Are You Not Entertained?: Mapping the Gladiator Across Visual Media 9781350120075, 9781350120099, 9781350120068

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Are You Not Entertained?

Library of Gender and Popular Culture From Mad Men to gaming culture, performance art to steampunk fashion, the presentation and representation of gender continues to saturate popular media. This series seeks to explore the intersection of gender and popular culture, engaging with a variety of texts – drawn primarily from Art, Fashion, TV, Cinema, Cultural Studies and Media Studies – as a way of considering various models for understanding the complementary relationship between ‘gender identities’ and ‘popular culture’. By considering race, ethnicity, class and sexual identities across a range of cultural forms, each book in the series adopts a critical stance towards issues surrounding the development of gender identities and popular and mass cultural ‘products’.

For further information or enquiries, please contact the library series editors: Claire Nally: [email protected] Angela Smith: [email protected] Advisory Board:

Dr Kate Ames, Central Queensland University, Australia Prof Leslie Heywood, Binghampton University, USA Dr Michael Higgins, Strathclyde University, UK Prof Åsa Kroon, Örebro University, Sweden Dr Niall Richardson, Sussex University, UK Dr Jacki Willson, Central St Martins, University of Arts London, UK

Published and forthcoming titles: The Aesthetics of Camp: Post-Queer Gender and Popular Culture By Anna Malinowska

Love Wars: Television Romantic Comedy By Mary Irwin

Ageing Femininity on Screen: The Older Woman in Contemporary Cinema By Niall Richardson

Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema: Cyborgs, Troopers and Other Men of the Future By Marianne Kac-Vergne

All-American TV Crime Drama: Feminism and Identity Politics in Law and Order: Special Victims Unit By Sujata Moorti and Lisa Cuklanz

Moving to the Mainstream: Women On and Off Screen in Television and Film By Marianne Kac-Vergne and Julie Assouly (Eds)

Bad Girls, Dirty Bodies: Sex, Performance and Safe Femininity By Gemma Commane

Paradoxical Pleasures: Female Submission in Popular and Erotic Fiction By Anna Watz

Beyoncé: Celebrity Feminism in the Age of Social Media By Kirsty Fairclough-Isaacs

Positive Images: Gay Men and HIV/AIDS in the Culture of ‘Post-Crisis’ By Dion Kagan

Conflicting Masculinities: Men in Television Period Drama By Katherine Byrne, Julie Anne Taddeo and James Leggott (Eds)

Queer Horror Film and Television: Sexuality and Masculinity at the Margins By Darren Elliott-Smith

Fat on Film: Gender, Race and Body Size in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema By Barbara Plotz Fathers on Film: Paternity and Masculinity in 1990s Hollywood By Katie Barnett Film Bodies: Queer Feminist Encounters with Gender and Sexuality in Cinema By Katharina Lindner Gay Pornography: Representations of Sexuality and Masculinity By John Mercer Gender and Austerity in Popular Culture: Femininity, Masculinity and Recession in Film and Television By Helen Davies and Claire O’Callaghan (Eds) The Gendered Motorcycle: Representations in Society, Media and Popular Culture By Esperanza Miyake Gendering History on Screen: Women ­Filmmakers and Historical Films By Julia Erhart Girls Like This, Boys Like That: The Reproduction of Gender in Contemporary Youth Cultures By Victoria Cann The Gypsy Woman: Representations in ­Literature and Visual Culture By Jodie Matthews

Queer Sexualities in Early Film: Cinema and Male-Male Intimacy By Shane Brown Steampunk: Gender and the Neo-Victorian By Claire Nally Television Comedy and Femininity: Queering Gender By Rosie White Gender and Early television: Mapping Women’s Role in Emerging US and British Media, 1850–1950 By Sarah Arnold Tweenhood: Femininity and Celebrity in Tween Popular Culture By Melanie Kennedy Women Who Kill: Gender and Sexuality in Film and Series of the post-Feminist Era By David Roche and Cristelle Maury (Eds) Wonder Woman: Feminism, Culture and the Body By Joan Ormrod Young Women, Girls and Postfeminism in Contemporary British Film By Sarah Hill Bad Girls, Dirty Bodies: Sex, Performance and Safe Femininity By Gemma Commane Are You Not Entertained? Mapping The ­Gladiator Across Visual Media By Lindsay Steenberg

iv

Are You Not Entertained? Mapping the Gladiator Across Visual Media

Lindsay Steenberg

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Lindsay Steenberg, 2021 Lindsay Steenberg has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. xviii–xix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Charlotte Daniels Cover image: Russell Crowe as Maximus in Gladiator (2000) (© Mary Evans / AF Archive / Dreamworks) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-2007-5 ePDF: 978-1-3501-2006-8 eBook: 978-1-3501-2008-2 Series: Library of Gender and Popular Culture Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters

To Scott Thomson

viii

Contents

List of images xi List of figures xiv List of tables xv Series editors’ foreword xvi Acknowledgements xviii

Introduction Millennial masculinity and the gladiators of Y2K 1 ‘Are you not entertained?’

I A gladiatorial genealogy

II Genre play

61

‘Playthings of the crowd’

III The arena fight

95

‘Two men enter. One man leaves’

IV Nostalgia

31

‘My name is Gladiator’

133

‘Is Rome worth one good man’s life?’

V The gladiatorial burlesque

‘Do you like movies about gladiators?’

VI Celebrity

‘Win the crowd’

201

167

x

Conclusion

Contents

231

We were entertained Appendix 236 Notes 248 Bibliography 259 Filmography 271 Index 285

List of images

0.1 Are you not entertained?  2 0.2 I’m Spartacus!  12 0.3 and 0.4 Metacritic summaries for Fight Club and Gladiator  21 0.5 and 0.6 Rotten Tomatoes ratings for Fight Club and Gladiator  22 0.7 Word cloud generated from critical reception study of Gladiator  23 0.8 Jean-Louis Gérôme’s 1872 Pollice Verso  24 1.9 Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1859 Ave Caesar! Morituri te salutant  39 1.10 In For Honor, the player can choose and customise the gladiator from a selection of other iconic warrior types  45 1.11 Beyoncé dons the net and trident of the retiarius  47 1.12 The Dying Gaul or The Dying Gladiator  52 1.13 and The deaths of Spartacus: On television 1.14 and in Hermann Vogel’s (1882) Tod des Spartacus/The Death of Spartacus  55 1.15–1.23 A road map to the gladiatorial scenario, expressed through film titles  57 2.24 Poster for Gamer  62 2.25 The built body of the peplum strongman: Mark Forest in Colossus of the Arena  79

xii

2.26–2.29 3.30 3.31 3.32 3.33 3.34 3.35 3.36 3.37 3.38 3.39 3.40 3.41 3.42 3.43 3.44 3.45 4.46 4.47 4.48 4.49 4.50 4.51 4.52

List of Images

Men of blood and soil – Maximus in Gladiator and Kable in Gamer  90–91 Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum  99 After a Gladiator Fight During a Meal in Pompeii by Francesco Netti  103 Colossus of the Arena: Aerial shot  111 Barabbas: Tunnel  111 Colossus of the Arena: Bodies  111 Pompeii: Salute  111 Demetrius and the Gladiators: Thumbs up  111 Thor: Ragnarok: The crowd  112 Gamer: Villain  112 Conan the Barbarian: Wounding  112 Spartacus fights Theokoles  112 Seven Rebel Gladiators: Bonding  112 The Hunger Games: Death of sidekick  113 Messalina in Demetrius and the Gladiators  113 The death of Gannicus  113 Gladiator: Victory  113 He was a soldier of Rome. Honour him  134 The framing devices of Spartacus  140 Marcus in The Last Days of Pompeii (1935)  147 Glaucus in The Last Days of Pompeii (1959)  148 Lydon in The Last Days of Pompeii (1985)  148 Milo in Pompeii (2014)  148 A patina of filth coats the body of the post-millennial gladiator  150

List of Images

4.53 4.54 4.55 4.56 5.57 5.58 5.59 5.60 5.61 and 5.62 5.63 5.64 5.65 5.66 6.67 6.68 and 6.69 6.70

xiii

Steve Reeves in The Last Days of Pompeii  154 Kit Harington in Pompeii: ‘Seriously? It’s like you’re photoshopped’  156 The Last Day of Pompeii by Karl Bryullov  158 Poster for Pompeii  159 Gannicus’ burlesque entrance into Capua’s amphitheatre  169 Saxa fights Mira at the gladiator encampment  171 Two future gladiatrices perform a gladiator-themed exotic dance routine in Amazons and Gladiators  171 Vanzant performs a paso doble routine flavoured with martial arts moves  172 Naevia journeys from ‘lost woman’ to vengeful warrior  179 The Bachelor uses gladiatorial iconography to frame its romantic competition  185 Beyoncé, Britney Spears and Pink fight in the Roman amphitheatre  188 The competitors on America’s Next Top Model pose as gladiators  188 The cover art of Anna Hackett’s Gladiator  189 The gladiator has become a souvenir  206 The monstrous crowd in Spartacus and Gamer  215 The final image of Spartacus emphasizes his role as father  217

List of figures

0.1 1.2 2.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 3.10 4.11 4.12

The gladiator archetype resides in the nexus between ‘before’ and ‘after’  6 A timeline of key events in the history of gladiators  36 The gladiatorial filone  70 The amphitheatre’s network of gazes  102 Average screen time taken up with arena sequences  107 Density of fight sequences across films with different budgets  108 Death counts across gladiator films with different budgets, release dates and genre affiliation  109 Gladiator’s arena fight sequences  114 The violent density of Gladiator’s first Colosseum fight  118 The fight sequences of the three Arena films  130 The interrelated forces of classicism and nostalgia  142 Overlapping registers of the nostalgically produced body of the gladiator  151

List of tables

0.1 0.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 2.6 3.6 4.7 5.8

Gladiators of the past, present and future  5 The millennial box office  14 Classification of gladiator types  44 Consistent attributes of the gladiator archetype  49 Excerpt from Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, with annotation  53 The fight sequences in Gamer  88 Typical arena conventions  111 The eruption of Vesuvius on screen  161 Selection of films featuring historical female gladiators  180

Series editors’ foreword

As many of the books in this series show, gender is in a state of constant flux, with developing liberal attitudes often finding themselves at odds with resurgent traditional models of gendered behaviour. Masculinity is not immune from these shifts, yet traditional models of masculinity do have some potency beyond others. This is what Lindsay Steenberg’s book explores. This book’s title is taken from a dramatic sequence in Ridley Scott’s 2000 film, Gladiator, and is just one of the highly quotable and muchused phrases from this film. The film marked the resurgence of interest in ‘swords-and-sandals’ movies in the late 1990s. Steenberg’s book explores the character of the gladiator across texts that stretch back to the Golden Age of Hollywood, but include the reality TV shows in the Gladiator franchise and how these feed into computer gaming. As she shows, this masculine archetype is one that exists not just in depictions of Ancient Rome, but in post-apocalyptic films such as the Mad Max franchise, and the male fighter’s body in various twenty-first-century mainstream films. Her argument is that the figure of the archetypal gladiator is compellingly nostalgic, found in texts that deal with not only the classical world, but in texts that deal with contemporary society and those that seek to explore a post-apocalyptic future. The appeal of this sort of masculinity is one that appears at times of crisis in wider society, where the classicist and messianic gladiator is the hero we are all looking for. As such, this form of masculinity appears to be remarkably stable, but reappears at various times. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the perceived crisis in masculinity that Susan Faludi identified has led to various popular culture texts appearing that sought to reimagine the hero in the guise of the gladiator. Steenberg’s study of this archetype allows for a wider discussion of the social context of such

Series Editors’ Foreword

xvii

films, and is a suitable juxtaposing text to read alongside others in this series that explore sexuality in times of crisis, such as Shane Brown’s Queer Sexualities (2016) and Marianne Kac-Vergne’s Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema (2018). The different responses to times of crisis are fascinating to explore. What Steenberg offers is a survey of different films and popular culture texts that reference the archetypal gladiator form of masculinity, using the Ridley Scott film as a point of reference, and thus providing a more original approach to exploring gender in popular culture.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to many people for their help and patience as I completed this project. I would like to thank my colleagues at Oxford Brookes University, who make up a marvellous community of scholars – they have been sounding boards, guinea pigs and allies. Thanks to James Cateridge, Daniela Treveri Gennari, Govind Chandran, Warren Buckland, Alberto Mira, Paolo Russo, Paul Whitty, Francesco Sticchi, Maya Nedyalkova, Pete Turner, Catherine Foley, Paul Dibley and Leander Reeves. Through a Research Excellence Award at Oxford Brookes, and with the support of my colleagues, I was able to take the time and space to imagine and realize this ambitious project. Thanks to my faculty writing group at Oxford Brookes, who gathered on many an occasion to keep each other focused and honest – Barbara Eichner, Alessandra Palidda, Alexandra Wilson, Julia Wedell. I have delighted in learning about your research as you supported mine. Lisa Coulthard, Pete Boss, Pat O’Shea and James Cateridge read drafts and fragments of this manuscript and I’m thankful for their input, questions and fortitude. To Pete, I am especially grateful for an endless supply of gladiatorial, jousting and rodeo references. Thomas Rogerson was a valuable contributor to my arena fight analysis, painstakingly assembling information and references. Rose Bowler’s diligent and creative research assistance was crucial to my project and I could not have assembled such a vast database of all things gladiatorial without her help. She began this project with me; aiding me in learning and refining the sprawling network of methodologies and texts that were the basis for this volume. Thank you, Rose.

Acknowledgements

xix

To the CDMA dojo in Abingdon – I thank you for welcoming me to your gladiatorial ranks and answering all my outlandish martial arts questions with good humour and care. I would like to extend my gratitude for the love and support of my family over the years that I worked on this project. My wonderful children, Simone and Astrid, have been conditioned to respond with groans every time I utter the words, ‘and another interesting fact about gladiators …’. They good-naturedly posed as fighters in front of ruined amphitheatres on family holidays and helped me decide on the title of this book. To Scott Thomson: thank you for your patience and all your help. This book would not have happened without you.

xx

Introduction Millennial masculinity and the gladiators of Y2K

Are you not entertained? Is this not why you are here? GLADIATOR

The first rule of fight club is that we do not talk about fight club … FIGHT CLUB

Introduction The gladiators are waiting for their turn to fight. Disgraced General Maximus Decimus Meridius (Russell Crowe) stands to take his turn in the amphitheatre as the flanking fraternity of gladiators salute him. Over Maximus’s shoulder, we glimpse the arena’s sands and five helmeted and heavily armed warriors. As he enters the arena, the camera frames him in a low angle shot as rose petals rain down from the stands. There is no music as the stoic Maximus defeats each opponent in turn, using brutal but economic blows and slices. There is no glory in such a victory, as Maximus has been forced to compete in the blood sport of the arena as a slave to the Roman Empire he once served. Maximus now turns his attention to the crowd and the wealthy sponsor of the games. He hurls one of his weapons into the stands, where it clatters against an opulently set table. The crowd, who had been raucous and noisy, are now silent. ‘Are you not entertained?’ He accuses, ‘are you

2

Are You Not Entertained?

Image 0.1  Are you not entertained?

not entertained? Is this not why you are here?’ In a gesture of defiance, he throws down his remaining sword and spits on the sand. After a beat, the crowd erupts in cheers and begins chanting Maximus’s stagename, ‘Spaniard! Spaniard!’ This moment is now ubiquitous in an online landscape of memes and clips (see Image 0.1). It is a perfect distillation of the archetypal character of the nobly suffering gladiator; revealing the cultural impulses that underpin his stories and feed his audiences’ fascination, arguably beginning a process of critiquing such mechanisms. Western culture is captivated and endlessly entertained by gladiators like Maximus; and it is the main goal of this book to map and interrogate this fascination through the many re-tellings and adaptations of the gladiator’s story. While the character begins in Ancient Rome, he does not die with the Roman Empire but is effectively adapted to a variety of other settings. This is the main reason why I consider the gladiator as archetypal. Despite the fact that the gladiator can be so effectively translated to different times and places, his core characteristics remain surprisingly stable. Across his, and less often her, many iterations, the gladiator archetype can be defined as a skilled warrior forced to fight for the entertainment of a crowd.1 The gladiator character is an exceptionally mobile archetype of warrior masculinity. The gladiatorial scenario in which he or she appears

Introduction

3

functions as an equally itinerant syntactical unit. The gladiatorial scenario is simultaneously a narrative convention, a central spectacle, and an overarching theme in stories belonging to a variety of genres and modes of popular entertainment – from reality television programming (American Gladiators [SGC, 1989–1997], Bromans [ITV2, 2017]) to videogames (Mortal Kombat [1992], Assassin’s Creed: Origins [2017]) and, most salient to this study, to the cinema, where the gladiator is most visible (Spartacus [Kubrick, 1960], Gladiator). The gladiatorial scenario has a fluid relationship to genre, as will be unpacked in detail in Chapter II. It reveals the game-like qualities of the gladiator’s stories, as he moves to different arenas, fights ever more skilled opponents in a series of episodes that parallel videogame levels. Maximus must fight a series of other gladiators before facing his arch-enemy Emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) at the film’s conclusion. While the settings might shift (from the pre-modern to the post-apocalyptic, for example), the fundamental structure of the scenario remains the same – usefully, if superficially, summarized in the audience’s chant during the arena fight from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (Miller and Ogilvie, 1985): ‘Two men enter. One man leaves.’ This introduction takes the turn of the millennium, the moment known as Y2K, as a gateway to an analysis of the gladiator, with Gladiator as a focalizing text. I first establish the ‘before and after’ logic of gladiator stories, following this up by identifying the importance of duality and doubling and the static sense of time that belongs to those about to die; that is, to the gladiatorial fraternity of the morituri. The second half of this introduction juxtaposes Gladiator with a contemporary adaptation of the gladiatorial scenario, Fight Club (Fincher, 1999). Through Gladiator I can map the cinematic and gladiatorial past, with its invocation of a digitally realized classicism, nostalgic celebration of the male fighter’s body and traditions of historically set genres, particularly those from mid-century Italy and Hollywood. Through Fight Club I map the ways the cinematic present imagines the gladiator as equally nostalgic and infused with post-apocalyptic despair. To consider Fight Club as a gladiator film is to open up the definition of the category to include the many important adaptations of the gladiatorial scenario in the present and the post-apocalyptic future. Thus, this introduction concludes with an analysis of the cinematic landscape of Y2K and reception studies of Gladiator and Fight Club. The former as a film that takes place in the

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Are You Not Entertained?

past and dramatizes the world of ‘before’ and the later imagining an apocalyptic present that dreams of the fallen world of ‘after’. The turn of the millennium represents the centre point between ‘before’ and ‘after’.

Before and after This project charts a web or network of gladiator scenarios and archetypes tracing backwards towards an idealized vision of antiquity and forwards to a future marked by dystopic violence. The Roman gladiator suggests a world before industrial modernity, in which male virtue can be celebrated and gloriously displayed; while the apocalyptic (and post-apocalyptic) gladiator insists that those virtues are not only relevant but absolutely necessary for the survival of humanity. The gladiator of the present day performs in underground fight rings, secret marital arts tournaments and illegal television gameshows. These dark arenas provide a stage for the reluctant fighter to embody the chivalrous qualities and skills of past warriors. Simultaneously, his struggles in the dark arenas of the present pre-figure a lawless postapocalyptic future. I argue that there is a fundamental tension in gladiator stories that is dramatized through ritualized patterns of ‘before and after’. I graft my exploration onto this pattern, tracing the gladiatorial impulse backwards (with films such as Gladiator, Spartacus, Seven Rebel Gladiators/Sette contro tutti [Lupo, 1965] and The Arena [Carver, 1974]), into the present day (with films such as Arena [Loop 2011], Fight Club, and Forced to Fight [Quastel, 2011]) and forwards towards the post-apocalyptic future (via films such as The New Gladiators/I guerrieri dell’anno 2072 [Fulci, 1984], The Running Man [Glaser, 1987] and The Hunger Games [Ross, 2012]). Table 0.1 provides a cross section of illustrative examples of the gladiator of the past, present and future in visual media. The figure of the archetypal gladiator embodies a potent form of nostalgia; a nostalgia that couples ideals of a lost prelapsarian authenticity with an apocalyptic drive. It is a nostalgia imbued with a celebration of a classicist and messianic masculine ideal. Gladiator stories map out the rediscovery of historicised authenticity in the face of a civilization in crisis – whether that civilization is in the past, present or future.

Introduction

5

Table 0.1  Gladiators of the past, present and future PAST

PRESENT

FUTURE

Demetrius and the Gladiators (Daves, 1954)

Gladiators (1992–2000 and 2008–2009)

Star Trek (1966–1969) 02x25 ‘Bread and Circuses’

Spartacus (Kubrick, 1960)

Gladiator Cop (Rotundo, 1995)

Endgame/Bronx lotta finale (D’Amato, 1983)

Seven Rebel Gladiators/ No Exit/Fatal Combat (Lee, 1995) Gladiators 7/Sette contro tutti (Lupo, 1965)

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (Miller and Ogilvie, 1985)

Thor and the Amazon Women/Le gladiatrici (Leonviola, 1963)

Fight Club (Fincher, 1999)

The New Gladiators/I guerrieri dell’anno 2072 (Fulci, 1984)

The Arena (Carver, 1974)

Blood and Bone (Ramsey, 2009)

The Running Man (Glaser, 1987)

Conan the Barbarian (Milius, 1982)

Deadliest Warrior (Spike TV, 2009–2011)

Arena (Manoogian, 1989)

Gladiator (Scott, 2000)

Arena (Loop, 2011)

Death Race (Anderson, 2008) and Death Race 2000 (Bartel, 1975)

Spartacus (Starz, 2010–2013)

Forced to Fight (Quastel, 2011)

Gamer (Neveldine and Taylor, 2009)

Pompeii (Anderson, 2014)

Female Fight Club (Ferrer, 2017)

Tekken (Little, 2010)

The Legend of Hercules (Harlin, 2014)

Thor: Ragnarok (Waititi, 2017)

The Hunger Games (Ross, 2012)

GLOW (Netflix, 2017– present)

Bromans (ITV2, 2017)

Real Steel (Levy, 2011)

The time of the morituri Fictional gladiators, like Maximus and his precursors in Hollywood epics or Italian peplum films, exist in what Robert A. Rushing calls ‘dead, nearly static cinematic time’ (2016a, p. 49). It is a time and place, I argue, that

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Are You Not Entertained?

Figure 0.1  The gladiator archetype resides in the nexus between ‘before’ and ‘after’

is both ‘before’ and ‘after’ (see Figure 0.1). This is best exemplified by the resonant, if historically inaccurate, gladiator salute: nos morituri te salutamus – we who are about to die salute you. This salute, uttered by the doomed gladiator before facing his opponent in the amphitheatre, has become a key moment in the mythological gladiator’s story despite the fact that there is little evidence to suggest it was a ritual belonging to the Roman gladiatorial games.2 The onscreen gladiator, however, continuously inhabits the frozen ‘time of the morituri’ – of those about to die. While Rushing argues that ‘[s]lowed time and stopped time are a part of the [sword and sandal/peplum] genre’ (2016a, pp. 34–6), I would insist on the gladiatorial specificity of such a label that extends beyond the mythohistorical settings of the sword and sandal or Italian peplum genres. The time of the morituri is frozen at the moment just before violence; however, it has embedded within it the velocity of ‘before and after’ so central to the gladiatorial archetype.

Introduction

7

Rushing describes the static image as a moment of stress just before the kinetic explosion of action, for example, when the strongman in an Italian peplum lifts a heavy object or strains to break his chains. He suggests that such moments reveal a larger generic structure ‘that seesaws between masochistic moments (the hero is imprisoned, trapped between spikes or tied up) and sadistic moments (he bursts free, beats up the guards or lifts a man in the air and throws him away)’ (2016a, p. 43). My conceptualization here builds directly on Rushing’s thoughtprovoking notion of morituri time in his consideration of Zach Snyder’s 300 (2007). He analyses the film as an example wherein the same frame can contain both the static time of the pose and the kinetic movement of violent action through the use of rhythmic ramping – shot with a high-speed camera that could vary its speed smoothly. Thus, the scene ‘oscillates rhythmically between slow motion and ultra-slow motion’ (Rushing, 2016a, p. 56). Many post-300 sword and sandal films, and those in the action genre more widely, use some version of this technique; although generally more sparingly – for example, the television series Spartacus, which uses 300 as its key visual reference point. Where Rushing’s morituri time belongs to the peplum as a genre, I wish to sharpen a definition that is specific to the gladiator as a character type (or, rather, an archetype) and to the gladiatorial scenario. Rushing’s seesaw is one illustrative moment of the ‘before and after’ structure of gladiator fictions. It is the intersection point between time and violence, not only in the uncanny sense that others have so usefully theorized regarding the cinema and photography, for example Mary Ann Doane (2002) and Roland Barthes (2000). Rather, morituri time is both frozen in uncanniness and action oriented or, as Rushing insists, sadistic. The violent time of the morituri describes the gladiator’s capacity for, and training in, violence as well as its execution and threat. Millennial gladiators, from Maximus in Gladiator to Milo (Kit Harington) in Pompeii, have trained to be violent, have acted violently, are prepared and determined to do violence. The eternal present of the gladiator is one that is ruled and framed by self-annihilating violence (he is one of the morituri; always already about to die) that draws from his past experiences (‘before’) and his doomed future intentions (‘after’). Fundamentally, violence changes the way that time works onscreen. The progression of time is complicated in scenarios threaded

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Are You Not Entertained?

through with time-obscuring forces such as nostalgia, classicism, gameplay, eroticism and hyperrealism. These forces are inscribed on the gladiatorial body. In his sculptural poses he strains against the weight of morituri time, which is eventually unleashed by the explosion of the violent act. This is clear in the plot structure of Pompeii, in which the gladiator hero Milo battles under the shadow of Vesuvius, whose eruption the audience knows is imminent. Pompeii, 300, Gladiator and Spartacus belong to (post-)millennial historical epics that Robert Burgoyne (2010) argues are examples of ‘what Mikhail Bakhtin calls ‘double-voicing’ – the adaptation of an older genre to a new context – revising themes and motifs customarily associated with narratives of nation in order to provide a narrative form that is transnational and postnational in its appeal’ (Burgoyne, 2010, p. 83). For a fiction like TV’s Spartacus or Gladiator, the double-voicing of genre reorientation (‘before and after’) exists within a framework bound by ‘the double logic of remediation’ an influential concept proposed by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin. They define remediation as part of a cultural desire ‘both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation’ (1999, p. 5). Thus, Gladiator doubles and layers its genre and its media reference points. For example, it oscillates between the analogue grandeur of the Hollywood roadshow epics of the 1950s–1960s (The Fall of the Roman Empire [Mann, 1965], Spartacus) and the digital augmentation of its ancient spaces (the capricious Roman mob in the Colosseum). The image of Gladiator’s digital crowd aims, via a reanimation of Anthony Mann’s film and others like it, to erase traces of its adaptive process and offer the viewers a raw experience of the cheering crowds of Rome. The gladiator’s ‘before and after’ is bound by these double logics and multiple voices, as well as by the cinematic/televisual/ludic frame that can simultaneously present the static and kinetic time of the morituri.

Duality and doubling The Mobius strip of ‘before and after’ that is imprinted on the body of the gladiator also informs (and is informed by) the many dualities conjured by the character. As a figure that is born, and made popular, in Ancient Rome the gladiator exhibits many dualities – he is admired as

Introduction

9

the embodiment of martial masculine virtue, while socially marginalized. He resonates with the creation myth of Rome itself, which is told through the story of twin brothers Romulus and Remus (abandoned as babies, suckled by a wolf and raised by a shepherd) who grow up to establish the city of Rome. As celebrity classicist Mary Beard highlights (2016), Remus is a peculiar addition to Rome’s creation myth, because he is murdered by his twin before the city’s foundation. He is merely a ghost, suggesting the duality and fratricidal violence of Rome from its beginnings. The peculiar doubled story of Romulus and Remus also invokes Janus, the two-faced Roman god of doorways and transitions, looking to past and future as a literalization of the ‘before and after’ pattern. The duality of the gods and the creation myths of Rome are embedded in the narrative structures of many gladiator films, through their numerous flashback sequences and in particular via their use of doubling. Lost virtuous wives (e.g. Maximus’ unnamed wife [Giannina Facio]) are doubled with redeemed seductresses/fallen women (e.g. the much more savvy Lucilla [Connie Nielsen]), fathers are doubled with their sons (e.g. flamboyant Commodus as the dark double of stoic Marcus Aurelius [Richard Harris]), while in post-apocalyptic or fantasy gladiator stories players are doubled with their avatars (as in Gamer and Real Steel). The most notable doubling is that of the unnamed narrator (Edward Norton) in Fight Club with Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), the hypermasculine projection of his most violent libertarian desires. Doubling also structures the gladiator’s story through repetitions; for example, the arena fight sequence is strikingly similar across many fictions. The ‘after’ often leads back to ‘before’, as Maximus is pictured joining his wife and son in the afterlife at the close of Gladiator. In her discussion of Raging Bull (Scorsese, 1980) and the boxing film, Pam Cook points out that the boxer’s story, itself a variation of the gladiatorial scenario, closely follows a tragic rise-and-fall structure that is doubled with the Oedipal trajectory of its male fighter hero, wherein ‘masculinity is put into crises so that we can mourn its loss’ (1982, p. 40) and enjoy his visceral suffering. Leger Grindon (1996) also emphasizes the almost unmoveable and mythical structure of the boxer’s story (rise and fall; before and after; victory, defeat, victory, defeat). The narrator of Fight Club destroys Tyler at the end of the film, but with serious injury and without stopping the larger act of terrorism that he and/as

10

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Tyler have orchestrated. While the film’s final image is of ‘Jack’ and Marla holding hands while watching high rises explode, the audience is unlikely to read this as a happy ending, but as an instance of selfimmolating respite. Unlike ‘Jack’ and Maximus, the gladiator hero of Gamer escapes his imprisonment, but his violent skills and celebrity indicate that he will not be allowed to escape into pastoral fatherhood. Like Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) in his many sequels, these gladiators are predestined to continue fighting for our entertainment. In the uncanny time of the morituri, ruled by the logic of ‘before and after’ and the cinematic impulse of the sequel, violence is tragically cyclical and inescapable.3

Millennial case studies: Fight Club and Gladiator The turn of the millennium marked the release of two notable films about fighters, which can be read as doubles of one another. Both told stories of doomed men violently resisting oppressive regimes using their skill at hand-to-hand combat. Both protagonists are surrounded by other men who worship them with cult-like intensity and both are desired by the women they treat with aggressive indifference. Both films’ thematic cores are maelstroms of anxious masculinity writ through fatherhood, nostalgia, homosocial bonding and revenge fantasies. Both offer violence as the only solution to such anxieties. The first film tells the story of a man who loses his possessions and his identity and in doing so discovers a primal version of himself as a fighter. The second tells the story of a soldier forced to fight against his will who uses his celebrity status to survive and take revenge on those who killed his family. The first film is David Fincher’s Fight Club and the second is Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. These are gladiator stories, which tap into an existing thread of genre films dating from the advent of cinema and infuse them with millennial anxiety and melodrama on an epic scale – from the anarchic terrorism that tumbles skyscrapers to the digital reanimation of the Colosseum. The fact that the films charted the journeys of fighters redeemed and destroyed through violence is certainly not enough to distinguish

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11

them from other millennial films, many of which told the stories of boxers, soldiers, spies and combat athletes. What made these films most memorable to audiences, contemporary critics and to academic scholarship was their damaged men, visceral violence and stylistic innovations (particularly their use of digital technologies). Many suggested that these elements were responses to a crisis in masculinity born from the hyper-capitalist and postfeminist media culture of the late nineties. I have begun my study of the gladiator with the rejection of the edict not to talk about Fight Club. In doing so, this volume echoes the ritualized refusals that provide narrative scaffolding for so many millennial gladiator stories. These stories are marked by moments of crisis in which men fight the oppressive situations and regimes to which they find themselves bound as slaves, either literal (as in Gladiator) or metaphorical (as in Fight Club). These moments of refusal are underpinned by an understanding of their futility. Tyler Durden tells his men not to talk about Fight Club (they do) just as other gladiators, from Maximus to Spartacus, make declarations such as: I won’t fight (he will); I’m not your slave (he is); nothing will keep me from returning home (he will never return); don’t hurt my family (they will/have). Maximus’s memorable insult to the arena crowd is framed as a negative, or in litotic terms: are you not entertained? (they are, just as we are). Likewise, Commodus describes himself in similar litotic language, ‘Am I not merciful?’ (he is not). Because they are a priori impossible, these refusals become a ritual way of insisting on the integrity of the gladiator character (i.e. here he proves that he does not want to fight) and on erasing his identity in order to rebuild and reaffirm it later. Martin Fradley suggests that melodramatic millennial heroes like Maximus enact a ‘mythic ritualised and recuperative strategy based on the double-bind of disavowal: the hero knows he will get his ball(s) back, but chooses to believe, albeit briefly, that the lost object is irretrievable’ (2004, p. 239). The redemption of the gladiator is similarly ritualized through melodramatic moments of unmasking and renaming. One of the most iconic examples is the moment of solidarity in which the captured slave army stands up and insists, ‘I’m Spartacus!’ in Stanley Kubrick’s eponymous 1960 film (see Image 0.2).

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Image 0.2  Spartacus’ army refuses to let him unmask himself and all claim, ‘I’m Spartacus!’

After insisting that his name is merely ‘Gladiator’, the enslaved Maximus unmasks himself to his enemy, the Emperor Commodus, revealing his true name and purpose, My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, commander of the armies of the north, general of the Felix Legions, loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius; father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife; and I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next. This play between crisis, refusal, anonymity and revelation also plays out throughout Fight Club with the unidentified protagonist’s frequent selfnamings: ‘I am Jack’s smirking revenge’, ‘I am Jack’s inflamed sense of rejection’, as well as the ascension of Bob (Meat Loaf) from fighter to martyr through a repeated chant that names him, ‘His name was Robert Paulson …’. Similarly, Milo in Pompeii refuses to let his fellow gladiators know his name, ‘What we have to do is kill each other at some point, so my name is my own.’ He finally reveals his name when he offers his friendship to fellow gladiator Atticus (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje). This pattern of doomed refusal, unmasking and generic renaming is key to understanding the way the post-millennial version of gladiator archetype works. Haunted by trauma, infused with melodrama, the post-millennial

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gladiator is simultaneously redeemed and destroyed through his skills and capacity for violence. The gladiator functions in archetypal terms across a variety of visual media, simultaneously embodying both the best of what a man might be and the worst a society produces. He is both victim and predator – somehow both ideal and toxic masculinity. He signals and survives apocalyptic forces and corrupt empires – in their allegorical and literal forms. His body and his violence are loaded with erotic and nostalgic charges. As a ubiquitous figure in Western popular visual culture, the gladiator is both seductively simple and puzzlingly nuanced.

Y2K and the technological apocalypse that never was It is at the turn of the millennium that the anxieties around postfeminist masculinity (registered by figures such as Maximus) fused with nostalgic anxieties around technology. The threatened mastery of the postfeminist man (both embodied and technological) was anxiously discussed in popular discourse. While the presumed crisis of masculinity had been publicly simmering for some time, the technological anxieties associated with Y2K were new. Predictions circulated that, through an error in programming, the world’s computers would be unable to handle the moment when their internal clocks switched over on the last day of December 1999. The consequences, when these internal clocks reset themselves to 1 January 1900, were to be total technological meltdown. A culture that had come increasingly to rely on new technologies and media would face a kind of apocalypse, returning to a pre-digital age. Countries spent billions on programmes to safeguard their systems from the millennium or Y2K bug. Such spending that was criticized, particularly by those looking at the expenditure in the developing world.4 There was an almost palpable sense of disappointment when the apocalypse failed to manifest on 1 January 2000. The turnover, however, marked the time when Y2K preparedness plans transformed into a global urban legend of a techno-reliant culture in ‘duck and cover’ mode in the face a digital Armageddon. Speculative fictions such as Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange

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Days (1995) associated a sinister technological threat with the turn of the millennium. This techno-anxiety goes some way to explaining why The Matrix (Wachowski and Wachowski, 1999) did so well at the box office, offering a messianic figure, Neo (Keanu Reeves), who exploited and fought the digital oppression of the new world order. It also suggests that the historically set stories released at the millennium, such as Gladiator, Tarzan (Buck and Lima, 1999) and The Mummy (Sommers, 1999), function as types of disappointed but wistful technological retreatism. Arguably, we might read two types of reactions to the Y2K legend: Tyler’s nihilism and Maximus’ nostalgia. Y2K at the box office reveals an equal and entangled obsession with masculinity, technology and their glorious failures. This is the media landscape against which Fight Club and Gladiator emerge as millennial gladiators. Table 0.2 shows the highest grossing films of 1999 and 2000 at the domestic box office.5

Table 0.2  The millennial box office Highest grossing films of 1999

Highest grossing films of 2000

1. Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (Lucas)

1. How the Grinch Stole Christmas (Howard)

2. The Sixth Sense (Shyamalan)

2. Cast Away (Zemeckis)

3. Toy Story 2 (Lasseter, Brannon, Unkrich)

3. Mission: Impossible II (Woo)

4. A  ustin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (Roach)

4. Gladiator (Scott)

5. T  he Matrix (Wachowski and Wachowski)

5. What Women Want (Meyers)

6. Tarzan (Buck and Lima)

6. The Perfect Storm (Petersen)

7. Big Daddy (Dugan)

7. Meet the Parents (Roach)

8. The Mummy (Sommers)

8. X-Men (Singer)

9. Runaway Bride (Marshall)

9. Scary Movie (Wayans)

10. The Blair Witch Project (Myrick and Sánchez)

10. What Lies Beneath (Zemeckis)

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What this snapshot reveals, particularly when placed in the context of all films that were theatrically released in the UK and the US in that time period,6 is a picture of a deep anxiety dovetailing with a powerful nostalgia. Films such as The Mummy, Tarzan, Mission: Impossible II and the first Star Wars prequel (Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace) are clear examples of nostalgic reimaginings of long-standing cinematic (and televisual) brands. These are clearly what Frederic Jameson (1998, pp. 7–10) would consider nostalgia films, made in la mode rétro, in their settings, subject matter and aesthetic stylization, and in their evocation of a lost moment of cinema. Both Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and Scary Movie are affectionate parodies of cinematic genres, while Toy Story 2 is the second instalment of Pixar’s popular family franchise. The same fertile cultural ground that helps these nostalgia films flourish provides the perfect environment for the bittersweet nostalgia of the gladiator’s heroism. It is likewise clear that at the turn of the millennium the ‘chick flick’ was still a vibrant genre, as was its action variation, with films such as Charlie’s Angels (McG, 2000), Miss Congeniality (Petrie, 2000) and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (West, 2001). The latter film also represents another visible, although less successful, genre/mode (in box office and critical terms) – the videogame adaptation. Films such as Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (Sakaguchi and Sakakibara, 2001), Wing Commander (Roberts, 1999) and Pokemon: The First Movie (Haigney and Yuyuama, 1999) appeared in theatres.7 Pokemon, a film that relies on a central conceit of gladiatorial combat, outshone Fight Club at the 1999 box office, taking number 25 to Fight Club’s 54. The commonplace nature of the videogame aesthetics and structure of these films likewise conditions audiences and filmmakers to accept the ludic elements of the gladiatorial scenario, of which these kinds of films provide a postmodern update and interpretation. Arguably the most significant pattern to emerge in the cinema of Y2K is that of entanglement between threatened masculinity and nostalgia. This combination produces adaptations, reboots and prequels and creates digital fantasy worlds, either in the historical past (Ancient Rome, Ancient Egypt), outer space (Star Wars) or inside a simulation (The  Matrix) where men can, often literally, fight these existential anxieties. For example, the millennial box office celebrates the doomed working-class heroism of the men of The Perfect Storm

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and the absurdity of the sensitive ‘New Man’s’ abject humiliation when faced with Robert De Niro’s hypermasculine action man in Meet the Parents. Fatherhood and generational issues are key to Greg Focker’s (Ben Stiller) struggles and feature prominently in the narratives and characterizations of X-Men, The Sixth Sense, Big Daddy and Gladiator. Taking this masculine anxiety beyond the high box office performers, boxing films, with their ritualized stories of a (usually working class) underdog’s rise and fall, were still a fixture of American cinema at the turn of the millennium; for example: The Hurricane (Jewison, 1999), Play it to the Bone (Shelton, 1999), the documentary On the Ropes (Burstein and Morgen, 1999) and Ali (Mann, 2001). The boxing genre was also being used as a vehicle to tell women’s stories, as in Karyn Kusama’s Girlfight.8 Skilled fighters appeared as police officers (Rush Hour 2 [Ratner, 2001], Training Day [Fuqua, 2001]); warriors or knights (Black Knight [Junger, 2001], A Knight’s Tale [Helgeland, 2001], Shrek [Adamson and Jenson, 2001] and less specifically Highlander: Endgame, 13th Warrior [McTiernan and Crichton, 1999] and The Musketeer [Hyams, 2001]); and martial artists (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon [Lee, 2000], The One [Wong, 2001]). Y2K anxieties over the personal costs/benefits of interpersonal violence are not limited to male characters, as female fighters are visible in mainstream genres. Like their male counterparts, these female fighters likewise fight with/about/ for their fathers (Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Girlfight). Millennial gladiators like Tyler and Maximus appear against (and emerge from) this cinematic backdrop informed by a collective Y2K techno-anxiety, sense of male crisis and intertwined mythologies and urban legends. What follows is a brief critical reception study of Gladiator and Fight Club based on contemporary reviews in broadsheet media, aimed at giving further depth of analysis to the previous snapshot of fighters and masculine instability at the millennium.9 The millennial gladiator inhabited this cinematic moment, alongside an established mediascape of: ●●

●●

fighting videogame franchises, such as Street Fighter (1987– 2016), Mortal Kombat (1992–2015), Tekken (1994–2015), Pokemon (1996–2016) and Tomb Raider (1996–2018); television programmes such as Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (Universal Television, 1995–1999) and Xena: Warrior Princess (Universal Television, 1995–2001);

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●● ●●

17

combat-based sports, such as boxing and the Ultimate Fighting Championship; and sports entertainment such as World Wrestling Federation/World Wrestling Experience; reality-based programming such as American Gladiators; and fitness programmes such as cardio kickboxing and Tae Bo.

The media culture of Y2K insisted that fighting was as empowering as it was entertaining. Fight Club and Gladiator are both exceptional and representative. They are films that garnered considerable attention for their visual innovation and deeply troubled heroes. However, they were born of a moment in which such innovation and heroism were not outliers, but an entrenched part of the media environment. Thus, a reception study reveals what is unusual about the two films, what is typical about them and how these two qualities are related.

Fight Club Fight Club was released by Fox on 15 October 1999 across 1,963 US (and Canadian) theatres to fill the number one spot during its opening weekend, which brought in USD 11,036,584, alongside films such as David Lynch’s The Straight Story (1999) and the millennial action vehicle The Omega Code (Marcarelli, 1999).10 After its opening weekend, the film continued with a relatively respectable – 42.6 per cent drop in its second weekend and, as of the time of writing, maintains a worldwide lifetime gross of over USD 100 million (USD 100,853,753)11 that recouped the picture’s reported production budget of USD 65 million,12 with 36.7 per cent of its running total (USD 37,030,102) earned domestically. These figures are not enough to earn the film a place in the top ten of that year’s box office (see Table 0.2). An analysis of the language used in a selection of contemporary reviews of Fight Club offers a striking view of the critics’ main preoccupations – among them violence and the nature of men and masculinity.13 In their consideration of Fight Club’s violence, broadsheet critics spent more time talking about how the film was likely to generate controversy than flagging it up as truly controversial. Charges of fascism were levelled against the film at its release in the Venice film festival and a connection made with recent American gun violence in Colorado (Koltnow, 1999). Generally, violence was used to explain the film’s

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rating (R/18) and to draw attention to the film’s aesthetic innovation. One critic flagged up the film’s ‘jarring visuals, intense physical violence, anarchic attitude, threatened male hysteria’ (Strauss, 1999) and continued to describe the director’s approach: ‘Deploying a multitude of state-of-the-art film techniques like only someone who used to make commercials for a living could, Fincher plunges us right into the fevered brain of an unnamed, unreliable Narrator. Literally.’ Other critics connected its violence to earlier controversial films (‘adrenalized rush a la A Clockwork Orange’ [Groen, 1999]), while some gave short shrift to the way it justifies such violent spectacles – dismissing its ‘carnival of violence and the numbskull philosophy that drives it …’ (Garcia, 1999). Many interviews with the film’s director and stars emphasize that Fight Club is meant to be taken as a metaphor (the word is mentioned seventeen times in the sample taken) and that violence is the primary language of such a device. According to most of the critical reviews, this metaphor and any of the other framings used to justify the film’s violence (e.g. the ‘numbskull philosophy’ mentioned earlier), circulate around the film’s central concern: the threatened and anxious nature of contemporary masculinity. This concern is not subtext, nor is it only thematic. Rather, it is built into the characters, dialogue and narrative of the film. One critic reports, ‘The bare-knuckle crunch of fist on bone and soft tissue gives them purpose and self. It gives them, in an obscenely stupid redefinition that’s nevertheless easy to grasp, their “manhood” back’ (Simon, 1999). Here again violence is coupled with commentary on the film’s formal features (in this case sound – ‘bare-knuckle crunch of fist on bone and soft tissue’). It is with the so-called crisis of masculinity that the film Fight Club is most associated, in its critical reception and in a large bulk of its academic analysis. One critic labels the film ‘Iron John for the Gen-X crowd’ (Groen, 1999) while many others position the film (as it positions itself through Tyler’s many monologues) in a context where men are going soft. They are ‘frustrated with their lives’ (Weinraub, 1999) and ‘unable to prove themselves as men’ (Koltnow, 1999) perhaps because ‘men have forgotten how to be men’ (Strickler, 1999). Such a crisis is managed in generational terms (‘The new sense of emasculation is not an attempt to challenge or compete with feminist thinking, but rather a deeply-rooted anxiety about men failing to be masters of their own destiny as their fathers or grandfathers were’ [Gumbel, 1999]) and with a

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nostalgic lens that often both blames and marginalizes women (‘we are a generation of men raised by women’, bemoans Tyler). Andrew Gumbel in the Independent on Sunday (1999) entitles his article considering a ‘wave of books and movies’ about the emasculation of the US male, ‘In America, men are the new women.’ Often this feminization, or ‘metrosexualization’, is mentioned in comic and detailed descriptions: one critic asked if ‘men still find glory in a fight’ because they ‘are going through a soft-skinned moisturizing mask, triple-bladed razor period, where the only hunting they’re like to do is through a wine list, in search of just the right Merlot’ (Schneller, 1999). The exact nature and extent of this millennial or postfeminist crisis in masculinity is controversial and much debated by journalists, media critics and scholars. It is generally defined as a postfeminist moment in the 1990s when it was believed that ‘American manhood was under siege’ (Faludi, 2000, p. 6).14 As part of her study of postwar masculinity, Susan Faludi discusses men’s anxieties over the ways the male body was being objectified by using a gladiatorial metaphor: ‘Cast into the gladiatorial arena of ornament, men sense their own diminishment in women’s strength’ (2000, p. 599). However, she insists that the objectifying gaze is not of women’s creation, but the ‘very gaze that women have been trying to escape’ (2000, p. 599). Although scholars such as Timothy Shary suggest that scholarship on post-millennial masculinity must move beyond earlier crisis-focused considerations and that ‘the crisis theme has perhaps run its course’ (2013, p. 9), the enduring impact, or mythopoetic resonance, of the story of crisis and redemption continues to fascinate the media. I would argue that, particularly in post-millennial gladiator fictions, the story is no longer about the crisis, as in Fight Club; rather it is built on the assumption that the crisis has already happened. Like the surge in postapocalyptic fictions that obscure the exact moment of Armageddon, such films assume a rupture that has already happened. Post-millennial men, like John Tillman/Kable (Gerard Butler) in Gamer, David Lord (Kellan Lutz) in Arena or Spartacus (Andy Whitfield/Liam McIntyre) in the Starz series, build their masculine identities in the wreckage and ruins.15 Whatever this crisis might be, it is clear from the critical reception of both Fight Club and Gladiator that film and cultural critics believe it is real and having a profound influence on the cinema (and often on literature, television and media culture more widely). Where Fight

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Club offers itself as a malignant symptom of the crisis in masculinity, Gladiator’s critics read it as a powerful balm. In one sequence, Fight Club’s narrator wonders what a real man looks like (while staring at a half-clad male torso in an advertisement). Gladiator’s critics suggest Russell Crowe is the answer; taciturn, stoic and traumatized; Crowe’s Maximus is a ‘Real Man’ (Fowler, 2000). The critics are, with very few exceptions, united in their praise for Crowe as an embodiment of an authentically new but nostalgic masculinity. In the words of Alice Fowler of The Mail on Sunday, Crowe is ‘a Real Man. Not a dumbed-down, muscle-bound Stallone or Schwarzenegger, but an old-style action hero, with a sensual intensity that seems entirely new … On screen [Crowe] combines strength with sensitivity’ (Fowler, 2000). Martin Fradley’s look at the celebration of Crowe in UK film magazines reveals a similar admiration of his masculine authenticity, with Empire commenting that ‘Russell Crowe was clearly born in a hard month, in a hard year during a freak outbreak of total hardness’ (2004, p. 243, citing Nathan). Fradley flags up the way such reports are embedded in publicity campaigns, but nonetheless strikingly insist ‘upon Crowe’s all-too-real unreconstructed masculinity’ (2004, p. 243). Crowe’s star persona and its association with pre-feminist masculinity frames Maximus’ heroic death as dramatically different to Edward Norton’s self-directed mutilation at the conclusion of Fight Club. Empires fall at the end of both films – one with a noble sacrifice and the other with an uncomfortable terrorist act that is rendered even more disturbing in the wake of the attacks on New York on 11 September 2001, an event that the film is sometimes seen to prefigure. Despite the debates that Fight Club inspired in critical circles, I would argue that the critical history of the film has long been eclipsed by its significance to film scholars and cinephiles. Fight Club is an important film to film studies, particularly to those studying masculinity and violence, and to people who count themselves as passionate about the cinema (whether they love the film or despise it). While Gladiator was generally received with more contemporary critical enthusiasm (winning five Oscars, including best picture), Fight Club has generated a wider variety and intensity of academic scholarship – often on those elements mentioned by critics: its formal ingenuity (Mack Hagood on foley sound), masculinity (Fradley 2004), consumer culture (Lynn M Ta 2006) and violence (Henry Giroux and Imre Szeman 2001).

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James Russell (2007) argues that Gladiator is the culmination of existing trends in the epic genre made popular in the 1990s with films such as James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), Dances with Wolves (Costner, 1990) and Braveheart (Gibson, 1995). Conversely, Fight Club represents less continuity of generic practice (there are few films with which it might be interchangeable) as, according to Chopra-Gant, the film plays with, and erodes, the boundaries between reality and representation (2013, p. 86). Although critical works frequently mention Ridley Scott in their consideration of Gladiator, they do so in order to offer his established track record – here the director of Alien (Scott, 1979) is credited with rebooting the sword and sandal genre. Fincher, on the other hand, is framed as an enfant terrible beginning to realize his potential – and doing so in combination with author Chuck Palahniuk, whose 1996 novel the film adapts. While auteurist handling of violence and masculine crisis dominates the reception of Fight Club, genre and setting dominate the reception of Gladiator. In some ways, and in a parallel with the doubling considered in the first half of this chapter, we might read Fight Club as Gladiator’s rebellious dark twin. Its gladiatorial scenario is infused with anarchy, terrorism and grubby gore but lacks the glory, heroism and mournfulness of Scott’s film.

Aggregates sites16

Images 0.3 and 0.4  Metacritic summaries for Gladiator (bottom) and Fight Club (top) had similar critical profiles

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Images 0.5 and 0.6  Rotten Tomatoes scores are somewhat more positive about both films; these may be more accurate as they draw from a larger set of ­reviews (195 in the case of Gladiator and 170 for Fight Club)

Gladiator Gladiator was released by DreamWorks on 5 May 2000 (approximately seven months after Fight Club) for almost twice the production budget (USD 103 million) and collected four and a half times more money at the worldwide box office (USD 457,640,427).17 In line with previous historical epics, Gladiator made the majority of its returns through the global rather than domestic marketplace (59 per cent of its final returns, or USD 269,935,000).18 Such a profit is perhaps understandable considering the film’s robust marketing campaign, its release in 2,938 theatres, its higher budget and its historical spectacle. When reviewing Gladiator, contemporary critics sometimes compared the two films – Rick Groen in The Globe and Mail describes Gladiator’s plot as being ‘pretty much a headlong rush into The Fight Club 180 AD’ (Groen, 2000). Aggregate sites reveal that Fight Club and Gladiator have accrued similar critical profiles since their millennial releases (see Images 0.3–0.6).

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Image 0.7  Word cloud generated from Voyant Tools critical reception study of Gladiator19

Contemporary reviews of Gladiator, as presented visually in Image 0.7, generally focus on one central aspect of the film – its reinvigoration of a lost genre (the sword and sandal film) through its lavish digitally composite Roman setting.20 It is through this setting that they frame the second most noted aspect of the film, the melodramatic heroism of Maximus. According to the film’s production mythology (and it seems a likely anecdote), the film began in earnest when DreamWorks co-head of production Walter Parkes brought Ridley Scott a copy of Jean-Louis Gérôme’s sumptuous neoclassical painting Pollice Verso (see Image 0.8). ‘Basically, Ridley looked at the picture and said, “I’m doing the movie”’, recalls producer Douglas Wick (Lewin, 2000, Strauss, 2000, Koltnow, 2000). This image held the essence of the film for Scott; although critics and scholars have also insisted that there are significant similarities

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Image 0.8  Jean-Louis Gérôme’s 1872 neoclassical painting Pollice Verso was m ­ eticul­ously researched and has had a profound influence on all later ­visualizations of g ­ ladiators, including the film Gladiator

between Scott’s film and Anthony Mann’s The Fall of the Roman Empire, which likewise tells the story of a gladiator-obsessed Emperor Commodus (Christopher Plummer) and the Roman military commander (Stephen Boyd) who opposes him. Gérôme’s painting will be a recurring touchstone throughout this volume, not only as an origin point for Scott’s Gladiator, but as one of the most memorable, recirculated and resonant images of the glory and tragedy of the gladiator and the crowds who watch him. Gérôme’s Pollice Verso, named after the turned thumbs gesture now associated with gladiators, further suggests the deliberate remediation built into Scott’s Gladiator and other gladiator stories. Scott’s film is not only a recreation of Rome, but a resurrection and adaptation of a neoclassicist version of Rome already circulating in culture as paintings, poetry and sculpture; a collage of mythic moments such as the Roman thumbs-down gesture. Production designer Arthur Max reports to Premiere Magazine, ‘Wherever there was a grey area in the history books, we invented. Napoleonic and Fascist design were influenced by the Ancient Romans, so we drew upon Napoleonic historical paintings and Triumph of the Will’ (Lewin, 2000). With subject matter as old as the gladiator, and as powerful and influential as (neo-)classicism, there are several filters through which a film projects its story.

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As is clear from the production story of Gladiator and from the word cloud in Image 0.7, Rome (with words such as ‘Roman’ and ‘Romans’) was one of the defining features of the film’s reception. Many critics reported the work that went into the material and digital design of Gladiator’s ancient setting: ‘Rome wasn’t filmed in a day …’ (Lewin, 2000), but through ‘effects wizardry that rebuilds ancient Rome on a staggeringly grand scale’ (Epstein, 2000), and through ‘state-of-the-art digital effects to reinvent Rome in all of its extravagant glory’ (Whipp, 2000). The final product was reported thus: ‘Ridley Scott’s rebuilt Rome is a wonder to behold’ (Faulks, 2000). As is clear from these quotations, opinions were largely appreciative, with the notable exception of Roger Ebert, who is described in another review as Augustus Ebert with the power of life and death to a film through his thumbs up or down (Groen, 2000). Ebert dismisses Gladiator’s Rome as a ‘shabby … model from a computer game’ (Ebert, 2000). There were critics who disapproved of Gladiator’s Rome for less aesthetic reasons. These are the critics who consulted historians and classicists in order to report the inaccuracies of the film. As I have established regarding the thumbs-down signal, gladiator stories are littered with anachronism and creative reinterpretations. The nature of these inaccuracies and what they reveal are of pressing interest to this study, rather than a cataloguing of the many historical mistakes made in telling the gladiator’s story. Ultimately, Gladiator is as much about other stories and images of gladiators as it is about Roman gladiators themselves. Despite any disagreement over Gladiator’s reanimation of Rome in 180 AD, critics overwhelmingly agree that the film successfully brings the long-dead sword and sandal genre back to life. One critic goes so far as to claim that ‘… Scott has done something miraculous in resurrecting the unfashionable sword-and-sandal genre without ever making it laughable’ (Covert, 2000), and another agrees that Gladiator ‘sweeps the sword-and-sandals epic into fresh, ferocious territory’ (Whipp, 2000). As I will outline in Chapter II’s discussion of genre, the sword and sandal films that were to follow Gladiator’s ‘triumphant return of the Roman Empire epic’ (Whipp, 2000) were received with less enthusiasm (films such as Troy [Petersen, 2004], Alexander [Stone, 2004] and Pompeii). James Russell (2007) argues that ‘[i]t is important to recognise that Gladiator was not the daring, innovative product it was

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sometimes classed as by the trade press’ and critics (2007, p. 159). Rather, it is a continuation of an investment trend that was established in industrial production in Hollywood, and through the rise of DVD as a format. He insists that epics were a relatively safe financial investment for studios. I would argue that the disconnect between industrial practice and critical reception might be explained by Gladiator’s Roman setting, which is haunted by associations of low budget mid-century Italian peplum films and a few significant failures of contemporary Hollywood roadshow epics such as Cleopatra (Mankiewicz, 1963). Like the gladiatorial stories filmed earlier, Gladiator felt innovative because its gladiator hero can so powerfully embody the concerns of the present; he can be so spectacularly realized through the technologies of his times. Released closely together, Fight Club and Gladiator were both credited with speaking for their times. They were seen to emerge from, and address, the so-called crisis of masculinity emerging in a postfeminist era. But to see Gladiator and Fight Club as symptomatic of a millennial crisis in masculinity is to see only part of the picture. The significance and complexities of their representations of enslaved celebrity fighters are under estimated and under analysed. These films are not just stories of millennial men in crisis; they are stories celebrating millennial gladiators. The gladiator archetype is central to their vision of nostalgia, crisis, resistance, redemption and masculinity.

