Ptolemy, Gladiator, and Empire

The cartography of Gladiator is first seen in the northern reaches of the Roman Empire in its waning years. When Commodus (Joachim Phoenix) and Maximus (Russell Crowe) fight to their death a battle of Empire and Democracy is staged in a tragic mode much as Preston Sturges’s struggle between Capital and Labor on the top of a speeding freight train at the beginning of Sullivan’s Travels (1941) was made for farce. Fate is such that in a monumental study, Empire, published roughly synchronously with Gladiator, authors Toni Negri and Michael Hardt argue that the last decades of the twentieth century have witnessed one world overtaking another. A “society of control” is replacing a “society of discipline” that had prevailed up to the Second World War. The two authors propose that the laws which now regulate nations and economies in the global sphere no longer impose limits or geographical barriers. In disciplinary regimes, they note, in some homage to Michel Foucault, wrongdoers are punished for reason of violation and transgression of laws are understood to be permanent.¹ In a society of control a law is interpreted as a mean that allows for various degrees of deviation. By contrast, in the disciplinary society a law is formulated in order to invite its transgression. Its formulation incites a desire to do what is proscribed.² Our attraction to laws is due not to the fear and loathing they inspire, but to the ways we can deploy, move about, and reconfigure them. The global “empire” of democratic capitalism controls its subjects through the play and the give-and-take of its relations with law. Such, they say, are some of the pertinent traits of the global empire in which we live.

In the coda to their history of the formation of the contemporary world they advance an agenda of resistance and articulation that bears some of the trappings of the great left-wing movements of the nineteenth century. They assert that a global society is politicized when it confronts directly or unambiguously responds to the question concerning how the actions of a global multitude can become politicized. They assert—with enthusing fervor—that it must begin with “the central repressive operations of Empire. It is a matter of recognizing and engaging the imperial initiatives and not allowing them continually to reestablish order” (399). The reader hears a call for transgression in a system of controls where the act is difficult to discern or at least where an oppressive order is of global extension. Hardt and Negri imply that disenfranchised Goths, Vandals, and Visigoths of the second, third, and fourth worlds, from the Chiapas to Chechnya, need to break the chains of the optical cables that enslave them.

The reader of Empire who has seen Gladiator (2000) and indulged in its “peplum” style (a word the French use to describe the genre because of the short skirt-like flaps below the armor of soldiers of the empire) recalls that the film came to theaters on the spurs of the circulation of the book in stores and on Web sites. Parallels between the book and the movie are many. Both use the decline of the Roman Empire to inaugurate their narratives. Gladiator begins with the destruction of the last horde, the final remnant of the bestial infidel massacred before the empire decays from within it own ranks. Empire builds its history from the point where no worlds are left to conquer, and from where Polybius’s vision of the three “good” forms of power in the Roman Empire—“monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, embodied in the persons of the Emperor, the Senate, and the popular comita” (314)—have uncanny parallels in today’s nation-states, “media-organizations, and other ‘popular’ organisms,... even though certainly its contents are very different from the social and political forces of the Roman Empire” (315). Empire and Gladiator are both done in an epic style, painted with broad historical strokes, either to legitimize civil disobedience or to warn against passive obedience to regimes that produce terror in the wars they declare on terror.

The edges of both the book and the film are gnawed at by a disaffection with the state of constructive dissonance known since 1968. The hero of Gladiator returns to Rome without quite realizing that his valor in Germania (projected in the style of Tacitus’s Annals) was perfunctory, for a cause that many viewers might have associated with the traumatic effects endured among soldiers returning from the war America had lost in Vietnam. The emblematic image on the flyleaf of Empire, an image reminiscent of the pictures from the Apollo 17 mission studied in the chapter above, is a satellite-photograph of an oceanic surface of the globe over which whirls a spiral of clouds. As we have seen in chapter 9, this type of picture reminds us that the first color pictures of the globe and its heavens came at a time of great civil protest against the American policy and, soon, with Watergate, the revelation of extensive corruption in Washington. Despite the clean and clear Icarian point of view of the emblematic photograph (the “map” suggestive of global empire), Negri and Hardt make a plea to the world to fight powers imposing the controls of corporate democracy.

