Gladiator II · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

They flood the Colosseum. Water comes over the sand, ships are rowed onto it, and there are sharks under the hulls. Historians objected. The sharks became the film's most argued-over image. Keep the objection and look at the shot again anyway, because that water tells you what kind of film Ridley Scott actually made.

Deleuze cut cinema in two. In the movement-image, someone perceives a situation and acts to change it; the cut serves the chain, and everything you see is on its way to becoming a deed. In the time-image, which he dates to the ruins of postwar Europe, that circuit snaps: the character can no longer act adequately on what they see, so they watch, and time shows up bare instead of as the measure of movement.

Gladiator II is a movement-image film assembled almost entirely out of time-image materials. Its raw stock is memory. A dead father. Flashback imagery of Maximus. A returning mother. A score written across the memory of another score. And all of it gets converted back into motive, without residue. That conversion is the film's real subject, and it is why the lens earns its keep here: the standard complaint, that this is the first film again but louder, turns into the description of a working mechanism rather than a shrug.

Start with shape. Deleuze calls this the large form of the action-image and writes it SAS': a situation presses on everyone, squeezes until one man is forced to act, and the act transforms the situation. The thing doing the pressing — Deleuze's synsign, the encompasser — is doubled here. Rome is one. The Colosseum is Rome's working model of itself, built physically in Malta and completed in the machine, and Arthur Max's design lets you watch marble grandeur go soft.

But notice what the arena is used for. It is not where the plot advances. It is where the plot is performed, for an audience inside the film. After Eisenstein, Deleuze calls this the attraction-image: staging that figures an idea rather than acting it out. The naumachia is an argument about legitimacy conducted in water.

Beneath the dressed city the film keeps finding a second world made only of appetite. Deleuze's name for it is the originary world, a savage substrate that the visible social setting is merely the crust of. The arena floor is that substrate with tickets sold. Sand, a charging rhino, baboons, then water and teeth. The twin emperors belong to the same register. Janty Yates and Dave Crossman dress Geta and Caracalla in a decadence pitched at the level of costume rather than character, which is exactly right for what Deleuze calls the impulse-image, where people are reduced to drives on a slope that only runs downward. Rome doesn't fall in this film. It drains.

Now the sharks specifically. Deleuze takes two terms from Peirce for objects that mean by habit. A mark means what its customary chain says it means: raised sword, then the crowd's verdict. Harry Gregson-Williams quoting the vocal ache of Zimmer and Gerrard is a mark, an inherited cue doing inherited work. A demark is the anomaly that breaks the chain and forces you to interpret instead of anticipate. The shark is a demark, and it is not aimed at the Roman mob. It is aimed at us. For one moment the film stops claiming to remember Rome and admits it is remembering movies.

The memory-work proper is Deleuze's recollection-image, the dated flashback that plays a former present back. Paul Mescal has the hardest job in the picture: to play a man whose center is another man's absence, and to let a franchise's memory function as his character's motive. That is memory as inventory rather than as duration. Retrieved in order to be spent.

The crowd is where the politics live. Deleuze uses dividual for a collective rendered as a single affective unit, and Scott's Colosseum audience is one animal with one appetite, digitally multiplied, acoustically enormous. Nobody in this film persuades a person. They tune a body. Gracchus and the Senate keep talking; the roar decides. And the film knows the roar includes us, which is the sharpest thing in it: the violence is staged for our pleasure by a story that indicts the appetite it is feeding.

Two things work that crowd. Macrinus is the more interesting. Washington plays a former slave with no place in Rome's order who therefore manufactures one, buying a fighter, forging a claim, telling whichever story the hour requires. Deleuze's forger does not report a truth, he produces one, serially, changing shape as he goes. The film is most alive whenever its plot is being invented in front of us by this man rather than inherited from a property, and Washington plays the inventing with open pleasure. The second instrument is the “dream of Rome” itself, the republic that never was, invoked by Lucilla and Gracchus and finally by Lucius. Deleuze calls this legending, or fabulation: people caught in the act of telling a story that might bring a people into being. He reserved it for the powerless. Here it is recited by the well-born, which is why modern political cinema's founding condition — the people are missing, a people has to be invented — never arrives. This film bets the other way. The people are present, massed, and for hire.

The lineage is unusually literal. Mathieson shot the first one and shot this one. Max designed both. Yates costumed both. Behind that: The Fall of the Roman Empire supplied the dissolute heir that Gladiator borrowed and this film doubles into two boys; Spartacus made the ludus a political crucible instead of a set; Quo Vadis fixed the mad-emperor iconography and the massed arena tableau; Ben-Hur established that one enormous set piece can carry the climax, and the naumachia is that logic poured full of water. Behind all of them, Cabiria in 1914, which invented the camera crawling across colossal architecture. Scott's digital set extensions still speak that grammar.

So what did it change? Not the vocabulary of the art. Its interest is as a demonstration of method: coverage so dense, from so many cameras running at once, that a scene is discovered in the edit rather than composed in the shot. That buys legibility in combat and costs something in authorship of the single frame. It is the current industrial answer to the question Cabiria asked, and worth watching as that.

So watch the mechanism. Watch Macrinus's hands. Watch the crowd become one creature. And when the water comes in, ask who the spectacle is for. Theirs, or ours.