Tags
300, Ancient Greece, Fascism, Frank MIller, Leonidas, Movies I Hate, Racial Issues, Spartans, Xerxes, Zack Snyder
So in previous posts about 300 I’ve discussed the problems with the way that 300 (2007, dir. Zack Snyder) depicts the battle of Thermopylae and Spartan society. In this post, I want to examine another, more disturbing, problem with the film, namely the way it treats everyone who’s not a hot straight white guy. While I have a lot of issues with this film, in many ways, this is the most problematic element of the film for me.
At its height, the Achaemenid Empire (the Persian Empire of this film) covered a very large portion of what we today call the Middle East: Egypt, Asia Minor, the Fertile Crescent, Iran, and modern Afghanistan and Pakistan. In that sense, it included a wide range of ethnic groups. Ethnically, its dominant group were the Persians, an Indo-European people who today are often called Iranians. Persians are Caucasians; they have ‘European’ features, but with dark brown to black hair, and somewhat swarthier skin tone, ranging from olive to light brown. Northern Persians often have skin as fair as Europeans, and reddish-blond hair, while uncommon, is not unheard of. (If you don’t believe me, google ‘red-haired Persian’ and see the results.) Persians are more closely related to Western Europeans than to, for example, Arabs, Jews, or Turks. Linguistically, Persian is closely related to Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and modern English, and entirely unrelated to Semitic languages such as Arabic or Hebrew or to the Turkic language family, although it does naturally have loan-words from those languages. But while the Achaemenid Empire covered a lot of territory, one area it didn’t occupy was Sub-Saharan Africa. While there may have been a few Negros in the Persian Empire, they would have been a minuscule proportion of the population.
The Achaemenid Empire
Greeks and Persians in 300
The good guys in this movie are pretty easy to spot. They’re the buff white guys in jockstraps. They are shown to be motivated by patriotism, by a love of liberty (despite the fact that most of them just do whatever Leonidas tells them, even when it gets them all killed senselessly), and, at least in the case of Leonidas, by a tender love of his wife. They’re white, they’re male, they’re straight, and they’re physically perfect. The only exception to this is Gorgo (Lena Headey), who is white, female, straight, and physically perfect. The actors playing the Greeks are all fair-skinned, and Dilios (David Wenham) has somewhere between blond and light brown hair, depending on the lighting. Contemporary Greeks are generally olive-complexioned, with dark brown or black hair, and thick eyelashes. While I don’t know for sure, my guess is that ancient Greeks probably were closer to modern Greeks than they are to the fair-skinned actors who play them in this movie. Normally, that would be a very minor point for me, but in this film, I think it’s important to point out that the actors playing the Greeks really don’t look very Greek (apart from Gerard Butler perhaps).
Notice any non-whites in this pic? Me neither.
In contrast to these fair-skinned, gorgeous men (and woman) is pretty much everyone else. It is notable that very few of the Persian characters appear to be Caucasian. The first Persian we meet in this film is the Persian messenger, played by the extremely dark-skinned Ghanan actor Peter Mensah. Mostly the Persian soldiers are very dark-skinned, Negro, or perhaps Semitic. However, many of the soldiers, the Immortals, wear black clothing and gold face-masks, thus obscuring their race. Some of the women in Xerxes’ harem seem to be Caucasian, but none of them have given names, much less speaking roles. Xerxes is played by a Brazilian actor, Rodridgo Santoro, in very swarthy make-up; let’s just say he’s extremely tan. He’s bald, so we can’t really get a sense of what his hair is like, but aside from that, he’s passably Persian. (To judge from Santoro’s publicity stills, he’s got reasonably fair skin, so his swarthiness seems to be a conscious choice for his make-up). The only real exceptions to the pattern that evil characters are non-whites are Theron (Dominic West), the villainous Spartan; the disfigured Spartan Ephialtes (Andrew Tiernan); and the creepy ephors, who only appear in one scene.
If I had that body, I’d demand to be worshipped too.
The bad guys are, by and large, physically mis-shapen. Ephialtes is a grotesque hunchback with terrible teeth. The pervy ephors are covered with boils. Xerxes’ court is populated by freaks, including characters identified in the credits as “Long neck woman”, “armless concubine”, and “transsexual 1, 2, and 3”. Xerxes himself is physically perfect, but roughly 8 feet tall, and therefore an oddity in a different way. The only significant bad guy who is doesn’t fall into this pattern is Theron, who just looks sort of average, which is pretty sad compared to all those strapping Spartans.
Ephialtes, setting back the cause of disabled rights 2000 years.