They do so from the standpoint of a politics of modulation, that is, of immanence, of practice, and of invention that have affinities with the art of the everyday—indeed, with individual mappings and spatial stories—that are tools of the politics of Michel de Certeau’s “spatial stories.” The authors propose that constructive dissent ought best work within networks of activities that strategic orders cannot or have not yet co-opted. It appears that Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, an otherwise entirely strategic film telling its viewer to admire the handiwork of its special effects, invites counterreadings or interpretive mappings that would be far more mobile and of tactical merit than what it seems to represent.

A spectacle of imperial corruption is witnessed through the grisly gladiatorial contests. The Roman games were corrupt, Gladiator suggests, and so, too, the film seems to remark boastfully, are its own ambitions. In Empire the economic history of the west is rehearsed in order to show that it can be rewritten otherwise, and not merely from the standpoint of capital. In Gladiator the spectacles in the Coliseum stage the history of the conquests of Rome but are brought to opposite conclusions through the astute logistics of battle, learned from the codes of the Roman army, turned and aimed against the partisans of the empire. Gladiator ends with the hope for political change after the ritual death of two personifications; Democracy, wounded and shafted by Empire, dies just as he impales and kills his evil enemy. Empire depicts a degraded and polluted world order that will only be cleansed, both politically and ecologically, with the revival of the militant, “the fundamental actor of the ‘long march’ of the emancipation of labor ..., the creative singularity of the gigantic collective movement that was working-class struggle” (412).

Coincidence of the timing of the book and the film and other parallels notwithstanding, the former advocates a cohering countermilitancy and the other displays a willfully confused and spectacular history of strategies and tactics, of archives and diagrams, within what might now be called a media-industrial-military complex. If the film succeeds in conveying a politics the latter is seen obliquely in its inclusion within its own form of some of the guiding principles of Paul Virilio’s work (1982 and 1999) on the affinities of war in and as cinema. In Logistique de la perception, we recall from the first chapter, he argued that the imagination of armed combat in early cinema inflected not only the shape and style of future wars (the First and Second World Wars) but also their very fact. Films produced a perception of war in order to anticipate and, by force of the imagination, even to conjure up its event.³ Producers quickly realized that their films were not histories or mimetic reconstructions of past events but, rather, maps that were setting into the imagination spatialized images of the kinds of social order and control they could wish to lock into a collective psyche.⁴ When D. W. Griffith staged the waves of Union and Confederate troops in attack and counterattack in The Birth of a Nation (1915) the “archive” of an image of war waged exactly forty years before the film was made was in essence a “map” of the territorial battle that would be waged in the trenches of northern France immediately following its completion.

In Gladiator Scott and his team transpose the paradigm onto the arena of media warfare. In the narrative they show that the disenfranchised senators belonging to the former democratic regime—all appear impotent because they resemble grey-haired sexagenarians shrouded in bedsheets—correctly observe that gladiatorial combat lures the populace away from the hard thinking and labor required of an egalitarian regime. In the spectacle of its images the film shows that it also (“Et tu Gladiator . . .”) is serving up the same ritual fare. Its titanic order, its own aspiration to be an empire of itself, is cast as a political lure. Its self-critical dimension, what Negri and Hardt would call its theory and practice, would be located in the way in its own form it reflects on the effects of its spectacle.

The map in the movie bears on what might be, if not the theory and practice of Gladiator, the raw material with which the viewer can turn it into something different. The projection appears in the field of the image for the duration of not much more than half a second. The charismatic leader, Maximus, his centurions, and their soldiers win an electrifying battle over the hirsute German horde. He returns to a sumptuously furnished tent in which he confers with the aging and debilitated Roman leader, Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris). Nearing death, Marcus Aurelius asks Maximus to be the next patron of the Roman people. By choosing Maximus on grounds of his merit and the unalloyed admiration he has gained by and from his countrymen, Marcus Aurelius oversteps a salic law that would require him to put his son, the malevolent Commodus on the throne. Marcus Aurelius commits an act of transgression in a world where he would wish a more flexible political system. His action also yields the consequence of drawing the narrative, up to then about combat, into the plot of a family romance.⁵

