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I'm Spartacus.
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No, I'm Spartacus.
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I'm Spartacus.
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This is one of the classic and much parodied lines from Stanley Kubrick's 1960 movie of that name, which dramatized the story of a nearly successful slave revolt against Rome in the 70s BCE under the charismatic renegade gladiator Spider Spartacus, played by Kirk Douglas.
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The I'm Spartacus line is an expression of solidarity when the Roman authorities demand that the slave rebels identify and so hand over Spartacus, their revolutionary leader. They all claim to be him. I'm Spartacus. We're all Spartacus. Don't single him out. In other words, we're all in this together.
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Kubrick's Spartacus is a. A real epic. It's over three hours long. It's one of those movies that most people kind of sort of know, even if they haven't actually seen it or seen it recently. And it's come to feel like the classic American Roman blockbuster, which in a
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way it is, but it's a very political one. Politics runs through it from start to finish. That's from the real history of the ancient rebellion on which it's ultimately based through the radical novel about Spartacus by Howard Fast, which it adapted to the
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famous film itself, produced under the spectre of the Cold War and when the era of McCarthy and the threat of UN American activities was still a very live memory.
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In this final episode on our series of America and Rome, we're thinking about how great American Roman movies intersect with modern politics.
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From Spartacus to Gladiator, they are not just historical escapism. They are talking to the modern world and its controversies, too.
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And to help us with these films, we are absolutely delighted to welcome back with acclaim to Instant Classics. Maria Wyk, professor of Latin at University College London. Not just a leading critic of Latin poetry, but a historian of film, too. This is Instant Classics, the podcast that uncovers the ancient stories still shaping the world today. I'm Mary Beard.
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And I'm Charlotte Higgins. Each week we dive into the myths, the dramas and the characters of the classical world to discover what they still mean to us. Now and this week, we are looking at America, Rome and the movies.
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This episode is brought to you by Starbucks.
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That is fire.
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Whoa, that's good.
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This might be the drink of the summer.
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Okay, I like this one too.
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I'm rocking with it.
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Okay, try it for yourself. Starbucks refreshers concentrates are coming home. Find them in the coffee aisle and make it yours.
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B
So, Maria, I rewatched Spartacus recently, which is a time investment because it is. It's one of those great American movies that has an intermission because it's so unbelievably long. And aside from, I guess, it has these extraordinary famous moments like the I'm Spartacus moment and, spoiler alert, the crucifixion of the slaves at the end of the film. But actually, I really enjoyed these brilliant moments early in the film. Like when the gladiators under Kirk Douglas Spartacus break free in a very spectacular way from their gladiatorial school in Capua and then find themselves escaping up Mount Vesuvius in this kind of lovely, bucolic, kind of, I don't know, egalitarian breakaway society that they've invented for themselves. But can you illuminate this, the sort of world of the film a little bit more for us, Maria?
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D
Yes, it offers a really, I suppose, invigorating, stimulating picture of containment, slavery, oppression, abuse, being treated like an animal. That's a theme early on in the film when they're in a gladiatorial school. And Kubrick particularly has been lauded for his eye in working out how to show you the dynamics, the excitement of how the gladiators manage to break out of the school and to escape. The film then considers what are they trying to escape to? Are they trying to escape back to their homes? Because these are all people who've. Who have come to Italy from other countries. So do they want to just get home or do they have a kind of a mission and ambition to change society so that there is no longer this kind of abusive relationship between masters and slaves? And that's also a theme in the film. So there's a certain tragedy to the end of the film to see that our hero is up the cross. Which, of course, didn't happen in the original version of the story, which I'm sure Mary might mention.
