Dreams of Empire

Gladiator II is not a good movie, but how it fails makes it a fascinating one. It is a rare movie that so stridently tells the exact opposite story its director thinks it's telling. And here’s the thing: the story that Gladiator II does not think it is pretty great precisely because it is buried within what is a downright mediocre film. The better movie (incarnated in the swaggering, grinning, and maniacal Macrinus played by Denzel Washington) offers a bracing allegory of American empire and decline, the morbid fascination of chickens coming home to roost, and the catharsis of righteous rage against the accumulation of generations of humiliation and oppression. Counterposed to Washington is the youthful visage of Paul Mescal’s Lucius who promises not decline, but renewal. Not retribution, but redemption. Not the weight of the past, but the lightness of the future. What makes Gladiator II simultaneously work and fail is that it cannot help but avow what it so desperately wants to repress: that Washington’s character, a charismatic well of negativity, is the true protagonist and all other characters are marching to the beat of his drum.

The movie begins with the announcement that Rome has fallen into decay and corruption as embodied by the twin emperors (Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger) who now rule Rome. We soon learn that Russell Crowe’s character from the first Gladiator movie had a son (Paul Mescal’s Lucius) with the daughter (Connie Nielsen) of a previous emperor—Marcus Aurelius. If you are wondering if you missed any mention of this child belonging to Russell Crowe in the previous Gladiator movie, you hadn’t. This plot point inadvertently makes Mescal’s character appear as a sort of deus ex machina whose royal blood will prove that the dream of Rome may finally be realized. However, from another angle forcing Mescal’s character to be the son of Maximus who is also sold into slavery only to become a gladiator fighting for truth, justice, and the power of the senate makes one think that Ridley Scott’s Rome is a sort of hell where time is a flat circle. This outcome is so unlikely that one wishes that there had been at least one scene where the characters looked at one another and said, “What? Again?” At least this level of self-reflection would have given the characters some insight into the true essence of the Rome they so wish to save: an empire that enslaves so widely will eventually enslave a dead gladiator’s son who had been hidden away in Africa.

Rome, it seems, is condemned to a cycle of corrupt emperors and being saved by the bloodline of another emperor (who is actually good). By making Lucius not only the son of the previous film’s gladiator, but literally a descendent of a previous emperor the movie strips away the veneer of the future that the movie insists Mescal represents. In reality, Mescal’s character is revealed to be pure, uncut nostalgia for a time of benevolent rulers, a return to when we could believe that the empire’s best days are ahead. By the end of the movie, Mescal’s Lucius seems to have become the new emperor of Rome asking his dead father for the wisdom of what to do next. Well. Perhaps we really could vote for Obama a third time!  

What is baffling about this ending is that Mescal doesn’t even rescue Rome from the corrupt emperors—that job is left to Denzel Washington who assassinates the twins. His true motivations—which only become clear in the climax—emerge when Washington reveals to Connie Nielsen that he was once enslaved by her father Marcus Aurelius. A real black eye for the legacy of the philosopher-king whose dream of Rome almost every character in the movie seems obsessed with realizing…except it must have been no secret that Aurelius conquered and enslaved all sorts of peoples during his tenure as emperor. Washington has never forgotten the humiliation of being enslaved and has set his entire life course on the objective of bringing Rome to an end. Fascinatingly, where all the other characters see the dream deferred of Aurelius’s Rome, Washington only sees a black nightmare at the heart of Rome where might makes right. In fact, Washington himself proclaims that Rome only recognizes power, not morality.

The piousness with which all the other characters speak of Marcus Aurelius and his dream of Rome (equality before the law and popular representation via the Senate) strikes a discordant note. Even as the characters offer paeans to the need for a Roman republic rather than a Roman empire their solution to every problem is violence. Gladiators must kill to win the public to their side. Armies led by popular generals must invade Rome in order to depose the emperors. The character opposed to Macrinus may disagree with him in word, but they certainly agree in deed. Perhaps what separates Lucius and the others from Macrinus is that they believe righteousness can emerge from the blood-soaked foundations of Rome. This fascination with violence brings Ridley Scott’s Rome close to the contemporary United States, turning it into an uncanny double of American life. The hope that an act of revolutionary violence will finally inaugurate an empire of peace saturates the American polity. The seemingly tragic fate of the characters is their dream of a future moral world refuses to break with the past. Violence is all spectacle; no revolution.

At any rate, it is hard to argue with Macrinus’s read of Rome when the first movie opens with Aurelius and Maximus claiming military victory over some Germanic tribes. Aurelius wistfully wonders to Maximus how he came to preside over fields of blood rather than an era of peace. If a supposedly wise emperor—a philosopher no less!—cannot resist the pull of violence, then what hope do the rest of us have? The identification with emperors, generals, and gladiators as the arbiters of moral conscience in a heartless world might strike those with Macrinus’s perspective as rank hypocrisy. These embodiments of violence also presume to be bearers of wisdom and peace. These films function as moral salve for us, the spectators of empire, who wish to be entertained by the spectacle of violence while believing we denounce it. The gulf between these two perspectives briefly comes into view in the first movie when Maximus, after killing an opponent in a gladiator arena, turns to the crowd and bellows, “Are you not entertained?” This question of spectatorial complicity all but disappears in the sequel in an effort to retroactively redeem the Aurelius of the first movie.