In an amber chiaroscuro Marcus Aurelius avows to the hero of the day that the burdens of leadership have been and will continue to be heavy. He infers that the Romans may been overly ambitious in expanding the borders of their empire. In a brief but salient series of shots and reverse shots, turning about and pointing his arm backward and over his shoulder he asks Maximus to “look at this map.” A cutaway shot shows, displayed, hidden among the curtains and objects in the darkened quarters—a burning candle to the left, the bust of a Caesar to the right—a wall map of Italy and the greater lands of Eastern Europe over and above the peninsula. It is hardly as svelte and boot-like as we know it on contemporary projections. A rugged and broad interior contained by a jagged coastal outline, the great mass of land on the bottom that thrusts into an aquamarine surrounding recalls the map of Italia in the Geographia of Ptolemy (ca. a.d. 145) (1991).

The rapid reference to the map is so offhanded—at once perfunctory and riveting—that it begs for interpretation. First, the map here does not quite play the same crucial role that it does in most classical military films. It is remote from the computer maps that sparkle on the screens in the briefing chambers at the outset of the same director’s Black Hawk Down (2001). Yet it functions as it might in a war movie. In Desperate Journey we have seen how commanders and their subalterns pour over maps before they trace imaginary lines upon them with pointers and pencils. Maps are generally reserved for films of the First and Second World Wars, for Vietnam or Somalia, but not for Roman campaigns.

The map usually plots the imaginary space of the conflict and passage for what lies ahead.⁶ In Gladiator the map of Italia does not include the entire Roman Empire of which Marcus Aurelius has spoken. The view is partial, indicating that the men are far from a circumscribed homeland. And as other elements of the cinematic rhetoric have shown (in the music of pathos, in the calm of fatigue following the battle, in the shift from clatter and noise to a somber mood), the map seems to indicate shrinkage and even decline. Rome is Rome, but Italia is a minor appendage of the continental body to the north, and the meager spoils the battle has yielded in the snowy realm have no place on the map. The map, anticipating the presence of the Eastern Roman empire as it would appear after a.d. 395, does little justice to the Mediterranean reaches of the Roman world. The projection is shown to bear the signs of historical fatigue that in surrounding closeups (and there are many) are traced in the wrinkles furrowing Marcus Aurelius’s face. The leader points to the map to remind the charismatic commander of the armies of the “big picture,” of the dubious future of imperial administration. Set on a darkened wall that stands behind the old man, Italia is a painful reminder that overarching conquest of new space can lead to entropy in matters of jurisdiction. A project that seeks to globalize through conquest will result in decline. By not situating the hinterlands where the Romans had just beaten the Barbarians, the map betrays the locational signs spelled out in the first intertitle, set over the snowy landscape, indicating that the events are taking place in boreal climes on the northeastern fringes of the kingdom. It begins to call into question the time and space of the military operation and its relation to that of centers and peripheries.

The projection is, second, an initial sign of an intertextual component that motivates much of Gladiator. The map clearly refers to a cartographical sequence in a film on which the sequence of Gladiator is patterned. Anthony Mann’s The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) constitutes the model for the beginning of this film. In that feature the Romans are also in the north and are waging perilous combat with an enemy hidden in the hills beyond the Roman stronghold. The past glory of the empire is evoked when a parade of chariots passes before the aging Marcus Aurelius (Alec Guinness) and his great commander (Christopher Plummer). Each chariot stops; its driver, wearing a breastplate, a peplum skirt below his belt and a feathered helmet on his head, bears the ensign of each and every region of the kingdom. The geography is declined by the leader’s vocal identification of each of the ten-odd chariots that pass in what seems an excruciatingly protracted review.

When Marcus Aurelius asks his general to take command of the empire he struts by an easel on which are mounted a number of great sheet-maps that otherwise confirm that the Roman territories are as vast as what had been indicated in the preceding military parade. Later in the same film, after poisoning his father, and now in a bind because enemy hordes are approaching the kingdom from all sides, Commodus (Stephen Boyd) acts out his decadent ways by strutting over a mosaic floor that depicts the Italian peninsula in the greater region of the Mediterranean, the Holy Land, Africa, Spain, and Europe to the north and east. Reproducing a topos common to imperial propaganda, Commodus virtually walks over and defiles what is rightfully his to command but that he has wrongfully obtained.

