#81 ‘Spartacus’
Chains, Chests, and the Appropriation of Rebellion for the Heterosexual Ego
Spartacus (1960) is Stanley Kubrick’s sprawling, sand-drenched epic about one man’s uprising against Roman tyranny—by which we mostly mean lots of shirtless men yelling in unison while women weep prettily in the background. It’s long. It’s lavish. It’s loaded with politics and pecs. And while it flirts with revolution, it ultimately can’t resist framing liberation as the slow, noble suffering of a single, beautiful man played by Kirk Douglas with all the gravitas of a man auditioning for a marble statue.
Douglas, who also produced the film, plays Spartacus like Moses if Moses had a chin that could cut glass. He starts out enslaved, rises through gladiatorial ranks, and then leads a slave revolt so sanitized you’d think the Roman Empire collapsed under the weight of its own melodrama. The film claims to be about freedom, but let’s be honest: it’s really about the charisma of one white guy who liberates others while being worshipped for his restraint.
The most infamous moment—“I’m Spartacus!”—is pure Hollywood martyrdom. It’s meant to show collective loyalty, sure, but really it’s a monument to the power of self-sacrifice performed by men who all look like they spend more time oiling each other than actually strategizing. The slave army doesn’t win the war, but it does win the moral high ground, and in the cinema of empire, that’s apparently enough.
And let’s talk about the women—briefly, because the film barely does. Jean Simmons plays Varinia, Spartacus’s love interest, whose primary function is to look beautiful, get pregnant, and cry from behind a veil. She’s “liberated” by Spartacus through love, because of course the real revolution is heteronormative affection. Her arc? From captive to wife to grieving mother of a symbol. She’s not a woman—she’s a womb with eyeliner.
Then there’s the infamous “snails and oysters” scene, which delicately hints at bisexuality between Laurence Olivier’s Crassus and his slave Antoninus (Tony Curtis). It's one of the only moments in early Hollywood to acknowledge queerness—even as it couches it in euphemism and makes sure the gay-coded character is also a sadistic tyrant. Progress, if you squint, and if you ignore how quickly Antoninus becomes Spartacus’s less sexy sidekick.
Kubrick’s direction is oddly restrained, likely because Douglas hired him late in production to replace the original director and then kept a tight grip on creative control. The result is a film that looks expensive, feels important, and yet often plays like a Greatest Hits album of Western Civilisation clichés: freedom is noble, death is meaningful, and revolution only matters if the man leading it looks good crucified.
3.5 out of 5 loaves of Roman propaganda
(One for Peter Ustinov’s oily genius. One for the cinematography. One for being just queer and subversive enough to raise eyebrows in 1960. Half a star for the unintentional camp of watching slaves form perfect phalanxes of male bonding. The missing stars? Left on the battlefield with the women who had no lines, the slaves who had no names, and the revolution that was reduced to a vanity project in sandals.)