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C
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, Little Miss Historian has to come in here and say that in some ways, this is a real story. Spartacus really happened. This slave rebel in the late 70s BC did do some of the things in some way, like what you see in the movie that he was unwillingly a gladiator in the gladiatorial school at Capua in south Italy. He did break out of the school with a load of other. A load of his kind of fellow gladiators. He attracted loads of people from the surrounding area to him and he did for a couple of years. He and his quite considerable band of followers did actually get the Romans worried. They stood up to Roman armies that had been sent out to deal with these people. Kind of ill prepared. Although in the end, Rome throws in the big guns, particularly in the person of the truly vile Marcus Licinius Crassus, who finishes the gladiators off. In some ways it plays quite a big part in the Roman imagination. You know, we have Rome as a slave society and, you know, slave societies are always anxious societies and one of their anxieties is that they will be overcome by their own exploited slave class. And so you get a lot of mentions of Spartacus. What you don't get is any really long coherent narrative of the rebellion and you don't get any sense really of what the aims and ambitions of the slaves are. They fail in the end after some wonderful kind of bits of daring do in Roman authors about set on the SL of Vesuvius, not very far away from Capua. But, you know, as we've said, you don't know whether they are just trying to get home or whether there is a bigger political agenda. In a way, it's a fantastic story for modern historians, modern novelists, modern filmmakers to kind of come into, because you've got the bare bones. But there's plenty of opportunity for doing what everybody who picks up the story of Spartacus does, which is making it make sense. And there's a long history of trying to make Spartacus make sense, give him a motif and.
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Etc, Etc.
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Yeah, in a way it's a very simple story. It is. Loads of slave gladiators escape, rebel hold Roman armies very much in their grip for a couple of years, but then get defeated, End of story, brutally, with, according to some sources, a load of crucified gladiators.
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Horrible.
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It's a horrible picture in the movie and it's not entirely without some ancient evidence. The slave gladiators put on crosses along the Appian Way.
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D
What's unusual about the film is that it shows that Spartacus was crucified, whereas there's no evidence for that. They think, we think that he died on the battlefield and was never found. But it Suits the film better to see him as sort of sacrificed for the greater good. But I think one thing that's really interesting, listening to what you were saying about how the slave rebellion worked in antiquity is the realization that thinking about how are we planning to relate this to American politics is that the story of slaves rebelling against masters was used as a metaphor by Karl Marx for the laborer, the proletariat, fighting against capitalists. We know that Marx famously said, break off your chains.
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So.
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So Spartacus was fantastic because his literal chains become a 19th century metaphor for fighting against your masters in the world of work. So you've got that metaphor, that metaphor that becomes very important in the communist world of Spartacus representing a fight against capitalism. And so what's it doing? What's it doing in a film from Hollywood in the late 1950s? That's our question.
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C
Yeah, and it's, you know, it's certainly, you know, Kubrick and Cohen Fast, they weren't the first people to pick up on. On the story of Spartacus. I mean, you know, every revolutionary with any sense from the 18th century onwards saw Spartacus as a fantastic symbol. And there are plenty of earlier literary accounts of Spartacus, plenty of, you know, earlier movies from Europe, etc. But it's. It is interesting to see, just as you put it, Maria. So what is this doing, with all that background of Spartacus, the proto communist, what's it doing in America in the mid 20th century?
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D
And the answer is Howard Fast, the novelist. And he's the answer because he wrote the novel that is adapted to screen in prison when he was imprisoned by the United States government for being a member of the Communist Party. And he wrote the Story of Spartacus. It's actually quite a good read because you're hearing Spartacus himself. We never heard that in antiquity, what Spartacus thinks and how he feels. And the preface to the novel says, this is for my children. This is for the next generation. This is a lesson that we need to learn. In effect, we need to be the sons and daughters of Spartacus. We need to bring down the system. That is what the novelist says in his preface, quite explicitly. And so what's interesting is how then he structures the story of Spartacus as a way of talking about what's wrong with the United States and how to what extent that criticism of the United States is still there in the film because the film is not a communist film. And the film is much more liberal and has adjusted the story to be able to tell it in the first place within the Hollywood film industry. And that, I think, makes it quite interesting how the message that fast was in your face telling us has been adapted to still be a message about the United States. And just one element of that is if you watch the film, the first thing you see is Spartacus. We're told the back backstory of Spartacus and how he used to work in a quarry, a gigantic quarry. And you see him laboring in the quarry, and it's there that the head of the gladiatorial school comes, looks at his teeth and feels his muscles and decides he's a good one for the arena. But starting with the quarry and starting with him laboring there and starting with him resisting the control of his cruel masters is a touch, a touch of the communism at the beginning of the film. A touch of the we need to fight against the system.