Viewers of The Fall of the Roman Empire are reminded of the construction of the reporting of the Gulf War in early 1991 when networks placed on the floors of their studios various maps of the Persian Gulf, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Israel, and the eastern Mediterranean that the anchoring newscasters trod upon in the course of their reports. The style of their gait and the pressure exerted by their massive wingtip shoes on the map attested to an aggressive domination of the Gulf as much by the media as the air attacks and the illusions of “surgical” bombing being reported. Anthony Mann’s film clearly provided a source for this effect. That Ridley Scott chose not to use it in the analogous sequences in which Commodus struts about the senate could be sign that the implied contest of global arena, of a theatrum mundi, would be enhanced by eliminating allusions to the real setting of the Roman Empire. The map connotes the history of the composition of the film. Mann’s work is clearly seen through that of Ridley Scott, and vice-versa.

The motley quality of Gladiator given through its allusion to The Fall of the Roman Empire is further enhanced, third, by the fortunes of the map seen on the wall. A historian of cartography would immediately discern that what Marcus Aurelius shows to Maximus belongs to the style of Ptolemy. But whose Ptolemy, and when and where? The Ptolemaic map of Italia figures among the twenty-three topographical views that follow the mappamundi and precede a detailed gazetteer of place-names and their location according to latitude and longitude. The maps were executed in the middle of the second century a.d., and rediscovered in the fourteenth century, when they were copied in manuscript and soon after published in handsome folio editions. In the latter the arts of woodcutting (in Strasbourg, but also in northern Italy) and copperplate etching (in Bologna and Rome) were developed and refined. As editions of Ptolemy were put to a test in view of experience and observation (perhaps because of the accuracy of portulan charts of the Mediterranean), two projections, one old and the other new, were included for each region.⁷

The map of Italia that we see in Gladiator belongs to a diacritical tradition peculiar to Ptolemy and to humanistic cartography, in which the history of the construction of the map is shown in the difference of an earlier and a later view. The veracity of the map is found in a field of differences, and not merely in the fact that the one projection replaces another. The map in Gladiator figures in this postmedieval context at the same time it marks a series of differences in respect to the sequence it draws from Anthony Mann’s earlier feature. Seen as an “earlier” view of the Italian peninsula, the map figures in a history that locates the projection in its distance in respect to its recovery in the Renaissance, the time when such a map was made visible for a general public.

In light of the history of the map to which he draws Maximus’s attention, Marcus Aurelius is oddly telling the warrior to heed an anachronism or to wonder what indeed may be the logistical power of cartography in future waging of war. When we locate ourselves both from Maximus’s point of view and our own, the map that situates the old leader and the military commander at a distance from Rome also indicates where we must imagine ourselves in the epic narrative soon to follow. In the context of what would seem to be a historical reconstruction the anachronisms unhinge disbelief and promote a closer examination of the filmic space. We find ourselves not just in Rome at the beginning of its decline, but also in a late-medieval setting that imagines Italy through a lens underscoring its remoteness from present time and space.⁸

In these three functions the map informs us that from the outset we are being asked to engage the film in the style of a comparative exercise. We are baited into evaluating and enjoying the film as a potpourri of combat and logistics. It is hardly surprising that “serious” historians have castigated the opening sequence. The catapults that launched fireballs referred to war movies showing how howitzers or shelling from battleships “softened” the terrain before foot soldiers were sent forward to engage enemy. The thousands of flaming arrows launched by row upon row of archers resembled movies of the grist of Ivanhoe (1952) but also recalled the rocket-launchers seen in the newsreel footage of the Second World War. When Maximus rides forward, yelling, “Unleash Hell!,” he is accompanied by a German shepherd that inspires recalls of the equestrian soldier in the guise of Albrecht Dürer’s famous woodcut, “Knight, Death, and the Devil,” in which a soldier in armor, his lance erect, puts his spurs to his stallion as his faithful canine runs beside them. The cumulative effect of the battle prompts comparison with the grisly beginning of Saving Private Ryan (1998), a film that might be its nearest rival or enemy brother. One wonders if the sequence was conceived to call in question the so-called authenticity of any Roman epic or other war movie by its own willful confusion of military codes.⁹

