You Love to See It: Caligula

Actor Guido Mannari has a single fleeting scene in which to transform the infamous ‘Wall of Death’, the most outrageous image in a film famous for little else, from banally demented fantasy to tragic backdrop. It’s a tall order. Caligula, one of the twentieth century’s most infamously misbegotten films, is not a subtle production. Its dramatic sensibilities are Roman, superstitious, jaded, and cynically cosmopolitan, with none of American cinema’s linear plotting or deterministic moralizing, and Mannari’s performance as Macro, prefect of the Praetorian Guard and de facto jailer of the ailing emperor Tiberius, belongs more properly to that theatrical tradition of the heavy-lidded temptor, a warrior figure playing both mentor and seducer to McDowell’s elfin, sadistic young noble.

The wall itself is a spectacularly lurid sight, a vast moving edifice of red sandstone carved like the facade of a temple and lined with naked, spear-wielding legionaries and rotating blades set at head height above the sands of the arena. In its path, accused traitors to the empire are buried up to the neck and made to await its glacial progress. Macro is one of these unlucky few, tossed aside by his vindictive and erratic patron mere days after he murdered an emperor to secure that patron’s throne. The look on Mannari’s face as he gazes back at his one-time lover and protege is shattering, the desolation of the field around him compounded by his inattention to the ponderous official death his emperor has slated for him. Alone among Caligula’s lovers, he fails to realize the nature of his beloved. Even as he dies, he can’t bring himself to admit that the man to whom he’s given his heart is a sadistic fool. For something that pure to survive within a man so disillusioned and casually violent is almost frightening.

Mannari, who spent his life playing a succession of macho seducers and brutes in Italian cinema, died at the age of 43 of complications stemming from HIV/AIDS. It’s difficult not to lay what little record survives of his complicated personal life over that strange, trashy sequence of carnal excess which ends his fictional one in Brass’s film. In his longing expression, his decision to believe Caligula might spare his life, might honor the kiss with which they sealed the oath of their shared treason, is a whole world of suffering, decade upon decade of loss and ruination with only the frail and windswept bodies of other men to anchor the misery. That single moment speaks louder than any of the film’s more famous vulgarities, imbuing its carnival atmosphere with such real human loss that one feels compelled to keep looking for meaning, to produce some proof that such a thing didn’t pass out of the world without a reason.