GROSS/51 1960 - Spartacus - the good epic
Heroes, Schmeroes.
SPARTACUS, director STANLEY KUBRICK, screenplay DALTON TRUMBO (based on the novel by HOWARD FAST, cast KIRK DOUGLAS, LAURENCE OLIVIER, JEAN SIMMONS, CHARLES LAUGHTON, PETER USTINOV, JOHN GAVIN, TONY CURTIS, production BRYNA PRODUCTIONS/UNIVERSAL PICTURES, 1960, 197 MINUTES.
Heroes
“There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” - Walter Benjamin1
Heroes in the movies are very often despicable. Figures we sort of grimly admire while really, inwardly, hating them. And there’s nothing disreputable about this. Nothing shabby about hating these one-dimensional inventions. I’m inclined to start a new school of criticism (maybe some kind of club or cult: as a subscriber you’ll qualify for founder membership) in which the principle aesthetic guide is the hatred - and the constant critical demolition - of movie heroes. The thesis is that every one of them is an anti-human - an anti-humanity - creation. An exception, an impossibility, a cartoon ego formed outside of the ordinary developmental process that produces the rest of us.
Ben-Hur - reviewed here last week - illustrates this. Everything about the movie’s hero (and, I learn, about his origin in the book) is hateful and shallow. All he has is his pig-headedness, his constancy in the face of suffering. It’s not enough. It couldn’t be enough. It’s the heroism of the animated plank, the nerveless robot. To actually know Ben-Hur would be to know a vacuum. In the movie many revere him, some even love him, but you can see it in their eyes: they can’t figure out what’s wrong with this empty coat of a man but they go through the motions, performing the worship of the hero that is required, not only in Hollywood, but in the whole history of story.
Bear with me. I’ve gone back on myself a bit here. I’m trying to set up the next epic - the one that comes right after Ben-Hur in the sequence of top-grossing movies. In the heading above I’ve called it ‘the good epic’. And if I’m allowed to call it that, it’s because Dalton Trumbo (everyone suspects it’s him and not Kubrick) gives us a people as hero. The caravan of liberated slaves - mostly Jewish but it’s fully-integrated - as it hurries to the coast across the waistband of Roman Italy, imperial legions in pursuit, is a thoroughly collective hero. Pauline Kael says “…it's like a giant kibbutz on the move; they're all hearty and earthy and good to each other - a bunch of picnicking folk singers.”
Epics
The task of the epic theatre, according to Brecht, is not so much the development of actions as the representation of conditions. - Walter Benjamin2
Brecht hated heroes. Even where one is suggested by the material: Lindbergh the solo Atlantic pilot, for instance. He’d revise out the heroism, leaving something less grand, flatter: more about event, circumstance, material conditions. Benjamin called the resulting undramatic narrative ‘epic’ because it didn’t rely on empathy or even on excitement or any of the standard dramatic devices. Trumbo is no Brechtian (hardly anyone is, let’s face it) but he does a Brechtian thing: he consciously lifts the story of Spartacus out of the hermetic, individualist timeline and places it into history. The film’s terrible climactic passage along the Appian Way, lined with crucified slaves, is an atrocity that unfolds in time and a collective punishment of a kind recognisable from the whole span of human history, up until the present day.
To state the obvious, we have a much less complicated relationship with villains than with heroes. Bad guys are, almost by definition, more psychologically plausible, more ‘relatable’. They are, necessarily, realists, accepting and embodying human fallibility. Even where they are wicked beyond measure it’s possible to identify with a movie criminal in a way that it hardly ever is with the sanctimonious, self-righteous, implicitly moralising hero. There’s obviously something of the master-slave in the assymetry of the movie hero’s relationship with humanity. An unbridgeable gulf separates the two classes but one cannot exist without the other, one brings the other into existence. Movie villains exist on our side of the gulf, though, with no complicated process of recognition required. Some of us are heroes but we are all villains.