The cartographic material inflects the relation of cinema and history in other areas of the film, in shots that on cursory glance seem no less perfunctory than Marcus Aurelius’s implicit nod to Ptolemy. Commodus, following his triumphant return to Rome, decides to make gladiatorial games the opiate of his people. He offers to the senate the plan of sating the public with a new stadium. A close-up of the edifice is shown. Bathed in dark grey, on first view the coliseum seems to be real; as the shot unwinds the stadium is slowly perceived to be a model whose proportion requires a comparative correlate. In respect to the architecture seen up to this point the arena seems grandiose, but only before a gigantic hand enters the frame from the right and sets into the middle a set of pegs to represent combatants on the field of play. The following shots reveal that the hand belongs to Commodus and that he is conceiving an architectural model for the new Coliseum. The shot of the maquette or miniature three-dimensional plan precedes an aerial (ichnographic) view of the finished stadium seemingly taken (at least for anyone who has watched professional football) from a Goodyear blimp that flies in the sky over the Eternal City. Thousands of dots, seeming throngs of people, mill about and around the site shown to be the realization of the emperor’s wooden model. The sleight of the emperor’s hand, toying with the wooden gladiators, reveals that the virtual character—the computer-generated imagery— of the architecture underscores how much a “Coliseum-effect” is built as much from simulation as from representation. The model avers to be the real thing because it is anchored in the regime of perception that the film is inventing and negotiating.

The shots that register the emperor’s architectural fantasy and its realization sum up the narrative of special effects that accompanies the epic tale of the return and vindication of a soldier betrayed by his country. A simulated architectural form gives way to a computer-programmed monument offered to the eye not as a mimetic form that reconstructs an integral object from the remainders of a contemporary ruin but a simulacrum creating its own order of beauty. As a result, when Maximus and his band enter Rome and gaze at the Coliseum from the streets below and on the outside of the structure their expression of marvel does not come from a sense of disproportion about their own size against the enormity of the building (nor, either, if the plot is recalled, does Maximus exude a lingering narcissism of astonishment fueled by his having come from a ramshackle stadium to play in one of the seven wonders of the world). Rather, the gladiators seem to be in suspended admiration over the special nature of their own special effect. They are programmed to marvel at the effectiveness of themselves as computer-generated and, with their pectoral sinew, body-built simulations. In that way, in the role of optical intermediaries between the spectator and the spectacle, their gaze elicits a critical relation with the modes of production of the film. Their eyes engage in a play of perception of all that is virtual in the film’s reality.¹⁰

In the DVD edition of Gladiator a good deal of the supplementary plastic disc is devoted to the ways that Ridley Scott and his crew “generated” the panoramic shots about and in the monument. In Malta they built a coliseum, no doubt from the same kind of maquette that fuels Commodus’s imagination, but they left open more than one-fourth of the structure in order to allow light to enter the arena. For shots of the inside and outside, panels were constructed to mask the open areas and to extend the stands and the archivolts and cornices all about the inner and outer perimeters. When Maximus battled the greatest of living gladiators and, while fending off tigers released from cages below the playing field (a citation from Delmer Daves’ Demetrius and the Gladiators [1954]), the dramatic effects came from programmers who moved the images of the felines closer to those of the hero wielding his sword.

The visual pleasure accrued in these areas of the film could be appreciated as genuinely bogus beauty. On one level the film plays into the world of publicity effects and advertising while on another it seems to be mapping them in ways that celebrate facticity not for itself but, as we have seen through the logistics of the map in the beginning, a relation of facticity to history that can, with adequate distance and alert appropriation, serve to militate in the direction of a cruel lucidity.¹¹ Somehow the circular image of the Coliseum, flat and deep as a hologram, resembles the shape and sheen of DVD diskettes.

It is here that these two “maps” in Gladiator can be taken in a sense consonant with the reflections of Negri and Hardt on empire, subjectivation, and control. The film is less an overt writing of history Saving Private Ryan or Schindler’s List than a self-interested speculation on what indeed comprises a writing of history. In other words, the flatness of the depth of field yielded by the computerized images tells of the workings of an operation that evacuates the present from its discourse by not locating where it stands in actual time. The special effects speak to the present through another time that the film claims to resurrect from oblivion and, thus, to distort and exorcise inherited images of history by displacing them into the present (Certeau 1975, 100). Gladiator indicates that its simulation of a campaign that Tacitus had described in arresting detail in the Annals floats between one epoch and another, and that its military “look” can be drawn through any number of wars. In turn, its reconstruction of the gladiatorial system is overtly plotted through various sets of images. Some are historical, others cinematic, and still others sportive.

