Ben-Hur and Gladiator: Manifest Destiny and the Contradictions of American Empire

BEN-HUR AND GLADIATOR: MANIFEST DESTINY AND THE CONTRADICTIONS OF AMERICAN EMPIRE

Jon Solomon

Of the several hundred films in the Ancient genre, not to mention all the rest of the thousands of popular films released in the last half century, few have been as financially successful, critically and publicly acclaimed, and influential in the popular culture as Ben-Hur (1959) and Gladiator (2000). MGM’s (second) cinematic adaptation of General Lew Wallace’s novel earned some $75 million while costing $15 million, won Best Picture and an unprecedented ten additional Academy Awards as well as the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Film, and helped to prescribe and reenergize Ancient films of the 1960s and beyond.1 Similarly, Gladiator grossed over $450 million while costing some $100 million, won Best Pic- ture and five additional Academy Awards, and has helped to engender a series of Ancients for both the big screen and television.2 By any measure employed to categorize popular Hollywood successes, Ben-Hur and Gladi- ator provide outstanding examples. At first blush it may seem as if these two landmark blockbusters share in common simply their ancient Roman settings, admirable and heroic protagonists, and spectacular action scenes. Other Ancients produced in the heyday of the 1950s and 1960s before and after Ben-Hur seem to

1 Cf. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052618/business. For domestic and international box office details, see Sheldon Hall and Steve Neale, Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010) 162–163. Action or farcical film representations of galley and chariot sequences include The Three Stooges Meet Her- cules (1962), The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), Titanic (1997), Any Given Sunday (1999), and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999). 2 For an overview with bibliography, see Laurence Raw, The Ridley Scott Encyclopedia (Lanham MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009) 136–141. The television legacies are the very successful Spartacus: Blood and Sand (2010) and its sequel Spartacus: Vengeance (2010, 2012) produced by Starz. Allusions to Gladiator in feature films include Shark Tale (2004), Big- ger Than the Sky (2005), Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector (2006), Pineapple Express (2008), and Finding Bliss (2010). Both Ben-Hur and Gladiator seem to have inspired the Greek gladiatorial/chariot sequence in Bedtime Stories (2008). For a negative perspective, see John D. Christian, Gladiator: Witchcraft, Propaganda, and the Rise of the World Hero (Austin TX: RiverCrest, 2001).

provide more obvious and closer comparisons with Gladiator.3 The reign of the Emperor Commodus provided the historical setting and central villain for Anthony Mann’s The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) long before Gladiator, and the philosophical presence of Marcus Aurelius, played by an established and aged British actor, graced several scenes in both films.4 The gladiatorial school, Republican Gracchus, and black gladiator com- panion in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960) all re-appear in Gladiator, and both Spartacus and Maximus instigate gladiator-led slave rebellions against the Roman government and are martyred in the process. In several significant ways, however, Ben-Hur presents equally if not more significant narrative parallels. Both films tell the story of a once prominent and loyal subject of the Roman Empire who falls victim to personal betrayal and politically motivated Roman villainy, loses his beloved nuclear family, is himself extra-judicially imprisoned and enslaved, kills the villain during a huge public entertainment held in a spectacular venue, and is then finally restored to his family.5 Most important is that the ultimate result of his struggles, actions, and final triumph is that he helps to revolutionize the entire Roman Empire.6 Of course the writers and director of Gladiator consciously avoided the pervasive Christian narrative track of Ben-Hur, and there is no evidence that the writers were modeling their script on the secular elements of Wallace’s story either, but the narrative arc of both films defines its protagonist hero by immersing him into a personal jeopardy that is fully resolved only when the much larger cultural and political environment has been revolutionized. In Ben-Hur the revolution within the larger cultural and political environment means the introduction of Christianity to the Roman world and its legalized acceptance and subsequent adoption three to four centuries later, the effects of which still reverberate in our own world at the out-

3 Cf. the comparisons identified in Martin L. Winkler, ed., Gladiator: Film and History (Malden MA: Blackwell, 2004) esp. 27, 65–66, 127–129, 156–158, and 169–172; for the tiger in the arena and black gladiator in Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954), see 27. 4 Marcus Aurelius is played by Alec Guiness (age 50) in The Fall of the Roman Empire and by Richard Harris (age 70) in Gladiator. The gladiatorial schools belong to Batiatus (Peter Ustinov) and Proximo (Oliver Reed). Gracchus is portrayed by Charles Laughton and Derek Jacobi. The black companions are Draba (Woody Strode) and Juba (Djimon Hounsou). 5 Literally “in this life or the next,” in that the various drafts of the Gladiator script differ in their treatment of the protagonist’s nuclear family. 6 For the attempt by the producers of Spartacus (1960) at making an equivalent, albeit ahistorical, claim, see Duncan L. Cooper, “Dalton Trumbo vs, Stanley Kubrick: The Histori- cal Meaning of Spartacus,” in Martin L. Winkler, ed., Spartacus: Film and History (Malden MA: Blackwell, 2007) 56–64.