Ridley Scott’s Gladiator released in 2000 explores a number of important issues that are not limited in time or in space. This is not just a story that could have happened in the Roman Empire with a Roman military general only. It is a universal story about family values, loyalty, justice, friendship and a lot more. One of the main themes of the film is the struggle for fairness. Gladiator advocates the idea of a regime without totalitarianism and argues against the dictatorship in any form. One of the primary forms of inequality in the Roman Empire was the distribution of wealth, and that is one of the areas that this film confronts head-on.
The protagonist of the film, a former military general, Maximus opposes the system. Maximus is a successful and loyal warrior. He is not willing to become a party to any political intrigues or a driving force of some political coup. However, he is forced to change his life completely and to confront Commodus’ authoritarian rule. Maximus’ military victories impressed the former Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Aurelius is dying and he does not want to make his son, Commodus, an heir to the throne. Aurelius decides to change the system of governance and to return the power to the Roman Senate, which would make the system of public management of the Roman Empire less totalitarian. However, the Senate was still largely an oligarchy, more so than a republic. For this incrementalist purpose, Aurelius appoints Maximus as a temporary leader. Unfortunately, this appointment fails to be effected. Aurelius gives Maximus time to think about his offer, while Commodus kills his father at discovering Aurelius’ wish to deprive Commodus of the throne and prevents Aurelius’ plans of transfer of authority from execution. Maximus’ family is killed by Commodus’ order and he becomes first an outcast and then an enslaved Gladiator.
Aurelius’ last wish was to make the Roman Empire a republic, i.e. to give the power of decision-making to people. Maximus becomes an efficient instrument of implementing Aurelius’ last will. The idea of less totalitarian governance is one message of Gladiator. Maximus approaches successful realization of this idea with the help of a Marxist concept, namely social mobility. In the beginning of the film, Maximus fills a high rank position of a military general. He is just one step from becoming the leader of the entire Roman Empire when Aurelius chooses him as a temporary successor. However, Commodus’ treachery makes Maximus start his ascent to power from the lowest social class. First, Maximus becomes a slave. Slaves did not actually form any social class in the Roman Empire. They were possessions, material objects with no rights or freedoms. Maximus’ rise is a picture of the Marxist idea of the proletarian man overturning the bourgeoisie and awakening a hunger in the lowest classes for equality and shared power.
One important element in this film when one looks at it from a Marxist perspective has to do with the filmmaking itself. As Martin Winkler points out, a lot of the visual design of the film reinforces the ubiquitous nature of the oppressive institutions at work in the story. If you look at the way so many different locations (North Africa, Germany, Spain and Rome itself) have already taken on an imperialist look, and you take a look at the apparently globalist conspiracy that has taken over so much of the known world, one sees that while Aurelius has been delivering his “bread and circuses” to the people, the empire has been slowly building itself. This is an interesting comment because the time Aurelius realizes what has happened, the momentum of empire is apparently too swift to stop. The fact that the film demonstrates a “self-congratulation about the power of the medium” (Winkler, p. 172) indicates much the same message as Aurelius’ patricide: the well-intentioned restrictions on empire are often too late to have any real effectiveness. Aurelius wanted to keep the wicked Commodus out of power, and he ended up dead under the weight of the pillow that Commodus held. Commodus would fall to Maximus, but if you’ve paid attention to your history, you know that Rome did not transition into its former republic self; the machinery was too far along to allow that to happen. Rome remained an empire, for better or for worse, until the German tribes tore the western part apart, limb by limb, and the Ottoman Turks worked their own destruction on the eastern half centuries later.
It is important to remember, of course, that Marxism did not come about as a result of frustration with the ways of the Roman Empire. Rather, it came about as a critique of capitalism. Indeed, his “dilalectical approachinsures that his fuller subject is always capitalist society as it developed and is still developing” (Ollman, web). He developed a theory of alienation that addressed the ways in which the process of earning a living affects people’s minds, bodies and everyday lives. In a capitalist society, the workers do not own the means that they use in their work (factories, raw materials, machines and so forth). In ancient Rome, of course, this was not as much of an issue. There were some wide-scale projects, such as the architectural buildings and the aqueducts, but there were not the sort of large-scale works that would later become the property of Capital in the time when Marx proposed his theories. So when one takes a look at Marxist critiques at work in Gladiator, one soon realizes that one is not really look at Rome at all but at a later context – the American system.
Of course, one thing that has been a constant since the very first conquests is that the conquering power did so to bring civilization or some other sort of hazy blessing to the people that they were taking over in order to increase their own holdings and their own power. This was true of the Spanish conquistadores – who purported to head across the Atlantic Ocean for the triumvirate of God, Gold and Glory, although perhaps never in that order – and it was true of the British Empire, who had that unfortunate poem “The White Man’s Burden” ooze from the pen of Rudyard Kipling. It also showed up in the American doctrine of “Manifest Destiny,” which held that it was somehow the God-given mission of the United States to spread all the way from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, no matter how many Native American tribes lived in the lands between them and threatened to keep them from erecting their own barbed-wire fences, shooting as many bison as they could and digging ruthlessly for gold, and then later for oil and other treasures lurking deep beneath the soil that the Native Americans had perhaps thought was the base of the carpet that the spirits had laid across the world.