One that is the intertextual complement to Anthony Mann’s Fall of the Roman Empire is Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960), a film that argues for constructive disobedience, after which much of the African and Roman sequences of Scott’s film are patterned. Another complement, put forward in the supplementary material included in the DVD version, is professional sport, especially American football, which reigns in televisual media and newsprints from July of one year to February in the next. Throughout the film the spectator is invited to compare its gladiatorial battles (there are at least five) to sports events of our time. The staging of sports events in the televisual realm becomes exactly what Gladiator does not elide, but whose broader military connotations it leaves out of its frame.

The contours of the film are visible between the narrative reiterations and their interplay with the media-productions of professional football. Like the distinction between advertisements and the plays seen on a gridiron (a map), the lines distinguishing its history of gladiatorial combat from its relation with media are blurred. From that blur emerges a “logistics of perception.” In the narrative Commodus has just strangled his father, Marcus Aurelius, after learning that not he but Maximus will inherit the task of leading the Roman people. He orders his henchmen to put the popular hero to death. Maximus is brought into the woods at daylight and thrown to the earth. Asking for a military death by having a sword plunged down his neck, Maximus, ruseful as Odysseus, is able to wrest himself free from his captors. He grabs the butcher’s weapon and kills the executioner and the other members of the phalanx. He escapes after suffering a deep cut in his shoulder above the tattoo, “S.P.Q.R.,” that seems to be the Roman equivalent of a marine’s tattoo of a globe displaying the Americas and an anchor set above “Semper fi.” Maximus finds a horse and, clasping his wounded shoulder, struggles to ride homeward. Along the journey over a lunar landscape he startles himself at the thought that Commodus will have sent centurions to massacre his wife and child at his villa. His intuition is correct. Maximus rides homeward and discovers their charred bodies hanging from a tree at the entry to his gated domain. The sight causes him to swoon. An itinerant band rescues him and takes him to a slave market in North Africa. A former gladiator buys him and puts him among a group that will play before a mixed public in a small arena on the edge of the empire. Maximus becomes a gladiator resembling a football player shipped to “NFL Africa.”

His success and esprit de corps bring him fame in the minor leagues where the games are played at the edge of the kingdom (for reason of having been proscribed in Rome during the sagacious reign of Marcus Aurelius). After Commodus returns to Rome in the name of the new emperor (in a depiction clearly patterned to recall the arrival of Hitler in Nuremberg in The Triumph of the Will), the games are revived. They will, murmur the senators, be a panacea to the real contradictions of social injustice and a degenerate infrastructure. But as media events, politicians agree, the professional sport will nonetheless entertain an increasingly ignorant, mixed, and illiterate populace. And so they do. As armies of gladiators are needed to stage the spectacles Maximus and his friends finally return to the major league, to the newly built professional stadium in the Eternal City.

He first plays in a performance billed to be a re-enactment of the victory of the Romans over the Carthagians. When his valor, bloodthirstiness, and military know-how reverse the predictable conclusion—when he kills the Romans who had killed the North Africans—he rewrites history that has suddenly returned to the narrative fantasy. After other similar performances he soon becomes a revered figure. When Commodus learns that the “Spaniard” is indeed Maximus it becomes clear that the two will ultimately confront and murder each other in a sunburnt arena: which they do after Commodus has tilted in his favor by stabbing Maximus in the back. The death of the evil leader assures that a democracy will return to the senate, and that the stupendous waste of life and energy in the gladiatorial world might also soon be on the wane.

The virtual map of the film is located, on the one hand, between the parabola of several reversals of fortune in the diegesis (the general is turned into a slave before he overcomes his enemy brother; history is inverted in the events staged in the games in the Coliseum; Democracy cedes to Empire and Empire to a promise of Democracy) and, on the other, the intertextual parallels with the combat of militarized bodies of professional football players who now wear light but massive shoulder pads, are coiffed in bright and thick helmets with cage-like faceguards, run in shoes spiked to grip sod and dirt, their bodies clad in tight-fitting Lycra to display svelte sinew and fulsome thighs.

