by Mattie Lucas
Cinema from a Decidedly Queer Perspective
Gladiator II | 2024
Even in a sea of nostalgia-driven legacy sequels, Ridley Scott's 2000 Oscar winner, Gladiator, feels like a strange candidate for the sequel treatment 24 years later. With its story complete and its protagonist dead, there seemed little point in revisiting this world.
A trans woman gets out of bed and pads across the room to the bathroom. She is naked. She goes to the bathroom. She brushes her teeth. It is a ritual I've performed so many times without a second thought, and now I'm watching it in a movie. I am struck by how commonplace this feels, how incredibly normal. I notice that her body isn't that different from mine. This is not a hyper-sexualized porn star; this is a regular transgender woman living a regular life. Our bodies are so often fetishized that it feels wholly transgressive to see a nude trans woman on screen simply existing - not being used as a sex object or an object of pity, just another woman going through motions that feel so mundane yet so familiar.