RAIN, STEAM AND SPEED by Huddled McMasses

The American founding fathers took classical Rome as the model for their new Republic. Huddled McMasses examines the development of that story in a tale of two films with classical, particularly Roman, avatars – Gladiator I and II. He sees American popular culture as a mirror held up to the current drift to greater authoritarianism and more rigid patriarchical political structures.

In Fascinating Fascism, Susan Sontag explores the aesthetics of power, observing how the dramaturgy that defines fascist regimes is underpinned by the idea of an ascent towards a high moral goal that can only be arrived at through extravagant effort and physical ordeal. These underlying virtues are ultimately tethered to heroic figures that emphasize control, submission to whose example promises ´the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community´ (Sontag, 2009, p. 96). Sontag observes how this model, detached from its association with violence and oppression, is consistent with how subjectivity is oriented under banners not recognized immediately as fascist, and indeed the above description sounds a lot like the paradigms that discern many spheres of human existence.

Ursula K. Le. Guin notes that the stability of such relations, between a vital embodiment of ideology and obeisance, requires a stable, un-interrupted, field of vision between the object of attention and the subjects it orients, in which dynamic the ´hero´ needs ´a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle´ (Le Guin, 2019, p. 35). Today though, where subjectivity is no longer created and unified by a particular gaze, but is rather overwhelmed, dissociated, and ultimately co-opted into the production of heterogeneous and overlapping points of perspective (aka ´content´), traditional modes of seeing and feeling, and the iconography long constituting realities, are involved in a much more complicated, multifocal, landscape.

At the end of 2024 Gladiator II was released into cinemas. It’s predecessor, Gladiator, came out 24 years prior, to much reverence, and is now considered a landmark film, particularly for its leading actor Russel Crowe´s performance, as Maximus. Crowe´s/Maximus´ image defines the film: an Olympian figure of vitality, poised as ‘a site of agonizingly laborious virtue’ (Barthes, 2013, p. 20).

Gladiator primarily follows Maximus, who, initially driven by murderous revenge against despotic emperor Commodus, positions himself at the locus of Commodus´ political power: an enormous media operation centering gladiatorial reenactments of historical Roman conquests, held in the arena of the Colosseum. As a Gladiator, Maximus wields the power of celebrity, giving him his opportunity to kill Commodus, in a duel that also claims his own life. In the end, Maximus´ actions are no longer driven by personal revenge, but are compelled by altruism, and with his dying words he abolishes absolute rulership, restoring democracy to Rome.

Although Gladiator is objectively critical of imperialism and authoritarianism, and indeed the very institution to which it belongs, mainstream media and entertainment, it is ultimately like its own portrayal of the spectacles that take place in the arena, in that it is a story of morality; an ‘intelligible spectacle’ (Barthes, 2013, p. 9), where a courageous ascent to victory is centered around an exemplary figure of honor, integrity and ultimately justice, capable of and willing to exercise extreme violence, in the most recognizable of mainstream cinematic projections: European of some description, heterosexual and masculine. Into the exaltation of this archetype, all other roles and visual signifiers, and subsequently the film´s audience themselves, are pressed into service.

Gladiator appeared at the end of a period where a disaffection for the mainstream societal values and pieties set in during the 1980s had come to permeate western popular culture. Heroism in this context popularly took the form of apparent dissent from conventional values, seen more in music than in film, embodied by avatars more aptly described as antiheros than heroes. In spite of a popular culture otherwise colored by transvaluation though, the reception of Gladiator´s classical expression of ´goodness´ ultimately reflects a prevailing taste for the monumental above all else. Aditionally, Gladiator´s burly expression of justice and legitimized violence fell just a few months before the events of 9/11, the catalyst for a broad cultural return to sincerity in the west. Conservative expressions of heroism can then be seen applied throughout much of popular culture of the proceeding decade, amidst a rejuvenated era of American Exceptionalism.

