This is undoubtedly an ugly film. From its imagery to its subject matter, Ridley Scott wallows in the baseness of rampant fascism. This complacency will certainly appeal to the nauseating tendencies of a deranged state, and its treatment of love on screen ensures that it at least lasts the full length of the film. Hidden, frivolous and relegated, it does not appear, or rather, it shines through. For homosexuality, women and tenderness have no place in this epicness. Love is translucent; death is reality. 

For Ridley Scott, a generation after his first film, which won five Oscars, buries the peplum by embracing bombastic royalism. Bombastic because the film is long above all else; bombastic because the film is hard to watch at the end. Hard to watch on the one hand because the means are so obvious; hard to watch on the other because the endings are so twisted. There's no escaping it: women are non-existent; homosexuals are evil. It's all for the sake of causing offence. Not that either of these groups cannot be portrayed as antagonists on screen, but it is done in a heavy-handed and pompous style. Ultimately, these characters are poorly represented. What could be more normal in the prevailing delirium? As much a fault of taste as a moral failing, this second opus will undoubtedly not be his magnum opus. There is, moreover, in this absolute desire to flex muscles, a homoerotic detour that would be almost interesting if only it were acknowledged... But this is not the case; homosexual eroticism is proscribed, amputated. 

Ultimately, it's as if this timidity and desire for men could find no echo in the crowd of virile boys who came to the cinema. As if masculinity could not tolerate the slightest deviation from the narrow corridor in which moral conservatism has placed it today. And it is this abandonment of man that is disturbing. This refusal to recognise that love of men among men exists. That love for men among men can exist. A love that could perhaps be defined simply as camaraderie. But no, masculinity is such a fragile thing that its mere exposure must automatically be accompanied by its negation. In this context, jus in bello is jus ad bellum, far superior to it. If men wage war against each other, they cannot fight for themselves in order to be loved by them. However, we cannot be satisfied with such a narrow view. Masculinism is therefore misandry. For this refusal to love men without women is ultimately hatred of men. Firstly, because it postulates that a man's value can only be measured by the love and recognition he receives. Secondly, because this value can only be granted by the love and recognition a woman gives him. And thirdly, and this is the most important point that can be drawn from this feature film, that a man's value cannot be granted by the love and recognition of another. Ultimately, masculinism on screen is masculinity thrown away. Thrown away because it throws in the face of men that they cannot exist as people. That they cannot be valued as people. That they cannot be loved as people. 

It is the character of a sensitive person that is forbidden to men. It is humanity that is denied to men. It is the character of a being subject to emotions and sensibilities that is forbidden to them. This terrible premise, namely that his dignity and right to live depend on what he possesses and can contribute, is nevertheless what emerges from the film. As such, his recognition in society and among his peers never comes to him as a person, but as a vehicle, an embodiment and a product. It is therefore his ability and not his thoughts that are valued. Through this virile lens, man can never be loved for himself, by himself and in himself. A man is never a person in and of himself, but always an instrument. And it is from this reification that the true enemy of men emerges. For it is the impediment to life and its possibilities; it is the impediment to freedom; the impediment to a life according to the expression of one's own will, of one's own will. It is therefore urgent to think in terms of humanism.

Humanity, which is a denial of this unreality, no longer has any meaning, for humanity is a negation of masculinism, through which this negation it aserts the existence of man. To deny virilism, this illusory happiness of men, is to demand their real happiness. To demand that they abandon all illusions about their condition is to demand that they renounce a condition that needs illusions. 

I would like to thank Le Masque et la Plume for its podcast on this film, which inspired this column and my article on the film The Substance in the previous issue. 

The American dream

After Napoleon, Scott revisits another classic subject with a bang, or rather, he crashes into it. Where the ignominy of a French people gifted with consuming and uncontrolled passions was to be broken by the stoic and phlegmatic English ranks, it is the dream and the myths that are torn apart. In this fratricidal war, clearly reminiscent of that between Octavian and Mark Antony, a clumsy sketch of the era emerges. While the Romans kill each other, a leader emerges and order is restored, and they fall back into line. However, we are talking about an empire built on money and the army, and that was the real motive, not to say the only one. Armed with a legal system that enshrined property as the appropriation of goods and men, Rome crushed the others. The author demonstrates his ability to do this and illustrates it on numerous occasions, but without really addressing it, which makes it a backdrop. The presentation of violence through violence on screen, the magnitude of which can be felt behind it. Violence, and its parasitic nature. The violence of beasts and monsters, contaminating everything. The violence of slavery. The morbid fascination with murder within the walls of the Colosseum. Previously seen through the prism of a general who “civilised” in the first film, the second presents us with someone who hates this colonisation, so everything seemed to be set up for originality, challenge and renewal, but it falls flat.

