Tonight We Dine On Spilt Milk

Just because it’s fun to rip apart the other end of the spectrum… Here is my (cheeky) take on Slate’s review of “300” (I’m not linking to it – they rot enough people’s brains as it is):

“A Movie Only a Spartan Could Love”

But tell us how you really feel about the unwashed masses, Ms. Stevens!

If 300, the new battle epic based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, had been made in Germany in the mid-1930s, it would be studied today alongside The Eternal Jew as a textbook example of how race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth can serve as an incitement to total war.

Ohhhh. Looks like someone hasn’t been drooling on their Cultural Studies texbooks. I could say pretty much all I want to say right now… But I want to give Dana a chance to make a total fool of herself first, because at this point, she’s only halfway there.

Since it’s a product of the post-ideological, post-Xbox 21st century, 300 will instead be talked about as a technical achievement, the next blip on the increasingly blurry line between movies and video games.

Post-ideological – is that, like, the new po-mo with spice? You know, it’s the same-old complaint I still remember as being related to Elvis shaking his pelvis, but as long as you can dress it up in snazzy rhetoric, I suppose you’ll be able to charm someone.

Directed by Zack Snyder, whose first feature film was the 2004 makeover of the horror classic Dawn of the Dead, 300 digitally re-creates the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., where, according to classical history and legend, the Spartan king Leonidas led a force of only 300 men against a Persian enemy numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

The “raging clue” is in bold. It’s all you need to figure out what I’m saying.

The comic fanboys who make up 300’s primary audience demographic aren’t likely to get hung up on the movie’s historical content, much less any parallels with present-day politics.

She’s got claws – raaaaar. It’s just too bad that she uses the gendered term “fanboys.” Sorry Dana, in the post-ideological universe, it pretty much means you’re sexist scum. Hey, I didn’t make up the rules. You’re the one who assumed that I am a boy! Now I have to send you to Tolerance Camp.

But what’s maddening about 300 (besides the paralyzing monotony of watching chiseled white guys make shish kebabs from swarthy Persians for 116 indistinguishable minutes) is that no one involved—not Miller, not Snyder, not one of the army of screenwriters, art directors, and tech wizards who mounted this empty, gorgeous spectacle—seems to have noticed that we’re in the middle of an actual war.

If chiseled white guys aren’t your thing, Dana, there’s plenty more you can choose from on satellite. No need to be bitter that this particular film did not cater to your needs. Now about that “actual war” business… Yeah, you’re sort of right. It was an actual war – millennia ago. Now, now, if I am self-absorbed enough to write a blog, I probably shouldn’t complain too much about self-absorbed hipsters who view the entirety of the world’s brutal history through the tiny prism of their day-to-day experience… But I feel I ought to get a freebie after the “fanboys” bit, no?

Anyway, I did a little something called “research” on Frank Miller’s odius comic book. And I found out that said odious comic book came out in, like, 1998 – way before Bush & Co. took over the White House. The only conclusion I can draw is that Frank Miller is an evil wingut psychic. Haha!

Oh, and don’t even try to dump that shit on Zach Snyder, considering the fact that the film follows the book in practically everything.

With actual Persians (or at least denizens of that vast swath of land once occupied by the Persian empire).

Oh dear Eru… Iraq = Mesopotamia. It was conquered by Persians. It does not equal Persia. But whatever, we don’t care about that, since when it comes to oppressed people, their identity ceases to matter.

In interviews, Snyder insists that he “really just wanted to make a movie that is a ride”—a perfectly fine ambition for any filmmaker, especially one inspired by the comics.

Those anti-intellectual comics! They never use phrases such as “hegemonic discourse”!

And visually, 300 is thrilling, color-processed to a burnished, monochromatic copper, and packed with painterly, if static, tableaux vivants.

This was thrown in here just to trip up the unwashed masses, naturally.

But to cast 300 as a purely apolitical romp of an action film smacks of either disingenuousness or complete obliviousness.

As a fan of fairy tale and myth and oral storytelling, I kinda thought so too…

One of the few war movies I’ve seen in the past two decades that doesn’t include at least some nod in the direction of antiwar sentiment, 300 is a mythic ode to righteous bellicosity.

… Until you brought this up, at which point I realized that you didn’t give a shit about storytelling at all. Though it’s funny that the film did not conform to your particular ideological standpoint – considering the fact that it basically paints the Spartans as people who would be looked upon as sociopaths today. Attractive sociopaths who have an interesting narrative of their own, but sociopaths nonetheless – Leonidas’ grinning desire for death should have clued you in.

In at least one way, the film is true to the ethos of ancient Greece: It conflates moral excellence and physical beauty (which, in this movie, means being young, white, male, and fresh from the gyms of Brentwood).

