous for - perversion. To be direct - orgies, terrible crimes against the body, shocking things - the acts that repulse and enthral us about these monsters of power and abandon - incest, etc.
The script, by deciding to throw a red cloak over almost all that is perverse and criminal in this world of depraved sexuality and licentiousness, recreates a milieu that is devoid of its main terrors. The mad unstable emperor twins look a bit "queer-coded" (make up) but seem entirely focused on their pets, violent games or war. They seem bored, as would most insane emperors, if all the roman orgies were sucked out of your existence.
Instead, Lucious Lucius (played with sub-Kirk Douglas beefcake gravitas by a young Irish actor Paul Mescal) is never caressed or admired erotically (as in Lawrence of Arabia's shocking scene in the Turkish prison where he is "punished"), never whipped - just bitten, punched, stabbed and shot at with arrows, and threatened by sharks and rhinos. Freud would easily be able to claim that the wild inventions of the arena, and their florid displays of excess, mark the moment the actual sexual eruptions are being repressed.
Gladiator 2 is a funny, weird, and oddly ineffective film, sometimes, with delightfully engaged performances from Denzel Washington and a few others; it is as wooden as a Gladiator's freedom sword, but may be the most expensive B-movie ever made at 250 million USD. It could be a guilty pleasure, but this review suggests much of the guilty pleasure was left on the cutting room floor, or airbrushed out. Seemingly, it has removed the Christian (they are mentioned once, these Christians) wound at the heart of the empire, beginning to fester and spread, and any reference to carnality (a bawdy house is barely referenced, the love-making - is there any? - chaste or non-existent).
For a film about the use and manipulation of the male body to generate pleasure for an audience, the scopophilia is low, though present. This is because, by definition, Gladiator films are "camp" and contain elements of so-called BDSM that cannot be entirely erased, even if the plot does its best to refocus away from the actual premise, to internecine political manoeuvrings.
Neither entirely religious, or evil, or even, let us be frank, sadistic (the killings are so rote and packaged to entertain, we forget the cruelty inherent in the system) then, the movie depicts a merely callous, and mainly mindlessly violent world, where life is cheap and the powerful weird and distant - a world recognisably our own, but without many of the complicating undercurrents that have been, this time, sifted out from the bloody sands of the arena.
The final message is, we will be entertained, but only by controlled murder, not uncontrollable mysteries of unacceptable desires. In this sense, the film is precisely the opposite of Psycho or Vertigo, that offer such depths of perverse viewing opportunity, we are ashamed and corrupted (or satiated) by the cinema's capacity to dive lower than any shark, to plunge deeper than any arrow tip.
Maybe desaturating (ethically) movies for the world market, and to allow younger audiences in, is a good idea? The fabled 70s features that troubled us seem a long time ago. There is far more moral ambiguity and shock to be had in the new TV remake of The Day of the Jackal.
Comments