The New Global Empire Casts a Nervous Glance Backwards
by Ray Cassin
April 24, 2001

Can there be anything left to say about Gladiator, the film in which Russell Crowe plays a Roman general-turned-gladiator who saves Rome by killing the evil emperor Commodus in the arena? As a matter of fact, there is.

But relax. What follows is not yet another critical deconstruction of Gladiator as either a splatter movie (yes, there’s quite a lot of blood in it, it’s about gladiators) or a homoerotic fantasy (yes, there are a lot of muscular men in short skirts in it , it’s about gladiators). Nor is what follows an attempt to disentangle the fact from the fiction in this purportedly historical film. Dennis Pryor, among others, has already done that (The Age, 24/5/00). There are things to be said, however, about Hollywood’s use and abuse of history in Gladiator that go beyond identifying what Ridley Scott and co. got wrong. As Pryor has reminded us, the historical Commodus was not killed in gladiatorial combat with a former general. In fact, he didn’t die in the arena at all, but was strangled in his bath by a professional wrestler who had been put up to it by the emperor’s mistress, Marcia. And none of those who were relieved by the demise of the megalomaniacal Commodus could seriously have expected it to herald the revival of Rome’s ancient republic constitution. The republic had already been dead for two centuries by the time Commodus became emperor.

The curious thing about Gladiator’s unhistorical denouement, however, is that Hollywood has killed Commodus off in virtually the same fictitious fashion before. The 1964 Anthony Mann film The Fall of the Roman Empire also had a plot based on a former general’s resistance to Commodus, and also culminated in the general’s single-handed despatching of the dastardly despot. Recycling old plots is common practice in Hollywood, of course, but, in this case I think, the explanation does not lie in the preference of screenwriters for tested formulas. That preference usually attaches to formulas that have made money, and The Fall of the Roman Empire, though as lavish a production in its time as Gladiator is now, was a dud at the box office.

A deeper explanation may lie in another Hollywood preference, for plots in which a good man (it usually is a man) slugs it out with the bad guy and, against all the odds, wins. By Hollywood logic, if American individualism is a good enough ethos for dubiously historical Westerns, it ought to be good enough for dubiously historical Roman epics too.

There is certainly something of this in Gladiator and The Fall of the Roman Empire, but I suspect that the real connection between these films and the cultural anxieties of modern America lies deeper still. The hint is in the title of Mann’s film, which alludes to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon began his history with a survey of the Roman empire under Commodus’s father, Marcus Aurelius.

Under Marcus Aurelius’s immediate predecessors, the empire had reached its greatest extent, with a single political entity and a shared Graeco-Roman culture extending around the Mediterranean basin and north to the Rhine and Danube frontiers. It was an age of stability, prosperity and relative ease of communication that was not rivalled again in Europe until the 18^th century. The only other potential world power was China, which was too remote to be of much interest. Until today, the Roman empire in the second century AD provided the chief example of what a globalised world would look like.

For Gibbon, the significance of Commodus is that the rot began with him. The empire never entirely regained the secure civilised existence it had known under Marcus Aurelius, and Gibbon apportions greater blame to the consequences of Commodus’s decadence and self-aggrandisement than to the eventual inroads of the barbarian tribes wandering beyond the empire’s frontiers.

The moral of Gibbon’s story was that the real barbarians were already inside the gates. It is not surprising, in a new age of globalism, that people should still be looking for them. The West has a cultural memory of how precarious the last one turned out to be. And that anxiety has surfaced in Hollywood, the culture factory of the new global empire.

Ray Cassin is a staff writer for The Age and The Sunday Age (Australia).