For here lies the double betrayal. Firstly, the biased interpretation offered to us, which is flawed and counterfeit. Yet the director promised an interesting reflection on the true nature of the American dream. The confrontation between a former slave for whom this dream exists but can only be the recognition of a person's value through the meritocracy of cruelty. And a new one for whom this dream never existed but could come about as the recognition of a person's value through the democracy of freedom. This is not the case. Logic would dictate that the corrupt Roman Empire would be reborn through these marginalised fringes, which are in reality the most noble, as literally personified by Hanno, at first glance. However, the barbaric aspect of the re-founding of the Roman dream is less akin to a decolonial struggle, in which, as Frantz Fanon would argue, ‘the dominated know the culture better than the dominant,’ than to a struggle for the renewal of barbarism. The term ‘revolution’ thus regains its original meaning: a return to oneself, a return to one's roots. A crowd forms, pretending to want to restore democracy in a corrupt system, but instead attacks its sacred temple to grant power to the leader who rules it. A legitimisation of a man who raises an illegal army quite disturbing… 

Secondly, there is the interpretation of the other symbols on screen. The fact that it is the black slave who is killed by a white nobleman… Without resorting to lowbrow analysis, there is despicable ideas there. Similarly, effeminate, stupids, made up, pointed at as decadent and evil. Gays are the emperors and emperors have usurped the throne. And this pettiness, this homosexuality as the embodiment of the regression of power, is not something we can be satisfied with. That is why the use of artificial intelligence adds to the stigmatization. Because it says a lot about the political colour that comes from it through its colour scheme. 

And yet, mad emperors, in the sense that they deny the reality of the world in which they live in an imperialist and colonial state, would make for a superb pamphlet. Capricious individuals who want to be truly loved without being flattered, who do not want to know whether this is true or not, whether their actions were deserved. It was all there. A triple betrayal, then, because the satire of the American buffoon and his plutocrat sidekick would have found its place in the disfigured and transfigured figures created by the cinema of these two young emperors. But no. Ridley Scott wouldn't dare. He's an advertiser, how could he not see his interests in the emergence of this new authoritarianism? 

Autoritas and imperium 

Advertising executive, as can be seen from the artistic direction, whose shots are often reminiscent of advertising spots. Advertising executive, because we dare not use the term propagandist or man in thrall to these new masters. Because there is still hope that emotion will emerge. It all comes down to a short, blue-tinged scene that we would have liked to see extended. The cleaning of the arena and the bloodstained sand, when no one is there and no one has returned. Because it channels all the points of interest in this film towards what ultimately appeared to be a renewal of the genre. The brutality and horror of a regime that subjugates, terrorises and is, at its core, truly barbaric. A regime that drives people away, that frightens them and that makes humiliation its trademark. A trademark in the literal sense through slavery and branding, but also in the figurative sense through the exercise of coercion, whose production chain has a thousand cogs. 

But there is no insolent courage in these times of globalised fascist offensive. The symbolism takes a culture literally from the underground and perverts its meaning. Thus, in the face of conquests, in the face of the character of a logic, of a coherence of colonising power, the maintenance of order, of an order, that of the patricians, of their capital and of corruption, is positively renewed. This is seen as positive. However, the parasitic nature of an emir who, wherever he settles, brings desolation, death and suffering; a violent empire where all the laws are based on the ability to endure and administer suffering, that is where the genius lay. 

The criticism is not of the gigantic collection of goods, but of the immensity of the poor, so vast that they resemble a sea. The lower classes, the beggars and the needy are forced to fend for themselves because Roma Lupa has abandoned them. It was all there. The hypocrisy of a mother and her dignitas, who did not concern herself with real problems because she did not want to deal with them. The hypocrisy of a father and his authority, who did not stop the wars because he did not want to risk losing his power. Servus and servility, two sides of the same coin, where the emperor's image on the coins bearing his effigy could not be scratched. 

The legitimacy of authority was the subject. Despotic character was the motive. Authority and Tyranny. The reiteration of the myth of the brothers, belonging to two seals: Romulus and Remus, separated by the Tiber. But we salute the actors who, despite unambitious direction and an erratic ending, were determined to give their all, whether it was Denzel Washington, Connie Nielsen, or Paul Mescal and Pedro Pascal. Vae Victis, then, for the success of this film. But, like one of the successful scenes in this peplum: what is it to pass through the Champs-Élysées haloed with glory, with all the irony of that glory, that vanity and that vulgarity? 

Bibliography:

« CRITIQUE - “Gladiator II” de Ridley Scott : “film pénible, bizarre” Ou “Pas si mal” ? L’avis du Masque ». France Inter, 24 novembre 2024, https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/podcasts/le-masque-et-la-plume/gladiator-ii-de-ridley-scott-9649907.

« “The Substance” : un body-horror “audacieux et jubilatoire” ou “complaisant et superficiel” ? L’avis du Masque ». France Inter, 17 novembre 2024, https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/podcasts/le-masque-et-la-plume/the-substance-de-coralie-fargeat-8569036.