I am happy to report that this season's last episode of Starz TV's Spartacus: Blood and Sand is over. My fascination with the Romans, which is of a piece with my fascination with the Mafia, the Romanovs, and the British Empire, kept me captive to what may well be the worst dialogue in the history of historical teledramas, and that's really saying something. In fact, to find writing this awful, you have to go back to before there ever was such a genre: back to The Robe, perhaps, or Samson & Delilah, or one of Cecil B. DeMille's tumescent epics.
There were times when the script's syntax became so mangled that I wondered if the series had been written by a dyslexic local anchorperson. But no, it turns out it was the work of a committee headed by one of the show's producers, Stephen S. DeKnight, the very same Stephen S. DeNight who gave us Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And who better to capture the power and the glory of the great slave rebellion of 73 BC?
DeKnight wrote the first and last episode, but left his mark on all the others. I offer some examples of his dialogue: all delivered within the first fifteen minutes of the season's final episode.
Here's Spartacus's master Lentulus Batiatus introducing a woman whose husband couldn't make it to the party, but would have his remarks "delivered by pleasing tongue of trusted wife." Then we go to "Two Days Ago," when Spartacus is told that some of the boys won't be joining the rebellion. "Lisus and the others refuse to grab cock without Crixus calming their balls." "How can you bring him to cause," asks another, "if you cannot break words with him?" "Being champion yet affords privilege," Spartacus assures him. When Batiatus declares he is getting out of the gladiator business, his black slave, Doctore, standing in for Woody Strode from the Kirk Douglas version, wants to know if he "would see your family's heritage a thing of memory?" "I had thought to make announcement at a celebration," Batiatus replies, and tells him he intends to free Doctore, who takes the news gravely. "I had thought the news to please," complains Batiatus, but Doctore replies that he has "heard rumor: one that has vexed sleep." "The rumor is true," concedes Batiatus, "yet absent reasoning." His wife doesn't appreciate his good news either, but explains that "joy is restrained to lend clear mind to celebration." Arranging a duel between Spartacus and Crixus, Batiatus's wife insists "we must insure Spartacus victorious." Spartacus is perplexed by the venue and asks Batiatus, "How will our guests have view?" After Spartacus insists that Crixus be given a chance to prepare for their duel, Batiatus exclaims, "Haha! You truly have fucking mind for this!" Doctore meets with Crixus and urges him to "delay talk of freedom until there are ears that would welcome the sound." When Spartacus compares his murdered wife to the sun, "never to rise again," his new squeeze replies, "Heavy thing to be denied its warmth."
Heavy, indeed. Not even poor Jay Silverheels as Tonto had to speak lines that bad. The effect of such dialogue is numbing, or, as DeKnight might put it, "Such words benumb brain of men." It's like listening to a dormitory full of not very advanced ESL students argue politics in their adopted tongue. For some reason, DeKnight decided that since the Romans did not employ definite articles, he should leave them out of his English dialogue as well. If the translators of Tacitus, Ovid, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius and the like had only thought of this, they could have posted their work on Twitter. And Shakespeare could have shaved half an hour off Julius Caesar. "Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend ears."
There's a whole lot else wrong with Spartacus, and it may seem strange that I fixate on the dialogue instead of attacking the show's exploitation of the ease with which obscure actresses, including one of the producers' wives, will agree to take off their shirts; or the delectatious way it depicts all those beheadings and skewerings, floggings and flayings, and buckets and gouts and geysers of blood. But there is something truly insidious about bad dialogue when it is harnessed to a vehicle like Spartacus, which, not for better but for worse, is as compellingly gruesome a spectacle as anything the Roman's devised for their own squalid amusement: a marvel of special effects and gladiatorial gymnastics. Awaiting the next slashing swordstroke, the next jab of a trident, the next heaving assignation, viewers and maybe even the cast may cease to even notice how terribly written the damn thing is.
Andy Whitfield is a charismatic lead, and the producers have attempted to ground the series in what little we know about the rebellion. But unlike the Kirk Douglas version, with Stanley Kubrick's sly direction and Dalton Trumbo's stirring populist script, Spartacus's tele-rebellion strikes a blow not for freedom but for nookie. Maybe it's a question of elective surgery, but the frequent sex scenes had a, well, numbing sameness about them (or the few I actually sat through. When I was a dismal teenager, I used to thumb through books for the "good parts," but here I did the opposite, hitting the fast forward button at the first drop of a toga. "Right," I kept telling the screen, "I get it. They screwed. They also probably went to the john. Get on with it.")
Every episode opened with one of those basso profundo warnings about the scenes of "sensuality, brutality and language that some viewers may find objectionable," although I think law enforcement should monitor very closely any viewer who does not. The announcer goes on to explain that the "intensity" of Spartacus: Blood and Sand is intended "to suggest an authentic representation of the period:" presumably a period when pecs were square, nipples were in flower, and people suffered from such high blood pressure that the merest pinprick produced fountains of gore.
At the close of the last sanguinary episode, Spartacus and his escaped comrades, each bespattered with Roman blood, set forth from Batiatus's collegium gladiatorium, presumably headed for a gym in the Castro. I wish well they whose brave heart and mighty hand do battle with ripped abs for honor and glory of . . .
Oh, the hell with it.
There were times when the script's syntax became so mangled that I wondered if the series had been written by a dyslexic local anchorperson. But no, it turns out it was the work of a committee headed by one of the show's producers, Stephen S. DeKnight, the very same Stephen S. DeNight who gave us Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And who better to capture the power and the glory of the great slave rebellion of 73 BC?