Towards a new methodology for an old archetype If Gladiator and its like stand as a spectacular repetition of an old story, then this volume hopes to do something more innovative with its methodologies. Studies of heroic and violent masculinity are many, as are studies of gladiators and their significance to culture.21 Stories about traumatized men achieving glory and redemption through violence are firm fixtures in (global) popular genre cinema and it was around the turn of the millennium that academics in film and cultural studies were publishing influential studies taking these stories seriously.22 Their methods and conclusions had a wide influence on the scholarly

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consideration of fighters on film and the action genre, although none of these studies spent a sustained amount of time on the gladiator as a character type. I lean heavily on their methodologies, but do not want to reproduce them wholesale to consider the gladiatorial phenomenon. To best investigate the gladiator, I hybridize these genre- and genderbased methods with those drawn from historical studies (particularly classical studies), celebrity studies and cultural studies. My approach is decidedly multimodal, focusing on an ambitiously large collection of visual fictions that feature gladiators as protagonists, gladiatorial combat as a main narrative strand and those that include a gladiator fight as a key set piece or backstory. In order to do this, I amassed a database of approximately 400 films, videogames and television programmes, which provides the foundation for this volume’s overall conclusions. It further informs the supporting tables, charts and timelines. The database ranges in date from the turn of the twentieth century to the time of publication – some twenty years after the release of Scott’s Gladiator. Gladiator is the central example of this study, just as the millennium serves as its entry point. The fictions included vary in genre and budget, as they likewise vary in their critical reception and popularity. They were produced largely in Hollywood; however, Italy and its co-productions are similarly central. In its scope, this project differs from many others that are bounded by, for example, genre, country or time period. This volume stretches the definition of the gladiator to include Roman gladiators in historically set films (e.g. Gladiator), gladiators drawn from an unspecified mythic past (e.g. Thor and the Amazon Women), contemporary fighters forced to fight against their will for the entertainment of a crowd (e.g. Forced to Fight) and gladiators of the post-apocalyptic future, such as Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) in The Hunger Games. Unlike most studies, I give significant attention to lowbudget and straight-to-DVD/TV films, reality and genre television, as well as high-budget US blockbusters and prestige pictures. Pam Grier’s embodiment of the gladiator in the low-budget The Arena is as important to mapping the archetype as that of Kirk Douglas in Spartacus. I argue that while prestige pictures such as Spartacus and Gladiator are more visible in discourse around gladiators, their lowbudget counterparts provide an almost unnoticed support structure cementing the gladiator as an archetype. Low-budget pictures and

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television programmes vastly outnumber gladiatorial blockbusters, feeding into, and out of, their fame and successes. While this study looks across many media, from combat sport, reality television, videogames, sculpture and neoclassical painting, it centralizes the medium of film. The scope, conventions and industrial circumstances of Western filmmaking (particularly American and Italian filmmaking) have made the gladiator archetype. Cinema has solidified many of the mythologies around his image (the thumbs-down signal and the gladiatorial salute, for example). The nostalgic classicism of the gladiator archetype has thrived through its relationship with the formal classicism of the Hollywood studio system and popular Italian cinema. Even in other media, the cinema is a central touchpoint. Videogames featuring gladiators or arena fight sequences (such as Assassin’s Creed: Origins, For Honor [2017] or Ryse: Son of Rome [2013]) lean heavily on the conventions of the cinematic gladiator fight; this is certainly true of Ryse: Son of Rome that unfolds with a clear debt to Ridley Scott’s film. In turn, post-millennial gladiator films are incorporating the aspects of videogame logic and aesthetics into their spectacles to produce a ludic sensibility. I recentre textual and formal analysis to offer an extremely focused consideration of fight sequences set in the amphitheatre, looking at them as spectacles that are foundational in multiple ways to the gladiator and to gladiator films, games and television programmes. I aim to provide an approach that explores interdisciplinary territories while keeping film and cultural studies as a central core; adapting and stretching it through other methods to look at the phenomenon in new and fruitful ways.

Conclusion: We who are about to die Following this introduction’s establishment of the centrality of the millennium and the framing device of ‘before and after’, Chapter I offers a comprehensive genealogy of the gladiator as archetype, as scenario and as cultural impulse. Chapter II builds on this, interrogating the gladiator’s playful relationship to genre and arguing that the most useful term to describe the gladiator scenario is the Italian critical term filone,

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as it implies self-aware entanglement of threads of influence that stretch over time and via different media. It further argues that gameplay is essential to the very nature of gladiatorial combat and stories about it, from dedicated gamespaces such as the Colosseum to the unwritten rules of engagement that offer vital generic and visual scaffolding. Having established key genre maps, genealogies and definitions, Chapter III pinpoints the single most important element of those: the arena fight. Looking at a wide range of arena fight sequences from films with different budgets, production practices and distribution contexts, the chapter notes significant continuities in the set piece and argues that such sequences are simultaneously standalone spectacular moments and integral to the characterization of the gladiator and his narrative trajectory. Chapter IV looks to the key cultural force framing and upholding the gladiatorial impulse: nostalgia. Looking at the entanglement between nostalgia and a digitally realized classicism, this chapter analyses the way in which gladiatorial stories revivify history, even those set in an imagined future. The nostalgic male body of the gladiator is a key marker not only of the peplum filone, but a ground zero for the complex eroticism bound to stories about gladiatorial fighting. I propose the term chronosoma (time body) to describe the gladiator’s body as a crystallization of time and historicity. Chapter V further analyses the chronosoma of the gladiator and its performance of a violent burlesque that reveals the erotic charge underpinning the archetype. From a study of the eroticism of the built male body, Chapter VI interrogates the apparatus of celebrity that infuses the gladiatorial scenario and frames the stakes of the gladiatorial games. It traces this celebrity from its  Roman roots, arguing that Roman concepts such as virtus (masculine strength) and infamia (infamy) remain central building blocks to the gladiator’s fame. There have been many studies of Roman gladiators. This volume aims to shake off some of the parameters of existing methodological approaches or discipline-based silos in order to examine a history of gladiators, and gladiatorial scenarios, and to identify, map and analyse the conceptual architecture that feeds their visibility and cultural currency. I have used many of these concepts as chapter headings – archetype (Chapter I), gameplay (Chapter II), panopticism (Chapter III’s formulation of the amphitheatre), nostalgia (Chapter IV), eroticism

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and burlesque (Chapter V) and celebrity (Chapter VI). In structuring my approach around these concepts, I insist on reading the gladiatorial impulse not as universal or transhistorical, but drawn from, and to, the historical and social specificities of its context – whether that is the  remediated digital classicism of Arena’s (2011) violent gameplay or the postfeminist body discipline and celebrity critiqued through teenaged Katniss’ heroism and exploitation. The stakes of this project are urgent – the heart of the gladiatorial mythology, appeal and imagery is a hypermasculinity that champions violence as more than just redemptive. For the gladiator, violence is the language of resistance to oppression; it is tangled with the apparatus of celebrity and proof of masculine victimization. The core of my agenda in this project is to demonstrate that gladiatorial violence does not ennoble men or empower women. Neither does it demonize them. It is a complex language for telling stories about history and imagining bodies that history acts upon. Through detailed mapping and interrogations of gladiatorial violence, I acknowledge the complex and profoundly paradoxical function of fighting in entertainment and media culture as simultaneously empowering and repressive; as a horrific spectacle, a desperate act of self-defence and a joyful game; as a system that is doubled and layered as it stretches back to a lost ‘before’ and reaches towards an equally ambiguous future.

Chapter I A gladiatorial genealogy

My name is Gladiator. GLADIATOR

The first gladiatorial fight in the 3D spectacular Pompeii perfectly illustrates the gladiator’s archetypal power and the ‘deep draught of savage passion’ (Augustine, 1961, p. 122) described with vivid sensuality in St. Augustine’s cautionary tale of the arena. The sequence is staged during a torrential downpour in a wooden and mud-coated amphitheatre in Londinium. Three helmeted gladiators have just won their fight but not the crowd’s approval. An ambitious nobleman watches in boredom, wishing to find something ‘new’ and ‘fresh’ to appeal to the masses. This is interrupted by the sound of grate opening, giving audiences their first, silhouetted glimpse of ‘the Celt’ played by Kit Harington. The archway frames the Celt’s shadow and his expectant opponents. They all wear face-obscuring helmets and are armed with the conventional weapons of the cinematic gladiator: the ubiquitous trident and Roman short sword, or gladius, from which we get the name gladiator. In reverse shot, the camera lingers in slow motion on Harington’s shirtless body, covered with mud and a leather harness. From the Celt’s point of view, we see the hushed crowd as they lean forward to watch him. For some time, the players hold their poses, watching each other, until they burst into violent action. In a matter of seconds, and with great skill, the Celt (aka Milo) kills all of his opponents. As he pulls the weapon from his final victim and begins to exit the amphitheatre, he throws the sword behind him in a gesture of distain. The crowd screams their approval and begins to chant, ‘Celt, Celt, Celt’.

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This sequence is axiomatic – here we have the stoic gladiator (scornful of the crowd and unmoved by his own victory) stepping into the gamespace of the arena to the delight of a restless crowd and at the whim of a decadent Roman authority figure. Though enslaved and an outsider, his martial skills demonstrate his virtus – masculine bravery – and earn him fame and glory. This fame and the favour of the crowd temporarily limit the authorities’ power over him. In its spectacle of a digitally realized classicism and the slow-motion stylization of violence, this sequence is also illustrative of post-millennial trends in epic historical cinema, visible in the aesthetics of 300 and the Spartacus television series. The violence of the gladiator fight is eclipsed only by the spectacle of Milo/Harington’s eroticized body. These two spectacles are fused together and framed by a nostalgia for a lost world (here Roman Britain, the lost tribe of the Celt and the ‘gladiator movies’ of the cinematic past). Augustine worried that the amphitheatre produced an intoxicating bloodlust in its spectators. However, he could not resist describing the pleasures offered in the amphitheatre in lingering detail in his cautionary tale, much as the cinematography does in this sequence. The Celt’s fight confirms his hatred of the Roman Empire, and provides the ‘draught of savage passion’ and bloodlust that underpins all gladiator stories. In this book, I argue that Anglo-American visual culture is marked by a gladiatorial impulse that begins with the gladiatorial games, or munera, of Ancient Rome. This chapter aims to offer a useful, comprehensive and precise definition of the widely used term gladiator – firstly as a historical player unique to Ancient Rome and, then, building on the specificities of that Roman context, compiling a critical definition of the gladiator as a resonant masculine archetype. Therefore, the goal of this chapter is somewhat taxonomic, defining the features of the gladiator and the stages on which he performs. I argue that the figure of the gladiator registers important shifts and continuities in how the performance of warrior masculinity fits with entertainment culture.

Chronosoma In order to do this, I propose the term chronosoma to describe the body of the archetypal gladiator. Building from Mikhail Bakhtin’s conceptualization of the chronotope (time place), as a crystallization

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of time and place, I define the chronosoma (time body) as a nostalgic solidification of time written onto the muscular body of the gladiator. The gladiator’s defining feature is his built body, often on display because of revealing, nominally historical, costumes. The centrality of the body and its dependence on history for its modes of display, performance and resonance prompts and justifies my conceptualization of the chronosoma as a critical term. This chapter uses the chronosoma as a lens to introduce, map and analyse the figure of the gladiator as an archetype and the main goal here is to provide a genealogy for this archetype. The chronosoma is a further manifestation/expression of the ‘before and after’ logic of gladiatorial stories, as they are expressed through the body of the key player. In his study of the relationship between Bakhtin and the cinema, Martin Flanagan (2009) introduces the chronotope using embodied metaphors that he insists are particularly ‘relevant to the medium [of film] which is said to bring fictional characters to ‘life’’ (2009, p. 58). Following Christian Metz, Flanagan centralizes embodiment in any understanding of Bakhtin’s chronotope. The chronotope ‘makes them [narrative events] take on flesh, causes blood to flow in their veins’ (Bakhtin cited in Flanagan 2009, p. 58). Gladiator narratives heighten the importance of physicality and centralize the body as a space of pain, violence, eroticism, beauty and nostalgia. The race and gender politics of the chronosoma underpin the stakes of this project and inform its urgency, as the gladiatorial ideal is the sculptural and muscular body of the white man. The gladiatorial chronosoma is not fixed, despite certain continuities of muscular physicality and shirtless display. It is fluid, expressing both an archetypal warrior ideal and the particularities of how a specific time and place in history celebrates those ideals.

The gladiators of Rome Before proceeding to the analytical taxonomy of the fictional gladiator as he circulates throughout popular culture, it is necessary to understand his historical and mythological origin point and to examine the formative iteration of the gladiatorial chronosoma. This provides a crucial springboard for understanding the many fictional gladiators that are inspired by the Roman figure. This chapter establishes and

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discusses some of the significant specificities of the evolving sociohistorical contexts of the Ancient Roman gladiator, as he competed for approximately 650 years between the third century BC and the fourth century AD (264 BC to 404 AD).1 Gladiators are uniquely Roman and all subsequent representations and mythologies build on these Roman origins. To build this genealogy, I begin by offering a brief summary of the Roman gladiator in order to familiarize the reader with his history. This is not a comprehensive survey, nor will it necessarily offer radically new interpretations of epigraphic, literary or archaeological evidence. This is an outsider’s sketch of connections across sources and, indeed, across media, culture and eras.2 Rather, rooted in classical studies, and leaning on rigorous secondary sources, I aim to offer the reader a survey of the ways gladiators have been understood and studied by historians. The larger project of this volume is to investigate how/when these understandings are entangled in visual and popular culture, particularly via post-millennial digital technologies of the entertainment media. Certain assertions are uncontroversial facts, others are generally accepted deduction, while still others are best estimates in the face of inconclusive and incomplete (or, even, contradictory) evidence. All versions (or perhaps perversions) of historical fact and interpretation are of interest here, as the hyperreal expression of the gladiatorial impulse does not feed exclusively on notions of truth or evidence, but relishes spectacle, mythology, classicism and nostalgia. This volume intercuts its analyses of the gladiatorial archetype and scenario with critical histories of the Roman gladiator. Without wanting to slip unacknowledged from fact to fiction and back again, it is critical to see the wider picture and patterns of the gladiator as a potent fusion between historical fact, historically rooted deduction and the multimodal process of adaptation and mythologization that begins in Rome and proliferates across Western visual media since then.

The time of the gladiator Although some classicists acknowledge that the origins of gladiatorial fighting are less certain than ancient and modern scholars have thought (e.g. Wiedemann, 1992, p. 1), they generally agree that the

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first recorded gladiator games or munera were at the funeral of Junius Brutus Pera in 264 BC (the same year that marked the beginning of the first Punic War). His sons organized for three pairs of gladiators to fight at the Forum Boarium. Thus, the munera began as private religious events to honour the dead and to literally combat death itself through ritualized violence. It is because these gladiatorial events were embedded in religious ritual that they have been labelled munera (meaning duty or obligation) as well as the more commonly used ludi (or games).3 The munera also showcased gladiatorial combat as a display of embodied power, not only of the skilled bodies of the gladiators themselves, but of the dead body of the powerful man whose funeral would cement his legacy and dynasty in the body politic of Rome. Two types of bodies faced death: the first was the sponsor of the games whose passage into the afterlife was being marked and, second, were the bodies of the gladiators who must face and conquer death through their fight. One thread of history uses the early funerary practices of the munera to suggest an origin in human sacrifice or blood rituals, perhaps of exotic Etruscan origins (Wiedemann 1992, p. 32). The Etruscan origins of the gladiator munera are no longer accepted as historically likely. Thomas Wiedemann reinforces that assigning the games to Etruscan origins is ‘a moral statement rather than a historical one’ (1992, p. 32) made by Roman historians and later in racialized discourses of the nineteenth century, including the fascist emphasis on eugenics. These imagined and mysterious origins are significant. I would argue that it proves that gladiatorial combat was nostalgic from the moment of its first practices – reaching towards an unspecified past, knitting tradition into its form and celebrating aggressive masculine virtus as a quality that needed constant reinforcement and was always under threat or in decline. Gladiatorial munera, which eventually included hunting demonstrations (venationes), beast fights and public executions, existed in the context of a varied system of Roman spectacles, including chariot racing, theatre, pantomime and Greek-inspired athletics (including combat sports of boxing, wrestling and pankration). Juvenal’s much-quoted phrase dismissing the Roman crowds as infinitely distracted by panem et circenses (bread and circuses) is about the chariot racing specifically, but has come to serve as a

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general statement about the gullible and bloodthirsty Roman crowd and, sometimes, widened out to describe the psychology of crowds across history (Fagan, 2011). Writer George S. Brooks suggested that Americans in the 1920s were distracted not by ‘blood and circuses’ but by ‘gas and games’ (Williams, 2017, p. 62) and cultural historian Johan Huizinga writing in the 1940s draws a parallel to ‘the dole and free cinema tickets’ (1980, p. 177). Thus, the gladiator munera have become metonymic for all derided popular spectacles (including, significantly, the cinema and gameplay) and the crowds of the amphitheatre come to stand for all crowds: easily bought, mercurial, sadistic and dangerously powerful. Figure 1.2 indicates some key dates in the shifting patterns of the gladiatorial munera from the funeral of Junius Brutus Pera to the end of the Western Empire, with Odoacer’s deposition of Romulus Augustus in 474 AD.4 While this format perhaps oversimplifies the shifts in the way the munera were run and received by audiences, it quickly illustrates the way games shifted from privately run events to exclusively imperial spectacles, increasingly regulated (in terms of who could stage them, who could attend and the manner in which the gladiators themselves were armed) from the time of Augustus onwards. It likewise points to the controversies that the games inspired, given attempts to legislate limitations on expenditure, participation and eventual closure of the gladiator games themselves.

Figure 1.2  A timeline of key events in the history of gladiators, overlaid with illustrative examples of their cinematic representations

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A timeline of Roman history and Roman history on film Overlaid on this is an additional timeline, which tells the story of the screen version of the gladiators of Ancient Rome. It provides compelling evidence for visual culture’s targeting of the more cinematic moments in Roman history, the most spectacular of which is the 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius, featured in the 3D digital spectacle of 2014’s Pompeii.5 The revolt of Spartacus in 73–71 BC is of similar interest (Spartacus the Gladiator/Sins of Rome/Spartaco [Freda 1953], Kubrick’s Spartacus and the Starz series Spartacus), as is the rule of gladiator-obsessed Emperor Commodus (The Fall of the Roman Empire, Netflix’s Roman Empire: Reign of Blood [2016–], and Gladiator). Biblical epics focus on the time around the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, sometimes mixing the timeline to include other events, such as the eruption of Vesuvius (as in The Last Days of Pompeii [Schoedsack, 1935]). This is Roman history represented as a simultaneous or ahistorical mosaic of spectacular moments, like the much referenced Zliten mosaic (which includes all the elements of several days’ worth of spectacles in one image). Likewise, the cinematic, ludic and televisual versions of the munera throw everything at the spectator at once. The sheer number of gladiator characters and imagery further reveals and proves that these celebrity fighters are visual media’s most constant Roman fixation – overshadowing other spectacles staged throughout Rome’s history. The gladiator (rather than, for example, the pankrationist or charioteer) can be most readily uncoupled from the contexts of antiquity and projected into the fight clubs or martial arts tournaments of the present and the digital arenas of the future. This fluidity gives the gladiator a unique ability to speak across timelines and genres. However, the specificity and fixedness of the gladiator’s Roman origins leave lasting, if inconclusive, traces on subsequent realizations. To uncover these Roman roots, it is worth asking how Romans experienced the gladiatorial timeline on a more prosaic level. Using the early imperial period as a common example, several classicists have sketched out a yearly calendar of munera, typical life cycles of a gladiator and a typical programme for a day at the games.6 These ‘typical’ schedules are the most influential foundations for the fictionalization

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that follows and, furthermore, form the basis of most popular histories of the gladiator. The Roman public would have been able to predict their next gladiatorial instalment, as most munera were grouped around regular festivals such as the Saturnalia in December. Exceptional events, such as the one hundred days of games staged by Flavian emperor Titus on the opening of the Colosseum in 80 AD would have augmented the gladiatorial calendar. Other pre-game information was available to Roman spectators in the form of advertisements, graffiti such as those found on the walls in Pompeii and in the days’ programmes (libelli). As with contemporary combat sports, statistics were an important part of a gladiator’s reputation and publicity, as was the type of armature he wore (described below) and even the stage name he chose. Betting appears to have been a common practice and significant prize money was awarded to the victorious gladiator along with the palm branch of victory. The following programme describing imperial era munera represents a kind of consensus among historians.7 It is widely circulated in popular histories and historical fictions, from the Horrible Histories series, documentaries such as the UK’s Channel 5’s Eight Days that Made Rome (2017)8 and educational fictions such as Dan Scott’s Gladiator School series of books (2013–2015). It begins the night before the munera, with a public-facing gladiator dinner, in which the fighters are given a feast and their fans are permitted to watch. The next morning begins with the beast hunts (venationes) in which trained hunters or beast fighters (bestiarii) hunted or fought animals and/or animals fought against each other; these included non-lethal animal performances choreographed by animal trainers. Evidence suggests that the more exotic and predatory the animal, the more popular it was. Furthermore, the Roman appetite for exotic animals put a particular strain (on top of the likewise draining costs of staging munera) on provincial governors and the editors (sponsors) of games, who struggled to capture and transport unpredictable wild animals. This practice led to the extinction of at least one species, the Libyan lion, and to the introduction of legislation aimed at limiting the costs of the games.9 The beast spectacles sometimes overlapped with the executions, which were likely staged during the lunch break or in the early afternoon. These included prisoners condemned ad bestias who were forced to

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face the animals unarmed or bound, often as part of a mythologically inspired snuff performances (pyrrichae) – in which doomed characters such as Actaeon die as part of the show.10 In addition to executions ad bestias, criminals (noxii) were sentenced, depending on the nature or perceived severity of their crimes, to burning, forced combat (damnati ad gladium), crucifixion or straightforward killing by the sword (reserved for higher-standing prisoners). In the afternoon came the gladiators as the ‘headline event’ (Fagan, 2011, p. 6), the subject of betting and introduced by music and a procession (pompa). It is hard not to draw parallels here between these ancient processions and the pageantry of boxers, martial artists and wrestlers as they make their (musically accompanied) entrance to the modern arena. Contrary to many fictional representations, including the Colosseum fights in Gladiator, gladiators did not begin their battles by ritually repeating the phrase that inspired Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1859 painting, ‘Ave Caesar! Morituri te salutant / Hail Caesar! We Who Are About to Die Salute You’ (See Image 1.9). That phrase was likely spoken only once by condemned prisoners about to perform a mock-naval battle (naumachia) for the Emperor Claudius in 52 AD. It is, however, an intensely affective moment and has been firmly embedded in the gladiator’s story. Likewise, contrary

Image 1.9  Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1859 Ave Caesar! Morituri te salutant

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to popular mythologies gladiatorial combat was not always a desperate and chaotic fight to the death. The fights (during the Empire) were regulated, refereed and fought with formal rules of engagement and, perhaps even, as M. J. Carter argues (2006), unwritten codes of conduct among professionally trained gladiators, which discouraged unnecessary injuring/killing as dishonourable. The gladiators fought under the supervision of referees (summa rudis and secunda rudis) in bouts that ended when the defeated man could no longer continue or signalled his defeat with his fingers (ad digitum). The fate of the loser was determined by the crowd and announced by the emperor or the games’ sponsor using a hand gesture (pollice verso, or inverted thumbs). As historians insist, the memorable cinematic convention of the thumbs down signalling a gory death for the gladiator is a dramatic deduction or augmentation rather than historical fact. Hand signals were involved; however, evidence is inconclusive as to what these might have been. The ubiquity of the thumbs down across centuries of visual media is one form of evidence, among many considered in this volume, that the gladiatorial scenario is built on a complex bricolage of fact, fiction and the indistinguishable shadow forms in between. The example that dominates the media lexicon of the early twentyfirst century is to be found in Facebook’s catalogue of iconic response options, which features the thumbs-up gesture as a social judgement that resonates with those of the remediated amphitheatre. Death was delivered by the victorious gladiator, likely via an efficient sword strike to the neck as shown several times in the Spartacus series in graphic detail. While death and serious injury were risks, they were not inevitable, even in those matches fought sine missione (without release) by permission of the emperor. Gladiators were expensive, highly trained and bound by rules known to audiences who had come to the arena to see skilful and fairly matched fights. Professional gladiators did not fight as often as other athletes, including charioteers, and their statistics were carefully recorded in order to determine their status for betting and advertisement purposes.11 Historians readily admit that first-person accounts from the gladiators themselves are missing – this is the gap that fictions have consistently tried to fill with their spectacle, melodrama, and unique recreation of the  internal world of gladiators like Maximus in Gladiator or Milo in Pompeii. There is some evidence to be found on the grave markers

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erected for gladiators by their families or comrades, offering an insight into the life of the gladiator and providing evidence that not all gladiators died anonymously and unmourned in the arena. Several historians quote a rhetorical exercise attributed to Quintilian as a unique account not only of the imagined first-person experience of being a gladiator, but of the atmosphere of the amphitheatre – the music of the trumpets, the procession and the gore: Already the populace had gathered for the spectacle of our punishment, and the bodies of those about to die had their own death-parade across the arena. The presenter of the show who hoped to gain favour with our blood, took his seat … All around I could hear the instruments of death: a sword being sharpened, iron-plates being heated in a fire [to stop fighters retreating and to prove that they were not faking death], birch-rods and whips were prepared. One would have imagined that these were pirates. The trumpets sounded their foreboding notes; stretchers for the dead were brought on, a funeral parade before death. Everywhere I could see wounds, groans, blood, danger … (Hopkins, 1983, pp. 26–7, citing Quintilian) There is much to unite Ridley Scott’s visions of the battles of the Colosseum with the richly textured sonic and visual experience imagined by Quintilian – the clanging of the metal in the backstage hypogeum, the trumpet music (underpinned in the film by the Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard’s score). What Scott’s film and other post-millennial gladiator fictions show (and Quintilian describes) is the excessive spectacle of bloodshed and bodies being physically and psychologically torn apart. Videogames can further this extrapolation in point of view, by offering the player/spectator the experience of controlling the gladiator during his arena battle (a process both satirized and dramatized in Gamer) and directly realized via the gladiator levels in Ryse: Son of Rome and Assassin’s Creed Origins Witcher 3: Blood and Wine. Always the subject of controversy, gladiatorial games were finally banned by Emperor Honorius in 404 BC. The beast hunts did continue for some time afterwards and, arguably, they are still being performed in the form of Spanish bullfighting.12 Like the beast hunts, public executions and their visual exhibition continue and have their own histories outside

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the scope of this volume. Several scholars across a variety of disciplines (most notably Garrett Fagan) have pointed out cross-cultural parallels between, and analysis of, gladiator fights and other forms of violent sport – including combat sports such as boxing or more recently mixed martial arts (MMA). Daniele Bolelli insists that ‘in no sport are the parallels as dramatic and appropriate as between gladiatorial games and the sport of Mixed Martial Arts’ (2014, p. 1). Bolelli argues that MMA does more than parallel the Roman gladiatorial munera; organizations like the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) build their brands via references to movies about gladiators (and martial artists). He flags up the role that Conan the Barbarian director John Milius played, as creative director, in Rorion Gracie’s formation of the UFC tournament brand. Milius’s gladiatorial connections (in Conan and the HBO series Rome [2005–2007]) perhaps informed his suggestion that the UFC competition space should be an octagonshaped cage (2014, pp. 4–5). The UFC self-consciously marketed itself as a brutal successor to Rome’s gladiatorial contests using images of gladiators in its promotional videos and the introductory sequence used on its television broadcasts until 2012 (Bolelli 2014, p. 8). These gladiatorial associations became, paradoxically perhaps, flashpoints for both the UFC’s self-promotion and their most vitriolic external criticisms. Counter to Bolelli and the UFC’s transhistorical parallels, most historians insist that any treatment of the gladiatorial munera must depend on their Roman context – as part of religious rites in a martial society, underpinned by slavery with a distinct investment in rigid social hierarchies. Fagan’s (2011) study of the social psychology of the arena crowd challenges this – arguing that what validates the cross-cultural analysis (between a Roman ‘them’ and postmodern Western ‘us’) lies not necessarily in the violent performances themselves, but in the cognitive processes and social behaviours of the spectators in the arena.

The body of the gladiator The history of the Roman gladiator was written on his body – in the armature he wore, the training he mastered, the gladiatorial family (familia gladiatoria) he lived/trained with and the corporeal pain he both endured and delivered. The Roman world was one of strict hierarchies

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of bodies – from slave to equites; from those linked by kinship bonds and dynastic power to those beyond the margins of society and the infamous, including the gladiator, the actor and the prostitute. These categories overlap on some occasions, as in Roman legislation, which according to Thomas Wiedemann describes gladiators as officially unreliable because they, like the prostitute, ‘sold their bodies for the delectation of others’ (1992, p. 26).

Individual and types Like the onscreen gladiators of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Roman gladiator is recorded both as an individual and, using sweeping metaphors, as an archetypal or ideal figure. For example, on the one hand, individual gladiators are celebrated, such as Verus and Priscus, whose fight at the opening of the Colosseum is recorded in Martial’s Book of Spectacles; on the other hand, the stoic Seneca uses the virtues of a generic gladiator to illustrate his philosophical principles (Cagniart, 2000). One of the ways gladiators and their imagery were deindividualized, perhaps even dehumanized, was through their armature, especially their face-obscuring helmets. These armaments served to categorize gladiators into different types (see Table 1.3 below).13 This division is also true of the fans, who were sometimes identified based on their loyalty to types of gladiatorial armament – scutarii (after the large rectangular shield or scutum) and parmularii (after the smaller round shield or parma). One of the more famous fans of the Thraex was the Emperor Caligula, who not only supported this type of gladiator but trained as one. Although gladiator fighting begins significantly earlier, most visually recognizable classifications date from the first to third centuries AD, beginning from the time of Augustus when the gladiatorial system became more codified (Junkelmann, 2001, p. 35). Table 1.3 is not a comprehensive breakdown of gladiatorial armature, it is a rough guide to widely acknowledged gladiator types during the early imperial period – the period in which the many of the films and fictions featuring gladiators are set. I would argue that this system of visual and martial classification, which has been influential to the look of gladiator characters in visual culture, functions to solidify the gladiator not as an individual character

Large, curved, rectangular shield

Visored helmet with fish design

Brimmed helmet with crest and griffin’s head design

Brimmed helmet

Vizored helmet

No helmet

Smooth ungrated vizored helmet with fin crest

Manica on right arm, short greave or shin guard

Manica on right arm, high greaves

Manica on right arm, high greaves

Manica on right arm, small greave on left leg, small breastplate

Manica on left arm, shoulder guard

Manica on right arm greave on right leg

Murmillo

Thraex

Hoplomachus

Provocator

Retiarius

Secutor

Rectangular, curved shield

No shield

Curved rectangular shield

Small, round shield

Small rectangular/ square shield

Shield

Helmet

Clothes and Armour

Type

TABLE 1.3  Classification of gladiator types

Gladius

Net and trident

Straight-bladed sword

Lance and long dagger

Short, curved sword

Gladius or Roman short sword

Weapons

Retiarius

Secutor, Murmillo

Provocator

Murmillo (sometimes Thraex)

Murmillo (sometimes Hoplomachus)

Thraex or Hoplomachus

Adversary

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so much as an archetype or, perhaps more suited to his circulation in post-millennial digital culture, an avatar. The videogame avatar (or game piece) is closely aligned with the gladiator archetype, most notably via conventions of armature, weaponry and setting. The figure of the avatar functions like an emptied or blank archetype that can be customized based on the player’s specifications or desires (within the available options provided by the game). In For Honor, for example, you can choose a gladiator from a pantheon of other ‘heroes’, such as the Valkyrie, Highlander and Berserker (see Image 1.10). The archetype circulates through visual media as and through an avatar with ease and fluidity that can recall history and blankly reproduce its iconography in the service of stylization or martial ability. Gladiator films and television programmes play with the tension between the gladiator as an individual man with a tragic backstory (e.g. Maximus and Milo) and the gladiator as a type signalling Roman bloodlust, virtue and martial skill – in much the same spirit as Seneca’s consideration of the gladiator’s stoic courage or the player’s selection of the gladiator avatar.

Image 1.10  In For Honor, the player can choose and customize the gladiator from a selection of other iconic warrior types

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When the gladiator is projected onto the screen, he loses the specificity of different types that were carefully reproduced by neoclassicist artists such as Gérôme. The cinematic gladiator is rarely limited to one armament type, or even to one historical period. Unhampered by expectations of certain pairings or the realities of armed combat, production and costume designers borrow loosely from the sum total gladiatorial iconography – from Ancient Rome and the accumulations of each visualization that was to follow, from the accounts of Christian martyrdom, to Lord Byron’s poetic reanimations, to the rich gloss of neoclassicist painting. Gladiators are dressed to best highlight their martial abilities, physical fitness and beauty and the needs of the narratives. Maximus, for example, wears a breastplate decorated with horses to signal his agrarian roots. Demetrius (Victor Mature) in Demetrius and the Gladiators changes his clothing based on his characterization as a modest Christian in the beginning and at the end of the film. During the middle of the film, when he has turned from his God and embraced his role as Roman gladiator-enforcer, he is dressed in elaborate Roman armour. The competitors on the British reality television programme Bromans wear revealing draped clothing over gold underwear that recalls the mid-century Italian peplum films. While gladiatorial anachronisms are perhaps painful to the historian, they are a part of the adaptations and specificities of the cinematic medium, which does not promise historical truth in its gladiator fictions, but a different kind of authenticity grounded in violence and inscribed on the body of the performer. The costumes of gladiators in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries feature the requisite swords and sandals that give the genre its name. They also favour worn leather strapping, greaves and manica. These costumes also borrow freely from the clothing of the legions, including breastplates, tunics and the occasional use of chain mail. The exceptionally photogenic and easily identifiable retiarius is perhaps the most circulated type of gladiator, appearing throughout gladiator fictions regardless of their historical setting (e.g. Draba [Woody Strode] in Spartacus, the eponymous Barabbas [Anthony Quinn], Beyoncé in a 2004 Pepsi advertisement – see Image 1.11.) Because the retiarius is so lightly clothed and wears no helmet he, and sometimes she, is effective as a performer for the close-ups of the film camera. Furthermore, it is worth noting that films and television programmes make sparing use of helmets in order to let the actors

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Image 1.11  Beyoncé dons the net and trident of the retiarius

emote without distraction. Screen gladiators certainly have helmets, but they do not wear them often; when they do, the helmet becomes a significant accessory to narrative revelations and aesthetic design. An illustrative example is the moment, described in the opening of this volume’s introduction, in which Maximus takes off his helmet and reveals his true identity to Commodus in Gladiator. Another use of the helmet, this time for innovative aesthetic reasons, is in a key arena battle of first season of Spartacus. Here Spartacus wears a Thraex helmet during his fight with the monstrous champion Theokoles. While Spartacus continues to wear the helmet, the sequence includes extreme closeup shots filmed from inside the helmet, allowing the audience to see his face as he strains in battle and also from his point of view, in the manner of the helmet-mounted cameras used in American football. The helmet thus determines the narrative force of the sequence, in addition to determining the fight choreography of the battle, and the immersive experience of the spectators. Although the archetype of the gladiator outlives the fall of the empire he embodies, the practice was curbed and then outlawed by Roman authorities. While the venationes continued for some time, the gladiator outlasted the Roman Empire only in fictionalized, or archetypal, form. It is onscreen that the gladiator stands as a visual cornerstone of popular understandings of Ancient Rome.

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The gladiator as archetype Building on the history outlined above, there are visual, narrative and thematic continuities between the amphitheatre-bound violence of the munera and subsequent mediated imaginings/visualizations of those gladiators and the gladiator characters who are forced to fight in underground tournaments or futuristic arenas. The heavily armed but scantily clad body of the gladiator registers the scars of time. Reading that body as a chronosoma becomes a way to measure continuities and shifts in violent masculinity and works towards an accurate and informed definition of the gladiator as an archetypal character beyond Rome. Roman gladiators were armed fighters and performers, trained in the ludus to fight other men or animals. Their fights and their bodies had religious and socio-historical resonance for the crowd gathered in amphitheatres throughout the Empire to witness their skill and the way they faced pain and possible death. Death was not as inevitable an outcome as later representations would insist. Gladiators were valuable commodities, achieving both fame and monetary recompense for their dangerous performances. They maintained a doubled or conflicted status in the Roman world – lauded, eroticized and celebrated for their embodiment of Roman virtus while simultaneously denied rights and considered officially infamous. This paradoxical status remains one of the keystones to understandings and representations of the gladiator – from Maciste in peplum films (such as Terror of Rome Against the Son of Hercules/Maciste, gladiatore di Sparta [Caiano 1964]) to the videogame avatar Kable/John Tillman in Gamer. While many of the gladiator’s specifically Roman characteristics have been lost in his remediated adaptations, there are a few salient and defining features that remain – or have been subsequently invented  – that add layers to the archetypal chronosoma. Put in simple terms, the gladiator archetype describes: a man (less often a woman) forced to fight (by circumstance or enslavement) for the entertainment of an audience. Each one of these interlocking pieces is essential to his or her resonance. I have built this definition from approximately 400 films, television programmes, music videos, paintings, sculptures, advertisements and videogames that formed the foundational database for this study of the gladiator. Informed by this database, Table 1.4 identifies the main features of the gladiator archetype, accompanied by supporting or illustrative examples.

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TABLE 1.4  Consistent attributes of the gladiator ­archetype Attributes of the archetypal gladiator in fiction

Illustrative characters

Films/programmes/ games

A white heterosexual man in his prime, 20s–40s

Spartacus, Maciste, Conan, John Tillman.

Spartacus, Spartacus (TV), Terror of Rome/ Maciste, gladiatore di Sparta, Conan the Barbarian, Gamer

A skilled, disciplined and well-trained warrior

Spartacus and Milo are trained in the ludus. John Tillman is military trained. Leo Bravo is a competitive fencer. Shane Slavin is a martial artist.

Spartacus, Pompeii, Gamer, Gladiator Cop, Forced to Fight

An unwilling fighter, forced into the arena

Maximus and Demetrius are slaves. Professor John Stoneman and Katniss Everdeen are forced to fight for television broadcasts. Jensen Ames is a prisoner.

Gladiator, Demetrius and the Gladiators, No Exit/Fatal Combat, The Hunger Games, Death Race

An outsider, deeply nostalgic for a lost home or family, never integrated into the community

Maximus is from Spain and Spartacus is from Thrace; both have lost their families. Bodicia and Mamawi have been kidnapped from Rome’s provinces. Jin Kazama is an underdog outsider challenging a corporate monopoly.

Gladiator, Spartacus, The Arena (1974), Tekken (film)

Framed by a vernacular understanding of stoicism

Maximus is the heir of stoic philosopher emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Milo is taciturn and unmoved by fame or physical pain, such as whipping. John Stoneman is an ethics professor who offers his friends and students philosophical advice.

Gladiator, Pompeii, No Exit/Fatal Combat

(Continued)

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Attributes of the archetypal gladiator in fiction

Illustrative characters

Films/programmes/ games

A member of an intense brotherhood/ sisterhood of fighters

Spartacus bonds with his fellow gladiators. Marcus turns his opponents into a coherent subversive group. Bodicia and Mamawi lead a troop of female gladiators against their Roman oppressors.

Spartacus, Seven Rebel Gladiators, The Arena (1974)

Becomes a celebrity through violent performance

Katniss Everdeen becomes famous through her broadcast on the Hunger Games, Maximus’s earns fame in the arena and the support of the crowd. Bex (Amy Johnston) becomes a celebrity of the underground fight rings. Drake is the celebrity hero of a futuristic biking show, forced to fight in the New Colosseum.

The Hunger Games, Gladiator, Female Fight Club, The New Gladiators

An eroticized spectacle, often with queer or camp associations

Milo and Atticus are offered to party guests as sexual partners. Ubaratutu is captured by an Amazon queen, made her ‘husband’ and then rescued by a jealous Thor. David Lord fights in an array of different fetish-like costumes (construction worker, biker, legionnaire). The female gladiators, Jessemina and Bodicia, are played by former Playboy playmates.

Pompeii, Thor and the Amazon Women, Arena (2011), The Arena (2001)

Played by an athlete, bodybuilder, fighter or performer who has undergone rigorous physical conditioning, who put their built bodies on display

Mark Forest and Lou Ferrigno were bodybuilders. Michael Jai White and Jeff Wincott were martial artists, Jason Statham was a diver, Gerard Butler and Kit Harington underwent bootcamp style pre-production regimes.

Colossus of the Arena/ Maciste, il gladiatore piu forte del mondo (Lupo, 1962), Seven Rebel Gladiators, The Seven Magnificent Gladiators/I sette magnifici gladiatori (Mattei, 1983), Blood and Bone, No Exit/Fatal Combat, Death Race, Gamer, Pompeii

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Attributes of the archetypal gladiator in fiction

Illustrative characters

Films/programmes/ games

Labelled with tough/ hypermasculine names (sometimes stage names)

Maximus, John Stoneman, John Tillman/Kable, Rocky, Bex ‘the Beast’, Gladius. Many modern/ futuristic gladiators are named John (e.g. John Carter).

Gladiator, No Exit/ Fatal Combat, Gamer, Rocky (Stallone, 1976), Female Fight Club, Hercules the Legendary Journeys, John Carter (Stanton, 2012)

While gladiator characters register the anxieties and fantasies of the culture that produces and consumes them, few of these central defining features change dramatically. It is the turn of the millennium, which provides the entry point of this study, that sees the most significant shift. Post-millennial gladiators are digitally augmented (both their bodies and their story worlds). Most importantly, there is a shift in the emotional register of the gladiator’s story: it is marked by a sharper sense of nostalgia and more explicit embodiment of loss, as noted by Robert A. Rushing (2016a), Martin Fradley (2004) and Michael Williams (2018). Maximus, Milo and the television Spartacus are significantly more traumatized than their predecessors and their stories have a tragic poignancy that is as heavily augmented as their digital backdrops. This produces a melodramatic sincerity that has become entwined with the heroism of the archetype.

An archetypal moment: The dying gladiator One striking example of the archetypal resonance of the gladiator is the ritualized moment of his heroic death. This is a key site for the tragic post-millennial gladiator, as earlier gladiators more frequently survived their battles to fight in other arena showdowns. The hero’s tragic death is a crucial emotional moment in the gladiatorial scenario (or filone) and its many associated genres. Where the peplum hero survived his story, later iterations of the genre culminate in the hero’s poetic death and his legacies, particularly those based on the doomed scenarios of Vesuvius’

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eruption or the story of Spartacus. The fated couple in Pompeii end frozen as plaster of Paris casts and Spartacus’ crucifixion at the close of Kubrick’s 1960 film is held onscreen in an affective tableau. They provide narrative justification for the lingering attention on the built male body made vulnerable through his suffering; transforming this suffering into something sacred. These moments further recall an established tradition of nostalgic romanticism that clings to the gladiator’s suffering body exemplified by discourses around the sculpture of the Dying Gaul, sometimes resonantly mislabelled as the Dying Gladiator (see Image 1.12), and Lord Byron’s description of a ghostly arena fight in Canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812). Byron’s vivid imaging of the gladiator fight celebrates the dignity of the suffering gladiator, calling forth a potent cocktail of pathos, stoicism, suffering masculinity and nostalgia that holds Rome and its crowds accountable for the blood spilled in the amphitheatre. Byron’s description provides a template for all the tragic deaths of the gladiators that would follow. Doomed post-millennial gladiators in fictions such as Gladiator, Pompeii and the Spartacus series are particularly indebted to Byron’s formulation, as is shown in the annotated Table 1.5.

Image 1.12  The Dying Gaul or The Dying Gladiator

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TABLE 1.5 Excerpt from Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Canto IV, Stanza 140), with annotation I see before me the Gladiator lie; He leans upon his hand,—his manly brow

The gladiator demonstrates manly courage (virtus) and stoicism, e.g. Maximus continues fighting after being mortally wounded in the final arena fight of Gladiator.

Consents to death, but conquers agony, And his drooped head sinks gradually low,— And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow

The gladiator’s death is tragic and horrific spectacle, e.g. Gannicus’ crucifixion is shown in grotesque detail in Spartacus.

From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one, Like the first of a thundershower; and now The arena swims around him,—he is gone, Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hailed the wretch who won.

The gladiator’s death requires witnesses, e.g. Maximus’s body is carried out of the Colosseum on the shoulders of soldiers.

He heard it, but he heeded not,—his eyes

The gladiator’s death is framed by nostalgia, e.g. Spartacus remembers his lost wife at the moment of his death.

Were with his heart, and that was far away. He recked not of the life he lost, nor prize; But where his rude hut by the Danube lay, (Continued)

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There were his young barbarians all at play,

The post-millennial gladiator is often a grieving or vengeful father, e.g. Maximus seeks to avenge his wife and son; Milo his village; Spartacus his wife.

There was their Dacian mother,—he, their sire, Butchered to make a Roman holiday!—

The death of the noble gladiator confirms the villainy of the Roman crowds, e.g. Spartacus’ death is framed as martyrdom.

All this rushed with his blood.—Shall he expire, And unavenged? Arise, ye Goths, and glut your ire!

Most post-millennial gladiator stories use revenge to fuel their narrative momentum, e.g. the goal of Spartacus, Maximus and Milo is revenge.

In 1960, Kirk Douglas’s Spartacus died as a Christ-like figure, crucified on the Appian Way, witnessing his baby son escaping Roman enslavement. Liam McIntyre’s Spartacus meets the death the audience knows is inevitable in a blood-spattered duel against his final adversary, Marcus Crassus. Just as Spartacus is about to kill Crassus, he is hit with multiple spears and falls to his knees in a pose that recalls the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. Blood and mud drip off the bodies of the men and sprays from Spartacus’s multiple impalements (see Images 1.13 and 1.14). He is brought back to the rebel encampment to die among his rebel army. In this sequence Spartacus’s death is trebled – his duel with Crassus, the spears thrown by the legionnaires, the tableau of rebels. Among his comrades in arms, Spartacus utters his final words as an inspiring legacy, ‘There is no greater victory than to fall from this world a free man.’ However, before these somewhat generic inspirational words are spoken, the dying gladiator remembers that Spartacus is not his true name: ‘That is not my name. I shall finally hear it again given voice by loving wife in greeting longed for.’ In a moment that echoes the gladiator’s many unmaskings and self-namings that I mapped in this

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Images 1.13 and 1.14  The deaths of Spartacus: On television and in Hermann Vogel’s (1882) Tod des Spartacus/The Death of Spartacus

volume’s introduction (I’m Spartacus! My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, I’m Jack’s wasted life), Spartacus’ dying refutation of the gladiator name that Rome has given him underlines the poetic tragedy of his archetypal death.

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The dying gladiator belongs to the ruins of Ancient Rome, where Byron imagines him. Counter-intuitively, the post-apocalyptic gladiator has a better chance of surviving the arena – Mad Max, John Tillman in Gamer, Drake in The New Gladiators, Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games and David in Arena (2011) ultimately escape their enslavement. Historical Rome is a lost place that invites a sense of tragic inevitability; whereas in the speculative future the apocalypse has already passed and a kind of pastoralism or retreatism is promised. This is another manifestation of the ‘before and after’ tension of the gladiator. His scenario is permitted a happy(ish) ending after the apocalypse, but not so before the fall of the Roman Empire. The present tense of Fight Club is balanced between these two scenarios or, rather, remains unique in navigating the eye of the historical hurricane. The disillusioned gladiator (Tyler/Jack) is offered a post-apocalyptic happy ending: holding hands with his heterosexual partner, but witnessing the destruction of Operation Mayhem with the knowledge that he himself has been its architect – a position made possible through his ritual enactment of the gladiatorial scenario (the fight club).

The gladiatorial scenario The archetypal gladiator is identifiable largely though his participation in an insular and ubiquitous sequence: the gladiatorial scenario. This spectacle of two fighters violently competing happens in front of an audience in a clearly demarcated space. The gladiatorial scenario is a contest between two warriors and a show for an enraptured audience. In fiction, the fight is most often to the death and the rules of the contest are flexible enough to include a visceral violence that distinguishes the gladiator scenario from other combat sports such as fencing or boxing. To pin down the gladiator scenario for analysis and to illustrate the continuity of its structure over a variety of formats and time periods, I look to the titles given to low-budget updates of gladiator stories. These films insist on their gladiatorial content through their titles. I have used these film titles to compile a roadmap of the scenario that holds fast

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when it is updated from Ancient Rome to the present or future (see Images 1.15–1.23): a physically fit man, or woman (made of Blood and Bone) who works in a manual or working-class job (Gladiator Cop) is Forced to Fight as a part of a deadly game (Endgame) or a secret society (Female Fight Club). The game has strict rules and is played for the entertainment of an unpredictable crowd watching in an Arena. Because the contest is Fatal Combat, the gladiator can Never Back Down, and must fight until the Final Round. This is the scaffolding supporting the gladiator’s story. The gladiatorial scenario is a mobile building block of gladiator stories and it can be adapted to a variety of genres and settings while retaining its fundamental format. It is insular and episodic, making it well suited to television and easily translated into a videogame level. As a cinematic spectacle, the arena fight – the primary form of the gladiatorial scenario – is a central spectacle easily recirculated and remediated via clips on video sharing sites such as Youtube. The arena fight is the focus of Chapter III’s analysis, which looks at the sequence across over eighty years of cinema.

Images 1.15–1.23  A road map to the gladiatorial scenario, expressed through film titles

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Conclusion: The gladiatorial impulse I argue that the gladiatorial archetype or scenario is part of a longstanding cultural impulse. The notion of culture as central to this impulse is crucial, as it distinguishes it from the biological impulses often assigned to martial masculinity. Jack Donovan’s The Way of Men is a clear illustration of this tendency. In it, he maintains, ‘Men are hard wired for aggressive play’ (Donovan, 2014, p. 7). This is the crux of the Men’s Rights’ Movement and serves as the foundation of Fight Club’s narrative concerns and the characterization of the amphitheatre’s crowd of spectators. I insist that the gladiatorial impulse is not a function of an essential or universal manhood. While I agree that the gladiatorial impulse is fundamentally about a Roman-inspired conceptualization of virtus, or virtuous qualities associated with warrior masculinity and manhood, the gladiator is an entertainer staging a ritual performance. The gladiatorial scenario remains a performance and thus will always be cultural rather than exclusively physiological. Its entanglement with nostalgia guarantees this and becomes persuasive evidence that the gladiatorial has less to say about the hardwiring of men’s brains than it does about an anxious sense of risk and loss. I stand counter to biologically essentialist notions of the irreducible relationship between men and violence. There are as many differences among men as between men and women. The notion that men are ‘hard wired’ for violence (the ‘boys will be boys’ argument) can become a convenient way of justifying, even glorifying, violent behaviour in men and boys. Refuting claims of universal male violence requires a separate project, tapping into intensely raging debates. This project deals predominantly with gladiators as myths, fictions and fantasies. However, it is important to delineate between universalist conceptions of eternal warrior masculinity and the fluid resonances of the gladiator as archetype, which is the subject of this analysis. My conceptualization and definition of the gladiatorial as an endlessly remediated archetype remains fixed on the concept of performance and on a more flexible notion of virtus, as a public-facing quality rooted in Ancient Rome and mythologized in adaptations of Roman culture and mythology.14 It is not necessarily limited to the male body, as classicist Thomas Wiedemann

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recalls: ‘Paradoxically, the very fact that women were not expected to share male virtues enables a female gladiator to symbolize that virtus as an abstract quality’ (1992, citing Cassius Dio, p. 112). Virtus is at once nostalgic, violent, performative, communal and tethered in nuanced ways to the gendered body. It is a foundational feature of popular understandings of Roman culture and, arguably, a lens through which the Romans mythologized themselves in antiquity. It is one of the driving forces behind the enduring appeal of the gladiator, along with nostalgia, eroticism and celebrity. Without question, the gladiatorial scenario is a long-standing trope, as Roman gladiatorial munera were staged across the Western and Eastern Empires for approximately 650 years. I would like to complicate the premise that the gladiatorial is a common and inevitable current in human culture. I align myself in this with the findings of classicists such as Hopkins (1983) and Edwards (2007) who insist that gladiatorial games were a unique feature of Roman culture. They argue that, quite simply, there has never been anything quite like these games before or after Rome. However, like Garrett Fagan (2011), I refuse to let this be the close of the discussion of the ongoing resonances of the gladiatorial in Western art, media and culture. He insists, ‘There is nothing peculiarly Roman about attraction to violent spectacle, even if the munera were indeed particularly Roman events’ (2011, p. 38). The gladiator is ubiquitous. The gladiatorial impulses in Western culture continue to reanimate the gladiator in his specificity and universality. He is both unique and without translation (indigenous to Rome) and archetypal (bound to Western culture and beyond).15 It is tempting to graft the metaphor of contagion onto the expansion of gladiatorial munera throughout the Roman world; a contagion that continues even after patient zero (the Roman Empire) has died. In the post-millennial period, the chronological and thematic centre of this project, the digitization of the gladiator demands a different, less geographically contingent model. The gladiator has been networked. He has become an avatar as well as an archetype. The forces that support him are both mythic and ludic. In the chapter that follows, I investigate the intersection of genre and gameplay in stories about gladiators in order to argue that gladiator fights are bound by rules and operate as games. This play informs the way the gladiator has been framed in fiction, particularly in cinema via populist genres such

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as the Italian peplum. This play is written on the scarred body of the gladiator, who I have defined as a man forced to fight for a greedy crowd’s entertainment in the rule-bound gamespace of the arena. This chapter has introduced and critically defined the gladiator through the concept of the chronosoma (time body); offering a genealogy that maps his, and sometimes her, translation from a historical actor to a digitally augmented archetype, via networks of representation that emphasize masculine strength or virtue – virtus – as the building block of a society and empire nostalgically threatened with extinction. The parameters of loss have changed, heightening with the melodrama of the millennium and graphically imagined through advances in digital technologies and the action-based aesthetics of cinema.

Chapter II Genre play

Here, where the Roman millions blame or praise / Was death or life, the playthings of a crowd. LORD BYRON (CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE, CANTO IV, STANZA 142)

Simon: Kable? Kable, dude, it’s me. It’s me. Kable: Who? Simon: Simon. I’m … I’m playing you. GAMER

The kinetic action film Gamer imagines a near future in which gamers control human bodies as gladiatorial avatars. Teenager Simon (Logan Lerman) manipulates death row inmate John Tillman in a combat game called Slayers. The game taps into the gladiatorial scenario and is heavily informed by the aesthetic of games such as Call of Duty (2003) and Medal of Honor (1999). Gamer is an update on speculative gaming fictions such as The Running Man, Rollerball (Jewison, 1975), The New Gladiators/I guerrieri dell’anno 2072, The Hunger Games, Endgame, Death Race 2000 and its remake. The film is most defined by the frenetic pacing and innovative digital cinematography that directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor pioneered in Crank (2006). The story follows John Tillman’s struggle to free himself and his family from the mind-controlling software implanted by a corrupt corporation, embodied by reclusive autocrat Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall). Like the gladiators who came before him, John is forced to fight for the crowd’s entertainment, manipulated both by authority (here a corporate rather

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than political/military empire) and the bloodthirsty crowds. The film adds an additional layer to this arena-mob mentality, as gamer Simon literally manipulates John’s body during gameplay, determining whether he lives, dies or kills. Like other post-millennial gladiators, John’s story relies on this layered doubling – as an avatar, he is doubled with Simon and with himself: he is both the game piece ‘Kable’ and John Tillman, a soldier condemned to death and forced to fight. Gamer’s doubling of the male body asks more complex questions than one might expect. Rather than vilifying Simon as a rich boy who cannot understand violence (or authentic masculinity), he comes to his avatar’s aid. He looks strikingly similar to John, suggesting that he might be a nascent or digital version of gladiatorial masculinity. Actor Logan Lerman’s previous role as Poseidon’s son in the Percy Jackson franchise (Columbus and Freudenthal, 2010–2013) recalls the mythically informed sword and sandal films, as does Butler’s role as Leonidas in 300. The teaming of Poseidon’s son with Sparta’s king playfully engages with the dualities of the gladiatorial genre and its ‘before and after’ logic. The film’s poster makes the doubling between Simon and John/Kable explicit (see Image 2.24 below).

Image 2.24  Poster for Gamer

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Additionally, the taglines circulated as part of the film’s publicity present alternative ways that Butler’s character is doubled – one asks, ‘Who’s playing you?’, thus suggesting we are much like the imprisoned and manipulated John, struggling to escape media manipulation. Conversely, the tagline on the DVD release of the film – ‘Unleash him’ – puts us in Simon’s position, with the exciting option of unleashing Butler at any moment. Are we cogs in the Wachowskis’ matrix or players in a postmodern game? Gamer refuses to commit to either and even its happy ending seems more playful than conclusive. While remaining absolutely and nostalgically committed to the authenticity of the built male body, the film uses gamespaces and ludic logic to play with the gladiatorial scenario; offering an updated gladiator whose remediation makes him seem as urgently relevant as he is seductively nostalgic.1 Gamer reveals this chapter’s fundamental argument that onscreen gladiatorial combat is fundamentally ludic. This is true of the bounded gamespace of the amphitheatre and equally true of the ways that gladiatorial iconography circulates in visual culture via the pathways of genre and as modes of entertainment – from arcade games such as Street Fighter (1987) and Gladiator (1986) to the combative athletics of reality programmes such as American Gladiators. In his seminal study of gameplay, cultural historian Johan Huizinga insists, ‘It is of utmost significance that these Roman gladiatorial combats, bloody, superstitious and illiberal as they were, nevertheless kept to the last the simple word ‘ludus’ with all its association of freedom and joyousness’ (1980, p.74). However, the gladiator, as fighter and performer, exists as both player and game piece, as illustrated by Gamer’s John. In addition to insisting on the connection between gladiator combat and gameplay, I argue that this sense of playfulness is how the gladiatorial scenario and the archetypal gladiator character relate to structures of genre. This relationship is not limited to postmodern practices of intertextuality. Rather, it is a key to the archetype and has been reinforced at almost every generic iteration, leaving an indelible imprint. Genre scholarship acknowledges the slippery nature of genres across media.2 Rick Altman’s landmark study begins by flagging the classical roots of our understanding of genre, citing Plato’s categories such as poetry and tragedy. He later argues that genre mixing has been understood as a romantic ‘critique of neoclassical generic purity’ (1999, p. 123) and should be studied as a ‘discursive issue’ (1999, p. 123).

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From its similarly classical origins to its current digitization, the fluidity and adaptability of the gladiatorial scenario across many genres (subgenres, cycles, series, modes and media) demands just such a discursive analysis that takes genre mixing and evolution into account. However, such a process requires the use of a more precise term than genre for a more diffuse phenomenon. Thus, I argue for a reconsideration or reanimation of the Italian critical term filone as the most appropriate and useful for an analysis of the gladiatorial scenario, its archetypal characterizations and its memorable iconography. The word filone was first used to describe Italian popular genre cinema; it is a flexible term describing interweaving threads of influence rather than concrete categories. To this definition of the filone’s fluidity, I would add the feature of playfulness that pre-dates and outlasts postmodern notions of pastiche and inhabits the form and content of the gladiator’s stories. In order to prove that the gladiatorial scenario should be described and analysed as a filone with a playful relationship to existing genres, this chapter first offers a detailed consideration of the term filone. It then goes on to describe the key genre moments in the history of the gladiatorial filone, notably the mid-century Italian peplum, the 1980s barbarian film, sword and sandal television of the 1990s and the millennial reboot begun with Gladiator. The second half of the chapter uses the film Gamer as a central case study to argue for the inclusion of films that transpose the gladiator from his traditional Roman setting. Gamer, and films like it, solidify the gladiator as ubiquitous archetype, demonstrating a ludic sense of genre.

