In honor of finishing my dissertation, I went to see 300 earlier this week, and found myself alternately repulsed and fascinated by the film's glorification of fascism and its really quite stunning visuals. The film's washed-out colors help the buff actors pop out from the digitally built backgrounds, and I enjoyed the action sequences themselves, including what Paul not unwisely described as an inclination towards slowing the action down almost to the point of the film being a slide show. I think the film reflects its graphic-novel origins much better than Sin City did, which did little more than make each scene look like a comic book. Snyder did a much better job of conveying the kineticism in well designed sequential art.
That said, this has to be one of the most reactionary films since Chuck Norris stomped around Vietnam in the early 80s, retroactively defeating the Viet Cong and defeatist liberals. 300 doesn't gloss over Sparta's policy of killing newborns it considered unfit to live, or its practice of training young boys to be brutal warriors, it places them as the linchpins on which Sparta and its heroic defense of Thermopylae rested. Indeed, the policy of destroying the unfit is reaffirmed by transforming Ephialtes into a monstrously misshapen hunchback who is seduced into betraying the Spartans with a lapdance. Xerxes looks like he got lost on the way to West Hollywood for Halloween -- a bronzed, megalomaniacal drag queen who likes to sidle up behind men and whisper sweet nothings into their ear about how nice he'll be if they just get on their knees. Several of his agents are African, and one shot fades to black so only the black man's eyes and teeth loom out of the darkness. Xerxes's armies are repeatedly referred to as representing all of Asia, and if the 300 Spartans (and, the film begrudgingly admits, about a hundred other nervous Thespians and Arcadians) don't stop them, these perverted Asians will overrun Greece and take away Our Precious Freedoms.
The only thing stopping this assault is a group of warriors who have been trained to identify themselves with their home of Sparta, who are willing to ignore the laws they are sworn to uphold while cowards and traitors at home try to stab them in the back, while the king's good wife tries to remind them that "freedom isn't free." I was almost surprised not to see the Greek equivalent of arbeit macht frei written over the gates of Sparta at the beginning.
The director and others have tried to defend the film with "it's just a movie," a spectacle to be enjoyed, as though it has no cultural context or that any similarity to fascist iconography and ideology is just a coincidence. Folderol. This film is steeped in fascism, from the emphasis on physical perfection and soldiering as an art form and duty, to the identification of Leonidas as the embodiment of Spartan honor and superiority, to the representation of democracy as weak and corrupt, to the rhetorical sleight of hand that says a group fights for freedom but only for those who are deserving of it (Snyder forgets to mention that Spartans had slaves). Thermopylae is presented as a battle of suspiciously Western European manly men defending Eastern Europe from Asiatic deviants. It would make Goebbels proud.
Back to its aesthetics, though, as a concluding note. In the mid 1960s, Pasolini wrote an essay about the screenplay, analyzing it as a form that wanted to be something else. In other words, a screenplay had to be able to be read as a text in its own right, but as one that would not be fulfilled until it became a different, visual text. Sin City and 300 are the apotheosisi (?) of the recent push for films to be as much like comic books as possible. Are we in effect seeing a reversal of Pasolini's analysis -- that these films must be coherent as films, but are not fulfilled unless the audience recognizes them as non-films, as graphic novels that blend printed word and image?
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3 comments:
Great post. Have you read the graphic novel? And, if so, how is it different (in the political terms you set up)?
I've flipped through the graphic novel, but the film looks to be fairly respectful of the source material. As I noted in an earlier post, Frank Miller's politics seem to have skewed to the reactionary recently (although they may always have been there).
Yes, i was interested in Frank Miller's politics. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I don't usually read comics, but I have read The Dark Knight Returns. There's a comparison there between Superman and Batman: Superman as a wimpy upholder of society's laws (which ultimately makes him a tool of the government) and Batman as a vigilante crusader who works outside of those laws (and who beats the crap out of Superman at the end). To the extent that this imbues vigilanteism (sp?) with a kind of glamor, is it perhaps of a piece with the fascism of 300?
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