Big Screen Rome - Amazon Web Services

laughs bitterly through tears when fellow slave Juba asks him: “Is that
the sign of your gods? Will that not anger them?” The film then cuts to
the massive SPQR engraved on the marble of the city as Commodus enters
in a phony victory parade lined with well-paid supporters, in a visual
equation indicating that Maximus now spills his own blood to reject what
Rome has become under the new tyrant, and literally excises that part of
him that was identifiably “Roman.” As a slave, nameless and known only
as “Spaniard,” Maximus focuses solely on exacting personal revenge. Whatever
commonality he shares with the other gladiators exists mainly because
of their mutual need for survival and self-preservation. Like a modern
urban gang, the gladiator brotherhood is a “community” that develops its
own code of honor and organizes its own system of allegiances that transcend
recognized rules and laws while challenging mainstream civil and
social conventions.
Maximus’ fighting skill and courage, once dedicated in service to Rome’s
greatness, are now trivialized as bloody entertainment for the masses, when
he is forced to fight for his life as a gladiator in the provincial arena in
Zucchabar. As a symbol of this sudden and undeserved degradation, the
brave wolf-dog who accompanied him into the opening battle in Germania,
the lupine emblem of Rome’s legendary and noble fighting spirit, disappears,
and is replaced by the crouching, leashed hyena in Proximo’s
tent. In the arena Maximus fights to stay alive, but when the crowd reacts
with wild adulation for his ability to kill with a soldier’s trained precision,
he displays his contempt for them by scowling and spitting on the sand.
The crowd adores him all the more for his disdain. “Listen to me. Learn
from me,” Proximo advises his talented new recruit from his own experience
in the arena: “I was not the best because I killed quickly. I was the
best because the crowd loved me.”
After one particularly gory show where Maximus dispatches several
combatants in a few minutes, the crowd roars their approval and an enraged
Maximus hurls his sword into the official viewing box of the Roman
provincial government, scattering the local VIPs in terror at his lethal
insolence. This moment recalls the scene in Spartacus where the African
gladiator Draba pins Spartacus against the wall of the arena at the Capuan
gladiatorial school, but refuses to kill him. Instead, he heaves his trident at
the jaded Romans watching them fight from an elevated platform, lunges
towards them, and then pays for this audacity with his own death when
Crassus calmly slits his throat (Wyke, 68). The provincial arena scene in
Gladiator provides an astonishing visual link between Maximus and Draba,
by associating Maximus with the suffering and isolation of Draba, who in
242 GLADIATOR (2000)