Play, violence and the gladiator Huizinga’s main premise in Homo Ludens is that play is a civilizing force that should not be discussed allegorically or as a training ground for more ‘serious’ or complex pursuits, such as war. Rather, he argues that ‘play is a thing by itself’ (1980, p. 45) with fixed rules and an insulated sense of time bounded by a gamespace that separates it from ordinary life. Like Altman, Huizinga quotes Plato at several important moments to emphasize how play is integral to culture and to idealize play as a human expression or humanist practice. Plato, he recalls, argues that ‘… man is made God’s plaything, and that is the best part of him’ (1980,

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p. 18). He insists that ‘life must be lived as play’ (1980, p. 19).3 Gamer’s gladiatorial violence reveals the dark side of these Platonic aphorisms and their idealization of gameplay. The avatar (Kable) is certainly a plaything forced to experience life and death as gameplay and the gamer (Simon) similarly experiences the film’s narrative through (and as) play. However, both are bound by the enforced disciplinary rules of authority embodied by media mogul Ken Castle. Gamer’s graphic violence both supports and resists the apparatus of corporate power. It is the addition of violence to the notion of play that is a particular feature of gladiatorial games, as opposed to other types of play. Huizinga concludes his book by again drawing from Plato and his premise that play ‘lies outside of morals. In itself it is neither good nor bad’ (1980, p. 213). The consideration of violence as part of the joyousness flagged up by Huizinga is generally side-lined, repressed and under analysed. An omission this chapter aims to redress. A more typical take is the one exemplified by Lord Byron’s influential and poetic evocation of gladiatorial munera in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which heaps blame on the Roman crowds for treating the gladiator’s fate as a game ‘[w]here Murder breathed her bloody steam’ and ‘where the Roman millions’ blame or praise / Was death or life, the playthings of a crowd’ (Canto IV, Stanza 142). He hints that the consequence for such bloodthirsty play is Rome’s ultimate decline at the hands of vengeful barbarians. Whereas Huizinga, following Plato, imagines that gameplay might be the best part of humanity, Byron’s fatalism here suggests that the game of gladiatorial combat is ‘murder’ and ‘slaughter’ indicative of a ‘Rome and her Ruin past Redemption’s skill’. On the other hand, Byron’s gladiators are all ghosts, and his Colosseum already a magical ruin. He muses that it does not really matter where we, or gladiators, die because ‘what matters where we fall to fill the maws of worms – on battle-plains or listed spot? Both are but theatres where the chief actors rot’ (Canto IV, Stanza 139). Thus, for Byron, the haunted space of the amphitheatre is not only a playground but a doomed performance that mirrors the larger futility of human life. As Mary Beard and Keith Hopkins assert, Byron’s description of the gladiator’s death and the ruin of the Colosseum has had an enduring influence on writers and storytellers that were to follow (2010, p. 4). To Byron’s and Ridley Scott’s romantic notions of the gladiator tragically ‘butcher’d to make a Roman holiday’ I would like to

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add Gamer’s violent joyousness and ambiguous presentation of gladiatorial gameplay. This ambiguity unfolds in debates around the purpose of the gladiator games. Classicist Keith Hopkins agrees with Huizinga’s premise that Roman gladiatorial contests were game-like, although he suggests that this was part of a process whereby the skills of the battlefield, particularly during peacetime, became less relevant and their martial charge was translated into the gamespace of the arena. When long-term peace came to the heartlands of the empire, particularly after 31 BC, these militaristic traditions were preserved at Rome in the domesticated battlefield of the amphitheatre. War had been converted into a game, a drama repeatedly replayed, of cruelty, violence, blood and death. (Hopkins, 1983, p. 29) Unlike Huizinga, who argues that games should be taken on their own terms, Hopkins suggests that the gladiatorial bouts were tamed expressions of war, whose ludic nature depended on the domestication of militarism during times of peace. Garrett Fagan, however, disagrees, and highlights the many gladiatorial games staged in peacetime as well as times of war (2011, p. 21). This divergence suggests the tension fundamental to gladiatorial bouts: are they merely ‘venting’ systems for cultural or psychological masculine impulses towards violence? Or are they important training grounds and performance spaces for masculine skills that are needed elsewhere (e.g. in the military during wartime)? Still other historians (Wiedemann, 1992) draw our attention to the designation of gladiatorial games as munera (duties/obligations) rather than ludi (games) – reflecting the important religious aspect of gladiatorial performances that distinguished them from other games such as chariot racing. I would argue that in visual culture, particularly in the cinema, the sharp edge of militarism and the solemnity of religious ritual endure as supporting structures of the gladiatorial mythology. This debate continues, with regards to combat sports such as mixed marital arts and the violent content of videogames, particularly fighting and warbased games. When our games are violent, it seems, their pleasures become more intertwined with guilt and prompt anxious policing and

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careful narrativizing. It is for this reason that the gladiator character is always framed as reluctant to fight in the arena. It is important to look at the deadly game of the gladiator on its own terms and for its own sake, as Huizinga insists. This means taking the Roman gladiatorial munera in the context of Roman cultural practices and norms, as was established in Chapter I. For the purpose of this study, and its focus on the cinematic gladiator in particular, looking at gladiatorial combat for its own sake means recognizing a stylized expression of extreme emotion including rage and violent joy; it is the performance of hard-won skills, of a kind of vernacular stoicism tied to the power of the white male body in patriarchal culture and the (largely mistaken) belief that such power is deteriorating and is threatened by outsiders. At a basic level, the gladiator battle is a contest to see who is the better fighter. This is made clear on television, where many reality programmes distil the gladiatorial scenario to an athletic contest, for example American Gladiators and its UK and Australian counterparts, Ninja Warrior (G4 Media, 2007), Wipeout (ABC, 2008–2014), Deadliest Warrior and Bromans. To analyse the onscreen gladiator games for their own sake is to acknowledge the many pleasures on offer through this violence, as well as through the pleasures of the tragic cautionary tales. It is to highlight the multiple functions of the gladiator games. The gladiator’s violent gameplay is a tourist destination, a contest, a game, a burlesque and erotic show and an expression of an intense homosocial brotherhood. The deadly gameplay of the gladiator is not played out exclusively on the sands of the arena; it is likewise a formal principle in stories about gladiators, particularly in visual media such as film. The gladiator character and scenario are always ludic (even irreverent) in their engagement with genre – weaving together strands of other genres and visual traditions in a manner that does not belong exclusively to the pastiche and parody of postmodern practice, but to longer standing conventions and reinventions of classicism, neoclassicism and nostalgia. While post-medieval depictions of the gladiator play with notions of the ideal so central to classicism, post-millennial versions are singularly able to combine this idealized classicist current with a playful integration of the genres in which the gladiator has previously appeared. Thus, the gladiators featured in the Starz series Spartacus can embody the posturing of the strongman in mid-century Italian

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film, the statuesque idealized male figure rediscovered and reinvented in eighteenth-century art history, Lord Byron’s evocation of the dying fighter ‘butcher’d to make a Roman holiday’ and the vicious kinetic power of Zach Snyder’s 300 Spartans. The series belongs to many genres and traditions simultaneously, knowingly and playfully.

Gameplay and genre Huizinga defines ‘play’ as having concrete rules, its own sense of time, communities of players and a dedicated (‘consecrated’ [1980, p. 10]) playground that forms an insulated inner world. To this he adds, ‘order, tension, movement, change, solemnity, rhythm, rapture’ (1980, p. 18). These are generic signifiers as much as they are formal features of gameplay. Game features form both the semantic (iconographic) and syntactic (organizational/structural) signposts of gladiatorial stories, to use Rick Altman’s (1999) influential terminology. The iconography of the amphitheatre as gladiatorial playground and key armatures such as the retiarius’ trident and net are easily recognizable, even in non-Roman stories about gladiators (e.g. the Martian amphitheatre in John Carter, Finnick Odair’s trident in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire [Lawrence, 2013]). Ludic elements also inform the narrative and formal syntactic features of the scenario across genres, telling the gladiator’s stories in familiar ways, often with clear cultural resonances. For example, Russell Crowe’s Maximus and Dan Vadis’ Roccia4 fight corrupt imperial powers, just as Gerard Butler’s John Tillman battles an evil corporate magnate, through their gladiatorial gameplay, in front of audiences who ultimately side with the celebrity gladiator rather than the established authority figures. The gladiatorial scenario, or filone, follows remarkably consistent senses of time, narrative rules and rhythms, all performed with aesthetic recognizability in the bounded gamespace of the arena, itself the central subject of the next chapter.

From genre to filone The term ‘gladiator movie’ has been used as a genre label and, in many ways, a central goal of this book is to offer an updated and critical map of the ‘gladiator movie’. While the continuities in iconography and syntax

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of the scenario suggest the practicalities of the use of the label ‘gladiator movie’, the term has some undeniable and noteworthy limitations. Most importantly, so-called gladiator films often tell stories that do not involve gladiators, or the gladiatorial scenario, at all. Famously, Steve Reeves never played a gladiator, although he did find himself in a few arena-based skirmishes, the most memorable of which is staged in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius’ eruption in The Last Days of Pompeii (Bonnard, 1959). Rather, ‘gladiator movie’ refers to stories set in the mythical or classical past – generally Greece, Rome and Egypt. The gladiator character becomes metonymic of the ancient world in significant ways, recalling not only Roman munera, but everything that was violent, permissive, heroic or corrupt about society and entertainment in the ancient world. The term is now used interchangeably with the labels ‘sword-and-sandal’ film, ‘historical epic’ and, in critical contexts, peplum. It is revealing that aggregate sites (Rotten Tomatoes, for example), online databases (such as IMDb) and streaming services (such as Amazon Prime and Netflix) do not list ‘gladiator film/movie’ as a genre but use ‘gladiator’, ‘arena’ and ‘gladiator battle’ as searchable keywords, providing evidence for the consideration of the gladiator character as an archetype and the scenario (‘gladiator battle’) as a mobile syntactic element.5 The designation ‘gladiator movie’, I argue, is not a genre but playfully conveys a sense of genre. This sense of genre is illustrated by the way in which the gladiator movie has become associated with a set of preferred readings. Like the musical, the term ‘gladiator movie’ has particularly strong links with queer readings (and a homoerotic subtext has become an expected syntactical feature). This is exemplified in the 1980 parodic comedy Airplane! (Abrahams and Zuckers), in which the off-kilter pilot welcomes a young boy into the cockpit of the airplane. The joke-a-minute style of the film has the boy quizzing the co-pilot about his identity (he is played by basketball superstar Kareem Abdul Jabar, who has appeared as a kind of gladiator character in Bruce Lee’s unfinished Game of Death [Clouse and Lee, 1978]). Meanwhile, the pilot asks a series of comedically inappropriate questions that no one appears to register: ‘You ever been in a cockpit before? You ever seen a grown man naked? Joey, do you ever hang around the gymnasium? Joey, you like movies about gladiators?’ This joke depends on the expectation that audiences associate gladiator movies with homoeroticism, a relationship that is explored in greater detail in

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Chapter V. The gladiator movie – and the gladiator filone as I define it – is persuasive in conveying a sense of genre rooting itself in one, or two, specific genres. For that reason, I consider Gamer, Arena and The Hunger Games as gladiator movies as much as Pompeii, Spartacus or Triumph of the Ten Gladiators. Figure 2.3 illustrates the fluid, interconnected and flexible nature implied by the term filone. I argue that the gladiatorial is best described and, more importantly, analysed using the Italian critical term filone rather than genre, subgenre, series or cycle. The concept of the filone is another way to label the ‘sense of genre’ just established and it augments the term ‘scenario’ as I have been using it, giving both greater precision as well as a more accurate sense of scope. It further highlights the playful relationship between the scenario and established genres that have featured and been founded on the gladiatorial (from the Italian peplum film to US boxing films). Though indicative of wider archetypal patterns, the gladiatorial filone remains anchored in the post-industrial mass media,

Figure 2.3 This web highlights many of the generic designations used to ­ escribe and market films built around gladiatorial scenarios d

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in particular finding its most comfortable home in the cinema. The filone and the gladiator archetype are largely, though not exclusively, cinematic. While there are nuances to scholarly definitions of the term filone, there is general agreement that it is more fluid and flexible than the term ‘genre’ and that it was galvanized in the context of popular Italian cinema of the post-war period, including giallo films (crime films), peplum (sword and sandal films), spaghetti westerns, horror (and its mondo offshoots) and other exploitation cycles. In his discussion of the giallo, folklorist Mikel Koven (2006) offers a useful starting point for a definition of filone. He begins by citing the ways filone has been used in non-cinematic contexts: to refer to veins of minerals running through rock, as the main current in a branching river and, in literary contexts, referring to something written in the tradition of (‘sullo stesso filone’) or following the tradition of/in the vein of (‘seguire il filone’) (2006, pp. 5–6). The liquid metaphor of the river has had the most resonance and Koven cites Paul Hoffman’s influential New York Times definition of filone as a streamlet off a main river (2006, p. 5). In his discussion of the performance of Italian films in the global box office, Christopher Wagstaff (1998) uses the term ‘formula’, in place of filone, to describe those popular genre films (including the peplum films) produced in Italy with the support of governmental tax rebates and quotas. Following Wagstaff’s lead, Koven and Donato Totaro (2011) argue that filone is a uniquely located term, indigenous to Italian popular cinema between the late 1950s and the early 1980s. Koven insists that it ‘is the culture of production that creates the environment of the filone’ (Koven 2006, p.11) and Totaro further itemizes this:  … it is highly unlikely that the varied factors that enabled Italy to be the hub of international co-productions from the 1950s to 1970s will ever be duplicated – the Legge Corona of 1965 which  increased subsidies in coproductions; the presence of major US film companies; the huge popularity of western television shows in the post 1950s period in the US which created a void in the US production of big screen westerns, which Italian producers gladly filled; along with the much slower dissemination of television in Italy, especially the South, which meant that Italians still went to the cinema theatres in great numbers; the city of Rome as an attraction for international

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filmmakers and actors; and the great reputation of Cinecittà as a huge studio with gifted technicians. (citing Wagstaff, 2011) Essential to my understanding and use of the term filone is its Italian production context outlined by Totaro, Wagstaff, Mark Betz (2013) and others. The Italian film industry and its scholarship are likewise crucial to my interrogation of the intersection points between masculinity and gladiatorial violence. Like the moment at the turn of the millennium in which Hollywood produced Gladiator, Italian popular cinema is a focalizing maelstrom around which the central issues of this project circulate. This is particularly true of my theorization of genre and commandeering of the term filone to understand the way that the gladiatorial (playfully) relates to genre. I use the millennium as a springboard for looking to the way the gladiatorial is written in terms of an interplay between ‘before’ (pre-modern, idealized, pre-feminist) and ‘after’ (dystopian, authentic, elegiac). Similarly, I look to the moment in Italian cinema when filone first crystallized around lowbrow popular cinema, or ‘vernacular’ cinema as Koven labels it.6 These films were designed to be made quickly and cater to popular tastes, domestically and abroad. The mid-century gladiatorial filone marks a place where the gladiatorial scenario became temporarily fixed within a cycle of films. Moreover, this was a key point in discourses of classicism and its imagery, in the wake of Benito Mussolini’s use of classical iconography to build a potent fascist imaginary, as Richard Dyer (1997) has most notably analysed in his study on the racial politics of the peplum film. Italy’s early history must be central to any understanding of the gladiatorial, its mythology and the global patterns of its imagery’s circulation. Gladiators were unique to Rome, even if the gladiatorial archetype is more mobile and enduring. As I have established, drawing from the works of classicists, gladiatorial munera belong exclusively to their Roman context without direct cross-cultural equivalents. However, as I have likewise insisted, the story of the gladiator and the imagery of his struggles are not limited to Ancient Roman origins, as the example of fascist imagery proves. The gladiatorial filone moves freely beyond Rome into the (old and new) media of many different nations: from the classically informed gladiator fights in Thor: Ragnarok, to the octagon of the Ultimate Fighting Championships and films such as Warrior

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(O’Connor, 2011). Therefore, like Betz, I am extending the use of filone ‘beyond studies of Italian cinema’ (2013 p. 511) and beyond the giallo, peplum or mondo categories in order to trace manifestations of the gladiatorial across a web of different genres and through a variety of playful formal tactics. Furthermore, I extend this to define the gladiatorial scenario and filone as untethered from Ancient Roman iconography, but uniquely and significantly able to translate across settings. In keeping with understandings of filone as rooted in the production practices and histories of postwar Italy, but moving beyond this time and location, my articulation of the gladiatorial filone includes the following established elements: ●●

●●

●●

●● ●●

Its involvement in practices of international co-productions and transnational distribution patterns; A definition that traces repeated/resonant patterns of story, character or setting (as in Wagstaff and Lagny’s [1992, p. 178] use of the term ‘formula’); The fluidity of its meaning, suggesting slipstreams and ­intersec­ting currents of generic markers, conventions and traditions; Its rootedness in popular or vernacular cinema; By extension, the widespread association of the word filone with the lowbrow and exploitation cinema.

To this list of elements generally accepted by Italian cinema scholars, I propose the following three amendments to more accurately define the way the gladiatorial filone functions: ●●

Its continuing relevance beyond mid-century Italian ­production and distribution contexts

As the many examples discussed in this volume attest, films about gladiators have been made and exhibited in several different countries in different time periods, including the Gladiator-inspired Hollywood reboot (e.g. Pompeii, The Legend of Hercules); the Canadian television film (Gladiator Cop) and Russian-produced direct to video (e.g. The Arena [Bekmambetov, 2001]). In his influential study of genre and Hollywood (2000), Steve Neale concludes by championing ‘… a more inclusive and

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flexible approach to Hollywood’s output, one which can encompass minor trends, local and non-canonic genres, cyclic contributions, starformula combinations and hybrids’ (Neale, 2000, p. 254). In reorienting and reapplying the term filone and considering gladiators beyond their Roman origins and beyond their Italian articulation, I am taking Neale’s advice and offering a more accurate map of gladiatorial imagery.7 ●●

Its self-aware sense of recycling and play with ­established cinematic conventions

This is exemplified in the frequently quoted statement by screenwriter/ director Luigi Cozzi: ‘In Italy, if you bring a script to a producer, the first question he asks is not “what is your film like” but “what film is your film like” that’s the way it is, we can only make Zombie 2, never Zombie 1’ (cited in Renga, 2011, p. 246; also in Koven, 2006 pp. 10–11). ‘These directors’, Dana Renga elaborates, ‘are not hoping to make the next great filmic masterpiece; instead, they are consciously and playfully recycling storylines, props and productions equipment’ (Renga, 2011, p. 251, my emphasis). This playful nature does not mean that the Italian genre films cannot speak to urgent cultural fears, anxieties or historical traumas, as Renga goes on to argue: ‘These films reference and playfully imitate their cinematic predecessors, while dramatizing and ironizing real fears and tensions associated with catastrophe’ (Renga, 2011, p. 252, my emphasis). Here Renga speaks to the particulars of the post-apocalyptic filone (that she dubs the ‘pastapocalypse’ film), but it applies across several Italian filoni, the peplum most certainly included. The New Gladiators and Endgame are examples that are both updated gladiator films and post-apocalypse films. It is the playful nature of the filone that I would like to foreground, in the context of production as well as representation. The ‘gladiator movie’ tells stories of violent games by playing with genre and its signifiers, tapping into the history of cinema as much as the history of the classical world. Cinema, according to Amanda Ann Klein and R. Barton Palmer, ‘has always been rooted in the idea of multiplicities – that is, in a text that consciously repeats and exploits images, narratives, or characters found in previous texts’ (2016, pp. 8–9). What Klein and Palmer name ‘multiplicities’ describes the many transmedia and transgeneric cycles, series and reboots that have characterized Hollywood filmmaking. I would argue that the gladiatorial filone is a particularly long-lived and

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resonant vein of multiplicities – well suited to the nostalgic remediation made possible by and through digital image-making technologies and to the practice of franchising and sequels. ●●

Its suitability to current digitally networked distribution patterns

The digital articulation of the gladiatorial filone is a networked one  – at once looking to the up-to-the minute innovations of filmmakers (e.g. Gladiator’s digital realization of the Colosseum or Gamer’s cinematography) and offering access to a large-scale catalogue of older films (e.g. Anthony Mann’s The Fall of the Roman Empire and Rebel Gladiators/Ursus, il gladiatore ribelle [Paolella 1962], all of which tell similar stories about gladiator-obsessed emperor Commodus). In this way, genre on streaming platforms such as Netflix or Amazon Prime recalls Luigi Cozzi’s rueful observation that the emphasis must always be on the sequel or the spinoff. The algorithm-based genre model is concerned with recommendations that branch from the original text. Daniel Smith-Rowsey argues that Netflix’s recommendation lists are ‘programmed with what I call intentional instability’ (2016, p. 64, emphasis in original) demonstrated through pathways of genre. SmithRowsey argues that genre is ‘a core aspect of Netflix’s business model’ (2016, p. 64) and that its unstable architecture allows the company to hijack the ‘long tail’ economic model by offering a combination of recommendations based on algorithmic viewing patterns and advertiserinformed input. Thus, Netflix’s ‘because you watched Gladiator’ category includes films with similar plot and setting (e.g.   300) and also advertisements disguised as recommendations. Amazon Prime appeals to a community of viewers by flagging up the fact that viewers who watched Gladiator also watched Braveheart, Kingdom of Heaven (Scott, 2005), Troy, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Weir, 2003), among others. These networks circulate around the key successful or chosen text (Gladiator or, in Cozzi’s case, Zombie 1), offering a combination of old and new films and exploiting an inbuilt instability that, I would argue, is perfectly suited to the long-standing playful nature of the filone’s relationship to genre, particularly in relation to a fluid scenario, such as those featuring gladiators. The structural drive of the networked filone is curatorial, catering to the pleasures of the digital archaeologist who has access to

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seemingly infinite trails/strata of media offerings that are not organized chronologically, nor bunched in an evolutionary model. Rather they ‘stream’ as filone, branching away from and back into the source point of the originally viewed film. The use of the term ‘streaming’ services to describe online viewing is more than a coincidence of metaphor: it suggests evidence of the impact of viewing modalities on understandings and uses of genre.8 The gladiator circulates with notable visibility and fluidity through these networked filones, but he is rooted to several key moments in film production and reception. These form whirlpools in the currents of the gladiatorial filone. There are four key genre moments in the screen history of the gladiator: the Italian peplum, the 1980s barbarian film, the 1990s televisual gladiator and the millennial reboot. I have mapped these with an eye towards acknowledging the historical specificities of each articulation but keeping the thread of significant continuities central.9 Most importantly, I am focusing on these genre cycles in order to identify the nature of the gladiatorial as filone. Building on this understanding of the breadth and movement of the gladiatorial in media, I also argue for the inclusion of non-Roman gladiators, whose addition brings urgency and immediacy to the archetype and proves that its durability is rooted in its adaptability.

The mid-century Italian peplum In tracing a comprehensive genealogy of the peplum genre Robert A. Rushing opens with a consideration of the term peplum, which he summarizes as ‘Italian films filled with beefy bodybuilders in even scantier costumes, and the term ‘peplum’ came largely to be used for these lowbudget, muscular extravaganzas’ (2016a, p. 2). Rushing establishes that the term peplum is largely used by French critics from the early 1960s aiming to take the genre seriously, ‘whereas more dismissive (or simply amused) commentaries call them ‘gladiator movies’ or ‘swordand-sandal’ films’ (2016a, p. 2). It was largely the Italian- and Englishlanguage critics that tended to dismiss the genre while the French critics, in the vein of those at Cahièrs du cinéma, gave them more measured attention. It is worth reinforcing here that the term ‘gladiator movie’ is traditionally used pejoratively, tying the scenario to that which can be

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safely ignored as low cultural genre fare. This association between the gladiator and low culture generally continues. The peplum is the single most important generic touchpoint for the gladiator. The term itself comes from an article of diaphanous women’s clothing associated with antiquity that is a signature part of the (revealing) female wardrobe in these films. While Rushing is correct that film scholars have hesitated to take the genre seriously, there are notable exceptions, including the scholars named above.10 Frank Burke insists that peplum films are ‘not just silly, they are seriously silly, parodying their own escapism and allowing for compelling critiques of the extreme limitations posed by the Americanization of politics at the end of and following the Second World War’ (Burke, 2011, p. 18). Rushing takes up Burke’s position, but widens its historical window to include the peplum reboots (outlined below) and insists that peplum films need careful scholarly attention because: the peplum amounts to a century-long cinematic biopolitical intervention that offers the spectator an imagined form of the ideal male body, overflowing with health, muscular energy and natural vitality, one that appears as a defense against menacing forms of alterity on the outside, including not only illness and degeneracy but also sexual and racial difference. (2016a, p. 3) Like Burke and Rushing, I am taking the peplum seriously. Furthermore, and more specifically, I am taking the ‘gladiator movie’ and the gladiator seriously. The gladiator is a nostalgic model of violent manhood that embodies and enacts a variety of crises in masculinity. Despite his robust physicality and the fact that he belongs to the most powerful demographic in Western culture (white, cis-gendered, heterosexual, able bodied man), he is endlessly victimized, enslaved and threatened. As patriarch-writ-as-underdog, he registers the threatened aspects of historical and bio-political shifts in power. The gladiator is an object of erotic and voyeuristic fascination and the focus of a deep and powerful cultural longing. His struggles reveal the pleasures of violence and brotherhood, and the injuries men do to one another. The gladiator’s story tells us of the power of the crowd – to pervert and demand justice, to confer celebrity, to condemn and to radically resist or conservatively

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support existing structures of authority, particularly written in imperialist terms. The gladiator should be taken seriously because he signals, resists, embodies and survives all that is corrupt in media-based/ entertainment culture. Scholars, such as Michèle Lagny (1992) and Daniel O’Brien (2014), agree that the peplum solidifies as a genre around the character of strongman Maciste (played by dockworker Bartolomeo Pagano) in Giovanni Pastrone’s 1913 Cabiria. Wildly popular with audiences, Pagano’s Maciste was to appear in many other films from 1915 to 1926, inspiring several imitators.11 The peplum’s second golden age (Lagny, 1992, p. 163) in Italian cinema of the 1950s and 1960s begins with Piero Francisci’s 1958 Hercules (featuring Steve Reeves, another strongman to headline across multiple films). Over 300 peplum films were produced in Italy between 1957 and 1965, in the wake of Hercules’ success (Günsberg, 2005, p. 97). The mid-century peplum was shot in Italy and distributed both domestically and abroad. Many of these films were co-productions, e.g. Ulysses (Camerini 1954), starring soon-to-be Spartacus Kirk Douglas. Maggie Günsberg and Rushing highlight the success of these films not only in the terza visione theatres across Italy, but in the US, the UK and in France.

Gladiators in the peplum Although not all so-called ‘gladiator movies’ featured actual gladiator characters, many did and they remain lasting icons of the genre. Peplum gladiators include: ●●

●●

●●

Roger Browne as Marcus in Seven Rebel Gladiators/Sette contro tutti; Mark Forest as Hercules/Attalus in The Magnificent Gladiator/ Il magnifico gladiatore (Brescia 1964) and Maciste in Terror of Rome Versus Hercules’ Son/Maciste, gladiatore di Sparta and Colossus of the Arena/Maciste, il gladiatore piu forte del mondo; Richard Harrison as Darius in Gladiators 7/I sette gladiatori (­Lazaga 1962) and as Rezius in The Invincible Gladiator/Il ­gladiatore invincible (De Martino and Momplet 1961);

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Gordon Scott as Marcus in Battles of the Gladiators/Gladiator of Rome/Il gladiatore di Roma (Costa 1962); Rock Stevens as Spartacus in Challenge of the Gladiator/Il gladiatore che sfidò l’impero (Paolella 1965); Dan Vadis appearing in a recurring role as Roccia the gladiator in The Ten Desperate Men/The Ten Gladiators/I dieci gladiatori, Triumph of the Ten Gladiators/Il triofo dei dieci gladiatori, Day of Vengeance/Spartacus and the Ten Gladiators/Gli invicibili dieci gladiatori/Spartacus e I dieci gladiatori, and as Ursus in Rebel Gladiators/Ursus gladiatore ribelle.

These films tell stories that depend on gladiators for their main spectacles and to structure their narratives. The peplum gladiator is a notable example of the genre’s primary spectacle and identifying feature: the built white male body. Whether gladiator, centurion or mythic hero (such as Hercules) the central strongman was almost always played by American bodybuilders such as Steve Reeves and Gordon Scott or by Italian actors under Americanized names, such as Adriano Bellini aka Kirk Morris. The strongman of the peplum is generally less clothed and more spectacularized than either his female love interest or the predatory queen/spider woman he faces (see Image 2.25).

Image 2.25  The built body of the peplum strongman: Mark Forest in Colossus of the Arena

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The body of the strongman facilitates many of the peplum’s most notable conventions. He performs Herculean acts of strength, wrestles animals, throws off chains, defeats corrupt and feminized authority figures and is childishly baffled by the romantic advances of female characters. ‘One of the dominant themes of the genre is that of virile strength’ (Lagny, 1992, p. 171) and this physicality is championed via sequences of sport and violent contests that form a structural spine of what Lagny dubs the mise en spectacle (1992, p. 170) or staged performances within the films. These performative moments include exotic dance sequences featuring scantily clad female performers, feasts and festivals, chariot races and, most significant to this study, the gladiator fights staged for the entertainment of the diegetic crowd, as I analyse in detail in Chapter III. With their more generous budgets, the Hollywood epics of the same time period were more lavish in their mise en spectacles as evidenced in moments such as the chariot race in Ben Hur (Wyler 1959) or the final gladiatorial battle in The Fall of the Roman Empire. While there are similarities between the sword and sandal films made in the US and in Italy, there were significant divergences. ‘It would seem that the Americans take a more serious approach and that the Italians are freer in their interpretation’, observes Lagny on the subject of the films’ treatment of classical history (1992, p. 175). The same might be said for their differing modes of address. The Hollywood epic remains sincere in its cautionary tales of Roman or Egyptian decadence and largely locked to biblical parables. The Italian peplum is more joyful and, indeed, playful in its treatment of the Roman past and previous historical genres and is based more firmly on ‘a ‘nudge and wink’ system via various cultural mediations’ (Lagny, 1992, p. 178). This might explain the higher cultural status of the Hollywood historical or biblical epic, which depended on literary source material, Hollywood star performers and auteur-directors like William Wyler, Joseph Mankiewicz and Anthony Mann. The deadly gameplay of the arena and the joyful play of the peplum’s recreation of genre and classical history tie it to the ludic features of the gladiatorial filone. ‘The genre in fact has a ludic dimension’ (Lagny, 1992, p. 177) revealed through reference to other types of media, disruptive contemporary references (Lagny flags up one film’s jazz soundtrack), untethered spectacles (e.g. non-narrative sporting contests), reversals of gendered behaviour (predatory queens, weak or

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childish bodybuilders) and clumsy special effects that contribute to an ironic or distancing mode of address. Lagny considers these ‘games of derision’ (Lagny, 1992, p. 178) that reveal the genre’s ironic mode of address. However, I would like to re-emphasize the joyful play of sincerity that unfolds in a patchwork of genre quotations and metatextual references, even in the not-so-veiled homoeroticism. The play of these films, through genre and through the excessive spectacle of the built male body, can be simultaneously ironic and sincere.

Barbarian films of the 1980s Where the Hollywood roadshow epic represents somewhat of a break away from the low budget pleasures of the peplum, Rushing argues for ‘direct lines of cultural transmission from the 1960s Italian peplum films to the 1980s barbarian peplums’ (2016a, p. 18). The film most associated with this cycle, sometimes called ‘sword-and-sorcery’ films, is Conan the Barbarian and its star, Austrian-born bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger. Several vaguely mythologically based, and transnationally co-produced low-budget films were to follow, including Deathstalker (Sbardellati, 1983), The Seven Magnificent Gladiators/I sette magnifici gladiatori, Barbarian Queen and Red Sonja (Fleischer, 1985). Rushing flags one key shift in this cycle, away from the joyful and naive men of the mid-century peplum towards men marked by physical pain, psychological trauma and a greater emphasis on interiority. While the barbarian films often mirrored the peplum in their low-budget industrial context and status as transnational co-productions, they were much more explicit in their representations of violence and sexuality. They sometimes offered more nuance to female characters to parallel the character development of the strongman (e.g. Valeria [Sandahl Bergman] in Conan the Barbarian and the eponymous Red Sonja [Brigitte Nielsen]). Significantly, the representative character of the cycle, Conan, galvanized his fighting skills as a gladiator. However, the barbarian films bring a shift to the biography of the gladiator and an exacerbation of the ‘before and after’ logic that I argue is so central to the mythology. In this model the gladiator scenario is relegated to a backstory. Conan the Barbarian is not ‘gladiator movie’ but a movie

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about a man who used to be a gladiator. Where Roccia and his nine comrades began and ended their narratives in a familia gladiatoria, for Conan and the gladiators that were to follow, ‘gladiator’ is always a temporary position – this is true for Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender) in Centurion (Marshall 2010), One Eye (Mads Mikkelsen) in Valhalla Rising (Winding Refn, 2009) and John in Gamer. Gladiator is merely a step on the Campbellian hero’s journey – one that offers all the expected pleasures of the peplum: the eroticized male body, mise en spectacle, skilled performances of violence and resistance to corrupt authority in a non-specified historical past.

Sword and sandal television in the 1990s In the aftermath of the barbarian cycle, the low-budget sword and sandal story found a comfortable place on broadcast television. BeastMaster (Alliance Atlantis Communications, 1999–2002), Tarzan (Keller Entertainment Group, 1991–1995), Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys are all examples of televisual peplums of the 1990s, each made outside of the US as co-productions. Italy was not involved, but Canada/Mexico and US/New Zealand were respectively. The Antipodean connection continues with Starz’s Spartacus. Television, furthermore, has been central to the afterlife of the mid-century peplum, as many of the Italian films were shown on global television screens where audiences went to watch Hercules and Xena in the 1990s.12 This has shifted since the 1990s and the peplum (televisual and cinematic) are to be found together on streaming platforms. As in the barbarian films, the gladiator on television was one episode among many rather than a central story – for example, the season one episode of Hercules entitled ‘Gladiator’, which tells the story of Hercules’ struggles against aristocrats who force their slaves to fight animals and each other. Furthermore, gladiator scenarios featured as one-off episodes in many 1990s/early 2000s television series including Angel (The WB Television Network, 1999–2004, ‘The Ring’), Birds of Prey (The WB Television Network, 2002–2003, ‘Gladiatrix’), Justice

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League (Cartoon Network, 2001–2004, ‘War Word, part 1 and 2’) and Justice League Unlimited (Cartoon Network, 2004–2006, ‘Cat and the Canary’ and ‘Grudge Match’). Earlier programmes, such as Star Trek (‘Bread and Circuses’) also imagined their regular characters forced to fight as gladiators. This trend continues unabated across disparate programming such as Adventure Time’s (Cartoon Network 2010–2018) struggle with the ghosts of gladiators past (‘Morituri Te Salutamus’) and Game of Thrones’ many death matches, such the one that pits female knight Brienne of Tarth against a bear (‘The Bear and the Maiden Fair’). Running parallel to these one-off episodes are long-running popular reality television competition programmes that are explicitly built on the gladiatorial scenario, such as Gladiators, American Gladiators and Ninja Warrior. Arguably, this programming has more in common with sports entertainment (such as the WWE) than with the sword and sandal genre. However, it is my contention that they are interconnected and thus the physical performances of personas such as ‘Wolf’, ‘Nitro’ and ‘Jet’ are founded on barbarian films such as Conan and achieve a notable televisual synergy with BeastMaster and Xena. The Starz series Spartacus is exceptional, as it focuses almost exclusively on gladiator characters throughout its four-season run. The series has a complex televisual genre provenance, which incorporates the mid-century peplum, the barbarian film, the New Zealand filmed television productions and the sex- and violence-focused historical imaginary of so-called ‘quality’ television programming such as HBO’s Deadwood (2004–2006) and Game of Thrones. However, its clearest reference point is the digital cinematography (and hypermasculine heroes) of Zach Snyder’s 300. The series imagines a tight-knit brotherhood of gladiators who are motivated by a potent cocktail of vengeance for violence done to their female partners and resistance to a slave-based system ruled by corruption and (sexual) exploitation. Despite the gladiatorial success of Spartacus, the gladiator on television remains largely limited to one episode among many – rather than a nuanced or sustained narrative arc. Arguably, the narrative format of contemporary serialized television that Jason Mittell (2015) labels ‘complex TV’ is not as well suited to the straightforward, episodic structure of gladiatorial syntax as is the structure of the genre film or the architecture of the videogame.

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The Gladiator effect The melancholic higher-budget Hollywood films released at the turn of the millennium in the wake of Scott’s Gladiator form part of what the New York Times calls ‘the Gladiator effect’ (Rushing, 2016a, p. 25 and Williams, 2017, p. 169). Many of the contemporary critical reviews of the film (as discussed in this volume’s introduction) hailed Gladiator as a film that resurrected a dead genre. However, since the release of Cabiria, the sword and sandal/peplum genres have had relative continuity, punctuated by waves of popularity and cult/niche followings. As Rushing argues (2016a, p. 43), Although the peplum genre spans almost a century, it exhibits a remarkable degree of coherence and similarity … At the same time, the peplum has also changed significantly: it has gone from being a predominantly Italian phenomenon in its first two cycles to a globalized Anglophone one beginning in the 1980s, and its dominant affect has changed from a sunny confidence in the power of manly muscles to a Nietzschean ressentiment in the face of an overwhelmingly decadent and morally corrupt enemy. Today’s peplum hero is not simply resentful, however – since Conan and Gladiator, his affect has been dominated by loss, melancholy, and a sense that he is ‘too late’ or otherwise out of time. The millennial cycle of peplum films including Gladiator, 300, Troy, Hercules, The Legend of Hercules, Alexander, Spartacus, Immortals (Singh, 2011) and Pompeii are notably populated by gladiator characters, such as Maximus, Spartacus, Hercules and Milo. It is the wounded bodies and nostalgic stoicism of those gladiators that largely defines and epitomizes the ‘Gladiator effect’. The ‘Gladiator effect’ is not the resurrection of a dead genre; it has always been in relatively good health. It is a measured shift in the affective register of the gladiator character, following the taciturn and doomed heroism of Russell Crowe’s Maximus Decimus Meridius. As is evident from the genre summary, Maximus does not represent a dramatic break from earlier gladiators, rather he is the apotheosis; a composite of shifts registered by Conan’s backstory, the middlebrow melodrama of Hollywood biblical epics such

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as Barabbas (Fleischer, 1961) and Demetrius and the Gladiators and the episodic and competition-based landscape of 1990s television.

Gladiators beyond Rome Running parallel to the Roman gladiator onscreen is another type of fighter forced to feed the crowd’s appetite for spectacle. These warriors appear in films to face-off in gladiatorial battles that are not set in historical Rome or the Western European mythological past. Katniss Everdeen volunteers to replace her sister in the ‘hunger games’ – a state-run reality television show featuring teenagers fighting to the death. Like deathrow prisoner John in Gamer, inmate Jensen Ames (Jason Statham) is forced to battle fellow prisoners in a car race that doubles as a gladiator fight in Death Race and falsely imprisoned George ‘Iceman’ Chambers (Ving Rhames/Michael Jai White) is forced into a prison boxing match in Undisputed (Hill, 2002) and its sequel (Florentine, 2006). Shane Slavin (Gary Daniels) must compete in an underground fight ring to save his brother in Forced to Fight and Bex (Amy Johnston) must likewise fight for her sister in Female Fight Club. Isaiah Bone (Michael Jai White) must keep a promise to a friend by participating in yet another variation of the back-alley fight ring in Blood and Bone. Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) is a fight promoter in a near future in which robots, rather than humans, fight as gladiators in Real Steel. Set in the Roman future, bike-racing champion Drake (Jared Martin) is forced to compete in the televised Death Games, an explicit update of the gladiator games in The New Gladiators/I guerrieri dell’anno 2072. These films all adapt the mythology of the gladiator filone by imagining gladiators in a variety of different times, places and set pieces – whether their battles are fought as videogames (Gamer, Tron Legacy [Kosinski 2010]), broadcast on reality TV (The New Gladiators, No Exit/Fatal Combat, Death Race, Rollerball, Hunger Games), or set in the back alleys of the urban present (Forced to Fight, Blood and Bone, Female Fight Club). In Figure 2.3’s network of gladiatorial genres, there are several included that are not set in Ancient Rome or in classically informed myth/history. Film scholars have not generally included, for example, the boxing film (Rocky, Girlfight) or the martial arts tournament film (Bloodsport [Arnold, 1988], Mortal Kombat, Warrior) in the same cycles

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or categories as the ‘gladiator movie’. However, I argue that they should be considered intertwined as they often feature the gladiator archetype; these types of film stream from and into the same filone.13 The boxing genre is an important offshoot of the gladiatorial filone, with gladiator characters often forced into boxing matches in, for example, the Undisputed series. The boxing film (e.g. films such as Rocky, Girlfight, The Champ [Vidor, 1931], and Somebody Up There Likes Me [Wise, 1956]) is an established genre or subgenre whose fighters can be distinguished from gladiators because they generally choose to fight and are paid to do so. Their competitions are bound by rules and overseen by professional regulatory organizations that limit violence and fatalities. The boxing genre has its own established history and practices that merit acknowledging it as a distinct category from the gladiator and a comprehensive study of these films is outside the scope of this project. Before moving on, however, it should be noted that there are striking genealogical overlaps between the gladiator and the boxer, as the title of the 1992 boxing film Gladiator (Herrington) proves. Contemporary and future-set gladiator stories demonstrate the mobility of the gladiatorial scenario. It does not need swords, sandals or pepla – nor is its nostalgia limited to a time or place (what Senator Gracchus [Derek Jacobi] in Gladiator calls ‘the dream that was Rome’). Rather, the nostalgia of the gladiatorial filone is written on the body of its hero (or heroine) and promises authenticity in a digital era. There is a paradoxical double logic to the post-millennial gladiator – as the promises of embodied authenticity are largely realized through digital augmentation and remediation. These types of films are most in alignment with the production contexts of the Italian peplum because they are so well suited to quick low-budget (and co-produced) filmmaking practices. As such, there is a multiplicity of updated gladiator stories that appear as television films, straight-to-video and, later, straight-to-streaming offerings. The low-budget, non-theatrical gladiator film, like its peplum predecessors, is often a variation on a successful more mainstream film. For example, continuances of sword and sandal franchises such as The Scorpion King: Rise of a Warrior (Mulcahy, 2008), The Scorpion King 3: Battle for Redemption (Reiné, 2012), The Scorpion King 4: Quest for Power (Elliott, 2015); unauthorized spin-offs, such as Female Fight Club, that trade on

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the success and status of the original film; and direct parodies, such as National Lampoon’s The Legend of Awesomest Maximus (Kanew, 2011), Gladiatress (Grant, 2004) or Meet the Spartans (Friedberg and Seltzer, 2008). Like the Italian peplum films before them, these types of marginal texts, largely circulating unnoticed by academia, are significant to the gladiator filone, often providing spaces for some of the more fanciful, extreme or subversive takes on the formulaic gladiatorial scenario. These parallel earlier ‘gladiator movies’, with their outlandish episodic plotlines, reliance on Herculean feats of supernatural strength and violence, and taboo-pushing representations of men and women’s bodies. These invisible films fall somewhere between the joyous bluster of the mid-century peplum and the elegiac sincerity of the millennial films. The Canadian television film, Gladiator Cop, for example, maintains a mode of address that is deadpan in its sincerity and in its celebration of its central hero – a police officer with psychic abilities, who is also a competitive fencer. The excesses of the film’s plot (the psychic fencing cop is on the trail of an underground gladiatorial ring dominated by the demonic incarnation of Alexander the Great) are not presented to the audience with the nostalgic and indulgent irony of many contemporary action films, such as The Expendables (Stallone, 2010). Rather, the film’s excesses are buried underneath well-worn generic markers and the spectacle of gladiatorial combat. The non-Roman gladiator film retains significant features of the filone, but often heightens their identity markers. Their gladiators’ bodies are more built (augmented by technology, martial arts expertise or performance enhancing drugs); their performances are transmitted beyond the arenas in which they fight using analogue broadcast or digital technologies; their enemies’ reach extends beyond the geographic domination of the Roman Empire through globalized economic pathways. Gamer is an illustrative example of the gladiator story beyond Rome. It retains some of the sincerity of its low-budget brethren and combines this with the technological and stylistic innovations made possible by its higher budget. In its digital cinematography, Gamer is innovative and hyperstylized, while many of its syntactic features mirror those of the peplum film and its millennial reboot. It employs an episodic structure, organized around different battles in the game Slayers each with a distinct setting,

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goal, obstacle and outcome. Each fight also represents an episodic unit (or level) of narrative, furthering plot and characterization; see Table 2.6. This structure is reinforced by the film’s emphasis on deadlines, mostly notably the countdown to John’s freedom. A feature of the game Slayers is that each inmate combatant is signed on to fight for thirty sessions. If they survive, they are officially pardoned and set free. The

TABLE 2.6  The fight sequences in Gamer Fight number

Brief description

Location

Kable’s objective

Plot points

1

Opening sequence

Warehouse

Survival

Establishes the film’s premise and aesthetic style

2

An ally fighter (Sandra [Zoë Bell]) is killed

Street

Survival; countdown to freedom

Reveals the global audience watching Slayers

3

Simon talks to Kable/ John

Underpass/ dirt-bike track

Survival, protect wife and daughter from Hackman

Forms an alliance between gamer and avatar and introduces a new adversary (Hackman)

4

Fourth and final fight inside the game

Drainage sewers, parking lot

John escapes the Escape game and goes the game, after Castle rescue wife and daughter

5

From one game (Slayers) to another (Society)

Inside the game Society: apartment block, rave

Rescue wife

John saves his wife, evades Hackman and partners with rebel group to remove mind control tech

6

The final showdown

Castle’s Mansion, basketball court

Defeat final villain (Castle), save daughter

Hackman and Castle are killed, daughter and wife are saved, Castle’s nanotechnology is disabled

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gladiators of Thor and the Amazon Women and Pompeii are likewise counting down until they earn their freedom. Early in the film, a buildingmounted screen announces that John has ‘4 battles to freedom’. The audience is frequently reminded of this urgent countdown, which supports the episodic structure of the plot and the centrality of John’s violent performances. Each fight also represents an updated articulation of the mise en spectacle that Lagny argued was so important to the Italian peplum. These doubly framed spectacles are augmented through the biomechanical nanotechnology that makes the live-action videogames possible and by the large-scale digital distribution of the games themselves. In these fights, John’s goals are generally aligned with those of all gladiators and Italian strongmen: escape enslavement, rescue women in peril, enact vengeance on evil authority figures, topple corrupt empires. As with all gladiator stories, it is the gladiator character that is central to Gamer and similar non-Roman gladiatorial stories. John Tillman/ Kable/Gerard Butler is at the core of the film, serving as anchor and focal point in an otherwise overwhelming visual and aural landscape. Like Maximus in Gladiator, John’s struggles are punctuated with golden-tinted remembrances of idyllic rural home and family life. Both characters are defined by their violent skills and their nostalgic longing for their lost families. In her study of Gladiator, Jennifer Barker (2008) argues that Maximus is not a ‘new’ man of the millennium but is framed by a fascist model of idealized masculinity – the Nazi ‘man of blood and soil’ (Blut und Boden). Maximus is portrayed from the first as a man of blood and soil – violence and farming – he even rubs dirt into his hand before he fights. This urge for heimat allows the ideas of empire and democratic representation to resolve themselves nicely into an idea best left to a patrician senate to sort out – ‘Rome’. (Barker, 2008, p. 174) The parallel between Maximus and John as men of blood and soil is reinforced visually. Like Maximus, a key scene in Gamer sees John rubbing dirt through his fingers before going into combat (see Images 2.26–2.29). Both are quiet and meditative moments focused on the gladiator before he launches himself into violent action.

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Images 2.26–2.29  Men of blood and soil – Maximus in Gladiator and Kable in Gamer

Most of the gladiator characters included in this study are, like John and Maximus, examples of an entrenched and contradictory fascistinflected model of (Western classical) manhood. In fact, the subtitle of the first Spartacus series (Blood and Sand) makes an even more precise label: the gladiator is a man of ‘blood and sand’ who embodies a complex and often contradictory relationship to fascism. As Richard Dyer cautions, it would be a mistake to conclude that the gladiator or peplum strongman is an onscreen exemplar of a Nietzschean superman. Neither is it accurate to dismiss the gladiator filone (and films like Gamer, Arena, Death Race and Centurion) wholesale as conservative or quasi-fascistic elegies for the loss of white male, heterosexual patriarchal power. In his influential consideration of the racial politics of the peplum, Dyer insists on the fundamentally contradictory nature of the so-called gladiator movie: Such contradictions are characteristic. In many ways, in explicit allusions and through certain distancing strategies, the cycle is a rejection of fascism, yet in its address and narrative organization it also shows continuities with fascism. Rather than attempt to side the peplum (and by implication its audience) either with or against

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fascism, it should be seen as an imaginary working through of the shameful momentousness of the period, shameful because it was fascist or because it was defeated. (Dyer, 1997, p. 172) Dyer localizes this to the site of the strongman’s raced body, which is marked as superior to the body of primitive ‘others’ he aids. The strongman can fight both fascist and totalitarian regimes (like the many evil-queen-run tyrannies of the genre), yet also personify eugenic and fascist ideals and in so doing prove erotically irresistible to these fascistcoded queens. The gladiator’s body is just such a contradictory site, made all the more nostalgic in a digital filmmaking economy because he symbolizes corporeal authenticity in the face of digital celebrity, mediation and virtual reality. While Gladiator is indebted to The Fall of the Roman Empire and Spartacus for plot and characters, it has more in common with the peplum films in terms of outwardly indicting fascism while consistently indulging in heroic hyper-masculinity, nostalgia for the simplicity of violence, and the spectacular display of this violence as a substitute for political action. (Barker, 2008, p. 173) The post-millennial gladiator (in Rome and beyond) is not locked to the post-Mussolini location of mid-century Italy. Thus, the contemporary gladiators – men of blood and soil or, more accurately, blood and sand  – are attempts to work through a much more diffuse sense of fascism and its iconography. Gladiator was often seen as a story of  a  crisis of masculinity, placed alongside films such as Fight Club (e.g. Barker, 2008 and Fradley, 2004). Later, fictions such as 300 and Starz’s Spartacus were to find themselves a potent form of mythological currency in the context of a growing global alt-right. As this chapter and the film Gamer make clear, the gladiator’s ideological struggles are long-standing features of the gladiatorial games. Its ludic features are written narratively, built into the archetype of the gladiator and extend to the way the ‘gladiator movie’ uses and reuses genre markers. Gerard Butler’s John is a man of blood and sand, fighting an authoritarian regime, while/because he is that

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regime’s most popular and visible celebrity. At one level, John’s story, and the film’s game, is a working through of the relationship between the game pieces (Kable), the players (Simon, Castle, the resistance group ‘Humanz’), the game itself (Slayers, Society, the ‘gladiator’ genre or filone) and the consumers (the diegetic audience and players, the viewers of Gamer). The product or resolution of such work is, as Dyer establishes, contradictory; this ambiguity is arguably more pronounced for Butler’s man of blood and sand than for Dan Vadis’ strongman or even Crowe’s mournful Maximus. Gamer is an important moment in the gladiatorial filone as it is a gladiator story that investigates its own ludic nature, offering conflicting messages. Has gamer Simon passed through the game as a rite of passage and emerged as a better human than he was before? Has John destroyed Ken Castle and his gaming empire only to have another figure and system arise in its place? Certainly the taciturn presence of Castle’s tech team at their final showdown suggests that Castle’s empire might not die with him. Has John, formerly a soldier, really escaped a system that demands his violence and exploits his body? Has the crowd that loved the games Slayers and Society really cheered their decommissioning or have they merely cheered the triumph of their favourite celebrity? The last line of the film (‘Well played, Kable’) resolves nothing, but highlights the fundamental ambiguity of the violent gameplay of the gladiator.

Conclusion: ‘Well played, Kable’ The gameworlds of the gladiator exaggerate and reveal – allowing an opportunity for characters across settings and genres to inhabit the gladiatorial scenario in order to display their virtue and heroism, violent abilities, psychological trauma and hard-earned muscular bodies. It furthermore reveals the complicit and active voyeurism of the audiences who watch the games from safety, offering the thumbs up or down, but never themselves experience the risks of death or mutilation. The gladiator filone identified in this chapter streams through many cycles and cinematic moments, influencing the genres it encounters. In turn, it incorporates and adapts the features of these genres, from shifts in the aesthetics of violent spectacles to changing conventions

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of psychological interiority. The arena, however, remains a constant feature even as it moves from the Roman Colosseum, the ludi of Capua, the basements and back alleys of the urban jungle, to the alien amphitheatres of the future. The next chapter focuses exclusively on the gladiatorial arena and its importance to the archetype. The arena reaffirms these generic continuities or flow and is a spatial reinforcement of the ludic nature of the gladiatorial filone. These elements feed one another, just as the gladiator filone feeds the networked system of genres surrounding it by playing with their syntax, imagery, systems of affect, mythology and modes of address. This familiar pattern further resonates in contemporary gladiator films, such as Forced to Fight or Fight Club and the post-apocalyptic gladiator film, such as Gamer, through the space of the arena, where the built male body must grapple with his double in front of a ravenous audience.

CHAPTER III The arena fight

Two men enter. One man leaves. MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME

I did not know men could build such things. GLADIATOR

From a spotlit structure designed as a hybrid between cage and amphitheatre, Aunty Entity (Tina Turner) welcomes her audience to the Thunderdome. Spectators have climbed the walls of the dome to watch as the latest fight is announced. The MC/commentator announces: This is the truth of it. Fighting leads to killing and killing gets to warring and that was damn near the death of us all. Look at us now, busted up and everyone talking about hard rain. But we’ve learned by the dust of ‘em all, Bartertown’s learned. Now when men get to fighting, it happens here and it finishes here. Two men enter, one man leaves … The crowd ritually repeats, ‘Two men enter. One man leaves.’ This is arguably the purest distillation of the gladiatorial scenario. The post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome imagines the gladiatorial arena as a cathartic place to work through social violence  through representative fights. Mel Gibson’s ‘man with no name’ finds  himself facing ‘Blaster’, dressed in the leather harness

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and face-concealing helmet that recalls the Roman gladiator in a battle that involves wirework, a sledge hammer and a chainsaw. The framing and camera movement are determined by the domed space of the arena, sweeping upwards and downwards to frame the fighters’ movements; movements that are underlined by the crowd’s unified noises of support or astonishment. Music is used sparingly, placing extra emphasis on the crowd and the fighters. Max is victorious, ultimately knocking off Blaster’s helmet with the sledgehammer. However, he breaks the rules of the arena and spares his opponent as his unmasking reveals that the monstrous Blaster is a human with Down Syndrome. This act of mercy earns Max further punishment inside the Thunderdome, while also confirming his heroism, casting it in opposition to the desperate scavenger mentality of the rest of the post-apocalyptic population of Bartertown. The spatial and spectacular centre of Max’s struggle in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is likewise the central focus of this chapter: the arena fight. Following from the preceding chapter’s insistence on the ludic nature of gladiatorial combat, this chapter zeroes in on the gamespace of the arena as the most important ludic element of the gladiatorial scenario/filone. I argue that the arena is a spectacular gameworld and, equally, an important narrative space. The tension between story and spectacle is a familiar debate to film, television and videogame scholars. Here I argue that the arena fight represents significant moments for both. In order to do so, I will offer a close analysis of the formal features of arena fights staged across thirty illustrative films (see Appendix), which form a representative sample of high- to low-budget films, taken from key moments in the gladiatorial filone’s history. They range from 1935’s The Last Days of Pompeii to Thor: Ragnarok in 2017. Before doing this, I establish the amphitheatre as a gamespace, looking to its history, architecture and its fictional functions. The centre of this chapter provides a close consideration of the first Colosseum fight in Gladiator as an illustration of these influences and functions and as gateway for considering the surprisingly consistent formal elements used to present the arena fight. This chapter concludes with a comparative discussion of three low-budget films named ‘Arena’ in order to pinpoint specific changes and striking continuities in the ways this defining sequence has been imagined.

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Architecture of power and vision The amphitheatre is a social and architectural space built around the presentation of violent spectacle. It is a monumental reminder of the successful disciplinary tactics used by the Romans through their entertainment and solidified by their architecture. Juvenal’s satiric proclamation about creating docile citizens by providing them with panem et circenses (bread and circuses) is evidence that the Romans themselves were aware of disciplinary function of spectacles and their arenas. Like Michel Foucault’s much referenced Panopticon, the amphitheatre ‘must not be understood as a dream building; it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political technology’ (1991, p. 205). However, where Foucault argued that the Panopticon ‘may and must be detached from any specific use’ (1991, p. 205), I would argue that the amphitheatre must remain rooted in its Roman specificities and mapped outwards from there. Firstly, the amphitheatre pre-dates the shift Foucault observes and the medicoscientific discourses that have been mobilized to frame panopticism. Foucault’s use of the Panopticon is built on ‘the disappearance of torture as a public spectacle’ (1991, p. 7) and ‘a slackening of the hold on the body’ (1991, p. 10). These entangled elements (‘disappearance of the spectacle and elimination of pain’ [1991, p. 11]) remain central to representations of the gladiator because he belongs to a historically informed moment ruled by violent spectacle and corporeal injury. Foundational to the stoic heroism of the gladiator is the oath he swears, the sacramentum gladiatorum, in which he pledges to endure physical pain without complaint. This oath, recalled by Seneca (Cagniart, 2000) and in Patronius’ Satyricon (Wiedemann, 1992, p. 107), is emotionally recited by Spartacus in the first season of the TV programme: ‘I commit my flesh, my mind, my will to the glory of this ludus and the commands of my master, Batiatus. I swear to be burned, chained, beaten or die by the sword …’ As with literary evidence from Ancient Rome, Spartacus’s oath sets him up as a man who can stoically endure physical pain. This is central to Seneca’s formulation of the virtuous stoic man, and to all the fictional gladiators that fight in the amphitheatre. ‘Like a gladiator, a

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man must submit himself to a life of action and, like him, take an oath of loyalty to stand his ground like a warrior, accepting all the sufferings that he will encounter in his fight’ (Cagniart, 2000, p. 615). The arena is an enduring disciplinary form older than the Panopticon and, perhaps, more effective for all its blunt, hypervisible and excessive disciplinary techniques. Where Foucault reads the Panopticon, with its processes of discipline and surveillance, as replacing the ‘spectacle of the scaffold’, the amphitheatre is an architectural structure designed to showcase this spectacle via creative presentations of the execution of prisoners integrated with other violent performances, such as the beast hunts and gladiator fights. Violent spectacle together with the organizing structure of gazes still cling to the architectural form of the arena. They are embedded in its continued use as a space for competitive violence – from Spanish bullrings, to boxing rings and the chain-link octagons of mixed martial arts. Many post-apocalyptic gladiator stories (e.g. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, The New Gladiators) use a kind of dark nostalgia to imagine the arena as an architectural monument to oppressive social hierarchies, corrupt authoritarian power and the tragic exploitation of men’s (less often women’s and children’s) bodies. If the amphitheatre’s spectacles of the scaffold predate the Panopticon, they also outlive it in many imagined gladiatorial futures. Any analysis of the form and functions of the amphitheatre, and the violence it encircles, must begin in Ancient Rome, with Roman spectacles and Roman bodies because they are key touchpoints for all fictional representations. The simple, iconic shape of the building further ensures its enduring monumentality. As architect and archaeologist Jean-Claude Golvin (2012) discusses in detail, the amphitheatre is an elliptical-shaped stadium designed to permit clear sight lines for large audiences to view spectacles from any side, unlike the Greek-inspired theatre that had 180 degree, half-circle seating. Where the Panopticon placed authority (and its vision) in the centre of its structure housed in a surveillance tower, the amphitheatre places the audience in the periphery and the bodies of the ‘those about to die’ in the central sands. It is from the sands that we get the name arena from harena, the Latin word for sand. Golvin’s influential studies identify approximately 250 known ruins of Roman amphitheatres (2012, p. 5) across the

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Mediterranean, providing a lasting map of Roman imperial expansion. If, as Keith Hopkins argues, ‘[g]ladiatorial shows suffused Roman life’ (1983, p.  7), then these amphitheatres represent a remarkably visible and lasting footprint of the Roman Empire. Golvin, like other historians, establishes that the amphitheatre is a uniquely Roman invention, without Greek antecedents, unlike other spectacular venues in the Roman world.1 Like the gladiator, the arena is a Roman invention. Similarly, the arena outlasts its Roman purpose, serving as a fluid signifier in fictions. Its design is consistently reused, providing a still-relevant architectural template. The many sports and entertainment venues based on the Roman amphitheatre’s specifications are testament to this strength of structure (see Image 3.30). Unlike a circular shape, the amphitheatre’s narrow ends provided a visibly privileged space for those with more power. Similarly, the tiered

Image 3.30 Sports and entertainment venues continue to draw inspiration from the amphitheatre’s design and associations, as Los Angeles’ Memorial Coliseum illustrates

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seating inside the amphitheatre physically divided the Roman crowd based on their social position, with the most powerful people closer to the sands and the authority figure seated in the narrow end of the ellipsis (Edwards, 2007, pp. 53–5). Women, with the exception of the symbolically important Vestal Virgins, were relegated to the back of the amphitheatre. Amphitheatres were singular spaces in which the marginalized had access to the powerful and such politically charged collisions form the narrative and thematic scaffold of fictionalized arena sequences that imagine how such spectacular disciplinary encounters might be manipulated. The arena structure can be permanent, as in the Colosseum (or   Flavian amphitheatre) in Rome or a more temporary wooden structure.2 Such wooden structures are frequent fixtures in predigital gladiatorial films, for example in Thor and the Amazon Women/ Le gladiatrices, The Arena (1974) or the second season prequel of Spartacus (subtitled Gods of the Arena). In cinema, these temporary structures more forcefully suggest the carnivalesque aspects of the gladiatorial fights. They do not have the permanence of a great monument like the Colosseum and thus signal corruption and bloodlust on a smaller, grassroots or provincial scale rather than historical grandeur. This is illustrated in the contrast between the mud-soaked British amphitheatre featured in the first act of Pompeii (with its filthy crowds and ambitious sponsor) and the doomed stone amphitheatre of Pompeii where the film’s denouement takes place. Leaving Rome and its ruined amphitheatres behind, the arena has become the single most important framing device of the gladiatorial scenario, even as its form changes when the scenario is updated, for example by broadcast or digital media in films such as The Running Man, No Exit/Fatal Combat, The Hunger Games, The New Gladiators, Endgame and Arena (2010). As the arena structure changes, leaving behind some of its architectural monumentality, it retains key features and functions. All arenas centralize the bodies of the fighters, providing the crowd an unobstructed view of their combat. This 360-degree coverage permits both the theatrical long shots favoured by midcentury epics and Italian peplums and the mobile camerawork of later sequences. It also provides multiple angles and heights for inventive framing and constructive editing to showcase the fight itself. The arena serves as boundary for the competition between fighters, spatially

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ensuring that the world of the gladiatorial remains distinct from the world outside. However, such a boundary is not impermeable and the fictional gladiator can never leave his violence or celebrity behind in the amphitheatre. In his analysis of the social psychology of Roman arena crowds, Garrett Fagan summarizes and critiques an early analysis of the gladiatorial munera by E. Gunderson, who insists that ‘the ideology of the [Roman] arena has no outside’ (cited in Fagan, 2011, p. 20). However, what did not hold fast for the ancient amphitheatre is certainly true of its twentieth- and twenty-first-century narrative interpretations. There is no outside to the disciplinary function of the arenas of the onscreen gladiator, who can never truly escape his or her archetypal purpose as celebrity fighter. For Katniss Everdeen the dangerous gamespace of the arena cannot be escaped, as she remains a politicized gladiator figurehead for most of her story. In the digital spaces of the arena, e.g. in Gamer and Arena (2011), it is not just the ideology of the arena that has no outside, it is the arena itself that has been digitally diffused via new media. Gamer takes this one step further, embedding nanotechnology into the body of the gladiator. The arena can have no outside when it is fused with the inside of the gladiator’s body. Despite this dispersion of the ideology, technology and architecture of the amphitheatre, the fictional arena does provide certain hard borders. In Roman times, it ‘symbolically divided what was Roman from what was not. It was the limit of Roman civilisation in a number of senses’ (Wiedemann, 1992, p. 46).3 The Roman amphitheatre delineated the limits of a city, the boundary between beast and human, between life and death, between society’s valuable citizens and their most infamous and disposable (Wiedemann, 1992, p. 45). In Rome and in fiction, the walls of the arena mark the boundary of the official state-sanctioned gladiatorial games, with their referees and rules. Most salient to this study, it also marks the formal boundary of the arena sequence, cordoning it off as a distinct unit of cinema. In television, the arena sequence often features as a one-off episode of a series, for example Star Trek’s ‘Bread and Circuses’ or Hercules The Legendary Journeys’ ‘Gladiator’. In videogames, the arena is often one level among many, for example in Assassin’s Creed: Origins. As a unit of cinema, an episode of television and a level of the videogame, the arena sequence is a key syntactical building block of the gladiator’s archetypal story.

