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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35180 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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The irony here is that Trumbo wanted the explicit Jewish elements of Fast's novel to be included in the movie but Kubrick shot that down.

Yeah, the article discusses one of those elements that was included in earlier drafts of the script but scrapped by Kubrick:

Trumbo expanded the role of David and magnified his Jewishness. Under Trumbo’s penmanship, David became a rabbi and one of Spartacus’s trusted aides, a brother-in-arms. Trumbo even has David organize a mass marriage ceremony preceding the final battle sequence. In considerable detail, Trumbo painted a very Jewish scene, which consisted of a fabric roof place on four poles to stand for the temple, beneath which is another smaller wedding canopy. Beneath that is an altar on which a seven-branched Menorah is standing. David wears a tallit. He chants in Hebrew and invokes ‘Talmudic law’. He makes a speech in which he compares the slaves to the Hebrews of the Exodus: ‘Behold us here in the wilderness – a little company of slaves’.

On one level I do agree that the film affirms Christian ideology insofar as it plays Christian morality (uncharitably, but relevant in context- slave morality) against Roman master morality. But ultimately Christianity is about Christ, and the heroes of the story are not Christian. Spartacus is squarely a Moses figure:

As a result, Spartacus very much resembles a Moses-like liberator who, having killed an overseer, leads the slaves out of captivity and into a Promised Land he will never see.

Douglas was also a passionate supporter of Zionism and Israeli independence. This was showcased in his earlier role as a traumatized death-camp survivor in The Juggler (1953). It helps to explain the depiction of Spartacus’ army as, in the words of Jewish critic Pauline Kael, ‘a giant kibbutz on the move’. It also explains the parallels between Spartacus and Otto Preminger’s Exodus which Trumbo began working on while he was finishing up on Spartacus. An adaptation of Leon Uris’s hugely successful 1958 novel, it promoted a fantasy of the muscular ‘New Jew’, the modern warrior reborn in violence from the ashes of the gentle old-world shtetl Jew and supplied a counterpoint to the Holocaust’s images of Jewish weakness, victimhood and passivity.

So the "Jewish element" exists in the source material, it was clearly a huge motivating influence on Douglas, Fast, and Trumbo, and it was written in the script but toned down in favor of a more cryptic identity of the heroes. Did they set out to make a Christian movie? Now that would be ironic.

If Braveheart was made by Jews

But it wasn't, it was made by Mel Gibson. It's like saying "If Passion of the Christ was made by Jews, you would have something to say about that." Well, it wasn't, it was made by Mel Gibson. If Jews did make Passion of the Christ, do you think it would be the same movie?

And yes, I do think Spartacus is cryptic and ingenious in a way that goes far beyond some Americanized glorification of abolitionism. And it is cryptic and ingenious in away that Woman King is not, and there are a lot of signs that this ingenuity has run its course.

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