In Ridley Scott's Gladiator films, viewers are shown the savage, primitive Romans reveling in the grotesqueries of the arena, and are meant to be disgusted by their bloodlust, even as they themselves watch along. For the Romans, one can see how the spectacle itself would have reinforced their perception of a line between themselves and their captives'a process of mass socialization in which the subordinate status of those they saw as barbarians was reinforced by their deaths being made fodder for entertainment. If the gods wanted your suffering to matter, you wouldn't be here for my amusement. Given that the film's audience is watching and thrilling to the same scenes, the movie seem to be asking, how different are people today from the jeering mob in the arena' We don't have arenas with death matches anymore. But turning human suffering into spectacle did not die out in antiquity. Instead, we have social media and reality television, which allow even more of a remove from what the...
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