PicoBlog

Ray Stevenson was an incredible actor. His recent passing, at a relatively early age, saddened me. In his honor, I’ll post here some writing I did about the greatest character he ever brought to life: Titus Pullo from the HBO TV series Rome. SPOILERS FOLLOW.

In a very telling moment from the tenth episode in Season two, Cleopatra questions someone who is very familiar with Pullo about his character. “Is he a good man?” she asks innocently. If the same question were asked about Maximus from Gladiator, or Spartacus from Kubrick’s 1960 movie, or most other gladiatorial heroes, the answer would be a simple yes. But Rome is part of a new generation of TV shows, and the answer to this question underscores it. After thinking about it for a moment, Pullo’s friend replies “Define good.”

“Define good”… In just two words we have a monumental transformation in worldview. “Define good” is a way of saying that expecting people to fall neatly in one category is to oversimplify things and miss the importance of Jarred Diamond’s advice: “History, as well as life itself, is complicated; neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.” As it turns out, Titus Pullo is not so easily definable. He certainly is the main hero of the entire TV series, but he is not the type of man whose personality can be summed up in one word. “Define good” is a way of reminding us that the hero of Rome stands light years apart from the moral certitude seen in earlier historical epics featuring gladiators.

If by “good” Cleopatra mean the most loyal friend one could have, Pullo easily fits the bill. If she means someone who knows how to make kids laugh, and can be incredibly sweet to the women he loves in a historical time when this was not a popular concept, Pullo is the embodiment of the very definition of “good”. If she means someone who is a heroic army veteran, brave in the face of danger, and willing to risk life and limb to help those who are nice to him, then Pullo is clearly a “good man”.

So, what is so unusual about him? How is he different from the typical knight in shining armor who stars in most gladiatorial movies?

Well…

In the course of the series, Pullo tortures an unarmed man by chopping off his thumbs, kills him and dumps his body in the sewers. During a fit of jealousy, he cracks the skull of a slave who has just finished thanking him for granting freedom to his beloved. He chokes his lover to death with his own hands when he finds out she has killed his wife. He becomes a professional killer in the service of a depraved crime lord. He drinks too much and gambles on a regular basis. He reacts to any insult with extreme violence. He climbs the criminal underground hierarchy until he becomes a crime lord himself. And, during an argument, he bites off the tongue of a rival crime boss and comments how it tasted like chicken. Pullo is a colorful enough character that it would be easy to add more items to this list, but the point is probably already made.

So, as it turns out, “define good” is the only logical answer to a question seeking to place Pullo squarely either into the “good” or “evil” camp.

Pullo’s experience as a gladiator is perfectly in line with this ambivalent picture. In Episode One of the first season, Pullo barely escapes being condemned to the arena after striking his commanding officer and disobeying orders in the course of battle. He is not quite as lucky by the end of the first season, and in Episode Eleven finds himself forcibly recruited as a gladiator. Ah, forcibly! Then, his experience fits with that of so many other cinematic gladiators who find themselves unjustly enslaved and forced to engage in combat in the arena against their will, right? Not exactly.

The reason why he is sentenced to fight in the arena does not look particularly unfair: the law has caught up with him because of his days as a hired assassin. After a bout of opium smoking, Pullo is arrested for the murder of an unarmed old man who was killed in cold blood in the streets.

When his lawyer tried to convince Pullo to reveal who commissioned him the murder in the hope of receiving a reduced sentence, Pullo refuses to betray his gangster employer. “Can’t help you. Sorry. Gave my word” is his reply. His lawyer then tries desperately to build some type of defense. Since his guilt is beyond doubt, he looks for some mitigating circumstances. Perhaps—the lawyer argues—the judges may be willing to spare you if you can provide a compelling reason. Maybe you turned to crime to help a sick relative or a friend in need? Typical screenwriters would answer this question by providing some rightful explanation for the hero’s seemingly immoral behavior—perhaps being forced into crime for the sake of crying widows and orphans, or some other suitable reason. When asked what he needed the money for, Pullo’s answer is—as usual—disarming, “I needed money for wine.”

“I needed money for wine”?!? What heroic cinematic gladiator has a worse excuse for engaging in violence?

Unlike the injustice that typically characterizes the sentencing to the arena of most movie gladiators, Pullo’s sentence seems hardly surprising. If anybody deserves being thrown in the arena, it is Titus Pullo. Whereas almost all movies are about poor, innocent heroes unfairly forced into becoming gladiators, Pullo is a convicted murderer. He does not become a gladiator due to the abuse of power of an evil Roman tyrant, but rather as the inevitable consequence of his actions.

Once we finally get to Pullo’s entrance in the arena, the differences with the gladiatorial experience of other cinematic heroes is reinforced. In the majority of cases, films show us gladiators fighting in sumptuous arenas in the style of the Colosseum, in front of rich, evil upper class Romans who stand in contrast to the virtuous slaves fighting in the sand. Here, instead, the arena is a very small-scale venue made of a few lines of benches assembled in the middle of a square. Conspicuously absent is an Emperor (which would be historically inaccurate anyway, since Rome takes place at the end of the Republican period) or any other upper class Roman to symbolize the depravity of the upper classes paying to see the lower classes shed blood. The people cheering in the audience are dirty, poorly dressed, and definitely lower class. At the beginning of the scene, the crowd is firmly set against him and is very much looking forward to seeing him killed. 

Unlike in the case of the gladiatorial films seen so far, the way the hero wins the support of the crowd has preciously little to do with issues of morality, innocence or guilt.  When eventually the audience turns to cheering for Pullo rather than clamoring for his death, it is not due to his mercifulness toward defeated opponents, because of the nobility of his cause, or in recognition of how he was wrongly condemned. Rather, what sways the crowd is the heroic fashion in which he is able to fight against overwhelming odds by killing seven of the executioners sent to dispatch him. It is only because he fights like a demon out of hell and demonstrates a nearly insane degree of bravery in the face of death. In perfect Nietzschean fashion, his fearless display of bravery—rather than the justice of his cause—is what turns him into a hero.  Through his fighting, he ends up offering the crowd a much greater spectacle than he would have by simply dying: this is what wins over the audience and convince them to ask the authorities for a pardon—which will promptly be granted. Pullo seems to be exactly what Friedrich Nietzsche had in mind when, in a chapter of his Thus Spoke Zarathustra appropriately entitled “War and Warriors”, he offers a rather unusual breakdown on the nature of goodness. Here Nietzsche answers the question “what is good?” with a blunt “To be brave is good.” The Roman audience cheering for Pullo clearly would agree. 

Whereas Christian morality was very much at the roots of the personality of many cinematic gladiatorial heroes either explicitly (Demetrius in Demetrius and the Gladiators for example) or implicitly (the lead characters in Spartacus and Gladiator), Nietzsche’s philosophy—with its highly controversial moral teachings—seems to inspire the character of Pullo.

What we see here is not simply a reversal of typical morality. Pullo is unlike the lead characters of a Stanely Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange who are just the opposite of what is normally considered “good”. If Cleopatra’s question were applied to such characters, the answer would probably be an unequivocal “no”. Pullo does not entirely reject any sense of morality, but rather follows his own code. He lives and breathes in a moral grey zone that makes him a very complicated character, but not an unlikeable one. In fact, despite all of Pullo’s troubling actions and his living outside the boundaries of ordinary morality, it is difficult for those watching Rome not to sympathize with him. He may not be “good,” but he is “good.”

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