We Don’t Need Another Hero: Troy, Fall of a City (2018) and the End of Epic Male Heroism

When Gladiator was released in 2000, its narrative of a betrayed general who becomes a gladiator and pursues a relentless and violent quest for personal vengeance (and simultaneously cleanses a corrupt state) struck a profound cultural nerve. Of course, Gladiator drew on well-established cinematic and generic conventions, but it is significant that the male revenge narrative, so common in genres such as the western and the action film, here served to alter the course of history itself, tearing down the rotten edifice of the Empire and returning it to a Republican state of grace. Given that, as Susan Faludi documents in her book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (published in 1999, one year before Gladiator), American men had experienced a sense of cultural and political betrayal in the years following World War II, it is hardly surprising that Scott’s film would have not only proven successful on its own terms, but that it would ignite a cycle of ancient world epic films and television series that continued to explore the fraught issue of male heroism and its place in the unfolding of history.

Indeed, central to the cultural and political resonance of Gladiator and its successors — most notably 300 — is their skillful meshing of the domestic, the historico-political, and the ability of…