Sinful Sunday: "Gladiator II" and the Persistence of the Queer Despot

"Gladiator II" has several queer villains, but Denzel Washington's Macrinus is the one who looms above them all.

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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.

As I wrote last week, I was sadly a little disappointed by Gladiator II which, for all that it has much of the sound and fury of its predecessor, still falls rather flat, particularly with its very sloppy story and inconsistent plot. Even so, I was compelled enough by its queer villains–particularly Denzel Washington’s Macrinus–to give them some more sustained attention. After all, even a lackluster film can often be saved, or at least made more interesting, by a really great queer villain. Whatever its other shortcomings, there’s no doubt that Gladiator II is quite stuffed with queer villainy, even if it doesn’t always know what to do with it.

We’ll start with Geta and Caracalla, mostly because they are far less interesting than their common-born counterpart, for all that they are supposedly the two most powerful men in 2nd century Rome. I knew from the minute that we first started getting stills from the film that these two characters were going to fit neatly into the established convention of epic cinema, in which Roman emperors are portrayed as effete and often ridiculous, desiccated exemplars of anti-masculinity who can’t be trusted with the burdens of rule. With their pancake makeup and blush, their gaudy costumes, and their unhinged antics, both Joseph Quinn’s Geta and Fred Hechinger’s Caracalla more than fit the bill.

To a degree, their actions do seem to match their appearance. Neither brother is particularly interested or adept at the actual logistics of ruling or even of warfare, which is why they depend on someone like Pedro Pascal’s Acacius to actually do the grunt work. Moreover, neither brother is particularly grateful for the services he provides, which is why they’re more than happy to throw him to the lions (metaphorically) when he is revealed to have been plotting against him. In their distorted perspective they are the state and are thus a synecdoche for the Roman state even if, on the flip side of that, they are also a symbol of everything wrong and rotten about the world over which they rule.

Strangely enough, though, they ended up not being nearly as fascinating as I thought they would be. They lack the intense and searing cruelty of, say, Domitian in the recent TV series Those About to Die (which I found to be, on the whole, more entertaining than Gladiator II, precisely because of Domitian), and they’re not even as debauched as Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus in the original Gladiator. Commodus’ death at Maximus’ hands in the film’s conclusion feels cathartic, because it marks the moment at which the former general has not only overcome the emperor’s duplicity but also avenged his wife, child, and surrogate father Marcus Aurelius. The deaths of Geta and Caracalla, on the other hand, may be brutal–both of them end up being hacked to death by Macrinus–but they don’t make much of an impact. If anything, I was rather glad they’d been shuffled off the stage so that their usurper could have his time in the limelight.

Indeed, if there is an actually interesting queer villain in this film it isn’t the effete and ultimately rather useless emperors but, instead, Macrinus, who flirts with men and, by his own admission, isn’t above sharing one’s bed every now and again. From the moment we meet him it’s clear that Macrinus is one of the few men in Rome who actually has a clear-eyed appreciation for how power works and is more than willing to do whatever it takes to get it, whether that means sacrificing Marcus Aurelius’ daughter or honing Paul Mescal’s Lucius into a weapon he can thrust into the heart of the imperial project.

One of the more striking things about the publicity surrounding the film is how much emphasis was actually placed on the diegetic revelation that Macrinus is supposed to be viewed as bisexual. Among other things, there were all of the rumors that Denzel Washington supposedly filmed a cut scene in which he kissed another man (even though Ridley Scott vociferously denied this and Washington ended up walking back his claims). While there are still hints of this explicit bisexuality in the completed film, it’s far more a matter of inference than outright declaration. It’s clear, though, that Washington at least is feasting on this role and that, when it comes down to it, Macrinus is far less interested in the sex of the person he’s fucking than he is in how he can use them for his own advantage. There’s more than a little eroticism in his encounters with the foolish and wispy Senator Thraex, and he seems to take especial delight in bending the silly politician to his whims.

And then there are his costumes.