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B
Having watched Spartacus again, you sense immediately, exactly as you say, that this scene in the quarry particularly is a sort of cri de queur against this appalling oppression. But as the film unfolds, I found myself increasingly confused as to what the politics of the film actually were. In other words, it seemed to lead. It seemed to. It didn't map on. It doesn't map on particularly clearly to any one position, as far as I could tell. I mean, there's a sort of moment where you want it to be coming at it relatively cold. You sort of want it to be a film about, you know, what will become the, you know, the civil rights movement. But it doesn't quite. It never quite lands. I mean, how did, how did this, what happened to the communist leaning novel to get it into a. To get it into the screenplay that we, that we see today?
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C
Can I, Can I add a writer question to that, which is how, how far was Fast involved in making the film? I mean, we say that the Kubrick film is based on this radical communist novel by Howard Fast, and he's a very controversial character. To what extent is he involved in the movie? Or are they just taking the book and then adjusting it to a Hollywood audience?
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D
Well, he actually has a mediator called Dalton Trumbo who was a famous scriptwriter in Hollywood, or had been, I should say, because he too had been associated with the Communist Party. He adapts the novel for screen. He actually, I suppose you could say, dilutes the communism a bit, but not enough for Kubrick or for Douglass. So, in fact, many of the things he suggested were not in the film. They wanted to spend Fast. Sorry. Trumbo wanted to spend much more time on the sheer number of years that Spartacus managed to resist the Roman armies. But if you see the film, you go very quickly from escaping from the Gladiatora school to being trapped in the foot of Italy. So it moves to tragedy quite fast. And that's partly to do with the input of the director, Kubrick, who didn't like the storyline that was coming his way. And Kirk Douglas also had another sort of more, shall we say, liberal vision of what to do with material. But it's Dalton Trumbo who writes a screenplay. And what makes that interesting. And for all the sort of watering down of the original story, what makes Douglass amazing was that he put the name of Howard Fast and he put the name of Dalton Trumbo right in the credits of the film. And these two people had been blacklisted in Hollywood. They had not been allowed to work, or at least not under their real names for some years now because of the institutional persecution of communists through an organization called the House of Un American Activities Committee. So Un American Activities is what was being investigated. And that leads us to. Back again to the politics of the film, that they were worried that their film about Spartacus might nonetheless seem an un American activity. So Douglas was being provocative.
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C
Was there any sense of that? I mean, we'll come on to talk a bit more about the quite hard to pin down politics of the movie. But were there people who still saw in this movie the very radical far left communist treatment that fast and then Trombo had given it? Were there people saying nasty communist film?
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D
Oh, yes. In fact, what's interesting is actually the focus of protest. And there were protests and demonstrations and campaigns that people do not go and see the film. It's a red film, they said, because that's how they used to talk about communism in those days. This is a red film. Don't go and see it. You know, it's. It's full of un American values. But the thing that concerned people most was that it was using a novel by a communist and using a screenwriter who had been blacklisted. So their main focus was really on the people behind the film rather than the film itself. And that's because, as you were saying, Charlotte, the film itself isn't quite going in the direction that the original novel was. And part of that's also to do with the interests of Kirk Douglas. Because Kirk Douglas, many years after this film, brought to the surface the fact that his father had come from Russia to the United States, that he had escaped persecution as a Jewish. His original name Was Isaac Denisovich. No, I'm getting that wrong.
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Definitely getting that wrong.
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D
But Kirk Douglass originally had a Russian name, which escapes me at the moment. And so he tells all this story in his biography and he says that one of the things that engaging with Spartacus was he said, these are my people. These are the people. Like the story of the Jews escaping from Egypt. It's a kind of Moses story. Let's get to the promised land. And of course, the more conservative audiences love that because then the United States can become the promised land instead of the place that needs to be radically overhauled that's full of oppression. You get this story that appears to be about a poor group of oppressed people, probably from Europe, trying to reach the promised land, that is the United States of democracy and freedom. And so there's this complete confusion of messages in the film.
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C
Almost a complete reversal. I mean, you start from the fast novel, which is to oversimplify, is seeing the slaves as the radical communist opponents of an exploitative America. When you get to the film, it's possible to, to process it. I think it's. It requires a bit of work at the edges, but it's possible to, to process it. It's completely the opposite. That Spartacus and co. Are freedom loving people who are what the United States is all about. And the oppressive Romans are the, the nasty communists.