Upon closer inspection, the conflict of the first Gladiator movie is not over whether emperors should rule. It concerns the question of succession. Aurelius does not think his son has the right temperament, but he believes Maximus does. Gladitor II leads us to assume that by transitive property Maximus’s son must also have the right temperament to rule. Which is fine except the Gladiator movies offer the pretense of being tales of revolution and revenge and not conserving the divine right of kings.

In this way, Washington’s Macrinus threatens to topple not only Rome, but the movie itself because it turns out that he is the most realized embodiment of revolution and revenge. Throughout the film, Washington quotes Nielsen’s father, Marcus Aurelius, to her with “The best revenge is to become unlike him who performed the injury.” Of course, the movie wants us to read this as a mad confession on Washington’s part where in contradistinction to Aurelius’s honesty and temperance he will be duplicitous and power-hungry. But this is hard to sustain when faced with the fact that Aurelius presided over literal enslavement and, thus, from another angle Macrinus looks like a liberator who has come to end the dynastic dominance of succession through bloodright. Where every other character seems to lack the self-awareness that the dream they seek to restore has created the very conditions for imperial decline, Macrinus sees through it all, grasps the essential rottenness at the core of Rome, and threatens to break the cycle through divine punishment. This has the awkward effect of placing Mescal, the putative protagonist, as the defender of the rules of order, institutionalism, and the status quo. Sound familiar?

As the film progresses, it is difficult not to become enthralled whenever Washington is on screen and this not only due to his charisma (which Mescal also has). It is because out of the entire cast Washington is the only one who actually does something. He sets the story in motion by purchasing Lucious as a gladiator. He discovers Mescal’s true identity. He foils a plot led by Pedro Pascal and Connie Nielsen to overthrow the emperors. He kills the emperors and nearly succeeds in ending Rome. You’d be forgiven for thinking that Washington was the true protagonist of the film. Where one character has pulled themselves up by their bootstraps from slavery, coming from no bloodline of renown, in a lifelong plan of vengeance against an empire is juxtaposed against a character who by the dictates of parentage and fate is destined to rule the movie suffers from a crisis of identity. If it is in film where we can project and play in our fantasies, Gladiator II attempts to make a return to rightful order the object of our desires, but Washington offers the only window beyond this eternal return of the same.

Macrinus represents another surprising break throughout both Gladiator movies: with the exception of Macrinus all of the major characters explicitly abjure politics. Both Russell Crowe and Pedro Pascal portray generals who spurn attempts by others to draw them into the political arena. The emperors across both films substitute war and gladiatorial combat for the hard work of governance. There is one scene in the first film where a senator attempts to speak to Joaquin Phoenix’s newly crowned emperor about am emerging plague in the Greek quarter of the empire only to be abruptly cut off by Phoenix’s apparent boredom and insistence that he knows what the people really want: months of games. When the twin emperors are reminded of the imperative to feed their citizens one of them gleefully exclaims, “Let them eat war!” Lucius, apart from a couple brief speeches, is primarily buffeted by the machination of Macrinus.

For his part, Macrinus happily engages in politics. He persuades, schemes, builds alliances, and preys upon his opponents insecurities and weaknesses. He represents a bleak view of politics, to be sure. Politics is nothing but corruption, deception, and vice. As one watches Macrinus it is easy to recognize a mirror of our own contemporary moment of exhausted and hollow liberalism. Macrinus depends on the existing institutions such as the Senate to secure his private gain. In a rather dramatic scene, after he has murdered one of the twin emperors and been empowered as consul to the remaining twin, Washington’s Macrinus asks the Senate to endow him with authority over the Roman army. Why bother with this ritualistic pretense of legitimacy? Well it seems Macrinus understands, and what few of the other characters grasp, is that one cannot kill their way into lasting authority; it must be politically ratified. The liberal ambivalences of Gladiator II shine forth most clearly here as we see the very institution of the Senate that is supposed to embody the dream of Rome cast the empire into perdition. We are meant to believe in the fantasy of this institution even as it continues to fail in reality. Furthermore, Macrinus loses in the end not because Lucius (or any character) has outmaneuvered, outwitted, or outclasses him, but because the film says he must. Good must triumph over Evil.

Lucius challenges Macrinus to one on one combat as two warring armies stunningly watch for some reason. In the most incomprehensible moment of the film, thousands of war-ready men watch Lucius and Macrinus battle for the soul of Rome with their swords seemingly admitting that they will follow whoever happens to win this bout of violence. Politics is converted into pure spectatorship as the core problem of Rome seems to be resolved not through the work of politics, but the clarity of violence. Upon slaying Macrinus, Lucius offers a perfunctory speech that can be summed up as, “Glad that guy is gone. You ready to make Rome great again?” Seemingly, this is enough for the thousands of soldiers who just second ago were ready to fight and kill one another. It is here that the film offers its judgment on politics as a form of action, that in the final instance, must be banished.