The parallel, however, is so obvious and so overplayed in the literature surrounding Gladiator that we wonder if it is tendered to be brought forward that so we can “admire” our critical faculties for making the connection; so that as a contemporary public we might possibly entertain a distanced view on the relation of opiation to the proliferation of televised sports. If so, the film exploits the fluid movement between advertising and the presentation of combat. It shows, in a commercial in which a forty-something quarterback throws a football at the bull’s eye of a tire swinging at the end of a pendulum under a tree in his back yard, a mature man’s need for more oomph (or Viagra) than he had in his earlier and more mythic days. It shows, too, that when a cap bursts from a bottle of Budweiser that beer is the imaginary aphrodisiac players drink when they squirt fluid from squeeze-bottles into their open mouths. The gladiators in Scott’s film and their contemporary avatars “win” through mediated similitudes taking place in the flow between the event and its frame.

The advertisements seem to be cartouches and inserts blending into the map that is the game itself. As in classical cartography, the one inhabits and flows in and out of the space of the other. When the film and the sport to which it appeals make clear their relation with mediation they raise critical consciousness. Like Maximus in all but one of his battles, Gladiator would be said to “win” because it entertains a globalized public in accord with the prevailing modes of representation that it mildly historicizes.

In its blur, however, of frame and subject or cartouche and map are glimpsed obvious allusions to contemporary media. After Maximus and his cohorts rewrite the history of the Punic Wars the spectators award the fighters “two thumbs up” with so much approbation that Commodus is unable to have his enemy assassinated. In turn, when Maximus beats a famous gladiator into submission, out of ostensive frustration Commodus signals “thumbs down”: refusing to exercise the death penalty, Maximus defies the emperor’s orders. In the rhetoric of computerized images the play of events seen from afar (the sight of the great arena) against things very near (close-ups of thumbs that turn up and down) enhances the antitheses that mobilize the story. But they also refer to an emblem popularized by a pair of reviewers, Roger Ebert and the late Gene Siskel, syndicated by Chicago Newspapers, that has crept into the language of cinematic judgment. A film having the benediction of “two thumbs up” assuredly finds success when the sign is reported in newspapers and printed in movie-trailers. Thus Gladiator gives “thumbs up” to itself by having its own public exercise a power of decision otherwise reserved for an elite.¹² Other allegorical figures follow the same model. Loaves of bread thrown to the fans are not just historical record; they belong to strategies of publicity found in every stadium or arena, which uses every available parcel of visible surface that can be seen by a camera. The Roman past is given as one that has “not yet” succumbed to subliminal advertising for the reason that the film conveys as much in its own graphic style.

Some of the aftereffects of Gladiator locate the economy of its perception and of its reception. At the National Football League Divisional Championship in January of 2001 at Giant Stadium in the New Jersey Meadowlands two great television screens stood over each end of the football field. On the giant monitors were shown, just prior to the official kick-off at 1:05 p.m., the opening shots of Gladiator.¹³ “Unleash Hell!” Spectators were invited to compare the introduction of the players as they ran out of corridors issuing from the bowels of the stadium much in the way that Maximus reviewed his troops in the clank and clatter of the buckling of Roman military gear or emerged from the depths of the Coliseum into the bright arena. The raised fists and high-fives shared between Maximus and his fighters—like those of Mark McGwire and José Canseco of the Athletics shared with each other in the early 1990s—were the imaginary correlative to what was happening on the field. The beginning of one event was coextensive with that of the other. Gladiator was served to incite combat and to sell perception (and the future DVD) through the comparisons being served up to the spectators.

Just prior to the game, when the Giants would battle another tribe of Goths from the north, the hoary Minnesota Vikings, a squad of Marines marched across the field, arms on their shoulders and with the gonfalon of the American flag in their midst. They stood immobile while the national anthem was played.¹⁴ Three veteran paratroopers descended from the empyrean and guided their parachutes to the center of the field where they landed in a tumble, rolled up their paraphernalia, and were saluted to the applause of 78,000 spectators. Gladiator was the most immediate memory-image in a game that staged, more than any of the contests in the regular season, the analogy of American professional football to American military might.

