It is no accident that in Gladiator, Maximus's first comeback bout is billed as an attempt to reach back to antiquity. The idea is to divert the Roman populace by recreating the battle of Carthage in the Colosseum with Russell Crowe (Maximus) and his crew playing the part of the to-be-slaughtered barbarians.
A spaghetti epic reaching back to the heyday of Hollywood antiquity, the film recreates a spectacle aiming to restage an actual historical event. The re-enactment does not go quite as planned. As one of Emperor Commodus's cronies remarks, the barbarians lost the battle of Carthage, but this time around the Imperial army is defeated by the disciplined resistance of Crowe's gladiators. In other words, the film not only advertises its restaging of history but dramatises the way such undertakings end up deviating from the historical record.
This is not the only way in which the film demonstrates its own internal uncertainties. As played by Joaquin Phoenix, Commodus is foppishly nasty, a ruthless but delicate flower. Merciless in his dealings with others, he is at the mercy of his own exquisite carnality, a victim of super-refined depravity. According to Edward Gibbon, however, "the labour of an attentive education had never been able to infuse into his rude and brutish mind the least tincture of learning". Gibbon goes on to point out that Commodus "was the first of the Roman Emperors totally devoid of taste for the pleasures of the understanding". Nero, by contrast, was a deranged aesthete whose famous last words - "What an artist dies in me!" - convey the extent to which his voluptuous cruelty was a species of intensely cultured dementia. Commodus was a forerunner of that now-familiar type of the lumpen aristocrat, a ruling-class lout with "a fond attachment to" the amusements of the populace: the sports of the circus and the amphitheatre, the combats of gladiators, and the hunting of wild beasts.
Having killed his father, Marcus Aurelius, and been crowned Emperor, Commodus aims to keep the populace sweet by serving up an immense gladiatorial orgy. Pandering to the mob's appetite for gory entertainment like this is seen as a betrayal of the high ideals, not only of his father but of Rome itself. Maximus wants to win his freedom, rid Rome of a tyrant, avenge himself on the killer of his wife and son, and restore democratic government by the Senate, to boot. To do this, he has not only to survive many battles as a gladiator but, more importantly, to "win the crowd". Even as he does so, he makes public his defiant contempt for the worthless spectacle in which he has been forced to participate.
Coincidentally, within days of the film's UK release, one of Crowe's colleagues, burly Nick Nolte, expressed similarly combative sentiments at the Cannes film festival. Defying the tyrannical emperors of Hollywood, Nolte declared that the "star system sucks. Hollywood has boiled itself down to four male leads - and they have to be in all the big movies. The major studios pick the star first with no thought for the material."
Uma Thurman drew blood too, deriding the anti-culture whereby movie actors are assigned roles that involve nothing more difficult than squeezing into a rubber Batman costume.
In the context of a film which contains a failed re-enactment, or allegory of an incident from the past, it is not too fanciful, then, to see Commodus as the head of a global cinematic empire, serving up for the untutored mob a high concept spectacle of chariot races and heart-stopping combat. (At one point Commodus actually sounds like he is quoting from a billboard for the movie, referring to Maximus as, "a general who became a slave, who became a gladiator, who challenged an Emperor". It is, he rightly concludes, "a good story".) Maximus opposes this with a vengeance, but can succeed in doing so only by winning over the "fickle" mob (I cannot remember a film in which the audience is referred to so consistently contemptuously).
He is, if you like, a virile representative the film's director, Ridley Scott, a Hollywood player who can only win his (creative) freedom by participating in high stakes games which depend on his liberty being restricted. Accordingly, Gladiator is, simultaneously, protest against the creative shackling imposed by the likes of Commodus on the likes of Scott and a pleb-pleasing epic of chariot crashes, explosions, battles and fights. At its worst it is a skilled, massively extended, antique prequel to Mad Max (Mel Gibson, apparently, was offered the part of the aptly named Maximus) with a few gouts of cod Latin sentimentus thrown in. The blood-hungry audience - or this member of it at any rate - endures these intermissions stoically, impatient for the next setpiece set-to.
The film's dual nature is never more apparent than in the gladiatorial duels themselves. Absorbing though they are, the action sequences have a quality of digital euphemism about them. As is so often the case with so-called violent films, the problem is that it's not nearly violent enough, virtually shirking the savagery it claims to depict. When it comes to fighting - more specifically, recovery from fighting - Hollywood has always taken the real Marcus Aurelius at his word: "Reject your sense of injury," he counsels in the Meditations, "and the injury itself disappears". Scott's vision of the gory, glory days of the Empire is entirely consistent with this tradition.
Don't get me wrong. Gladiator is undoubtedly a superior Hollywood product. That, precisely, is the point. But it still compares rather poorly with a bullfight, say. In Experience, Martin Amis recalls going to bullfights in Spain, in his teens, and watching in "a kind of brutalised vacancy". That's bad enough but it is preferable to the un-brutalised vacancy with which we, the mob of 2000 AD, have come to regard the unedifying spectacle of the cinema screen.