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Right, who all have English accents, of course. Those, those awful, awful, awful colonial people from whom the Americans quite rightly disengage themselves.
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That's why you can get, you can, you can push the film to become about the greatness of America is because there's this tradition in epic filmmaking that the villains all have European, preferably British accents. But I do think the film is actually better than that. And I think that one of the respects in which it's better than that is about civil rights. Despite what you said earlier, Charlotte. Because I think the whole. There's this whole episode in the film about the gladiator, the black gladiator, Draba. We learn a little bit about his backstory. Not very much because he says, in fact, I must not tell you my story because I'm going to have to kill you in the arena. So we're all pulled apart from each other. We can't have solidarity. He becomes a really moving figure. He utterly resists the Romans. There's a tremendous cinematic scene in the film when he's having to fight. I was gonna say Kirk Douglas. He was having to fight Spartacus in a small arena for the entertainment of those cruel Nasty Romans. And when he is at the point of killing Spartacus and refuses to do so, he turns his javelin towards the Romans. And suddenly the camera is with the Romans in their box. And you see it coming at you, and it is really shocking. And it's about resistance to that kind of authority and abuse. And so subsequent to that scene, when you see Draba hanging upside down, having been hung in the graduatorial school as a punishment, it is absolutely about lynching. It is absolutely about the civil rights movement. And it's partly achieved through the fact that Woody Strode, who was cast as the Drobber figure, had appeared already in other films set in American times, in which he was abused as a black soldier in the American army and accused of rape when he was innocent. So he brings that American story into the film, and that makes this a story about American civil rights. So I think that's a really important feature.
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B
How fascinating.
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D
Before we get onto the I am Spartacus, which is another important feature, can
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B
I ask you a question about the sexuality of the film? Because there is a famous scene that I think was cut for the original release, but if you watch this film now, you can see this rather extraordinary scene in which Crassus tries to somehow seduce Spartacus using a very complicated set of metaphors to do with snails and oysters.
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D
It's a servant. Antoninus.
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B
Sorry, wrong character. But, I mean, what is going on with this sort of moment? Again, this is totally absent from the historical record. This is another example of one of the many examples where interpretation has rushed in to fill the void of the very sort of fragmentary and skeletal sort of historical knowledge we have. What is going on here in this sort of fascinating, Fascinating seduction attempted.
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D
You could say that it. Again, it relates to the United States not in terms of politics, but in terms of the attitudes to gender and sexuality in the late 1950s. In the sense that when Faust wrote his novel, you know, his communist novel about the need for equality and all the rest of it, one of the ways he made sure, from his perspective that the Romans seemed villainous was because they were all having sex with all. With all sexes. Right? So for him, that is a perversion. Absolutely, a perversion. It marks the Romans as disgusting and revolting, and you need to rebel against them. And that attitude, that homophobia, it actually moves quite smoothly into the film. So when you see the two characters, Crassus and Antoninus, together in the general's bathroom, it's presented to you as a scene of a perverse sort of sexual assault. Attempted sexual assault. And you have a little curtain so you can't see it too carefully. The music is quite grating. This is meant to be completely unpleasant. It's entirely to do with the time of the filmmaking. And what I think is also interesting about this film is that in decades later, that moment could be extracted, if you like, from the film and absolutely celebrated Is one of the first moments when Hollywood recognized that men might have desire for each other. And even though it's consensual in the film as bad, you can take it after them.
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B
It's the moment that makes Antoninus rebel, isn't it? It's the absolute. Enough is enough. And he gets out of there and joins Spartacus and the fellow rebels.
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D
Isn't it interesting that years later, Spartacus could be shown in a gay all nighter in the 1970s as an example of one of the first films that celebrates homosexuality? Cause it's on the screen, so you know it. So again, when we're thinking about what's Rome got to do with the United States, There are aspects in which Rome is reshaped precisely to fit in to American tastes of the late 1950s. And the same applies to the treatment of women. Cause Varinia starts out as quite a cool character. She's had sex with everybody. She's really in your face, quite assertive. And by the end of the film, she's this lovely, nice wife. Because that's the. What? That's the aspiration.
