Spartacus vs Gladiator: conflicting ideologies

Rating: 9/10 (9 February 2005)

SPARTACUS dir by Stanley Kubrick based on blacklisted writer, Howard Fast's 1952 novel Historian Durant was an adviser.
Won Oscars for best supporting actor and best cinematography. Amazing that it is in many ways a better film than Ridley's "Gladiator" which won best pic of 2001, yet Spartacus was made 41 years ago. It is an epic look at the underbelly of the Roman Empire, with allegorical overtones about the McCarthy era House Un-American Activities Committee. Like "Gladiator", there is a struggle between the aristocratic class and the senate. In an obvious scene, the patrician aristocrat, Glaucus, holds up a list of names of those to be arrested. The leading senator himself is eventually brought by force from his home to the senate to listen to the aristocrat's demands.
Impressive scenes throughout, without aid of computer technology. Kubrick gives us a vision of the carnage after a major defeat of the slave army. Hundreds of remaining male slaves are crucified along the highway leading back to Rome.
A romantic plot is overlaid on this by Hollywood, as usual. The dismal tragedy of the execution of Spartacus is mollified by the idea that his infant son will live in freedom. This was to suggest, prophetically we can see today, that the future generation of Americans would be free from the paranoid injustice of McCarthyism.
Where Kubrick's is ideologically superior to the new Gladiator is that it dramatizes the oppressed dignity of the working class against the corrupt decadence of the owners. But in "Gladiator", the hero is a military general, defeating the barbarians at first. He is an imperialist who dreams of private life, and his story unfolds as an individualist. He does not inspire an uprising of slaves who seek their liberty. Instead he inspires admiration for his individual struggle for vengeance. It is a simple revenge plot of justified violence, parading its own hypocrisy openly. The film pretends to be critical of Roman blood-lust, which creates violence as a spectacle of entertainment; yet "Gladiator" itself won the prize precisely by representing a spectacle of violence (or to be more accurate, it won by deploying this hypocrisy of glamorizing violence while moralizing against it--the most common technique in movies today). In contrast, "Spartacus" represents much justified violence on the part of the slave uprising, but it leaves us with a distaste for the struggle.