Gladiator

Even though it may be tempting to summarize the virtues of ancient Rome as “might makes right” because of the emphasis, which is even in the Latin language, on fighting armies and repressing rebel populations, the virtues did not reduce to those of war. In fact, such virtues, as Nietzsche suggests in his texts, can serve as a refresher for our species as it has “progressed” through the centuries since the Roman Empire existed. Even though the film Gladiator (2000) contains much mortal combat albeit contained in coliseums rather than unrestrained on battle fields, at least three clusters of virtues can be gleamed and articulated as alternative “schools” of virtue ethics. This is not to say that all three are equally valid, however. The virtues cherished by the Emperor Commodus, for instance, are arguably inferior ethically to those of his father, Marcus Aurelius, and even those of the gladiators.

In the film, Commodus suffocates Marcus Aurelius just after the father has informed the son that Maximus, a renown general, will become the next emperor. As Marcus Aurelius has explained to Maximus, Commodus “is not a moral man” and therefore “should never hold power.” How true that is, and yet even in modern democracies very unethical people have succeeded in gaining immense power of public office. Marcus Aurelius should have made his announcement to the entire camp, which includes two visiting senators from the Roman Senate, before confiding in his malicious son, Commodus. It is in that very conversation that the father and son discuss different virtues, and thus present the film viewers with the notion that “virtue” is not a homogeneous category; people can hold different virtues, and even be deemed as immortal because the same virtue can be emphasized and left out by different people.

After being told that he would not be emperor when his father dies, Commodus admits that he has failed in the four virtues that Marcus Aurelius esteems: wisdom, justice, fortitude, and temperance. Later in the film, the failure of Commodus to be just is clear when he secretly stabs Maximus, who is tied up after being captured by Emperor Commodus’s guards, so to have an unfair advantage in fighting Maximus in the Colosseum, and yet, fittingly, Maximus wins the match even though he quickly dies from the stab-wound. Back when Commodus is talking to Marcus Aurelius about succession, the latter says, “You go too far” in speech; in other words, even in a conversation involving virtues, Commodus demonstrates a lack of temperance.

But there are other virtues, Commodus tells his father. Ambition can be a virtue because with it a person can strive for excellence. Aristotle’s notion of virtue is closely associated with doing something well. Marcus Aurelius has lamented to Maximus that only four years of twenty as emperor have been in peace; ambition for territory (and plunder) can be inferred as another, less boast-worthy, virtue esteemed by Marcus. As for the virtues of Commodus, he lists loyalty to Rome and filial piety towards his father, Marcus, although the son shows a lack of sonly duty to his father in murdering him. Commodus adds bravery, but with an important—to Romans—caveat. Bravery does not necessarily have to be demonstrated on a battle field. This would be a hard sell to a Roman.

In fact, the virtues cherished by the gladiators are strength and honor, especially in physical combat. Physical strength, and being willing to constrain it to be exercised within the confines of honor, are not valued by Commodus, as demonstrated in his unfair fight with Maximus, and even Marcus Aurelius is not a showcase in physical strength, though he is quite old by the time he is planning for his successor.  

To be sure, virtues can be combined out of the three clusters. Honor, wisdom, and justice go well together, as do fortitude, ambition and loyalty (to Rome). “There was a dream that was Rome,” Lucilla, the daughter of Marcus Aurelius, says in the Coliseum as she cries over the body of Maximus. Ambition can indeed serve good ends, but throughout the film the substance of that dream eludes the Romans. What does “Rome” stand for? Which virtues? If only ambition, is that in itself really a virtue if it is by military conquest? This is a pitfall with virtue ethics. Leaving the content open can invite the sort of defense that someone as ethically sordid as Commodus can use—namely, that there are different virtues. It is not a matter for relativism that Maximus is ethically superior to Commodus; that they have different virtues does not equate the two men ethically.

When the film ends, we can expect that Senator Gracchus, whom Maximus has just set free from the imprisonment by Commodus, will do as Lucilla asks; Rome will again be a republic headed by the Senate and presumably two consuls. That Gracchus values the virtue of honor as a constraint on ambition is clear when he asks those gathered around Maximus’s dead body, “Who will help me carry him?” In utter contrast, Maximus has remarked to Commodus, "The time for honoring yourself will soon be at an end." The difference between people who value honor and those who do not is huge, and this can be seen in what other people say about a person. At the end of the film, no one wants to carry the dead, defeated body of the cheater-emperor, Commodus, whereas Maximus is already a hero because he fought for Rome as wanted by Marcus Aurelius, who directed Maximus to assume the reins of power in order to return Rome to the rule of the Senate.  

To be sustained again as a republic, Rome as an ideal to look up to and be proud of will depend on there being enough men of honor among the political and military elite. As nice as this sounds, the actual history of the Roman Republic and the ensuing Roman Empire demonstrate just how weak a reliance on a virtue can be in the face of raw ambition sans virtue, meaning ambition for its own sake, more territory for its own sake, and more power for its own sake. Choosing between alternative clusters of virtues may be akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic; as our species has evolved, we seem ill-equipped to give virtue its due when acting virtuously is no longer convenient.

