White Redemption: Jake Paul, Gladiator 2, and the Culture Industry

how modern entertainment weaponizes spectacle to reaffirm systemic power

It already felt absurd: a Gladiator 2 screening at the Whitby Hotel hosted by GQ, Paul Mescal in attendance, and me, a plus-one to Chi Ossé, a city councilmember who would probably rather be seated next to anyone else. Add to this the fact that Gladiator 2—all $250 million of it—is bad. Not “so bad it’s good” bad, but depressingly, insultingly bad. The kind of bad that makes you question the function of cinema, art, and human civilization.

Pictured: Future Governor of New York Chi live tweeting.

There is, for example, a CGI sequence where Paul Mescal fights a troop of baboons—yes, baboons—that look like they’ve been rendered by a PlayStation 2. Not quite original PlayStation rendered Hagrid, but not good. And the climax (spoiler, but really, save yourself) is a bloodbath where Mescal’s character, a sunburned white savior archetype, takes down Denzel Washington in a final battle at the gates of Rome. The film ends with the restoration of democracy or something vague that screenwriters assumed audiences wouldn’t question too hard because there was, after all, a lot of stabbing, shouting, and Pedro Pascal.

Pictured: PS1 Hagrid. Why is he kinda…

Earlier in the film, Denzel’s character delivers a chilling monologue that is meant to establish him as a Machiavellian figure, motivated entirely by a perverse lust for control. Borrowing from Cicero, he declares, “The slave dreams of owning a slave,” using the words to justify his own rise and desire to consolidate power. Freedom is the lie you tell the weak, or something like that. The monologue, delivered with Denzel’s signature gravitas, casts his character as irredeemable: corrupt, conniving, and willing to sacrifice anyone for his own ambition. He is, in short, the perfect villain.

But the film’s visual and symbolic language reveals another layer. While the overt message paints Denzel’s character as a destabilizing force that must be overcome to restore order, the underlying imagery tells a different story. A pale Irishman, embodying virtue and righteousness, standing over a defeated Black man at the gates of Rome is not just about defeating corruption—it’s a symbolic reaffirmation of whiteness as the natural order.

There is an unsettling discordance between the explicit content of this scene, where we are made to root for Mescal’s character, and its racial subtext. While the film asks us to root for our pale Irish hero, and rewards us with some form of emotional gratification when he is victorious, we are also spoon-fed a latent image tinged with the stain of white supremacy, where the virtuous, white hero triumphs over a formerly enslaved black man who is cynically attempting to consolidate power for his own personal gain. This image crystallizes white racial anxieties in amber, only to be alleviated by first confirming their validity. The film would never make this explicit, of course, and yet it is difficult to imagine that this latent meaning wasn’t a source of emotional gratification, subconsciously at the very least, for many white audiences.

This disconnect between overt narrative and subtext is not accidental. It reflects a crucial component of what philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer called the “Culture Industry,” or the simplified, mass produced cultural products made by monopolistic capitalist firms for the sake of profit. In their book Dialectic of Enlightenment, they describe the Culture Industry as an extension of the economic forms of domination and exploitation into the cultural sphere. The Culture Industry works via emotional manipulation, taking advantage of the exhausted labourer who has little energy for meaningful intellectual pursuits by giving them simple, easily reproducible cultural products that provide emotional gratification in lieu of any intellectual complexity. Adorno notes that the Culture Industry is “psychoanalysis in reverse.” Instead of attempting to treat audiences’ neuroses, which broadly grow out of their overbearing and unforgiving work life, it instead glorifies them, portraying these neuroses in a positive light so as to make audiences feel better about having them.

Pictured: Theodor Adorno looking playful in bathing suit.

Using this lens may help provide clarity as to why the racial politics within Gladiator 2 are so troubling. On the surface, the film delivers a familiar narrative of the hero’s triumph over the villain, audiences gain some form of emotional gratification rooting for the hero, living vicariously through his triumph. Yet we cannot understand the gratification audiences receive from this film without consideration for the broader socio-political context that it feeds off of and perpetuates. Its narrative tricks us into celebrating what seems like moral clarity, the “politically neutral” triumph of virtue over cynicism, while embedding deeper messages about who deserves to wield power and why. By consuming these stories, we aren’t just entertained; we are subtly reconditioned to accept and even celebrate the systems that bind us. The image of white supremacy that this film subtly suggests is lodged within our subconscious, not merely as a depiction of how things ought to be but also as things are now. As Adorno and Horkheimer note, “The whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry. The… moviegoer… perceives the street outside as a continuation of the film he has just left.”

One of the most striking features of Gladiator 2 is its reliance on the romanticization of empire—a trope that has long been a staple of Hollywood epics. The film invites audiences to root for a triumphant return to Rome’s “golden age,” framing it as a bastion of virtue and democracy in an otherwise chaotic world. But this sanitized vision of empire, scrubbed clean of its historical complexities and brutalities, raises uncomfortable questions about what kinds of narratives resonate with contemporary audiences and why.

