Abstract
The series emphasizes an extremely strong physical presence, especially in the gladiators, and later also in the female fighters, who are almost continuously staged only scantily clad. This creates a specifically cinematic perception of the male and female body, which is made permanent through the series and its montage.
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Notes
- 1.
Stiglegger (2006: 108) emphasizes, with regard to film and his seduction theory, that the dominance of body representation in film “is not an authentic body [but] rather the idealized version of one, tightly bound into rituals of seduction and the staged play and montage of the film. As a consequence, the play of the film actor is just as fragmented as the film technical apparatus visually disassembles and reassembles his body: It is in the montage that the filmic representation of a human body emerges, which can be perceived as such by the audience at all. […] It seems, then, not only that the cinematic representation constructs the human being ever anew as a physical simulacrum for the audience, but that moreover […] the formerly authentically sensual bodily reference of this audience is transformed in the reception of this simulation.” Kleiner (2012: 185 f.) applies a similar argument to the staging of the body in the music video.
- 2.
It should be noted once again that there were also female gladiators in the later Roman imperial period, although they were in the minority. Cf. Wate/Peiter 2017.
- 3.
By “Promethean shame” Günther Anders meant in 1954 that man begins to feel ashamed of the tendency towards perfect, aesthetic machines that he manufactures and develops compensatory strategies such as fashion, make-up, fitness, etc. with regard to the resulting disparity. Cf. also Kleiner (2012: 186 f.), who speaks of the “disciplined and dramaturgical body” and the “body as capital”. Behind this, the ‘body-reference theories’ of Michel Foucault, Erving Goffmann and Pierre Bourdieu are action-guiding: “The studies of Foucault, Goffman and Bourdieu have in common that they address the social constitution and (re)production of the body. […] Through body work, moreover, one can work on one’s own identity; body and identity capital are constitutively linked in Bourdieu, as are body and identity dramaturgy in Goffman or body and identity disciplining in Foucault.”
- 4.
Possible intersections between Queer Film Theory and A/Sexual Film Theory with a view to discourse currently discussed Dannenberg 2017.
- 5.
Advertising can be cited as a paradigm, here a slogan of the Deutsche Bank subsidiary Postbank from 2008–2014: “Unterm Strich zähl ich”.
- 6.
A further consideration of such constellations in a US series would inevitably have to include the question of inscribed American relations with regard to slavery, racism, sexuality, black and white, etc. would have to include: “In the time of the transatlantic slave trade […] power indeed maintained not only an object-oriented but also an erotic relation to the commodity, with pleasure in this context representing the equivalent of absolute immorality, while power was understood as everything that was preferably embodied in a practice of transgression – albeit in a practice that at the same time understood itself as aesthetics.” Mbembe 2016: 220.
- 7.
As an expression of an extreme situation in which power-specific conditional relations of ability, control, resistance, and self-sacrifice in the climax determine perception and action, a similar situation is found in the manga and later adapted television series Kozure Ōkami (English Lone Wolfe & Cub, 1973–1976) by Kazuo Koike and Gōseki Kojima.
- 8.
This is explicitly demonstrated on another social level: The brothel owner capitulates to Cupid. Pleasure-walking through the chambers of his fully active house with a jug of wine in his hand, he allows himself to be infected by the lust of his clientele and aroused by the excessive action.
- 9.
The Pater Familias (genitive form of classical Latin) was a social rank reserved for Roman citizens and referred to the eldest male head of the family, who not only represented the family to the outside world, but since the Twelve Tables Laws was also endowed with the so-called vitae necisque potestas, the power over death and life over the members of the family. He could thus punish the wife for adultery, even kill her, marry off the children. His word was absolute and incontrovertible. Giorgio Agamben sees in the vitae necisque potestas the state of exception, hence the foundation of political power. For while in the Roman Empire the principle of the twelve-table law applied, according to which no citizen could be killed without a verdict (indemnatus), the vitae necisque potestas gave the father the unrestricted right to judge his relatives without jurisdiction, and in this reflects the state of exception, which today is understood as the suspension of law by the state. Cf. Agamben 2004: 68 f. Agamben – as also Christoph Menke 20183 – deals with Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin in the context of law and violence and thus arrives at the concept of “suspension”.
- 10.
This is where the distinction between centre and periphery comes into play: orgies and the like also existed in Rome, but in order not to make its social position in the centre vulnerable to attack, it needed closed spaces in the periphery. Furthermore, the rape of a slave was, in case of doubt, no more than a depreciation in value that could be compensated financially.
- 11.
Entertainment as a need that can be satisfied would imply that it could be put to an end by reaching a ‘degree of saturation’. However, this is difficult to determine, especially in the case of entertainment, since the supply of entertainment can be described as unbounded and the need is exposed to incentives that turn into desire. This would be an attempt at an explanation that goes beyond the dramaturgical cliffhanger effect in series and looks at binge-watching as a mode of reception. When a duty takes effect, desire is temporarily suppressed.
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Online-Quellen
Seewald, Bertold (2012): Blut, Schweiß, Sperma. Die TV-Serie “Spartacus” bietet eine Tour d’Horizon durch den Sandalenfilm. In: Die Welt, veröffentlicht am 20.04.2012
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Wilke, T. (2023). Body Staging and Corporeality. In: Living and Dying in the Roman Republic . Palgrave Macmillan, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38870-6_6
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