Hans Zimmer, Ridley Scott, and the Proper Length of the Gladius

HISTORY GOES TO THE MOVIES: HANS ZIMMER, RIDLEY SCOTT, AND THE PROPER LENGTH OF THE GLADIUS Kay Dreyfus (SOPHIS, Monash University) In his article “Hollywood’s German Fantasy: Ridley Scott’s Gladiator,” Marc A. Weiner does something that is quite novel in the literature of film as history. He bases an historical reading of Scott’s Roman epic film (2000) on a close analysis of two seminal music cues.1 Briefly told, the film’s narrative is an invention that draws on certain historical elements—the death of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius in AD180 and the succession of his son, Commodus—but develops a fictional story around the character of General Maximus Decimus Meridius, a Spanish farmer and landowner turned soldier who, having defeated the barbarians of the north in a battle in Germania, is betrayed by the treachery of Commodus. (Maximus’s Spanish origins are perhaps the only link between this essay and the research interests of the dedicatee of this book.) Maximus becomes a slave, then a gladiator, and finally a saviour of Rome; he is the gladiator of the film’s title and the story concerns his journey.2 Weiner’s reading of the film focuses on the musical underpinning of two key moments: the first an evocation of the opening bars of the Prelude to Götterdämmerung (with its echoes of the prelude to Das Rheingold) that accompanies the audience’s first view of the ancient city of Rome; the second, a reminiscence of the opening of Siegfried’s “Funeral March” that is heard at the moment when Maximus, a masked gladiator, reveals his true identity to Commodus at the conclusion of a great battle in the arena of the Coliseum. The Wagnerian emphasis emerges from the study in which Weiner’s essay is published, a collection of writings on Wagner and Cinema. Of course there is more to Weiner’s reading than a consideration of the music alone; as he writes, the function of the music is reinforced by a number of other signs within the film, iconographic, textual, cinematic and so forth. But while the vision of Rome that is _____________________ 1 Marc A. Weiner, “Hollywood’s German Fantasy: Ridley Scott’s Gladiator,” in Wagner & Cinema, ed. Jeongwon Joe and Sander L. Gilman (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010), 186–209. 2 A detailed study of the development of the script by two of its three different writers— David Franzoni, John Logan and William Nicholson—each of whom brought particular dramatic qualities to the final filmed version, may be found in Jon Solomon, “Gladiator from Screenplay to Screen,” in Gladiator Film and History, ed. Martin M. Winkler (Malden MA, Oxford and Carlton Vic: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2005), 1–15. 41 the starting point for his discussion is defined equally in significance by cinematic imagery and music, the import of his second example is attributable to the music cue alone. Scholars of the potential or particular character of film as history do not in general pay much heed to music or, if they acknowledge music as an element that differentiates film history from written history, they do not accord it a function of any importance. Hayden Whyte may have coined the term “historiophoty” to cover the role of images in film history, but no such term has appeared to capture the role of music. For Marnie Hughes-Warrington, for example, music has only ancillary functions: it serves to “foster the conscious appreciation of films as illusions” and becomes a merchandising and marketing element that assists saturation promotion of the film.3 Her last observation could certainly be said to be true of the soundtrack to Gladiator: as the recipient of a number of industry awards and nominations, the original soundtrack spawned a sequel, More Music from the Motion Picture Gladiator (2001), and a cinematic clone in the Franzoni-Zimmer collaboration King Arthur (2004).4 Scholars of music in film, on the other hand, ascribe a central role to the affective power of music. In direct contradiction to Hughes-Warrington’s idea that music distances the viewer from the filmic illusion, Anahid Kassabian, for example, asserts that music functions to draw the viewer into the illusion. Music, according to Kassabian, is “at least as significant as the visual and narrative components that have dominated film studies. It conditions identification processes, the encounters between film texts and filmgoers’ psyches.”5 Weiner introduces a different element into the debate: for him it is not just the presence of music but the particular style of the music—in this instance, the evocation of the music of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen—that invests these scenes in Gladiator with what he calls “ideological importance.” 