The original Gladiator (2000) was no stranger to this trope, depicting Russell Crowe’s Maximus as a noble warrior fighting to restore justice to a corrupted Rome. It succeeded in creating a sense of grandeur and nostalgia, a longing for a mythical past where honor and democracy could coexist under the aegis of a benevolent leader. Gladiator 2 amplifies this nostalgia but does so with an even heavier hand, positioning Paul Mescal’s pale, sunburned protagonist as the savior of a Rome teetering on the edge of ruin. The stakes are heightened, the battles bloodier, and the enemy more ominously “othered.” Also now there are TWO emperors. Which is fucking sick. We can only hope that Gladiator 3 will feature 3 emperors. Hell yeah.

Pictured: Two cunty emperors in their joint slay (one has Syphilis).

Rome, as envisioned in Gladiator 2, is less a historical place and more a cipher for contemporary anxieties. Its “restoration” is a metaphor for a return to norms—a familiar refrain in today’s conservative discourse. In this vision, the past is reimagined as a source of stability and moral clarity, conveniently erasing the imperialism, exploitation, and violence that defined Rome’s reality. This is not history; it’s mythmaking, designed to reassure audiences rather than confront them with uncomfortable truths.

The romanticization of empire is not unique to Gladiator 2. It can be seen in films like 300, or even in recent superhero movies that rely on savior figures to preserve order against chaos. These stories often position their heroes as defenders of a fragile civilization under siege, implicitly endorsing a worldview where hierarchy and violence are necessary evils to maintain stability. In doing so, they perpetuate a kind of cultural exceptionalism that resonates with nationalist and authoritarian ideologies.

This is where Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the culture industry feels most prescient. By romanticizing empire, Gladiator 2 doesn’t just entertain—it trains audiences to long for the imagined virtues of hierarchical systems while accepting their inherent violence. As Adorno and Horkheimer wrote, “Unending sameness also governs the relationship to the past. The machine is rotating on the spot.” These narratives reduce history to a series of digestible archetypes, flattening its complexities and repackaging it as spectacle.

What’s particularly troubling is how easily these myths can be co-opted by white supremacist ideologies. A film that celebrates a return to Rome’s “order” may feel cathartic to some audiences, but it risks reinforcing notions of who belongs in that order—and who must be excluded to preserve it. Denzel Washington’s character, despite being positioned as a cunning and corrupt antagonist, cannot escape the racial dynamics embedded in the film’s imagery. His defeat becomes more than just the fall of a villain; it’s a symbolic cleansing that reinstates whiteness as the natural arbiter of power.

This dynamic feels familiar, partially because it is reproduced everywhere. It’s even in the contours of Jake Paul’s recent “boxing*” match against Mike Tyson, though much more overtly. Tyson, framed as the underdog returning for one last shot at glory, is lauded for his resilience. But Paul, a professional troll elevated by algorithms, walks away with twice the payday and the narrative triumph. After the fight, in the middle of the ring when Tyson suggested fighting Paul’s brother, Logan, the older Paul’s chilling retort—“I’ll kill you”—laid bare the subtext of these spectacles: dominance cloaked in the language of sport.

*That’s right. It’s not real boxing! Fuck you Jake Paul!

Pictured: Two mistakes of human evolution.

Like Gladiator 2, the Paul brothers’ rise is built on violence packaged as entertainment. Even when the characters or scenarios change, the outcome remains the same: the consolidation of dominance, framed as progress or justice. The climax of Gladiator 2, where Mescal savagely dispatches Denzel, isn’t merely about defeating a rival; it’s a symbolic cleansing. Similarly, the Paul/Tyson fight isn’t just about boxing but about leveraging the aesthetics of violence to reaffirm cultural dominance – but the dominance of whiteness in particular. Tyson, for all his millions, is a prop in a narrative that centers white ascendancy. As Adorno and Horkheimer put it, “The enjoyment of the violence done to the film character turns into violence against the spectator; distraction becomes exertion.” In both cases, the audience is conditioned to accept the spectacle of dominance as natural and inevitable. This is not done through rational argumentation, but instead as a result of a psychological sleight of hand.

This conditioning is crucial to the culture industry’s power. By immersing viewers in cycles of predictable narratives—whether it’s a gladiator restoring “democracy” to Rome, or a YouTuber defeating a legend—the industry trains us to see resistance as futile and the status quo as unchangeable. “The culture industry has finally posited this imitation as absolute,” Adorno wrote, “divulging style's secret: obedience to the social hierarchy.”

We live in a moment where democracy’s fragility is constantly invoked, its ideals turned into cinematic shorthand for virtue. But what Gladiator 2 and Jake Paul vs. Tyson reveal is the emptiness of that invocation. Democracy, in these stories, is not about shared power or collective will—it’s a return to the white supremacist status quo, enforced with a clenched fist. Much of Adorno and Horkheimer’s work concerns how the suffering brought about by historical forms of domination is channeled, or misdirected, towards upholding the status quo.

We all, but especially the most neurotic and sycophantic of us, invest our hopes in attaining the emotional gratification that domination denies us on concepts only made legible by a social totality that is fundamentally false. We are lied to and deceived merely by virtue of living in a world where using others as a resource to be consumed for our own betterment is not only acceptable but ubiquitous. We should not be so foolish as to think this violence does not irreparably stain the forms of enjoyment produced by large capitalist firms operating first and foremost for profit. And while the audience cheers, the real victors—people like Jake Paul and the corporate apparatus backing those like him—continue to rake in profits, their supremacy unquestioned, their violence excused as part of the show.

Note for today’s readers: this piece was co-written by my dear friend Liv Agar. Her substack is here:

Liv Agar