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A network of gazes In the arena, vision and gazes are always central. The amphitheatre is a space to exchange multiple interlocking gazes (see Figure 3.4) made possible by its architecture. The gladiators look to one another (as allies and opponents) and around the dangerous gamespace of the arena to the watching crowds in the stands. Gladiator’s first Colosseum fight begins with the smoothly mobile camera following Maximus and the other gladiators into the brightly lit arena. As it keeps the armed men in the foreground, it moves slowly to offer a mobile panoramic shot of both the wonder-struck faces of the gladiators and the digital vision of the crowded stands of the arena. As I will analyse in detail, the arena sequence is a crucial narrational unit allowing for the simultaneous and compelling presentation of spectacle and narrative, largely via this network of looks. The gladiator exchanges gazes with the authority figure and with the imperilled woman who often accompanies him (e.g. Lucilla in Gladiator, Cassia [Emily Browning] in Pompeii, Carmel Stoneman [Guylaine StOnge] in No Exit/Fatal Combat, Milla in Arena). This exchange of gazes, often accompanied by yelled words of revolt, is  closely watched by

Figure 3.4  The interlocking network of gazes made possible by the a ­ rchitecture of the arena serves a disciplinary purpose

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the crowds who are aligned with the cinema/television audiences and often with the gaze of the gladiator-protagonist. In those moments where the camera permits it, the audiences in the stands offer each other quick looks of camaraderie, united in their spectatorship, or made monstrous in their universally delighted reactions to the carnage below (as with the audiences presented in the Spartacus series and Gamer). The amphitheatre provides the scaffolding for a complex web of interconnected admiring and sadistic gazes between figures of authority, exploited fighters, worried and endangered women, and the complicit carnivalesque crowds to whom all must answer.

Arena subsets While arena sequences exhibit significant continuity, gladiator fictions sometimes vary or flavour their articulations by featuring different types of arenas and thus diverse forms of arena fights. One of the most common variations to appear across the gladiatorial filone is the ‘party arena’, which is an ad hoc gladiator fight staged during a party, feast or festival. This scenario is often used to signal the decadence and corruption of Rome or its representatives (e.g. in Maciste, gladiatore di Sparta and Francesco Netti’s 1880 neoclassical painting entitled After a Gladiator Fight During a Meal in Pompeii, see Image 3.31).

Image 3.31  The decadence and delights of Pompeii’s party arena

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Party arena sequences linger on shots of the hedonist crowd and focus less on the fighters, who are there to provide background entertainment. These types of arena fights are the most sexualized and often feature moments of explicit sexuality, as in the Spartacus television series where the gladiators are expected to compete as fighters and serve as sex workers/slaves. The double of this festive carnival is the ‘dark arena’, the underground, illicit fights that run parallel to more regulated gladiatorial bouts. Among the dark arenas are the many illegal (sometimes prison-set) no-holds-barred fight rings appearing in action films that update the gladiatorial scenario (for example: the Undisputed series, Female Fight Club or Forced to Fight). There are also several ‘dark arenas’ that serve as death traps, such as the pit to which Jabba the Hutt condemns Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) to fight the Rancor in Return of the Jedi (Marquand, 1983). This moment also recalls the beast fights/venationes that began the day of arena spectacles in the Roman amphitheatre. The fight between human and beast appears across several sword and sandal films; for example, both Demetrius and Maximus fight tigers and Glaucus (Steve Reeves) protects Christians from lions in The Last Days of Pompeii. The beast fight sequence is likewise a frequent feature of science fiction films, such as Attack of the Clones (Lucas, 2002) in which Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) and Padme (Natalie Portman) battle vicious aliens in an arena and John Carter in which John (Taylor Kitsch) fights Martians. While these films include a single arena set piece, 1989’s Arena pits Steve (Paul Satterfield) against multiple aliens in a series of organized tournaments. In Starz’s Spartacus the dark arena is known as ‘The Pit’, an underground amphitheatre that offers more brutal combat than that showcased in the amphitheatre. The fights in the dark arena are presented as more visceral and less honourable than the combat that appears on a more legitimate stage. These fights also lack any sense of the professional brotherhood that underpins the ludus system, which feeds the official amphitheatre. Arguably, the dark arena highlights the depravity and lack of honour inherent in all arena combat, while the party arena points an accusatory finger at the monstrously hedonist and callous crowds. Another familiar subset of the gladiatorial scenario is the ‘trial by battle’ sequence in which representative warriors engage in single combat in order to determine which army will win, often with the opposing armies

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standing as spectators. This battle between champions marks the start of both The Legend of Hercules and Troy. They serve as bounded substitutes for all-out war, a quasi-democratic process highlighted by the Thunderdome sequence in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. These ritual political arenas seem particularly suited to stories about superheroes, appearing as (arena-shaped) set pieces in the leadership races in Black Panther (Coogler, 2018) and Aquaman (Wan, 2018). These fights are not (only) for the entertainment of a diegetic audience, but contests with willing combatants attempting to earn legitimized authority through ritual violence. They are nonetheless staged, shot and framed using the conventions of the arena fight, with eager onlookers and high stakes. There are many examples of related arena subsets that feed out of and into the gladiatorial filone. The most closely related to the gladiatorial arena includes the many lavish jousting sequences featured in medieval-set films, including Ivanhoe (Thorpe, 1952), Knights of the Round Table (Thorpe, 1953), El Cid (Mann, 1961), Prince Valiant (Hathaway, 1954) and the millennial A Knight’s Tale. Several films used motorcycles or even bicycles to update the jousting sequence, fusing them with chariot-racing traditions. The most memorable of these types of fight sequences occurs in Rollerball, The New Gladiators and Knightriders (Romero, 1981), which features a troupe of historical reenactors dedicated to the nostalgic chivalrous traditions of jousting as much as to the jousting contest. Traditions of fighting against animals continue in many films that centralize bullfighting, for example the Rudolph Valentino vehicle Blood and Sand (Niblo, 1922) and the many rodeo films that express the traditions of the Roman beast fight via distinctly American conventions, including The Lusty Men (Ray, 1952) and Junior Bonner (Peckinpah, 1972). These arena variations reaffirm a fixed continuity in the presentation and purpose of arena fights; they foreground the built bodies of warriors locked in a competition with rules and a designated gamespace that frames the game, but often cannot contain it. This spectacle is likewise a disciplinary mechanism visible in the spatial organization of the arena crowds for the confirmation of power on a designated authority figure (e.g. by tribe in Black Panther or by the army in the opening The Legend of Hercules). While the different subsets of arenas provide opportunities to add further spectacular elements to the fight sequence

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(the erotic, the more graphically violent), they are both semantically and syntactically steady, an unusually consistent narrational fixture of the gladiatorial archetype and scenario. Following the last chapter’s emphasis on gameplay, all arenas function as playgrounds with their own rules and sense of time. Huizinga defines playgrounds as ‘forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain … temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart’ (1949, p. 10). The arena-as-playground has clear, but not inviolate, boundaries – internally between spectators, emperor and gladiators and externally between the deadly game of gladiatorial combat and the outside world. The violent game does not begin and end in the arena but spills over its porous borders and into the rest of the story. In the arena, space determines function. It is a gamespace specifically designed for viewing gladiatorial competition and built to showcase violence as a performance.

The arena fight by numbers This chapter’s investigation is informed by a detailed formal analysis of thirty representative films drawn from across the gladiatorial filone (see Appendix).4 It includes those films that take the gladiator scenario as their main plot (e.g. Pompeii, Gladiator) and those featuring an arena fight as a one-off set piece (e.g. Thor: Ragnarok, John Carter). It contains films set in Ancient Rome, fantasy spaces (past and present) and the speculative futures of dystopian fiction. Across these samples, and in the larger set of films that inform this volume, there are striking continuities in the formal, narrative and affective structures of the arena fight on film. Based on this illustrative dataset, films in gladiatorial filone have an average of 4.4 arena sequences, each lasting an average 3 minutes 47 seconds (see Figure 3.5). Given that the arena is a defining feature of gladiatorial stories, it is surprising how little screen time is sometimes devoted to the sequence, for example Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome spends only 14 minutes and 14 seconds in the eponymous arena. Of that total, just under five minutes (4:51) were taken up by two men fighting. Similar statistics are true of other futuristic films that use the arena fight as a singular set piece rather than a central narrative premise (e.g. John

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Figure 3.5  Average screen time taken up with arena sequences, organized by film release date

Carter, Thor: Ragnarok). The Hunger Games is an exception to this, as it sets almost an hour (59:45) of its runtime inside the gamespace of the arena. However, only 10 per cent of its arena time is spent showcasing humans fighting one another. On the other hand, films that set their gladiatorial scenarios in the present day (with theatrical and television releases) spend considerably longer inside the arena and, when there, substantially more time fighting. This creates what I label a higher density fight sequence – that is a higher proportion of actual violence to the overall time of arena sequence (see Figure 3.6). The high-density fight is a common feature in lower-budget pictures (e.g.

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Figure 3.6  The relative density of fight sequences

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No Exit/Fatal Combat, Female Fight Club, Forced to Fight, Gladiator Cop, The Arena [1989 and 2011]). Lavish high-budget films spend a good amount of time in the arena, but less of it is spent screening violent acts, creating a lower-density fight sequence (e.g. all Hollywood epics from 1935 to 1961 had a density of less than 50 per cent). This permits more time for cinema audiences to marvel at the elaborate architecture/mise en scène and for the frame to linger on the complex network of gazes between those fighting on the sands and those watching from the stands. Across the sample of films, an average of 15.17 people died in each arena sequence (see Figure 3.7). This figure is dramatically impacted by the high number of deaths in Gamer’s digital arena (166), a figure sometimes confirmed by onscreen kill counts informed by its videogame aesthetic and premise. When Gamer is taken out of the picture, the casualty count per arena fight falls to 9.97, a number that more accurately reflects the typical fatalities of larger scale battle re-enactments, as in Pompeii, Gladiator, Revenge of the Gladiator and Colossus of the Arena. Tournament-based gladiator films frequently stress that the battles have no rules and that death is a possible outcome; however, their casualty numbers are notably lower than other types of films (e.g. no one dies in the arena fights

Figure 3.7  Death counts across gladiator films with different budgets, release dates and genre affiliation

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in Female Fight Club, Forced to Fight, Real Steel and Arena [1989]). High-density fights can also be an outcome of the slow-motion digital cinematography of post-millennial films such as The Legend of Hercules, as they stretch the time it takes to view the act of violence to fill more of the sequence. Within the systems of individual films, the final showdowns tend to have a lower density than earlier establishing battles, as the hero must battle the central villain. Because of the high stakes of such a final battle, there is often more time reserved for dialogue, for example the third and final arena sequence in The New Gladiators, in which we see gladiatorial teams fight on motorbikes, unfolds over 15 minutes and 58 seconds, in which 2 minutes and 18 seconds are spent fighting (a total of 14 per cent of the sequence time). Whereas, the film’s first arena sequence is 2 minutes and 8 seconds of solid fighting. These numbers only tell part of the story. In addition to these statistically driven patterns describing average death counts, percentage of screen time and the relative violent density of fight sequences, there are a series of repeated conventional shots and motifs  that appear across the thirty films in this dataset and across the  wider database of gladiatorial films (see Table 3.6 and Images 3.32–3.45). This pattern repeats with noticeable stability across almost all fictions discussed in this volume. The arena fight is always more than spectacle, progressing the plot and themes of the film in important and under-examined ways. Drawing on Warren Buckland’s work, Richard Rushton argues that ‘the function of the spectacle is no longer one that opposes narrative, but rather, spectacle becomes an integral element in the unfolding of narrative’ (2001, p. 37). Rushton suggests that Maximus’ victory over Commodus, secured, I would emphasize, during one of the arena fight sequences, is achieved ‘precisely from within the logic of the spectacle’ (2001, p. 37). ‘It is important to realise that the spectacular sequences of Gladiator, while being thrilling, corporeal, disorienting and ‘engulfing’, also provide important information for the narrative of the film’ (Rushton, 2001, p. 38). In the section that follows, I look to one key arena fight sequence to illustrate the way conventional shots and spectacles are mobilized to progress the story of the gladiator and enrich the overall system of the film.

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TABLE 3.6  Typical arena conventions Conventional shot

Selected relevant fictions

Aerial establishing shot of arena

Colossus of the Arena, Pompeii, Thor: Ragnarok

Example

Image 3.32  Colossus of the Arena: Aerial shot Backlit shot through tunnel into the arena

Barabbas, Pompeii, Attack of the Clones

Image 3.33  Barabbas: Tunnel Lingering tilt/pan on the body of the gladiator

Pompeii, Triumph of the Ten Gladiators, Colossus of the Arena

Image 3.34  Colossus of the Arena: Bodies Gladiator salute

Pompeii, Demetrius and the Gladiators, The Hunger Games’ salute Image 3.35  Pompeii: Salute

Thumbs up/thumbs down

Demetrius and the Gladiators, Pompeii, Gladiator

Image 3.36  Demetrius and the Gladiators: Thumbs up

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Conventional shot

Selected relevant fictions

Reverse shot of crowd (and Emperor)

Barabbas (2012) Arena (2011), Thor: Ragnarok

Example

Image 3.37  Thor: Ragnarok: The crowd Close encounter with a villainous opponent

No Exit/Fatal Combat, John Carter, Gamer

Image 3.38  Gamer: Villain Superficial wounding of the gladiator

Conan the Barbarian, Arena (2011), The Legend of Hercules

Image 3.39  Conan the Barbarian: Wounding Victory from the jaws of defeat

Spartacus, Pompeii, Gladiator

Image 3.40 Spartacus fights Theokoles Familia gladiatoria – male bonding/team building

Triumph of the Ten Gladiators, Seven Rebel Gladiators, The New Gladiators Image 3.41  Seven Rebel Gladiators: Bonding

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Conventional shot

Selected relevant fictions

Death of the beloved sidekick

Forced to Fight, Fatal Combat, The Hunger Games

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Example

Image 3.42  The Hunger Games: Death of sidekick Cutaway to anxious or desiring women

Spartacus, Pompeii, Arena (2011), Terror of Rome

Image 3.43 Messalina in Demetrius and the Gladiators Death tableaux

Spartacus, Gladiator, Pompeii

Image 3.44  The death of Gannicus Victory celebration (swords raised)

John Carter, Pompeii, Gladiator

Image 3.45  Gladiator: Victory

Maximus enters the Colosseum One fight sequence in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator stands as the apotheosis of the arena fight and as perhaps the single most important sequence in this project on gladiators. It is 13 minutes and 23 seconds long and takes place just over halfway through the film’s runtime (see Figure 3.8).

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Figure 3.8  Gladiator’s arena fight sequences

This is Maximus’s first and longest gladiatorial battle in Rome (his third of five in the film), set in the richly reconstructed Flavian Amphitheatre, better known as the Colosseum. In the sequence leading to this battle, Maximus and the rest of Proximo’s (Oliver Reed) gladiators first see the Colosseum from street level at a low angle. Juba whispers to his comrades, ‘Have you ever seen anything like that before? I didn’t know men could build such things.’ Here we have the archetypal gladiators encountering the most monumental architectural legacy of the gladiatorial munera and the Roman Empire itself. As Byron rather hyperbolically insisted in Manfred (1816–1817), the Colosseum remains the most visually arresting signifier of the Empire:5 But the gladiators’ bloody circus stands, A noble wreck in ruinous perfection! While Caesar’s chambers and the Augustan halls Grovel on earth in indistinct decay. (Byron, Manfred, Act III, Scene IV) When the awestruck gladiators interact with the Colosseum (at street level, on the sands) they put it onto a human scale, rendering the monumental space legible. According to Nick Jones (2013), using Michel de Certeau’s work as a base, the action hero onscreen is often

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able to tactically resist the large-scale disciplinary (or ‘strategic’) spaces of the city and its panoptic architecture through his or her violent actions. He describes the interaction between human hero and urban monuments as ‘phenomenologically measur[ing] what would otherwise be unmeasurable’ (Jones, 2013, p. 48). Via an aerial establishing shot, the Colosseum in Gladiator is visually striking. However, glimpsed from the streets with Juba, or with Maximus from the sands (including the reverse shot of his reaction), it becomes more than a monument. It becomes a legible generic and historical space; more importantly it becomes a space with a human scale and human stakes. These are not only Roman gladiators in the Colosseum, this is stoically suffering Maximus on his quest for revenge against the man who killed his family. Maximus can tactically resist the monumentality of the Colosseum (as Commodus’s imperial space) by using the spectacle, and his fame, in ways that the building itself has not been built to permit. This tension and tactical resistance begin to unfold during the memorable Colosseum sequence.

From the hypogeum to the sands The arena fight is bracketed by conventional moments and shots, such as pre-fight and post-fight moments in dark backstage spaces. Maximus’s Colosseum debut begins in the hypogeum, the area under the amphitheatre that equips the sands with beasts, gladiators and set pieces via an elaborate system of trapdoors and elevators. The crowded space is lit only by the low-key spotlights of sunlight coming from the arena above. Gladiators mill about choosing their weaponry, accompanied by the sounds of the burn of a blacksmith’s bellows and loud metallic clanking that matches the low music. Here the gladiator often receives a pre-combat motivational speech from his trainer (lanista). In Gladiator, Proximo periodically offers advice about the inevitability of death and the duty of the gladiator to face it stoically. Backstage in Zucchabar he says, ‘Ultimately, we’re all dead men. Sadly, we cannot choose how. But we can decide how we meet that end in order that we are remembered as men.’ At a later Colosseum battle, he reminds Maximus, ‘we mortals are but shadows and dust’.6 However, before Maximus’s first Colosseum fight the silent gladiatorial ranks that line the tunnel to the arena are

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addressed by an unnamed gladiator who instructs them on arena procedure (‘salute the emperor’) and offers them only, ‘Go and die with honour’. The backstage space of the arena further reveals the elaborate stagecraft that contributes to the spectacle of the arena fight. Garrett Fagan insists that Roman ‘[g]ladiators were, above all else, showmen’ (2011, p. 356) and it is in these backstage moments that bookend the arena fight that gladiator fictions reveal the mechanisms that support just such a performance. Richard Rushton argues that a film like Gladiator ‘provides a position from which audiences can criticise this use of spectacle. In this way the film [Gladiator] qualifies as a reflexive one: it places in question its own representational strategies’ (2001, p. 43). The backstage sequences are key to setting up the arena fight as a spectacular moment of reflexivity. The darkness of backstage is dramatically juxtaposed with the over-exposed sunshine of the arena sands and the camera typically trails behind the gladiator (in an over-the-shoulder shot) framing him in silhouette against the grated archway of the door to the amphitheatre. In Gladiator, the mise en scène of the Colosseum is a set piece that earns a dramatic pause as the shot lingers on the gladiators dazzled by the sunlit spectacle of the amphitheatre and its audience. This moment, perhaps above all others, is built to direct the gazes of the cinema audiences, prompting a spectatorial reaction of awe and wonder. In this sequence we see the Colosseum reanimated; history revivified; pre-industrial authenticity nostalgically embodied. We are asked to marvel, as the gladiators do – our wonder infused with the expectation of the violence to follow. Michael Williams observes that ‘[f]ilms like Gladiator used cutting-edge camera movement to take us into the arena with Maximus, ‘moving us’, as Kirsten Thompson writes, ‘from a static and more contemplative position … into a more active and immersive spectatorship’ (Williams, 2017, p. 177). Building from Williams’s and Thompson’s observations, I would argue that Maximus’s Colosseum entrance is not a narratively disruptive spectacle, but an open invitation to the audience to participate in the system of gazes made possible by the amphitheatre’s architecture (and the cinematography of the arena sequence), further cementing the self-reflexive nature of Gladiator’s use arena fights.

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Let the games begin! The camera follows Maximus and Juba’s entrance into the Colosseum in low angle and moves in a sweeping 360-degree wide-tracking shot in which the amazed gladiators stand in the foreground framed against the spectacle of the crowd-filled stands. Music blares from trumpets and drums, repeating the motif associated with Commodus and marking the amphitheatre as his domain (Tillman, 2017, p. 63). The gladiators salute the emperor, ‘We who are about to die salute you.’ Commodus accepts with a wave to the crowd, accompanied in his imperial box by Lucilla and her son Lucius (Spencer Treat Clark). The garishly made-up narrator then introduces the scenario: the gladiators will be re-enacting the Roman victory at battle of Zama against Hannibal’s Carthaginians in 202 BC. Thus, Maximus’s Colosseum battle is a doubly framed nostalgic recreation of history – the victorious Roman battle of Zama and the digital recreation of the Colosseum. The nostalgic doubleframing device is also used in Pompeii, where Milo is forced to perform a re-enactment of his village’s massacre by the Romans. Steadily held symmetrical long/medium shots switch from different levels in the amphitheatre: from shots level with the gladiators on the sands; to higher shots from the viewpoint of the spectators seated in the stands; to a shot showing the saluting gladiators over Commodus’s shoulder, framed by the cheering crowd in the background. As the gladiators hold the salute tableau, Maximus quietly addresses his fellow gladiators, ‘Anyone here been in the army? … whatever comes out of these gates, we’ve got a better chance of survival if we work together. Do you understand? We stay together, we survive.’ As the Colosseum fight unfolds, Maximus takes on a leadership role and galvanizes the gladiators as a brotherhood – activating one of the key conventions of the gladiator scenario. The brotherhood of the familia gladiatoria is a frequent fixture of the gladiator’s story, accentuated during his arena battles. Over the course of his first arena encounter, condemned prisoner Marcus befriends a troupe of gladiators in Seven Rebel Gladiators and the fraternity of ten gladiators led by Roccio appear across multiple films. The moral core of the Spartacus television series is embedded within the brotherhood of Batiatus’ gladiators who fight against Rome. In certain cases, the

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stakes of the arena battle shift as the gladiator is forced to fight his comrades, as Spartacus must kill his friend Varro in a party-set arena fight. As he again takes on his persona as General, Maximus is the centre of the film’s gladiatorial brotherhood. He provides the moral and military leadership that helps them survive and resist.

The fight With the brotherhood assembled, the battle explodes into action taking up 3 minutes and 28 seconds of the 13 minute 23 second sequence (see Figure 3.9). The narrator announces the legionnaires of Scipio Africanus, the music swells and the gates fly open to admit warriors in chariots, who circle the gladiators so that archers can pick them off. The circling motion of the chariots in fluid long shot is intercut with unsteady, closer, briefer and disorienting shots of the gladiators grouping together in a circle behind their large rectangular shields. As the fight continues, the camera frequently cuts to a low-angle close-up of the blades mounted on the chariot wheels as they come closer to the gladiators. This battle, like most arena fights, spends considerable time in wide long

Figure 3.9  The violent density of Gladiator’s first Colosseum fight

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shots. This allows the spectator to survey the lavish mise en scène (the amphitheatre, its crowds, the costumes, the weapons, the animals) as well as the action on the sands. The tide of Maximus’s battle turns dramatically when the shield wall flips an attacking chariot, underlined by several short cutaway shots of the audiences (crowd, narrator, Commodus). This explosive violence is amplified by sound: the beat of horses’ hooves, the whizzing of arrows, the thwack of arrow on shield, the wordless grunts or shouts of the fighters and the high pitch insect-like noise of the chariot blades. The sonic wall of the crowd’s cheers stays in the background until key moments, as when Maximus intervenes to save a comrade and when an archer is sliced in half by a chariot blade. Sonic punctuation is also added by the occasional rallying cry or order (‘To the death!’ ‘Stay as one! Hold!’) or, at the battle’s close, by the crowd’s rhythmic chanting (‘Live! Live!’ ‘Maximus! Maximus!’). The rhythmic soundscape of the crowd mimics the pause/burst/pause pattern that David Bordwell (2000) observed in his seminal work on Hong Kong cinema’s action sequences. Bordwell argued that Western cinema is not as formally adept as its Hong Kong counterpart at taking advantage of this kind of rhythmic action narration. As I have argued  elsewhere (2019), the sword and sandal film is an exception to this rule, as its arena sequences rely on an interaction between posed moments (the salute, the long take of the gladiator’s body, the sword raised in victory) and frenetic action. Because the violence of the gladiator in the amphitheatre must be a performance as well as a contest, such sculptural posing is necessary. I suggest that Bordwell’s pause/burst/pause might be more accurately rewritten in the context of the arena fight as pose/burst/pose. In Gladiator’s Colosseum sequence, it is the sound as much as the framing, editing or choreography that ensures this pattern.

Digital violence Bracketed by the posing of the gladiator, in the sonically supported rhythms of the arena, is the violent act itself: weapons penetrating flesh, spurts of blood, smash of sword on shield, hard crunch of fist on bone. The critical reception of Gladiator often highlights its innovative use of digital effects, particularly in its reanimation of the Colosseum, its

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crowds and the violent spectacles it stages. Kirsten Moana Thompson (2010) discusses the immersive potentiality of digital cinematography, particularly in the Colosseum sequence. Lisa Purse (2017) argues that the early years of computer-generated imagery, which she dates from the 1990s, proved a cost-effective way to present graphic violence in which ‘verisimilitude was prioritized’ (2017, p. 18). Films such as Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg, 1998) and, I would add, Gladiator, utilize graphic, digitally enhanced violence to augment their melodramatic storytelling and moral message. In order to do so, the filmmakers worked to obscure the composite nature of the image (Purse, 2017, p. 18, citing Sobchak and Rodowick). I would push this further to insist that the cinematography of the Colosseum fight has much in common (and should be read in the context of) the Omaha beach sequence that starts Saving Private Ryan. In its presentation of the overwhelming confusion of battle and the way it nests its male melodrama inside historical recreation, the film belongs to this early moment of digital cinema and builds on classical traditions of earlier Hollywood arena fights (Demetrius and the Gladiators, Spartacus, Barabbas, The Fall of the Roman Empire). Purse insists that Gladiator’s digital realism depends on its status as a prestige picture, much like Saving Private Ryan. The violence of Gladiator’s Colosseum as a composite between digital and analogue effects prefigures but differs from the excessive digital violence that would characterize later sword and sandal fictions such as 300 and the Spartacus series. This later strand of digital violence, Purse argues, has a close relationship with the excesses of exploitation cinema. The gladiatorial has a long-standing association with happily received low-budget genre pictures. Thus, the arena sequence lends itself particularly well to the excessive stylization of the ‘digital-visceral’ aesthetic, which Purse defines as ‘hyperbolic iterations of spatial and temporal extension and visual texture in a flamboyant gesture of violence that remediates previous exploitation aesthetics, while signalling and celebrating its own artifice’ (2017, p. 24). While the digital violence of Gladiator reaches towards realism, it nonetheless includes elements of violent extravagance common in the later Spartacus series (e.g. when the archer is cut in half by the chariot blade). The excesses of Gladiator often escape notice as the film merges them into a bricolage dominated by naturalism and claims of historical realism.

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Where the sounds and digital violence of the Colosseum promote a sense of orchestrated disorientation, the music provides an emotional and narrational anchoring point. Joakim Tillman (2017) argues that the score of Gladiator is a dramatic departure from the fanfares of earlier Hollywood epics (such as Spartacus) and that it is largely organized to showcase an emotional confrontation between its tragic protagonist and corrupt antagonist expressed through their associated musical themes. This is exemplified in the Colosseum sequence, which recreates Commodus’s theme on the ceremonial trumpets and features the Spanish guitars connected with Maximus’ homeland (Tillman, 2017, pp. 63, 71). The music serves as a steady prompt for the audience to recall the main conflict of the film, of which the Colosseum sequence is one episode. Maximus poses for the crowds with his sword raised on his white horse, underpinned by the musical ‘tragic hero theme’ first heard when he served as victorious general during his battle in Germania (Tillman, 2017, p. 76). The remaining time on the sand is dedicated to Maximus’s confrontation with Commodus, in which he reveals his true identity and swears his vengeance. The confrontation between gladiator-hero and his powerful antagonist is a fixture of the arena sequence, echoing a central structure of classical Hollywood storytelling. Here the walled boundary between performers on the sand and spectators on the stands is breached – either by the gladiator calling up towards the balcony where the authority figure sits (as Demetrius does in Demetrius and the Gladiators and Maciste likewise in The Terror of Rome) or through outright violence as in Pompeii or the 2012 Barabbas remake (Young). After the gladiators claim victory in the Battle of Zama re-enactment and Maximus’s unmasking, the crowd ensures his survival with their support and he exits the Colosseum’s gates to chants of ‘Maximus! Maximus!’ This sequence is, on the one hand, perfectly insular, hemmed in by the gamespace of the amphitheatre so that it functions as a complete film in itself. On the other hand, through its narration, it provides key information and story developments that change the course of the larger system of the film. There is a parallel to be drawn here between the arena fight sequence and the musical number, each representing a genre-defining spectacle with a clear beginning, middle and end. In his discussion of Bruce Lee’s influence on the kung fu genre, Hsiung-Ping Chiao argues that Lee’s fight sequences (one of which was

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memorably filmed in the Colosseum) parallel the dance sequences of performers like Gene Kelly in that ‘their physical performances of kicks, turns, and jumps serve as their ultimate self-expressions’ (Chiao, 1981, p. 34). There are more elements linking the two spectacular genres. More significant here is the argument that the musical number is not a moment of narrative-arresting spectacle, but integral to its progression – in a manner that is structurally analogous with the arena sequence. As I will argue in Chapter V, the frequent orgiastic sex scenes in the Spartacus series likewise function as these kinds of moments fusing spectacle and narration. Richard Rushton, drawing on the work of Kristin Thompson, sees the Colosseum sequence from Gladiator as a discrete unit of cinema that is key to its narrative arc (Rushton, 2001, p. 38). As the point of view shifts during the set-up and execution of the fight, the camera focuses on characters representing several storylines, economically developing each sub-plot: we see the gladiators prepare backstage and emerge on the sands, we simultaneously stand (via camera angle) with the gladiators at sand level and with the spectators at stand level. In the aftermath of the battle, the focus of the camera (and the musical motifs that bridge shots) is on the key actors, for whom this battle will dramatically change the trajectory of their lives: Proximo, Lucilla, Lucius, Commodus. Because of the tightly structured nature of the gladiatorial scenario, with its ritual repetitions and archetypal resonances, it is possible to talk about the Colosseum sequence as illustrative or even typical of the arena fight. The arena combat sequence is notably similar across gladiator stories, genres, countries and time periods. With the inclusion of new filmmaking technology (sound, colour film, CinemaScope, the mobile camera, CGI, 3D), the arena sequence is augmented rather than fundamentally changed. It is a singular moment of heightened spectacle, emotion and narrative significance. It occurs at consistent times in the overall structure of films, providing similar types of plot reversals or progressions. A gladiator will suffer bravely, reverse the tides of the fight, band together with his comrades and confront corrupt authority. He will swear vengeance, loyalty or defiance and he will pose bravely and beautifully. When audiences see the establishing shot of an amphitheatre, they can be comfortably expectant of the spectacular rituals to follow.

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Three films called ‘Arena’ To conclude this chapter, I consider three gladiator films with the same title; telling the gladiator’s story in ways that reflect the anxieties and desires of their times, while centralizing the space of the arena. Each of these low-budget films dramatize the arena as a fascinating (and titillating) gamespace; a place of excess commensurate with their contemporary media culture. Taken together, these films tell different versions of the arena story using the same tools (similar production environments, similar distribution and, from the sparse information available, relatively similar critical receptions).7 Thus, these three films are well suited to speak together about the way their cultures saw the gladiator’s story as it unfolded in the arena.

1974 In 1974, the story of the arena was of enslaved and sexually brutalized provincial women victimized by the Roman Empire. They are kidnapped from their communities and forced to fight as gladiators to provide an innovative spectacle for jaded provincial audiences. It is being forced to fight for entertainment as part of a violent burlesque (an ‘unnatural’ act according to Margaret Markov’s Bodicia) that bonds the women together as a revolutionary force. Although there are obvious feminist resonances, the film nonetheless sidesteps overly politicized messages by concentrating on a sisterhood galvanized by an individual corrupt tyrant’s desire to make a profit. It offers sub-plots in which the women fight to avenge their murdered men, or mobilize the paternal sensibilities of powerful male gladiators. The arena of 1974 also belongs to exploitation cinema, in both the ‘Sexploitation’ and ‘Blaxploitation’ variants. This film, starring one of Blaxploitation cinema’s most celebrated superstars, Pam Grier, falls firmly within the production and reception practices common to exploitation cinema, while filtering its story through the iconography of the fading Italian peplum cycle. The film pairs Pam Grier (as Mamawi) with Margaret Markov (as Bodicia); a pairing that had met with success in the previous year’s Black Mama White Mama (Romero, 1973). The film features six arena fights that take up 25 minutes and 36 seconds

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of its total hour-and-a-half runtime. Each of these represents important points in the film’s plot and in the radicalisation of its female characters, who break free of their Roman captors in a 10-minute-and-14-second fight sequence that spills out of the amphitheatre and into the streets. It is telling that Mamawi initially unleashes her violent rage not because of the ‘unnaturalness’ of being forced to fight, but because of the racist slurs thrown at her by another enslaved woman. In addition to the pre-fight sex scenes, the wooden amphitheatre is also the staging ground for the film’s most eroticized spectacles. It is perhaps surprising that the arena fights themselves are no more (or less) erotic than those found in more mainstream films or outside of the exploitation genres. I would argue that this is because the onscreen arena is at maximum erotic saturation point; any further sexualization would tip the balance from burlesque into soft-core pornography or switch from sexualization to actual sex acts. For example, in the much later film Female Fight Club, there is an arena-based sequence in which the central female fighter has sex in the fight ring. Although this is not filmed with a diegetic audience present and obeys the conventions of sexual representation dictated by its R/18 rating, it remains jarring, even in a low-budget context, particularly as it is cross-cut with a scene in which another woman is violently attacked. A similarly disturbing juxtaposition between the arena fight and sexual violence is a central spectacle in the 2001 remake of The Arena, which cuts to an arena fight directly after a violent sexual assault of female slaves. Later in the film a sex sequence between gladiators about to fight and the female protagonists is intercut with shots of arena fights while the electric guitar music common to soft-core pornography bridges the flashing images. While the arena fight is most certainly an erotically inflected spectacle, as I will analyse in detail in Chapter V, it generally obeys the sexual conventions and taboos of its audiences and is in keeping with either the strictures of censorship (such as the Hayes code) or its MPAA/ BBFC rating, even while pushing at some of these boundaries, as The Arena 1974 certainly does. (Re)mediated representations of arena fights must carefully navigate the line between titillation and disgust. Female Fight Club’s literalization of sex in the arena stands as an example of a film’s eroticization of the fight space of the arena that overwhelms the fiction. I have argued that the gladiator’s violence and the large-scale vision of the crowd-filled amphitheatre are spectacles that support

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and forward the narrative. However, the eroticism of the gladiator’s sexualized body does represent moments of disruptive spectacle that slows, even if it does not stop, the momentum of the story. This holds true for the female performers of The Arena (both diegetically and for the system of the film) and for the eroticized male gladiators that form the mainstay of the arena fight sequence (for example, Kit Harington’s entrance into the arena in Pompeii). As I will discuss in the analysis of the gladiatorial burlesque in Chapter V, while the female gladiator is always sexualized, visual fictions use more varied and excessive formal elements to eroticize the male gladiator. In 1974, while exploitation cinema was enjoying a measure of popularity, the Roman amphitheatre was a space of sexualized spectacle and female fighters were presented as unwilling participants, ultimately uniting in their disgust of, and resistance to, an exploitative imperial system that demanded they make violent spectacles of themselves for its profit and entertainment. The film dramatizes, with significant pathos, the plight of exploited and marginalized men (Mamawi’s gladiator lover is unfairly killed in the arena, and one Macistestyle strongman is moved to rebel to avenge his wife and protect his daughter). Despite the fact that all the gladiators are killed with the exception of Mamawi and Bodicia, the film ends on a promising note, offering the women their hard-won freedom, and permitting them some joy in their (inexplicably effective) fighting abilities.

1989 In 1989, the story of the arena is set in the far-flung future and mimics the US boxing film in almost all aspects, including conventional characters such as the corrupt promoter, the underdog fighter (here pitted against much larger alien foes), the treacherous seductress and the ultimate victory of reaffirming one’s masculinity by ‘going the distance’. The film, an Italian-American co-production filmed at Empire Studios in Rome, takes for granted the audience’s experience of earlier boxing films, often skating over aspects of plot and procedure in order to focus on the spectacle of costume, mise en scène, and human vs alien violence. The film can be read as commensurate with other higher-budget action films of the period that recall gladiatorial scenarios or characters, such as Conan the Barbarian, No Retreat, No Surrender (Yuen, 1986), Death

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Warrant (Sarafian, 1990) and Gladiator (1992). Where many millennial gladiators, such as Maximus, are older veteran fighters and fathers, human fight contender Steve is a young untried novice, like Rocky Balboa (in the first Rocky film) or Conan during his gladiatorial training. The youthful enthusiasm of the apprentice fighter desperate to prove himself produces a significantly different thematic core to the gladiator’s story. Steve’s story is a victorious rite of passage made possible in the arena, unlike Mamawi’s resistance in 1974 or David Lord’s digitized update in 2011’s Arena. If, as Robert A. Rushing (2016a) argues, the overall narrative arc of the gladiator is one of anxiety about alien incursion, the 1989 Arena (released on the eve of the fall of the Soviet Union) offers easy reassurance: the built white body of its blond working-class hero suffers and ultimately triumphs over literal aliens, with their much larger grotesque and hybrid bodies. Steve is one of the few humans to compete in the arena and certainly the only one to win the championship. In its presentation of man vs alien, Arena (1989) recalls the Roman beast fights or venationes. Steve faces an array of alien enemies and training partners; some are cyborg fusions of monster and machine and others have insectoid bodies. The beast fight has been a fixture of the peplum since its early twentieth-century inception, for example strongman Ursus (named after a bear) in Quo Vadis (Guazzoni, 1913) protects his mistress by wrestling a bull. Later films followed up with their heroes wrestling several types of predators, from pythons (in The Witch’s Curse/Maciste all’Inferno [Freda, 1962]) to lions in The Legend of Hercules. The beast fight was designed in antiquity to demonstrate Rome’s dominance over the fiercest the natural world had to offer, in particularly the threatening wilderness of its provinces. The same is also true of the beast fights that would follow in popular representations such as Gérôme’s neoclassical painting and peplum films. The beast fight has several functions, in Arena as elsewhere. In fighting a larger monstrous or alien foe, the strong, physically fit white man becomes the underdog, as Steve does in the film. The beast fight also offers the opportunity for the gladiator to be at his most bloodthirsty without having to kill another human, for example: the biblical epic Demetrius and the Gladiators features devoutly Christian Demetrius showing his strength against tigers because he refuses to kill another human. John Carter and Anakin Skywalker can similarly demonstrate their violence legitimately

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against alien challengers. The robot fighting in films such as Real Steel or Big Hero 6 (Hall and Williams, 2014) or even the reality television series Robot Wars (BBC, 1998–2018) are further extensions of the alien or beast fight. These films can keep their human death counts exceptionally low, while still spectacularizing violent conflict. In these examples, as in Arena (1989), the white human male body is reinforced as the baseline of martial (and moral) worth by staging combats between fragile-seeming human men and alien or mechanical monsters.

2011 By 2011, the arena was not a physical place, but a digital broadcast for paying customers who are offered the spectacle of real death framed by digitally realized, historically diffuse gladiatorial scenarios. In the film, Denver firefighter David has been kidnapped by an underground fight organisation that live streams battles to the death to a global audience. Still reeling from the death of his pregnant wife, David is tortured and forced to participate in an escalating series of fights in which he becomes a fan favourite under the moniker Death Dealer. Each fight in this ‘dark arena’ is an elaborately staged spectacle playing to themes of warrior mythology and masculine strength. These range from a samurai battle to a DEA raid and a nail gun battle on a high-rise construction site. In his penultimate fight he faces a South African spree killer while dressed as a Roman legionnaire, reinforcing the Roman resonances of the scenario. This fight is claustrophobic and dark, hemmed in by what appears to be an amphitheatre’s backstage area. The walls are mounted with weaponry, chains and torture devices of imprecise historical purpose or period. The small space, low-key lighting, tightly framed shots, the excess of blood and deadly weaponry contribute to a sense of menace, constriction and desperation. The Roman costumes combined with the gladiatorial setup of the film generically recall both the millennial sword and sandal film and the closed torture rooms conventional in hypergraphic horror films of the ‘torture porn’ variation. For David, the digital fight arenas have as much, if not more, in common with Saw (Wan, 2004) as they do with Gladiator. This is compounded by the fact that his adversary is played by stuntman Derek Mears, who starred as Jason Voorhees in the 2009 (Nispel) instalment of the Friday the 13th slasher franchise.8

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The fight itself is determined by its stage. The men throw each other against the wall-mounted weapons and awkwardly grapple in the small, dark space. There are few long shots or long takes and an absence of establishing shots as the space prevents it and the action relies heavily on constructive editing.9 A notable exception is an aerial shot of the two fighters on the ground wrestling, slippery with their own blood. This shows the exhaustion and desperation of its hero through his fighting style. David throws frantic elbows, claws at the arms that are choking him and headbutts his opponent, breaking his nose. Yet, even this dark arena fight follows vaguely professionalized rules of combat; rules that are entrenched in a sense of what is a ‘proper’ or honourable fight. Despite the headbutt, for example David does not bite nor does he aim for the groin of his opponent. Both fighters pause after each tussle, resetting their stances and facing one another, following the pose/burst/ pose pattern identified earlier and common in sport-based combat. The pace of the fighting, and the space of engagement, is punctuated by cutaway shots of the audience watching online. Over the course of the film, two main groups of spectators have been highlighted: a group of college students watching in their dormitory room and a Japanese office worker watching on his work computer or mobile phone. The titular arena in this film is digitally augmented in a way that differs from Pompeii or Gladiator and resembles the digital or broadcast spectatorship paradigms of Gamer, The Hunger Games, No Exit/Fatal Combat, Endgame, The Running Man, Rollerball, the Death Race franchise or The New Gladiators. The arena becomes the studio set or the sport stadium, viewed remotely by audience members who can contribute to the decision of whether the gladiators will live or die (in Arena, the audience members can vote to kill or spare the losing fighter). Punctuating these shots of the audience watching enthusiastically are shots of the corrupt authority figure, media impresario played by Samuel L. Jackson who directs the camera work and whose presence provides motivation for a double-framing device: a wall of screens producing a hypermediated image of the fight overlaid with titles and text. In these shots we also see the conventional character of the worried woman (Milla), recently redeemed and now aiding David in his drive to escape. The arena in this fight is oriented to suggest and facilitate the graphic presentation of violence: weapons decorate the walls, the costumes

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and bodies of the fighters are covered in blood, the (close-up) sounds of exhausted breathing are overlaid with the echoing noise of bones cracking and the moist squelching of blood and sweat. The closeness of the space requires extremely close attention to the straining male bodies of the fighters; it foregrounds and contributes to the abject nature of their violence. This resolutely embodied materiality is then digitally broadcast globally across multiple, hypermediated, screens. Arena is a perfect illustration of the ‘digital-visceral’ aesthetic highlighted by Lisa Purse. It delights in flamboyant gestures of violence informed by exploitation and horror cinema, doubly framed through the broadcast set-up, while decorating them in the costumes and signifiers of prestige pictures such as Gladiator or Spartacus (1960). Where it further differs from films such as Machete Kills (Rodriguez, 2013) or Saw is in the nostalgic melancholia that it attaches to its gladiatorial character, a legacy of Scott’s Gladiator. Each of these films named Arena is a low-budget genre film (the first two are Italian-American co-productions) whose screen time is largely occupied with arena-based fight sequences (see Figure 3.10) and fixated on the spectacles of violence and sex (1974’s The Arena was originally rated X and the 2011 version is rated R/18, whereas the 1989 film is classified as 15/PG-13). The film from the 1970s shows the arena as an uncanny space of oppression that is entirely destroyed by revolutionary women and the men who join them. In the 1980s, another film named Arena showed a futuristic amphitheatre as a joyful place, reinforcing the importance of one man’s physical mastery against carnivalesque alien others. After the turn of the millennium, 2011’s Arena constructs the arena as a more diffuse place, existing not only in imprecise (hypermasculine) historical backdrops but as an interactive corporate network that enslaves blue-collar men. While the conventions of the arena sequence remain relatively steady across these three films, the stakes are historically situated at the times of their production. Each new arena fight adds to, reinforces and subtly shifts the gladiatorial scenario. Arguably, the most striking changes in the make-up of the arena sequence are not its generic or formal function (these remain unusually steadfast). Rather, the racial and gender politics of its representations have shifted. The white man, and his body, become increasingly more victimized and naturalized in the position of exploited underdog. Where the male

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Figure 3.10  The fight sequences of the three Arena films

authorities were enslaving women of many different ethnicities in 1974, by 1989, the hero is a young white outsider trying to earn a piece of that authority. By 2011, and informed by the perceived crisis of masculinity that marked the turn of the millennium, the working-class white man is the victim of a corporate system that exploits his skills while brutalizing and objectifying his body.

Conclusion: ‘While stands the Coliseum …’ The next chapter suggests that nostalgia has an increasingly important role to play in this shift and how it registers within the gladiatorial archetype and scenario. The arena, of which the Roman Colosseum is the most famous example, has become an architectural manifestation of, monument to, that nostalgia, not only in its ruined form, appearing as the backdrop to the gladiatorial bout between Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris at the end of Way of The Dragon, but in its digital reconstruction in Gladiator. The endless returns to the arena recall the much-cited aphorism, ‘Quamdiu stat Coliseus, stat et Roma. Quando cadet Coliseus, cadet et Roma. Quando cadet Roma, cadet et mundus’,

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which Byron interprets as ‘While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand; / When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall; / And when Rome falls – the World’ (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto IV, Stanza 145).10 In the light of a close examination of the arena sequence across key films, this aphorism might be amended to conclude that while the arena stands and recirculates with such arresting consistency and ubiquity, so stands the monumental archetype of the gladiator: a singular figure able to nostalgically embody the best and the worst of his civilization.

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Chapter IV Nostalgia

Is Rome worth one good man’s life? GLADIATOR

Roma quanta fuit, ipsa ruina docet / How great Rome was, its very ruins tell. FRANCESCO ALBERTINI1 In the melodramatic conclusion to Gladiator, Lucilla stands over the lifeless body of Maximus, murdered by perverse emperor Commodus in a rigged gladiatorial battle. She turns to the crowd and demands: ‘Is Rome worth one good man’s life?’ The question hangs over the shocked onlookers for a moment. Lucilla continues, ‘We believed it once’. She turns to the worldly Senator Gracchus: ‘Make us believe it again. He was a soldier of Rome. Honour him.’ Narratively, this moment reaffirms the republican dream of Rome, hyperreal and American though it surely is. The good man’s life has been sacrificed in order to overthrow a dangerous dictator in the name of a more democratic order run by the senate, representing the ‘people’, that is to say the crowd watching in the Colosseum. However, the entire system of the film, and the impulse of the gladiatorial scenario or filone, insist on a different answer to Lucilla’s question. Maximus is superior to the emperor that he has killed, to the other gladiators that he has defeated, to the crowd that delights in his violence and to the corrupt aristocrats and senators that aim to manipulate him. The ‘dream that was Rome’ was certainly not

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Image 4.46  He was a soldier of Rome. Honour him

worth this good man’s life. The good man’s life and body are precious commodities at the centre of the film’s spectacular pleasures – the historical, the violent, the sensual. Rome is a gaudy, flat digital copy when set against the weight of the body of the fallen gladiator. This is the weight of nostalgia.

Nostalgia of the gladiator The gladiator is a nostalgic invention. He has been so from the moment of his first fight at Roman funerary games in 264 BC. His many remediated appearances across visual culture are always nostalgic expressions or, perhaps, symptoms. He is one of the morituri – always about to die violently, even at the height of physical strength. His mental archive of martial skills belongs to the lost time before civilization or, as I have argued, to the post-apocalyptic time after civilization has fallen. In either case, the gladiator is a man who is always out of time – in both senses of the phrase. This puts him firmly on a nostalgic register infused with an elegiac structure of feeling, particularly in those fictions produced after the golden era of the Italian mid-century peplum. The post-millennial digital era marks an increase in both the generalized force of nostalgia and, in the case of the nostalgic body of the gladiator, an intensification of a sense of loss.

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The gladiator can embody nostalgia in its many meanings and manifestations – historical, cultural, cinematic, psychological and commercial. The Roman gladiator onscreen firstly signals a historical nostalgia for the time of the Roman republic and Empire, which manifests as a tense synergy between the ideals of classicism and the eroticized yearnings of romanticism. This is frequently in the service of a nationalist nostalgia, of which fascism might be the most notorious example. Infamously, Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini mobilized, or perhaps more accurately weaponized, the iconography of the Roman Empire to nostalgically revivify the glory of an idealized national past in order to justify and reinforce his totalitarian politics. It is significant that Mussolini’s nostalgia foregrounded the muscular male body as integral to national identity, for example in the sculptures of male bodies that line the Stadio dei Marmi in the Foro Italico – discussed by Richard Dyer (1997). The cultural nostalgia of the gladiator is layered, as he also represents a lost moment of cinema (the peplum, the biblical epic) that Frederic Jameson included under the label la mode rétro. Certainly, the barbarian films of the 1980s might be considered examples of the nostalgia film, flavoured with the same kind of cinematic flashback as the Indiana Jones franchise (Spielberg, 1981–2008). The barbarian cycle actively remembers and references the peplum films of the previous postwar generation, just as the Indiana Jones films recall earlier cinematic serials.2 The gladiator belongs to the cinema of remembered and lost childhoods, just as the peplum hero, according to Robert A. Rushing (2016a), embodies an infantile jouissance in feats of strength and kitsch mythical struggles. The gladiatorial scenario permits its producers, characters and audiences to ‘play’ at being gladiators and to play at being children watching gladiators in second-run cinemas or on television. The post-millennial gladiator layers this cinematic nostalgia, incorporating its generation’s nostalgia for films like Conan the Barbarian and television programming such as Xena: Warrior Princess into stratified nostalgia of The Scorpion King franchise, The Legend of Hercules, Hercules (Ratner, 2014) and the Conan or Barabbas remakes. The nostalgia embodied by the gladiator, and used to frame his stories, is at the core of his enduring appeal. The strands of nostalgia I have just outlined roughly correspond to the chapters in this book: of the turning

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of the millennium with its perceived crisis in masculinity (Introduction), of enduring warrior archetypes (Chapter I), of play and genre (Chapters II and III), of a permissive, sometimes perverse, eroticism tied to the classical world (Chapter V) and of glory and infamy inscribed on the fighter’s body (Chapter VI). All of these are expressed through the built body of the doomed gladiator at the moment just before his violent death or victory. The force of this nostalgia has only increased in power as the gladiator becomes digitized through remediation practices that layer his function as representation, avatar and archetype. In order to analyse the gladiator’s embodiment of different traditions and functions of nostalgia, this chapter begins by offering a critical definition of nostalgia, its entanglement with classicism, and its augmentation through digital media. The chapter then goes on to an indepth analysis of the nostalgic body of the gladiator, in particular Steve Reeves’s Glaucus in The Last Days of Pompeii and Kit Harington’s Milo in Pompeii. I conclude with an investigation of one key example of gladiatorial nostalgia, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, as a potent fusion of the apocalyptic and the nostalgic.

Towards an understanding of nostalgia The root of the term ‘nostalgia’ is from the Greek nostos (return home) and algos (longing) and most historians assign its origins to Odysseus’s decade-long struggle to return home in Homer’s Odyssey (for example, Lowenthal, 2015, p. 43). Nostalgia, as we currently understand it, begins with Johannes Hofer’s 1688 description of it as a medical condition manifesting in a crippling longing for home.3 Twentieth-century uses of the term emphasized the psychological diagnostic sense of the term ‘nostalgia’ and widened it to consider communal and individual senses of longing not only for a place, but also a time – a lost youth. Nostalgia can also be associated with the dispossessed and deracinated, with commemoration and with forms of resistance. Nadia Atia and Jeremy Davies (2010) establish the double-edged sword or ‘deadlock’ of nostalgia. On the one hand nostalgia is ‘often reactionary at best …, and at worst can be deeply exclusionary and atavistic’ (2010,

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p. 181), presenting false histories. For example, Gladiator ends by imagining a re-establishment of the Roman republic, a return that never happened. However, they also acknowledge the pleasures of nostalgia and establish that it can be ‘a potent form of such subaltern memory’ with considerable ‘critical potential’ (2010, p. 181, emphasis in the original). Atia, Davies, Katharina Niemeyer (2004) and other nostalgia scholars ask us not to think about what nostalgia is, but what it does. What does nostalgia do? It commodifies and it conserves. It builds communities around memories of lost homes and childhoods. It can create art and consumer goods: music, film, television, videogames and fashion. It is a powerful force in advertising. It can be, following on from Chapter II’s discussion of the ludic aspects of genre, a form of playing with the midden of popular culture often exhibited through kitsch. It reanimates the past (sometimes literally through computer-generated effects) and fuels both remediation and hyperreality. Thus, nostalgia is a style, feeling, practice and a mode of filmmaking. It is more accurate to think of nostalgia in the plural – nostalgias. Svetlana Boym offers a poetic and robust definition of nostalgia early in her seminal work on the subject: Modern nostalgia is a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values; it could be a secular expression of a spiritual longing, a nostalgia for an absolute, a home that is both physical and spiritual, the Edenic unity of time and space before entry into history. (2001, p. 8) At the heart of Boym’s formulation is the sense that nostalgia is a search for unity no longer possible in a fragmented present; this is expressed through both the sadness of mourning and the delight of enchanted yearning. Likewise, Niemeyer defines nostalgia as a ‘bittersweet longing for former times and places’ (2017, p. 1). She builds on this formulation to argue that it ‘has always been an affair of different engagements with media’ (2017, p. 18). She suggests that while it is certainly not a new phenomenon, nor a product of the digital age, the turn of the millennium has marked a significant ‘nostalgia boom’. This nostalgia boom happens at the same millennial moment as the reboot of the sword and

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sandal film, and the resurgence of the gladiatorial impulse in cinema, exemplified by Gladiator and its imitators. This is more than coincidence. It is a symbiotic relationship that has only increased in intensity with the progression of the millennium. This chapter’s discussion of nostalgia takes the gladiator as part of its process and as an object for yearning. The gladiator can embody nostalgia, prompting me to describe him as chronosoma – a time-body – registering nostalgic desire as mournful, erotic, spiritual and ultimately self-destructive. The feeling and sensibility of nostalgia is intensely commodified and often reduced to a style (vintage, retro, ‘retrosploitation’, rockabilly, etc.) or even a brand (the National Trust). Raphael Samuel’s influential Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture flags up a long-established tradition of revivifying the past, in which retrochic and Niemeyer’s nostalgia boom are recent iterations of traditions such as copyism, revivalism and neoclassicism. ‘[I]n short, it is modernism, with its fetishization of the new, which is the exception; revivalism, whether in the form of cultural borrowing or variations on a classical theme, has more often resembled the norm’ (Samuel, 2012, p. 110). The digital media, and the accompanying nostalgic practice of remediation, represent a distinctly new pattern and aesthetic of dealing with the past; of making and communicating what Samuel argues is the social knowledge of history (2012, p. 8). This is not to argue that digital media represent a rupture with previous traditions of revivalism. Rather, it is to insist that the technologies of the digital media (from the handheld camera, to the internet, to new methods of archaeological inquiry) demand a reconsideration of how nostalgia works and how we might study it. Thus, we began this study at the turn of the millennium, when digital cinema was making measurable changes in the aesthetics of representing the past (e.g. Gladiator’s Colosseum). As I have established, this is also when Gladiator kick-started a new wave of sword and sandal film in Hollywood and marks the time of the nostalgia boom identified by Niemeyer. Here, the digitally augmented classical body of the gladiator, like Maximus or Spartacus, is caught in a nostalgic dream of Rome and framed by computer generated copies of amphitheatres and hyperstylized sprays of ancient blood. I would argue that the most salient product of digital nostalgia is an update on the French term nostalgie de la boue (nostalgia for mud), that Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard associate with the gladiator. ‘In part we

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are no doubt dealing with a common fascination of elite culture for its opposite … In other words, gladiators were not sexy and exciting despite being beyond the social pale, but because they were’ (2011, pp. 82–3). Digital culture makes this desire for mud all the more enticing. However, I would suggest that we might relabel this mud nostalgia in the face of the digitally augmented gladiator to read nostalgie du sang, or blood nostalgia, for a low-cultural authenticity that is informed by violence, coated with blood rather than the patina of age. The gladiator’s veneer of blood evokes a history of visceral excess and intense experiences. Gladiator and the Spartacus series represent divergent iterations of blood nostalgia in the digital media, roughly corresponding to Svetlana Boym’s two tendencies of nostalgia: the restorative and the reflective. Restorative nostalgia aims to reanimate the past in totality, erasing all marks of the passage of time. There is no patina here, but the shiny exterior of something newly made. ‘Actual material traces of the past might disturb the total recreation of the original, which was to look old and brand new at the same time’ (Boym, 2001, p. 46). Here Boym is discussing the restoration of the Sistine Chapel in Rome but it applies equally to the production team on Gladiator who reanimated the Colosseum or those who recreated the resort town in Pompeii. This kind of restorative nostalgia reaches towards total immersion, towards a kind of historically focused virtual reality. Unexpectedly, although not for Boym, the virtual reality of restorative nostalgia loses the quality of authenticity associated with the ruin. It is too clean. The filth of the past can only be brought alive through the bodies of historical players (we see their injuries, sweat and tears) and through the violence they perpetrate. However, when blood splashes in Capua’s arenas and ludi in Spartacus, restorative nostalgia gives way to the reflective, via hyperstylization and through the digital-visceral aesthetic formulated by Lisa Purse (2017). Boym’s reflective nostalgia is more playful than the restorative nostalgia that takes itself seriously (2001, p. 49). It accepts the past as a ruin, ‘cherishes shattered fragments of memory’ (Boym, 2001, p. 49) and acknowledges the signs of dissipation, taking ‘sensual delight in the texture of time not measurable by clocks and calendars’ (Boym, 2001, p. 49). Francesco Albertini’s much-circulated aphorism is a perfect example of the power of the Roman ruin: ‘Roma quanta fuit ispa ruina docet’/‘how great Rome was, its very ruins tell.’4 It is the ruins,

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not the restoration, that testify to Rome’s greatness and encapsulates its enduring allure. On Spartacus, Capua is digitally recreated and augmented as a hyperstylized and perfectly imperfect creation. The series’ production design pays significant attention to the visceral and tactile qualities of the past, particularly through costumes, violence and sexuality. This emphasis on sensation does not depend on a dichotomy of realism versus stylization, according to Purse’s formulation of digital violence that is constructed via a ‘logic of extreme aestheticization’ (2017, p. 17), Spartacus’s blood nostalgia, with all of its visceral qualities and excessive treatment of the vices of the past, is instrumental to its reflective mode. They work in arresting synchronization. The series presents a playful treatment of the Roman past that incorporates a variety of visual media, at times resembling a videogame, an earlier sword and sandal film, or using animation in the style of a graphic novel (see Image 4.47). Even more than Capua’s past, reflective nostalgia informs the gladiators of the post-apocalyptic future, where the aesthetic of ruin, dilapidation and decay is central, as are the violent ‘flamboyant gestures’ of exploitation cinema (Purse 2017, p. 18). That the ruins in these films belong to our present rather than the Roman past adds a further layer to their reflective modes of address. The post-apocalyptic film, whether inhabited by gladiators or not, offers its viewers an uncanny ruin wherein

Image 4.47  The framing devices of Spartacus reference the aesthetic of the graphic novel and Zach Snyder’s comic book adaptation, 300

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they must work to identify their world – most famously, perhaps, in the broken figure of the Statue of Liberty at the close of Planet of the Apes (Schaffner, 1968). This uncanny identification of the present day in the future’s ruins also applies to the districts in The Hunger Games’s Panem, the roadways of the Mad Max franchise (Miller, 1979–2015) and the futuristic Rome of The New Gladiators. The basic question of these post-apocalyptic fictions is: ‘how did our world turn into this ruin?’ Thus, the premise of the setting demands a reflective position. However, such apocalyptic nostalgia can sometimes drift into the conservative (in both senses of the word), urging us to safeguard our humanity against invading forces, whether alien or viral. What links the ruins of the Roman past and the post-apocalyptic future is the weight of nostalgia that they both assign to the suffering body of the gladiator. The gladiator represents both the worst and the best of a savage time, in which he, and sometimes she, is both symptom and solution. The gladiatorial scenario oscillates between Boym’s two tendencies, often exhibiting elements of both. Like the whitewashed statues of antiquity (Roman copies of lost Greek originals, Renaissance augmentations of both), the gladiator can be both a site for reflection and an object of perfect (digital) restoration. Often, although not universally, the budget of the fiction further determines whether the gladiator’s story will be restorative (in middlebrow and prestigous productions such as Gladiator, Demetrius and the Gladiators, Ben Hur, etc.) or more haphazardly and playfully reflective (Spartacus: Blood and Sand, Arena [2011]). Furthermore, the blood nostalgia of the middlebrow is often linked in stronger formal ways with the principles of classicism. On the other hand, low-budget gladiator stories push at the boundaries of formal traditions in their excesses and self-reflection.