What was implied in co-presence of armed forces, sequences from Gladiator, and football players became more pronounced in the fabled Super Bowl that took place just two weeks later. There, before the eyes of even more spectators, were multiplied many of the agencies producing perception. Gladiator was not played on the screens of the Raymond James Stadium in Tampa Bay, but its retinal persistence held strong. The same paratroopers descended on the field. Minutes later, an American stealth bomber flew silently over the stadium. Then in a great blare a squadron of F-16s whooshed over the crowd and left gossamer contrails in their path. The military complex was felt ubiquitously above the stadium, in the persons of the aviators and skydivers who emblazoned the invincibility of American armies both in and outside of the arena. On the occasion of Super Bowl XXXV (Roman numerals strictly in uppercase) the pregame pageant featured a timely commemoration of Super Bowl XXV, in which exactly a decade ago the same Giants had beaten the Buffalo Bills. Super Bowl XXV had taken place at the same time war was unleashed in the Persian Gulf. In the introductory ceremonies in 2001 the heroic combatants of 1991 also emerged from the depths of the stadium and ran into the arena. Reinaugurated, along with the near-synchronous inauguration of George W. Bush, was that moment when George Bush Sr., then president, had enjoyed unparalleled popularity. The moment of the game was staged, it appeared, to celebrate the triumph of Americans over the Iraqis, the Infidels, Barbarians, or Carthaginians of modern times. With the real or implied presence of Norman Schwartzkopf and Colin Powell the game was staged to rehearse, six months before 9/11/01, the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The construction of the perception of a military complex embedded in a space and architecture of entertainment did not stop with the implicit analogy of Super Bowl XXXV to gladiators replaying Roman battles won in the Punic Wars. Every seatholder at the contest was awarded a free plastic cushion to which was attached a pouch containing a radio with batteries and earphones, and a disposable flash camera in a box labeled “E Trade Super Bowl Halftime Show.” The camera was thus thought on first sight to be a memory-machine supplied to everyone who would want to eternize the halftime spectacle by flashing pictures of friendly fans in and about the stands or aiming the camera and shooting directly at the theater on the field. The latter was organized around an immense floor over which stood great girders with lights and speakers. It recorded the calisthenics of Britney Spears and her furies while charge after charge of skyrockets were blasted into the air, like antiaircraft cannons, or flaming arrows with exploding tips that shrouded the bowl of the stadium under immense clouds of smoke. The disposable snapshot devices given to each spectator had the function of recording the event in which they were playing a part. The devices (clearly antiques in contrast to the camcorders many fans brought to the stadium) were supplied en masse in order for the many cameras set all around the coliseum to record thousands of “points of light” flickering in the dark surround of the stands. Hundreds of thousands of flashes became the scintillating background to the spectacle available to viewers at home. Where they were producing memory-images of the game, the spectators were also participating in the construction of an aerial battle in the black of night. The flashes they made were conveyed on the airwaves as part of the overall dazzle that restaged and prolonged the military effects with which American aviators inaugurated the game.

In the context of a globalized network to which it alludes, Gladiator became a mobile map that moved toward contemporary genres of entertainment and an array of films past and present. It became part of an “empire” of cinematic control whose ultimate projection is one of a worldwide circulation of itself. A trajectory drawn from a glimpse of a map bearing some resemblance to Ptolemy’s Italia to the spectacle of the coliseum reveals that a fragment of an archive figures in a broader cinematic diagram. Gladiator itself is meshed with other maps, mostly of strategic agencies of advertising and entertainment, but its cartographies open an interpretive space in which the ends of cinema, mapping, and globalization are shown interrelated. The film allows us to see how modes of control in popular culture are interwoven and reach beyond the confines of a coliseum, a television screen, or a movie theater. Gladiator ultimately seems to be light-years away from a modest feature such as Paris qui dort, the film chosen to inaugurate this study of cinema and cartography. Both films play on perception to a maximal degree in the idiolects and technologies of their time. Closer inspection shows that they share many of the same traits. It may be fitting to move to a broader conclusion in order to see how and why.