Common Dominators

Their blood-red fingernails encased in boxing gloves, the two working-class gladiatrixes took to the ring on Fox Television to duke it out for sums rumored to be around $35,000 and a last-ditch attempt to cling to fame, whatever the cost.

Pathetic! Poignant! Revolting! we pronounced.

Then we tuned in by the millions.

“Celebrity Boxing” averaged 15.5 million viewers--Fox’s highest ratings since “Temptation Island” last year. Although there were two other matches, most viewers tuned in Wednesday to see Tonya Harding beat the tar out of Paula Jones. The catfight in boxing gloves even won its time period against a rerun of the critically acclaimed “The West Wing.”

In the days leading up to the highly publicized event, culture critics across the country lamented the declining state of television--and civilization.

They’re missing the point, said Neal Gabler, cultural commentator and author of “Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality.” “People like low-grade entertainment, and have for a long time, not because they are stupid, but because they realize this kind of behavior is transgressive,” Gabler argued. “There is a real thrill to sticking it to the custodians of culture.”

People watch shows such as “Celebrity Boxing” precisely because they are terrible, and because they are commentary on how we feel about celebrity. “No one took this seriously,” Gabler said Thursday. “What was going on last night was a giant wink to one another. It was a giant tweak to high culture. This was about saying, I’m hip. I’m cool. I get it. It’s about irony.”

Some scholars of ancient civilizations believe we are led to watch such spectacles by the same impulses that led crowds to the coliseums of the Roman empire to watch gladiators fight for their lives. Roman gladiators were “socially dead,” said Margaret Imber, a classics professor at Bates College in Maine. Often despised in polite society, the fighters had few or no legal rights, she said. “Harding and Jones arguably are in a similar situation because they sought--despite their non-elite origins--to play on an elite stage” (Olympic figure skating for Harding, American presidential politics for Jones).

Both Jones, 35, and Harding, 31, have been stereotyped in the media as low-class. Harding gained notoriety in January 1994 when she was involved in a botched plot hatched by her ex-husband to injure the kneecap of skating rival Nancy Kerrigan.

Jones entered the U.S. political arena in 1994 when she filed a lawsuit against then-President Clinton, claiming he made an unwelcome sexual advance in 1991 when he was governor of Arkansas and she was a state employee. She went on to pose nude for Penthouse.

“Ideologically we try to suppress class distinctions,” Imber said. “The reason these two are lightning rods is because they are from a lower socioeconomic class, and they came to social attention by crossing a boundary into an elite arena. That made it very highly charged.” If you survived as a gladiator you essentially got a nice fat retirement package and lost your servile status, she said, though beyond the money they earned from Fox, the rewards for Harding and Jones are unclear.

Other scholars of the ancient world scoffed at such analogies.

“The spectacle thing is true in both [situations],” said Ian Worthington, a professor of ancient history at the University of Missouri-Columbia. “But ... this really is just a marketing thing.”

No one would have wanted to see Harding and Jones humiliate themselves, Worthington said, if the women hadn’t already been pathetic public figures, a step away from oblivion. In the evening’s two other matches, 42-year-old Danny Bonaduce of “Partridge Family” fame pummeled 47-year-old Barry Williams, Greg of “The Brady Bunch,” and Todd Bridges, 36, of TV’s “Diff’rent Strokes” took down Robert Van Winkle, 32, the rapper once known as Vanilla Ice.

Robert Thompson, a popular-culture critic and director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, agreed that one must be cautious in drawing parallels between gladiator battles and reality TV.

“While some parallels do exist, we are talking about two completely different scales of cultural expression,” Thompson said. “The biggest story about Fox’s ‘Celebrity Boxing’ is not so much that a fat, lazy culture is being expressed as much as that it is a natural outgrowth of the current state of American journalism. Fox simply exploited the monsters created by the news cycle. News managed to create celebrity equity in Tonya, Paula, Danny and Todd, and Fox has managed to find a way to cash in on that celebrity now that the news cycle is finished with them.”

As for the pundits who don’t seem to get the lure of this spectacle, Imber, who teaches an undergraduate course on gladiators, explained that the cultural elites then, as now, scorn the entertainment of the masses. “You read that elite Romans like Seneca and Cicero hated the games,” said Imber. “It’s hard to read the letters of Cicero, they are so snotty. The elites thought people got too bloodthirsty. But any emperor worth his salt made sure he attended.”

Mike Darnell, Fox’s executive vice president of specials and alternative programming, said the genesis of “Celebrity Boxing” was a 1994 radio stunt. Danny “The Pugilistic Partridge” Bonaduce pasted poor Donny “The Mormonator” Osmond in a three-round charity bout orchestrated by a Chicago radio personality. With the emergence of celebrity versions of other shows, Darnell felt the time had come for celebrity boxing. “It was really thrilling to me,” he said. “What ended up drawing people to it was the surrealness of it. People you sort of know, getting into the ring and boxing.”

He said he has been surprised by the negative reaction of the cultural critics. “All we do is put together what we think has great entertainment value,” Darnell said. “I’m amazed at how many people look at what we do with a philosophical bent.”

Imber thinks people should try to be more aware of the connections between high and low culture. “Something is wrong in our public discourse that we don’t have the ability to connect the crazy completely tawdry stuff we see with the courageous stuff that we see,” she said. “Until we understand both parts, we will have an incomplete notion of ourselves.”