Classicism At first glance, the emotionality of nostalgia might seem at odds with the ideals and rationalism of classicism. However, these are entwined in complex ways that are instrumental to understanding the enduring appeal and shifting structure of feeling of the gladiator and his stories (see Figure 4.11). The nostalgic process that constructs the gladiator uses classicism (and neoclassicism) as its composite material. Both

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Figure 4.11  The interrelated forces of classicism and nostalgia

nostalgia and classicism inform how a culture deals with the past and, like nostalgia, classicism describes both style and substance. This is true for classicism in fine art and also in the ways studio-era Hollywood cinema is described as classical.5 The term ‘classic’ in a more vernacular sense is a descriptor of quality. If something has become a ‘classic’, it is not only considered good but having rightfully stood the test of time. For example, Spartacus (1960) or Ben-Hur are both products of classical Hollywood cinema and are routinely described as ‘classics’. Michael Greenhalgh (1990 and 1978) defines classicism as concerned ‘always with the ideal, in form as well as in content’ (1978, p. 11). Such classicism is driven by rationality and symmetry and an understanding of the Greco-Roman world as offering these things that have been lost or forgotten and to which we must look as canonical objects for study and imitation in order to create a better more harmonious world through architecture, law, art, politics and philosophy. ‘The structure of classicism’, he argues, is ‘a canon of qualities and ideals used again and again in a series of deliberate revivals’. Classicism is our past as we come to know it through art (Greenhalgh, 1990, p. 7). Michael Williams’s study of classicism focuses on its vernacular form, rejecting ‘constructions of classicism as monolithic and “timeless” and interrogates as an unstable and ambiguous form where references

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to the past are always mediated through the present’ (2013, p. 4). Like Greenhalgh and other art historians, Williams establishes classicism as bound to Ancient Greece and Rome and points to the way it could idealize the film star’s image – ‘elevating and internationalising’ it (2013, p. 6). ‘Indeed, the “classical” itself has always been an open discourse by design that had to adapt to local use’ (2013, p. 6). My use of classicism is based on Williams’s thoughtfully constructed definition and is most firmly rooted in neoclassicism and its entanglement with the digital. However, where Williams is largely focused on the interface between statuary and stardom, I look to the classicism framing the figure of the gladiator that has always been, in both its vernacular and academic senses, fused with nostalgia and, more recently, digitally remediated. The gladiator, unlike the film star, is himself a classical creation – indigenous to Ancient Rome. Thus, whenever he is mobilized as an archetype, scenario or even as a background icon, he connotes the classical world. In particular, he is an ambivalent signal for Roman masculine virtue/virtus and sadistic bloodthirsty spectacle.

Digitally augmented classicism The digitally enhanced classical world of the gladiator is presented to audiences as a spectacular theme park built on nostalgic foundations. This world oscillates on Boym’s nostalgic continuum between the idealized symmetry and perfection of the restorative (Gladiator’s Colosseum, Pompeii’s villas) to the romanticism of the perfect ruins and incomplete retrofits of the reflective mode (Bromans’s amphitheatre, Arena’s videogame levels). Boym argues that digital reconstruction of the lost object (particularly in an American restorative mode) ‘didn’t cure nostalgia but exacerbated it’ (2001, p. xiv). This exacerbation is expressed through practices of remediation. In their influential work on new media (published at the turn of the millennium), Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin define remediation as the process whereby new media reference, retrofit and reinvent older media in order to insist on their relevance. The dual logic is born out of rapid advancements in digital technologies. Remediation is where old and new media collide and collude. Speaking of contemporary digital film violence, Purse argues that remediation strategies can ‘reinvest

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the digital image with the haptic density of a “lost” materiality and the human experience it implies; the insistent focus on the body’s interior, via a digital simulation of past special effects practices, might seek to do the same for contemporary film violence’ (2017, p. 21). The Spartacus series is axiomatic, as its style recalls the mid-century cinema peplum through a television style informed by digital action cinema (the blood sprays on the camera lens from 300), the helmet camera (and aerial ‘blimp shot’) of NFL football, the Instagram shots of fitness influencers, and the ‘hack and slash’ momentum of certain videogame genres. This produces a visceral experience for the viewer of liveness, violence, bodies and (classical) history. Like nostalgia and classicism, Bolter and Grusin are clear that remediation is not new, nor exclusively digital; their analysis traces it back through Western (classical) art: ‘… these new media are doing exactly what their predecessors have done: presenting themselves as refashioned and improved versions of other media’ (1999, pp. 14–15). This, they argue, is accomplished by combining immediacy (liveness, urgency) with hypermediacy (mixed media, multiple-framing, graphics and text). Again, Spartacus represents the apex of this process as it re-presents, for example, classicism via formal framing elements of the comic book, twenty-first-century fitness and sport culture and soft-core pornography. Digitally augmented classicism represents a continuation of the many stylistic revivals flagged up by Greenhalgh, Boym, Samuel and others; just as digital cinema does not necessarily mark a rupture with Hollywood formal classicism. The digitally augmented classicism of Spartacus (2010–2013) or Arena (2011) represents attempts to revitalize and remediate the Greco-Roman world through digital media of cinema, graphic novels, television and videogames. Such digitally augmented classicism is infused with nostalgia and playfully engages with the established genres and classical traditions of visual art forms, such as painting (e.g. Gérôme’s Pollice Verso) and sculpture (e.g. the Borghese Gladiator).6 Where such practices differ from previous revivals is in their intensity and violence. By intensity, I mean that it is proliferating across multiplying digital media with a global speed not possible in earlier revivals (e.g. nineteenth-century neoclassicism). When I locate this nostalgic classicism in acts of violence, I mean this literally, but also in the ideological violence that accompanies an aggressive longing

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for white male power that is perceived to be disintegrating during an apocalyptic moment. For example, Fight Club’s violence is not only physical; it is a disturbing anger at the loss of white male mastery. This simmering violence was an aspect of the whitewashed classicism of the 19th century that racialized its idealization of the sculptures of the ancient world, and the mid-century fascist mobilization of the Roman masculine ideal and Empire. Like Maximus in Gladiator, Milo in Pompeii and the eponymous TV Spartacus, the heroes of these films are classically, digitally and physically built bodies we are invited to watch suffer and inflict suffering, suggesting that the ideal entrenched in this wave of classicist revival – a digital classicism – is an ideal of doomed gladiatorial violence fused with a beautiful male body.

The nostalgic body The gladiator’s body, which is on display for most of the duration of his visual stories, registers significant shifts in paradigms of masculine beauty and strength. Despite changes in size, shape and fighting style (for example from bodybuilders like Steve Reeves or Mark Forest to the slimmer kinetic muscularity of Bruce Lee, Jason Statham or Kit Harington) the body of the gladiator has always been, and continues to be, framed by both (digital) classicism and nostalgia. As an active and negotiable process, nostalgia informs the gladiator chronosoma, as a body that physically registers shifts in idealized masculinity. While it would be overstating it to claim that the body of the male gladiator is a monolithic lost object, he does signal certain constant physical qualities that are framed as lost or threatened: weight/bulk, muscularity, strength and, less visibly, martial skill and the ability to withstand pain. Like the doomed nature of the gladiator, who is always ‘about to die’, his nostalgic body is a catalogue of what has been lost or is at risk. The gladiator, as a Roman fighter-performer and an archetype in the Western imaginary, is a product of, and proposed solution to, that nostalgic sense of loss. The loss to which the gladiator’s body responds is never explicitly identified in his stories, with the memorable exception of David Fincher’s Fight Club, whose characters often meditate on the nature of their crises

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in masculinity. Fight Club’s protagonists blame consumer culture and women for these crises. This is also true, if not plainly highlighted, in other gladiatorial stories, which place their heroes in opposition to the oppressive and problematically feminizing forces of urban corporate culture (e.g. Tekken, Arena [2011] and Gamer). They suggest that the moment of second wave feminism might represent a rupturing, even apocalyptic, event dividing the ‘before’ from the ‘after’ of the gladiator. The strong and built body of the gladiator signals a desire for a preindustrial form of legitimate male-perpetrated violence and male identity that exist outside of the perceived censorious system of feminism.7 Additionally, other important elements of this apocalyptic/mythic moment of rupture (threatening monolithic/hegemonic white Western masculinity) include urbanization, industrialization and the shift in Western countries to more knowledge- or service-based economies. The proliferation of digital media is the most recent break with an embodied or material past that fuels a nostalgia for the archetypal men like the gladiator. These elements divide the ‘before and after’ of the gladiator and produce a sense of nostalgia in that division. As has been established throughout this volume, the gladiator is a victimized and exploited white, ablebodied, nominally heterosexual man. The female gladiator’s body, as I will discuss in more depth in the next chapter, has different resonances. She does not register the nostalgic loss of the male fighter because she did not have such patriarchal power in the first place. Visual fictions that foreground gladiators offer relatively fixed conventions that allow the spectator (diegetic and non) to gaze at the nostalgic bodies of gladiators without the need to stop the narrative. The most notable example is the mise en spectacle of the arena fights that permits moments of explosive violent action and more static posing to show the skilled and muscular body of the fighter. The arena fight, in keeping with many action sequences in films more generally, often feature violent action that shows the fighter having his clothes ripped off. As Dyer (1997) highlights, moments of torture, such as Conan’s suffering on the Tree of Woe or Milo being whipped in Pompeii, hold their frames steadily to allow for the centrality of the nearly naked male body. To these conventions, I would add the many Roman bathing sequences common to the sword and sandal genre, for example, the much-discussed bathing sequence featuring Tony Curtis and Lawrence Olivier in Spartacus. The ludus of Batiatus in the Spartacus series has its own bathing complex

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that becomes a regular backdrop for the show’s exposition and even its violent action. Spartacus also imagines several scenarios where the gladiator provides sexual services and sexualized entertainment to party guests, a convention that is also included, in less excessive versions, in Kubrick’s Spartacus and later in Anderson’s Pompeii. This is a source of deep shame to the gladiator. As a sex slave to both men and women, the gladiator’s body is further exploited and disempowered – arguably this is rendered even more poignant when he is victimized by powerful predatory woman (from the evil queens of the peplum, to aristocratic women in the television and film version of Spartacus). Boym’s study of nostalgia insists that ‘[i]n romantic texts nostalgia became erotic’ (2001, p. 13), as the sexualization of the gladiator’s nostalgic body proves. The gladiator performs and embodies this eroticized nostalgia in an established tradition of assigning sexual permissiveness and perversity to the classical (often fused with orientalized) past, as, for example, in the case of the eighteenth-century Hellfire Club, the Penthouse-produced story of Caligula (Brass 1979) or the queer currents of mainstream classical Hollywood films such as Spartacus or Ben-Hur. As a lost object of nostalgic desire, the gladiator’s body is always, to varying degrees, eroticized (see Images 4.48–4.51). The nostalgic bodies of gladiators in the shadow of the Vesuvius

Image 4.48  Marcus in The Last Days of Pompeii (1935)

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Image 4.49  Glaucus in The Last Days of Pompeii (1959)

Image 4.50  Lydon In The Last Days of Pompeii (1985)

Image 4.51  Milo in Pompeii (2014)

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eruption in 79 AD demonstrate shifts in the gladiatorial chronosoma [time body]. This is an inbuilt feature of the archetype, explored in detail in the next chapter on the subject of the gladiatorial burlesque. Steve Reeves stars in the 1959 adaptation of The Last Days of Pompeii, an early peplum that features many of its lasting conventions. Despite his association with the gladiator movie, Reeve’s portrayal of Glaucus in this film is the closest he will come to playing a gladiator; as a condemned prisoner he protects Christian victims in the arena. Kit Harington headlines in 2014’s Pompeii, a sword and sandal disaster film that cannot help but reference earlier versions of the disaster story. Both play nostalgic characters, whose anger and longing for a destroyed home erupts through acts of physical violence. As the centurion Glaucus, Reeves is returning to his beloved town of Pompeii only to discover that his parents have been murdered. Harington’s Milo witnesses his village massacred in the film’s opening sequence and he is being forcefully taken to Pompeii to compete in their gladiatorial games under stage name ‘the Celt’, billed as ‘the last of his kind’ by his trainer/lanista. Both are admired by women and other men for their fighting skills and strength. Both actors’ bodies carry the weight of a star persona entangled with the historical action genres – Reeves was the biggest star of the Italian peplum cycle and Harington is best known for his role on Game of Thrones. Their built bodies belong to history, providing spectacles only upstaged, perhaps, by the spectacular eruption of Vesuvius. They are the ‘figure in the landscape’ of nostalgia, providing scale, urgency, authenticity and romantic/poetic tragedy for the large-scale events and monuments of history. Pompeii’s gladiators provide an excellent cross-section for mapping the kinds of changes that have been inscribed on the gladiator’s body. This map also demonstrates the two dominant nostalgic chronosomas (or chronosomata) of the gladiator: on the one hand there is Steve Reeves’s sculptural posing, bulk and lifting strength, influenced by the earlier work of Bartolomeo Pagano in the Maciste films and by the classically informed conventions of body building culture that began with Eugene Sandow in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, Kit Harington’s youthful, kinetic power and leaner but defined musculature is informed by the athleticism of fighter-performers such as martial artist Bruce Lee; celebrity athletemodels such as David Beckham; and by changes in fitness culture that aim to produce the type of physique Brad Pitt displayed for Fight Club

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and Troy. To a certain extent, these two types of bodies (or chronosoma) correspond to the classical dichotomy between images of Hercules and those of Apollo. These differences, however, are relatively superficial. Both body types are classically inscribed and appear as gladiators throughout history; and both body types are equally decorative and serve as objects of an eroticized gaze. The differences arguably lie in the queer readings more readily attached to Apollonian body type. A significant and interesting distinction between the mid-century Hercules/Reeves and the post-millennial Apollo/Harington chronosomata is the way the surface of the skin is covered, coated and punctured. According to Rushing, the muscular bodies of the strongman hero from the barbarian films of the 1980s are wounded or scarred in ways that did not affect Reeves or other peplum heroes such as Mark Forest, Dan Vadis, Reg Park or Kirk Morris. Where Rushing’s haptic analysis (2016a, particularly pp. 117– 19) foregrounds depth, wounding and puncturing, I would like to draw attention to the way nostalgic gladiatorial bodies are coated, smeared or, to borrow Williams’ term, patinated. Williams describes patina as ‘an aesthetic of beauty in decay’ that ensures the object’s authenticity because ‘it marks it as both having existed in the past, but also having survived in the present’ (2017, p. 212). One of the primary visual differences between Reeves as Glaucus and Harington as Milo is the layers that build up on top of Milo’s smooth muscled skin. Where Reeves was oiled, evenly tanned and clean, Milo, Spartacus and non-Roman gladiators such as David Lord in Arena are smeared with abject fluids such as blood, sweat or filth (see Image 4.52).

Image 4.52  A patina of filth coats the body of the post-millennial gladiator

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Thus, Harington’s patinated body lies more on the reflective register of Boym’s nostalgic scale, drawing attention to the layers of history. His body is a clear example of the nostalgie du sang (blood nostalgia) flagged up earlier, that coats history with the blood and dirt of authenticity rather than the patina of age. On the other hand, Reeves’s smooth and sculptural body suggest a type of restorative nostalgia.8 Rather than see these distinctions as oppositional, I propose that the gladiator’s nostalgically produced body appears across visual media via overlaid lenses of the sculptural-kinetic-haptic that incorporate all these embodied iterations of nostalgia (see Figure 4.12). Rooted in a phenomenological point of view, Rushing defines the haptic as ‘the ability of visual art to produce a tactile response in the viewer or, more generally, the ability of visual imagery to activate senses other than sight’ (2016a, p. 100). He does not limit this touch to surfaces, such as the viewers’ skin, the surfaces of what is visually represented (such as the smooth tanned skin of the peplum strongman), or even the surface of the film itself. He also includes deeper layers of psychological touch and a visceral or muscular dimension. These are key to understanding the post-millennial nostalgia that recreates a gladiator using ‘the haptic logic of masculinity that measures a man by how deeply his skin has been breached’ (2016a, p. 132).9 To Rushing’s formulation I would add the importance of blood, sweat and dirt to the nostalgic body – these surface-based and textured representational strategies are signals of authenticity and historicism for the viewers. They are the archaeological strata separating the nostalgic body of the gladiator (buried, as Milo is, under the ashes of Vesuvius) and the bodies of Western viewers rooted in a more digital consumer economy.

Figure 4.12  Overlapping registers of the nostalgically produced body of the gladiator

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Where Roland Barthes (1993) famously argued that a certain kind of haircut has become synonymous with ‘Romanness’, I would likewise suggest that the sweating, beaten, dirt-coated body of the gladiator (or, indeed, other post-millennial warrior types such as the Viking) is produced and received as a signal of an imprecise but compelling historical authenticity and the sensuous process of immersion in that history. The near fetishistic delight in layers of blood and muck coating the historical male body is one of the most striking examples of nostalgie du sang. Blood nostalgia literally coats the muscled skin of gladiator as a veneer or patina, rendered immediate and affective because of its haptic properties. When the veneer of blood and dirt is removed from the nostalgic body, what remains recalls the white-washed marble associated with classical statuary. The sculptural posing of the mid-century strongman is driven by body-building traditions that depend on classical statuary as a key reference point, as Maria Wyke insists: ‘[a]s a product of the nineteenth century, bodybuilding – the practice of putting highly defined musculature on public display – drew its initial context and much of its validation from the ancient world’ (Wyke, 1997, p. 51). Wyke goes on to argue that such classicizing discourses provide an alibi for looking at the static male body for aesthetic reasons, reaching towards an association of the classical with ‘high’ culture. Wyke’s article flags up several occasions in which bodybuilding pioneer Eugene Sandow poses as a gladiator, in particular The Dying Gladiator (also known as the Dying Gaul). The gladiator’s body in particular often proves too excessive to contain with sculptural or classical framing, particularly in later representations that incorporate the camp and homoerotic readings that became a part of the reception of the mid-century peplum. Under the layers of blood nostalgia, the gladiator, as played by the bodybuilder, is a resolutely white body. ‘Bodybuilding in popular culture articulates white masculinity. The body shapes it cultivates and the way it presents them draw on a number of white traditions. First, bodybuilding makes reference to classical – that is, ancient Greek and Roman – Art’ (Dyer, 1997, p. 148). Thus, in the strongman films, underpinned by the practice of bodybuilding and in representations of the heroic male body across Western art and media, classicism is entwined with and supports a mythologization of the white body. When the white marble sculpture of the ideal man comes to life in films, the sculptural body

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in motion can open up space for other types of masculinity, as I have argued with regards to the celebrity martial artist, Bruce Lee (2019). Lorrie Palmer’s discussion of the frenzied hypermasculine production environment and aesthetics of the films of Neveldine and Taylor provides a springboard for understanding the gladiator’s nostalgic body in action. ‘I propose that the prefix hyper- may connect hypermediation and cinematic hypermasculinity not just as an obvious spectacle of excess but also a function of speed’ (Palmer, 2012, p. 7). The nostalgic body of the gladiator, via this logic, is both the ‘figure in the landscape’ and the figure moving through that landscape with a velocity expressed through editing techniques and mobile camerawork (here Neveldine and Taylor’s Gamer becomes a primary example). This speed is inscribed on the body type of the performer. Palmer argues that Jason Statham (who played a gladiatorial character in Death Race) ‘seems built for sheer velocity’ (Palmer, 2012, p. 8). The same might be argued about Harington’s physique, although his performance of Milo (and Jon Snow in Game of Thrones or Robert Catesby in Gunpowder [BBC, 2017]) also includes moments of sculptural posing and emoting, producing more balletic/ emotional movements than Statham. ‘Monolithic, rather rigid, musclebound masculinity has gradually evolved into men of speed, such as Chev Chelios (Statham) and Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), across highly mobile technologies of digital vision’ (Palmer, 2012, p. 24). Palmer sees the kinetic action hero as bound to digital technologies: ‘he has the speed of new media itself coded into his gender performance’ (2012, p. 25). While Palmer roots the kinetic hero in the aesthetics of the glance, the gladiator’s insistent sculptural posing and the attention given to his patinated skin demands that the glance give way to the gaze, at least for a moment. These registers – sculptural, haptic, kinetic – shape the gladiator’s body as part of a nostalgic process and their shifting combinations define different gladiatorial chronosomatas, such as Reeves’s bulky Hercules and Harington’s post-millennial Apollo. Mr Universe winner Steve Reeves’s nostalgic body appears largely in the sculptural and haptic zones, as he struggles to lift heavy objects, wrestle with animals, resist evil queens or break the chains that hold him. His skin, as Rushing argues, becomes a focal point for the fascination of the camera and characters in the film. In The Last Days of Pompeii, unlike some of his other roles, he spends a good deal of screen time in historically

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Image 4.53  Steve Reeves as Glaucus in The Last Days of Pompeii

recognizable, if not accurate, clothing – as the centurion Glaucus. In a more conventional manner, he appears lying prone and unconscious being tended to (and looked at) by the older more worldly woman who stands in opposition to the virginal Christian love interest (see Image 4.53). The display of his body is still the focus of the film’s spectacle, although rather than his chest or torso, it is his legs that are on display via his short tunics. The Herculean gladiator (like Reeves) fights his enslavement by taking up space (in the frame, in the arena) and physically moving obstacles out of his way. Such sculptural and haptic demands produce an eroticism born of contemplation and visual delight; and a nostalgia for a lost mytho-historical time when such bodies (and such eroticism) might have been typical rather than exceptional. Where Reeves’s body is monumental, particularly when set against recognizable classical architecture and sculpture, Harington’s languid posing frames him as the pouting James Dean of gladiators. Both expressions foreground history as richly textured tableaux. Harington’s Milo embodies the sculptural, haptic and kinetic almost equally, although not necessarily in the same moment. I would position this character in the centre of the overlapping lenses pictured in Figure 4.12 above. The same is true of other post-millennial actors who

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play gladiators such as Kellan Lutz (in Arena, Legend of Hercules) and Gerard Butler (in Gamer). Harington’s action sequences, particularly when he is on horseback, highlight his ability to move quickly as he spins and rolls in gestures that echo the camera. In one arena sequence, Milo kills several opponents from horseback using his chains. His mobility is cross-cut and juxtaposed with the larger, older and more static body of his comrade Atticus. Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s Atticus recalls Reeves’s Herculean form as well as the often overlooked black sidekicks in earlier films, such as Draba in Spartacus and Juba in Gladiator – a topic discussed in greater detail in Chapter V. This ability to move quickly is further emphasized when Milo fights Roman opponents, who seem stiffer in their armature. Where Reeves’s Glaucus wrestles lions in front of crowds of costumed extras, Harington and Akinnuoye-Agbaje fight on the sands framed by digitally created crowds and in the shadow of an animated Vesuvius. The film was originally released in 3D, further foregrounding the layered spectacles of digital historical recreation, muscular masculinity and natural disaster. Furthermore, Harington’s scarred and sweat-soaked body is granted authenticity and materiality through digital media not via a direct opposition. Rather, to return to Williams’s conceptualization of patina, I would suggest that digitality likewise becomes a patina coating the surface of the gladiator’s body, augmenting it in interesting ways, through texture, speed and violence. This combination of digital and corporeal is reinforced in the production circumstances and publicity for the film, which focus on the narrative of Harington’s dedication to physically preparing for his role. In publicity interviews, and via Amazon Prime’s X-Ray function, he is cast in the role of committed actor working diligently towards the gladiatorial body he displays in the film. This is bolstered by an insistence that his gladiator body is historically accurate. In one interview he is asked if he is prouder of the film or his abdominal muscles, and he goes on to say that ‘I’m proud of both … I did actually look at … stone pictures of gladiators … statues of gladiators; they’re always very muscular. They’re very ripped. … and they were incredibly well-fed individuals. They were prized animals really …’10 A 2014 Vanity Fair article publicizing the film features an image from the film (see Image 4.54) with the caption: ‘Those who are about to die of happiness salute you.’ It then uses a quote from the film Crazy

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Image 4.54  ‘Seriously? It’s like you’re photoshopped’

Stupid Love (Requa, 2011) to describe Harington’s body and the source of that happiness: ‘Seriously? It’s like you’re photoshopped’ (Marcus 2014). This article brings up digital augmentation explicitly, but then goes on to talk about how Harington trained for the role, thus insisting that we may enjoy this almost digitally perfect body with the assurance that it is authentically analogue. This tension was a central concern in the critical reception of the Spartan bodies of 300, as Williams summarizes reviewers’ assumptions that Butler and the other Spartans had been augmented using makeup and digital special effects. He flags up the reviewers’ belief that an ‘awareness for the potential for digital trickery created further doubt among audiences’ (2009, p. 46). Harington’s interviews for Pompeii, released several years later, work hard to insist that his physique was earned and authentic. Harington’s body in Pompeii and, indeed, in his most notable role to date as Jon Snow in the medievalist Game of Thrones, is nostalgic in its recall of the physicality of a pre-digital age (before photoshop) and a pre-industrial age, when working male bodies (like those of the gladiator) might have looked as his does in the film. The chronosoma is a persuasive simulacrum; anchoring the digital spectacles but seamlessly integrated within them. One final example from the film Pompeii literally cements and illustrates the nostalgic aspects of the gladiator’s body via the interlocking lenses of the haptic-kinetic-sculptural: the moment when Milo’s body is

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engulfed by Vesuvius’s fire and turned into a white plaster sculpture. The emotionally powerful images of the plaster of Paris casts that were poured into the rock cavities left by human corpses in Pompeii open and close the film. In the opening sequence of the film, the camera moves along the digitally produced white casts in extreme close-up while white flakes of ash drift around the otherwise black frame. Choral music plays in the background and what at first seems like a mottled snowscape is revealed to be the surface of the plaster casts being slowly buried in ash. Intertitles appear quoting from Pliny’s contemporary account of the disaster: In the darkness you could hear the crying of women, the wailing of infants and the shouting of men … Some prayed for help. Others wished for death … but still more imagined that there were no gods left … and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness. The frame then spins and widens into an aerial shot of the plaster cast bodies lying on the ground in a group. In keeping with the Pompeii mythology, the human casts seem frozen in the moment of their deaths, despite the fact that the casts were made centuries later as part of an archaeological exhumation. These cast bodies reveal the stratified semiotic effects of the Pompeii scenario: as both apocalyptic (‘the universe was plunged into eternal darkness’) and restorative (framed through archaeological excavation and conservation). The film ends with a similar slow pan across magnified sculptural surfaces as Milo and Cassia are preserved in their final kiss. In this moment, the nostalgic body of the gladiator has been transformed into a sculpture, just as the velocity of history and nature (Vesuvius’s eruption) has been stopped. The camera moves in a circular motion around the kissing sculpture (recalling Rodin’s classically informed The Kiss), paying close attention to the rough tactile qualities of its surface, as Milo and Cassia’s blood and ash-smeared skin has transformed into the inert stone and moss of the historical artefact. Softer choral music plays, with poignant female vocalization, recalling Lisa Gerrard’s nostalgic motif in Gladiator.11 This sequence is made more resonant as it follows Milo’s final lines in the film advising Cassia not to look at the erupting volcano, ‘Don’t look. Look at me. Just me.’ This is the thematic emphasis of the film itself and its mobilization of the nostalgic body of the gladiator.

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If we pick up where Pompeii leaves off and continue Pliny’s account of the Pompeii disaster, he follows up the evocative description of humans crying and despairing of the existence of the gods with a kind of despairing joy, or perhaps stoic acceptance, that if he is to die, he is comforted that the entire world is dying with him – ‘I with everything and everything with me was perishing’ (Jones, 2001, p. 45).12 As I have established throughout this volume, the gladiator character is a potent fusion of this kind of apocalyptic drive with the nostalgic recall of an idealized past. The eruption of Vesuvius, and its significant reuse as a backdrop for gladiatorial stories, is evidence of this and stands as an originary apocalyptic moment in the history of the gladiator’s mythology.

Pompeii: Apocalyptic nostalgia Western culture has an intense fascination with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD and its destruction of the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Key moments solidifying Pompeii in the Western imagination include Pliny’s haunting eye-witness account that begins Pompeii and the rediscovery of the buried city via the emergent discipline of archaeology (begun in Pompeii 1748), the practice of which produced the plaster of Paris casts of the city’s victims. Neoclassical painter Karl Bryullov’s The Last Day of Pompeii (1830–1833) (see

Image 4.55  (see caption on opposite page)

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Images 4.55 and 4.56  The momentum and colour palette (dominated by ­oranges, browns and well-lit whites) of Pompeii’s publicity materials are echoes of Bryullov’s influential painting

Images 4.55 and 4.56) and the melodramatic Victorian novel it inspired by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1834) are likewise foundational touchpoints in its mythology. As a prototypical disaster scenario, Vesuvius’s eruption is a tremendous, almost sublime, spectacle of total annihilation. While popular history (as transmitted, for example, in television documentaries or via museum plaques) places emphasis on the value of the eruption for capturing a frozen moment of time in the ancient world and its people, fiction (almost all of which draws from Bryullov and BulwerLytton) cannot resist turning it into a lush cautionary tale of Rome’s decadence punished. There are many films and television programmes that revisit and reanimate the eruption of Vesuvius, of which Anderson’s 2014 Pompeii is a recent example. Many of these ‘toga movies’ as Göran Blix labels them

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in his history of Pompeii’s archaeology (2009, p. 10), are adaptations or loose interpretations of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, as Table 4.7 indicates. It is worth noting that Bryullov’s painting does not contain a recognizable gladiator figure. Furthermore, in Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, gladiators are grotesque background figures, rather than central characters. Glaucus, the narrative’s protagonist, disapproves of violent spectacles, in particular those moments when unarmed prisoners are fed to the beasts, ‘… you Italians are used to these spectacles; we Greeks are more merciful …’ (Bulwer-Lytton, 1834, Kindle Edition, p. 21). However, one sequence sees his body admired by a sculptor who comments, ‘if we could get him on the arena – there would be a model for you! What limbs! What a head! He ought to have been a gladiator! A subject-a subject worthy of our art!’ (Bulwer-Lytton, 1834, Kindle edition, p. 50) Here Bulwer-Lytton lays out a foundational paradox of the gladiatorial body: its synthesis of violent infamy and muscular virtue. Contrary to their source material, as Table 4.7 also reveals, several of these stories feature gladiator characters – either in the background, as in the 1913 (Caserini and Rodolfi) version, or as central characters, as with Milo in Pompeii and Marcus in the 1935 The Last Days of Pompeii. In the latter film, the tragic story arc belongs to the gladiator whose death in the eruption of Vesuvius is framed as punishment for his misdeeds – turning from Jesus Christ’s teachings and joining in a horse theft ring with Pontius Pilate (Basil Rathbone). Marcus’s death in the disaster becomes a moment of Christian redemption where he is visited by a vision of Jesus. In this way, it is in alignment with the way the biblical epic Barabbas uses the great fire of Rome as a spiritual cleansing, offering an apocalyptic transfiguration for its flawed gladiator character. The post-millennial gladiator does not require the Christian redemption of the biblical epics because it frames the gladiator using the secular spiritualism of nostalgia. In the 2014 film, the mythology of the Vesuvius disaster is inseparable from the tragedy of the postmillennial gladiator, and both are equally important cinematic (and digitally augmented) spectacles. The tagline of the film is revealing, ‘A hero will rise. A city will fall.’ Where Marcus’s fall from grace parallels the destruction of the city, Milo’s rise is contrapuntal to Pompeii’s fall. It offers equal weight to the city’s destruction and Milo’s heroism, as his last line in the film confirms (‘Don’t look [at Vesuvius]. Look at me. Just

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TABLE 4.7  The eruption of Vesuvius onscreen13 Title

Year

Country of production

Gladiatorial content

The Last Days of Pompeii

1900

UK

Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei/The Last Days of Pompeii

1908

Italy

Glauco (Umberto Mozzato) is condemned to the lions in the arena.

Jone ovvero Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei/The Last Days of Pompeii (del Colle)

1913

Italy

Glauco (Luigi Mele) is condemned to the lions in the arena.

Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeii/The Last Days of Pompeii (Caserini)

1913

Italy

Glauco (Ubaldo Stefani) is condemned to the lions in the arena.

Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeii/The Last Days of Pompeii

1926

Italy

Glauco (Victor Varconi) is condemned to the lions in the arena.

The Last Days of Pompeii

1935

USA

Marcus (Preston Foster) fights as a gladiator for a significant part of the film.

Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei/The Sins of Pompeii

1950

France/Italy

Lysias (Georges Marchal) is condemned to the lions in the arena.

Curse of the Faceless Man

1958

USA

Quintillus Aurelius (Bob Bryant) has been preserved and then enhanced by the eruption of Vesuvius. He comes back to life to realize his curse. (Continued)

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Title

Year

Country of production

Gladiatorial content

Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei/The Last Days of Pompeii

1959

Italy

Glaucus (Steve Reeves) fights in the arena to defend condemned Christians.

Anno 79: La distruzione di Ercolano /AD 79: The Destruction of Herculaneum

1962

Italy/France

Marcus Tiberius (Brad Harris) goes undercover as a gladiator, competing in a mock naval battle (naumachia).

Up Pompeii!!

1969–1970 (TV comedy)

UK

Up Pompeii!

1971

UK

The Last Days of Pompeii

1984 (miniseries)

Italy/UK/ USA

Lydon (Duncan Regehr) is a gladiator.

Warrior Queen

1987

US/Italy

Includes an arena fight set piece.

Pompeii: The Last Day

2003 (TV movie)

UK/France/ Spain

Gladiators appear in the cast of characters.

Gladiator of Pompeii/ Pompeii

2007 (miniseries)

Italy

Gladiators appear in the cast of characters.

Doctor Who, ‘The Fires of Pompeii’

2008

UK

Pompeii

2014

USA

Apocalypse Pompeii

2014 (DTV)

USA

Protagonists Milo and Atticus are gladiators.

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me’). The Pompeii scenario is a perfect fusion of the chronosoma (the time body belonging to gladiator characters like Milo or Marcus) and the chronotope (the time place) in which Pompeii is a fixed moment and type of place – the intertwined decadence and classicism of the Roman Empire at the moment of its spectacular obliteration. Narrative depictions of the eruption suggest that it is a classicizing and nostalgic event – a moment of rupture in which the idealized past was revealed as corrupt and then lost forever. Vesuvius’s eruption is important to the gladiator’s mythology for several reasons, the first of which is archaeological.14 A vast amount of historical evidence has been uncovered at the site of Pompeii. The town had a gladiatorial ludus, amphitheatre and informative gladiatorrelated street graffiti. All of this evidence is frozen at the moment of 79 AD and provides a unique lens on how life might have looked, for the gladiator and his audiences, at the moment of the eruption. Junkelmann suggests that ‘[o]ver 75% of all equipment that is clearly gladiatorial, on which material has been published, comes from the single find [at Pompeii]’ (2001, p. 38). Much of our understanding of the historical gladiator has been unearthed at Pompeii and this has had an impact on the gladiator’s story, tying it to the shadow of the volcano. The relationship between the cinema and archaeology of Pompeii is both under examined and under appreciated. Striking cinematic recreations of Pompeii in 79 AD are entrenched in popular memory, serving a prosthetic function that creates and simulates history as well as representing it. Cinema and television do more than represent Vesuvius’s eruption, they are changing the meaning of the disaster with each subsequent iteration. They provide moral and historical framing, perspective and affective markers. Often, they try to provide a narrative reason for Vesuvius’ eruption — punishing a corrupt empire in Pompeii, proposing a Christian perspective on the destruction (in the 1935 and 1959 films) largely in keeping with American biblical epics. In Pompeii, Vesuvius becomes a force for Milo’s revenge against Rome and Senator Corvus. As Pompeii’s plaster-cast framing device suggests, each version of the Pompeii story depends upon an archaeological gaze as much as the apocalyptic gaze of the disaster film. Göran Blix argues that ‘[a]rchaeology, or rather its myth, affirmed that nothing perishes, that earthly existence itself embodies a form of immortality, and that the tragic historicity of modern life carries with it a secular ontology that

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neutralizes its fragile and fugitive character’ (2009 p. 7). It is through the myth of archaeology that Pompeii’s stories can conserve the gladiator’s body, capturing (in sculptural form) the ‘about to die’ uncanniness of the brotherhood of the morituri. In the shadow of Vesuvius, the nostalgia of the gladiator becomes hauntological in Mark Fisher’s (2014) sense of the word – a kind of nostalgia for lost futures as well as the lost past. This quality is knit into the brotherhood of the morituri, who live their screen lives framed by the understanding that they have no future, except in violent martyrdom. This is exemplified in the futility of many of the narratives about Vesuvius, which showcase the eruption almost as an afterthought. Films such as the 1935 and 1959 versions of The Last Days of Pompeii and Anno 79 La distruzione di Ercolano use the eruption to frame the final climax, very close to the film’s ending, making all the melodrama that had previously occupied the screen seem somewhat pointless. It also puts a running (hauntological) countdown for the spectator who knows that Vesuvius will erupt at some point. This hauntological model, however, cannot quite dominate the gladiator’s apocalyptic story as it does the melodrama of post-apocalyptic fiction such as The Book of Eli (Hughes, 2010) or the Mad Max franchise. This is because of the underlying presence of the archaeological gaze that assures the gladiator his immortality, if only as a symbol, icon or sculpture.

Conclusion: ‘Barbarians at the gates’ Within frameworks of digital classicism, the Roman past becomes a lost object for nostalgic longing, a system of iconography connoting both the lost past and an apocalyptic impulse indicating a future that is likewise lost. This recalls Lucilla’s nostalgic question to the Colosseum’s crowd that opened this chapter, ‘Is Rome worth one good man’s life?’ The answer to her question, however, cannot be yes or no because in the gladiator story the ‘good man’ is inseparable from the nostalgic dream that was Rome and both (Rome and the good man) are always already lost and can never be unproblematically reanimated. They can only be sculpturally commemorated, as with Milo’s body in Pompeii.

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The next chapter builds on the nostalgic formation of the gladiator’s body to analyse the ways he has been consistently eroticized across Western visual fiction. In order to do this, it looks to the gladiatorial burlesque performed by both the male and female gladiator. Mary Beard calls attention to ‘one of the most important aspects of the symbolic register of Classics: that sense of imminent loss, the terrifying fragility of our connections with distant antiquity (always in danger of rupture), the fear of the barbarians at the gates’ (2014, p. 9). The celebrity gladiator embodies this elegiac anxiety, revealing that in conversations with the past (and perhaps with the post-apocalyptic future) Anglo-American culture imagines and conserves an idealized version of masculinity that can be weaponized to fight those barbarians at the gate because he embodies both the nostalgic classicism of civilizations such as Rome and the ferocity that is precisely what makes the barbarians so dangerous.

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Chapter V The gladiatorial burlesque

Nobody respects the lady wrestlers, sweetie. It’s like midgets – you’re a sideshow. GLOW

Do you like movies about gladiators? AIRPLANE

In the fourth episode of Netflix’s GLOW, fledgling wrestler Carmen (Britney Young) argues with her father (Winston James Francis) over her participation in a women’s wrestling troupe. She insists that she has found a space where people respect her, but her father disagrees, ‘nobody respects the lady wrestlers, sweetie. It’s like midgets – you’re a sideshow.’ This dismissal captures a dominant strain in the reception of female fighters, combat athletes and performers. They are treated as an eroticized sideshow – a burlesque. Here I am adding a particular qualifier – the gladiatorial burlesque – to describe the eroticized, excessive and, at times, subversive performance of the female gladiator’s violence. The burlesque mode of performance also applies to male fighters, whose bodies and performative violence are likewise, but distinctly, eroticized and excessive. To add further weight to this definition, I build my formulation of this violent burlesque on John Cawelti’s notion of ‘tragic parody or a doomed burlesque’ (1978, p. 504). When the gladiator is a woman, Cawelti’s doomed burlesque can be layered with the carnivalesque associations of Kathleen Rowe Karlyn’s (1995) ‘unruly woman’, who

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makes a spectacle of herself in disruptive ways. The female gladiator’s violence violates boundaries (between male and female, between victim and perpetrator, between sex and violence and between funny and tragic). She unsettles her audiences, even as she entertains and titillates. Rowe Karlyn asks, ‘How might women use spectacle to disrupt that [patriarchal] power and lay claim to their own?’ (1995 p. 11) and Cawelti offers an intriguing answer by suggesting that burlesque is ‘more effective when the inverted presentation actually seems to bring out some latent meanings which were lurking all the time in the original convention’ (1978, p. 506). Thus, I would argue the female gladiator’s hypersexualized burlesque performance pushes forward the truth that all gladiatorial violence, games and scenarios might be understood as part of these unruly, carnivalesque and erotic performances; an admission that might be more radical than it would seem at first glance. The female gladiator, or gladiatrix, is at the centre of this chapter’s exploration of the gender and race politics of gladiatorial violence. However, my central argument is that the burlesque mode characterizes every gladiator’s performative and stylized violence to varying degrees. Thus, I begin with an account of the burlesque performance of Gannicus in Spartacus as he delights in his role as gladiator. Using Gannicus’s performance as a springboard, this chapter then introduces and defines the term ‘burlesque’ through a discussion of gladiator-themed dance performances, featuring both men and women. I follow this with a detailed investigation of the relatively rare character of the female gladiator. Each of the subsequent sections examines a significant element of the burlesque performance: its rootedness in low-budget genre production; its playful eroticism built on a fetishization of the ancient world; the exoticization of the bodies of ‘others’ (in particular the black body); associations with the excesses of camp sensibilities; and the subversive but perhaps unrealized avenues of parody and unruliness.

The gladiatorial burlesque I am arguing that all gladiatorial performances have burlesque elements. However, certain mise en spectacles are more excessive in their engagement with the mode and thus provide illuminating examples. The

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Image 5.57  Gannicus’ burlesque entrance into Capua’s amphitheatre

Spartacus series is driven by such excesses and the opening episode of the programme’s second series provides a perfect encapsulation of the gladiatorial burlesque. It features the entrance of Gannicus, champion of the house of Batiatus, into Capua’s amphitheatre. The sequence celebrates the more joyful aspects of gladiatorial skill and spectacle, alongside a lingering gaze on the body of the male gladiator (see Image 5.57). As Gannicus enters the amphitheatre in extreme slow motion, the camera slowly pans from his feet to his ecstatically smiling face and then cuts to a reverse low angle shot of the wildly cheering spectators packed into the wooden stands of the arena. Still in slow motion, the camera lingers on the open mouths of the screaming crowds, most of whom are sweaty, slightly dirty and framed by blood-spattered timber. Quintus Lentulus Batiatus (John Hannah) screams, ‘Now that’s a fucking gladiator!’ and one woman calls out ‘Gannicus, I love you!’ while baring her breasts. The fight is shot largely in slow motion as Gannicus laughs and roars, finally slicing his opponent’s throat in a flamboyant scissoring motion, as a member of the audience screams: ‘Fucking kill him!’ The electric guitar becomes louder and the camera’s circular movements quicker, augmenting the excesses of the violence. This sequence intercuts shots of the closely packed stands, covered in dirt and blood, with fans offering themselves to Gannicus and his obvious joy in his violent skill. Gannicus’s introductory fight embraces all the main elements of the burlesque mode, as I am defining it: eroticism, graphic violence,

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excess, self-conscious exhibitionism and parody. These elements are interwoven with the camp, kitsch and queer associations that cling to the gladiator since at least the mid-century sword and sandal films. Gannicus is not alone in his unrestrained enjoyment of gladiatorial combat. Batiatus’s champion Crixus (Manu Bennett) likewise enjoys his fame, the brotherhood of the ludus, and the violence of arena combat in the first seasons of Spartacus. Later in the series, after the gladiators have killed their master and escaped enslavement, they form a loosely organized rebel society that frequently stages gladiatorial shows in order to build morale and train the rebels to fight the Roman legions. Among these many contests and training bouts, there are two important illustrative skirmishes between female fighters Saxa (Ellen Hollman) and Mira (Katrina Law). The first is when the Saxa is brought into Spartacus’s rebel encampment. As the new additions to Spartacus’s army celebrate and test their fighting skills, Saxa provides bawdy commentary from the side-lines: ‘tear his fucking cock off!’ The violence escalates and spreads to include the spectators. Saxa faces Mira, Spartacus’s lover and one of the key rebel leaders. There are few female fighters on Spartacus and this clash between Saxa and Mira is an unusual occurrence for both television and diegetic viewers. The two trade blows; striking and grappling. The camera sweeps in to film the pair from directly above, focusing on Saxa strangling Mira with her own hair (see Image 5.58). Later in the series, Saxa and Mira join forces in a more organized ad hoc gladiatorial battle, defeating a much larger male opponent in front of a vocally appreciative crowd of rebel onlookers. The respect between the two women is built via these battles. What marks both performances is Saxa’s obvious delight in fighting, which mirrors Gannicus’s joy. On the other hand, Mira and her sisterat-arms Naevia (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) are reluctant warriors driven to fight because of circumstances or because they have been abused. Although Saxa has been enslaved by the Romans, her’s is not a rape revenge story as is the case with many female gladiators. She is characterized as lusty and aggressive – in charge of both her violence and her sexuality. Spartacus is a series that relies heavily on the burlesque mode, but complicates it in self-reflexive ways, as Gannicus and Saxa reveal. The fights between Saxa and Mira make an enlightening contrast with other (hypersexualized) fights between women, for example those

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in The Arena (1974), The Arena (2001) or the similarly low-budget Amazons and Gladiators (Weintraub, 2001). The latter film showcases two captured women performing a gladiator-themed exotic dance for Roman party guests (see Image 5.59). Armed with wooden swords and gauzy revealing clothing, the women perform a choreographed dance routine using fight moves and poses that recall the exotic dance sequences of the peplum as well as earlier arena fights. Unlike the fights between Saxa and Mira that celebrate the excesses of aggression and the adrenaline rush of a contest between fighters, the gladiator dance is performed as a sexual spectacle to titillate audiences. The

Image 5.58  Saxa fights Mira at the gladiator encampment

Image 5.59  Two future gladiatrices perform a gladiator-themed exotic dance routine in Amazons and Gladiators

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Amazons and Gladiators sequence highlights the close relationship between fighting and dancing, which I discussed with regards to arena fights in Chapter III. In the burlesque mode, these links are even more apparent, given the term burlesque’s association with erotic dance performance.

The gladiator-themed dance sequence There are several examples dance performances across media culture that use gladiatorial iconography and settings as backdrops, most of which tap into cinema history as much as Roman history. Not all of these performances are marked with the eroticism generally understood to belong to burlesque dance. One illustrative example is the gladiator-themed/mixed martial arts paso doble routine performed by professional fighter Page Vanzant for the 23rd season of ABC’s Dancing with the Stars (2005–present) (see Image 5.60). The sequence showcases female aggression and relies on the conventions of combat sport and its televised coverage. A similar example features on the British variety show Strictly Come Dancing in a presentation of a gladiator/Roman-themed dance routine performed by its professional dancers in 2017, accompanied by Woodkind’s ‘Run Boy Run’. Professional dancer Anton Du Beke sits as emperor and offers the recognizable ‘thumbs-down’ hand

Image 5.60  Set in the octagon with vaguely gladiatorial costumes, Vanzant performs a paso doble routine flavoured with martial arts moves

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gesture to cement the connection with the amphitheatre. This routine featured male and female dancers, but the gladiator/slave characters (recognizable by their ripped clothing) were all played by men, in keeping with the song’s chorus, ‘Run, boy, run’. The imprisoned gladiator storyline is also the basis for the imagery accompanying the video for Fall Out Boy’s 2015 ‘Centuries’, which uses all the common visual tropes of the arena fight sequence of earlier films to tell a story of the four band members forced to fight as gladiators. This video intercuts its gladiator imagery with stylized Christian imagery building around a mythic message of its underdog heroes who will be ‘remembered for centuries’. A less cinematically rooted gladiator dance performance can be found in Aram Khachaturian’s Spartacus ballet, composed in the Soviet Union in 1954, only three years after Howard Fast’s allegorical novel was published. Just as the Italian peplum films were rising to prominence, Spartacus’s story was providing a compelling allegorical vocabulary for Cold War culture. It is the lavish historically informed costuming, mise en scène and iconography that connect these dance performances with the gladiatorial filone or scenario. Most of these are organized around the set piece of the arena fight, a topic discussed in detail in Chapter III. I would argue the peplum genre’s ubiquitous exotic dance sequences inform many of these dance performances, adding an erotic element to the gladiator’s dance routine that suggests fetish and camp. Thus, I would suggest the dancing gladiator, particularly when performed by a male dancer, has a queer framing that is impossible to ignore and manifests throughout the archetypal characters’ many media incarnations. The dance routine makes this excessive and thus easier to recognize. When the performer is a woman, as in the erotic swordplay of Amazons and Gladiators, there is a clearer connection between the gladiator’s burlesque with a more vernacular understanding of the term as connected to sexualized dance performance. The widely understood use of burlesque sees it as a striptease framed with a nostalgic glamour. This is most recognizably embodied by well-known contemporary burlesque performer, Dita Von Teese. Von Teese’s public image is one built on the retro glamour of classical Hollywood and her millennial revival of a nineteenth-century form of dance variety performance. Kaitlyn Regehr (2012, p. 138) suggests that the popularity of Oscar Wilde’s 1891 play Salome, with its ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’, provided

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a precursor for burlesque as a type of performance and, I would argue, also informs the many exotic dance routines of the mid-century peplum film. Amazons and Gladiators thus provides an entirely typical exotic dance routine (glamorous, nostalgic, orientalized, sexualized). The variation comes from adding wooden swords as accessories, thus foreshadowing the female gladiator narrative that follows and, I would argue, setting up the burlesque associations that have become fixtures of all the performances of the film’s female gladiators. The male gladiator dancers, whose performances are not ostensibly or exclusively designed for sexual titillation have an equally enmeshed, but perhaps more nuanced relationship to the burlesque mode. In his 1978 discussion of genre and neo-noir, Cawelti describes films that follow in the literary tradition of burlesque or parody, ‘in which a well-established set of conventions or a style is subjected to some form of ironic or humorous exploitation’ (1978, p. 503). He goes on to describe ‘[t]his puzzling, combination of humorous burlesque and high seriousness seems to be a mode of expression characteristic of our period, not only in film, but in other literary forms’ (1978, p. 504). Certainly, the post-millennial gladiator performs an updated version of Cawelti’s doomed burlesque. Maximus in Gladiator, Milo in Pompeii and David Lord in Arena are tragic figures framed by stories that combine the camp excesses of the peplum and barbarian films with earnest melodrama and nostalgic longing. Their texts can function as both humorous and heartbreaking, particularly in the low-budget forms (e.g. Arena and Gladiators and Amazons). However, where Cawelti points to the possibility of a burlesque mode that might work towards demythologizing a genre, using the neo-noir Chinatown (Polanski, 1974) as his primary example, the gladiatorial burlesque has been seamlessly absorbed by its mythology and become an identifying convention of the genre itself. To summarize, the gladiatorial burlesque is a performance of violence that entwines comedy, tragedy and parody. It fuses these with playful eroticism and unsettling excesses. The actors in these burlesques are  unruly and queered in ways that are most visible in low-budget genre film and television programming but embedded features in even the most melodramatic mainstream gladiatorial tragedies. The function of this burlesque is not necessarily politically mobilized to realize the agency that Kathleen Rowe Karlyn believed possible for the subversive unruly woman; the gladiator is too firmly fixed in (and dependant on)

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patriarchal and imperial systems of power and governmentality. When the archetypal role of the gladiator is embodied by a woman or a girl, structures of power become more complicated and the burlesque easier to identify and map.

The gladiatrix The exploitative treatments of the female gladiator, or gladiatrix, throw her male counterparts into stark contrast. The male gladiator across the media and across the gladiatorial filone (from Spartacus to Maximus) are framed using honour and nostalgia. This project has mapped the fictional gladiator as a surprisingly consistent archetypal character, drawing from a large corpus of American and European films, television programmes and, to a lesser extent, painting, sculpture, music videos and videogames. The archetypal gladiator, however, is a man. More often than not he is a tortured and enslaved white man forced to fight for an empire hungry to watch his built body as part of its perverse spectacular entertainment industry. Given the ubiquity of the male gladiator in the Western popular imaginary, it is telling that female Roman gladiators onscreen are so rare – as they were in Roman history. In contrast, female warriors in fiction are relatively numerous and the female gladiator has been somewhat overshadowed by a more archetypal representation of classical martial womanhood – the Amazon. Sensual and predatory Amazons are countless across peplum films (e.g. Hercules Unchained/Ercole e la regina di Lidia [Francisci, 1959], Thor and the Amazon Women/Le gladiatrici, Amazons of Rome/Le vergini di Roma). The success of Patty Jenkins’s 2017 Wonder Woman saw revived visibility for the mythic female warriors. The costuming of the Amazons in Wonder Woman steers clear of hypersexualization of the Amazons of earlier peplum cinema and draws inspiration from cinematic gladiators. One behind the scenes interview for the film Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (Snyder, 2016),1 credits costume designer Michael Wilkinson and director Zach Snyder with drawing inspiration from gladiator imagery: when we started doing research on the character and also determining what we do for this costume, we felt like it had to be

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a costume that a warrior would wear. Michael [Wilkinson, costume designer] and Zach [Snyder, director] came up with this idea that what if we go with something that’s more like a gladiator costume; that feels ancient but it feels like something she could actually fight in. Here, gladiatorial imagery inspired from cinema rather than history provides martial authenticity to Wonder Woman’s character and warrior identity, as gladiators were Roman rather than Greek. While Amazons outnumber gladiatrices, they are mutually reinforcing characters, often fusing together through their costuming and narrative functions.2 Historians agree that there were female gladiators in Ancient Rome because of epigraphic evidence, anxious cautionary tales and because of legislation that was enacted to limit and then ban them (in 200 AD by Septimius Severus). Historians likewise agree that women fighting in the amphitheatre were a rare and exoticized occurrence. However, women would have been included in arena entertainment as victims of executions or featuring in mythological-set snuff performances (pyrrichae). Female gladiators would have been as rare and noteworthy in Ancient Rome as they have been in cinema.3 Most of what we know about women’s relationship to the gladiatorial games belongs to deeply held Patrician/upper-class anxieties about women and the amphitheatre  – these included taboos surrounding female fighters themselves and the influence of male gladiators on female spectators (largely thought to be unable to control their sexual appetites around the spectacle of men fighting). The woman in the Roman amphitheatre was one who could not be controlled and who could not control herself. These anxieties are the foundations on which the gladiatorial burlesque is built and first performed in Ancient Rome. It is a performance that Roman culture both condemned and celebrated as absurd, titillating and dangerous. Roman gender politics, later fused with the cultural pre-occupations and aesthetics of neoclassicism, has become foundational to the way female gladiators are represented (rare, exotic, erotic) and contributed to the construction and reception of the female fighter on screen, particularly in action cinema. There is no compelling evidence to indicate that Ancient Romans ever used the word ‘gladiatrix’ to describe female gladiators (McCullough, 2008, p. 198). Gladiatrix, and its association with the fetish and the dominatrix, belongs to the cinematic imagination and to the performance of a

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gladiatorial burlesque that has moved beyond its Roman roots to the world of the screen, the simulated and the generic. While female gladiators are rare, women are ubiquitous in stories of gladiators, largely occupying the narrative function of inciting incident. Maximus’s (unspeaking and unnamed) wife is murdered, driving him to vengeance; the same is true for David in The Arena and TV’s Spartacus. John Tillman’s wife and daughter are kidnapped in Gamer, John Stoneman’s pregnant wife is attacked causing her to miscarry in No Exit/Fatal Combat. These women are not nuanced characters with any form of agency or goals of their own. Their sole purpose is to suffer violence and drive their men to act. The Spartacus series uses the woman-as-inciting-incident trope explicitly and to excess; before her death, Sura (Erin Cummings) urges her husband to attack the Romans, issuing the edict that will frame Spartacus’s character and the velocity of the entire Spartacus series: ‘Kill them all’. With that demand, and with her violent death, Sura activates the violence-fuelled narrative machine that will drive the rest of Spartacus’s story. Her order, one repeated by many women in revenge stories, marks the liminal moment in between the ‘before’ and the ‘after’ of the gladiator’s story; it provides the force for actively switching from one to the other.