6 His discussion beautifully exemplifies Robert Rosenstone’s recognition that “[an] important part of [a] film’s creative strategy for rendering the past comes in its use of the soundtrack . to render historical complexities not easily obtainable by the written word.”7 Taking Weiner’s _____________________ 3 Marnie Hughes-Warrington, History Goes to the Movies: Studying History on Film (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 157 and 166. 4 For a discussion of the King Arthur soundtrack as an attempt to recreate the success of Gladiator, see the unattributed “Filmtracks Editorial Review.” Accessed October 2012, http://www.filmtracks.com/titles/king_arthur.html. 5 Anahid Kassabian, Hearing Film. Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 1. 6 Weiner, “Hollywood’s German Fantasy,” 186. 7 Robert A. Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to our Idea of History (Cambridge Mass and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), 149. He gives the single example, from the film Walker, of the use of joyous music as a counterpoint to images of death and 42 article as its point of departure, this essay aims to look more broadly at the soundtrack to Gladiator with a view to suggesting how, and in what ways, the music contributes to our engagement with the film. In so doing, I will look at elements that are not considered in Weiner’s discussion: the role of Lisa Gerrard (Hans Zimmer’s creative collaborator), the shaping influence of the film’s genre on musical style and choices, and the fact that the soundtrack references iconic elements of the music of other composers than Wagner, most notably Gustav Holst. Since, it is claimed, music mediates in very particular ways between the film and its viewers, I will attempt to scrutinise the potential of Hughes- Warrington’s statement that “Any search for the reality of historical films is thus a search for viewer responses.”8 Gladiator facts and figures Gladiator is loosely based on events that occurred in the Roman empire in around AD 179−180. It has been described as a remake of the 1960s Hollywood film The Fall of the Roman Empire; Ridley Scott attested to the influence of two other films, Spartacus and Ben Hur.9 A nineteenth-century painting entitled Pollice Verso (Thumbs Down) (1872), by French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme, was also an important source of inspiration for the film’s gladiatorial motif. As in Shakespeare’s so-called historical plays, events and characters are freely interpreted and historically real characters exist alongside others who are inventions or composites. The result is a mixture of fact and fiction in which, as Martin M. Winkler notes, “the story takes precedence.”10 Riding on the back of the film’s success, and of its interest as the first historical epic set in Roman times to be produced in Hollywood since the mid 1960s, Winkler, a classical scholar, assembled a volume of essays devoted to various aspects of the film, with an emphasis on its status as historical. The conclusions of the writers, who included the film’s historical consultant, were generally negative on this count: “Right from the opening scene, the film’s historical inaccuracies are, well, legion.”11 ___________________________________________ destruction in war. A similar example occurs at the end of the opening battle sequence in Gladiator and will be discussed below. 8 Hughes-Warrington, History Goes to the Movies, 111. 9 http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Gladiator_%282000_film%29. Accessed December 2012. An excellent synopsis of the plot may also be found on this site. 10 Martin M. Winkler, “Gladiator and the Traditions of Historical Cinema,” in Gladiator Film and History, ed. Winkler, 17. 11 Allen M. Ward, “Gladiator in Historical Perspective,” in Gladiator Film and History, ed. Winkler, 31. 43 Hans Zimmer, Ridley Scott, and the proper length of the gladius Aside from Weiner’s eloquent but selective discussion, consideration of the music of Gladiator is situated at the opposite end of the discourse continuum from the academic critiques of the film as history: blog discussions of the Holst estate’s lawsuit claim over alleged plagiarism of “Mars” from Holsts’s The Planets, an online review of the soundtrack CD and an online interview with Hans Zimmer hardly tip the scales. This despite the fact that the soundtrack album was a significant success for Universal and Decca, selling more than three million copies worldwide.12 Zimmer received an Oscar nomination for the score, though in fact it was the result of a number of collaborations, most notably with Lisa Gerrard, but also with German film composer Klaus Badelt and duduk virtuoso Djivan Gasparyan.13 Though it did not win the Oscar, the soundtrack attracted a host of other nominations and awards,14 which has led to the claim that the soundtrack, along

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