Auteurs
“An epic—signed or anonymous—evokes a world-historical moment in order to produce a hero for the collectivity in question.” - Fredric Jameson3
This is the only film of Stanley Kubrick’s mature period over which he wasn’t allowed absolute creative control (he’d been called in by Kirk Douglas, the prime mover, to replace Anthony Mann, when shooting was already under way). So Kubrick felt the pressure from studio and wider culture to insert this movie into the fashionable cold-war framework. Trumbo’s instinct, as a blacklisted socialist, was to resist (what did he have to lose?) and to associate his story with the other 20th Century European catastrophe, the Nazi one. You can feel the tension, the to-and-fro. Trumbo fought with Kubrick and resented the changes made to his title character to make him more of a standard-issue Hollywood hero. In this project Kubrick’s auteur status is not demolished or made irrelevant - he’s not reduced to a journeyman or a crew member - it’s just short-circuited by the circumstances. When they’re defending the idea, the auteur theorists often fall back on the obvious presence of the (always male) auteur/director - “look, there he is, in his plus-fours, shouting. Of course he exists.” But this is the dumbest of defences and the least political. Yes, he exists, just as Odysseus the hero existed and was not, at any point in his history, a hero.
In his screenplay, Trumbo gives us something close to a polity and Kubrick cannot, because he is so compromised by his rigid contract with Douglas, delete it, as he does in all his other movies. Scan the great man’s filmography. Kubrick will never give us anything resembling a state - literal or metaphorical - when he can give us an abstraction, an intellectual toy. Those astronauts: do they represent a state, up there? Or some kind of philosophical dilemma? Is there a plausible, dystopian territory in A Clockwork Orange? Or is it more of a miserable, involuted paranoid episode? Even in Strangelove, the aggressor states are allowed no cause, no goal, no ideology.
Trumbo provides all the mechanisms of a state in crisis, though: a divided senate, landowners on the rise and patricians in decline, a dissident group of generals and aristocrats who try to derail wannabe dictator Crassus’s project of chasing down and slaughtering the slaves. Plus the slaves, of course. There’s a visible politics, even a political economy. He actually carried it forward from the source novel, another post-war creation from another blacklisted communist, Howard Fast. In the story, as Spartacus liberates the slaves, landowners mither about their abandoned estates and unharvested grapes. Senators calculate the loss of vital labour in the imperial economy - negotiating in corridors beside the curia (dissident patricians are killed and their ashes scattered). The slave uprising is crushed for explicitly economic reasons - these contemptible slaves are units of labour, not religious insurrectionaries. An unruly workforce or a workforce that had to be paid for its labour would have undermined this polity more than any treasonous or self-serving patrician plot could ever have done.
Writing this newsletter was painful. I don’t really know why. I got caught up in the material and wrote three or four drafts that I then threw away. I think the trigger for all the pointless introspection (what am I, Bertrand Russell?) was a quite astonishing piece by Fredric Jameson published in the NLR to mark his death. It’s called Agon: The Iliad and it’s full of headspinning assertions - about the idea of the epic, the hero, the story, the evolution of the literary subject etc. and it left me certain that I should learn more about classical epic otherwise my shallow bullshit about movie epics would remain just that. I even - I kid you not - signed up for an online course from Harvard University. Anyway, I’m over it now, and I do know a bit more about the history and form of the epic (and, not incidentally, about Hegel’s contribution to our understanding of the hero). Blimey. Anyway, next: West Side Story! Watch me get all tangled up in Shakespeare adaptations and high- vs. low-brow and so on.
I read that Hegel had in mind the slave uprising in Haiti when he was developing the master-slave thing.
In the Iliad the Gods are on a learning curve - they must learn that they are immortal and mustn’t care so much about the mortals, like Hollywood heroes, right?
The book’s author, Howard Fast spent time in jail because he wouldn’t give up his comrades to the HUAC. He’s a person I need to know more about. He wrote propaganda for the State Departmenr, stood for Congress, won the Stalin Peace Prize, and wrote 80 novels - all big, socially-conscious human tales - and published many of them himself after he was blacklisted, becoming a wealthy man in the process.
David Thompson, a Kubrick sceptic, relays this precious anecdote: “At an early script reading, Laurence Olivier appeared in a three-piece suit, Peter Ustinov wore a summer suit. Charles Laughton came in a bathrobe. Whereupon Kirk appeared in sandals and a short leather skirt, brandishing a gladiator’s sword. The British contingent started giggling, and Kirk knew what it was to be a revolting slave who still owned the picture.”
Spartacus is on Amazon Prime. There’s a very good-value Blu-Ray.
‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Walter Benjamin, 1940 - included in Hannah Arendt’s 1968 collection Illuminations.
‘What Is Epic Theatre?’, Walter Benjamin, Mass und Wert, 1939 - included in Hannah Arendt’s 1968 collection Illuminations.
‘Agon: The Iliad’, Frederic Jameson.