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B
That's Spartacus's partner and partner and eventual wife.
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D
Oh, sorry, yes.
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C
Yes.
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D
She's the love interest for Spartacus.
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C
Can we just go back to the moment we started from? Because, you know, the. The famous moment in the film, it's that you're the. The one that, you know, that gets into the parodies and everybody remembers is, I'm Spartacus. I'm Spartacus. And, you know, we said pretty casually, look, this is about the solidarity between the slaves. That they're not. That they have a common cause. Can we dig a bit deeper into that? Is that all there is going on there?
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D
No, I think it's a really interesting scene because you can pin it to a specific set of concerns in the time that the film was made. In that it becomes a protest against the interrogations that occurred. I remember I mentioned the House UN American Activities Committee. What they would do is get people before them and say, are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? And the interrogation was all about the requirement to say yes or no. I've been a member or to indicate other people who were members of the Communist party. So it was assault not just on an individual, but on an individual's friends and a sort of denial of the relationships between people. So, you know, a way you have to betray people. So the no I'm Spartacus within the context of the plot, it's a really nice sense that none of the slaves want, despite knowing they're going to be crucified, none of the slaves want to give Spartacus up because he has been so important to them. But on the sort of level of what does it mean in that time, it's about solidarity, sticking together in the face of persecution by the anti communist movement in the United States and subsequent. And you can see how well done that scene was because the no, I'm Spartacus has since spread out into the world as a meme in some trivial contexts, some not so trivial contexts where it's a recognition of the solidarity of a movement fighting against the system.
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C
I suppose just sum up a little bit. What I'm taking away from this is the sense that, look, it would be. It's a bit of a hiding to nothing to scrutinize this movie looking for a consistent and coherent modern political message in it. But on the other hand, that it would be impossible to see. It's to see where it's coming from or to see what it's saying. Unless you saw that as so often in the story of America, that here we've got Hollywood thinking about what it is to be American, what it is to look at the conflicts of the present day United States. They're looking at that through the eyes of Rome and also they're simultaneously looking at Rome through the eyes of the contemporary United States. And so, you know, one can't hammer this movie into a very crude set of equivalences. But you know, as soon as you start scratching the surface of particular scenes and particular lines, you're finding a reflection of. You're finding a reflection, sometimes a distortion. You're finding a reflection of Rome there.
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D
Could I just add, Mary, I think that's a really helpful sort of broader picture. But just to add that in this particular period in what was the Cold War, a sort of cultural fight between the United States and the Soviet Union, there was an expectation by government in the United States that Hollywood did its bit, that Hollywood was part of a sort of patriotic presentation of America values. So it's not just us who are sort of scraping at the film to see what its political content is. There was an expectation that Especially epics would offer nation building values. And what makes Spartacus interesting is it's not quite the values that the government might have wanted to be exposed.
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C
Hello lovely listeners. If you're not yet part of our Instant Classics Book club, well, now is the perfect time to join because we are making our way through one of the most exciting works of literature ever. That's Homer's Odyssey.
- [31:50]
B
We would love you to join our book club which we absolutely adore. So please do join now to give you all the access to our previous episodes and loads of other perks like being able to join our online community and getting early booking access to our live events.
- [32:10]
C
All details are on our website instantclassicspod.com
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B
we've talked all about Spartacus previously because it's just very obviously political in whatever way. But isn't Rome always political in the Hollywood, Maria? I mean it is a sort of. Rome becomes a kind of imaginary place and time in which modern America can kind of work out its own relationship to itself and the rest of the world in some ways. I mean, I kind of suppose I'm thinking here actually of that other great gladiatorial film, Gladiator. I suppose we should call it Gladiator 1 in the light of Gladiator 2. But this is also a very American film that seems to say quite a lot about America, but in an extremely different way, I'd say.
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D
No, absolutely. I mean, it's worth thinking that these big epic films that are sort of nation building and obviously not just one set in Rome, but Rome brings its own kind of political messages. These kinds of epic films about the ancient world had died out in the late 60s. Gladiator, Ridley Scott's film, is the return of the epic. And in returning the epic he also returns to the idea that cinema ought to have messages, timely messages about the state of the nation and the state of the world. So plenty of people now would look at Gladiator and say, what's its message about America? And again there it's quite interesting because it seems utterly different from the message that was in Spartico.