First and second women As with the earlier peplum films, the lost wife character is often juxtaposed against a predatory evil queen, completing the well-worn opposing archetype of the virtuous mother/evil spider woman or Madonna/whore. The lost wife of the millennial gladiator can rarely be recovered or rescued, unlike the good women of the peplum. She is generally pictured in flashback and inhabits the prelapsarian world of ‘before’. In the fallen world of ‘after’, the second woman of the millennial gladiator film is framed against the traditional femininity of the hero’s lost wife. She is coded as sexually aggressive and postfeminist and embodies many of the features of the afterworld: corruption, perversion and possible redemption in the face of the hero’s virtuous violence. After his pregnant wife is killed, David in Arena (2011) is seduced and kidnapped by Milla, who delivers him to an evil consortium that forces men to fight to the death for an online global audience. David’s love of

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his lost wife is transformative and Milla eventually becomes his ally – as the evil queens of the mid-century Italian films had done before her. Gamer uses the same woman to embody both types. John’s flashbacks remember Angie as a wife and mother; however, in the film’s present she tries to make a living as an avatar in the videogame Society, controlled by a grotesque game player who forces her to have sex with other avatars. Angie’s body is framed using both feminine archetypes. She is simultaneously lost wife and unwilling postfeminist seductress, both of whom are rescued and redeemed by the gladiator hero. There are many lost wives across the Spartacus series; Sura is the first and the most important for the narrative. She provides the template for one of the very few unambiguously good women in Spartacus. Oenomaus’s (Peter Mensah) wife Melitta (Marisa Ramirez) and Varro’s wife Aurelia (Brooke Williams) play similar roles. Their deaths spur the male characters to action while also complicating the homosocial bonds between gladiators. This plays out over several seasons through the love triangle between Oenomaus, Melitta and their friend, Gannicus. Naevia’s character arc is a more nuanced negotiation between the first/ second woman character tropes as she transforms from the object of Crixus’s romantic longing to traumatized victim and then to battlehardened warrior and gladiatrix. While she remains the central driving force for Crixus’s actions throughout the series, she also pursues her own goals. Across the last two seasons of the series, her journey follows a similar trajectory to the rape-revenge cycle of films. At the end of the series’ third season, she defeats one of her rapists, the rogue gladiator Asher, in an improvised gladiatorial battle by castrating him and then clumsily decapitating him. The traumatized second women of the afterworld (like Naevia in Images 5.61 and 5.62) train and perform as gladiatrices as an empowering phase of their rape-revenge cycle. Scheming and sexually aggressive women, much in the mould of the evil queens of the peplum genre or the femme fatales of film noir, are much more common in Spartacus. Ilithyia (Viva Bianca) and Lucretia (Lucy Lawless) are two central Roman femme fatale characters who manipulate the men around them using their sexuality, family connections and premeditated violence. Both women are framed as sexual predators and manipulators; and both are horrifically punished through their pregnant bodies. Lucretia is stabbed in her pregnant stomach by her former lover Crixus at the close of the first season. She

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Images 5.61 and 5.62  Naevia journeys from ‘lost woman’ to vengeful warrior

goes on to on to befriend and then kill Ilithyia by slicing the baby out of her body. The punishment inflicted on these women is in keeping with the many graphic, visceral acts of violence across the series. The dialectic between first and second women, between lost wives and savvy allies or monstrous enemies, is heightened in post-millennial gladiator fictions and serves to underline and highlight the ‘before and after’ logic of the gladiator’s story. The lost world of ‘before’ belongs to mothers, wives and to sweet and supportive women, who are reduced to a one-dimensional narrative function. The corrupt world of ‘after’ belongs to psychologically broken warrior women, monstrous mothers and scheming femme fatales. The story of the gladiatrix resists the relatively symmetrical narrative functions of first and second women. Like Naevia in Spartacus, she is

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unsettling and fits uncomfortably within the story of the gladiator. This goes some way to explain why there are so few feature films that follow female Roman gladiators as main characters (see Table 5.8). Women are more likely to appear in contemporary and futuristic updates of the gladiatorial scenarios, for example in action films where female boxers or martial artists are forced to fight to save or avenge their families (e.g. Female Fight Club, Lady Bloodfight [Nahon, 2016]), where superheroes

TABLE 5.8  Selection of films featuring historical female gladiators Title

Year

Country

Description

Thor and the Amazon Women/ Le gladiatrici

1963

Italy

Thor and his sidekick Ubaratutu struggle against a matriarchal society that enslaves men and forces women to fight as gladiators.

The Arena

1974

Italy/USA

Kidnapped women are forced to fight in the Roman provinces. They band together and rebel.

The Arena

2001

Russia/ USA

Remake of The Arena 1974, likewise following kidnapped women as they escape Roman enslavement.

Amazons and Gladiators

2001

USA/ Germany

Exotic dancers are rescued and trained by Amazons. In a quest for revenge, they find themselves fighting as gladiators.

Gladiatress

2004

UK

Three British sisters adventure around the Roman Empire, eventually surviving an arena fight and returning home victorious.

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are pitted against one another (e.g. in The Justice League series and Birds of Prey), or in the post-apocalyptic world of The Hunger Games and its Japanese predecessor Battle Royale (Fukasaku, 2000). They may appear as background characters, as the archers in Gladiator’s Colosseum battle or fighting dwarfs in Barabbas. As elsewhere, these women are significantly outnumbered by male fighters. The female gladiator is a novelty across fiction and her impact lies in her rarity. This character can uniquely reveal the burlesque mode that I argue characterizes all gladiatorial performances on-screen.

Low-budget genre cinema The gladiatrix on screen is most likely to be found in low-budget genre cinema, a medium notable for entangling eroticism with violence via explicit soft-core pornographic content and graphic augmentations of violence. As a marginal mode of cinema, low-budget genre films often serve as a kind of sideshow to mainstream action film, thus reinforcing the carnivalesque ‘sideshow’ aspect of the female gladiator in particular and the gladiator archetype more widely. The behind-the-scenes story of GLOW, which follows a troupe of female wrestlers beginning their broadcast television careers, plays upon the connection with lowbudget genre cinema. The troupe’s director, Sam Sylvia (Marc Maron) is a former horror film director, who weaves many of the conventions of the genre into the storylines performed by the wrestlers. The nostalgic mode of the series exploits the cult associations of Sylvia’s cult film stardom (expressed through his estranged daughter Justine [Britt Baron]) to build a gladiatorial scenario that layers the nostalgia for 1970s cult filmmaking with a hyperstylized nostalgia for the 1980s television landscape that saw GLOW: The Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (INI, 1986–1989) first broadcast. Unlike the troubled but committed sisterhood of GLOW, the female gladiators in Thor and the Amazon Women/Le gladiatrici are unwilling combatants forced to fight as gladiators by their extreme matriarchal culture, a fate shared by the film’s virtuous heroine, the princess Tamar (Susy Andersen). Many gladiatrices fall in the arena of the film’s evil queen, either as losing combatants, as reluctant participants executed for their disobedience or by committing suicide to avoid

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fighting. In one conversation, the gladiatrix trainer and leader of the resistance, describes her motives for fighting against the Amazon queen’s matriarchy. She mourns the loss of her family and insists that a matriarchy is an ‘unnatural’ form of government. The queen, however, condemns men’s use of oppressive force as a strategy of governmentality and claims to have overthrown such tyrannical patriarchy. While the messianic muscles of former wrestler Joe Robinson as Thor ultimately fulfil the prophecy to topple the queen’s androcidal matriarchy, it is the enslaved gladiatrix Tamar who kills the queen with her spear, in order for her younger brother to accede to the throne and re-establish patriarchal rule. It is telling and perhaps surprising that in 1963, the female gladiator is a figure who so clearly and violently supports a patriarchal system. Over ten years later, women are likewise forced to fight one another, this time by Roman patriarchal government. The Pam Grier vehicle The  Arena (1974), and its straight-to-video 2001 Roger Corman-produced remake, feature enslaved women whose gladiator careers are explicitly framed as ‘unnatural’, in a manner similar to the gladiatrices of the mid-century peplum film. However, sexuality is much more central and explicit in the later films, both of which belong to a type of quickly produced and sexually focused low-budget cinema labelled ‘sexploitation’. Given the casting of Grier, the film also recalls the cycle of low-budget films called ‘Blaxploitation’, some of which offer gladiatorially inspired scenarios informed by their hybridization of martial arts cinema (e.g. Black Belt Jones [Clouse, 1974]). There are many crossovers between the gladiatrix of low-budget genre films and pornographic film, as evidenced by the casting of Playboy playmates, Karen McDougal and Lisa Dergan, in the 2001 version of The Arena. A pornographic aesthetic is foundational to the Sam Raimi-produced Spartacus television series, which features a handful of female fighters (Saxa, Mira and Naevia), seen in Spartacus’s rebel army rather than in the Roman-regulated arena. Marc Bousquet (2012) argues that the series repeatedly presents ‘gladiators as the adult films stars of their time. The mapping of gladiation by way of the contemporary cultural space of porn is literal, with repeated scenes of gladiators sexually performing for an audience of citizens, who sometimes offer direction (à la interactive porn sites), zoom in for close-ups of the action, and so on.’ Bousquet’s interest in the pornographic modalities of Spartacus

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hinges on its representation of class struggle and the ‘superexploitation’ of gladiators as (sex) slaves. The television show features iconic warrior woman and former Xena star Lucy Lawless as one of the series’ many deadly aristocratic femme fatales. Lawless’s star persona strongly informs her role as Lucretia, drawing on the queer associations built over six seasons of Xena (and its homoerotic subtext between Xena and her sidekick Gabrielle [Renée O’Connor]). Lucretia features in both heterosexual and homosexual sex scenes, typical of a series that punctuates almost every episode with both graphic violence and sexual imagery. The sex sequences generally involve groups of people and are largely staged in brothels and in orgiastic parties at Roman villas, Batiatus’s gladiatorial ludus and the gladiator army’s encampments. Spartacus’s sex scenes simultaneously provide narrative and character information against (and through) a backdrop of nudity and sexuality – a practice that, in the wake of HBO’s Game of Thrones, has been dubbed ‘sexposition’.4 Some of Spartacus’s most important political alliances and rivalries play out in this manner. Like the amphitheatre fights analysed in Chapter III, the sex sequences in Spartacus are not exclusively spectacles; they progress the narrative, offer insight into characters and, I argue, cement the series’ association of decadent Roman sexualities and their thirst for gladiatorial violence. The series does not offer a straightforward condemnation of either sexual exploitation or gladiatorial violence, as Spartacus’s heroic army, bound by a nostalgically inflected brotherhood of those who trained at the ludus, are active and happy participants in orgiastic parties just like as their Roman enemies. However, it is worth noting that the two men that the series frames as the most virtuous (Spartacus and Oenomaus) do not willingly join in the sex parties. The low-budget Gladiatress, starring the main players of the popular comedy series Smack the Pony (Channel 4, 1999–2003), clearly draws from the successes of Gladiator a few years earlier. In part facilitated by the film’s parodic tone, the film’s heroine, Worthaboutapig (Sally Phillips) and her sisters embody the unruliness described as ‘disruptive’ by Rowe Karlyn. This is clearly demonstrated in the arena sequences that act as the film’s climax. The first sequence sees a hugely muscled Goth face the three women. As he enters the arena he remarks, ‘There’s something odd about them.’ His Roman minder/lanista replies, ‘They’re women.’ The Goth seems pleased, ‘Ah, so those are women.

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I’ve seen women before. I like it. Give them swords.’ While rooted in a comedic gag, the notion of a misrecognition of the female gladiator as a male gladiator with ‘something odd about him’ is in perfect alignment with the inverse logic of the carnivalesque central to Rowe Karlyn’s unruliness and to the gladiatorial burlesque that I build on it. Further unruliness follows this exchange, as the women squabble and knock one another unconscious. The Goth beheads Worthaboutapig, requiring her sisters to journey to the underworld in order to retrieve her. Ultimately, Worthaboutapig defeats the Goth in a decidedly unsettling way, castrating him with her teeth. Female gladiators are notably absent or marginalized in the mainstream Hollywood high-budget reboot of the sword and sandal film, although they do sometimes appear as opponents in the arena, such as the gold-armoured archers in the Colosseum fight in Gladiator and as a retiarius in the final amphitheatre fight in The Legend of Hercules. In the latter example, Hercules defeats six of Greece’s most deadly warriors. He kills the five men but spares his female opponent, leaving her tangled in her own net. Such a decision reaffirms his heroic masculinity and the position of the female gladiatrix as distinct from the gladiator. The Roman gladiatrices of the millennium’s higher-budget pictures fight only in group scenarios where they are outnumbered by men. The burlesque of the gladiatrix belongs to the hypersexualized cinematic traditions of exploitation filmmaking more than mainstream historical cinema. Which is not to say that this mode is absent in mainstream production because I would argue that despite her relative rarity, the burlesque of the female gladiator (with all its exploitative associations) has had a lasting influence on female fighters in American and European action cinema – particularly in scenarios in which two women are fighting in front of a diegetic audience, in underground tournaments or back-alley fight clubs. However high the stakes, women fighting each other retains a stubborn connotation of sexualized hysteria. The pejorative term ‘cat fight’ is used as a slang label for describing a fight between two women and carries with it a frisson of sexuality and foolishness that is used to titillate and to render the physical violence between two women ridiculous. This describes spectacles such as the Jello wrestling sequence in the frat boy comedy Old School (Phillips, 2003) and ‘mud wrestling’ sequences like it. The cat-fight model is

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illustrated more recently in a 2019 Facebook advertising campaign for the UK reality competition programme The Bachelor (Channel 5, 2003– present), which featured women dressed in vaguely classical costumes with swords doing battle with one another in extreme slow motion (see Image 5.63), recalling Snyder’s 300 and the Spartacus series. Moments such as these are commonplace and reveal the synthesis of silliness and sexual objectification that often characterizes the way female fighters and female violence are perceived in media culture. This framing marginalizes and dismisses women’s efforts in combat sports, just as it renders the cinematic gladiatrix a figure of almost pure spectacle rather than melodramatic tragedy or heroism. However, when the onscreen gladiatrix, or female fighter, faces a male opponent, the erotic equation shifts notably, as Hercules’ more merciful treatment of his female opponent testifies. When gladiatrix faces gladiator, their battles can fall anywhere on a continuum of male– female violence. At one end, the threatened female victim is subjected to violence by a man whose strength and violent skills outmatch

Image 5.63  The Bachelor uses gladiatorial iconography to frame its romantic competition

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hers (e.g. the deaths of many ‘lost wives’). At the other end lies the grotesque horrors of the monstrously threatening woman of the horror film (e.g. the castration scenes in Spartacus and Gladiatress).5 In either case, the gladiatrix vs gladiator scenario is more unsettling than the ‘cat-fight’ model common to comedies because it reveals the violence of unequal power relations and/or the terrifying qualities of the female fighter who can overwhelm her male adversaries. As the unruly woman of comedy, the gladiatrix ‘dwells close to the grotesque’ in a ‘realm of inversion and fantasy where, for a time at least, the ordinary world can be stood on its head’ (Rowe Karlyn, 1995, p. 11). Where the comedic unruly woman might escape the fate of many monstrous women and femme fatales, the gladiatrix’s unruliness is often limited by her hypersexualization and her relegation to the ‘sideshow’. The inversions of the gendered gladiatorial carnivalesque are often ‘righted’ when the headline battle between male gladiators begins. While such associations are stubborn and difficult to combat through new mythic systems, I insist that the carnivalesque sideshow mode of the gladiatrix’s burlesque is threaded through the male gladiator’s performances as well. This is in part due to the kitsch associations of mid-century gladiator movies, which persistently eroticize the gladiator’s body and insist on alternative reading strategies and subtexts that cling to the archetype. It remains difficult to offer a female gladiator character onscreen that will be accepted using the mythic frameworks of honour, nostalgia and virtuous strength. Those belong to the headline fight between male gladiators, while the gladiatrix is an unsettling feature of a sideshow marked by foolishness, hypersexuality, monstrosity or victimhood. However, I would suggest that while ‘elevating’ the female fighter to the position of tragic mournfulness would certainly be a welcome variation on the gladiator archetype, it is perhaps more radical to ‘lower’ or relegate the male gladiator to the unruly sideshow; thus upending the structures of nostalgic-heroic masculinity that marginalize female characters. Acknowledging and foregrounding the pleasurable ridiculousness of all gladiators onscreen can demythologize the archetype (and its genres) and make it clear that the gladiator belongs as much to the carnival as the gladiatrix. This aspect is an important part of his appeal and an expression of his version of a queered male unruliness.

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Eroticism and the gladiator ‘Burlesque’ is a word largely associated with sexual spectacle and with female striptease. The violent performances of the gladiatrix are decidedly, and sometimes explicitly, sexual and sexualized as I have outlined above. Male gladiators are also sexualized or, to be more accurate, eroticized. In Ancient Rome the word ‘gladius’, which gives the gladiator his name, was also slang for penis and the gladiator was considered a (slightly troubling) object of erotic fixation for female spectators in particular. Here I would like to make a distinction between the sexualization of the gladiatrix and the eroticization of the gladiator. With this distinction, I further insist that both are entwined fixtures of the queered performances of the gladiatorial burlesque. Women, in visual media, exist within in a long-standing apparatus of gazes that conventionally offers their bodies as (sexual) spectacle and representations of gladiatrices exist with the continuity of such practices. If it is considered unexpected to see a female fighter in the gladiatorial arena, as each Roman gladiatrix story insists, then it is expected and conventional to see female performers in scenarios designed for sexual spectacle. Thus, the gladiatrix is always already sexualized; her violence is inseparable from her sexuality. In postfeminist media culture, the gladiatrix in millennial film and television appears in a wider context of an action cinema that features female warriors as deadly but hyperfeminine (e.g. Charlie’s Angels) leading Marc O’Day (2004) to label them ‘action babes’. This likewise describes the postfeminist female fighters in 1980s barbarian films such as Valeria in Conan: The Barbarian, the titular Red Sonja, the gladiatrices of The Arena (2001) and Amazons and Gladiators. It also fits the gladiatrices played by pop stars Beyoncé, Pink and Brittney Spears in a 2004 Pepsi commercial and the competitors in season 10 of America’s Next Top Model (see Images 5.64 and 5.65). I would argue that the ‘action babe’, like the melodramatic gladiator, is a millennial creation. She reaches her apex in the early years of the twenty-first century and has been gradually eclipsed by less ironic female performances, including classically informed action heroines such as Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman and more viscerally violent performances such as former ‘American Gladiator’ and MMA fighter Gina Carano in Haywire

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Image 5.64  Beyoncé, Britney Spears and Pink fight in the Roman amphitheatre

Image 5.65  The competitors on America’s Next Top Model pose as gladiators

(Soderberg, 2011),6 Charlize Theron in Atomic Blonde (Leitch, 2017) or Jennifer Garner in Peppermint (Morel, 2018). I would likewise include some of the warrior women of the Spartacus series, particularly Saxa, in this category. This is not to suggest a rupture in representations of the female action heroine, but a subtle shift in post-millennial digital action cinema away from hyperfemininity as an ironic performance. Eroticization, on the other hand, is something more difficult to define but easy to identify across the gladiator scenario or filone.

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Gladiators are relatively common characters in erotically infused romance novels aimed at women. These books generally, but not exclusively, focus on female heterosexual desire. Mills & Boon’s The Gladiator by Carla Capshaw (2009) uses much of the tropes of the biblical epic to frame its love story between a young Christian woman and the lanista and former gladiator who becomes her protector and convert. Anna Hackett’s ‘Galactic Gladiator’ series (2016–present) tells the story of human women kidnapped by aliens and ultimately rescued by a fraternity of hypermasculine gladiators (see Image 5.66).

Image 5.66  The cover art of Hackett’s Gladiator features the headless torso of the eponymous character described across several ekphrastic passages in her novel

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As part of a female-centred mode of entertainment, these books linger on descriptions of male bodies, engaged in fighting and training as well as in sexual acts. I would argue that these ubiquitous descriptive moments become ekphrastic, to borrow a classical term for the lavish and evocative literary descriptions of works of art.7 Ekphrasis is a potent early example of remediation and in gladiator romantic fiction the built male body replaces or functions as the work of art being described. The erotic ekphrasis of the gladiator romance novel mimics the cinematic treatments of the gladiator’s body, dwelling on its haptic and sculptural properties, as is clear in an introductory description from Hackett’s Gladiator: Then she looked at the man next to him and everything inside her went still. He looked like a tattoo-covered, badass god. He was an inch taller than his friend, wearing the same black leather pants, but his chest was bare except for leather straps that crossed over his skin topped by a burnished gold medallion. The straps held the bloodred cloak that hung down his back. Power radiated off him. She noted the people nearby were watching him with wide, deferential gazes. Harper’s chest tightened a little. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on him, and all his muscles and tattoos – and there were a lot of them – were on display. He was made up of defined ridges and hard ropes of muscle, and every inch of them was covered in amazing markings. The tattoos had all been done in black ink, no color to be seen. His left arm and shoulder were covered with tribal-looking marks and swirls, his right arm was covered in a beautiful script she couldn’t read, and down his hard sides, she saw fascinating images … Her gaze drifted up his body, and when she reached his rugged face, she stiffened. He was looking at her. His eyes were deep green in a face that was too hard to be called handsome, but it was commanding. (Hackett, 2016, pp. 40–1) In a later book, another alien gladiator – this time given the loaded Roman name ‘Nero’ – is described as ‘a sight to behold. He was big and broad-shouldered, and his muscles … God, every inch of him was tight and hard-packed. He only wore a harness topped with fur across his chest … ’ (Hackett, 2017, loc.231). Like their futuristic counterparts,

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Capshaw’s gladiator hero is defined by his strength and bulk when he is first seen and admired by the female protagonist: A crisp, light colored tunic draped across his shoulders and the expanse of his chest contrasted sharply with his black hair and the rich copper of his skin. Gold bands around his writs emphasized the strength of his arms, the physical power he held in check. Her breath hitched in her throat. She could only stare. Without a doubt, the man could crush her if he chose. (Capshaw, 2009, loc.326) In many of these ekphrastic passages, the gladiator’s physical beauty is triangulated via multiple admiring gazes – most importantly from the point of view of the desiring female protagonist. This is reinforced by the appreciative gazes of other men that seem to ensure his high status. This system of networked gazes is formalized in those passages describing the gladiator’s body as he fights or prepares to fight in the arena. The ekphrastic mode of gladiator romance belongs, for the most part, to heterosexual female desire and as such is a legacy of the Ancient Roman belief that women were particularly susceptible to an overwhelming desire for the male gladiator. The gladiator in visual culture, however, is a figure who has become tied to male homoerotic desire as much as, if not more than, female heterosexual desire.

Homoeroticism In the sword and sandal film, the erotic treatment of the male body is embedded in its ancient world setting, often displaced onto the bodies of classical statuary, as Michael Williams (2009) and others have highlighted. This association of the erotic male body with the ancient world frequently connotes a homoeroticism that has become central to the gladiator’s mythology. In her discussion of masculinity in Kubrick’s Spartacus, Ina Rae Hark (1993, p. 151) begins by establishing the ‘extreme forms’ of displaying the male body permitted in the biblical epic and sword and sandal film. She insists that these mytho-historical settings allow for both male and female fashions that reveal considerable flesh; moreover, in these cultures homoerotic practices are widely

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acknowledged and the punishment of criminals or conquered foes is a highly elaborated public show, allowing for the ample spectacularization of male characters. Most frequently this spectacle is sado-masochistic, enacted through beating or torture, during which the male body, marked by the punishment, is eroticized through stripping or binding. (1993, pp. 151–2) Michèle Lagny likewise remarks on the sadomasochistic practices highlighted by Hark, ‘[t]here is often a titillating sadistic element in the countless circus scenes to be found in such films, where gladiators are subjected to the brutal whims of the spectators’ (Lagny, 1992, p.  172). While Lagny remarks on gladiators offhand, I would insist that gladiatorial combat and training are primary opportunities for the eroticization of men through violence; more common and less analysed than the torture scenes mentioned above. The primary purpose of the Roman gladiator was to serve as spectacle; the same is true of every fictional gladiatorial performance that foregrounds the gladiator’s body. It is fitting in this moment to recall that in Ancient Rome, the gladiator belonged to a similarly low-status social category as the prostitute, because both sold their bodies for the entertainment of others. The erotic crossover between sex worker and fighter is a persistent entanglement. The gladiatorial burlesque, like the exotic dance sequence of the peplum, is a mise en spectacle that uses the classical world as a kind of theme park offering a more permissive space for erotic experimentation and play. However, it builds this playground on violence, as it provides an alibi for the sustained and objectifying gazes on male bodies, often entangled with one another as they struggle or train. The violence of close-range fighting is used as a language to communicate the possibilities of homosexual erotic encounters and homosocial bonding, particularly wrestling or grappling between two men (or, indeed, two women). Gladiatorial violence sees male characters in various states of undress and injury, in close proximity to other men: fellow gladiators, trainers and the men (and women) who watch them fight. Lagny suggests that in the Italian peplum, ‘… physical strength has a powerful erotic function, which is exploited in the scenes of (very) close combat, where the sexual component of two clinching men is clearly emphasized’.

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She wonders if this is for the benefit of the female spectator or, ‘under the cloak of ancient customs, is it a way of alluding to the delights of censured homosexuality?’ (1992, p. 171). This display of the gladiator’s body and the eroticization of his fights with other men serves both functions simultaneously. While the gladiator is a figure of intense erotic fascination and libidinal investment for both women and men (as is clear from the examples above), the strength of the association between the figure of gladiator and homoeroticism is particularly strong. This can be illustrated in a much-circulated joke in the parodic film Airplaine (mentioned in Chapter II’s discussion of genre). The pilot of the doomed airplane asks a young boy a series of inappropriate questions: ‘You ever been in a cockpit before? You ever seen a grown man naked? Joey, do you ever hang around the gymnasium? Joey, you like movies about gladiators?’ This joke depends on a well-known link between the gladiator, gladiator movies and homoeroticism. I argued earlier in this volume that this joke also confirms the label ‘gladiator movie’ as an effective tool for conveying to audiences a type of film that includes the built male body (nearly naked, trained in a gymnasium) and homoerotic subtext or text. Another telling example of the performative and coded eroticism of the male body in the sword and sandal film is a ‘behind-the-scenes’ anecdote from the filming of the biblical epic Ben-Hur. In the 1995 documentary The Celluloid Closet (Epstein and Friedman), screenwriter Gore Vidal tells how he became ‘very good at projecting subtext without saying a word about what you were doing’. In an attempt to add interest to the plodding relationship between Stephen Boyd’s Messala and Charlton Heston’s Judah Ben-Hur, Vidal recounts how he designed a backstory for the characters, ‘Let’s say that these two guys when they were fifteen, sixteen, when they last saw each other, they had been lovers. And now they’re meeting again and the Roman wants to start it up.’ Director William Wyler agrees and insists that Vidal relay the backstory to Boyd but not to Heston. ‘So, Heston thinks he’s doing Francis X. Bushman in a silent version … and Stephen Boyd is acting it to pieces. There are looks that he gives him that are just so clear.’ Like this example, the eroticism of the ancient world is expressed through subtext and performance. Furthermore, as Lagny suggests, this is an eroticism of male bodies interacting; centred on the love between

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men that was forbidden in 1950s Hollywood under production code censorship and in the contexts of the Italian peplum co-productions. It is significant that this homoeroticism, and its subtext, is tied to classical antiquity and to an understanding Greco-Roman world as more sexually permissive. According to Patrick Higgins’s survey of queerness and antiquity, ‘[w]ritings about antiquity have often allowed author and reader to indulge their own personal fantasies of a longdeparted golden age’ (1993, p. 17). Here Higgins is speaking about the legacy of J. J. Winckelmann whose 1764 History of the Art of Antiquity is foundational to art history as a discipline. According to Alex Pott’s (2000) comprehensive analysis of Winckelmann’s life and works, undeniably the most visible striking aspect of his writing on Greek art, [is] the unapologetically sensuous homoeroticism of his reading of the Greek male nude … The ideal erotic figure for him is not a feminine object offered up for the delectation and domination of a male gaze. It is rather a finely formed male body. As such it becomes for the male viewer both an object of desire and an ideal subject with which to identify. (2000, p. 5) Winckelmann, and figures such as Walt Whitman, are proof to Higgins of a mode of viewing Greek culture and ‘the ancient world as a homosexual paradise’ (1993, p. 18). According to Maria Wyke, the classical world and its signifiers such as the amphitheatre or Greek statuary, give a justification for the lingering focus on the male body in forms such as fitness magazines or peplum films, with their inherent homoeroticism; they ‘provided a rationalization for the pleasurable contemplation of the semi-naked male body … [serving] as a form of alibi for, rather than denial of, homoeroticism’ (1997, p. 61). Michael Williams foregrounds the importance of statuary in this process: ‘Desire thus needs to be displaced and made safe under the mantle of classicism; a desire both frozen and unable to be enacted, but also reassuringly preserved in a sublime state’ (2009, p. 44). Gladiatorial combat provides an additional classical alibi for viewing the male body; one that is arguably less sublime than the sculpture but more kinetic, visceral and compelling. In addition, in the moving images of film and television, the morituri

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become uncanny expressions of a sublime preservation of erotic beauty just before death, as confirmed in the many tableaux of dying gladiators.

Greece versus Rome If neoclassical artists and writers, following Winckelmann, were keen to recall refined Greek origins, then twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists working in film, television and new media find much more fertile ground in Rome. It is in martial Rome, rather than ‘civilized’ Greece, that filmmakers and showrunners find a perfect fusion of violent barbarism, eroticism and civilized classicism. It is via a distinctly Roman figure, the gladiator, that stoicism, heroism and eroticism can be so effectively hybridized. Leading from Winckelmann’s influential and erotically charged admiration of Greek statuary in the eighteenth century, neoclassicism privileges Greece as an enlightened space of civilization while marginalizing Rome as the uncouth military machine making less enlightened copies of Greek originals. Classicist Thomas Wiedemann (1992) argues that artists were anxious to disregard Roman classicism as limited to bloodthirsty gladiators and corrupt emperors. It is those gladiators and emperors that are so spectacularly cinematic, televisual and ludic; and so perfectly suited to digital remediation. Even the historically ambiguous spaces of the barbarian subgenre (the Middle East of the Scorpion King franchise, for example) mobilize Roman iconography, particularly in the bodies of the male leads who are imagined as a pragmatic Hercules juxtaposed against sidekicks marked as more thoughtful Greek Apollos.8 Post-millennial digital classicism is particularly keen to revitalize its Roman roots – their excesses, violence and masculine spectacles – as gritty and somehow more authentic. Roman militarism provides a kind of ‘inoculation’ against the more effeminate Grecian sexualities, even as it also showcases them. Williams identifies this paradox in 300 where ‘male (homo) sexuality is mapped onto the same body that attempts to disavow it, resulting in a perverse iconography that is both homoerotic and homophobic’ (2009, p. 46). I would argue that this paradox belongs to a mythologized and remediated understanding of Roman sexual politics. Thus, we see a shift towards the militant Romans rather than the Greeks – here idealized for their unfiltered savagery and their mournful embodiments of it.

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This shift is particularly noticeable in masculinities of the postmillennial sword and sandal film. I would argue that the sword and sandal genre is more excessive in its fetishizations of the male body, even if its heroes often refrain from participating in sexual acts. Rushing (2016a) suggests that the male sword and sandal hero is generally either pre- or post-Oedipal – shifting from a pre-sexual infantile state of delight in the mid-century Italian peplum film to a post-sexual state of tragic mourning in millennial films such as Gladiator. I would argue that this sexual pre/post, as Rushing labels it, is fixed to the ‘before and after’ logic of the gladiator, displacing sexuality onto erotic fetish objects, for example classical/sculptural bodies and the leather clothing they wear, so vividly illustrated in the ekphrastic passages in gladiator-themed romantic fiction. The violence of the gladiator and gladiatrix becomes a language for expressing eroticism and sexuality; sometimes, as in the case of the post-Oedipal gladiator, replacing it. The simmering (homo) eroticism of both gladiator and gladiatrix is sublimated into performative violence that permits bodies to touch one another and invites voyeuristic participation, sometimes even direction. It can also function as the glue that binds comrades together in brotherhoods, like the intensity of Batiatus’s ludus in Spartacus, or sisterhoods, like the rebel gladiatrices in The Arena.

Eroticism and/of race The gladiatorial burlesque depends on frameworks in which race is mobilized for sexual spectacle. In The Arena, Margaret Markov’s Bodicia is clear in her belief that women should not be made to fight as men. If the white character insists that fighting is unnatural for a woman, Grier’s Mamawi is not presented with such reservations. She does not need to learn to fight, as she picks it up quickly and effortlessly. This skill is predicated on assumptions about the raced body of the black woman as more in tune with atavistic skills (and embodied physicality) such as hand-to-hand combat and aggressive sexuality. In The Arena, as elsewhere, race becomes another layer to the violent spectacle and sexual fantasy, highlighted by the film’s tagline, ‘Black Slave, White Slave: see wild women fight to the death!’ Given how few representations there are of female gladiators, it is telling how many of

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them are played by black women, such as Grier in The Arena, Beyoncé in the Pepsi advertisement, warrior woman Naevia in Spartacus and the archers in Gladiator’s Colosseum. It is impossible to ignore the excesses of showing a black woman’s body trapped in a literal system of slavery bound to a white empire that exploits her as an exotic object of sexual and violent interest. The same is also true of black men in gladiator films who often act as sidekicks to the white protagonist (i.e. Demetrius and the Gladiators, Spartacus, Pompeii, Gladiator). It is important to examine the fantasy of the erotic black gladiator in more detail, rather than merely dismissing it as a racist feature of marginal low-budget cinema – if only because this fantasy is certainly not limited to exploitation cinema or gladiator characters. One illustrative sequence occurs in Kubrick’s Spartacus, as aristocrats visiting Batiatus’s (Peter Ustinov) ludus are privy to a private gladiator battle. The noblewomen, Lady Claudia (Joanna Barnes) and Lady Helena (Nina Foch), ask to choose the gladiators who will battle to the death for them. In a shotreverse-shot sequence, framed by the bars of the cage, the women survey the gladiators. Batiatus makes a suggestion, ‘The trident is something very rare these days. May I suggest the Ethiopian? There are very few Ethiopians in the country. Ethiopians are recognised as masters of the trident.’ The women are more interested in aesthetics than armature and Claudia insists on Woody Strode’s Draba. ‘I’ll take him … I want the most beautiful. I’ll take the big black one.’ A similar sequence takes place in Pompeii, in which the gladiators are placed on plinths at a party, like living statues. An older aristocratic woman inspects Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s Atticus and, it is implied, pays his lanista for his sexual services. This scenario – predatory and powerful older white woman desiring and exploiting the enslaved black man – demonizes one and objectifies the other in a sexualized equation of anxious and unequal power relations. Celine Parreñas Shimizu insists ‘that pleasure and fantasy from the sexualization of race must be part of race politics’ (2007, p. 6). Acknowledging and analysing the raced fantasies of the gladiatorial burlesque is a step towards this goal. Harry Baird’s performance as Ubaratutu in Thor and the Amazon Women is an excellent place to start, as he is typical of the built black men who appear, generally as infantilized sidekicks, in Italian peplums. He is captured by the evil queen (Janine Hendy) and inspected in a surreal sequence that puts

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Baird’s body on display via a spotlit plinth, like Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s Atticus. The captured Ubaratutu is then forced to perform a bodybuilding routine by the queen, who watches through an aperture decorated like an eye. She chooses him as her ‘husband’ and promises to make him king. However, Thor comes to the rescue and points out to an unwilling Ubaratutu that the queen will kill him when she tires of him. It is significant that black actress Janine Hendy plays the unnamed queen, known only as The Black Queen. The matriarchy that enslaves white men and forces white women to fight each other is led by a black woman who captures the strong black man that she desires. Ubaratutu is enslaved by the Black Queen in much the same way as other strongmen before him. He remains a prostrate and passive sex object victimized by the queen and he refuses to believe Thor. A strange, stilted fight follows as Thor tries to free him. They trade slow deliberate punches as the queen watches with obvious sexual delight until Ubaratutu comically knocks himself out by running into a large gong. Ubaratutu is the centre of an erotic love triangle caught between Thor and the Black Queen and he is asked to choose which one he would serve – as neither offer an equal partnership. Ultimately, given the choice between black femme fatale and white ‘saviour’, Ubaratutu sides with the homoerotic partnership (unequal though it is) rather than an alliance with black female power that might offer a more unsettling challenge to the status quo. His relationship to Thor is framed through moments of intense homoeroticism. In an early sequence Ubaratutu catches Thor in his arms as he falls from a cliff (victim of an Amazon poison arrow attack). He carries Thor back to his cave and, as Thor’s unconscious body dominates the frame lying on a bed of furs, Ubaratutu sucks poison from his leg. When Thor regains consciousness, he carefully resets his dislocated shoulder. The black bodies in Thor and the Amazon Women showcase desire that is either homoerotic or predatory. In either scenario, they are in keeping with conventions of cinema that hypersexualizes black bodies via broad stereotypes such as the ‘black buck’, a dangerously sexual black man. Because the black gladiator is a slave, as Ubaratutu is subservient to Thor and captured by the Black Queen, the anxieties around the ‘black buck’ might be managed. Arguably, this is in operation in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012), which

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features American slaves forced to fight for the entertainment of their immoral and grotesque white owners. Steven Cohan argues that Hollywood epics tended to cast British actors as Romans and white Americans as virtuous rebels, which ‘allow[ed] for the safe inclusion of an exotic muscular black gladiator every now and then, as in Demetrius and the Gladiators and Spartacus’ (1997, p. 149).9 However, the black gladiator and gladiatrix resist such containment violently. In a shocking scene, Draba throws his trident at the aristocrats who watch him fight and at the camera that frames him for cinema audiences. As Hark flags up, Draba cannot escape a system of phallic violence, only redirect it at those who enslave him (1993, pp. 160–1). Grier’s Mamawi likewise redirects her violence away from her fellow gladiatrices and towards her Roman masters. The black gladiator and gladiatrix are figures of hypersexualization and equally intense resistance; both of which are tied to gladiatorial violence and its performance via the burlesque mode. A post-millennial gladiator like Atticus, relatively content to participate in gladiatorial sex work, is vocal that his goal is personal freedom rather than the (quasi-politicized) vengeance his white comrade is pursuing. Atticus dies just after he wins his freedom and remains secondary to the white hero, Milo, in a surprisingly similar manner as Ubaratutu’s marginalization in favour of Thor fifty years earlier. Correlating with this relegation, the black sidekick figure is both sidelined and hypersexualized in a way that the eroticized and tragic/melodramatic white gladiator is not. This connects him to the gladiatrix characters of varied ethnicities. The racial politics of the sexual fantasies represented by gladiator characters reveal the high stakes of the gladiatorial burlesque and the centrality of a nostalgic white male saviour figure whose body is as erotically idolized as Winckelmann’s statuary.

Conclusion: ‘I want the most beautiful’ Ultimately, the gladiatorial sideshow has not changed markedly over time, even as the burlesque mode offers moments of unruly excess or earnest resistance. The fights of the gladiatrices in 1963 had much in

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common with those of 1974 and even those at the turn of the millennium. The black male gladiator remains secondary to his white partner. To conclude, I propose two divergent examples of how texts about female gladiators have resisted or exploited the burlesque model by focusing their stories on their female protagonists’ agency. The Hunger Games and GLOW are updates of the gladiatrix’s story that leave behind its Roman setting. The post-apocalyptic battles of teenaged gladiator Katniss Everdeen are the main events of The Hunger Games franchise, whose story mirrors that of the many Spartacus characters. Adolescent Katniss is not sexualized. However, the story of her manipulation via an imperial system of celebrity-based disciplinary tactics is the premise of the franchise’s plot. The next chapter of this volume focuses on the apparatus of celebrity that, in The Hunger Games, becomes the primary mode of exploitation rendering this articulation of the gladiatorial burlesque significantly more ‘doomed’ or ‘tragic’ (to use Cawelti’s terms) than those of other gladiatrix fictions. It is only through an act of violent refusal (shooting of rebel leader President Coin) that Katniss can step down as gladiatorial figurehead. Her retirement is as melodramatic as that of Maximus and comes at the price of taking another powerful woman’s life. I would argue that Katniss’s refusal of the burlesque mode is not entirely successful, as her happy ending in a nuclear family (like John Tillman’s in Gamer) remains unconvincing. Conversely, a fiction like GLOW, with which I began this chapter, looks to acknowledge and exploit the sexualized and kitsch associations of the gladiatorial burlesque. It foregrounds a group of unruly women who find kinship in their knowing embodiment of the sideshow and exploitation cinema. While liberally threaded with an over-simplified nostalgia, GLOW offers a fantasy space where a gladiatrix sisterhood finds purpose and expression through incorporating rather than refusing the gladiatorial burlesque.

Chapter VI Celebrity

Win the crowd and you will win your freedom. GLADIATOR

A third of the way through Gladiator, Maximus receives a pep talk from his combat trainer/lanista. Proximo tells him that the reason he was a successful gladiator (eventually winning freedom from slavery) was not just because of his martial skills, it was because the crowd loved him. ‘Win the crowd’, he tells Maximus, ‘and you will win your freedom’. This sequence connects celebrity and interpersonal violence as the interlocking keys to political and personal freedom. The rest of the film develops this theme; a theme that is the central concern of this chapter, which argues that the enduring cultural currency of the gladiator stems in large part from his or her celebrity status. In Scott’s Gladiator, as in Ancient Rome, one of the few routes for a non-aristocrat to attain celebrity was as a gladiator, fighting to the death in arenas like the Colosseum. As Derek Jacobi’s Senator Gracchus asserts, ‘Rome is the mob … the beating heart of Rome is not the marble of the senate, it’s the sand of the Colosseum.’ The amphitheatre is the spectacular, narrative, ludic and thematic hub of stories about gladiators. It is an architectural monument to the enduring celebrity of the gladiator; one that is consistently characterized as violent, populist and erotically charged. For centuries it has also stood, and continues to stand, as an exceptionally popular tourist attraction, drawing millions of visitors. The people who gather in Rome’s Colosseum are participants in the controversial practice of dark tourism, which is the practice visiting a

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place associated with death or violence. Philip R. Stone introduces dark tourism or thanatourism using the gladiatorial games as a formative example; he suggests that dark tourism is merely ‘an old concept in a new world’ (2005, p.112). It is with the phenomenon of dark tourism that I begin my interrogation of gladiatorial celebrity. In this chapter I argue that the apparatus of celebrity reinforces the gladiatorial archetype, from its Roman origins (and their legacies) to contemporary reality television. Based on the legacies of Roman antiquity’s formulation of fame, and the panoptic structure of the amphitheatre discussed in Chapter III, this chapter explores the ways that gladiatorial celebrity functions as a disciplinary mechanism for the gladiators and their audiences. I suggest that this is well suited to reality television, such as the competition show Bromans and to double-framed fictions such as The Hunger Games and The New Gladiators, which tell the story of reality television. In these spaces, and through the celebrity body, there is a crystallisation of concerns around celebrity as the harbinger of society’s failures and the related ways in which a fighter’s body is almost wholly commodified in the contemporary media marketplace. It further reveals the violence that contributes in unacknowledged ways to the process of celebrity itself. In his 2010 book, journalist and conservative politician Ferdinand Mount argues that much of what characterizes twenty-first century British culture (from the rise of spas to celebrity chefs) is evidence of a kind of cultural déjà vu, ‘a deeper closeness to the classical world’ (2010, p. 3). He seeks to prove ‘how in so many ways, large and small, trivial and profound, we are them and they are us’ (2010, p. 3, emphasis in the original). In a memorable comparison representative of those drawn his book, Mount describes reality television star Jade Goody as: in the situation of those captured barbarian princesses who were carried in chains through the streets of Rome to execution or enslavement. They too were ridiculed for not being able to speak proper … but their cruel fate eventually moved the gawping crowd to horror and pity. (2010, p. 288)

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Mount’s arguments around a historical déjà vu are echoed in works of classicists such as Robert Garland (2005 and 2010) and Garrett Fagan (2011) and their emphasis on continuities between ancient and contemporary entertainment cultures. Garland, however, reminds us, ‘[i]t would be stretching things unconscionably to suggest that celebrity functioned exactly the same way in antiquity as it does in our society’ (2010, p. 6). However, like Mount, he argues for significant parallels between the fame sought in Ancient Rome and the celebrity that marks our contemporary media-saturated culture. Moreover, celebrity classicist and popular historian Mary Beard argues that Classics are embedded in the way we think about ourselves, and our own history, in a more complex way than we usually allow. They are not just from or about the distant past. They are also a cultural language that we have learned to speak, in dialogue with the idea of antiquity. And to state the obvious, in a way, if they are about anybody, Classics are, of course, about us as much as about the Greeks and Romans. (2014, p. 8) Building on Beard’s assertion, this volume has insisted that gladiator stories are key conversations wherein contemporary culture speaks with and constructs fantasies about the past.

The Horrible Histories effect and dark tourism I would argue that journalists and historians such as Mount and Garland often use this cross-cultural comparison to focus contemporary interest on the study of the ancient world. This is what I would label a ‘Horrible Histories’ effect – enticing modern audiences, particularly children, into studying history by using (in)famous sensational topics (be it celebrity or the violence of the Colosseum) as a gateway into more serious historical study.1 This Horrible Histories effect is certainly not new. Writing in the  late fifth century AD when gladiator fights were still being

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staged, St Augustine comments on the pedagogical potential of the gladiator’s sensationalism and violence. He recounts, It occurred to me that the passage which I happened to be reading could very well be explained by an illustration taken from the games in the arena. It would appeal to the students and make my meaning clearer, and it would also enable me to make a laughing-stock of those who were under the spell of this insane sport. (1961, p. 121) There is more to our connection with the ancient world than just a way to teach history or over-simplified conclusions about unchanging human nature – and its obsessions with violence and celebrity. Even when they are not always founded in rigorous historical research, such cross-cultural associations have tremendous resonance and significant longevity. They give historical and mythic weight to current cultural trends and desires. Similarly, they make the people and cultures of the past more accessible, more immediate and more relevant. This goes some way to explaining the practice of ‘dark tourism’ that has achieved significant media visibility, particularly since the release of the Netflix reality television travelogue, The Dark Tourist (2018–present). David Farrier’s series follows him to dangerous places and disturbing monuments (e.g. Fukashima, Cambodia’s killing fields), as he muses on the nature of dark tourism. Philip R. Stone defines dark tourism as ‘the act of travel to sites associated with death, suffering and the seemingly macabre’ (2006, p. 145). I would insist that, with millions of visitors per year, the Colosseum remains one of the most enduring and recognisable dark tourist destinations on earth.2 Stone highlights, ‘Early examples of dark tourism may be found in the patronage of Roman gladiatorial games. With death and suffering at the core of the gladiatorial product, and its eager consumption by raucous spectators, the Roman Colosseum may be considered one of the first dark tourist attractions’ (2006, p.147). However, because the Colosseum is considerably older than other dark tourist sites, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau or Chernobyl, its darkness is tempered. It belongs more to the discourse of Horrible Histories than to the frisson of immediacy, trauma and danger of visiting other dark tourist attractions. Dark tourists visiting the Colosseum are

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provided with an educational alibi, which is arguably more convincing than for visitors to Chernobyl or patrons taking a Los Angeles murderthemed bus tour. What dark tourism and Horrible Histories have in common, other than their inclusion of the gladiator, is their contribution to, and reinforcement of, a kind of ‘celebrified history’; that is, a nostalgically informed understanding of history as a series of episodes or landmarks involving famous or infamous people. Celebrified history is often delivered via celebrity historians such as Mary Beard or Bettany Hughes on television documentaries that include dramatic re-enactments informed by cinematic traditions. Such historical narratives are spectacular and compelling but can risk ‘turn[ing] history into a bunch of amusing and readily available souvenirs, devoid of politics’ (Boym 2001, p. 51). In such a formulation of history, the gladiator himself is a souvenir; as he is in the shop on site at the Colosseum, where gladiator keychains, playing cards, costumes and replica weapons are readily available (see Image 6.67). The types of costumes and weapons available for purchase in the Colosseum shop are likewise worn by iconic costumed gladiators and legionnaires that station themselves near the Colosseum, offering to pose with tourists for a fee. In a manner that resonates with the ancient legislation enacted to ban gladiators themselves, the posing gladiators were banned from around the Colosseum in 2015.3 These tourists’ photographs, and the selfies taken inside the Colosseum itself, form a digital trail of their experiences when posted and shared online via sites such as Instagram. In his discussion of screen tourist practices, James Cateridge has suggested that these digital traces form a stratified ‘deep map’, which functions as ‘a means of reconciling place and narrative’ (2015, p. 322). Cateridge goes on to insist on the ‘seductive fantasy of embodiment’ (2015, p. 322) realized through such deep mapping practices. When this type of touristic mapping and fantasy involves the figure of the gladiator, I would argue that aspects of embodiment become even more central while simultaneously cinema and other media become the key ways that tourists imagine themselves in the Colosseum. Gladiatorial dark tourism is as much a trip to the cinematic past as the Roman past, as even a cursory study of the deep map left by tourists reveals. Ultimately, it is the suffering and exploited body of

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Image 6.67  The gladiator has become a souvenir

the gladiator that is purchased and consumed by the Colosseum’s dark tourists and their experiences of celebrified history. The doubling of the spectacle of gladiatorial entertainment with the spectacle of dark tourism reveals the kinship between the celebrity culture of the Roman and contemporary worlds. The next part of this chapter interrogates and analyses the discourse around celebrity and its perceived ancient origins. It questions the assumption that celebrity now, as in Ancient Rome, signals ultimate social decadence; it unpacks, through the figure of the gladiator, the violence enmeshed in the system of celebrity and its consistent focus on the bodies of male, and less often female, fighters.

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Gladiatorial celebrity Ancient Rome is the (mythical) site of two entangled aspects of gladiatorial celebrity: the first, dramatized in Roman amphitheatre, is the story of the gladiator as a celebrity fighter commanding popular appeal and visibility. The second is the legacy of Roman, and earlier Greek, conceptualizations of fame – as a double-edged sword, which both rewards and punishes; that offers glory and infamy; and that functions as both spectacle and disciplinary mechanism. Gladiator stories insist that the celebrity that earns the Roman gladiator money, freedom and perhaps political power comes at the cost of enduring and committing unconscionable acts of violence and being marginalized by the society that celebrates him. Michael Williams argues that ‘the association between the gods of Ancient Greece and Rome and the representation of fame and celebrity, whether of film stars, actors, poets or politicians, has a history that is as old as antiquity itself … These forms are often poised between the ideal and damaged, as they are between high art and kitsch’ (2013, p. 4). The gladiatorial archetype as it is realized by twentieth- and twenty-first-century media is perhaps the best example or embodiment of the doubled forces of celebrity (fame and infamy; high art and kitsch) and their heritage as legacies of the ancient world. In their early days, the Roman gladiatorial munera were infused with religious significance and were largely financed by upper-class individuals. By the late Republic, ‘the religious and commemorative elements of gladiatorial shows were increasingly fused with, even eclipsed by the political and the spectacular’ (Hopkins, 1983, p. 5). From his inception, the Roman gladiator was a figure of ambivalence: reviled and subjected to a wide range of legal disabilities. In some ways they were the lowest of the low … Yet they were also stars, incarnations of a potent masculinity, skilled fighters, above all, and men whose courage was such that they could look death in the face without flinching. (Edwards, 2007, p. 49) The Roman gladiator’s stardom came at significant cost, certainly to him personally but also (according to many contemporary and historical

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accounts) to the fabric of Roman society. In manner that resonates with current debates around the violence in videogames, or sports such as mixed martial arts, contemporary Roman debates around the gladiator worried about the effect that viewing violence had on its audiences. It should, however, be mentioned that accounts by Christians, such as St Augustine or Tertullian, were, unsurprisingly, the most condemnatory of this type of violent public theatre. I would argue that Christianity has made a deep impression on the relationship between the gladiator and celebrity; first in the form of these early Christian writers, and through each subsequent formulation of ancient heroism, reaching an apex in the Hollywood biblical epics.

Celebrity through the lens of Christianity Perhaps the most vivid account of the (dangerously) seductive appeal of the gladiator fights comes from St Augustine’s Confessions, in which he tells the story of his student Alypius’s addiction to the arena: When he saw the blood, it was as though he had drunk a deep draught of savage passion. Instead of turning away, he fixed his eyes upon the scene and drank in all its frenzy, unaware of what he was doing. He revelled in the wickedness of the fighting and was drunk with the fascination of bloodshed … Need I say more? He watched and cheered and grew hot with excitement, and when he left the arena, he carried away with him a diseased mind which would leave him no peace until he came back again. (1961, pp. 122–3) St Augustine’s account describes the desire to watch the gladiator as a kind of intoxicating addiction, against which the audience members, like Alypius, are almost helpless. St According to Leo Braudy, Augustine insists that Christianity is an antidote to the ‘diseased mind’ of Roman violence. Braudy describes Augustine as ‘preoccupied with defining what was specifically Christian against the vast legacy of a Rome that still, less than a hundred years after the conversion of Constantine, might again become the agent of persecution’ (1997, p. 161). The tension that Braudy establishes plays out in the gladiatorial stories of several biblical epics, including Demetrius and the Gladiators (and certainly, its

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prequel The Robe [Koster, 1953]), Barabbas, The Last Days of Pompeii (1935) and, to a certain extent, in Spartacus (1960). The gladiatorial games represented in these films are illustrative here; they are infamous examples of the Roman persecution of Christians and are now axiomatic instances of Rome’s corrupt desire for the entwined spectacles of blood and fame. They also dramatize the way Roman society voraciously consumed the celebrity fighters that embodied both. Christianity has become a key framing device through which we understand Rome as a corrupt system that gives birth to, and nourishes, celebrity fighters and the desire of everyday citizens to watch them. In his book on historical film, Jonathan Stubbs argues that in Roadshowera epics, such as Quo Vadis, Rome is: characterized by slavery, corruption, persecution, and paganism, and is apparently in desperate need of Christianity’s redeeming influence. At the same time, and in marked contrast to the piousness of the Christian characters, Rome plays host to spectacles of imperial power, excessive consumption, and luxurious sensuality. In this way the Roman/Christian epic provided contradicting pleasures, juxtaposing the spectacle of Rome with the moral uplift of Christianity. (2013, p. 95) The opening voiceover of Spartacus (1960) provides definitive evidence  of the way in which Christianity functions as a lens through which we view Roman decadence: ‘In the last century before the birth of the new faith called Christianity, which was destined to overthrow the pagan tyranny of Rome and bring about a new society, the Roman Republic stood at the very centre of the civilised world.’ These are the first words spoken in the film and are designed to orient viewers in history, encouraging them to read Rome as teetering on the brink of well-deserved ruin and presenting Christianity as the foundation of a new world order. Here Spartacus is set up as a Christ figure – whose traumatized masculinity is forged through the gladiatorial training that is ultimately responsible for his ability to overthrow his masters and lead a slave rebellion. Like Christ, Spartacus’s story of suffering ends with his crucifixion. Significantly, the television series is resolutely secular, assigning religious belief only to Romans, such as Lucretia and then only as part of her pathological quest for revenge. Spartacus himself

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frequently insists that he does not believe in the gods, aligning with the much more materialist culture of its twenty-first century production context and the neoliberal mythology of the self-made man. Gladiatorial munera and the corruption of Rome are not the only salient elements of the ancient world framed by Christianity. Arguably, the desire for fame itself is collapsed with Roman decadence and read as anti-Christian; or, rather, fama in the Roman sense (and the earlier Greek epic ideal of kleos/glory) is in direct opposition with Christian notions of humility and godliness. Leo Braudy argues that Augustine believed that ‘true goodness (as opposed to temporary greatness) is demonstrated not by any action, but by the refusal to perform. To the Roman definition of virtue as military and personal action (with its root in vir, “heroic man”), Augustine opposed virtue as a characteristic of the soul’ (Braudy, 1997, p. 167, emphasis in the original). If the effective embodiment virtue was one of the chief reasons behind the gladiator’s Roman fame, then this stands in direct opposition with Augustine’s insistence on virtue as a refusal and a state of being. Performance here is likewise key, as the gladiator – in Rome and onscreen – is a performer as much as he is a warrior. Consistently, the gladiator archetype is centred on the performance of both virtue in a personal/moral Christian sense and also in a public Roman sense of virtus, masculine courage. The celebrity of the cinematic gladiator depends on both Christian virtue and Roman virtus. Maximus is an illustrative example here: his virtues and fame lie in his military abilities (he begins the film as a successful Roman general) and his state of being – his role as father and husband, his humility and his refusal to take up the reins of power when they are passed to him directly from a dying Marcus Aurelius. Maximus’s embodiment of virtue (as a state of being and action) is directly opposed to that of his chief rival, Aurelius’s son Commodus. Commodus’s characterization as sadistic, out of touch and desperate for fame fits firmly with earlier portrayals of corrupt Romans. Joaquin Phoenix’s Oscar-award-winning performance channels the spirit of these earlier cinematic Roman villains, such as Peter Ustinov’s Nero or Jay Robinson’s Caligula. Just as the character of Maximus reconnects the kind of greatness associated with the Christian soul with the virtus of the Roman body, Commodus combines both the Roman and the Christian models of ultimate corruption and abjection.

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From ancient fame to postmodern celebrity The licentious infamy of Commodus and the celebrated virtue/virtus of Maximus demonstrate not just a symbiosis of competing models of ancient fame, but point to an investment in fame as a product of a more interesting past; a past that was home to more worthy men and, perhaps, more compellingly villainous men. Indeed, most media debates around celebrity are deeply nostalgic for a (nondescript) time long gone when people were celebrated for their talents, not simply ‘famous for being famous’ or, to use Daniel J. Boorstin’s much quoted phrase, ‘a person who is known for his well-knownness’ (1961, p. 57). These debates often point to a fundamental tension between celebrity, which is seen as entirely a product of media exposure rather than merit, and fame, which is granted to those who earn it by, for example, playing an instrument or a sport. In this we might read an older tension. On the one hand, there are the military virtues of kleos and gloria (glory) pursued doggedly by epic heroes such as Achilles. On the other hand, is the concept of celebritas, which Robert Garland points out is only occasionally associated with being publicly celebrated, and generally refers to ‘a crowd’ or ‘commonness’ 2006, p. 5. Garland brings our attention to the Roman dichotomy of celebrity versus fame by recalling Cicero’s condemnation of celebrity, ‘all that it took for someone to acquire it was “for a stupid and ignorant crowd to shout in unison”’ (2005, p. 5). This is of course ironic, given Cicero’s own celebrity status at the time. Cicero’s statement also goes some way towards proving that a critique of celebrity as ‘attributed’ rather than ‘achieved’ (Rojek, in Holmes, 2005, p. 10) is not an exclusive feature of postmodern celebrity culture. As Su Holmes points out, ‘We inhabit an age which is remarkably vocal about the phenomenon of celebrity, and the current watchword in media commentary appears to be change – the prevalent sense that modern celebrity represents a qualitative break with the past’ (2005, p. 7, emphasis in the original). Following Holmes, I insist that reports about our break with the past are largely overstated. Furthermore, what statements by Cicero and ancient nostalgic conceptualizations about fame suggest is a remarkable continuity: we have inherited the sense that our celebrity

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is different from the past from the past itself. What continues is not the same forms of celebrity (for in a media saturated environment we cannot say that ancient fame is the same as contemporary fame), but the sense that the ‘good’ fame (like good men and worthy adversaries) belongs to the past. Leo Braudy argues that ‘[l]ike many of the fevers, frenzies, and desires of the past, the longing for old standards of “true” fame reflect a feeling of loss and nostalgia for a mythical world where communal support for achievement could flourish’ (1997 p. 585). Braudy reminds us that these historical societies reserved fame for their elite. Fame as democratic was certainly not a mainstay of the classical world. That gladiators were exceptions to this goes some way to proving the rule. It also explains why the gladiator, as a low-status man (or occasionally woman) who made his living by fighting, would have such a tremendous appeal to contemporary American society and its meritocratic myths of rugged individualism and resistance to imperial authority. In telling the story of ancient fame through the gladiator, contemporary media revise history to reflect their concerns (an impulse surely common to all historical fictions) and critique contemporary versions of celebrity as less worthy than their historical/mythic counterparts. Braudy goes one step further to suggest that contemporary culture’s endless critique of celebrity culture ‘depend[s] always on some nostalgia for a past where standards were adhered to because values were fixed’ (2007, p. 185). It is in this formulation of fame that the ‘before and after’ logic of the gladiator’s story again manifests itself. In the lost time of before, fame and glory were stable and those that earned them deserved their rewards. Empty celebrity, by contrast, is less meaningful and perhaps even dangerous. The post-apocalyptic gladiator is viciously exploited by celebrity culture, as in Rollerball, The Hunger Games and The New Gladiators. The idea that in the past values were fixed is key to the appeal not only of fame, but to the revisionist rewriting of historical gender performances. The implication here is that the past is the place of a more authentic masculinity – where ‘men were men’. Certainly, there can be no better example than mythic Roman gladiators such as Maximus and Spartacus – who win fame by simultaneously embodying Roman martial physicality and a Judeo-Christian sense of humility and self-sacrifice. The enduring appeal and celebrity of the gladiator is based on the nostalgic revivification of historical masculinity as a quality

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which is always relevant – and against which contemporary masculinity is always found wanting. This is the polemic at the heart of Fight Club, itself a postmodern adaptation of the gladiator story. The film aims to speak for a generation of men who are being feminized by consumer culture and because they are ‘a generation of men raised by women’. No-holds-barred underground fight clubs are held up as the cure for this feminization and celebrated by the characters in the film as a return to their authentic (more masculine) selves. This is similarly threaded through the warrior identities of many other contemporary gladiators, such as Andrew Garrett’s background as a fencer and use of historical weapons (in Gladiator Cop) and the ways in which martial arts practice is framed as part of chivalrous historical traditions (e.g. John Stoneman in No Exit/Fatal Combat). The gladiator embodies both celebrity (he is a mediated product) and fame (his martial abilities signal a nostalgic historic military glory). Thus, the gladiator is a layered invention of an imagined past. He embodies violent authenticity and a ‘better’ version of fame, which is ‘earned’ by his perpetration and suffering of graphic acts of interpersonal violence. The gladiator’s fame, however, cannot survive on his deeds alone, it requires an audience. As Reiss and Fagan insists of the Roman amphitheatre, ‘To ensure the visibility that was crucial to lend legitimacy and fame to blood deeds, witnesses were required’ (2016, p. 12). The capricious and complicit Roman crowd represents a key character in all gladiator stories – granting (or withholding) fame, favour and mercy. Likewise, the crowd, cut from a carnivalesque cross section of the Roman populace, are much like the gladiator himself: always already subject to imperial subjugation and always potentially the next victimheroes of the arena.

