Where's Our Lucius?

The gladiators in the ring

While I was on a long flight home to Texas from Rome, hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people protested in the streets of every state across America. While y’all protested down on the ground, I was up in the clouds watching Gladiator II because I finished my book (Molly Jong-Fast’s How To Lose Your Mother, so good). Don’t judge me for my movie pick. I was desperate for something mindless to occupy my brain and make the hours tick by faster.

I know muscled men in short skirts playing ancient Romans and North Africans with British accents is ludicrous. So was the scene where the Romans somehow filled the Colosseum with sea water and angry great white sharks to add a little flair to the gladiator games. But as I watched, I thought of Trump’s stupid military parade. I couldn’t help but feel like the two power hungry, cruel, ridiculous emperor brothers in the movie who commissioned the shark spectacle were a lot like the maniac currently running our country. The emperors’ hair was a weird bottle dye shade of red/blonde. It was eerie, and off-putting. I can just imagine the hair person telling the director, “Well if we really want to make them creepy, we’ll make their hair the color of a bleached apricot!”

“They didn’t have electricity but they transported sharks into the Colosseum?” my husband commented after we watched the spectacle.

The disconnect, laughable as it is, feels oddly modern. Trump and the MAGA bros love WWE, right? He would probably love to bring back the bloodsport of gladiators and truck millions of gallons of water from the Atlantic into a colosseum built by one of his donors. Great white sharks in Washington! I bet he watched the movie and turned to his cardboard cutout of Melania and whined, “Why can’t I have that big beautiful thing!? We could put Rachel Maddow and Kellyanne Conway in the ring! Or Michelle Obama and Taylor Swift! Think of the ticket sales!”

As I watched the hero, Lucius, son of Maximus, rebel against the tyrannical order, it all felt very nail on the head. I don’t know if the director, Ridley Scott, had Trump in mind when he made this film, since it came out in 2024 and was finished shooting long before January 2025 came along and set the world and our nervous systems ablaze. But it all felt extremely of the moment as I watched on that plane.

In ancient Rome, it took brute strength, cunning, and bloody battle to take down the bad guys. I don’t know what it’ll take in our current world (please, no actual battles). Pressure, protests, and people with actual power finally standing up? For years I prayed and waited for the day the bad guys would be handcuffed in front of a huge crowd, their downfall live streamed for millions to see. That day has not come.

I have an old friend, let’s call him Victor. I love the guy, but since we were 19 I have seen him get away with so much shit. He’s truly a lucky bastard. He can weasel his way out of any situation, truly. And he always ends up unscathed, cavorting with models in Iceland or dining on the world’s most expensive sushi in a cave in the Arctic (the guy has a badass job, of course). He’s not cruel like the despots of today, but it’s a marvel to watch him continually get away with shit. What I am saying is that after years of waiting for the public handcuffing scene of my dreams, I’m now worried it’ll never happen and you know who will continue golfing and destroying the universe until the end of time.

What will happen is that we’ll keep worrying, grinding teeth and biting our nails. We’ll keep making clever posters and marching and pushing and donating to NPR and PBS and ringing our hands and making calls. I just hope that there is a Lucius out there, not sharpening a sword (Gladiator was way too violent for me), but following the money, tracing the steps, finding the thing, the ONE THING, that can bring this man down.

In the meantime, I will keep looking at photos of Paul Mescal, who played Lucius, because even though I know he’s a modern day Irish actor and not an ancient Roman hottie hero, the idea of this person, whoever they are, gives me a little bit of possibly irrational—but maybe not!—hope. Plus, he looks real good in his little skirt.