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C
You're going to have to help us here, Maria, because I'm going to. I'm playing dumbo. I've looked at Gladiator 1 and I've cried, you know, at the terrible sad ending and the wonderful wife. And when I was looking at it, let me be honest, the issues of modern America weren't the top of my mind. Right. What have I missed? What have I missed?
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D
I felt exactly the same way when I Went to see it in the cinema. Came out going, strength and honor. And by the way, is never given a name. Interesting, but okay. So a lot of the film. The film is about the idea of Rome. We've lost the great philosophical leader. The emperor Marcus Aurelius says there was an idea of Rome. It was a great idea. It was an idea of the unity of different nations. It was an idea of equality, etc. Etc. There was this idea, but we seem to be losing it. It seems to have gone. So the interpretation is that idea is also a sense that there was an idea of America. America used to be the great republic. New republic in the new world. America was a place of democracy and liberty. But somehow, at the turn of the millennium, it has been diminished. And what we need to do is to return to that idea of America. So how does that work out? Well, if you can take just the arena, given that it's a film about a gladiator, and you think that what you see is the development of the character of Maximus. He warns a general, he loses his position. He ends up humiliated. He has to fight in lots of combats. And he ends up finally in the Coliseum, fighting there. What are the values that are being shown there? Well, in the last combat, he takes over. He becomes the leader of the gladiators. He says things like, work together. Do you understand? Lock your shield, stay as one. And what's happened here is he's being presented as a really virile male, as a leader and as a military leader. It's all about the joys of army discipline and of having great leaders. In the film, there is quite the critique of the mob. The mob know nothing. The mob only love entertainment. There is no sense that the mob could actually form a new society. Oh, no, you need Maximus. So there is this sense that it's quite conservative, that it's sort of looking again for a new leader and all that stuff, which is absolutely beautiful. And that's what makes a film so, you know, so sad to me that it's relatively conservative. All those beautiful scenes where Maximus touches the surface of the cornfields, where he bends and he holds the earth in his hands and feels its texture when he longs to return to his farm. Well, us widows who think about the politics of this film, we think Cincinnatus. And you think, who, what?
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C
How?
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D
Well, Cincinnatus was this Roman general who led Rome with great virtue. When he had done his job to look after Rome, he retired back to his father. That is what a good politician should do. No dictatorial ambition. And George Washington was compared to Cincinnatus. Cincinnatus is, in a sense, the first Roman president of the United States. So Maximus is a return to the great values of America. This imagined America that was sort of rural, that had family values, that believed in honor. And this is a film made when Bill Clinton was in the White House. So in some respects, it's seen rather trivially as an attack on the corruption of Bill Clinton. But it isn't. It's really about just a nostalgia for an America. That was the kind of way of getting there is relatively conservative. There are ways.
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B
Is it naive of me to see something or overreach of me to see that Spartacus could be seen as about solidarity in one way or another and Gladiator in a very simplistic way about the individual?
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D
Well, that's it.
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C
That's it.
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D
It's not just the individual, Charlotte, it's the leader. We need to follow our leader, not be as one with them. No one says, I am Maximus in that film, do they? The whole point is he's better than the rest of us. But there are ways of seeing. I think Ridley Scott to do him justice is much more complex than that. And I think all the lyrical elements in the film, the sort of. The ways in which Maximus has a real sort of religious. You know, he has a spirituality. He dies almost like a Christ figure at the end. He sacrifices himself, you know, for the greater good. But there's also a sense of foreboding. You know, I think, you know, people used to criticize the film because it implied that the Republic was coming back. You know, that Maximus had done his job and everything was going to return to the past. But in a way, the whole point was everyone's supposed to know that doesn't happen. Rome is never going to be the Republic. It was. All you're going to get is another emperor. And maybe Ridley Scott wanted people to understand you can't go back. That isn't going to happen. Doesn't matter how good your Maximus is, you're going to have to think differently. So I think the film is a bit more sophisticated than it's being given credit for.
