In the waning days of the Year of the Dragon I eagerly await the final season of the Grand-Guignol retelling of the 3rd Servile War, Spartacus: War of the Damned. No mystery how it will end. In Howard Fast’s novel the end is revealed at the very first mention of the hero:
"Is that Spartacus?" Claudia asked foolishly, but the fat man found patience for her. …
"Hardly Spartacus, my dear."
"His body was never found," Caius said impatiently.
"Cut to pieces," the fat man said pompously. "Cut to pieces, my dear child.
Tender minds for such dreadful thoughts, but that's the truth of it—"
Howard Fast, Spartacus (1951)
Tender minds have never been the audience for this story. But the audience has, it seems, undergone important changes in the passage of this legend from Fast’s novel and the Universal Studio’s film adaptation of 1960 to the Starz series scheduled to finish in 2013.
The novel and the film come in the near aftermath of the Popular Front period with a working class politically conditioned both by the disaster of the First World War and the energy of the Russian Revolution. Specifically, they occur at the point where the blacklisted American remnants of that current were struggling to survive and to reengage their reactionary opponents, as before, in an alliance with the liberal New Deal. Fast’s novel was universally refused publication forcing him to self-publish with, as it turned out, great success. Kubrick’s film was another step in that process, deliberately attempting to break the blacklist with the employment of Dalton Trumbo as screenwriter.
To be considered a success and to adequately engage the legend of Spartacus the film needed to attain unprecedented dimensions. Budget, stars, length and scope were all enormous. Sustaining that in the political climate of 1960 U. S. inevitably required compromise and was the subject of painful reflection by Trumbo and disavowal by Kubrick. According to Trumbo’s memoir there was a constant battle between the story’s ideological guardians and its financial sponsors over the depiction of the slave army’s campaigns:
“Despite the vigorous objections of Douglas, Kubrick, and Trumbo, Universal’s unwillingness to confront the prevailing political myth of the inevitable failure or degeneration of social revolution resulted in the elimination of nearly a dozen dialogue and action sequences which fostered the hope that Spartacus’s rebellion might actually have succeeded in destroying Rome.”
Although some edits were restored in 1991 these battle sequences are known to have been destroyed. What did survive and is clearly part of Kubrick’s vision are a number of beautiful scenes of the masses in movement, working autonomously, joining and organizing spontaneously.
The present iteration of the legend occurs in a very different environment. The working class political currents of the early 20th century which nourished the post-WW2 Spartacus are gone. They are, undoubtedly, still to be found soaked into the soil. But they are gone as traceable bodies of flowing water. In this landscape the current production has none of the constraints of its predecessor. Of course Rome is eternally the image of empire and nothing can remove Spartacus’ claim as champion of revolt against the empire from below. So, even as its producers deny the political heritage of what they are doing they cannot completely escape and, no doubt, wouldn’t want to, the resonance of revolution inhering in their subject.
There is no blacklist to break but the subject still requires some cover if it going to reach a wide audience with the scope and resources it deserves. In this new production the cover is provided by sex and gore, the strategy of the Grand-Guignol. The fan response, and here I know only what I can gather on Tumblr, is clearly keying on these elements, both of which were significantly more constrained by censorship and audience sensitivities in 1960.
The sources on the 3rd Servile War are bare and sometimes contradictory. To create drama from what is a historical period that had it in abundance requires a license to flesh out the story from the point of view of the defeated, where the sources are silent. Fast did this above all with the love story of Spartacus and Varinia. It provides a thread of hope in a narrative of cruel defeat and illuminates the contradictions which were tearing at the Roman republic from within. It also provided Steve Reeves with his final 'sword and sandal' role as Il Figlio di Spartacus.
But Varinia and Spartacus’ slave origins are not found in the sources where the only personal history mentioned depicts him as a free man and married before capture and sale as a slave. The producers of the series on Starz are binding themselves more to the historical record for their story and bringing in the fantasy elements in their visual presentation, hand to hand combat clearly drawn from the world of animated games. Their additions to the story come from the least documented part of the Spartacus legend: his career as a gladiator at Capua, the backstory of the lanista, Batiatus, and the circumstances and motives for the initial revolt.
What remains to be told in the final season is the course of the war itself, the story that was largely removed from the film. It is not surprising, however, to learn that the network has lost some of its interest in the franchise at the stage where it is dealing with an army of slaves in a position to threaten the emblematic Roman empire (and incurring the rising costs for doing so). The ten episodes this winter will be all we will have of the time that Spartacus and his cohorts stood at the center of history.
Although dispensing with the character of Varinia the series keeps close the theme of love which she introduced to the novel and film. Persisting through the 60 year course of this legend is passionate attachment among the slaves and its absence among the Romans. Having cut their connection to work the slaveholding citizens of the empire are left with only a pattern of sexual machinations for their beds and bitter envy of the love found among their slaves. Spartacus is no longer the center of the love story as the revolt progresses. Instead, his loss of love becomes the motive driving him to leadership in the revolt.
So what has passed in our world as this story has been transformed from a novel to a serial fantasy? In 1960 there was still the memory of an international workers movement, a movement that had provided both energy and the fence containing the working class within world capitalism. From 1968 to 1989 we saw the erasure of that memory. What has emerged since, in the face of the collapse of global capital is, of necessity, something new. It is something still undefined, yet to fully emerge. But it can only be the “old mole”. There is no place else it can come from than labor and no extent adequate to its needs other than worldwide.
What have I been reading and watching while I wait?
Spartacus – Howard Fast, 1951, self-published
Spartacus – directed by Stanley Kubrick, screenplay Dalton Trumbo, Howard Fast etc. 1960
Spartacus – directed by Robert Dornhelm 2004
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