“Spartacus” (1960) and the Despair of the Future

The 1960 film Spartacus is one of the bleakest and most despairing of the midcentury cycle of epic films set in antiquity, and as such, it most vividly brings to the forefront the fundamental paradox the epic confronts. Denied even the presence of a sacramental figure such as Christ or a powerful (if ultimately unrepresentable) Old Testament God, the film displaces onto the unrepresented future the abolition of slavery that is the ostensible endpoint of the title character’s rebellion. In the end, Spartacus’ revolt is not only unsuccessful; the film cannot entirely decide whether his death has any transcendental meaning. The film expresses a profound pessimism about the plausibility of human ability to bring about a better future.

Throughout the film, its various heroes find themselves subjected to powerful physical forces that they cannot resist, their very bodies afflicted with the perils of living in history, and this extends to the lived bodies of the actors. The illustrated story of the film’s production notes, for example, that “Death Valley, in the heart of the dreary and desolate California-Nevada wasteland, proved to be almost too close a copy — in heat and hardship — to the Libyan gold mine of the story” (Spartacus n.p.n.). And, somewhat later, it notes that “off-stage tribulations [including Tony Curtis’s split achilles [sic] tendon and Kirk Douglas’…