Anything but youth, whiteness, and maleness! And the gym! Holy shit! I’m not really sure how the word “moral” figures into all this – since morality, or, at least, what we cuddly Westerners define as morality is pretty much a non-issue for blood-thirsty, self-destructive, fanatical Spartans… But hey, if you want to believe that this film was made by simple-minded fools – if that makes you feel better about your own lefty credentials – by all means, continue.

See, you obviously can’t conceive of a narrative in which fanaticism would be attractive – but I can. Guess it might have something to do with my background as an “oppressed person…”

Here are just a few of the categories that are not-so-vaguely conflated with the “bad” (i.e., Persian) side in the movie: black people. Brown people. Disfigured people. Gay men (not gay in the buff, homoerotic Spartan fashion, but in the effeminate Persian style). Lesbians. Disfigured lesbians. Ten-foot-tall giants with filed teeth and lobster claws. Elephants and rhinos (filthy creatures both). The Persian commander, the god-king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) is a towering, bald club fag with facial piercings, kohl-rimmed eyes, and a disturbing predilection for making people kneel before him.

Here’s where the issue of NARRATIVE comes up again. Alas, if Dana was not busy racking up the ways in which “300” rankled her delicate sensibilities, she might have noticed that the entire film was narrated by a Spartan for Spartans. The audience have the role of passive witnesses. What’s going on here is a re-telling of an oral tradition which is mediated completely through the Spartan experience – a tradition which is then further inscribed by Frank Miller’s own fiction. It’s a fucking story, by Sparants, for Spartans – and Frank Miller is our Virgil. It’s a story of a brutal Other who faced another brutal Other – with all the metaphoric consequences.

In the immortal words of Kevin Smith: “Read between the lines, bitch.”

Meanwhile, the Spartans, clad in naught but leather man-briefs, fight under the stern command of Leonidas (Gerard Butler), whose warrior ethic was forged during a childhood spent fighting wolves in the snow. Leonidas likes to rally the troops with bellowed speeches about “freedom,” “honor,” and “glory,” promising that they will be remembered for having created “a world free from mysticism and tyranny.”

See above.

(The men’s usual response, a fist-pumping “A-whoo! A-whoo!” sounds strangely fratty.)

When was the last time you were at a frat party anyway?

But Leonidas is not above playing the tyrant himself. When a messenger from Xerxes arrives bearing news Leonidas doesn’t like, he hurls the man, against all protocol, down a convenient bottomless well in the center of town. “This is blasphemy! This is madness!” says the messenger, pleading for his life. “This is Sparta,” Leonidas replies. So, if Spartan law is defined by “whatever Leonidas wants,” what are the 300 fighting for, anyway? And why does that sound depressingly familiar?

If you weren’t so busy deconstructing the film, you might have noticed that Leonidas, offensively hot and masculine as he is, is not a true-blue hero. That word – “tyrant” – those evil filmmakers, they wanted you to use it. Leonidas is a tyrant, and I suppose you want a gold star for figuring that one out, except that us silly “fanboys” and, *gasp*, “fangirls” – we’re ahead of you.

Another of the Spartans’ less-than-glorious customs is the practice of eugenics, hurling any less-than-perfect infant off a cliff onto a huge pile of baby skeletons. Unfortunately for the 300 at Thermopylae, this system of racial cleansing isn’t foolproof: One deformed hunchback, Ephialtes (Andrew Tiernan), manages to make it to adulthood and begs Leonidas for a chance to serve Sparta in the 300. Sure enough, when he’s turned down, the hunchback confirms his moral weakness by accepting Xerxes’ offer to join ranks with the Persians.

How DARE Frank Miller use actual historical facts (i.e. eugenics) in his storyline? How DARE he make the anti-heroes look so damn attractive to themselves?

*I throw my copy of Master and Margarita at Dana Stevens at this point*

Meanwhile, back home in Sparta, Leonidas’ wife, Gorgo (Lena Headey), engages in some plot-padding political intrigue with the evil Theron (The Wire’s Dominic West, looking particularly risible in classical drapery). Theron wants to persuade the Spartan council not to send reinforcements to the desperately outnumbered 300 (what is he, a Democrat?).

See my comments regarding the year that the comic book was published. Anyway, people who think outside the box are so much more attractive. Although then again, what right do I have to talk about attractiveness? After all, I liked seeing Leonidas’ evil, oppressive, white-boy bum.

The noble and sexy Gorgo finally gives herself to Theron in exchange for a chance to persuade the council. “This will not be over quickly,” the villain warns as he pins her against a temple pillar. “You will not enjoy this.” It might have been Zack Snyder himself whispering in my ear, and he would have been right.

Hey, it’s cool if you have different taste than I do. I’m a big fan of vodka on the rocks, par example (see, I use trendy French-isms too!), and I don’t expect everyone to enjoy it.

The difference between you and I is clear, though: I don’t normally imply that the whiskey drinkers are stupid cunts.