300 And The Extreme Right

I have to tell you, I think this is over the top hysteria:

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.

...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 The comic fanboys who make up 300's primary audience demographic aren't likely to get hung up on the movie's historical content, much less any parallels with present-day politics. 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. With actual Persians (or at least denizens of that vast swath of land once occupied by the Persian empire).

Three things.

Firstly, comparing an obviously semi-fantastic movie made from a comic book written years ago because of a childhood obsession with the story to a deliberatly manufactured bit of Nazi propoganda designed specifically to demonize an entire race is just...dumb. Get a grip.

Second, comics readers tend to be pretty educated and are probably quite aware of the movie's historical content.

Third - more aware than Slate's reviewer, Dana Stevens, anyway. Is it just me or does that last bit in parentheses look like an editorial insertion after it was pointed out to Stevens that Iraq wasn't Persian? In any case, Iraq was part of the British Empire too (so was the US, come to that) but no-one has suggested The Patriot is a bad movie simply because of a war involving all three nations.

Even the section of the movie that seems to have given most trouble to Stevens, the Spartans barbarism, didn't go unnoticed by Frank Miller when he wrote the original comic. He told one interviewer at the time:

The book is about Sparta's barbarity. The Spartans were the oldest of Greeks and they were quite brutal. The most offensive thing they ever did was tossing all those messengers into the well because you never kill the messenger. It's considered blasphemy but Spartans didn't give a damn. They were willing to commit blasphemy. They were all trained soldiers with 15 slaves to every Spartan so they were a very rough crowd. But because they're the heroes of my story, I'll make them look as good as I can but I wouldn't want to have dinner with any of them.

Still, Miller seems to be an Islamophobe and to have bought into the "Clash of Civilizations" narrative, willing to paint the entire Moslem world with the excesses of it's worst extremists:

For some reason, nobody seems to be talking about who we’re up against, and the sixth century barbarism that they actually represent. These people saw people’s heads off. They enslave women, they genitally mutilate their daughters, they do not behave by any cultural norms that are sensible to us. I’m speaking into a microphone that never could have been a product of their culture, and I’m living in a city where three thousand of my neighbors were killed by thieves of airplanes they never could have built.

"These people" - not exactly nuanced thinking. You can see why the uber-Right loves his politics.

Oh, and if you're wondering why neocon classicist Victor Davis Hanson loves "300", maybe a bit of disclosure would be in order. Don't fret VDH, I'll do it for you:

Q: Zack Snyder: “In the Making Of book there’s a guy named Victor Davis Hanson who is a…”

Frank Miller: “We’re his fan club.”

Zack Snyder: “He’s a frickin genius. He’s a Greek historian and we showed him the movie because I wanted him to write a forward to the Making Of book. I was a little nervous to be honest, because I wasn’t sure how he’d react. And Kurt Johnstad who he and I worked on the screenplay together, he actually also is a huge fan of Victor Davis Hanson. He went up to show him the movie at his house. And about halfway through the movie, it’s the scenes where the Spartans are leaving for Thermopylae and they’re walking out of Sparta, Victor turned to Kurt and said, ‘Are the Spartans just going to be naked like this the whole time?’ And Kurt kind of went, ‘Yeah…,’ thinking that Victor was like, ‘Okay, wrong.’ But at the end of the movie he said, ‘You know, I’ve got to say that the movie in some ways,’ and I’m going to post on the website just a little excerpt from it because I feel like it’s a cool thing for people to read because it actually puts a lot of it in perspective as far as from an historical standpoint. He says that, ‘Look, if you have a problem with distilling the Battle of Thermopylae down to freedom versus tyranny, you need to read Herodotus because he’s the one. It’s his fault, not modern culture’s fault. He did it.’ He references a lot of things like that because he feels like the spirit of the book and of the movie are very close to the Spartan aesthetic. That’s really kind of what he feels.”

Frank Miller: “When I started work on the comic book I said, ‘Okay, let’s see how the accurate version works.’ Imagining 300 slow-moving beetles wearing skirts coming across the field to face off, rather than these huge, muscular guys running with these red capes and those really scary Corinthian helmets. I mean, jumping back to Victor Davis Hanson, it was right in the middle of maybe our first conversation that Zack brought his name up, not realizing that he was citing my favorite non-fiction writer in the whole universe. I kind of felt we were starting to get along.”

So that's the background to the makers of the movie. It's certainly informed by the Clash of Civilizations meme so beloved of neoconservatives but to compare it to Nazi propaganda is a bit rich.

Will I go see it? Hell yes. I love a good fantasy action flick and (even if I am a comics reader) I will manage to be aware of the historical content and parallels with present-day politics without being brainwashed by them.