This contradictory interplay between politics and antipolitics, violence and nonviolence, crystallizes real anxieties in contemporary liberalism. The narrative of liberalism’s providential good sits uneasily with the violence it visits on both citizens and noncitizens alike. We would like to believe in the song of the republic, but the drums of war beat ever louder around us. This can produce nothing but a disorienting and disenchanting experience. We are caught in the crosscurrents of a yearning for a return to the future and rage towards the present. The pressure of these desires permeate Gladiator II as the film persistently misrecognizes the source of rage that has brought Rome to the brink of collapse. And it is this misrecognition where the film begins to avow that Rome itself is rotten, but hastily represses this insight into yet another speech about the dream of Marcus Aurelius.

Misrecognition, transference, and most of all doubling, reverberate throughout Ridley Scott’s unnecessary sequel. Macrinus picks Lucius as his gladiator—his “weapon” against the Roman empire—because he sees himself in Lucius. He sees the unbridled rage that we come to learn Macrinus harbors inside of himself. Or, at least, the movie has Macrinus tell us that he sees rage in Lucius, but truth be told Mescal does not play up this supposedly irrepressible rage. In what felt an unintended comedic beat, Macrinus tells Lucius of the rage that he sees in him and when the camera cuts to Mescal’s face we find an affable, young man with dreamy blue eyes, who you sense would listen to all your problems and tell you it will “all be okay.” This is not a knock against Mescal’s performance! The audience is meant to feel safe with Mescal such that even when he commits acts of violence, we know it is just. Washington’s violence, on the other hand, is filled with danger and a hint of seduction. In the two separate scenes where Washington kills each of the twin emperors, he coils around them like a snake as the camera lingers on his intimate embrace. Compared with Macrinus’s violent acts, Lucius seems clinical and perfunctory. One gets the sense that the film wants to prevent the audience from associating Mescal with violence even as we know he is a warrior of some renown. Indeed, the most brutal violence we see from Lucius is not when he eventually kills Macrinus, but when he kills a CGI monkey near the beginning of the film. Now there was rage!

Between these two we have a veritable chiaroscuro of light and dark. Perhaps we are meant to think that Macrinus has been so warped by his need for revenge that he cannot help but misrecognize Lucius as a fellow traveler. Macrinus could not help but miss that before him stood a favored son of the true Rome while he himself is the outcast progeny. The problem is that nothing we see of Rome in the movie disputes Macrinus’s vision of the world. Hence, the ambiguity of his violence. When he kills the twin emperors the scenes are played for horror, but in the last movie we couldn’t wait for Joaquin Phoenix’s emperor to meet Crowe’s just violence. Now we are meant to feel a sort of pity for these emperors who, by the end of the movie, have been manipulated and betrayed by Macrinus. From this violence the movie stumbles and muddles Washington’s character. In a stunning about face Macrinus no longer wants to end Rome because he hates it; he wants to install himself as emperor. Whatever happened to the “best revenge is to become unlike him who performed the injury”? The seductive fantasy of Macrinus’s violence must be interrupted lest he run away the story. So we must come to feel that Rome as such is not the object of our rage, but these emperors. They are unfit to rule. So let that be a lesson to any unknown upstarts who wish to upset the natural order.

In the narrative of the film, Lucius cannot truly hate this empire because this empire is home, his birthright. Yes, this empire killed his wife, but that was not the real Rome. It was a perversion of the empire. Nothing but a sick shadow of his grandfather’s dream that is quite literally led by ashen-faced twins—one half of whom we are told is slowly being driven mad by syphilis as he makes his pet monkey a citizen and advisor to Rome. Lucius offers the hope of a Rome that can be saved if only its infection could by lanced through the saving grace of the Senate. Mescal’s performance does exactly what it must even if it is not what was intended: he saves us from the seduction of Macrinus’s nihilism by allowing us to dream of empire again without guilt or complicity. Perhaps Rome is not hell after all, but a future heaven. It may be built on a pile of bones, but it also the site where the wisdom of our ancestors can call us to our better angels. In the very last shot of the movie, we see Russel Crowe’s hand floating through waves of grain in the afterlife as his son beseeches him for wisdom. From empire, may we all find this tranquility where violence brings rest, war brings peace. In the fantastic dreams of empire, (almost) anything is possible.

We never do see what all these changes will mean for the people of Rome and its subjects, but that would be a wholly different movie. Yet it is worth remarking on how absent the people are from the structure of the film. Existing just out of frame they are more myth than reality; little more than a reflection of whomever happens to be in power. As with Macrinus, the film must repress the people’s rage and displace the real political action onto the choices made by warriors and generals. If one thinks too hard this would be a disquieting place to leave what we are meant to see as a happy ending. Perhaps it is enough that we know the empire has been left in good hands. Because what matters is that we can still believe in the dream of Rome. The dream of an empire whose best days are ahead. And who amongst could not be tempted by this fantasy especially when compared with the costs of waking up?