Silent Night

The medium of film has an amazing ability to trigger emotions, even very strong ones, through dialogue, narrative, cinematography, and even sound. The suspension of disbelief, if achieved, renders the impact all the more complete. Dread, for example, can be conjured up even at a deep level in the psyche of a film-viewer. That emotion can be fused with another, seemingly antipodal emotion, such as joy, and an instrumental score can capture and stimulate both. Such is the case with the film, Silent Night (2021), which interestingly was made during the global coronavirus pandemic in which even young people were suddenly confronted with the notion that they could die rather than grow up. The film’s closing instrumental version of the song, “Silent Night,” incredibly fuses joy with dread and even hints at distant religion as sheer depth in feeling rather than anything supernatural. The fusion of Christmas joy and the dread of suicide inexorably coming up is best epitomized by the instrumental, hence more than by the plot, dialogue or visuals.  

As for the plot, Nell and Simon, and their three boys, have friends over for Christmas in their upscale house. Nuclear war has broken out, with Russia attacking Europe. Anticipating this eventuality, the government has made “exit pills,” which is a play on the so-called, ideologically-coined term “exit” meant to hide the fact that Britain seceded from the E.U. (i.e., states secede; they do not “exit” except in Euroskeptic ideology). Of course, voluntarily “exiting” life to avoid suffering a slow, certain death from radiation-poisoning is very different than a state seceding from a union of states; such a state goes on as a sovereign state. The inexorable finality of existing, once known to be coming up, is excruciating in a way that politics cannot know or reach. The will to cease willing, period, is difficult for the human mind to accept, let alone grasp in its bluntness.

Kant wrote that a moral principle can have the necessity of a law even though a person can will either to follow the principle or ignore it. For most people I suppose, the same voluntarism (i.e., voluntary choice of the will) instantiated in the decision to end one’s life tends to overrule the decision to end one’s own life, even at the last minute. Such is the force of the instinct of self-preservation; Nietzsche’s will to power pales in comparison, and yet it is precisely that will that has caused the nuclear war in the film. In other words, the will to power forces the people in the house to overcome, or master, their intractable instinctual urge for self-preservation.To be sure, the family and their friends in the film have an incentive to take the pill before the radioactive cloud reaches the house, but even so, only with the slight radiation poisoning of Art, one of the three sons, does the physician, James, urge everyone to go to the bedrooms to take the pill. It is ironic that Art is the only one to survive to the end of the film; his father, Simon, had not given Art an “exit” pill, believing him to be dead already. Presumably in being left alone in the house the next morning, as the nuclear-winter slow is falling eerily in peace, Art would die a slow death (unless he ventures outside into the radioactive snow).

It is precisely as the camera closely pans all the pale heads of the dead people in the bedrooms on that morning that the Christmas favorite, “Silent Night,” is played as a sound-over. As the song progresses, a subtle dark undercurrent of dread builds in a way that coincides with the joy of impending hope. It is the precisely seamlessness between the Christmas carol and a melody of death that the two emotions of joy and dread can be experienced together rather than dichotomously. The music’s overall harmony is downright eerie. Back during the scene of the Christmas Eve dinner, the dialogue sets up the two emotions as mutually exclusive, as Simon tries in vain to keep talk of the impending suicides from taking over the holiday. But the synthesis is not achieved until the instrumental music that takes the viewer from the story-world.

The political implications of the nuclear bombs being heard in the distance, at least where Nell’s mother is located, may come to the fore for viewers when the credits are rolling. Even through the film, viewers could be excused for hoping that a last-minute peace deal with Russia would be announced such that no one would take the “exit” pill and everyone in the house would wake up, as if from a bad dream, on Christmas morning. Christmas is, after all, about the advent of hope for even such a sordid species as homo “sapiens.” It is not until just before the cloud reaches the house that the inhabitants swallow the “exit.” Such is the strength of the instinctual urge of self-preservation that even Thomas Hobbes argued in his text that the right of self-preservation is not ceded even to an otherwise all-powerful political sovereign, which a king or a democratic assembly.

For viewers of the film in 2024 or especially in 2025, thoughts of Russia lobing nuclear bombs on Europe could well have had the uncomfortable ring of reality imitating art, given Russia’s years-long invasion of Ukraine. Putin starting a nuclear war if the E.U. had provided Ukraine with enough weapons to make a dent in Russia is not as unrealistic as merely watching the film might seem it to be. Some viewers of the film as 2025 was coming to an end could even have been thinking while listening to the Christmas carol of joy intertwined with dread that due to the political leadership both of Russia and Israel, the species could no longer put its faith in sovereign nations; that something of a check as in a world federation with limited though sufficient power is needed in the nuclear age. In other words, the film portrays the futility of entrusting nuclear arms to politicians without an overarching check on them beyond the nation-state. The “exit” pills in the film should not have been needed; if Russian and European politicians could not resolve their differences without launching nuclear bombs, then even this possibility stands as a good argument for relegating the UN in favor of an international force that is capable of stopping political disputes from annihilating the species. Nevertheless, even such political matters pale in the film, as in real life, in comparison to the ongoing excruciating anguish felt by a person who knows that one will not exist ever again after a certain, upcoming, time. The characters in the film do a good job with this anguish, and except for not making sure that Art is already dead, they take the cue of the approaching toxic cloud and swallow the pills with fortitude. No one should experience that.