DeKnight wrote the first and last episode, but left his mark on all the others. I offer some examples of his dialogue: all delivered within the first fifteen minutes of the season's final episode.
Here's Spartacus's master Lentulus Batiatus introducing a woman whose husband couldn't make it to the party, but would have his remarks "delivered by pleasing tongue of trusted wife." Then we go to "Two Days Ago," when Spartacus is told that some of the boys won't be joining the rebellion. "Lisus and the others refuse to grab cock without Crixus calming their balls." "How can you bring him to cause," asks another, "if you cannot break words with him?" "Being champion yet affords privilege," Spartacus assures him. When Batiatus declares he is getting out of the gladiator business, his black slave, Doctore, standing in for Woody Strode from the Kirk Douglas version, wants to know if he "would see your family's heritage a thing of memory?" "I had thought to make announcement at a celebration," Batiatus replies, and tells him he intends to free Doctore, who takes the news gravely. "I had thought the news to please," complains Batiatus, but Doctore replies that he has "heard rumor: one that has vexed sleep." "The rumor is true," concedes Batiatus, "yet absent reasoning." His wife doesn't appreciate his good news either, but explains that "joy is restrained to lend clear mind to celebration." Arranging a duel between Spartacus and Crixus, Batiatus's wife insists "we must insure Spartacus victorious." Spartacus is perplexed by the venue and asks Batiatus, "How will our guests have view?" After Spartacus insists that Crixus be given a chance to prepare for their duel, Batiatus exclaims, "Haha! You truly have fucking mind for this!" Doctore meets with Crixus and urges him to "delay talk of freedom until there are ears that would welcome the sound." When Spartacus compares his murdered wife to the sun, "never to rise again," his new squeeze replies, "Heavy thing to be denied its warmth."
Heavy, indeed. Not even poor Jay Silverheels as Tonto had to speak lines that bad. The effect of such dialogue is numbing, or, as DeKnight might put it, "Such words benumb brain of men." It's like listening to a dormitory full of not very advanced ESL students argue politics in their adopted tongue. For some reason, DeKnight decided that since the Romans did not employ definite articles, he should leave them out of his English dialogue as well. If the translators of Tacitus, Ovid, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius and the like had only thought of this, they could have posted their work on Twitter. And Shakespeare could have shaved half an hour off Julius Caesar. "Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend ears."
There's a whole lot else wrong with Spartacus, and it may seem strange that I fixate on the dialogue instead of attacking the show's exploitation of the ease with which obscure actresses, including one of the producers' wives, will agree to take off their shirts; or the delectatious way it depicts all those beheadings and skewerings, floggings and flayings, and buckets and gouts and geysers of blood. But there is something truly insidious about bad dialogue when it is harnessed to a vehicle like Spartacus, which, not for better but for worse, is as compellingly gruesome a spectacle as anything the Roman's devised for their own squalid amusement: a marvel of special effects and gladiatorial gymnastics. Awaiting the next slashing swordstroke, the next jab of a trident, the next heaving assignation, viewers and maybe even the cast may cease to even notice how terribly written the damn thing is.
Andy Whitfield is a charismatic lead, and the producers have attempted to ground the series in what little we know about the rebellion. But unlike the Kirk Douglas version, with Stanley Kubrick's sly direction and Dalton Trumbo's stirring populist script, Spartacus's tele-rebellion strikes a blow not for freedom but for nookie. Maybe it's a question of elective surgery, but the frequent sex scenes had a, well, numbing sameness about them (or the few I actually sat through. When I was a dismal teenager, I used to thumb through books for the "good parts," but here I did the opposite, hitting the fast forward button at the first drop of a toga. "Right," I kept telling the screen, "I get it. They screwed. They also probably went to the john. Get on with it.")
Every episode opened with one of those basso profundo warnings about the scenes of "sensuality, brutality and language that some viewers may find objectionable," although I think law enforcement should monitor very closely any viewer who does not. The announcer goes on to explain that the "intensity" of Spartacus: Blood and Sand is intended "to suggest an authentic representation of the period:" presumably a period when pecs were square, nipples were in flower, and people suffered from such high blood pressure that the merest pinprick produced fountains of gore.
At the close of the last sanguinary episode, Spartacus and his escaped comrades, each bespattered with Roman blood, set forth from Batiatus's collegium gladiatorium, presumably headed for a gym in the Castro. I wish well they whose brave heart and mighty hand do battle with ripped abs for honor and glory of . . .
Oh, the hell with it.
You truly have fucking mind for this, Andy....
ReplyDeleteI'm wondering, without having heard this dialogue in context, if the committee was trying to replicate the sound of Roman comedy in translation. That they thought this twisted syntax was in fact a great virtue -- that they were sounding exactly the way Roman dramatists and satirists sound when they are translated by academic nitwits. The really good translations of Catullus, Juvenal, etc. take liberties to tone this "witty" effect down. The literalists tie themselves in knots trying to maintain the stupid complexity. The committee would have defended this approach to themselves saying it is like the cocksucker Shakespearian of "Deadwood." Which I found interesting, but I can imagine caused frown lines to sprout on many viewers.
ReplyDeleteWell said, Andy. I feel better about my decision to deny my Roman-minded boy this 'Tudors'ish epic. Now, if you could have screened Clash of the Titans for us, too, I could have those two hours of last weekend back.
ReplyDeleteThe cartoons look terrific.