- [39:46]
C
I think that's really interesting and because in our episode on the Founding Fathers, we talked a bit about Cincinnati and. Yeah, and so it's kind of very nice sort of arc here because I'd never thought about it this way. But you're obviously absolutely right that what you've got, in a certain Sense, a year, 2000, return to some of those fantasies that the founding fathers themselves had about returning to the plough and the simplicity and the non kingship of early America. And it's a wonderful tie in with, as you're suggesting, with George Washington Cincinnatus. And you're absolutely right. I'm sure that Maximus is a sort of. He's a. Would be. He doesn't actually kind of quite get to go back to his plot of land and cultivate it, but he's a sort of. Would be Cincinnatus. I think that's, you know, that's absolutely.
- [40:56]
D
He would like to return if he could.
- [40:57]
C
Yeah, yes.
- [40:58]
B
Yeah. It's a really neat point. It's a really neat point. That's all he wanted all along, was to be able to plough his cause. The film opens with that already that sense of nostalgia and desire that it's just one last posting until he can go back to cultivating his beautiful fields again.
- [41:15]
D
Just to say that something quite prescient about the film because it's obviously concerned with this idea of empire and that you have to get that right. There could be, you know, there is such a thing as a bad empire and the subtext being we don't want America to be like that. What's prescient about it is that a few years later, after certain global events, there were a lot of books, a lot of public discourse in the United States and about the United States that said, has America become the new Roman Empire? So you might have a nostalgic vision that America could be the republic it was, but actually America is becoming the empire with all the possible downfall that that might imply. And so the film has been read since as sort of quite prescient about this idea of Republic empire. What is the place of America in the world? How can it retain some of its values of the past in a very different context?
- [42:19]
B
Gladiator 2 is not a film that I massively admire, I have to admit. But just picking up what you were just saying, Maria, it does at least send us very full frontal into an utterly corrupted Rome with an utterly corrupted emperor. I mean, what do you think of Gladiator 2 in relation to the sort of the politics that we've been discussing? Is there anything you can get out of it or is it a film that we might best forget?
- [42:51]
D
Well, I felt very Sad when Gladiator 2 came out because I was very moved by Gladiator, you know, in all sorts of ways because it's a very, very beefly made film. But Gladiator 2 is really a video game on a large screen. And there are all sorts of reasons why filmmaking has changed. Even from 2000, it's much more directed at a different kind of demographic films, you know, epic films. Now they're all about comic book heroes. Although those two might have something to say about the United States, but that's really not their main purpose. You know, if there's a message, it's only an attempt at a message to make it a little bit more interesting. But basically it's about, about fighting rhinos and sharks.
- [43:38]
C
I thought that, you know, I imagined our listeners tuning into this podcast and you know, thinking, there they are. They go in there seeing politics and everything there, you know, here's some, you know, happy bits of good old fantasy epic. And there's those three women who were saying it's all deeply political, you know. Well, I think that in our defense
- [44:03]
D
sense,
- [44:05]
C
I think we bring out Gladiator 2 because I think that anybody who really tries to see a sophisticated message, a complicated message of any sort in Gladiator 2, I mean, you know, maybe I'm prejudiced and maybe in 10 years time people will be unpicking it in a way that we've been unpicking Gladiator 1 and Spartacus. But I think sometimes, sometimes Rome works for America as precisely what we've been saying. A kind of culture that is good to think with that you can't ever, you can't ever separate Rome from the United States entirely. And sometimes that's true. Sometimes I'm afraid it is just beat em up, crude, slightly mindless stuff. And that's what I think Gladiator 2 is for me.
- [45:02]
B
Tell them what you really think, Mary.
- [45:05]
C
It's a bit of a downer way to end, you know.
- [45:08]
B
Yeah, well, you know, we've got to be honest. We've got to be honest on this show.
- [45:13]
C
Yes.
- [45:13]
B
And Maria, I want to say thank you so much for being our guest on this episode. And it's your second appearance and we have, we long to find an excuse to have you on again because it's just great fun to talk to. So illuminating. Thank you so much.
- [45:28]
C
Yeah, thanks, Maria. You know, you will be back, you know, would you,
- [45:35]
B
as ever, we want to know your thoughts and comments, ideas, questions and so if you have them, please do send them to us@instantclassicspodmail.com or on our social media at Instant Classics Pod. Bye.