Finally, the bad guys appear to be sexual deviants. The ephors have a thing about licking sexy semi-conscious priestesses. Xerxes is vaguely effeminate; he wears eye liner, eye shadow, eyebrow pencil, and has long gold-painted nails. He sports multiple piercings, and in one scene he touches Leonidas’ shoulders in a rather suggestive fashion, as if he’s trying to seduce the Spartan (but given how hot Butler is, I suppose that’s understandable).
Leonidas, you must tell me who does your hair!
This stands in contrast to Leonidas’ demonstrable heterosexuality. He is shown lying in bed after sex with his wife, he thinks of her body in another scene, and he derides the Athenians as “boy-lovers”. The other Spartans in his army don’t have any explicit sexuality (unless you count cavorting in jockstraps with 300 of their closest friends and neighbors), but the film makes no suggestion that they are anything other than straight men. Theron is also clearly heterosexual; he forces Gorgo to have sex with him. But the film suggests that he’s a sadist, since he points out to Gorgo that their tryst is going to take a while and will not be very pleasant for her (a comment she throws back at him later when she stabs him to death).
So in the world of 300, physically perfect, heterosexual white men are good; just about everyone else is bad. In this film, the Persians function as the opposite of the Greeks, like a distorted mirror. Everything that is good about the Spartans and their society is absent from the Persians. The Spartans are associated with freedom and individuality, while the Persians are associated with submission, slavery, and loss of individual identity; Persian characters are either dominating (like Xerxes and some of this commanders), or servile (like his harem and most of the soldiers). White people are seen as the embodiment of liberty (although it’s mostly a liberty to do as they’re told, since they all implicitly trust Leonidas), while non-whites are presented as enemies of liberty and the embodiment of absolute monarchy.
And, since the Spartans are the characters the audience is intended to identify with, this says something about the audience’s presumed cultural values. It’s assumed that the fanboys, fratboys, and military types who will want to go see this film will find non-whites, homosexuals, and the handicapped to be acceptable bad guys. In this, Snyder is largely following Frank Miller’s graphic novel; Miller has occasionally been accused of having fascist leanings, and I think Snyder’s version of 300 channels that in significant ways.
The film celebrates whites and villainizes non-whites. It celebrates perfect physical bodies and demonizes imperfect bodies. It celebrates heterosexuality and denigrates sexual deviancy. It celebrates social unity and obedience to the leader, even when his choices are suicidal. The enemy is a nameless, faceless, submissive and yet predatory Negro and Semitic Other led by a totalitarian leader. The enemy threatens from without and corrupts from within (by bribing Theron to betray Leonidas). The quasi-democratic deliberative element in Spartan society (the council of elders) is shown to be ineffectual and worthless. All that’s missing from this film is a lot of Nazi swastikas on Spartan armbands.
That’s right. The Spartans in this film are ancient Nazis. And they’re the good guys.
In a previous post, I argued that historical accuracy in film matters because film shapes our understanding of the world we live in, where we come from, and who we are. If we accept 300’s claim that whiteness is, and always has been, good, that it has always been indelibly linked to freedom, and that it is also harnessed to physical perfection and heterosexuality, we are teaching ourselves that American society can only have room for white people, heterosexuals, and those with ideal bodies. 300’s skewed depiction of the past is, in many ways, appalling un-American, and deeply offensive to those of us who aren’t white, heterosexual, and physically ideal. 300‘s other historical errors make it a bad movie; but on this score, I’m inclined to see it as actually dangerous. It celebrates a sort of crypto-fascism that really isn’t even that crypto.
One might object that Snyder was simply being faithful to his source material. But it’s important to realize that everything that goes onto a movie screen is the result of conscious choices made at various steps in the film-making process. Snyder and his crew had ample opportunities to step away from the ugliness in Miller’s graphic novel, and instead he chose to embrace it and magnify its reach. He could have chosen actors who more closely resemble the historical Greeks. He could have chosen to explore the extent to which many Greeks and Persians look quite similar. He could have depicted Xerxes as looking like a normal human man with conventional sexual tastes. None of these would have required any real divergence with the plot of Miller’s graphic novel. Instead, Snyder chose to follow Miller’s lead. But as the world learned at Nuremberg, “I was just following orders” isn’t a legitimate defense.
Want to Know More?
300
Correction: In a previous version of this post, I mis-spelled Lena Headey’s last name. I regret the error.
An Historian Goes to the Movies 
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Or you could do what Ron Howard and Ian McKellan did when Christians objected to “The Da Vinci Code” – Brush it off with “It’s just a movie.”
