At the scarce online watering-holes of pop-cultured classicists, Gladiator II has been predictably massacred for its heavy historical blunders and half-baked answers to “Are We Rome?”, a favourite question for Marcus Aurelius fanboys and, briefly this year, a portion of the internet somehow surprised at how many men’s inner monologues consist mainly of the phrases “ooh swords” and “empire fun.” I’m extremely ashamed to admit that for a good few minutes of this film, mine was much the same.
It’s not the first time that an onscreen bloodbath inspired by the gladiatorial games has reduced me to a Roman pleb. Somewhere in the interlude between Ridley Scott’s twin cultural timestamps, Suzanne Collins reigned as supreme dispenser of Juvenal’s panem et circenses (in the quite literal setting of Panem). Much like the Gladiator movies, The Hunger Games had its audiences (i.e. me) baying for blood while ironically condemning this primitive urge. There’s a sense of shame in enjoying these gladiatorial scenarios, and it’s not just the fact that it makes me think about the Roman Empire more than I’d ideally like to be. It makes us double back on ourselves, perhaps exposing a disturbing human instinct for – sadism? – that expands beyond the fictional-historical text to its live reception. Scott and Collins both seem to exploit, even encourage, an analogy between their Capitolian audiences and the contemporary cinema-going public.
Arguable hypocrisy aside, do our new, more self-aware emperors have a point? In 2021, Hwang Dong-hyuk’s Squid Game brazenly set off a trend for just-can’t-look-away onscreen butchery that seems to have only gotten stronger since, if last year’s gross-out triumph The Substance is any indication. But those are still fictional. Are there any real-world instances of human suffering being used as a source of entertainment?
Classicist Sarah Mills argues that the surveillance aspect of Collins’ Games references that of modern reality television. And admittedly, there are some parallels. In Korean media, the alarmingly-named “Survival Show” implicitly equates the creation of K-pop groups with a life-or-death process of elimination. As of this week, “Montoya por favor” is the internet’s latest tic, emerging from a clip that sees the aforementioned Montoya careening down a beach after being forced to watch surveillance-style footage of his girlfriend in a compromising situation that I’m genuinely shocked Spanish daytime television is allowed to air. I’d be less surprised if Montoya had whipped around after ripping his shirt off, looked down the barrel of the camera and declared to us: ‘Are you not entertained?’
In other senses, things are changing. Notwithstanding the pivotal dialogues around dating shows in the UK, the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing has more recently come under ethical scrutiny. Viewers of Pop Star Academy, Netflix’s take on the K-pop survival show, praised one contestant for leaving the competition after the candidates were surprised with a public voting round, effectively exposing twenty teenage girls to mass online scrutiny with no prior notice.
What is responsible for this divide between a more self-consciously “ethical” type of media consumption, and a more brutal one than ever – and why now? I’d put it down to the principle of moral proximity. On the one hand, now that anyone can garner thousands of views on social media without a previously established online presence, young people feel a stronger proximity to on-screen personas than ever before. The closer we feel to people through personal familiarity, community or even geography, the more empathy we feel for them. And so, the more young people are dispositioned to view the people they see on TV as their peers, the less partial they might be to seeing them under emotional or physical distress. Just look at I’m A Celeb – it’s always the politicians that end up being thrown to the cockroaches. You wouldn’t catch Mary Berry getting voted onto a Bushtucker trial.
If the accessibility of content creation encourages moral proximity, the brevity of viral clips circulated through reels and Tiktoks stunts it. La Isla de las Tentaciones and its Anglophone parent Temptation Island aren’t the most palatable in their entirety; but cut into bite-size, minute-long chunks, their “best bits” can be savoured without any of the guilt that comes with emotional familiarity.
Scott and Collins know this “proximity principle” by heart. You could argue it’s one of the core doctrines of violence in cinema: the less sympathetic the character, the more graphically they might meet their end. While evil emperor Geta is subjected to a stilted, almost comical decapitation, Lucius’ loved ones all get a euphemistic death-by-arrow, recalling Katniss Everdeen’s signature weapon and Rue’s similarly “clean” end (via spear). These modes of death capitalise on the positive correlation between empathy and emotional proximity. It’s not like this principle is new to modernity, either. For one, it was the reason a group of men sentenced to death in the gladiatorial arena once said to the emperor Claudius, “We who are about to die salute you” — not a customary expression as it’s portrayed in the first Gladiator, but as a desperate final plea for their lives (to which Claudius responded: “Or not”).
Luckily, there are few of us for whom human suffering is an indiscriminate source of joy. But if we can be convinced that the shots we aim at public figures are either justified or of little consequence, then we’re disturbingly trigger-happy. The Gladiator and Hunger Games franchises are so compellingly scary because they demonstrate how easily we can be manipulated into dehumanising innocent people. Are we morally terrible for enjoying the spectacle? I do think that a little bit of emotional distance is somewhat healthy, and helps us to get on with our daily lives without catastrophising over the state of the earth 24/7. But on the next occasion a dictator tries to win us over by throwing people to exotic animals as entertainment, I’d hope for us all to be a little more discerning
“Colosseum | Kolosseum” by unbekannt270 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.