Allegories of Decline

American exceptionalism is no longer our story

If Joker: Folie á Deux was a sequel that completely rebuffed expectation, then Gladiator II, Ridley Scott’s second installment to his swords-and-sandals epic from 2000, was the opposite, a retread delivering a recognizable treat.

But the two movies have more in common than this apparent, and, ultimately, negligible, difference.

In the Joker story, we get to see the protagonist’s interiority, his psychic struggle, undergo a makeover from the first movie. Whereas in the first Joker, Arthur Fleck’s story is depicted with objective, naturalist strokes, in Folie á Deux, the Joker becomes an allegory, his very consciousness recast as courtroom drama. Our “hero” in the musical second movie is doing something very different than from the first, drawing further within himself until he becomes merely a floating ego writhing in ontic struggle against the superegoic judge and jury.

What stays the same, however, is Gotham, which is the same drab metropolis of wealth inequality and social decay, the same cesspool of sclerotic welfare systems and vapid entertainment, the same dystopia of dehumanization and alienation as we saw in the first movie.

The Gladiator sequel offers a neat parallel to this dynamism but inversely structured.

From an opening battle scene in which Lucius’s heroism is established, to his forced ingress into the gladiatorial industry, to his ultimate redemption as a Roman leader, one can essentially tack through the plot of Gladiator II using the original’s screenplay as para-text. It is a virtually one-to-one correspondence. The movie restages the Maximus story as the story of his son, yet renders it in identical terms and in an identical arc.

So, whereas the Joker sequel keeps the same setting to foreground a totally different protagonist, Gladiator II tells almost the same story with almost the same protagonist but with a radically altered backdrop. Scott’s new Rome is an altogether different beast from the that of Maximus’s day.

Furthermore, as a vision of imperial decline, this new Rome has a striking family resemblance to the Gotham of both Joker films. As such, it, along with the Joker movies, reflects the contemporary malaise within the liberal world order.

Not the “shining city on a hill” imagined in the original, Scott’s new Rome is a place of corruption, decadence and moral rot, a procrustean realm as diseased as the syphilitic, simian-enthralled emperor Caracalla, the petulant psychopath comprising one half of the power sharing scheme between him and his brother Geta. This Rome is led not by the valiant figurehead of a Marcus Aurelius, but configured as a bifurcated power sharing scheme between two disturbed adolescents projecting psychopathic glee.

Both Phillips’s Gotham and Scott’s new Rome are clear stand ins for the contemporary liberal world order. Just as we today see our polity as a pale copy of the dignified republic imagined in our Constitution, so is Rome in Gladiator II imagined to be so pale against the standard set by the erstwhile philosopher-king Marcus Aurelius.

These movies, coming in well into the 21st Century, bear the marks of our era’s cynicism and confusion. They are allegories of our era’s crisis of classical liberalism and democratic rule and exude the preoccupations of our time, only using completely different methods.

And you wouldn’t be altogether crazy if you imputed a little bit of the day’s antiestablishment fervor to the politics of Scott’s 2024 Rome.

When the heroic general Acacius, played with moral heft by Pedro Pascal, returns from battle, his request for rest is dismissed by the emperors so that he might go on to fight in Parthia and Persia. His response, something to the effect of expressing popular exhaustion with Rome’s wars, clearly nods to the growing antiestablishment demand in the West for a more protectionist stance.

Later on, when Macrinus, the social climbing gladiator chief played glowingly by Denzel Washington, sentences Lucilla to death, he regurgitates well-worn platitudes about the meritocratic order, which by now sound quaint after antiestablishment critique has recast the meritocracy as a recipe for oneupmanship and toxic competitiveness. Phrases like “Where else but in Rome could a man like me become emperor” used to come out of the mouths of heroes: in today’s world, by contrast, the bromides of classical liberalism are more appropriately assigned to our villains.

When we hear Lucius towards the end of the movie dream out loud of rebooting the “Roman Dream,” we can’t but see this as a parallel of the day’s antiestablishment voices exhorting us to see through the propaganda about the failure to enact our own “American Dream” and hold up the West to its original ideals.

Particularly striking was how clearly villainous Rome’s praetorians, as they turn their arrows on the Roman public, were made to appear in the movie and one must take note of the sympathy garnered for average Romans attempting their revolt. Only Commodus was the baddie in 2000; in 2024, it is the entirety of the Roman establishment that is cast as the villain.

Keeping the structure of the original Gladiator intact was a strong, and, ultimately, successful, decision on the part of Ridley Scott. In sustaining the original formula he insured that Gladiator II would deliver a powerful entertainment reward while sneaking in his social critique through the setting of a Rome inflected with contemporary concerns about the failure of the liberal world order.

Todd Phillips obviously went for something completely different with his Joker sequel. But the specter of social unrest and its figuration as a response of conscience in the Joker movies is neatly reproduced in the scenes of Roman chaos in the streets in Gladiator II, where the citizenry is all too eager to dethrone its oppressive leaders.

Gladiator II was hardly the disruptive, Brechtian exercise of Joker: Folie á Deux. Scott’s film fully assumed the vestiture of the commodity form and delivered a digestible nugget of old fashioned historical epic entertainment. Folie á Deux had more recondite designs and reframed and allegorized the protagonist of the original within a postmodern deconstruction.

But the parallels between them, how they both posit a world utterly deserving of revolutionary overthrow, are too important to ignore.

In 2024, with the growing populist tide, reflected in the presidential election and in these two sequels, we seem to have left behind the naive exceptionalist beliefs of the 20th Century, the Rome of Marcus Aurelius and the America of Ronald Reagan, and conclusively entered the more realistic and cynical 21st Century.