Spartacus: Blood and Sand

Bursting onto the scene in 2010 as part of the cultural aftershock of 300, Spartacus: Blood and Sand clearly stands as the pulpiest show ever released on any kind of TV. Produced by Steven DeKnight (a veteran of shows like Buffy, Angel and Dollhouse) the first season went off like a bomb, as nobody had ever seen anything quite this carnal, bloody, and excessive. Taking the well-known story of the leader of the so-called Third Servile War in 73-71 BCE, the show amped everything up to 11 and made a bloody, melodramatic epic for a modern audience.

One of the things that makes the story of Spartacus so popular to rework is that there is not a whole lot of solid information about him. We know he was Thracian (from somewhere in what is now Eastern Europe) and that he was a gladiator. We can tell from his success as a general that he had some military experience and was an excellent tactician. We know he led the largest slave uprising in Roman history, and we know when he died. That’s about it.

The first season of the show stars Andy Whitfield as the titular character, and shows us how he became a slave in the first place and how he ended up in a ludus in Italy, sentenced to be a gladiator. Since we don’t know anything factual about this part of his life, the show is free to invent whatever it wants, and does so. It fills in other named members of the revolt, and adds to them with characters both historical and imaginary.

The first smart thing the show did was reimagine the gladiator school as a hothouse for melodrama, putting in rivalries, jealousies, affairs, hatreds, friendships and betrayals galore. Every character is caught up in multiple different plotlines where they are pulled in different directions, trying to reach their personal ambitions for power, freedom, wealth, or love, all against the backdrop of the brutality and violence of the system of slavery and combat they were caught up in.

Brutality was the other thing the show did right, as they elected to not sugar-coat anything, and in fact did whatever you would call the opposite of that. While shows like Rome strove for historical accuracy, Spartacus went way beyond that into sheer pulp sex and violence. Rather than show tasteful nudity, Blood and Sand was almost wall-to-wall naked flesh and sex so explicit it is still kind of shocking. There was none of this “necessary to the plot” bullshit, and plenty of the nudity and sex was just there to add to the debauched atmosphere. It helped to create a feeling that anything was possible, and you were never sure what the show would do or how far they would go.

And showing most clearly the influence of 300 on the whole idea, the violence in Spartacus was cranked way past anything believable, with plenty of slow-motion and lots of bright, color-corrected blood everywhere. With the saturated digital color, the action scenes are gripping festivals of screaming, hyper-real carnage featuring ripped flesh, severed limbs, and literal buckets of gore.

None of this would work at all if you didn’t have a cast willing to go for it, and the cast of this show really rose to the occasion. Andy Whitfield stars as the hero, but he is almost eclipsed by the rest of the crew, including Manu Bennett hamming it up as Crixus, Nick Tarabay as the serpentine, treacherous Ashur, Peter Mensah as the whip-cracking trainer Doctore, and John Hannah as the cussing, murderous, amoral owner of the ludus, Batiatus. One has to single out Lucy Lawless for bringing a ton of complexity and depth to her role as Lucretia, and at the same time she doesn’t shrink from the sexuality of the role. Everybody here just goes all-out.

Each subsequent season of the show had a different title, and it maybe never recovered entirely from the death of Andy Whitfield in 2011, which necessitated the recasting of the central character with Liam McIntyre. As it moved more into the history of the revolt, the show became less inventive and more a tragedy, which is tonally quite different. The first season stands apart for these and other reasons, though they were all solidly made.

With it’s intense sexuality, gory violence, and overheated melodrama, Spartacus: Blood and Sand is an almost pure pulp entertainment, and that puts it squarely in the wheelhouse of Sword & Sorcery. Adventure writers have spilled oceans of ink over the Roman Empire, and the gladiatorial arena still exercises an enduring fascination even today. Hell, the movies made Conan a gladiator when he never was in Howard’s stories, just because gladiators are so cool. With maybe an undead wizard as the villain instead of a Roman consul, this would be right on target.

The Serpent in Shadow

Malika, Queen of Meru, lay coiled on the heaped cushions of her bedchamber, and she waited for night to fall. Curtains screened away the light of the fading day, and she was glad of it. She had been born a woman, but now she was something other, half-changed in her shape, and her blackened eyes no longer loved the light of the sun. It was Utuzan who had unmade her when she tried to defy him. He had stayed his hand from killing, and instead he had twisted her mortal form into the travesty she now wore.

