Gladiator

8 Pages 2005 Words

inema resonate in unfamiliar ways.
The Hollywood epics of the 1950s and 1960s constructed their past worlds to explicitly mirror twentieth century American mainstream culture, reflecting in broad outline its ideologies, aspirations, delusions and concerns. Wyke observes how, as was typical of its genre, MGM's 1951 Quo Vadis "offered its American spectators self-satisfied parallels between imperial Rome and modern fascist states, between Christianity and the American Way" (1999: website). While the Hollywood epic's theatrical sets and costumes connote a freshly-laundered version of distant times and places, familiarity attaches to social and political structures (the family, Christianity, the republic) that are lifted wholesale from contemporary America and dropped, with little significant translation, into the heart of one or another ancient civilisation. Stephen Neale notes how such cinema tends to stress
the thematic and dramatic oppositions between atheism and idolatry and a belief in one true God, and between religious, political and personal freedom and the repressiveness of "totalitarian" empires, states and regimes, often represented in the ancient-world films by Egypt or Rome. (2000: 90)
Thus the eponymous hero of Spartacus (1962), a character based on a real historical figure who lived and died seventy years before the birth of Christ, is carefully constructed as a man ahead of his time - a cipher for an idealized, if unimaginative, American masculinity, individualistic, heroically proto-Christian and proto-democratic, a good "Christian" who happened to be born too early to know that he was a good Christian. Just in case its audience was in any danger of missing the point, the voice-over at the start of the film explains how the system of slavery that Spartacus failed to overthrow would soon be ended by the dawning of Christianity (thereby conv...