Breasts and circuses
With a show like Spartacus: Blood and Sand, you’re in no danger of falling alseep during a tedious history lesson. No modern-day Arnold Toynbee or Edward Gibbon is going to face the camera and drone on about decisive battlefields and important dates. No, fans basically tune in for the gouts of blood and bare female appendages. And with American network Starz showing it (lately making the rounds in torrent downloads), they are not disappointed.
A few minutes into a typical episode, you find yourself plunged into a Roman coliseum, a place that makes Ridley’s Scott’s Gladiator look like a grade school food fight. With its whipping, 360-degree coliseum-cam making the rounds, you are pressed nose-deep into flying limbs and rivers of gore. The show’s art director prefers the slow-mo streamers of blood that made 300 such a pivotal guy flick. (The show updates 300’s freeze-frame blood splatter: the action stops, but the blood keeps spreading in enhanced, HD glory.)
Around the coliseum stands, female fans shake their bare knobbies like they’re casting for beads at the Mardi Gras, or auditioning for Roman Girls Gone Wild. Who knew gladiators had their own cheerleading section? It’s only fitting that, as America enters its late Roman phase, TV viewers wallow in a costume drama that is as titillating as the culture’s own decline. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to connect the dots: this is Rome’s UFC and WWF, all rolled into one. Just try tearing your eyes away from a car crash sometime, and you’ll see the futility of saying this is not a guilty pleasure. And hey, who knows? Maybe the Roman Empire was actually this sensationalistic and exploitative. Possibly even more so.
Exploring themes of heavy lesbianism among Roman housewives, foul-mouthed slave banter (more four-letter-words than a typical episode of The Sopranos; those Roman slaves were fond of their Anglo-Saxonisms), and a higher boob count than the collective work of Kate Winslet, Spartacus: Blood and Sand is light years away from Stanley Kubrick’s 1960s take on the famous slave-turned-liberator (i.e., chicks kissing chicks, instead of Tony Curtis taking a sauna with Laurence Olivier). There’s equal-opportunity nudity here, this being cable, and one of the prerequisites for fringe cable stations to get noticed, if not a license, is an ample abundance of flesh and blue-hour dry-humping on display. Full frontal nudity is as casual as blood gouting — it’s softcore Spartacus for the digital gaming set. Lots of female anatomy on display, but you could argue all the bare male pecs and buttocks shown are meant as a draw for female viewers. Well, why shouldn’t they enjoy the breasts — er, bread — and circuses like the rest of the audience?
Like so many sword-and-sandals revamps in recent years, Spartacus: Blood and Sand sports a cast of not-quite-British Sterling talent (think: Australian soap stars) such as Andy Whitfield as the titular slave gladiator and good ol’ Lucy Lawless (Xena herself, though more naked these days) as scheming Lucretia. Whitfield is given to speechmaking on the killing grounds, but even with his chiseled face and Hollywood beard, he’s not quite up to Russell Crowe’s skill set. Still, wheeling a sword around, he does a decent job of knocking apart lesser gladiators. There’s something primal in watching him take out five Roman warriors in the Coliseum: unlike Gladiator’s hero, Maximus, Spartacus doesn’t spare a single soul, not even the vanquished Roman trying to crawl away without the benefit of his legs. Are we not entertained?
With Sam Raimi as an executive producer, the show definitely has a quality look to it. Shot in HD, watching it is a lot like thumbing a joystick console in front of a high-def game version of Roman Times. Plus it has that post-production spackling that makes clods of dirt thrown in the air look truly gritty; the blood spatter travels through the air in a bullet-time ballet, capturing the brutality of coliseum viewing. At last, a show that lives up to its title: there’s plenty of blood… and sand!
Early viewers were reportedly disappointed with the first five or six episodes, which outline the Thracian soldier’s capture and rebirth as Spartacus, king of the Octagon (or at least its equivalent in his day). Which just goes to show, even in historical drama, you’ve got to cut down on the “back story” and cut to the chase. This is done basically by cutting from talky exposition to a sex scene every now and then, like The History Channel crossed with The Playboy Channel.
By the time episode seven or eight rolls around, you’ve learn all kinds of interesting things about the Roman Empire, such as that Roman wives were kind of like sorority sisters, gossiping and stirring up intrigues among one another. Apparently they purchased gladiator slaves mostly for sex (often while wearing Roman drama masks, doggie-style), and occasionally to drink some of their slaves’ blood for “vitality.” Slaves, meanwhile, not only got paid to do their gladiator gig, they also received door-to-door hooker service — for a small extra deduction from their earnings. This allows Spartacus: Blood and Sand to linger around the torch-lit slave cells, where slaves are shown banging away like the orgy scene from Eyes Wide Shut (or Caligula). All this is merely backdrop to the story arc, which somehow, after eight or so episodes, I still can’t really make any sense of or generate much enthusiasm for. But then again, I am easily distracted in this modern, decadent age.
