![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Okay, I'm gonna stand over here and have mini brain-spasm over Spartacus: Blood and Sand. Yeah. You heard me. This show is the shit.
This isn't really a primer, more just me trying to figure out why I love it so damn much.
...Okay, yes. Good point. But there are more reasons than that.
This show speaks straight to the visceral, primal thrill; it's like escapism and beautiful people and Borgia-esque deviousness and clever, tragic characters all on their own collision course with vengeance, greed, lust and pride wrapped up with boobs, dick, blood, sex, muscles, jewels and pretty, pretty dresses.
It's the illegitimate hatechild of 300 and Rome that dropped out of school and ran away from home to live in Tyler Durden's abandoned mansion.
The lead, whose true name we never learn, but rather is known by his Gladiator stage name, Spartacus, is strangely compelling. He is someone who is meant to be an up-and-up hero, pure of heart, a good man and all that, but, as the story draws out, it becomes clearer and clearer that here is something much more vicious, violent and self-assured to the point of near-sociopathy. He cares deeply, loves so hard and so easily that those who don't fall under that wing become easy roadkill to pave the way of his good intentions.
Where I left him, he now fights like a man possessed by the gods, as stated within the narrative, and it's true; the gore and blood and über-violence is glorified into a kind of channel of raw reason for being. There are no apologies made for the grotesque and visceral delight taken in slaughter, as the camera lovingly bathes itself in sweeps of comic-book blood and 300-style electric guitars saw across the soundtrack, screaming, SHIT JUST GOT REAL.
No apologies made, because in Rome, this was exactly what the stadium, what Gladiators, were felt to be, natural, beautiful, addictive, godlike. Men and women scream like teenage girls going into seizures at a Beatles concert, exposing themselves, rutting with the raw energy of the Id-surf that is the stadium.
This is why he's so compelling. He fights like he was born to do it, like he is nothing but a vessel for holy violence, and the blood that he spills is his prayer. He's given himself over to fate and has cleaved all the soft edges from himself until he is not Human, but Gladiator. It's taken seven episodes to get to this point, and through that he was been fighting with a similar drive to free his wife. He did not believe in the gods, because his love, his wife was all the divine he needed. Now that has shifted, with his wife's guidance and subsequent fridging, to the gods.
Basically, he doesn't give a fuck anymore. He's given himself over to fate. Which is what makes the fabric of the show. The struggle of each character to overcome the carved path they've been placed into, to escape the slavery of their station. In accepting his, Spartacus becomes the foil, the driving, shining narrow sword of a narrative that contrasts the richness of all the others.
I'm not going to talk about the other characters at the moment, because they all have such strong presences that this would go on forever, and I'm not nearly ready to take on the towering, complex, gravitational well of presence that is Lucretia, my other favourite character, as played by the magnificent Lucy Lawless.
Okay, I can't help myself.
BUT THAT'S ALL I'M GOING TO SAY ABOUT THAT.
This isn't really a primer, more just me trying to figure out why I love it so damn much.
...Okay, yes. Good point. But there are more reasons than that.
This show speaks straight to the visceral, primal thrill; it's like escapism and beautiful people and Borgia-esque deviousness and clever, tragic characters all on their own collision course with vengeance, greed, lust and pride wrapped up with boobs, dick, blood, sex, muscles, jewels and pretty, pretty dresses.
It's the illegitimate hatechild of 300 and Rome that dropped out of school and ran away from home to live in Tyler Durden's abandoned mansion.
The lead, whose true name we never learn, but rather is known by his Gladiator stage name, Spartacus, is strangely compelling. He is someone who is meant to be an up-and-up hero, pure of heart, a good man and all that, but, as the story draws out, it becomes clearer and clearer that here is something much more vicious, violent and self-assured to the point of near-sociopathy. He cares deeply, loves so hard and so easily that those who don't fall under that wing become easy roadkill to pave the way of his good intentions.
Where I left him, he now fights like a man possessed by the gods, as stated within the narrative, and it's true; the gore and blood and über-violence is glorified into a kind of channel of raw reason for being. There are no apologies made for the grotesque and visceral delight taken in slaughter, as the camera lovingly bathes itself in sweeps of comic-book blood and 300-style electric guitars saw across the soundtrack, screaming, SHIT JUST GOT REAL.
No apologies made, because in Rome, this was exactly what the stadium, what Gladiators, were felt to be, natural, beautiful, addictive, godlike. Men and women scream like teenage girls going into seizures at a Beatles concert, exposing themselves, rutting with the raw energy of the Id-surf that is the stadium.
This is why he's so compelling. He fights like he was born to do it, like he is nothing but a vessel for holy violence, and the blood that he spills is his prayer. He's given himself over to fate and has cleaved all the soft edges from himself until he is not Human, but Gladiator. It's taken seven episodes to get to this point, and through that he was been fighting with a similar drive to free his wife. He did not believe in the gods, because his love, his wife was all the divine he needed. Now that has shifted, with his wife's guidance and subsequent fridging, to the gods.
Basically, he doesn't give a fuck anymore. He's given himself over to fate. Which is what makes the fabric of the show. The struggle of each character to overcome the carved path they've been placed into, to escape the slavery of their station. In accepting his, Spartacus becomes the foil, the driving, shining narrow sword of a narrative that contrasts the richness of all the others.
I'm not going to talk about the other characters at the moment, because they all have such strong presences that this would go on forever, and I'm not nearly ready to take on the towering, complex, gravitational well of presence that is Lucretia, my other favourite character, as played by the magnificent Lucy Lawless.
Okay, I can't help myself.
BUT THAT'S ALL I'M GOING TO SAY ABOUT THAT.
deploy