Sinful Sunday: The Queer Jouissance of Nero in "Quo Vadis"
Peter Ustinov gives a deliciously unhinged performance as one of ancient Rome’s most decadent and queer emperors.
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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.
For this week’s queer villain we’re going back to antiquity again for one of my very favorite on-screen baddies: Nero of Quo Vadis. Released in 1951, this sumptuously-produced film–based on the novel of the same name by Henry Sienkiewicz–follows Robert Taylor’s blunt Roman soldier Marcus Vinicus as he falls in love with Deborah Kerr’s virginal Christian Lygia. Unfortunately, they also manage to fall afoul of the powerful but deranged Emperor Nero, played with unmistakable panache by the late, great Peter Ustinov.
At first blush, it seems as if the film hits all of the notes that one would expect of a post-war biblical epic. There’s the whole Roman soldier/Christian maiden dyad, the power-mad and despotic Roman ruler, and the requisite scenes of Christians being brutalized in the arena. Yet there’s more to this blockbuster than meets the eye and, while the Christian/Roman romance is supposedly the beating heart and soul of the film’s narrative, the truth is that it’s Ustinov’s Nero who is the far more interesting character. Petulant and cruel and utterly narcissistic, he is in some ways the epitome of the queer child, a figure that scholars such as Kathryn Bond Stockton have theorized as resisting the various imperatives of heteronormativity. Nero steadfastly refuses to grow up: he throws tantrums, he whines incessantly, he is fixated incessantly on his own greatness, and significantly, he also refuses to produce a child, despite the fact that his wife Poppaea (Patricia Laffan) is herself quite a predatory vixen.
It’s immediately clear that Sir Peter Ustinov is having an absolute blast in the role. Ustinov was the type of actor who never did anything by halves, and from the moment that Nero appears on the screen he commands the gaze, caterwauling his own ludicrous (and transparently bad) musical compositions. And, as if to heighten the sense that we are witnessing a very queer bird indeed, Ustinov recounts that, upon the direction of Mervyn LeRoy, he essentially played the emperor as “guy plays with himself nights.” Such as Nero’s narcissism that even his sexual desire is turned inward rather than outward as it should be.
Though his courtiers might sneer and laugh behind their hands at the foibles and excesses of their ruler, Quo Vadis makes it quite clear that beneath Nero’s absurdity there lurks the heart of a vicious tyrant. This is the man, after all, who’s more than willing to throw Christians to the lions and relish the sight of their being devoured, just as he’s willing to strum his lyre and sing about the fall of Troy while the city over which he rules starts to burn to the ground. In that sense, Nero is the embodiment of the destructive ego, a creature of base hunger that must be assuaged and satisfied or else it will unleash its fury on anyone and everyone in its path, whether that be his own courtiers like the wry Petronius (Leo Genn) or Lygia herself.
Unsurprisingly, the film’s narrative wants us in the audience to be horrified by Nero’s excesses and his cruelty. Like so many other epics of the period, however, its spectacle tends to work at cross-purposes to both the narrative and the morality tale it presents. After all, the film was made by MGM, a studio renowned for its production values, and Quo Vadis repeatedly enjoins the audience to embrace and take pleasure in all of the pagan, barbaric, and queer pleasures that the ancient world has to offer. The screen ripples with luxurious fabric, particularly the hues of purple and magenta in which Nero so often drapes himself.
And then there’s the famous scene in which Nero and his lascivious wife Poppaea gaze through pieces of colored glass at those who have gathered for their dinner. In these moments color suffuses the screen, drenching us as viewers in the barbarous shades of red and green. By suturing the viewer into their chromatic point of view–with all of its hedonistic, emotional connotations–the film disrupts the binary of good and evil that is so often associated with, say, black and white. Moreover, by ensuring that the viewer sees everything from the point of view of these villains, Quo Vadis also encourages them to feel complicit in all of the debauched and sinister acts which the Romans perpetrate on their Christian subalterns, with all of the vexed pleasure such an association entails.
Of course, this is classical Hollywood we’re talking about, and a deviant like Nero cannot be allowed to survive his cruelties and, after the crowd turns against him, he flees into the palace, which has become a nest of bruised color, all blues and deep violets. And, in the end, he meets his end at the hands of his spurned mistress Acte (Rosalie Crutchley). His last anguished cry is, I think, an expression of the queer jouissance of the death drive. If the world of the future is one that belongs to the Christians and all of their boring heterosexuality, then Nero cannot be a part of it nor, it seems, does he want to be. It certainly helps that, in this case at least, history is on the screenwriters’ side, for if Nero is known for anything other than supposedly fiddling while Rome burned it was taking his own life rather than face execution at the hands of the Senate.
Where does this leave us? Though the narrative does all that it can to make sure that Nero is expelled and cast into the void that almost always awaits queer villains in classic Hollywood cinema, there’s still no denying that he is the most fascinating and compelling figure in the entire film. Unlike both the wooden Taylor and the stultifyingly placid Kerr, Ustinov’s performance has life and vitality and even, day I say it, passion. It’s no wonder that he’s often the thing that viewers remember most about the film, a further testament to the enduring appeal of his queer panache.
Nero’s potent queerness is all the more extraordinary when viewed against the backdrop of the notoriously homophobic 1950s, an era in which queer men were seen as both sick and as blights on the body of the nation. Figures like Nero, who remain unrepentant about their deviance to the end–and who, it is worth noting, get to have most of the power for the duration of the film–provided, perhaps, a rare node of resistance against the the heterosexist hegemony of the postwar age of conformity. Even his death, I would argue, can be read against the grain. Rather than just a convenient expunging of queerness from the world of the narrative, I read Nero’s suicide as a rejection and refusal to obey the Christian imperative of the future.
Ustinov’s performance as Nero would go on to enjoy a long afterlife, and it’s easy to see him drawing on the same outlandish persona in his voice performance as Prince John in Robin Hood, yet another tyrant who can’t or won’t grow up. And, like Nero, Prince John hides a certain ruthlessness beneath his foppish and silly exterior. After all, is there anything more dangerous to the health of the realm and the body politic than a queer? It is precisely this mixture of the ridiculous and the deadly that makes both of these Ustinov creations so indelibly enduring and which earns them both a place in the pantheon of the great queer villains of the screen. We fear them and we love them, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.