Rome is the mob As highlighted in this chapter’s introduction, the themes of the gladiator film find their perfect expression on the sands of the amphitheatre, and most gladiator movies showcase the key moment in which the gladiator hero realizes Gladiator’s Senator Gracchus is right in his assertion that ‘Rome is the mob’. The bloodthirsty cinematic Roman crowd is politically powerful, infinitely changeable and always implicated in the violence it

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is (and we are) watching. It functions as more than an atmospheric backdrop or a triumph of CGI crowd-generation software. The Roman arena crowd functions as a jury or, perhaps, as a lynch mob. Rather than a collection of arguments and evidence, this jury (representing the entrenched strata of Roman society) is offered spectacles of violence, either as punishment or contest. The amphitheatre does not always present a straightforward system of trial by battle, in which justice is made manifest through violence – as in Aquaman, Black Panther or even the cathartic act of vengeance performed by gladiatrix Naevia against her rapist in Spartacus. The winner is not necessarily the last man (or, infrequently, woman) left standing, but the one to whom the crowd grants their favour. At a key moment in Pompeii, Milo and his fellow gladiator Atticus have beaten or killed all the other men in the arena yet remain in a precarious position  – at the whim of the mob-jury and the judge (represented here by evil Roman Senator Corvus). Here it is Milo’s love interest Cassia who saves the gladiators by swiftly offering the thumbs-up gesture to the roaring crowd and indebting herself to Corvus. In the tradition of many Roman villains, Corvus then forces Cassia to agree to marry him in exchange for his support of her merciful gesture. Likewise, Maximus finds himself the victor of a recreation of the battle of Carthage, but at the mercy of Commodus. Commodus, however, quickly realizes that he cannot have Maximus publicly executed after his gladiatorial victory because he will alienate the crowd and jeopardize his position of authority. He must cede to the crowd’s chanting of ‘Maximus! Maximus!’ Gladiator stories insist, through their aesthetic and framing, that we must watch the crowd as much as the gladiators. This crowd can be merciful, saving Maximus for example. However, more common are representations of the arena crowds as grotesque and monstrously cruel (see Images 6.68 and 6.69). Whether sadistic or merciful, the crowd itself is an under-examined force in gladiator stories. Through their representation of the crowds, gladiator films reinforce the notion that celebrity is a political currency. This is a power that belongs to the crowd itself, offering protection for the disenfranchised gladiator and eroding the absolute power of the emperor and his representatives. Because fame is granted to gladiators who come to represent the violent struggles of the common man under a repressive Roman system, celebrity is inextricably tied to a kind of politically

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Images 6.68 and 6.69 The monstrous crowd in Spartacus (above) and Gamer (below)

nondescript populism. The gladiator can win the crowd, because he is their most perfect representative. In this, gladiatorial celebrity fits with the model of film stardom established by Richard Dyer, in his widely influential 1979 Stars, as characterized by an extraordinary ordinariness. Dyer recalls conceptualizations of fame by thinkers such as Edgar Morin and Alexander Walker that speak of the ‘de-divinisation of the stars’ (2011, p. 22), a movement that tracks the star from the ideal to the typical. Dyer suggests that the belief that stars where different types of people, like the Greek and Roman gods, is overstated. He argues that stars are more usefully theorized as ordinary people. He suggests that film stars, like Judy Garland, can embody the seemingly paradoxical qualities of ordinariness and extraordinariness. Like the film star, the gladiator is both one of the crowd (in that he is not of the privileged

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class, but a slave or mercenary) and the perfect realization of Roman masculine virtue. When film stars such as Kirk Douglas, Victor Mature, Jack Palance and Russell Crowe play famous gladiators onscreen, Dyer’s formulation of film stardom is doubled. Crowe’s Maximus is an extraordinary everyman; a Roman farmer and father and a highly skilled and decorated general. This is illustrated in the tagline for the film, ‘The general who became a slave. The slave who became a gladiator. The gladiator who defied an emperor.’ When one considers the celebrity gladiator as extra/ordinary, his violent skills become natural fixtures of a quotidian masculinity that only needs the apparatus of the gladiatorial games to activate it. Thus, the gladiatorial training and trajectory of many characters might be read as aspirational – all men might be as stoic, skilful and virtuous as Maximus, should they find themselves on the sands of the arena. For Maximus, the catalyst for revealing his extraordinary gladiator skills is the murder of his family and his drive to paternal revenge. Simultaneously, his role as father also roots him to an ordinary life and drives his longing to return to the lost world of ‘before’.

Fatherhood Looking at the gladiator stars of the cinema, particularly from the late twentieth century, there is a long list of grieving or traumatized husbands and fathers. John’s family are being held hostage in Gamer. Maximus’s key speech in Gladiator is his revelation to Commodus that he is not an anonymous gladiator, but ‘father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife’. On television, Spartacus only competes as a gladiator in order to bargain for his wife’s life and ultimately avenge her death. Family as motivation for the gladiator is evidence of their extraordinary ordinariness and also a depoliticizing force rooting the gladiator film to the action genre and to contemporary Hollywood cinema’s idealization of fatherhood as the key feature of a sympathetic postfeminist masculinity. As Hannah Hamad establishes, ‘ideal masculinity in post-feminism has increasingly tended towards fatherhood’ (2014, p. 1). Arguably, the roots of this can be seen in Spartacus (1960), in which the film pulls back from the harsh political allegories of its source material to focus on Spartacus’s excitement at fatherhood and his desire to give his child a

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Image 6.70  The final image of Spartacus emphasizes his role as father

better world.4 The last image of a dying Spartacus sees him vindicated because his wife and son are safely escaping Rome (see Image 6.70). The crucified Spartacus is memorable as a father who sacrificed himself for his child and the metaphorical children who formed his ex-slave army. Like the violence of the gladiator, fatherhood lends an air of emotional authenticity, which can be read as an antidote to the corruption of a society in decline. The ending of Spartacus focuses on legacy – Spartacus’s son will enjoy the freedom that his father has fought and died for.5 Contemporary gladiator stories see the vengeful gladiator father fighting to regain or rejoin the family that is being withheld from him (e.g. John in Gamer, Kevin Flynn [Jeff Bridges] in Tron: Legacy, Danny Fisher [John Cena] in 12 Rounds, John Stoneman in No Exit/Fatal Combat). Paternity becomes the weightiest justification for violence in the story of the gladiator. Fatherhood likewise becomes a powerful method of winning the crowd’s support in the arena. Maximus’s superior martial skills earn the Roman mob’s adoration, but it is his revelation that he is ‘father to a murdered son’ that earns their sympathy and loyalty. Additionally, it is his paternal attitude towards Lucilla’s adoring son that ensures his legacy in the absence of his own son. The Roman mob is ultimately loyal to violent paternal figures. Gladiator suggests but does not address the tension between its celebration of Maximus’s violent fatherhood and its condemnation of the perverse paternal dictatorship of Commodus.

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The hyperreal mob The emphasis on populism and on the mob in post-millennial gladiator stories is complicated by the fact that the populace in these films is a simulacrum – not only because it is a strategically adapted recreation of the historical Roman crowd, but also because it is almost entirely generated by computers. Unlike the ‘cast of thousands’ model of the roadshow era, twenty-first-century gladiator films rely on a crowd that is digitally realized. In her study of Gladiator, Jennifer Barker juxtaposes this artificiality against the earthy naturalism of Maximus who, she argues, is framed by the fascist model of the ‘man of blood and soil’ (Blut und Boden), as is discussed in Chapter II. She argues that Gladiator ‘imitate[s] the fascist tactic of replacing political discussion and critique with the spectacle of a hysterical mass unity, aestheticizing violence as well as politics’ (Barker 2008, p. 171). In Barker’s formulation the digital mob is not a site of democratic dialogue between members of the population and those who rule them. It is a depoliticized spectacle of artificial consensus, which I would argue produces and sustains the apparatus of gladiatorial celebrity. The mob thus represents a fascistic ‘Nightmare Rome’ as much as the idealized ‘Dream Rome’ imagined by Lucilla and Gracchus in Gladiator.

Panopticism and Fame’s Palace The gladiator’s story clearly pictures fame (and the crowd that grants it) as a double-edged sword. It offers the possibility of resistance to oppression but acts as a deeply conservative force through surveillant and disciplinary functions. This is realized spatially through the architecture of the amphitheatre and the unruly and restless crowd inside. Although there are many historical literary sources that establish the Roman belief in the desirability of fame (particularly military fame), there are many others whose imagery points to the darker sides of fame; these have had a lasting impact. Epic poets such as Virgil meditate on the dangerous aspects of fame and picture the  concept embodied as a vengeful, all seeing goddess.6 Virgil’s

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Aeneid describes the goddess Fama or Rumour as a winged Titan gleefully spreading scandal: She fills the peaceful universe with cries No slumbers ever close her wakeful eyes. By day, from lofty towers her head she shows, And spreads through trembling crowds disastrous news; With court-informers, haunts, and royal spies; Things done, relates; not done, she feigns, and mingles truth with lies (Book IV, trans. Dryden, 1906, p. 89). Ovid’s anti-epic account of the Trojan War in The Metamorphoses imitates Virgil’s description of Fama. However, instead of describing her as a terrible goddess, he describes her palace as a watchtower at the centre of the world: Where all things everywhere, however far, Are scanned and watched, and every voice and word Reaches its listening ears. Here Rumour dwells, Her chosen home set on the highest peak, Constructed with a thousand apertures And countless entrances and never a door. It’s open night and day and built throughout Of echoing bronze; it all reverberates, Repeating voices, doubling what it hears (Book XII, trans. Melville, 1986, p. 275). Like the visual panoptic architecture of the elliptical amphitheatre discussed in Chapter II, Ovid’s formulation reads fame as a diffuse sonic apparatus of surveillance and rumour. Fame’s panoptic (or perhaps more accurately pansonic) watchtower serves an ambiguous disciplinary purpose, providing opportunities for rumour to circulate and for the surveillance of the population and, through distracting violent spectacles, aims to make the population more submissive. This is certainly the central premise of The Hunger Games, a fiction that pictures the adolescent gladiator as navigating a violent (televised) arena, upheld by the apparatus of celebrity that prompts audiences to offer lifesaving gifts.

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There are several gladiator stories that incorporate the disciplinary nature of the gladiatorial arena in their premises: Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome sees the arena fight as a substitute for war; The Running Man is a gladiatorial television show used by a totalitarian government to placate its populace; Tekken imagines fight tournaments as expressions of corporate monopoly; and Death Race and The New Gladiators imagine deadly race-battles as opportunities to use the penal system for neoliberal profit. The popular Hunger Games franchise is among the most recent of these types of gladiator fictions. The films, and books on which they are based, imagine a post-apocalyptic world in which representative teenagers are taken by the metropolis from each conquered region to battle to the death on reality television. In advance of their gladiatorial fight in the Hunger Games, each teenaged tribute is transformed into a celebrity through recognizable strategies such as make-overs and chat-show appearances. The franchise critiques the system that doubly exploits the young tributes as both gladiators and celebrities. The story focuses on Katniss’s competitions in various Hunger Games and the way in which her star image is used by a nascent revolutionary movement to overthrow the capital. The Hunger Games is representative of a recent surge in postapocalyptic fiction aimed at young adults in which young warriorprotagonists struggle violently against corrupt systems trying to discipline them, including the classically informed Percy Jackson series and The Maze Runner (Ball, 2014). These fictions are unique in that they often imagine very young female fighters at the centre of their stories and these gladiatrices are not as hypersexualized as other warrior women, perhaps because they are not yet fully-grown women. Divergent (Burger, 2014) sees a young female fighter (Shailene Woodley) struggling against totalitarian forces, as does the earlier Japanese film Battle Royale, which focuses on the use of gladiatorial combat as a form of government-sanctioned pre-emptive punishment. Its premise is that in the near future the government has mandated that unruly adolescents be managed by choosing a representative class of teenagers and flying them to an island where they fight each other to the death until only one survives. This is believed to frighten other teenagers into docility. As can be seen from the summaries of these films, post-apocalyptic gladiator stories make governmental disciplinary and panoptic devices obvious

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and exceptionally violent. These are not subtle satires, but often clumsy allegories – no less effective, perhaps, for their literalization of the mechanisms of panopticism and critique of the double-edged sword of celebrity circulating through such mechanisms. The minutiae of panoptic discipline become part of the cinematic (and televisual) spectacles in post-apocalyptic gladiator stories. Exposition and set pieces are built around giving the audience the details of the how the teenage gladiators will be tortured and punished. I would therefore argue that these stories formulate their panoptic model via the amphitheatre, as I established in Chapter III, retaining a focus on spectacle and physical pain. This is foregrounded in recent young adult series that tell Roman gladiator stories as well, such as Simon Scarrow’s Gladiator series and Dan Scott’s Gladiator School series. These stories are meant for somewhat younger audiences and, in keeping with the Horrible Histories effect mentioned earlier, are likewise designed to spark the reader’s interest in studying history through stories of violence and heroic young people fighting back at corrupt adults.7 These books follow the training of young boys into the kinds of hypermasculine but mournful/traumatized gladiators of the Maximus mould. In many ways the imperial disciplinary structures against which Marcus (the son of Spartacus) and Lucius are rebelling are those that have made them deadly warriors. Thus, they can never truly escape the system of the Roman gladiatorial games because it is a prerequisite for their heroism and adventures. One of the significant aspects of the panoptic punishment narrative device (or, perhaps, subgenre) that links the young adult fictions to gladiators is the way they foreground celebrity as ambiguous. It has a key role in disciplining and distracting the population and providing an updated manifestation of Juvenal’s bread and circuses (panem et circenses). It is no coincidence, of course, that The Hunger Games is set in a country called Panem and starts its gladiatorial contest with a chariot-driven procession. In the gladiatorial futures of Panem and its like, the amphitheatre, the Panopticon and Fama’s Rumour Palace are layered to produce a disciplinary architecture that is powerfully effective. This is made more resonant and spectacular via doubly framed stories that see the gladiators’ fights broadcast or streamed as part of a reality television show.

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Reality TV at the end of the world There is a healthy field of scholarship on reality television, which takes as one of its key concerns the disciplinary functions and governmentality of reality TV.8 Much of this scholarship focuses on the ways in which reality television effectively ‘polices’ gender performances in particular. ‘For subjects on Reality TV’, argues Brenda R. Weber, ‘success comes not from evading the gaze but from internalizing and learning to please it … Much of this surveillance in turn reinforces identarian normativity, or ways to establish the normative predicated on categories of identity such as gender, race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality’ (2014, p. 27). This is certainly true of the anxious, yet ironic, gender politics of gladiatorial reality television programming such as The Ultimate Fighter (Spike TV, 2005–present), Last Man Standing (BBC 2007–2008), Deadliest Warrior and Bromans, whose formats celebrate hypermasculine violence and competition. Films such as The Hunger Games, The Running Man, Death Race, No Exit/Fatal Combat, Endgame, The New Gladiators, Rollerball, Gamer and Arena employ reality television as a layered framing device – in each of these narratives men, women or children are forced to fight to the death for the entertainment of a population that is not seated with them in the amphitheatre, but watches from a distance on their televisions and computers. These postmodern iterations of the gladiator story move it from the circular, stratified space of the arena, to the flattened screen of television and new media. In such a flattening, the panoptic and pansonic functions of the ‘Rumour Palace’ of the goddess Fama are increased exponentially – allowing the governmentality of reality TV to couple symbiotically with the punishing spectacle of the gladiator’s arena. The fact that these are feature films that reproduce reality television as a narrative device draws further attention to the remediated nature of the gladiatorial spectacle. Thus, the cinematic spectator watches the spectators of the reality show who watch as the celebrity fighters are tortured and exploited as spectacular cautionary tales. The inherent contradictions of gladiatorial celebrity depend upon the combination of forces that layer and multiply the audience with those that flatten the spectacle onto a screen surface.

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Reality TV is a perfect vehicle for both celebrity and gladiators and I have argued elsewhere that gladiatorial programming can be considered a subgenre of reality television (Steenberg, 2014). Programmes such as American Gladiators, The Ultimate Fighter, Deadliest Warrior and Bromans are primary examples of the subgenre, which focuses on violence, bodies and performances of a hypermasculinity often rooted in nostalgic recreations of history. Deadliest Warrior, for example, researches and stages imaginary battles between famous warriors throughout history (e.g. the pilot episode pits a Roman gladiator against an Apache warrior). I argue that the history belonging to gladiatorial television, like gladiatorial films, is hyperreal, ‘revivifying the sacred nature of history not as a perfect re-enactment or simulation but as an experimental space in which to measure our progress and as a playground to which we aspire to return. Here history becomes a collection of statistics, bundled together regardless of location, time period, or cultural specificities’ (Steenberg, 2014, p. 200). In such a history, the gladiator functions as an archetype and as an action figure or an avatar, as is literally case in Gamer. In a continuation of the experimental and ludic dimension of history, reality television (and films about reality television) have redrawn the lines of the gameplay to emphasize the arena as a competition space rather than merely a playground or theme park. They foreground the agonistic nature of gladiatorial combat, which Golvin establishes as the element that distinguishes the ritual nature of Roman gladiatorial combat from other types of sacrificial violence (2012, p. 7). Huizinga believes that there is a distinction to be made between the ludic and agonistic, as ‘the passion to win sometimes threatens to obliterate the levity proper to a game’ (1980, p.47). I would argue, however, that gladiatorial games in fiction struggle to stabilize the balance between the ludic and agonistic; at their core, they are high-stakes contests in which people compete in a game to determine who is the best fighter. Where many low-budget films about gladiators demonstrate a playful relationship with both violence and genre, an agonistic impulse provides the propulsive narrative force of tournament focused films such as those based on boxing or martial arts (e.g. Mortal Kombat, Bloodsport, The Quest [Van Damme, 1996], Enter the Dragon [Clouse, 1973], Never Back Down, Warrior). On reality television, unlike the

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post-apocalyptic death games imagined in speculative fictions such as The Running Man and The Hunger Games, the ludic–agonistic balance is reoriented to foreground the competition as much as (sometimes more than) the violent spectacle. It is the contest that gives momentum and structure to reality television’s gladiators, in for example American Gladiators. Bromans, like many reality television programmes, is arguably less a contest to determine who the best gladiator is, but who will emerge as the biggest, most visible celebrity. The arena for such a competition is not exclusively the miniature recreation of the Colosseum on the show’s set, but the conversations on social media that run parallel to the show’s broadcast, as I analyse later in this chapter. In gladiator films set in the present day, such as Arena and No Exit/ Fatal Combat, reality TV provides the remediated platform bringing gladiatorial celebrity into the twenty-first century. Because they are set in a society that has already crumbled, post-apocalyptic films such as The Hunger Games exaggerate the uses of reality TV as a powerful tool for (fascistic) governance. It is the capital in The Hunger Games that controls all aspects of the production and exhibition of the fictional Hunger Games reality television show, from designing the arena to manufacturing the tributes’ celebrity to doling out the gifts commercial sponsors offer to their favourite celebrity gladiator. Here, reality television, as a remediated version of the amphitheatres of Rome, is literally responsible for the violent punishment and death of the population in the name of the government. Arguably, it is through these excesses and high stakes, that the more commonplace disciplinary practices of reality television, and the related apparatus of celerity, are critiqued and resisted. However, post-apocalyptic fictions are not necessarily subversive. The Hunger Games is much more ambiguous. It features celebrity as a delivery system for violence – a violence that is redemptive, cleansing, punitive and horrific. It also features a female protagonist who outlives her violent usefulness, finishing the final instalment of the franchise not as a tragically poetic gladiator (like Maximus, Spartacus or Milo) but as an empty celebrity signifier with an unclear role in the revolution that has overthrown the totalitarian regime of the Capital. The violence and celebrity that marked Katniss as special to the resistance (who assign her the symbolic role as the ‘mockingjay’) contribute to the problems

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of her society and are simultaneously offered as the only possible solution. The gladiatorial reality show in The Hunger Games distracts and punishes its regional populace with celebrity narratives (makeovers, underdogs, unrequited teenaged love) and violent spectacles (live reality television broadcasts of children killing one another). Katniss embodies all of these contradictions. She is traumatized by the violence she endures and commits, and she is baffled by the work that goes into her makeover as a celebrity. Particular work goes into making her less taciturn, more emotive and more feminine. She suffers loss and is manipulated by the leaders of the resistance and the capital. As the central signifier in the film, the popularity of Katniss also testifies to the importance of young women as consumable products in the symbolic system of celebrity culture. The final filmic Hunger Games instalment, Mockingjay Part 2, ends on an ambiguous note with an adult Katniss relentlessly haunted by her exploitation as a celebrity gladiator. Despite the salutation that marks the Hunger Games contests, it is clear that no matter what the situation, the odds are never in Katniss’s favour. Neither do those odds favour Maximus, Spartacus or Milo, who all die tragically, if poetically, at the conclusion of their stories.

Gladiators on reality TV: Bromans Katniss’s experience of gladiatorial reality television belongs to the elegiac and tragic system of the millennial gladiator and is brought to the screen in a high-budget Hollywood production that spans four films. A contrasting example from British television offers an excessive and playful performance of gladiatorial masculinity presented without the gloss of a Hollywood picture. ITV’s Bromans follows a group of young men, and their female partners, competing in Roman-inspired physical challenges that culminate in a final set piece of gladiatorial competition. Upon its release, Bromans was advertised as rising ‘to fill the void left by Love Island’ [ITV2, 2015–] (Mccahill, 2017), using a self-aware and ironic mode of address. The show’s set-up is both straightforward and baffling. Couples compete to participate in the emperor’s games through a series of loosely historical tasks, including fighting in a smallscale Colosseum. Nudity, drunkenness and in-fighting are encouraged by the show’s structure. Each week a couple is banished from the show,

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with the line ‘all roads lead home …’; after this the banner on which their picture is printed is ritually burned in front of the remaining participants. With the tagline ‘Modern geezers in the time of Caesar’ the show generated a healthy network of Twitter conversations under #bromans and #ladiators.9 In advance of the show’s first broadcast, these were largely negative, some even reporting that it heralded the end of civilization. Many desperate tweets wished that celebrity classicist Mary Beard would offer her input, for example @neil_crombie posted ‘Please @wmarybeard. You rule Twitter. In some ways you are our Caesar. We implore you to give thumbs up or thumbs down to #Bromans on @ ITV2?’ (14 September 2017). Unfortunately, Beard’s commentary did not appear online. Another classicist, however, emerged to live tweet the first episode of the programme. Dr Andrew Sillett’s comments were largely appreciative of the show and its many excesses. He suggested that the series’ nudity and bawdy jokes at the expense of the emperor are in line with the realities of gladiatorial history. Press coverage in, for example, the Radio Times (2017) has overemphasized Sillett’s comments regarding the show’s accuracy and underplayed his tweets’ ironic tone of voice. Nevertheless, the classicist viewed the pilot episode with obvious enjoyment and perhaps gave serious consideration to the request from @NevilleMorley that: ‘@lizgloyn @andrewsillett And we definitely need Gogglebox-style spin-off programme, filming classicists and ancient historians watching #Bromans, yelling at tv etc’ (3 November 2017). Much of the online conversation is based on the bodies and desirability of the show’s male participants (many participants were fitness professionals) – often through the liberal exchange of the aubergine and peach emojis. In the timespan sampled for this Twitter analysis, the following post was re-tweeted eight times, ‘RT @tierneytweets: If you think it’s been bonkers so far wait until tomorrow when Rome gets filthy #bromans @itv2 tmrw at 9pm https://t.co/ EgVvaO6ETQ https://t.co/ePM0kqMkd7’. Furthermore, within the text of the 5,534 tweets, there were 114 aubergines and 59 peaches, demonstrating the ubiquity of sexually charged commentary around the bodies of the participants. The focus on the eroticism of the built male body is the frequent subject, and foundational premise, of the fan-produced podcast, Homo Empire: The Unofficial BROMANS Podcast that analyses each episode.

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The show itself is deliberately excessive and fosters an intertextual and ironic mode of address – mostly through the show’s noncompetitive characters: Doctore played by former UK Gladiator David McIntosh and actor Tom Bell (who featured on an episode of Drunk History [Comedy Central 2013–2017]) and who plays the master of ceremonies Dominus. The voiceover, in the words of the show’s online press centre, ‘is provided by a real life Roman: Roman Kemp’. As the series finale unveils, Roman Kemp’s father Martin sits as the mysterious emperor judging the final games. In addition to the undeniably camp aspect of the show’s production and reception, I would argue that the main reference point for the series is not Love Island, but the Starz series Spartacus. Spartacus, as established in Chapter V’s discussion of eroticism, has been discussed in terms of its similarities to soft-core pornography and as an example of the way complex serial television is integrating pornographic conventions. Classicism and the gladiator archetype offer justifications, however tenuous we may deem them, for the nudity and eroticism of programmes such as Bromans and Spartacus. Two sculptural challenges on the series are illustrative of Bromans’s pornographic classicism. One sees the female participants taking casts of their bodies for their male partners to try to guess which cast belongs to which woman. Although they are permitted to render any body part, with one exception, they all chose either their bottoms or their breasts (‘The emperor has requested that some of your favourite body part be turned into sculptures … you must choose among yourselves which body parts you choose to sculpt’). The voiceover ironically reflects on their choices, ‘whose idea was this?!’ This challenge is taken up by the men in the series finale, when they must each create a Roman fascinum, or totemic phallic statue, by sculpting their own genitalia. It is both jarring and productive to contrast Bromans’s bawdy, playful and absurd sculptural challenges with the way Pompeii uses plaster of Paris casts as tragic and nostalgic signifiers. Where Pompeii offers an archaeological gaze that foregrounds the plaster of Paris body as timeless and beautiful, Bromans presents its pornographic classicism as a mischievous and irreverent celebration of the sexualized celebrity body. These sculptural bodies are fragments; unsettlingly reduced to sexual organs separated from a whole.

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Like the infamous eighteenth-century Hellfire Club, which used classicism as a permissive playground for sexual adventures, the gladiators of Bromans are eroticized through classical iconography, creating a type of classicism written through the conventions of softcore pornography. The classicism of Bromans’s gladiators depends on wider media discourses of active bodies – the most salient of which is the ‘spornosexual’. Jamie Hakim (following Mark Simpson) defines this as a hybrid of sportsman and porn star, a ‘young man who attempts to fashion a spectacularly muscular body in order to share images of it on social networking sites’ (2015, p. 84) and which Hakim links to the British climate of economic austerity and precarity. The men (and women) of Bromans certainly fall into the spornosexual category as they compete for celebrity on reality television (and simultaneously via social media) through the display and performance of their gym-honed bodies. I would go so far as to argue that the men of Bromans inhabit the same paradoxical social status as Roman gladiators themselves: both esteemed and despised; worried over by anxious elites and enslaved, perhaps in some way, by the new media they inhabit so fully in an economy of precarity. In such a way they find a kindship with the auctorati, or volunteer gladiators, who were doubly vilified as willing participants in their own humiliation.10 The crowds delight in their triumphs, but perhaps more so in their abject humiliations and graphically represented defeats.

Conclusion: The odds are never in your favour Gladiatorial celebrity is always a double-edged sword. On the one hand, fame allows the gladiator to subvert Roman or any monolithic tyrannical authority, including that of mob justice. For example, Maximus can only get close to Commodus because he is famous; John is only interesting to the underground resistance movement in Gamer because he is famous. These men use their celebrity and their martial training to secure their revenge and to end the system that enslaves them – punishing authority figures and the crowds of cheering spectators. While the apparatus that makes gladiators like Maximus,

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John and Milo into celebrities is shown as repulsive (tapping into contemporary anxieties around celebrity culture), it also offers them a privileged position from which to topple tyrannical institutions. This is the gladiator’s multifaceted contribution to the apocalyptic charge so foundational to his stories – he witnesses and reveals that the empire/ regime is crumbling; his celebrity status is held up as evidence of social decay; and he violently begins the empire’s fall. The gladiator’s celebrity demands he perpetrate and suffer violence, even to his death. To be a celebrity gladiator is to accept your role as morituri – as a doomed hero who is already lost. Maximus’s fame ensures that he has Commodus’s homicidal attention. Because Milo is a celebrity, he must travel to Pompeii to compete at the foot of a rumbling Mount Vesuvius. On a significantly less melodramatic note, even the young men of Bromans are disparaged and ridiculed by the media that grants them celebrity status. The acceptance of the role of celebrity gladiator demands a blood oath, like those that gladiators of Ancient Rome and postmodern television swore: to accept physical pain without complaint and to honour the brotherhood of the morituri. To the gladiator’s blood oath and doomed salute, we can add the salutation repeated at key moments in The Hunger Games: ‘May the odds be always in your favour’, which rings false throughout the franchise’s story of exploited teenaged gladiators. The fatalism of the celebrity gladiator is built into the rules of the game and the design of the arena. The game is rigged and the odds are never in the gladiator’s favour as Katniss, Milo and Maximus discover many times. Like Katniss, John in Gamer and Milo in Pompeii only find victory by breaking the rules, destroying the arena and refusing the fame and label of gladiator. However, given that these gladiators so completely embody and internalize that label, escape seems largely impossible.

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Conclusion

Years after Maximus died heroically in the Colosseum, fans of the film are reported to have discovered a surreal and unrealized script for Gladiator 2 written by Australian musician Nick Cave (Michaels, 2009). The film opens in the afterlife where a recently slain Maximus struggles to get his bearings. He is brought back to earth by Hephaistos in order to save the dying Greco-Roman gods from the rising cult of Christianity, of which Maximus’s son (also brought back from the dead) is now a devoted follower. ‘I wanted to call it Christ Killer’, recalls Cave in a podcast interview where he recounts how he much enjoyed writing the script because he knew it would never get made.1 The Christian plot of Cave’s screenplay is aligned with Hollywood’s biblical epics, putting Maximus in the role of sceptic Roman previously inhabited by Richard Burton in The Robe and Robert Taylor in Quo Vadis. The finale of the screenplay sees Maximus and his son defeating Lucilla’s son Lucius, who has grown into a glamorous and bloodthirsty Roman leader. This is followed by a montage of Maximus in a series of battles, from the Crusades to Vietnam. Framing Maximus as an eternal warrior recalls the ending of another post-millennial sword and sandal film, The Immortals, which concludes with an extreme low-angle shot of Theseus (Henry Cavill) fighting a never-ending battle against evil in heaven. Despite the obvious excesses of Cave’s scenario, it is no more fantastic than many of the gladiatorial stories surveyed in this volume. Reinforcing examples include the evil matriarch who forces uncooperative women to fight as gladiatrices and kidnaps virile men for her pleasure (Thor and the Amazon Women); the psychic fencing police

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Are You Not Entertained?

officer who breaks up a supernatural gladiator ring (Gladiator Cop); the metropolis that demands its provinces surrender their children to kill one another on reality television (The Hunger Games); a videogame avatar escapes his digital enslavement by drinking a vast quantity of vodka that he vomits into the gas tank of an abandoned car (Gamer). In its comforting continuity and generic dependability, the gladiatorial scenario is a structure that can well support bizarre narrative variations and ostentatious digital violence. If Cave’s Gladiator 2 had been filmed, I do not believe that it would have been as outlandish as cultural critics like Mark Maron suggest. Cave’s sequel, however, has been eclipsed by what promises to be a much more reserved and conventional script written by Peter Craig, likewise featuring Lucius as a central character. News coverage of Craig’s sequel generally frames it against Cave’s script, insisting that this is the more legitimate sequel (BBC, 2 November 2018).

The best things that never happened In its accumulation of rumour, fan-generated fantasy and almost mythic status, Cave’s Gladiator 2 is an example of hyperreal accumulation that has marked the mythological journey of the gladiator and made him so suitable to the logic of the sequel and the series. As the gladiator scenario is endlessly staged throughout Western culture (like the eternal montages of Maximus and Theseus), it solidifies with each subsequent retelling. The chronosoma (time body) of the gladiator registers each of these additions. The historical veracity of these additions has no bearing on their staying power. There are many examples of invented or ambiguously accurate turns of phrases, tableaux and affective gestures that have struck such a deep chord that they cling to the mythology, becoming more authentic each time they are recreated; for example: the gladiatorial salute (nos morituri te salutamus/we who are about to die salute you) that was never uttered by Roman gladiators but poetically re-enacted in Gladiator, Pompeii and Spartacus (1960) and the thumbs up/down gesture (pollice verso) that now determines the fate of almost all onscreen gladiators. These moments have become entrenched conventions and a gladiator movie might ring false without them.

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In his mournful melancholy and playful violence, the gladiator as archetype can successfully embody the best things that never happened. Thus, the ‘before and after’ logic of the gladiator does not function in a chain of cause and effect, because it can embed something new in the past and project some ancient into the future. The eternal present that characterizes the time of the morituri, which I established in this volume’s introduction, marks a constant mythic reaffirmation. This project has been an ambitious mapping of this mythic process, offering a definition and interrogation of the gladiator as an archetypal character, born in Rome and projected into many imagined futures. This volume began at the turn of the millennium, with Gladiator’s reinterpretation of the sword and sandal genre and its infusion of the gladiator archetype with melodrama and loss. Such a shift did not break radically with earlier characterizations of the gladiator, it merely added another layer. Using Gladiator and the millennium as its centre, this book began with a gladiatorial genealogy (Chapter I) that looked back in time to the generic antecedents of Gladiator, including neoclassical painting, the Italian peplum genre, the barbarian films and 1990s television. It also looked forwards (in setting, if not in cinema release date) to the many non-Roman gladiators of the present and future who were forced to fight in no-holds-barred tournaments or on alien worlds. It defined the gladiatorial archetype as a man or, less often, a woman who is made to fight against his or her will for the entertainment of an audience, as a part of performance staged in some sort of arena. The gladiator is not tied to a Roman setting but moves fluidly across different backdrops and time periods. Gladiators are not conventions of a single genre, such as the sword and sandal film, the Italian peplum or even the gladiator movie. I have argued that the Italian critical term filone is best suited to describe the fluid and playful relationship between the gladiator and genre. Gladiators and the gladiatorial scenario are likewise well suited to adaptation across a variety of media. However, this project argues that the gladiator is tied to cinema more than any other medium. Across the filone and via many adaptations, the gladiator archetype and scenario are strikingly consistent, as proven by the detailed analysis of the arena fight sequence in Chapter III. The body of the gladiator is always the central spectacle of his or her story. The muscular body of the male gladiator endures physical pain with stoicism and performs violence

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Are You Not Entertained?

with skill and style. The gladiator, particularly in cinema, embodies a potent form of nostalgia that fuses a lost and authentic prelapsarian world with an apocalyptic impulse. This underpins the ‘before and after’ structure of the gladiatorial archetype and characterizes the gladiator as a member of the brotherhood of the morituri, those about to die. Gladiator stories offer the rediscovery of historicized authenticity in the face of civilizations in crisis. As a father, a fighter and a product of the so-called crisis of masculinity, Maximus in Gladiator embodies a lost form of masculinity that is at once emotive and violently masterful. He represents the people and the ideals of a fallen Roman democratic republic. Maximus can win the crowd (and become a celebrity) because he is both ordinary and extraordinary; he is simultaneously one of the crowd and the best of them. Gladiators like Maximus are uniquely positioned at the end of societies (of the past and of the apocalyptic future) articulating what contemporary culture has lost and must rediscover – namely an authentic masculinity reinforced by redemptive violence. As I explored in Chapters IV and V, the nostalgia that is inscribed on the gladiator’s body is tied to the eroticism that informs the archetype. The gladiator’s body is almost always on display, for example, because of the historically themed costumes of the sword and sandal genre or the bare chests of MMA tournaments. I argued in Chapter V that the eroticism of the gladiator produces a gladiatorial burlesque that is distinctly raced and gendered. The female gladiator or gladiatrix is hypersexualized in a manner that often renders her violence foolish and ineffectual. However, the performances of the male gladiator are also eroticized and his combat likewise belongs to the burlesque mode. The erotic charge of the gladiator’s violent performance remains unsettling and can be mobilized to topple or support empires. The gladiator is a celebrity and has been since antiquity. Since Roman times the gladiator’s fame (or infamy) has been ambiguous, as he has consistently been a figure that is both celebrated and reviled. The gladiator’s fame has likewise prompted anxieties over the negative influence that watching violence might have on audiences, particularly when gladiator fictions showcase graphic violence. Such debates around celebrity fighters continue outside of narrative fiction, particularly in discourses around the fighting styles of mixed martial arts. The use of gladiatorial imagery to both support and condemn the Ultimate Fighting

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Championship brand (Bolelli, 2014) is a particularly prescient example that is in keeping with the conflicted nature of gladiatorial celebrity.

We have been entertained I will conclude this book by recalling Maximus’s arena fights in North Africa, which prompted Proximo to reveal the secrets of gladiatorial success: winning the crowd. In an act of angry refusal that has been endlessly reproduced as an internet meme, a contemptuous Maximus hurls his sword at the crowd and demands: ‘Are you not entertained?’ This question is, of course, addressing both the amphitheatre crowds of Zucchabar and the cinema crowds of Scott’s film. It provides a selfreflective moment in the film, complicating the spectacles that will follow in the amphitheatre and beyond. Like many others viewing Gladiator, I must answer Maximus’s question in the affirmative. I was entertained. However, as this project’s analysis attests, it is imperative to question what entertains us; to interrogate the structures and strategies that underpin such spectacles and to acknowledge and resist our role as part of the jeering, bloodthirsty crowds.

Appendix

This appendix gives further details on the dataset of 30 illustrative films used to inform the arena fight sequence analysis in Chapter III. Only films with fights set in an arena space were selected. These included Roman amphitheatres, televised competition spaces, illegal no-holds-barred fight rings and alien theatres of combat. Timings of these sequences are approximate, as films were viewed on a variety of platforms including VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray and digital streaming. The 30 films were organised into 9 cycles that are informed by release date, production environment and diegetic setting. The numbers of chosen films in each category are commensurate with each cycle’s output; thus, for example, the peplum category includes more films than the barbarian cycle.

Illustrative examples Cycle

Film Title

Year of Release

Gladiator of Rome /Il gladiatore di Roma

1962

The Magnificent Gladiator/Il magnifico gladiatore

1964

Colossus of the Arena/ Maciste, il gladiatore piu forte del mondo

1962

AD 79: The Destruction of Herculaneum/Anno 79: La distruzione di Ercolano

1962

Mid-century peplum

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Revenge of the Gladiators/La vendetta dei gladiatori

1964

Triumph of the Ten Gladiators/I dieci gladiatori

1963

The Last Days of Pompeii

1935

Demetrius and the Gladiators

1954

Barabbas

1961

Spartacus

1960

The Arena

1974

Conan the Barbarian

1982

7 Magnificent Gladiators

1983

I guerrieri dell’anno 2072/The New Gladiators

1984

Hunger Games

2012

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome

1985

Gladiator

2000

Barabbas

2012

Pompeii

2014

The Legend of Hercules

2014

Gamer

2009

Arena

2011

Real Steel

2011

Hollywood Epic

Exploitation Cinema

1980s Barbarian Film

Post-Apocalyptic Gladiators

Millennial Reboot

Beyond the Sword and Sandal

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Appendix

Direct to Video (DTV) Contemporary Action Gladiator Cop

1995

No Exit/Fatal Combat

1995

Forced to Fight

2011

Female Fight Club

2017

The Arena

1989

John Carter

2012

Thor: Ragnarok

2017

Alien Arenas

Arena fight sequences The information collected for each film (summarised in the series of graphs below) included: ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

The runtime of the film The average across the 30 films was 1 hour and 51 minutes The number of arena fight sequences The average number of fight sequences across the 30 films was 4.4 The total runtime of all arena fight sequences Arena sequences were timed starting with the first shot of the arena (normally in an establishing aerial shot) and stopped when the fighters exited the venue. The average combined length of fight sequences across the 30 films was 00:21:52, the average length of the individual arena fight sequence was 00:03:47 The runtime of actual fighting in the sequence The ‘actual’ fight timing describes the period when the fighters were actively engaged in combat, beginning with the first strike and ending with the defeat/death of one of the combatants. The average across the 30 films was 09:07 the average runtime of actual fighting in each arena sequence was 01:28 The percentage of the film’s runtime taken with arena fight sequences The average across the 30 films was 20.36%

Appendix

●●

●●

●●

239

The percentage of the arena sequence taken with actual fighting (or fight density) The average across the 30 films was 47% The human death count Across the 30 films the average human death count was 15.17 The animal and alien death count Across the 30 films the average animal/alien death count was 1.21

The graphs below summarise the findings across each of the cycles identified.

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241

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Appendix

243

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Appendix

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Notes

Introduction 1 A note on my use of the masculine pronoun: the vast majority of stories about gladiators feature men. The archetype itself is inextricably bound to notions and conventions of violent and virile masculinity. This is not to say that all gladiators are men, as I do discuss stories and discourses of female gladiators in Chapter V. As I explain in Chapter I, I am labelling the gladiator archetype as male. Unless there is a specific case for a female gladiator (the significant exception rather than the norm), I will be using the general ‘he’ to refer to gladiators. 2 I explain the origins and hyperreal trajectory of the gladiatorial salute in Chapter I, including the striking and influential 1859 painting Ave Caesar, Morituri te Salutant!/Hail Caesar, those who are about to die salute you by Jean-Léon Gérôme. 3 For a discussion of the now-infamous Gladiator sequel written by Nick Cave, see the conclusion of this volume. 4 See, for example, reports on the millennium bug in the UK (Brown and Schaefer, 1998; Jones, 2014) and in the US (‘The Millennium Bug’ New York Times, 1998; Faiola, 2000). In the gladiator’s home town of Rome, the Y2K consultant team was assembled much later than in other parts of the globe, attracting criticism from UK news agencies (‘Italy: Tourists and Flights’ BBC, 1999; ‘Y2K latest: Avoid Italy’, 1999). When Italy weathered the turn of the millennium with little upset, Mayor Francesco Rutelli was reported as ‘[a]ppearing at a triumphant news conference … dismissively waved one European and two Italian newspapers that had warned in headlines of possible New Year’s doom because of the Y2K computer bug and other problems, and proudly declared that “there were no catastrophes”’ (Smith, 2000). 5 According to boxofficemojo.com and boxofficepro.com (last accessed 3 October 2017). 6 In order to contextualize the box office high performers at the turn of the millennium, I surveyed all titles of all films released across Europe,

Notes

7

8

9

10 11 12

13

249

North America and India between 1 January 1999 and 31 December 2001, including DTV releases (a total of 1,516 titles). This data was informed by the online archive at the-numbers.com and imdb. I focused my attention largely on Anglo-American theatres, leaving global releases and videos to analyse elsewhere. While Gladiator was relatively unique in setting its action in Ancient Rome, many of these films feature gladiator characters and stories – as in the boxing narrative of Girlfight (Kusama, 2000), the medieval tournaments in A Knight’s Tale, the main concept of the videogame adaptation Pokemon: The First Movie and the ‘there can be only one’ premise of the latest instalment of the Highlander franchise (Highlander: Endgame [Aarniokoski, 2000]). Films such as The Matrix and eXistenZ (Cronenberg, 1999) actively engage in videogame aesthetics and logic but are not outright adaptations of existing videogame franchises. While I read boxing films as adaptations of the gladiatorial scenario, they have become a notable and important genre in themselves. Thus, I consider them a significant enough offshoot of the gladiatorial scenario to merit consideration as an entirely separate category. Critical reviews were drawn from broadsheet newspapers published in the UK, US and Canada. For Fight Club, this included articles published between 1 May 1999 and 1 December 1999. For a more focussed analysis, duplicates, cinema listings and brief reviews under 200 words were eliminated, leaving 53 focus articles. For Gladiator, duplicates, cinema listings and reviews under 200 words were similarly eliminated to leave 35 focus articles, drawn from the period 20 April 2000 to 20 July 2000. These samples were used to create a corpus that was fed into the online analysis platform Voyant Tools. The analysis that follows is a combination of the findings from Voyant Tools and a wider critical reception study that included the corpus samples, reviews drawn from aggregate critic sites and box office analysis. In the box office analysis that follows, all figures are in US dollars unless otherwise indicated. The film was released on 12 November 1999 in the UK alongside equally violent and anxious domestic films such as Ratcatcher (Ramsay, 1999). Figures reported as of 2 August 2017. All box office figures are reported in US dollars unless otherwise indicated. As established by David Fincher in an interview published in The Orange County Register, ‘“I want people to see my movie”, the director said. “I have spent $65 million of someone else’s money, and employed 900 people for two years”’ (Koltnow, 1999). Boxofficepro.com confirms this figure, but boxofficemojo.com reports it as somewhat lower at $63 million. Voyant Tools analysis of contemporary Fight Club reviews conducted on 3 October 2017. Available online: https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus= cbeccf5a5368cf7a239393a9158aef67.

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14 Faludi’s study of masculinity in postwar America begins by acknowledging the media panic around the so-called crisis in masculinity and the difficulty in ascertaining the nature and causes of such a crisis (2000, pp. 7–16). 15 Notable studies of masculinity include Susan Faludi’s Stiffed (2000), Michael Kimmel’s (2013) Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of the World and Brenton Malin’s (2005) American Masculinity Under Clinton: Popular Media and the Nineties. 16 Unlike the critical reception study, these reviews are drawn from pieces appearing up until the time of download (25 February 2020) and include ‘User’ reviews as well as those drawn from broadsheet media and online review sites. 17 Figures accurate as of 2 August 2017. 18 James Russell reports this as 58.9 per cent (2007, p. 179) and confirms that epics generally grossed more overseas. He uses the case of Troy as evidence, given that it grossed 73.3 per cent of its returns overseas. 19 Gladiator critical reception study initially ran on 2 August 2017 (https:// voyant-tools.org/?corpus=d456a5c10b2f769c14b23e964f755d73) and again, with additional stop words (it’s, said, like, says, just, way), on 3 March 2020 (https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus= d456a5c10b2f769c14b23e964f755d73). 20 English language reviewers generally refer to the genre as ‘sword and sandal’, occasionally ‘gladiator movie’ where French and Italian reviewers, and later film scholars, use the term peplum, which will be discussed and defined in depth in Chapter II. 21 For studies on masculinity, see Steven Cohan and Ana Rae Hark’s (1993) Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, and particularly Steve Neale’s notable study ‘Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema’, S. Robinson’s (2000) Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis, Peter Lehmann’s (2001) Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture and Timothy Shary’s (2013) Millennial Masculinity. For popular histories of the gladiator, see Fik Meijer (2004), Mary Beard’s discussion in Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town (2010), pp. 259–75, M. C. Bishop’s Gladiators: Fighting to the Death in Ancient Rome (2017) and Mary Beard and Keith Hopkins’s The Colosseum (2005). Other histories include Garrett Fagan’s The Lure of the Arena (2011) and Ewigleben and Kohne’s accessible Gladiators and Caesars (2000). For studies of specific to screen adaptations of the Greco-Roman world, see Maria Wyke (1997), Robert Rushing (2016a and 2016b), Daniel O’Brien (2014), Monica Silveira Cyrino (2005), Martin M. Winkler’s (2005 and 2009) edited collections and M. Fradley on Gladiator (2004). 22 Seminal studies around the action cinema include Yvonne Tasker’s Spectacular Bodies (2002) and Lisa Purse’s (2011) Contemporary Action Cinema.

Notes

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Chapter I 1 2

3

4

5 6

7

8

I am using ‘BC’ and ‘AD’, keeping in line with the common nomenclature used by gladiatorial fictions, such as Scott’s Gladiator. For studies on the Roman gladiator, see Keith Hopkins’s Death and Renewal (1983), Catherine Edward’s Death in Ancient Rome (2007), Garrett G. Fagan’s The Lure of the Arena: Social Psychology and the Crowd at the Roman Games (2011) and Thomas Wiedemann’s Emperors and Gladiators (1992). Popular histories such as Fik Meijer’s The Gladiators (2004), M. C. Bishop’s Gladiators: Fighting to the Death in Ancient Rome (2017), Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard’s (2005) travel guide history of the Colosseum are similarly useful in flagging up key historical evidence and summarizing both established and controversial interpretations. Eckart Köhne and Cornelia Ewigleben’s (2000) edited collection published in association with the exhibition Gladiators and Caesars at the British Museum provides a visually striking assemblage of objects and their interpretation. Throughout this volume I will use the terms munera, ludi and games to describe gladiatorial contests/fights depending how they are described in the fictions themselves. The timeline is informed by sources such as Meijer (2004), Wiedemann (1992), Fagan (2011), Hopkins (1983), Edwards (2007) and Ewigleben and Kohne (2000) who in turn draw on largely literary and archaeological evidence. The author would like to thank Rose Bowler for her work on this timeline. These representative examples or ‘day in the life’ illustrations are not without controversy, as many historians flag up that they are deductions based on limited evidence or from biased literary sources, often written after the fact (several hundred years later) or with a clear agenda (e.g. Christian writers such as St. Augustine or Tertullian). Evidence from programmes (libelli) or advertisements, the archaeological evidence at important sites such as Pompeii and the testimony found on grave monuments supports many of these deductions. Fagan (2011) summarizes this typical day in his study of the crowds at the Roman amphitheatre (2011, p. 506). He acknowledges that the evidence for this line-up is patchy and cites Cassius Dio’s writing on Commodus, Lucian and Suetonius as sources. Keith Hopkins (1983) likewise summarizes this order of events, citing Seneca’s account of a visit to the arena (1983, p. 3). A note on this series, hosted by classicist Dr Bettany Hughes: the series’ producers chose eight key moments to encapsulate Roman history. Of these eight days, two were framed by the gladiatorial munera – the rebellion of Spartacus and the opening of the Flavian amphitheatre. This indicates how important the gladiator remains to popular understandings of Roman history as a whole.

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Notes

9 On the subject of the legislation of 177 AD (senatus consultum de Pretiis Gladiatorum Minuendis), see Michael Carter (2003). 10 There are many references to one particularly salacious account of the myth of the Minotaur’s conception being staged for Nero as part of these pyrrichae, with a condemned prisoner playing Pasiphae forced to have intercourse with a bull, as recounted by Suetonius (Wiedemann, 1992, p. 86). 11 Historians frequently cite archaeological evidence found at Pompeii, including graffiti, to support this. 12 Dog fighting, bear-baiting and cockfighting (now illegal in most countries) might likewise been counted as continuances of the beast hunting element of the munera. However, as I point out with the cross-cultural comparisons between gladiator fights and contemporary combat-based sport, the differences are significant enough to count as a definite break in practices here, as cockfighting is no longer supported by governmental and cultural structures in Europe as they were in Ancient Rome. 13 Informed by Wiedemann (1992) and Junkelmann (2000). It should be noted that these categories were not fixed and absolute. They shifted over time, some disappearing. For example, the retiarius was not brought in until relatively late in the early imperial period. However, as the retiarius is the most easy to identify category and fights without a helmet, a large number of cinematic gladiators wear this type of armature. 14 For a detailed discussion of the evolution of the concept of virtus during the Roman Republic, see McDonnell (2006). 15 Gladiatorial moments, archetypes and scenarios are not exclusive to Western culture – as the many examples drawn from Asian film indicates (e.g. The Way of the Dragon [Lee, 1972]). Such a mapping of the gladiator beyond Western culture is beyond the scope of this study, which takes such screen fictions into account, but is limited to their Western reception and influence on Western art and media.

Chapter II   1 Thomas Elsaesser and Warren Buckland define videogame logic as informing narrative structure with an emphasis on ‘serialized repetition, disguises, the attempt to move up to the next level, a feedback loop (in which unsuccessful characters are immediately eliminated and successful ones rewarded), and a space warp’ (2002, p.165). Elsaesser and Buckland argue that the film narrative, even one informed by the logic of an interactive medium, should be read as a spectacle because it is a representation. They contrast this to the notion of the festival or ceremony that might describe the interactivity of the digital media. The gladiatorial games or munera, which began as a religious ceremony in Rome have been successfully transposed into cinematic spectacle framed by game logic.

Notes

2 3

4

5

6

7

8

9

253

See, for example, Steve Neale (2000) and Janet Staiger (1997). Likewise Seneca, who spent some time musing about the nature of gladiatorial violence, believed that ‘man is a toy to Fortuna’ (Cagniart, 2000, p. 614). Dan Vadis plays Roccia in Triumph of the 10 Gladiators/Il trionfo dei dieci gladiatori (Nostro, 1964), The Ten Gladiators/The Ten Desperate Men/I dieci gladiatori (Parolini, 1963) and Spartacus and the Ten Gladiators/Gli invincibili dieci gladiatori [Nostro, 1964]. Under the keyword ‘gladiator’ in IMDb, there are several related subsets, including ‘Fight’, ‘Bare Chested Male’, ‘Ancient Rome’, and ‘Sword and Sandal’. The most relevant terms include ‘Arena’, under which there are ninety-eight films (including Thor: Ragnarok, Pompeii, The Legend of Hercules, Deathsport [Arkush, Niciphor, Corman, 1978], and American Samurai [Firstenberg, 1992]); and ‘Modern Gladiator’, which has nineteen entries, largely made up of DTV offerings such as Ring of Steel (Frost, 1994), Final Round (Erschbamer, 1994) and Street Warrior (Jackson, 2008). Under the keyword ‘Gladiator Battle’ there are thirty-eight titles, including mid-century peplums, such as Thor and the Amazon Women, barbarian films such as Barbarian Queen (Olivera, 1985), music videos such as Fall Out Boy’s Centuries, videogames such as Shadow of Rome (2005) and the post-millennial series Spartacus. Koven defines vernacular cinema, following its application to architecture as ‘a product of a place, of a people, by a people’ (2006, pp. 28–29, citing Richard MacKinnon’s definition). Koven’s definition of vernacular cinema recognises ‘localized practices’ and imagines a ‘‘filtration” process from high-art predecessors’ that also ‘privileges not the Platonic ideal of filmic orthodoxy, but the experiential dimension of a people’s cinematic lives – that is, with and around cinema’ (2006, p. 29). I am, however, limiting myself to Hollywood and English-language productions and key Italian films (and Italian co-productions). A future project might imagine how the gladiator moves beyond his Western articulations into other traditions of cinema, for example mingling with figures such as the Samurai. As one small step in this direction, I have analysed how Bruce Lee embodied the gladiatorial impulse and the ways in which his star persona had an impact on the gladiatorial filone (2019). There is not space in this study to fully analyse the shifting patterns of genre and audience engagement due to online streamline services. This discussion represents a small but useful digression in order to fully register the way the filone works beyond its mid-century Italian context and to argue for its continued relevance. For further study of streaming platforms’ importance in the study of cinema, including genres, see Mareike Jenner (2018). These are built on the studies of scholars such as Richard Dyer (1997), Michèle Lagny (1992), Günsberg (2005), Frank Burke (2011), Richard O’Brien (2014), Maria Wyke (1997) and, in particular, Robert A. Rushing’s thorough analyses of the genre (2008, 2016a and 2016b).

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Notes

10 If academics were slow in their consideration of the peplum, fans were not. Mark Betz flags up how instrumental the ‘paracinematic cohort of fanscholars’ (2013, p. 511) were in early research on peplum films (and also horror and spaghetti westerns). Fan-scholars continue to be invaluable to studies of marginalized popular cinema and this study has certainly made use of the curatorial skills of the team behind the website, peplumtv. ca, for example. Betz dates serious academic work on these genres to Richard Dyer and Ginette Vinceandeau’s 1992 edited collection Popular European Cinema. For more comprehensive considerations of the peplum, see Frank Burke (2011), Michèle Lagny (1992), Rushing (2008, 2016a and 2016b), Christopher Wagstaff (1998), Richard Dyer (1997), Maggie Günsberg (2005) and Maria Wyke (1997). 11 Arguably, Maciste is born from traditions such as strongman circus shows, comic book formats and via bodybuilding spectacles, such as those performed by British bodybuilder Eugene Sandow, as I discuss in Chapter IV. I would argue that a further influence here are the touring Victorian (pre-cinematic) sound and light shows, such as those based around the bestselling novel, The Last Days of Pompeii. 12 As Totaro (2011) established, TV in the US paved the way for the initial box office successes of the Italian films and Lagny observes that ‘peplums are enjoying a second lease of life, as they are now being shown again on certain television channels and are available on video’ (1992, p. 164). 13 The boxing genre deserves a quick mention here. It is a well-established genre whose fighters can be distinguished from gladiators because they generally choose to fight. The boxing genre has its own established history and practices that merit acknowledging it as a separate category from the gladiator film or adaptation.

Chapter III   1 Golvin summarizes: ‘[l]’amphithéâtre est le seul type d’édifice de spectacle qui mérite pleinement le qualicatif de romain car, conçu pour le déroulement des spectacles nés en Italie, il n’a eu, contrairement au stade et au cirque, aucun antécédent grec’ (The amphitheatre is the only type of spectacular edifice that clearly merits the label ‘Roman’ because it was imagined/designed for staging Italian-born spectacles. Unlike the stadium or the circus, the amphitheatre has no Greek antecedent) (2012, p. 5, author’s translation).   2 One such temporary structure was in the ill-fated and hastily constructed amphitheatre in Fidenae just outside of Rome that collapsed in 27 AD, killing approximately 20,000 spectators and prompting stricter legislation for the running of munera.

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3 Wiedemann continues in his description, ‘The arena was the place where civilisation confronted nature, in the shape of the beasts which represented a danger to humanity; and where social justice confronted wrongdoing, in the shape of the criminals who were executed there; and where the Roman Empire confronted its enemies, in the persons of the captured prisoners of war who were killed or forced to kill one another in the arena’ (1992, p. 46). 4 This dataset informs all the charts and tables that follow in this chapter, unless otherwise indicated. 5 The Flavian Amphitheatre was built on the site of the private lake that the now-infamous Nero had built for his Golden House in a calculated (and very successful) move by the Emperor Vespasian. It gets its more popular name, the Colosseum (sometimes the Coliseum), because of the large/ colossal statue of the sun god Sol with Nero’s face that remained on site. Thus, arguably, Byron’s statement does not quite apply, as the Colosseum can be considered a monument that remembers both the gladiator’s arena and the emperor’s statue and palace (Hopkins and Beard, 2005, p. 35). 6 This poetic turn of phrase recalls a line from one of Horace’s odes, ‘Swift moons, moreover, recoup their celestial losses: when we have fallen and joined our father Aeneas and opulent Tullus and Ancus, we are dust and shadow’ [Pulvis et umbra sumus] (Book IV, No. 7, Shepherd 1983, p. 183). 7 Data is scarce on aggregate reviewing sites such as Rotten Tomatoes, which gives The Arena (1989) an audience score of 33 per cent and Arena (2011) 27 per cent (with no data available on the 1974 version) (accessed 2 July 2019). 8 Lutz also featured in the 2010 A Nightmare on Elm Street (Bayer) film and the 2008 remake of Prom Night (McCormick). 9 For a detailed discussion on constructive editing, particularly in Hong Kong action cinema, see David Bordwell (2000, pp. 210–17). 10 According to Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard (2005, p. 35), this saying is incorrectly ascribed to the scholar known as the Venerable Bede and may refer to Nero’s statue of Sol, rather than to the Flavian Amphitheatre.

Chapter IV   1 This phrase appears in Albertini’s sixteenth-century travel guidebook of Rome, Opusculum de mirabilibus novae et veteris urbis Romae, and is discussed and mapped by Victor Plahte Tschudi (2019, pp. 89–114) and art historian Jessica Maier (2012, p. 402).   2 Rushing insists that 300 ‘is not Frederic Jameson’s post-modern nostalgia’ (2016a, pp. 7–10) because the film is more interested in the frustrated masculinity of the present. However, I would argue that the gladiatorial worlds of Pompeii, Gladiator and TV’s Spartacus include elements of Jameson’s mode rétro in their engagement with the concept of the ‘gladiator movie’.

