Late in the evening, tired, our guard down, we plop in front of the TV looking for a little entertainment. We give “Deadwood” a try. People seem to like it. This version of a frontier town has virtually everyone issuing the f-bomb every other word (surely a contemporary overlay; was vocabulary so impoverished then?). And people so monodimensionally mean-spirited, when not downright murderous, that we move on about the time they throw a recently dispatched sucker to the pigs for dinner.
But out of the (f—-n) frying pan… into “Spartacus,” which has grabbed me occasionally in the past. Story of a Roman noble down on his luck, and his gladiators. The title character is in “the pits,” a hellish, to-the-death fight in which one victor deliberately hacks off his victim’s face, affording us a good glimpse of what’s underneath, and parades around with it to the glee of onlookers. What am I doing to myself, I wonder. But stay to the end to see if S will survive, to see if there will be any of the nudity insistently warned against.
Plenty of f-bombs here, too, and they’ve come up with a ridiculous clipped version of English to suggest something about the way the old Romans might have spoken or heard each other. (What’s Latin for “f—-n”?)
Is this really nitty gritty realism about some bad old days? Something tells me it is less about there and then than about here and now. A version of ourselves, WHAT WE’VE COME TO in our cynical oligarchy. Is there really any difference between the show’s depiction of the debased Romans absorbed in the pits horror– sweating, laughing, spattered with blood, clamoring for more brutality–and us watching them watch (as well as watching what they are watching)?
Yes, it’s not intended to be family fare. We have choice. But that this is available to choose; that we as a society choose to have this choice. That fellow humans choose to make such stuff…for the likes of me. (And you too, apparently, from what I read in Wikipedia about its reception.) Is it just happy freedom from censorship? Or something not so happy?
Somebody tell me this doesn’t mean anything dire about the state of us, that it’s “all good,” as we say about everything these days.
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