From her waist upwards she was as a woman, save with skin as pale as frost. Below she was a tremendous serpent, pearl-scaled and strong as iron. Utuzan, the Black Flame, had transformed her when she turned upon him, and now she bided her time. She awaited the night, she awaited the moment, and she believed it had come.

Lanterns always burned in her darkened chambers, day and night. She watched as the last light of day blazed down beyond her walls, sun setting in fire over the endless desert, and then the chill of night came creeping in on silent feet. She heard insects sing in her garden outside, frogs calling out in the waters of the pool, and she waited, for she knew her lover would soon arise.

Gladiator

Gladiator was one of those lightning-in-a-bottle movies where a bunch of shit that shouldn’t have worked came together and transformed the whole landscape of film in ways which are still evident today, two decades later. Director Ridley Scott had a good reputation, as the auteur behind movies like Alien and Blade Runner, but he hadn’t really had a hit in a long time, mostly turning out forgotten movies like Someone to Watch Over Me and Black Rain. Russell Crowe was clearly on his way up, after his breakout role in 1997’s LA Confidential, but would audiences buy him in a period piece like this one?

Further than that, it has to be remembered that the so-called “Sword & Sandal” genre had been out of fashion for literal decades by the year 2000. The big upswell of movies about ancient Greece and Rome had seen its heyday in the early 60s, and there had been almost nothing but TV movies and Masterpiece Theatre since then. As Crowe himself pointed out, for a very long time in Hollywood, if you were on-set in a toga, it meant you were doing a comedy. Nobody had attempted to approach historical drama about Rome with any kind of seriousness since the days of Spartacus and Cleopatra. It was an Old-Hollywood genre and nobody had seriously tried to revive it.

The film didn’t even begin with a completed script. There had been a treatment about the death of Emperor Commodus, who was drowned in his bath by his slave Narcissus (Crowe’s character was even called Narcissus in early drafts) but that was quickly expanded into what became a big, action-oriented movie filled with intrigue, treachery, and what were, at the time, almost unprecedented levels of violence.

Because a big change that Gladiator brought to Hollywood movies that can be seen even to this day was the elevation of action choreography as it pertained to swordfights and other close-up forms of combat. Fight scenes and stunts in the old Sword & Sandal films had been pretty primitive, and the blood in them kept to a low level so as not to offend censors of the day. With modern standards and modern effects, Scott was able to bring the fight scenes to a whole new level. The violence was visceral, bloody, and exciting in a way no one had ever seen before – not in depicting combat in the ancient world. The arena sequences in particular were absolutely electrifying, conveying what it must have been like to see such spectacles in the real Colosseum.

The effect on future movies was profound, as not only did Gladiator touch off a series of historical epics focused on Greece and Rome – Troy, 300, Alexander, Spartacus: Blood and Sand, and Rome among others – it also set a standard for action and excitement that other works had to deal with. You couldn’t just crap out something about the ancient world and call it a day, you had to at least try to stand up to Gladiator’s level of choreography and gore. Scott didn’t just make the Sword & Sandal epic viable again, he made it respectable. Gladiator didn’t feel cheap or silly, it took its subject matter deeply seriously, with a first-rate cast and what may be Hans Zimmer’s finest hour as a composer, creating a score that has been almost as influential as the movie itself.

And the history of Sword & Sorcery fiction is steeped in the ancient world, as it was a major area of fascination for writers from Howard to Mundy. Howard’s tales of the Picts only work with the backdrop of the Roman Empire to push against, and the opening battle in Gladiator is like something right out of one of his stories. Despite the brutality of battle, Scott does not shy from showing the exaltation of war, or the excitement in spite of the horror. The arena scenes range from ugly to grandiose, and yet they are never less than edge-of-your-seat thrilling.

Ancient Rome during the Empire is definitely a morally compromised world, and we see various characters struggling with that through the course of the film, trying to find a way to be moral in an amoral society that has become decadent and dangerous. Commodus stands as the avatar of that moral decay, and as such the symbolism becomes far too rich for Sword & Sorcery, even if the overarching theme of revenge is one that fits right in.

Gladiator is definitely not a Sword & Sorcery film, but it had a huge impact on action cinema in general, and infused a tremendous amount of blood and violence into the mainstream of Hollywood blockbusters. It affirmed that R-rated films could make money in an era of bland PG-13 fare, and it brought back a fascination with the Classical World that served as a major wellspring of inspiration for S&S authors old and new.