Ridley Scott's Gladiator and the spectacle of empire: global/local rumblings inside the Pax Americana

Ridley Scott's Gladiator is situated and decoded not just as a representation of the Roman Empire but as a blasted allegorization of the Pax Americana itself in its modes of moral innocence, Euro-civililizational ratification, soft hegemony, and hegemonic technologies of sublime spectacle. This essay thus interrogates global/local attachments to, and critiques of, US-dominated forms of neo-liberal globalization.