Ridley Scott’s film “Gladiator” is an American parable about the triumph of “merit” over “birth.” The film narrates the struggles of Maximus the Spaniard, who is favored by the old and “philosophical” Marcus Aurelius over his inept son Commodus, who opposes Maximus using deceitful means. The charm of Shakespeare’s “patient merit” returns, with all the hardships it endures (as seen in “Hamlet”).
Americans love telling themselves this “fairy tale.” It might be their favorite mental representation. It doesn’t matter if it’s true. Hundreds of anti-American “haters” will tell you it’s simply a virtuous “fable” told to cover up their basic personality structure, which is inherently violent and domineering: the fig leaf of imperialist power. (I can’t delve into the debate on “meritocracy” here. I’ve read and reflected on many works, including Michael J. Sandel’s “The Tyranny of Merit,” which criticizes the theory of “credentialism.” According to this theory, Americans tell themselves the story that those with more “credentials”—mostly education and elite schools—deserve to rise, but in reality, these credentials are accessible to the richest and socially strongest. According to Sandel and others, the USA is a classist society with no social mobility. Yet, the entire ITC economy was founded in garages by anonymous nobodies. Does this mean the USA remains a world with a “frontier” ideology and an “open” society? It’s a huge debate. In any case, “merit” remains “left-wing” because it opposes “birth,” which is objectively and historically “right-wing.” End of parenthesis.)
Dozens of films tell this story, like a sort of Proppian function (V. Propp, “Morphology of the Folktale,” University of Texas Press, 1968) replicated in different plots: the triumph of the individual tested by endless trials, infinite torments against all odds. It acts as an “obsessive metaphor,” something that taps into the depths of the American soul. Besides many old Western films, I want to mention some relatively recent mid-tier productions, if not true “B movies”: “An Officer and a Gentleman,” “Karate Kid,” “Flashdance” (or “Fame”), and the “Rocky” series. What do these films tell us? Always the same “American story,” the very one from the old pioneering film “The Agony and the Ecstasy” (1965), which told, in an American way, the story of a tormented and opposed genius Michelangelo by foolish cardinals: do you want to become someone? (an officer, a dancer, a boxer… Michelangelo!)… Do you want to succeed? Well: you must make yourself worthy. You must not do as Catholics do, who turn to a saint in heaven but often on earth (recommendations, familism, indulgence: “isomorphism,” or Saints in heaven but especially “saints” on earth, as Amalia Signorelli calls this phenomenon in her essay on Southern Italian recommendations “Chi può e chi aspetta”). No: you must shed blood, go through the sadistic sergeant’s gauntlet, carry quarters of beef on your shoulders, paint endless fences, dance like crazy, fight against ignorant monsignors, but you will only conquer paradise and ecstasy if you know how to suffer and if you have faith in yourself. This Protestant morality is unbearable, isn’t it? Do you prefer the Catholic one of intercession of saints? Recommendations? It’s no coincidence that Italy lacks almost entirely the “Bildungsroman,” the coming-of-age novel (except for “Rubè” by Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, which comes to mind now). What would you tell in nepotistic Italy? The push of the “old parent” (everyone who makes it in our country is a “son of art”), or the intrigues of “ciònamico”*?
American cinema exposes the ideology of the self-made man. Max Weber noted in “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” that in an open-frontier society like America (or perhaps it was), a “self-made man” is what in a blocked society like the aristocratic and ancien régime France was called a “parvenu.” It’s clear that the viewpoint changes depending on whether you adopt the first term or the second. But also the moral and ideological tone. Only if you are aristocratic, in fact, will you call someone who has made themselves a “parvenu.” And in Italy, the aristocratic viewpoint is willingly embraced: woe to those who succeed on their own, there is no social sympathy around them, rather anathema on them.
We are all countesses here.
I like movies like “Gladiator” because I enjoy the tale of merit it tells, even if in this film it is a punished merit, and perhaps because I have been a bit of a gladiator myself. And then there’s that beautiful music by Hans Zimmer, almost an aura of my existence.
Alfio Squillaci
* I have a friend
