No soy Espartaco, yo

I wrote an essay back at PCC on “rape culture”, years before I wrote about ‘Spartacus’ a few days ago. As I’m re-finishing the last season, I’m reminded of how closely related they are.

Rape is a storytelling device throughout the series. Male slaves are used by women or men, female slaves are used by men or women. Sometimes it’s a quiet event and the victim just follows the orders they’re given, sometimes its played for drama on screen. For most of the first two seasons, the dynamic plays out to form; free Romans assaulting owned slaves, or free men being dominant assholes to free women. It’s gratuitous, but conventional. With the slave revolt underway in the third season, things get more chaotic and the lines become blurred. Women and children are murdered for sport, and the slaves become wanton aggressors at times.

In the last season though, the show gets sick in an inexcusable way. There’s a self-absorbed asshole who joins the revolt in s3, a cracker named Nemetes. He’s in it for the glory, but he’s not in it to die. His job is to provoke and enrich himself, and the only orders he’s cool with are the ones to fight. After the slaves take Sinuessa, he goes whole-hog on the Romans, looting what he can. There is ambiguity however; he turns over his spoils when Spartacus demands, and he’s fully on board and sincere about vetting Caesar in service to both Crixus and Spartacus. But in that process he reveals himself to be a brutal rapist, keeping a Roman woman for the sport of himself and his crew.

And in the audience, you’re sold. Seemed possibly ok, but nope, definitely not. He’s shit.

But here the show fucks up, because here they make him a hero. As Crassus advances and Caesar plies Nemetes to abandon the fight, Nemetes finds nobility. For all his posturing, he’s caught up in grander events and he knows it. He sets aside his want for profit to fight alongside the gladiators leading the revolt, and he gets a hero’s death for it. Weaponless and kinda cowering before Caesar, but he gets the lingering slo-motion fall into a gory end. An ending that, in the context of the show, he fully deserves. But here is no justice in the event, save for Caesar’s avenging a fellow Roman. His “cool moment” came after his crime, so the show is encouraging you to see the softer side of a truly sick fuck.

And then!

As the show nears its end and they do their little memorial for the warriors fallen in the march on Rome, Nemetes gets a name-check. Alongside Crixus, Oenomaus, and all the others who managed to make their way through the violence with their “honor” intact. The guy who kept a rape dungeon in Sinuessa is named as a respected hero.

By a woman.

I suppose you’ve really got to flex your definitions to say it, but it’s a decent show for what it is. It’s intense, gory, and visceral, and who the hell knows if it’s period-appropriate, but whatever. It’s Gladiator by way of Brazzers, and every scene is being played for effect somehow. When the good guys become bad guys, you see some of them getting it, and learning. Nemetes isn’t that though, and because of him the revolt loses credibility as a vehicle for the oppressed. Yet still the show honors him, and there the writers fail.