If the clothes make the man–and costuming certainly plays an outsize role in an epic film like Gladiator II–then what do Macrinus’ clothes say about him? For one thing, they are remarkably ornate, and as such they are sartorial signifiers of his class-based ambitions. With his keen intellect and shrewd understanding of the nature of Roman society, he wisely knows that one has to look the part of someone in power in order to be convincing. It’s not just about having enough money to blackmail senators into giving up their houses but about appearing as if one belongs among the elite.

And, say what one will about his motives or his actions, but the truth is that Macrinus comes very close to seeing his ambitions realized. When he sees an opportunity to destroy those who stand in his way he seizes it with both hands, whether that’s ruthlessly slaughtering Geta (using Caracalla’s hand, of course), plunging a concealed blade into Caracalla’s neck while he’s deliriously enjoying the slaughter and chaos of Lucius’ uprising, or shooting Lucilla with an arrow while she is held helpless in the Colosseum, Macrinus repeatedly demonstrates that he is no shrinking violet. This is a man who clawed his way out of slavery, and he’s not going to let anyone–particularly no patrician blueblood–stand in the way of the power he feels is due.

However, one must always remember that this is an ancient world epic, and in that tradition it is a foregone conclusion that all queer villains perish, lest their corrupting influence retain its hold over the onward flow of historical time. It’s also ideal for such a villain to meet his doom at the hands of someone capable of performing his masculinity appropriately and thus demonstrate to the audience the wages of queerness. So it is that Macrinus finally has his epic showdown with Lucius who, after cutting off his hand, puts an end to him altogether before claiming the throne and supposedly beginning yet another new era for Rome.

As I wrote in my review of the film, I can’t help but read this through the lens of the present (as is almost always the case with Scott’s films, particularly those set in the ancient world). Yes, the film does seem to be interrogating the myth of Marcus Aurelius since, as it’s revealed near the end of the film, Macrinus was actually owned by the dead emperor himself before getting his freedom and clawing his way to the top. However, no matter how compelling and captivating Denzel Washington might be in the role of Macrinus, the fact remains that in the imagination of a film like Gladiator someone like Macrinus–Black, queer, utterly ruthless and cunning and cruel–can’t be allowed to survive a confrontation with the paragon of epic masculinity, let alone rule. Even though he, like Lucius, imagines a different sort of Rome, one that can perhaps have more avenues of ascent for folks like him, that’s a trajectory the film cannot allow itself to entertain. While it may be pushing the metaphor just a bit far, it’s hard not to find in this film an uncanny and disturbing echo of Trump’s victory emerging out of the shadow of Obama’s presidency which, we now know, was something of a primal scream from a White America terrified at the idea that it might be supplanted. Gladiator II, whether intentionally or not, gives voice to a similar outcry.

In a different film than this one–one, perhaps, that a braver and more iconoclastic Ridley Scott might have made–it would be Macrinus, the bisexual, slightly foppish yet ruthlessly cunning political mastermind who would be able to climb to the apex of power and reshape Rome in his own image. Yet for all that it seeks to interrogate the trappings of power and the dangers of autocracy, Gladiator II can’t quite let go of the idea that only those with the proper genealogical bona fides can ever be entrusted with control of the sprawling Roman Empire. Part of this has to do with the limits of historical reality–not that Scott has ever let that stand in the way of a good yarn–but, I would argue, it also stems from the innate conservatism of the epic form, in which certain kinds of male authority must always triumph while others are doomed to fail. It certainly doesn’t hurt that the new emperor-to-be is handsome, White, and rigorously heterosexual (despite the fact that Mescal is arguably most famous at the moment for his haunting role in the queer romance All of Us Strangers).

Despite all of this, I think that it will be Macrinus who remains one of my favorite things about this film. However much Gladiator II might want us to believe that this is Lucius’ film, the truth is that it belongs very much to Washington and his scenery-chewing performance. His Macrinus is the type of character that you don’t soon forget and, while he may end up dead outside of the city he sought to rule, he will surely come to occupy a special place in the pantheon of epic film characters.