Much has changed since the time of Gladiator´s release though, most significantly the media landscape into which its sequel was introduced. Gladiator II is set 16 years after the events of its predecessor, and essentially repeats the same story. This time, Maximus´ son Lucius, played by Paul Mescal, is in the role of the hero, although amongst a much more convoluted narrative context than the original, of which at times it seems almost satirical. One of Gladiator II´s main criticisms has been that its hero doesn’t hold our attention in the way that Gladiator’s did. Indeed, what defines the first film is its concision, in keeping all the action ultimately tethered to Maximus. In comparison, Gladiator 2 comes across more like a mash up of elements, some of which echo the first film and others that would seem feverishly out of place among the original, with the hero´s story, embodied by Lucius, at times disappearing into the tumult. Gladiator reflects a time where monumental sincerity, as an organizing paradigm, can still triumph amongst conditions apparently antagonistic to it, whereas the shape of Gladiator II tells of a moment where this is no longer the case.

Writing in 2011, Hito Steyerl tries to make sense of a moment where our collective sense of subjectivity has changed dramatically due to the emergence and acceleration of new visual technologies. Steyerl describes a moment where ‘linear perspective’, as an original principle of representation, is impaired among a radically contemporary, multifocal, visual field. Steyerl notes that although violations of the authority of linear perspective were already apparent in the 19th century, in the paintings of J. M. W. Turner for example, it is really in the years recent to the time of Steyerl´s writing that we can see a more radical displacement of this paradigm, upon which stable concepts of time and space, subject and object, and thus foundational political myths are based.

Conclusion

Steyerl likens the resulting experience to that of being in a state of ‘free fall’, in which context the horizon ´quivers in a maze of collapsing lines, and you may lose any sense of above and below, of before and after, of yourself and your boundaries’ (Steyerl, 2012, p.13). Steyerl distinguishes her time as being one of ‘a prevailing condition of groundlessness’ (Steyerl, 2012, p.13), where the public are, at best, ´faced with temporary, contingent and partial attempts at grounding (Steyerl, 2012, p.13). This description, fourteen years after it was written, seems perfect for the present moment, in light of an increasingly anarchic plurality of media.

In spite of this plurality, that in a sense democratizes discourse, media is still heavily mediated, with narratives eagerly pursued by elite forces. Amongst conditions that are pluralistic though, the desire for absolutism – itself already a type of cognitive distortion – appears more apparently demented and dysfunctional. This can be seen emanating from the U.S. leadership currently as it insists upon the most engorged signs of Olympian prowess, like a kind of rabid simulacrum of the ideal that is its referent, reactively contemptuous of any form of intellect that is reflective or critical. The hubris on display here intersects with that of newer social platforms and spheres of influence, particularly those sycophantic towards the hyper expression of patriarchal values and prerogatives. The invocation occurring here appears with an air of desperation, protesting for our attention in a manner that is indistinguishable from satire, imploring us to believe in delusions of extreme mastery, as though afraid if it stops to take a breath it might disappear into the tumult of other visualities. Paradoxically though, this type of performativity, of what appears like blatant parody, achieves the same ends as an archetype would in a more parochial setting, ultimately participating in a climate of overstimulation, where the repudiation of intellect through distraction seems to be prevailing state of affairs.

This is indeed the dynamic that defines the current moment in general, an intensifying jumble of sincerity and irony, realism and idealism, conspiracy and fact, echoing Steyerl´s notion of a circumstance where ´horizons have, in fact, been shattered. Time is out of joint and we no longer know if we are objects or subjects as we spiral down in an imperceptible free fall.´ (Steyerl, 2012, p. 26).

What emerges at the end of this cascade must surely be quite different in nature to what has gone before. For now though, it can often seem that acceptance is simply the only response to the current circumstance, as, ´grappling with crumbling futures that propel us backward onto an agonizing present, we may realize that the place we are falling toward is no longer grounded, nor is it stable. It promises no community, but a shifting formation.´ (Steyerl, 2012, p.28).