“The beating heart of Rome is not the marble of the senate- it’s the sand of the Colosseum.”
I love that quote from “Gladiator“. It’s a fantastic reminder of the incredible empire that Rome was, and how hard and desperately it fell from its peak.
For those who don’t know, Rome is the capital of Italy, and was once the largest empire in the world, controlling countries as far north as Great Britain and as far east as Mesopotamia. They were innovative, fierce, and historically undefeatable in battle for hundreds of years. Yet, at the “climax” of its civilization, they wiped themselves out, and the known world fell into the dark ages.
Why is this? Well, the Fall of Rome has been attributed to the inability to control their own citizens. In reality, the above quote is probably completely true. Rome’s civilization eventually swiveled from their powerful republic government and onto the Games. The gladiatorial fights, races, hunts, and “mock” battles (staged battles with actual slaughter) kept the citizens entertained. But only for so long.
* * *
It’s been in well-known studies for a long time: The more graphic violence people are exposed to, the more numb they become to it. Studies performed on children with violent video games, films, and RPGs show evidence of it in frightening amounts. And if we look at our own history books, we can see the sort of entertainment progression, just in America. From the beginning of motion pictures, just having a close-up moving footage of an approaching locomotive caused people to flee from theaters. Nowadays, even movies with excessive gore and intense action sequences bore audiences too easily unless they also hold original storylines and/or headlining actors and actresses.
In fact, entertainment is what seems to drive Americans these days. Magazines devoted to celebrities and television shows; award shows honoring the same celebrities who host them; films about the actors who act in the films; videogames mimicking movies in order to attract larger customer bases; violence and sex becoming more and more common in everyday culture; even our president is voted in purely on his status as a celebrity figure. We’ve progressed beyond just an entertainment-driven society: We are now a society driven by necessity to be entertained.
If tomorrow, all cinemas shut down, and theatres across the globe went out of business, and the music industry left town, and every celebrity died of lung cancer- as a society, mass panic and chaos would ensue. America would go the way of ancient Rome: Take an epic dive as President Obama played the cello from the deck of the Capital Building, watching all of surrounding Washington D.C. burn around him to the sound of the lamenting strings. (Actually, that would be pretty stinkin’ epic.)
See where this is going? The more incredible, the more more shocking, the more risqué, the more outrageous- the more entertaining. Until we’ve numbed ourselves beyond movement, and we can’t stand up for anything that isn’t presented as a form of entertainment. Will we pull ourselves out of the rut of history, and force our flabby, selfish, fun-driven forms into a stronger lifestyle? Can we escape the inevitable?
Either way, that D.C. scene up there would make a rockin’ ending. I’d watch that movie.
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