Maximus’ full name is Maximus Lucius, which kindly enough means “full light.” The implication, of course, could be that he is destined to bring enlightenment to the Roman Empire. He is also referred to as the Spaniard, as those in power want to call out his genetically murky origins as a way of keeping him low as well. However, his quarrel does not seem to be with Empire itself. After all, he is Aurelius’ faithful servant and never calls into question the duties that he is assigned or the structure in which he lives. His real problem seems to be the young Commodus, who has enough oddities of his own, such as wanting to have sex with his sister but seeming awfully squeamish when it comes time to do so. Commodus is to the Empire as Claudius was to Denmark, or as Richard Nixon was to the United States. His remaining in power was such an odious thing that it raised the sort of ire that led to an overthrow. Whereas Maximus seems to embody the equivalent of the young George Washington or Abraham Lincoln (although his musculature indicates that chopping down that mythical cherry tree or splitting those logs might be beneath him), Commodus is the decadent figure, the one who has taken too much for granted, has allowed the material need for power to seep into his very bones. After all Claudius only came to power because he slew his brother in the most cowardly way (while he was sleeping) and then wedded the widow he had just made, before politically maneuvering the young Hamlet out of the way and snatching the election to the throne. Richard Nixon was not a materially decadent President, but the lust for power turned into a paranoia that motivated him to involve himself with a break-in that, taken by itself, probably was not all that much of an issue (particularly given the ethical corrosion that the Oval Office suffered between 1992 and 2000 and seems headed for once again, no matter whether it is the Donald or Hillary Clinton who will occupy it next January), but it was the lying and the fear that ended up driving Nixon into the only resignation in American Presidential history. Commodus’ incest serves to make him more disgusting and to place him in direct contrast with Maximus, whom Commodus’ sister clearly prefers.
The fact that Commodus kills Maximus’ heteronormative family throws this contrast into even a starker relief. The argument between the two men is intensely personal in nature, which at first seems to be at odds with the idea of Marxism. After all, Marxism is about means of production, about ownership, about oppression of groups rather than conflicts between individuals, and it is fairly clear that if Maximus hadn’t been in the favor of Commodus, none of this would happened. It could be that this is to hook the interest of the audience (after all, there are not many successful films that analyze the movement of people with respect to the means of production) but it also gives the film its authenticity. After all, what caused Marxism to fail so utterly in its Chinese and Soviet iterations came from its personal factors. George Orwell documented this vividly, of course, in his parable Animal Farm, in which the rightly chosen pigs ended up taking the leadership away from the other animals, first declaring that equality really is not equality (because some were more equal than others) and then simply moving into the farmer’s house, wearing his clothes, having dinner with his friends and starting to look more and more like the other humans – in other words, joining Capital. Orwell’s critique was that when people are in charge of managing the gears of socialism, they start grabbing for themselves first, forgetting that egalitarianism that is supposed to be the foundation of Marx’s system of thought. This is how the Soviet Union’s Five-Year Plans turned into a division between those who had a dacha and those who lived in dark, sour tenements rather than the egalitarian paradise that Lenin had laid out for the Bolsheviks in encouraging them to get rid of those pesky tsars.
In Gladiator, though, the Marxist critique comes in its depiction of the average man. Maximus starts out as a general but ends up in the proletariat, chained to the other gladiators and living a life of servitude. Whatever happy republic may have emerged centuries before, the empire is now a regime that uses the fear of the Legion to impose its will on its subjects, and anyone who would raise a finger against the Emperor finds himself and his family burned – much like Maximus. If there is Capital here, it is the Empire itself, and the means of production have instead become the means of domination. Consider the opening scene, in which Aurelius’ forces are taking on the Germanian tribes in a battle that matches greater numbers and technology (such as it was) against guile and courage. The combat slows and incorporates firework shots as part of its shoving the audience forward into a consideration of the modern (????, p. 67). The bizarre confrontations between mounted cavalry and tanks and/or artillery that occasionally popped their heads up in World War I and World War II come to mind here, and it remains one of the grand ironies of history that the Germanic tribes were able to gnaw away at the moral and emotional core of the Roman Empire until they finally corroded the Legions and shut down Rome itself. Here, though, the battle between Rome and the tribes is the battle of Capital and Labor, as it shows what would happen if those who were oppressed actually decided to rise up and take on the forces that had held them in. If the Romanovs had only made it forty more years, it would have been unthinkable for a ragtag collection of proletarians to overthrow their court, because of the technology that the Romanovs would have had at their disposal to defuse the threat and send the great unwashed on their way. In our own time, it will be interesting to see how any sort of proletarian uprising that finds its way around the distractions of cable television and smartphones ends up working itself out, whether through the Ethernet cables or through the streets, or both. What Gladiator teaches us about the Marxist struggle is that there is always a tension between power and people that no idealistic brush will ever be able to sweep completely away.
Works Cited
Nelmes, Jill. Introduction to Film Studies. 5th ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2012.
Ollman, Bertell. “What is Marxism? A Bird’s Eye View.” NYU n.d. Web. 27 April 2016.
Forsyth, Scott. “Marxism, Film and Theory: From the Barricades to Postmodernism.” Web. 19 Apr. 2016. <file:///C:/Users/HP/Downloads/5692-7587-1-PB.pdf>
Wilson, Rob. “Ridley Scott’s Gladiator and the Spectacle of Empire: Global/Local Rumblings inside the Pax Americana.” English Journal of American Culture 21(2): 62-73.
Winkler, Martin. Gladiator, Film and History. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.
