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The 300 is a pretty awesome spectacle: I have new respect for the spear as a multi-faceted instrument of carnage and terror. And really, who doesn't want to see elephants clumsily tumble off a cliff into the roiling sea below? This reminds me... I am constantly amazed by the frequency of elephants falling down in movies, from having their jugulars cut by spry elves (Lord of the Rings) to being viciously thrown through plate glass windows (Ong Bak 2). You really get the sense that humanity fucking hates elephants. So now in the 300 we have elephants being jabbed with long spears and crashing down onto rocks, and it's all CGI'd and prettily done. But I think it would be pretty hard to argue that this movie is "deep" or "meaningful" or "rich, like a cheesecake". It's shiny plastic packaging.

The product inside is a less-than-impressive jumble of Orientalism. On the adversarial side we have faceless Asian hordes, characterized by the exotic, the deformed and the grotesque, who form a very effective and very stereotypical Other. Perhaps the cumulation of this experience is the dramatic re-appearance of an unfriendly hunchback, now wearing a gigantic black fez laced with gold chains. Meanwhile, the Spartans spew a bunch of honeyed speeches from about preserving freedom against tyranny, in between extended sessions of nakedly thrusting their spears into Other, Yellow, Bad men. Every Spartan is worth a trillion Asians, you see, and despite a distinct lack of character development we are supposed to feel sad when one loyal soldier is abruptly sucker-beheaded from behind. Well, too bad guy, you just killed that Asian dude's entire village, one by one, in slow motion. He owed you, so let's all stop crying and get back to the genocide.

The 300 is basically just a repetition of the familiar old Westernized theme of "Oh shit, the East is rising to swallow us all... we must fight back FOR DEMOCRACY AND FREEDOM!" We're encouraged to identify with the small, honourable guy, the underdog, and struggle against the encrouchment of a faceless mass of foreign invaders. And that's great and all, I don't especially want to be hunchbacked or wear a black fez, but I think the manipulation of history to revisit century-old themes of hatin' on Orientalism is way too overdone to be acceptable in 2007. We do, however, have the delicious irony of Xerxes the Persian declaring that the 300 will be lost forever to history, when in fact it is his perspective that has been swallowed up by lopsided Western interpretation of the past.

History! Sparta was not really a democratic paradise. It was a dual-monarchy. Spartans weren't heterosexual manly-men compared to the "boy-loving" folk in Athens: pederasty was hype nationwide in Greece. They wore armor, and little skirts. Hitler liked their style, and Nazi Germany's emphasis on the iconography of the male body was largely lifted from Greek tradition. So if you're down with the Spartans, you're down with democracy but you're also sorta loving Hitler as well. Do you love Hitler?? Do you??

300, kudos on the sheer volume of awesome stabbings (rhinos! guys in scary masks! gigantic beast men!), but next time wrap your tired xenophobia in a less transparent box. Suggestions? Spartans versus Elephants might be a good start, and sci-fi aliens always add a powerful metaphorical kick to cultural conflict stories. I'll be saving my money for Spartans versus Elephants versus Predators.

Posted by Chris at 04:16 PM >> Commentations (9)