Sinful Sunday: Crassus and the Queer Pleasures of the Death Drive in "Spartacus"
Stanley Kubrick's 1960 epic features one of the most sinister and powerful queer villains in the history of epic cinema.
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Welcome to “Sinful Sundays,” where I explore and analyze some of the most notorious queer villains of film and TV (and sometimes literature, depending on my mood). These are the characters that entrance and entertain and revolt us, sometimes all three at the same time. As these queer villains show, very often it’s sweetly good to be bitterly bad.
It’ll come as no surprise to anyone to find that I’ve been in an antiquity mood lately, so for this week’s Sinful Sunday I wanted to turn to one of the most menacing examples of queer villainy in the Hollywood epic: Marcus Licinus Crassus, the big bad of Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus. As one might gather from the title, the film focuses on the rebel slave Spartacus–played here with scenery-chewing gravitas by Kirk Douglas–as he attempts to free his fellow slaves and escape the crushing weight of the late Roman Republic.
Though Spartacus might be the hero of this film, there’s another character who looms large and that, of course, is Laurence Olivier’s sinister Crassus, the Roman aristocrat who is recruited to crush the rebellion. As many have noted, Olivier grants Crassus not just a refined Britishness that stands in marked contrast to Douglas’ hard-jawed American epic masculinity but also one that is characterized by its troubling indeterminacy. In arguably his most (in)famous scene, he lounges in the bath while coming on to his young slave Antoninus (a baby-faced Tony Curtis), using the metaphor of oysters and snails to engage in a little light philosophy about the morality of human sexual desires. Though not included in the original theatrical version of the film, it was restored in the 1990s (with Anthony Hopkins dubbing the vocals), and in the years since it has become an indelible part of the film, its legacy, and audiences’ understanding of Crassus.
Even without the scene, though, there’s no question that Crassus is a very queer fish indeed. Ana Maria Sapountzi observes that he shows far more interest than men and than women–always a bad sign in a classical Hollywood film, particularly of the epic variety–and Crassus’ sly queerness also intersects with his desire to control everything around him. Ina Rae Hark, in an extended discussion of the workings of masculinity in Spartacus, analyzes the extent to which Crassus’ desires remain predicated on sadism and control. This is a man who relishes both his own power and that of the state of which he is the representative, and there’s no missing the extent to which he takes vicarious pleasure in the power of the Roman legions to crush all resistance beneath their hobnailed boots. For Crassus, pleasure is inextricably intertwined with power and the ability to enforce one’s will upon others, whether they be house slave or rebel.
At first blush this would seem to be in service of the film’s partaking of a broader American ideology which associates queerness with degeneracy and the decadence of the Roman state. While this is certainly true, it’s hard not to feel as if Spartacus, like so many other midcentury ancient world epics, doth protest a bit too much. Just as Quo Vadis often seems to be of Nero’s party without really knowing it, so this film repeatedly offers the viewer–including and especially, I would argue, a queer one–the opportunity to savor along with Crassus the power that Roman queerness brings with it. After all, just because the film wants us to see Crassus as the villain of the piece doesn’t mean that we also have to accept the ideological message that goes along with such an identification. Indeed, as we know from many the many other examples of villains in the history of cinema, there can be a pleasure in being evil, in being the epitome of all that is dark and sinister and perverse, and that pleasure increases exponentially when one decides to identify with a powerful Roman general who has the power to bend the entire state to his will. It’s also worth noting that it is Crassus, not Spartacus, who ends up being the one who emerges from the film as the final victor.
Indeed, what’s particularly striking about Spartacus is just how pessimistic it ends up being, particularly in contrast to so many other ancient world epics of the period, which tended to posit that the weak and the downtrodden (which usually tend to be Christians), are the ones fated to inherit the world from a Roman Empire brought low by its own excesses, both sexual and otherwise. After all, the title character doesn’t manage to free his fellow slaves; in fact, he ends up having to kill Antoninus in a hand-to-hand duel mandated by Crassus. As if all of this weren’t enough, he ends the film crucified, his body left to hang as one of numerous nameless rebels, reduced to nothing more than ragged flesh. Though there is some effort to give the film a quasi-happy ending by having Spartacus’ wife Varinia (the ever charming Jean SImmons) ride away with his son, this isn’t quite enough to overcome our awareness of just how futile this whole thing has been.
There is, therefore, a way of reading Crassus that aligns him with the queer death drive as theorized by Lee Edelman. The film clearly struggles to reconcile its epic narrative investment in Spartacus’ heroic (and salvific) masculinity with the historical inevitability of his defeat and death at Crassus’ hands. At the end of the day, history demands that it be Crassus who emerges as the victor, with the Roman state continuing on uninterrupted, while Spartacus is just another nameless sacrifice on the altar of Crassus’ overwhelming political and martial ambition. Scholars like William Fitzgerald have argued that toga films like this one ask the audience to inhabit the contradictory space of identifying with both the oppressor and the oppressed, and it’s not hard to see how Spartacus accomplishes this with remarkable panache. After all, screen presences don’t come much more compelling than Olivier, who manages to exude aristocratic menace every moment he appears. You find yourself drawn to him and identifying with him, even though you know you shouldn’t.
It’s not hard to see the giant shadow that the Crassus of Spartacus has cast over subsequent epics, whether on the big or the small screen. His aristocratic disdain for the more egalitarian ethos espoused by the revolutionaries–to say nothing of his ambiguous and troubling masculinity–finds its echo in other characters in subsequent epics, including Commodus of Gladiator and, perhaps most explicitly, Xerxes in 300. Crassus also makes a memorable appearance in the Starz series Spartacus, though notably less queer. He is a perpetual reminder of the power of ancient Rome to excite and to enthrall. Sometimes, it really is good to be bad, particularly when history itself is at stake.