256

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3 For discussions on the medical history of nostalgia, see Svetlana Boym (2001, pp. 3–7), David Lowenthahl (2015, p. 469) and Katharina Niemeyer (2017, pp. 7–10). 4 Jessica Maier suggests that the origins of this saying may be earlier than Albertini’s Opusculum, but argues that by the time they are recorded in that work ‘it was cited as something of a truism. Indeed, around that time it passed into common currency’. She translates the passage as ‘As great as Rome was, the ruins themselves show’ (2012, p. 402). 5 For further discussion on classicism in Hollywood cinema, including continuity editing and invisible cinematography, see Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson (2005) and for discussions of the relationship between classical Hollywood cinema and antiquity, see Williams (2013 and 2018). 6 It should be noted that the Borghese Gladiator does not depict an actual Roman gladiator, but is a Hellenistic representation of a warrior. However, it has circulated in popular culture under the label ‘gladiator’ since its rediscovery in 1611 and has been repeatedly associated with the ideal male body. 7 See Faludi (1999) and Kimmel (2013). 8 Boym suggests that restorative nostalgia is particularly suited to American subjectivities, thus, it is worth noting that Reeves is an American performer (albeit associated with Italian productions), where Harington is an English actor whose star persona is firmly fixed on historical Englishness. Their embodied performances of the Vesuvius scenario are thus in a way transnational. 9 I would highlight the under-theorized connections between this kind of hapticity and earlier understanding of ‘body genres’ that affected the bodies of the viewers through excessive displays of bodies on-screen (see Linda Williams, 2003). 10 Interview available online: www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-dd1rcPDMU (accessed June 2018). 11 According to Joakim Tillman (2017, p. 73), Gerrard’s compositions for Gladiator were exceptionally influential for the historical dramas that were to follow, spawning a convention that Timothy Grieving somewhat dismissively labels the ‘moaning woman’. These wordless female vocalizations are deeply nostalgic and offer a somewhat derivative but nonetheless effective poignancy to the closing sequence of Pompeii. 12 For further discussion of the significance of Pliny’s letters to Tacitus describing the Vesuvius disaster, see Nicholas F. Jones (2001) and Roy K. Gibson and Ruth Morello (2012). 13 This table includes a representative selection of narrative fiction on film and television. Television documentaries are not included. The author would like to thank Pat O’Shea for her diligent help in assembling this table. 14 It is worth noting that Spartacus’s revolt, which began in Capua in 73 BC, saw the gladiators successfully hiding on Vesuvius to elude their Roman pursuers, as is dramatized in the later seasons of Spartacus.

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Chapter V 1 2

3 4

5

6 7

8

9

Interview available online: www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kciGT_Atp4 (accessed 10 November 2019). This was likewise true in Ancient Rome, where one of the most referenced images of female gladiators (a stone relief) names the combatants by what is almost certainly their stage names, Amazonia and Achillia. For further information on Roman female gladiators, see McCullough (2008). The term was first coined by television critic Myles McNutt in his discussion of HBO’s Game of Thrones. Michael Hann (2012) argues that sexposition was not pioneered on Game of Thrones and suggests that long-form serial narrative programming on channels like HBO has been instrumentally committed to the practice. For a comprehensive study of frightening women as monsters in the horror genre, see Barbara Creed’s seminal The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993). Carano had her cinematic debut in an updated gladiator story, Blood and Bone starring Michael Jai White. Michael Williams (2013) similarly uses the word ekphrasis to describe the classically informed language of film-fan magazines in the early days of the twentieth century. Williams argues that the classical pantheon provides resonant archetypal shorthand for cinema: ‘The classical canon is a pantheon of familiar mythic archetypes and physical ideals that offer simultaneously general (Adonis = a beautiful male) and more sub-cultural (Apollo = gay) interpretations’ (2009, p. 42). Cohan suggests that Yul Brynner’s orientalized performance of Ramses registers the binary logic of cold war ideology when juxtaposed against Charleton Heston’s Moses. He ties Brynner’s eroticism to a ‘mythical Eurasian heritage’ (1997, p. 154) and an orientalism that is distinct from marginalized black characters such as Spartacus’s Draba.

Chapter VI 1

2

Horrible Histories frames its historical lessons largely through humour and parodies of contemporary popular culture, such as their recreation of one memorable moment in Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960) in which the Celtic army rebelliously tells their Roman conquerors, ‘I’m Fartacus!’ and their presentation of Spartan martial training via the High School Musical franchise in ‘Spartan School Musical’. One 2019 tourist website suggests that 7 million tourists visit per year, however, a 2018 USA Today article estimates it at 4 million, a more typically cited number.

258

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3 The ban was only temporary, as according to the Telegraph another 2017 ban was lifted five months after it was implemented (Squires, 2017). 4 For further information about the depoliticization of Howard Fast’s 1951 novel Spartacus, see Carl Hoffman (2000). 5 The legacy has been imagined many times in popular culture from Simon Scarrow’s Gladiator series (2011–2014) to the film The Slave/Il figlio di Spartacus (Corbucci, 1962) starring Steve Reeves in the titular role. 6 Likewise, Homer sees glory as an illusion, through the fateful meeting of Odysseus and Achilles in the afterlife. 7 These series resemble Rosemary Sutcliffe’s earlier fiction set in Roman Britain such as Eagle of the Ninth and Mark of the Horse Lord, which focused on a gladiator hero. 8 See, for example, Martin Roberts (2007), Brenda R. Weber (2014) and Misha Kavka (2012). 9 From 9 October 2017–19 November 2017, a survey of Twitter conversations with the hashtag #bromans was recorded via TAGS software and included 5,534 tweets. Illustrative samples from that survey have been taken to inform this analysis of Bromans. 10 Roberto Ciccarelli (2018, p.137) traces an etymological connection between economies of precarity and the auctorati, a term associated with the selling of the self. My thanks go to Francesco Sticchi for his translation of this concept.

Conclusion 1 The WTF podcast interview with Mark Maron and Nick Cave is available online www.wtfpod.com and a summary is available online www. denofgeek.com/movies/gladiator/26288/nick-cave-on-his-unproducedgladiator-2-script.

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Filmography

Films 12 Rounds (2009), [Film] Dir. Renny Harlin, USA: 20th Century Fox. 12 Rounds 2: Reloaded (2013), [Film] Dir. Roel Reiné, USA: 20th Century Fox. 13th Warrior, The (1999), [Film] Dir. John McTiernan and Michael Crichton, USA: Buena Vista Home Entertainment. 2020 Texas Gladiators/Anno 2020 – I gladiatori del future (1983) [Film] Dir. Joe D’Amato, Italy: Continental Motion Pictures Corporation. 300 (2007), [Film] Dir. Zack Snyder, USA: Warner Bros. 300: Rise of an Army (2014) [Film] Dir. Noam Murro, USA: Warner Bros. Airplane! (1980), [Film] Dir. Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, USA: Paramount Pictures Alexander (2004), [Film] Dir. Oliver Stone, France/Germany/Italy/Netherlands/ UK/USA: Warner Bros. Ali (2001), [Film] Dir. Michael Mann, USA: Columbia Pictures. Alien (1979), [Film] Dir. Ridley Scott, UK/USA: 20th Century Fox. Alone Against Rome (1962), [Film] Dir. Luciano Ricci, USA: Medallion Pictures. Amazons and Gladiators (2001), [Film] Dir. Zachary Weintraub, Germany/USA: Atlas International Film. American Samurai (1992), [Film] Dir. Sam Firstenberg, USA: Cannon Pictures. Any Given Sunday (1999), [Film] Dir. Oliver Stone, USA: Warner Bros. Aquaman (2018), [Film] Dir. James Wan, Australia/USA: Warner Bros. Arena (1989), [Film] Dir. Peter Manoogian, Italy: Empire Pictures. Arena (2011), [Film] Dir. Jonah Loop, USA: Stage 6 Films. Arena, The (1974), [Film] Dir. Steve Carver, Italy/USA: New World Pictures. Arena, The (2001), [Film] Dir. Timur Bekmambetov, Russia/USA: New Horizons Home Video. Assassin’s Creed (2016), [Film] Dir. Justin Kurzel, France/Hong Kong/Malta/ Taiwan/UK/USA: 20th Century Fox. Atomic Blonde (2017), [Film] Dir. David Leitch, Germany/Hungary/Sweden/ USA: Focus Features. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999), [Film] Dir. Jay Roach, USA: New Line Cinema.

272

Filmography

Barabbas (1961), [Film] Dir. Richard Fleischer, Italy/USA: Columbia Pictures. Barabbas (2012), [Film] Dir. Roger Young, Italy/USA: ReelzChannel. Barbarian Queen (1985), [Film] Dir. Héctor Olivera, Argentina/USA: Concorde Pictures. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), [Film] Dir. Zack Snyder, USA: Warner Bros. Battle Royale (2000), [Film] Dir. Kinji Fukasaku, Japan: Toei Company. Ben-Hur (1959), [Film] Dir. William Wyler, USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Ben-Hur (2016), [Film] Dir. Timur Bekmambetov, USA: Paramount Pictures. Big Daddy (1999), [Film] Dir. Dennis Dugan, USA: Columbia Pictures. Big Hero 6 (2014), [Film] Dir. Don Hall and Chris Williams, USA: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. Black Belt Jones (1974), [Film] Dir. Robert Clouse, USA: Warner Bros. Black Knight (2001), [Film] Dir. Gil Jungar, USA: 20th Century Fox. Black Mama White Mama (1973), [Film] Dir. Eddie Romero, Philippines, USA: American International Pictures. Black Mask (2001), [Film] Dir. Daniel Lee, USA: Artisan Entertainment. Black Panther (2018), [Film] Dir. Ryan Coogler, USA: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. Blair Witch Project, The (1999), [Film] Dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez: USA: Haxan Films. Blood and Bone (2009), [Film] Dir. Ben Ramsey, USA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. Blood and Sand (1922), [Film] Dir. Fred Niblo, USA: Paramount Picutres. Bloodsport (1988), [Film] Dir. Newt Arnold, USA: Cannon Film Distributors. Book of Eli, The (2010), [Film] Dir. Albert and Allen Hughes, USA: Warner Bros. Boyka: Undisputed (2016), [Film] Dir. Todor Chapkanov, USA: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment. Braveheart (1995), [Film] Dir. Mel Gibson, USA: Paramount Pictures. Cabiria (1913), [Film] Dir. Giovanni Pastrone, Italy: Kleine Optical Company. Caligula (1979), [Film] Dir. Tinto Brass, Italy: Penthouse Films International. Cast Away (2000), [Film] Dir. Robert Zemeckis, USA: Twentieth Century Fox. Celluloid Closet, The (1995), [Film] Dir. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, France/UK/USA: Columbia TriStar Home Video. Centurion (2010), [Film] Dir. Neil Marshall, USA: Magnet Releasing. Challenge of the Gladiator//Il gladiatore che sfidò l’impero (1965), [Film] Dir. Domenico Paolella, Italy: Jonia Film. Champ, The (1931), [Film] Dir. King Vidor, USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Charlie’s Angels (2000), [Film] Dir. McG, Germany/USA: Columbia Pictures. Chinatown (1974), [Film] Dir. Roman Polanski, USA: Paramount Pictures. Clash of the Titans (1981), [Film] Dir. Desmond Davis, UK/USA: MetroGoldwyn-Mayer. Clash of the Titans (2010), [Film] Dir. Louis Leterrier, USA: Warner Bros. Cleopatra (1963), [Film] Dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Switzerland/UK/USA: 20th Century Fox.

Filmography

273

Clockwork Orange, A (1971), [Film] Dir. Stanley Kubrick, UK: Warner Bros. Colosseum: Rome’s Arena of Death (2003), [TV Film] Dir. Tilman Remme, UK: BBC1. Colossus of the Arena/Maciste, il gladiatore piu forte del mondo (1962), [Film] Dir. Michele Lupo, Italy: Interfilm. Conan the Barbarian (1982), [Film] Dir. John Milius, USA: Universal Pictures. Conan the Barbarian (2011), [Film] Dir. Marcus Nispel, USA: Lionsgate. Crank (2006), [Film] Dir. Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, USA: Lionsgate. Crank: High Voltage (2009), [Film] Dir. Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, USA: Lionsgate. Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011), [Film] Dir. Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, USA: Warner Bros. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), [Film] Dir. Ang Lee, Taiwan/Hong Kong/USA/China: Asian Union Film 7 Entertainment Ltd. Dances with Wolves (1990), [Film] Dir. Kevin Costner, UK/USA: Orion Pictures. Death Race (2008), [Film] Dir. Paul W.S. Anderson, USA: Universal Pictures. Death Race 2000 (1975), [Film] Dir. Paul Bartel, USA: New World Pictures. Death Warrant (1990), [Film] Dir. Deran Sarafian, Canada/USA: MetroGoldwyn-Mayer. Deathsport (1975), [Film] Dir. Allan Arkush, Roger Corman, and Nicholas Niciphor, USA: New World Pictures. Deathstalker (1983), [Film] Dir. James Sbardellati, Argentina/USA: New World Pictures. Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954), [Film] Dir. Delmer Daves, USA: 20th Century Fox. Divergent (2014), [Film] Dir. Neil Burger, USA: Lionsgate. Django Unchained (2012), [Film] Dir. Quentin Tarantino, USA: The Weinstein Company. Double Dragon (1994), [Film] Dir. James Yukick, USA: Gramercy Pictures. Dungeonmaster, The (1985), [Film] Dir. David Allen et al., USA: Empire Pictures. Eagle, The (2011), [Film] Dir. Kevin Macdonald, USA: Focus Features. El Cid (1961), [Film] Dir. Anthony Mann, USA: Allied Artists Pictures. Endgame/Bronx lotta finale (1983), [Film] Dir. Joe D’Amato, Italy: Filmirage. End of Days (1999), [Film] Dir. Peter Hyams, USA: Universal Pictures. Enter the Dragon (1973), [Film] Dir. Robert Clouse, USA/Hong Kong: Warner Bros. eXistenZ (1999), [Film] Dir. David Cronenberg, USA: Columbia TriStar Egmont Film Distributors. Expendables, The (2010), [Film] Dir. Sylvester Stallone, Bulgaria/USA: Lionsgate. Fall of the Roman Empire, The (1964), [Film] Dir. Anthony Mann, USA: Paramount Pictures. Female Fight Club (2017), [Film] Dir. Miguel A. Ferrer, USA: Grindstone Entertainment Group. Fight Club (1999), [Film] Dir. David Fincher, USA: 20th Century Fox.

274

Filmography

Fighter (2001), [Film] Dir. Amir Bar-Lev, USA: First Run Features. Fighter, The (2010), [Film] Dir. David Russell, USA: Paramount Pictures. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001), [Film] Dir. HiroNobu Sakaguchi and MotoNori Sakakibara, Japan: GAGA. Final Impact (1992), [TV Film] Dir. Joseph Mehri and Stephen Smoke, USA: Anchor Bay Entertainment. Final Round (1994), [TV Film] Dir. George Erschbamer, Canada/USA: Republic Pictures Home Video. Fire over Rome (1965), [Film] Dir. Guido Malatesta, Italy/Yugoslavia: Regionale. Forced to Fight (2011), [Film] Dir. Jonas Quastel, Canada: Final Cut Films. Foxcatcher, The (2014), [Film] Dir. Bennett Miller, USA: Sony Pictures Classics. Friday the 13th (2009), [Film] Dir. Marcus Nispel, USA: New Line Cinema. Game of Death (1978), [Film] Dir. Robert Clouse and Bruce Lee, Hong Kong/ USA: Columbia Pictures. Gamer (2009), [Film] Dir. Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, USA: Lionsgate. Girlfight (2000), [Film] Dir. Karyn Kusama, USA: 20th Century Fox. Gladiator (1992), [Film] Rowdy Herrington, USA: Columbia Pictures. Gladiator (2000), [Film] Dir. Ridley Scott, UK/USA: DreamWorks Distribution. Gladiator Cop (1995), [TV Film] Dir. Nick Rotundo, Canada: Alliance Home Video. Gladiator Games (2010), [Film] Dir. Stefano Milla, Italy: Claang Art. Gladiator of Rome/Battles of the Gladiator/Il gladiatore di Roma (1962) [Film] Dir. Mario Costa, Italy: Compagnia Iternazionale Realizzazioni Artistiche Cinematografiche. Gladiators of Rome (2013), [Film] Dir. Iginio Straffi, USA: Paramount Pictures. Gladiators 7/I sette gladiatori (1962) [Film] Dir. Pedro Lazaga, Italy: Atenea Films. Gladiatress (2004), [Film] Dir. Brian Grant, UK: Icon Film Distribution. Gods of Egypt (2016), [Film] Dir. Alex Proyas, Australia/USA: Lionsgate. Harry Potter & The Goblet of Fire (2005), [Film] Dir. Mike Newell, UK/USA: Warner Bros. Haywire (2011), [Film] Dir. Steven Soderberg, USA: Relativity Media. Hercules (1958), [Film] Dir. Pietro Francisci, Italy: Lux Film. Hercules (1997), [Film] Dir. Ron Clements and John Musker, USA: Buena Vista Pictures. Hercules (2014), [Film] Dir. Brett Ratner, USA: Paramount Pictures. Hercules in New York (1970), [Film] Dir. Arthur A. Seidelman, USA: Trimark Pictures. Hercules Unchained/Ercole e la regina di Lidia (1959), [Film] Dir. Pietro Francisci, Italy: Lux Film. Highlander: Endgame (2000), [Film] Dir. Douglas Aarniokoski, USA: Miramax. History of the World, Part 1 (1981), [Film] Dir. Mel Brooks, USA: 20th Century Fox. Horrible Histories: The Movie – Rotten Romans (2019), [Film] Dir. Dominic Brigstocke, UK: Altitude Films, BBC Films.

Filmography

275

How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000), [Film] Dir. Ron Howard, USA/ Germany: Universal Pictures. Hunger Games, The (2012), [Film] Dir. Gary Ross, USA: Lionsgate. Hunger Games, The: Catching Fire (2013), [Film] Dir. Francis Lawrence, USA: Lionsgate. Hunger Games, The: Mockingjay - Part 1 (2014), [Film] Dir. Francis Lawrence, USA: Lionsgate. Hunger Games, The: Mockingjay - Part 2 (2015), [Film] Dir. Francis Lawrence, USA: Lionsgate. Hurricane, The (1999), [Film] Dir. Norman Jewison, USA: Universal Pictures. Immortals (2011), [Film] Dir. Tarsem Singh, Canada/UK/USA: Relativity Media. Ivanhoe (1952), [Film] Dir. Richard Thorpe, UK/USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), [Film] Dir. Steven Spielberg, USA: Paramount Pictures. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), [Film] Dir. Steven Spielberg, USA: Paramount Pictures. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), [Film] Dir. Steven Spielberg, USA: Paramount Pictures. Invincible Gladiator, The (1961), [Film] Dir. Alberto De Martino and Antonio Momplet, Italy: Variety Film Production. John Carter (2012), [Film] Dir. Andrew Stanton, USA: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. Junior Bonner (1972), [Film] Dir. Sam Peckinpah, USA: Joe Wizan-Booth Gardner Productions. Karate Kid, The (1984), [Film] Dir. John Avildsen, USA: Columbia Pictures. Kingdom of Heaven (2005), [Film] Dir. Ridley Scott, Germany/Morocco/Spain/ UK/USA: 20th Century Fox. Knight Club (2001), [Film] Dir. Russell Gannon, USA: American World Pictures. Knightriders (1981), [Film] Dir. George A. Romero, USA: United Film Distribution Company. Knights of the Round Table [Film], Dir. Richard Thorpe, USA: Metro-GoldwynMayer. Knight’s Tale, A (2001), [Film] Dir. Brian Helgeland, USA: Columbia Pictures. Lady Bloodfight (2016), [Film] Dir. Chris Nahon, China/Hong Kong: Voltage Pictures. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), [Film] Dir. Simon West, Germany/Japan/UK/ USA: Paramount Pictures. Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003), [Film] Dir. Jan De Bont, Germany/Japan/UK/USA: Paramount Pictures. Last Days, The (1999), [Film] Dir. James Moll, USA: October Films. Last Days of Pompeii, The (1913), [Film] Dir. Mario Caserini and Eleuterio Rodolfi, Italy: Giuseppe Barattolo. Last Days of Pompeii, The (1935), [Film] Dir. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, USA: RKO Radio Pictures.

276

Filmography

Last Days of Pompeii, The (1959), [Film] Dir. Mario Bonnard, Italy/Spain/West Germany: United Artists. Last Man Standing (1987), [Film] Dir. Damian Lee, USA: Academy Entertainment. Last Starfighter, The (1984), [Film] Dir. Nick Castle, USA: Universal Pictures. Legend of Hercules, The (2014), [Film] Dir. Renny Harlin, USA: Summit Entertainment. Lethal Force (2001), [Film] Dir. Alvin Ecarma, USA: Anthem Pictures. Lusty Men, The (1952), [Film] Dir. Nicholas Ray, USA: RKO Radio Pictures. Machete Kills (2013), [Film] Dir. Robert Rodriguez, Russia/USA: Open Road Films (II). Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), [Film] Dir. George Miller and George Ogilvie, Australia: Warner Bros. Magnificent Gladiator, The/Il magnifico gladiatore (1964), [Film] Dir. Alfonso Brescia, Italy: Retro Media. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), [Film] Dir. Peter Weir, USA: 20th Century Fox. Matrix, The (1999), [Film] Dir. Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski, USA: Warner Bros. Matrix Reloaded, The (2003), [Film] Dir. Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski, USA: Warner Bros. Matrix Revolutions, The (2003), [Film] Dir. Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski, USA: Warner Bros. Maze Runner, The (2014), [Film] Dir. Wes Ball, USA/UK: Twentieth Century Fox. Meet the Parents (2000), [Film] Dir. Jay Roach, USA: Universal Pictures. Meet the Spartans (2008), [Film] Dir. Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, USA: 20th Century Fox. Messalina vs. The Son of Hercules (1964), [Film] Dir. Umberto Lenzi, France/ Italy: Produzioni Europee Associate (PEA). Million Dollar Baby (2004), [Film] Dir. Clint Eastwood, USA: Warner Bros. Miss Congeniality (2000), [Film] Dir. Donald Petrie, USA: Warner Bros. Mission: Impossible II (2000), [Film] Dir. John Woo, Germany/USA: Paramount Pictures. Mortal Kombat (1995), [Film] Dir. Paul W. S. Anderson, USA: New Line Cinema. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997), [Film] Dir. John R. Leonetti, USA: New Line Cinema. Mummy, The (1999), [Film] Dir. Stephen Sommers, USA: Universal Pictures. Musketeer, The (2001), [Film] Dir. Peter Hyams, USA: MDP Worldwide. National Lampoon’s The Legend of Awesomest Maximus (2011), [Film] Dir. Jeff Kanew, USA: Comedy Central. Never Back Down (2008), [Film] Dir. Jeff Wadlow, USA: Summit Distribution. Never Back Down 2: The Beatdown (2011), [Film] Dir. Michael Jai White, USA: Mandalay Pictures. New Gladiators, The/I guerrieri dell’anno 2072 (1984), [Film] Dir. Lucio Fulci, Italy: Video Treasures.

Filmography

277

Nightmare on Elm Street, A (2010), [Film] Dir. Samuel Bayer, USA: New Line Cinema. No Exit/Fatal Combat (1995), [TV Film] Dir. Damian Lee, Canada: Columbia TriStar. No Retreat, No Surrender (1986), [Film] Dir. Corey Yuen, Hong Kong/USA: New World Pictures. Old School (2003), [Film] Dir. Todd Phillips, USA: DreamWorks Distribution. Omega Code, The (1999), [Film] Dir. Robert Marcarelli, USA: Providence Entertainment. On the Ropes (1999), [Film] Dir. Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgen, USA: WinStar Cinema. One, The (2001), [Film] Dir. James Wong, USA: Sony Pictures Entertainment. Peppermint (2018), [Film] Dir. Pierre Morel, Hong Kong/USA: STX Entertainment. Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010), [Film] Dir. Chris Columbus, Canada/UK/USA: 20th Century Fox. Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (2013), [Film] Dir. Thor Freudenthal, USA: 20th Century Fox. Perfect Storm (2000), [Film] Dir. Wolfgang Petersen, USA: Warner Bros. Planet of the Apes (1968), [Film] Dir. Franklin J. Schaffner, USA: 20th Century Fox. Play It to the Bone (1999), [Film] Dir. Ron Shelton, USA: Buena Vista Pictures. Pokemon: The First Movie (1999), [Film] Dir. Michael Haigney and Kunihiko Yuyama, Japan: Toho Company. Pokemon 2000 (2000), [Film] Dir. Michael Haigney and Kunihiko Yuyama, Japan: Toho Company. Pokemon 3: The Movie (2001), [Film] Dir. Michael Haigney and Kunihiko Yuyama, Japan: Toho Company. Pompeii (2014), [Film] Dir. Paul W.S. Anderon, Canada/German/USA: Entertainment One. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010), [Film] Dir. Mike Newell, USA: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. Prince Valiant (1954), [Film] Dir. Henry Hathaway, USA: Twentieth Century Fox. Quest, The (1996), [Film] Dir. Jean-Claude Van Damme, USA/Canada: Universal Pictures. Quo Vadis (1913), [Film] Dir. Enrico Guazzoni, Italy: Società Italiana Cines. Quo Vadis (1951), [Film] Dir. Mervyn LeRoy, USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Quo Vadis (2001), [Film] Dir. Jerzy Kawalerowicz, Poland: Chronos-Film. Raging Bull (1980), [Film] Dir. Martin Scorsese, USA: United Artists. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), [Film] Dir. Steven Spielberg, USA: Paramount Pictures. Ratcatcher (1999), [Film] Dir. Lynne Ramsay, UK/France: Pathé Pictures International, BBC Films. Real Steel (2011), [Film] Dir. Shawn Levy, USA: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

278

Filmography

Rebel Gladiators, The/Ursus, il gladiatore ribelle (1962), [Film] Dir. Domenico Paolella, Italy: Medallion Pictures. Red Sonja (1985), [Film] Dir. Richard Fleischer, Netherlands, USA: MGM/UA Entertainment Company. Ring of Steel (1994), [Film] Dir. David Frost, USA: MCA/Universal Home Video. Robe, The (1953), [Film] Dir. Henry Koster, USA: 20th Century Fox. Rocky (1976), [Film] Dir. John G. Avildsen, USA: United Artists. Rocky II (1979), [Film] Dir. Sylvester Stallone, USA: United Artists. Rocky III (1982), [Film] Dir. Sylvester Stallone, USA: MGM/UA Entertainment Company. Rocky IV (1985), [Film] Dir. Sylvester Stallone, USA: MGM/UA Entertainment Company. Rocky V (1990), [Film] Dir. John G. Avildsen, USA: MGM/UA Entertainment Company. Rocky Balboa (2006), [Film] Dir. Sylvester Stallone, USA: Metro-GoldwynMayer. Rollerball (1975), [Film] Dir. Norman Jewison, USA: United Artists. Runaway Bride (1999), [Film] Dir. Garry Marshall, USA: Paramount Pictures. Running Man, The (1987), [Film] Dir. Paul Michael Glaser, USA: TriStar Pictures. Rush Hour 2 (2001), [Film] Dir. Brett Ratner, USA: New Line Cinema. Saving Private Ryan (1998), [Film] Dir. Steven Spielberg, USA: DreamWorks Distribution. Saw (2004), [Film] Dir. James Wan, USA: Lionsgate. Scary Movie (2000), [Film] Dir. Keenen Ivory Wayans, USA: Dimension Films. Scorpion King: Rise of a Warrior, The (2008), [Film] Dir. Russell Mulcahy, Germany/South Africa/USA: Universal Studios. Scorpion King 3: Battle for Redemption, The (2012), [Film] Dir. Roel Reiné, USA: Universal Studios. Scorpion King 4: Quest for Power, The (2015), [Film] Dir. Mike Elliott, USA: Universal Studios. Seven Magnificent Gladiators, The (1983), [Film] Dir. Bruno Mattei, Italy: Cannon Film Distributors. Seven Rebel Gladiators/Gladiators 7/Sette contro tutti (1965), [Film] Dir. Michele Lupo, Italy: Adria Filmverleih. Shrek (2001), [Film] Dir. Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson, USA: DreamWorks Distribution. Sins of Rome/Spartacus the Gladiator/Spartaco (1953), [Film] Dir. Riccardo Freda, France/Italy: Associati Produttori Indipendenti Film. Sixth Sense, The (1999), [Film] Dir. M. Night Shyamalan, USA: Hollywood Pictures. The Slave/Il figlio di Spartacus (1962), [Film] Dir. Sergio Corbucci, Italy: Titanus. Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), [Film] Dir. Robert Wise, USA: MetroGoldwyn-Mayer. Southpaw (2000), [Film] Dir. Liam McGrath, UK: Downton Pictures. Spartacus (1960), [Film] Dir. Stanley Kubrick, USA: Universal Pictures.

Filmography

279

Spartacus and the Ten Gladiators/Day of Vengeance/Gli invincibili dieci gladiatori (1964), [Film] Dir. Nick Nostro, France/Italy/Spain: Filmar. Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999), [Film] Dir. George Lucas, USA: 20th Century Fox. Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002), [Film] Dir. George Lucas, USA: 20th Century Fox. Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi (1983), [Film] Dir. Richard Marquand, USA: 20th Century Fox. Strange Days (1995), [Film] Dir. Kathryn Bigelow, USA: 20th Century Fox. Straight Story, The (1999), [Film] Dir. David Lynch, France/UK/USA: Buena Vista Pictures. Street Fighter (1994), [Film] Dir. Steven E. de Souza, Japan/USA: Universal Pictures. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (2009), [Film] Dir. Andrezej Bartowiak, Canada/India/Japan/USA: 20th Century Fox. Street Warrior (2008), [Film] Dir. David Jackson, USA: Genius Products. Super Mario Bros. (1993), [Film] Dir. Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, USA: Buena Vista Pictures. Swordsman, The (1992), [TV Film] Dir. Michael Kenned, Canada: Alliance Atlantis Video. Tarzan (1999), [Film] Dir. Chris Buck and Kevin Lima, USA: Walt Disney Pictures. Tekken (2010), [Film] Dir. Dwight H. Little, Japan/USA: Anchor Bay Entertainment. Ten Gladiators, The/The Ten Desperate Men/I dieci gladiatori (1963), [Film] Dir. Gianfranco Parolini, Italy: Filmar. Terror of Rome Against the Son of Hercules, The/Maciste, gladiatore di Sparta (1964), [Film] Dir. Mario Caiano, France/Italy: Filmar. Thor and the Amazon Women (1963), [Film] Dir. Antonio Leonviola, Italy: Galatea Film. Thor: Ragnarok (2017), [Film] Dir. Taika Waititi, USA: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. Titanic (1997), [Film] Dir. James Cameron, USA: Twentieth Century Fox. Toy Story 2 (1999), [Film] Dir. John Lasseter and Ash Brannon, USA: Pixar Animation Studios. Training Day (2001), [Film] Dir. Antione Fuqua, USA: Warner Bros. Triumph of the Ten Gladiators (1964), [Film] Dir. Nick Nostro, France/Italy/ Spain: Sinister Cinema. TRON (1982), [Film] Dir. Steven Lisberger, USA: Buena Vista Distribution Company. TRON: Legacy (2010), [Film] Dir. Joseph Kosinski, USA: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. Troy (2004), [Film] Dir. Wolfgang Petersen, Malta/UK/USA: Warner Bros. Twin Dragons (1999), [Film] Dir. Ringo Lam and Hark Tsui, Hong Kong: Media Asia Group Limited. Two Gladiators, The (1964), [Film] Dir. Mario Caiano, Italy: Euro International Film.

280

Filmography

Ulysses (1954), [Film] Dir. Mario Camerini, France/Italy/USA: Paramount Pictures. Undisputed (2002), [Film] Dir. Walter Hill, USA: Miramax. Undisputed 2: Last Man Standing (2006), [Film] Dir. Isaac Florentine, USA: New Line Home Video. Undisputed 3: Redemption (2010), [Film] Dir. Isaac Florentine, USA: New Line Home Video. Universal Soldier II: The Return (1999), [Film] Dir. Mic Rodgers, USA: TriStar Pictures. Valhalla Rising (2009), [Film] Dir. Nicolas Winding Refn, Denmark/UK: Vertigo Distribution. WarGames (1983), [Film] Dir. John Badham, USA: MGM/UA Entertainment Company. WarGames: The Dead Code (2008), [Film] Dir. Stuart Gillard, USA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment. Warrior (2011), [Film] Dir. Gavin O’Connor, USA: Lionsgate. Warrior’s Gate (2016), [Film] Dir. Matthias Hoene, Canada/China/France: EuropaCorp. Distribution. Way of the Dragon, The (1972), [Film] Dir. Bruce Lee, Hong Kong: Bryanston Distributing. What Women Want (2000), [Film] Dir. Nancy Meyers, USA: Paramount Pictures. What Lies Beneath (2000), [Film] Dir. Robert Zemeckis, USA: DreamWorks. Wing Commander (1999), [Film] Dir. Chris Roberts, Luxembourg/USA: 20th Century Fox. Witch’s Curse, The/Maciste all’inferno (1962), [Film] Dir. Riccardo Freda, Italy: Medallion Pictures. Wonder Woman (2017), [Film] Dir. Patty Jenkins, USA: Warner Bros. X-Men (2000), [Film] Dir. Bryan Singer, USA: 20th Century Fox.

Television programmes Adventure Time (2010–2018), [TV programme] Cartoon Network, 5 April. American Gladiators (1989–1997), [TV programme] The Samuel Goldwyn Company, 1 January. American Gladiators (2008–2009), [TV programme] National Broadcasting Company. Angel (1999–2004), [TV programme] The WB Television Network, 5 October. Bachelor UK, The (2003–present), [TV programme] Channel 5, 30 March. BeastMaster (1999–2002), [TV programme] Alliance Atlantis Communications, 9 October. Birds of Prey (2002–2003), [TV programme] The WB Television Network, 9 October.

Filmography

281

Bromans (2017), [TV programme] ITV2, 13 September. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), [TV programme] United Paramount Network, 10 March. Contender, The (2005–2007), [TV programme] ESPN, 7 March. Dancing with the Stars (2005–present), [TV programme] American Broadcasting Company, 1 June. Dark Tourist (2018–present), [TV programme] Netflix, 20 July. Deadliest Warrior (2009–2011), [TV programme] Spike, 7 April. Deadwood (2004–2006), [TV programme] Home Box Office, 21 March. Doctor Who (1963–present), [TV programme] BBC One, 23 November. Drunk History (2013–2017), [TV programme] Comedy Central, 9 July. Eight Days that Made Rome (2017), [TV programme] Channel 5, 27 October. Game of Thrones (2011–2019), [TV programme] Home Box Office, 17 April. Gladiators (1992–2000), [TV programme] ITV, 10 October. Gladiators (2008–2009), [TV programme] Sky One. GLOW (2017–present), [TV programme] Netflix, 23 June. GLOW: Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (1986–1989), [TV programme] INI, 1 January. Gunpowder (2017), [TV programme] BBC iPlayer, 18 December. Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995–1999), [TV programme] Universal Television, 16 January. Horrible Histories (2009–2019), [TV programme] BBC, 15 April. Justice League (2001–2004), [TV programme] Cartoon Network, 17 November. Justice League Unlimited (2004–2006), [TV programme] Cartoon Network, 17 November. Last Man Standing (2007–2008), [TV programme] BBC, 26 June. Love Island (2015–present), [TV programme] ITV2, 7 June. Ninja Warrior (2007), [TV programme] G4 Media, 3 October. Pokémon (1997–present), [TV programme] Kids’ WB, 25 November. Robot Wars (1998–2018), [TV programme] BBC2, 20 February. Roman Empire: Reign of Blood (2016–present), [TV programme] Netflix, 11 November. Rome (2005–2007), [TV programme] Home Box Office, 28 August. Smack the Pony (1999–2003), [TV programme] Channel 4 Television Corporation, 19 March. Spartacus (2010–2013), [TV programme], Starz!, 29 December. Star Trek (1966–1969), [TV programme] NBC, 27 November. Strictly Come Dancing (2004–present), [TV programme] BBC One, 15 May. Tarzan (1991–1995), [TV programme] Keller Entertainment Group, 10 November. Ultimate Fighter, The (2005-present), [TV programme] Spike TV, 17 January. Wipeout (2008–2014), [TV programme] ABC, 9 September. WWE Raw (1993–present), [TV programme] The National Network, 11 January. Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001), [TV programme] The WB Television Network, 4 September.

282

Filmography

Videogames Assassin’s Creed (2007) Assassin’s Creed: Origins (2017) Call of Duty (2003) Final Fantasy (1987) For Honor (2017) Gladiator (1986) Gladiator Heroes (2018) Gladiator: Swords of Vengeance (2003) Gods of Arena (2017) X-Men vs. Street Fighter (1996) Medal of Honor (1999) Mortal Kombat (1992) Mortal Kombat II (1993) Mortal Kombat 3 (1995) Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 (1995) Mortal Kombat Trilogy (1996) Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero (1997) Mortal Kombat 4 (1997) Mortal Kombat Gold (1999) Mortal Kombat: Special Forces (2000) Mortal Kombat Advance (2001) Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance (2002) Mortal Kombat: Tournament Edition (2003) Mortal Kombat: Deception (2004) Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks (2005) Mortal Kombat: Armageddon (2006) Mortal Kombat: Unchained (2006) Ultimate Mortal Kombat (2007) Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe (2008) Mortal Kombat (2011) Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection (2011) Mortal Kombat: Komplete Edition (2012) Mortal Kombat X (2015) Pokémon Red Version (1996) Pokémon Green Version (1996) Pokémon Blue Version (1996) Pokémon Yellow Version: Special Pikachu Edition (1998) Pokémon Gold Version (1999) Pokémon Silver Version (1999) Pokémon Crystal Version (2000) Pokémon Ruby Version (2002) Pokémon Sapphire Version (2002)

Filmography

Pokémon Emerald Version (2004) Pokémon FireRed Version (2004) Pokémon LeafGreen Version (2004) Pokémon Diamond Version (2006) Pokémon Pearl Version (2006) Pokémon Platinum Version (2008) Pokémon HeartGold Version (2009) Pokémon SoulSilver Version (2009) Pokémon Black Version (2010) Pokémon White Version (2010) Pokémon Black Version 2 (2012) Pokémon White Version 2 (2012) Pokémon X (2013) Pokémon Y (2013) Pokémon Alpha Sapphire (2014) Pokémon Omega Ruby (2014) Pokémon Moon (2016) Pokémon Sun (2016) Ryse: Son of Rome (2013) Shadow of Rome (2005) Street Fighter (1987) Street Fighter II (1991) Street Fighter II: Champion Edition (1992) Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting (1992) Super Street Fighter II (1993) Super Street Fighter II Turbo (1994) Street Fighter Alpha (1995) Street Fighter Alpha 2 (1996) Street Fighter EX (1996) Street Fighter III (1997) Street Fighter III: 2nd Impact (1997) Street Fighter Alpha 3 (1998) Street Fighter EX2 (1998) Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike (1999) Street Fighter EX3 (2000) Hyper Street Fighter II: the Anniversary Edition (2003) Street Fighter Anniversary Collection (2004) Street Fighter Alpha Anthology (2006) Street Fighter IV (2008) Tekken (1994) Tekken 2 (1995) Tekken 3 (1997) Tekken Tag Tournament (1999) Tekken 4 (2001)

283

284

Filmography

Tekken 5 (2004) Tekken: Dark Resurrection (2005) Tekken 6 (2007) Tekken Tag Tournament 2 (2011) Tekken 7 (2015) Tomb Raider (1996) Witcher 3: Blood and Wine (2015)

Index 300 [film] 7–8, 32, 62, 75, 78, 83–4, 92, 120, 140, 144, 156, 185, 195, 255 n.2 agonistic 223–4 Altman, R. 63–4, 68 Amazons and Gladiators [film] 171–4, 180, 187 American Gladiators (1989–1997 & 2008–2009), [TV programme] 3, 17, 63, 67, 83, 223–4 amphitheatre 28, 31–2, 41, 48, 63–8, 95–106, 124–5, 169–170, 201–2, 254, 254 n.1 (see also arena, arena fight and Colosseum) crowds 35–6, 65, 77–8, 99–100, 102–5,169, 201, 213–16, 234, 251 n.7 structure 97–103, 116 women in the amphitheatre 176–7, 184, 187–8 apocalypse 4, 13, 145, 146, 224, 229, 234 apocalypse (and Y2K) 13–14 apocalyptic nostalgia 134, 140–1, 145, 158–164 post-apocalyptic 3–4, 6, 56, 95–6, 200 post-apocalyptic genre 9, 27, 56, 74, 94, 98, 108, 181, 212, 220–225 archaeology 138, 157–160, 163–4, 227 archetype 2–3, 26–9, 45, 47–51, 58–60, 63–4, 69, 76, 86, 130–1, 145, 149, 186, 202, 207, 210, 223, 233–4, 248 n.1, 257 n.8

definition of gladiator archetype 6–7, 12–13, 32–3, 48–49 archetypal women 177–181 (see also gladiatrix) Arena (1989), [Film] 5, 104, 109–110, 125–127, 129–130, 253 n.5, 255 n.7 Arena (2011), [Film] 4–5, 19, 30, 50, 56, 70, 91, 96, 100–101, 107, 109, 112, 126–130, 141, 143–4, 146, 150, 155, 174, 177, 224, 250 n.21, 253 n.5, 255 n.7 arena 41, 94–6, 98–106, 214, 224, 253 n3, n5 (see also amphitheatre) arena fight 9, 57, 95–132, 145–6, 171–3, 220 dark arena 4, 104 party arena 103–4, 118 Arena, The (1974), [Film] 4–5, 27, 49–50, 100, 107, 123–5, 129–130, 171, 180, 182, 196–7, 253 n.5 Arena, The (2001), [Film/DTV] 50, 73, 107, 124, 171, 180, 182, 187, 253 n.5 armour 38, 42–6, 68, 184, 252 n.13 helmets 43–4, 46–7 Assassin’s Creed: Origins (2017), [Videogame] 3, 28, 41, 101 Augustine (Saint, of Hippo) 31–2, 204, 208, 210, 251 n.6 avatar 6, 9, 45, 48, 59, 61–2, 65, 88, 136, 178, 223, 232 Ave Caesar! Morituri te saluant/Hail Caesar! We Who Are About to Die Salute You [Painting] 39

286

Index

Bakhtin, M. 8, 32–33 Barabbas (1961), [Film] 46, 85, 107, 111, 120, 160, 181, 209, 237, 240 Barabbas (2012), [Film] 107, 112, 121, 135, 181, 237, 244 barbarian film (genre) 64, 76, 81–3, 135, 150, 174, 187, 233, 237, 242, 253 n.5 Battle Royale (2000), [Film] 181, 220 Beard, M. 9, 65, 138, 165, 203, 205, 226, 251 n.2 ‘before and after’ 3–10, 28, 33, 56, 62, 81, 146, 179, 196, 212, 233–4 Ben-Hur (1959), [Film] 80, 141–2, 147, 193 Blut und Boden (blood and soil) 89–91, 218 bodybuilding 50, 76, 79, 81, 145, 152 198, 254 n.11 Bolter, D. and Grusin, R. 8, 143–4 boxing 16–17, 35, 42, 56, 70, 85–6, 125, 223, 249 n.8, 254 n.13 boxer 6, 9, 11, 39, 86, 180 Boym, S. 137, 139, 141, 143–4, 147, 151, 205, 256 n.8 Braudy, L. 208, 210, 212 bread and circuses (panem et circenses) 5, 35, 83, 97, 101, 221 Bromans (2017), [TV programme] 3, 5, 46, 67, 143, 202, 222–9, 258 n.9 Bulwer-Lytton, E. 159–160 (see also The Last Days of Pompeii novel) burlesque 29–30, 123–5, 167–200 Byron, G.G. (Lord) 46, 52–3, 56, 61, 65–6, 68, 114, 131, 255 n.5 Cabiria (1913), [Film] 78, 84 Caligula 43, 147, 210 camp 50, 152, 168, 170, 173–4, 227

castration 178, 184, 186 Cawelti, J. 167–8, 175, 200 celebrity 6, 10, 29–30, 50, 92, 200–230 (see also fame) celebrified history 205–6 celebrity fighter 26, 37, 101 gladiatorial celebrity 207–211 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 52–3, 61, 65, 131 (see also Byron) Christianity 126, 160, 163, 173, 208–210, 212, 231 chronosoma 29, 32–3, 48, 60, 138, 145, 149–153, 156, 163, 232 chronotope 32–3, 163 Cicero 211 classicism, 8, 28–34, 67, 72, 135–6, 141–5, 152, 163–5, 194–5, 227–8 classicism in Hollywood cinema 28, 63, 256 n.5 digital classicism 32, 143–5 neoclassicism 23–4, 46, 67, 138, 141–5, 176, 194–5 pornographic classicism 227–8 Colosseum (or Flavian Amphitheatre) 8, 10, 38–9, 41, 43, 53, 65, 75, 94, 100, 102, 113–122, 130, 133, 139, 143, 201, 204–6, 255 n.5 combat sport 28, 35, 38, 42, 57, 66, 172, 185 Commodus 3, 9, 11–12, 24, 37, 47, 75, 110, 115, 117, 119, 121–2, 133, 210–211, 214, 216–7, 228–9 Conan the Barbarian (1982), [Film] 5, 42, 49, 81, 107, 112, 125, 135, 237, 242 Crowe, Russell 1, 20, 68, 84, 93, 216 crucifixion 37, 39, 52, 53–4, 209, 217 dark tourism 201–206 Deadliest Warrior (2009–2011), [TV programme] 67, 222–3

Index

Death Race (2008), [Film] 5, 49–50, 61, 85, 91, 128, 153, 220, 222 death 20, 35, 40–1, 48, 51–6, 65–6, 93, 101, 113–115, 156–160, 177–8, 204–7 death counts 109–110, 114, 127 dying gladiator 51–6, 152, 195 fight to the death 40–1, 62, 85, 109–110, 127, 197, 201, 220, 222–4 Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954), [Film] 46, 49, 85, 107, 111, 113, 120, 121, 126, 141, 197, 199, 208, 237, 240 doubling 8–13, 21, 30, 62–3, 206, 216 Dyer, R. 72, 91–3, 135, 146, 152, 215–6, 253 n.9, 254 n.10 eroticism 8, 29, 33, 48, 50, 67, 77, 82, 124–5, 154, 167–170, 173–4, 181, 185, 187–199, 226–8, 234, 257 n.9 (see also burlesque) eroticism and race 196–9 eroticized nostalgia 135–6, 138, 147 homoeroticism 69–70, 81, 152, 181, 183, 191–6, 198, 226–7 Fagan, G. G. 36, 39, 42, 59, 66, 101, 116, 203, 213, 251 n.7 Fall of the Roman Empire, The (1964), [Film] 8, 24, 37, 57, 75, 80, 92, 120 fame 28–9, 32, 48–51, 115, 170, 202–3, 207, 209–15, 218, 219, 228–9, 234 (see also celebrity) Fama (fame, goddess) 210, 219, 221–2 familia gladiatoria (gladiatorial family or brotherhood) 42–3, 82, 112, 117–18

287

fascism 17, 24, 35, 72, 89, 91–2, 135, 145, 218, 224 fatherhood 10, 16, 216–7 Female Fight Club (2017), [Film] 5, 50–1, 57, 85–6, 104, 107, 109–110, 124, 180, 238, 246 Fight Club (1999), [Film] 1, 3–5, 9–12, 14–22, 26, 37, 50–1, 56–8, 85–6, 92, 94, 104, 107, 109–10, 124, 145–6, 149, 180, 184, 213, 238, 246, 249 n.9 filone 28, 64–78, 87, 253 n.7, 253 n.8 fitness 17, 46, 144, 149, 194, 226 For Honor (2017) [Videogame] 28, 45 Foucault, M. 97–8 Gamer (2009), [Film] 5, 9–10, 19, 41, 48–51, 56, 61–6, 70, 75, 82, 85, 87–9, 91–4, 101, 103, 107, 109, 112, 128, 146, 153, 155, 177–8, 200, 215–7, 222–3, 228–9, 232, 237, 245 games gamespace (see also arena and amphitheatre) 29, 32, 60, 63–6, 68, 94–6, 101, 102–106, 123 ludic 15, 28 37, 59, 63–8, 80–1, 92–4, 139, 195, 201, 223–234 play and genre 49–60, 68, 80, 92–94 play (see also ludic) 29, 36, 45, 57–60, 61–94, 135, 136 Roman games (ludi) 6, 32–6, 41–2, 58–60, 66–7, 101, 176–7, 202, 204–5, 209, 251 n.2, 251 n.3 Garland, R. 203, 211, 215

288

Index

genre 3, 15–16, 61–94, 181–186, 250 n.20, 253 n.8, 253 n.9 Gladiator (2000), [Film] 1–6, 8–11, 14, 16–17, 19–27, 31, 37–41, 47, 49–53, 64, 73, 75, 84–6, 89, 91–2, 95–6, 101–2, 106–7, 109–122, 127–130, 133, 137–9, 141, 145, 155, 157, 183–4, 196, 201, 216–18, 221, 232–5, 250 n.9, 255 n.2, 256 n.11 gladiator (historical/Roman) 4, 6, 31–60, 72, 134–5, 207–212, 232–3, 251 n.2, 257 n.2 (see also archetype, gladiator games, gladiatrix, munera) Gladiator effect 84 gladiator salute (nos morituri te salutamus) 6–7, 28, 39–40, 111, 116–7, 119, 229, 232 gladiator types 38, 43–6, 68, 252 n.13 retiarius (gladiator who fought with net and trident) 44, 46–7, 68, 184, 252 n.13 Gladiator 2 [Film] 231–232, 237 Gladiator Cop (1995), [TV Film] 5, 49, 57, 73, 87, 107, 109, 213, 232, 238, 246 Gladiator of Rome/Battles of the Gladiator/Il gladiatore di Roma (1962) [Film] 79, 107, 236, 239 Gladiatrix, gladiatrices (female gladiators) 100, 171, 176, 178, 181–2, 184, 187, 196, 199, 220, 231, 257 n.3 Gladiators 7/I sette gladiatori (1962) [Film] 5, 78 Gladiatress (2004), [Film] 87, 180, 183, 186 GLOW (2017–present), [TV programme] 167, 181, 200 Golvin, Jean-Claude 98–9, 223, 254 n.1

Greenhalgh, M. 142–4 Grier, Pam 27, 123, 182 Harington, Kit 7, 31–2, 50, 125, 136, 145, 149, 150–1, 153–6, 256 n.8 Herculaneum 158, 162, 237, 239 Hercules (1958), [Film] 78, 153 Hercules (2014), [Film] 5, 84, 135 homosocial 10, 67, 178, 192 Hopkins, K. 41, 59, 65–6, 99, 138, 207, 251 n.7 Horrible Histories 38 Horrible Histories effect 203–5, 221, 257 n.1 Huizinga, J. 36, 63, 64–8, 106, 223 Hunger Games, The [film series] 4–5, 27, 49–50, 56, 61, 68, 70, 85, 100, 107, 111, 113, 128, 141, 181, 200, 202, 212, 219–222, 224–5, 229, 232, 237, 243 hyperreality 8, 34, 133, 137, 218, 223, 232 hypogeum 41, 115 Jameson, F. 15, 135, 255 n.2 John Carter (2012), [Film] 51, 68, 104, 106–7, 112–13, 126, 238, 247 Junkelmann, M. 43, 163, 252 kitsch 135, 137, 170, 186, 200, 207 Koven, M. 71–2, 74, 253 n.6 Lagny, M. 73, 78, 80–1, 89, 192–3, 254 n.10, 254 n.12 Last Days of Pompeii, The (1913), [Film] 97 Last Days of Pompeii, The (1935), [Film] 37, 96, 147, 149, 153–4, 160, 161, 164, 209, 237, 240 Last Days of Pompeii, The (1959), [Film] 69, 104, 107, 136, 148, 162, 164

Index

Last Days of Pompeii, The [novel] 37, 69, 96, 104, 107, 136, 147–9, 153, 154, 160, 161–2, 164, 209, 253 n.11 Legend of Hercules, The (2014), [Film] 5, 73, 84, 105, 107, 110, 112, 126, 135, 155, 184, 237, 244, 253 n.5 ludus (gladiator school) 48–9, 63, 97, 104, 146, 163, 170, 183, 196, 197 Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), [Film] 3, 5, 95–6, 98, 105–7, 220, 237, 243 Marcus Aurelius 9, 12, 49, 210 masculinity crisis of masculinity 9, 11, 13, 16, 18–20, 26, 77, 92, 130, 136, 234, 250 n.14 hypermasculinity 30, 92, 153, 223 warrior masculinity 2, 32, 58–9, 127, 152, 213, 223, 231 (see also archetype) Matrix, The, [Film series] 14–15, 63, 249 n.7 methodology 26–30 millennium (and Y2K) 3–4, 10, 13–17, 26–8, 51, 60, 72, 84, 89, 129–130, 136–8, 143, 184, 200, 233, 248 n.4, 248–9 n.6 millennial reboot (gladiator films) 15, 21, 64, 73–4, 76, 87, 108, 109, 121, 124, 135, 137, 180, 182, 187, 237, 244 mixed martial arts (MMA) 42, 98, 172, 187, 208, 234 morituri (those about to die) 3, 5–8, 10, 39, 93, 134, 164, 194, 229, 232–4, 248 n.2 (see also gladiator salute) Mortal Kombat (1995), [Film] 3, 16, 85, 223

289

Mussolini, Benito 72, 92, 135 munera (Roman gladiator games) 32, 35–8, 42, 48, 59, 65–7, 69, 72, 101, 114, 176–7, 202, 204, 207, 252 n.1 (see also games and ludi) New Gladiators, The/I guerrieri dell’anno 2072 (1984), [Film] 4–5, 50, 56, 61, 74, 85, 98, 100, 105, 107, 110, 112, 128, 141, 202, 212, 220, 222, 237, 243 No Exit/Fatal Combat (1995), [TV Film] 5, 49–51, 85, 100, 102, 107, 109, 112, 128, 177, 213, 217, 222, 224, 238, 246 nostalgia 4, 15, 58, 133–166, 255 n2, 256 n.3, 256 n.8 blood nostalgia (nostalgie du sang) 138–9 nostalgia film (mode rétro) 15, 135, 255 n.2 Ovid 219, 221 Palmer, L. 153 panopticism 29, 97–8, 115, 202, 219–222 pansonic 219, 222 patina 139, 150–3, 155 peplum (genre) 5–7, 26, 29, 46, 48, 51, 60, 64, 69–74, 76–84, 86, 89, 91–2, 100, 108–9, 123, 126, 134–5, 144, 147, 149–152, 171–3, 175, 177–8, 182, 192, 194, 196–7, 233, 250 n.20, 254 n.10, 254 n.12 Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010), [Film] 62, 220 Pollice Verso, [painting] 23–24, 144 Pompeii (2014), [Film] 5, 7–8, 12, 24, 31, 37–8, 40, 49–50, 52, 70, 73, 84, 89, 100,

290

Index

102, 106–7, 109, 111–3, 117, 121, 125, 128, 136, 139, 143, 145–9, 156–160, 162–4, 197, 214, 227, 229, 232, 237 Pompeii (place) 38, 158–164, 251 n.6, 252 n.11 pornography 124, 144, 181–3, 227–8 postmodern, postmodernity 15, 42, 63–4, 67–8, 211–213, 222, 229 Purse, L. 120, 129, 139, 140, 143 queer 50, 69, 147, 150, 170, 173–4, 183, 186–7, 194 race 33, 35, 72, 77, 91, 105, 129, 145, 168, 196–7, 199, 222 Real Steel (2011), [Film] 5, 9, 85, 107, 110, 127, 237, 245 reality television 3, 28, 46, 83, 85, 127, 202, 205, 220–5, 228, 232 Rebel Gladiators, The/Ursus, il gladiatore ribelle (1962) 4–5, 50, 75, 78–9, 112, 117 Reeves, Steve 69, 78–9, 104, 136, 145, 149–151, 153–5, 162, 256 n.8 remediation 8, 24, 63, 75, 86, 136–8, 143–4, 190, 195 Renga, D. 74 revenge 10, 12, 54, 107, 109, 115, 163, 170, 177–8, 180, 209, 216, 228 Rollerball (1975), [Film] 61, 85, 105, 128, 212, 222 romance novel 189–190 Rowe Karlyn, K. 167–8, 174, 183–4, 186 Running Man, The (1987), [Film] 4–5, 61, 100, 128, 220, 222, 224 Rushing, Robert A. 5–7, 51, 76–8, 81, 84, 126, 135, 150–1, 153, 196, 253 n.9, 255 n.2

Rushton, R. 110, 116, 122 Russell, J. 21, 25, 250 n.18 Ryse: Son of Rome (2013) 28 sculpture, sculptural 52, 144, 151–7, 154, 227 Seneca 43, 45, 97, 251 n.7, 253 n.3 Seven Magnificent Gladiators, The/I sette magnifici gladiatori (1983) [Film] 50, 81 Seven Rebel Gladiators /Gladiators 7/Sette contro tutti (1965), [Film] 4–5, 50, 78, 112, 117 Spartacus (1960), [Film] 3–5, 8, 11–12, 27, 49, 37, 46, 50, 52–55, 70, 78, 112–13, 120–1, 129, 146–7, 150, 155, 191, 197, 200, 209, 216–225, 232, 257 n.9 Spartacus (2010–2013), [TV programme] 5, 7–8, 20, 27, 32, 37, 40, 47, 49, 50–51, 52–5, 67, 82–3, 91–2, 97, 100, 103–4, 107, 112–3, 117–8, 122, 138–142, 144–7, 168, 170, 177–9, 182, 185–6, 188, 196–7, 200, 214–6, 227, 255 n.2 Spartacus (historical person), Spartacus rebellion 37, 52–5, 209–10, 256 n.14 Spartacus and the Ten Gladiators/ Day of Vengeance/Gli invincibili dieci gladiatori (1964), [Film] 79, 253 n.4 spornosexual 228 stardom 143, 181, 207, 215–16 (see also fame and celebrity) stoicism 9, 20, 32, 45, 52–3, 84, 97–8, 115, 158, 195, 216, 233–4 vernacular stoicism 67, 49 superhero 105, 180 sword and sandal genre 6, 7, 21, 23, 25, 62, 71, 80, 84, 86, 104,

Index

119–120, 127, 138, 140, 146, 149, 170, 184, 191, 193–6, 231, 233–4, 250 n.20, 253 n.5 sword and sandal television genre 64, 82–3 Tekken (2010), [Film] 5, 49, 146, 220 Ten Gladiators, The/The Ten Desperate Men/I dieci gladiatori (1963), [Film] 79, 253 n.4 Terror of Rome Against the Son of Hercules, The/Maciste, gladiatore di Sparta (1964), [Film] 48–9, 78, 113, 121 Thor and the Amazon Women (1963), [Film] 5, 27, 50, 89, 100, 175, 180–1, 197–8, 231 Thor: Ragnarok (2017), [Film] 5, 72, 96, 106–7, 111–12, 238 torture 97, 127, 146, 175, 192, 221–2 trial by battle 104, 214 Triumph of the Ten Gladiators/ Il trionfo dei dieci gladiatori (1964), [Film] 70, 79, 107, 111–2 thumbs up/down (pollice verso) 24, 25, 28, 40, 93, 111, 172–3, 214, 226, 232

291

Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) 17, 42, 72 Venationes (beast hunts) 35, 38, 47, 104, 126 Vesuvius 8, 37, 51, 69, 136, 147, 149, 151, 155, 157–164, 229, 256 n.12, 256 n.14 Virgil 218–9 virtus (Roman manly virtue) 29, 32, 35, 48, 53, 58–60, 143, 210–1, 252 n.14 western (genre) 71, 91, 254 n.10 Wiedemann, T. 34–35, 43, 58, 66, 97, 101, 195, 251 n.2, 252 n.10, 255 n.3 Williams, M. 36, 51, 84, 116, 127, 142–143, 150, 155–6, 178, 191, 194–5, 207, 256 n.5, 257 n.7, 257 n.8 Winckelmann, J.J. 194–5, 199 Wonder Woman (2017), [Film] 175–6, 187 Wyke, M. 152, 194, 250 n.21, 253 n.9, 254 n.10

292