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There’s no such thing as ‘just a movie’. Movies and tv shows have a strong shaping influence on how viewers understand the world. Movies send messages about what’s good and bad, what’s acceptable or unacceptable behavior, and what the past was like. There’s a fair amount of evidence that movies and tv shows have a formal impact on how people think about things.
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I’m not a Christian and I had major problems with The Da Vinci Code including but no limited to it’s obvious anti-Catholicism.
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You are actually quite wrong about the Spartans. While Ancient Greeks were a mix of Indo-European and autochthonous (and darker) people, Spartans were among the purest Dorians, who were pretty Nordic in appearance. So, Spartans were in fact mostly fair-haired, while Athenians were more like modern Greeks.
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I have periodically seen claims to this effect, but I have yet to see any scholarly support for this idea. Given the strong racial (and racist) implications these claims have, I am skeptical. But if you want to point me toward some scholarship on the issue, I’ll be glad to look at it if I can find the time.
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“Generations of invaders, particularly the under the Ottomans has altered the genetic make-up of modern Greeks. I have seen some literature, however, that claims the inhabitants of the Mani peninsula are the closest descendents of the ancient Spartans. I remember sitting at an outside fish taverna in Gytheon when a fishing boat put in and started off-loading its catch. The young fishermen were fair — not Nordic white-blond, but certainly not dark — and their features could easily have graced an ancient statue of Apollo. SO I’d say there is something to that thesis.” Helena P. Schrader
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300 is a movie based on a comic book, or graphic novel, and as a mythological exaggeration it is odd to criticize it for accuracy. But if it were to be criticized for accuracy, I would mention the nudity of the Persians. Present day Iranians are shocked when they see, for example, an Indian mendicant holy man in only a loincloth. I used to think this was a Muslim thing, but then I came across several ancient sources, including Herodotus, indicating that they hated nudity even back then, they veiled their women, had harems, etc. Persians would never be caught dead dressing as they do in this movie. I think Muslims got their dislike of skin from the Persians, not the other way around.
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Your point about Persians and nudity is a very good one. Xerxes ought to be wearing a chador.
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Thanks for another informative post.
There was one sentence, however, that threw me somewhat. When you wrote: “… we are teaching ourselves that American society can only have room for white people, heterosexuals, and those with ideal bodies. 300’s skewed depiction of the past is, in many ways, appalling un-American, and deeply offensive to those of us who aren’t white, heterosexual, and physically ideal.” Could you clarify your statement of this only affecting American society? No doubt I missed something in your explanation, but as a non-American, I’m confused as to the reference. I suddenly got a peculiar feeling that this blog was actually not meant for me, which made me uncomfortable. This seems so contrary to your attitude in all other posts that I had to ask – I hope you understand.
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My apologies for making you feel excluded–certainly not my intention.
When I write my blog posts, I do tend to view things through an American lens for a couple of reasons. 1) The majority of my hits are from the US, by an enormous percentage. So the average reader of my blog is actually American. The fact that I’m writing in English might contribute to that. 2) The Hollywood industry is American, although in recent years it’s started paying more attention to foreign markets. And I think that Hollywood’s approach to the past is a very American one–that the distant past is essentially a fantasy world where you do anything you want and pretend it’s ‘inspired by actual events’. 300 is particularly egregious this way. I think that if the film had been made by, say, a British company, it would have turned out a different way. And because of this, I think Americans are more prone than other cultures to the effects of films that distort the past. 3) Frank Miller and Zach Snyder are both Americans working within the American story-telling idiom, and when I first saw the movie, I was struck by how deeply American its story was–profoundly black-and-white, profoundly hostile to non-whites, obsessed with physical perfection, filled with coded anti-Muslim sentiment, obsessed with a bizarre communal version of heroic individualism. So moreso than most Hollywood films, this one is really aimed at an American audience, trying to offer a message specifically to Americans. 4) When I write these posts, I think I sort of picture myself discussing the film in front of my students, who are mostly Americans. And I know some of my students read the blog. 5) Finally, I have to write from the American perspective, because as an American, it’s what I know. I have a much better sense of how Americans will view a film than say, Australians or Japanese, simply because I’m American and I understand my own culture better than anyone else’s culture.
But, having said all that, I certainly don’t want to discourage non-Americans from reading my blog. My non-American readers occasionally offer comments and insights that my American readers are unlikely to have. So I enjoy having conversations with non-Americans like you. I think most of my analysis will make as much sense to non-Americans as to Americans, so I hope you can forgive me the occasional moments that I speak directly to Americans.
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Thank you for taking the the time to reply.
I liked the idea of you seeing yourself lecturing your students when you write, it gives a professor vibe instead of a ‘blogger’. Numbers two and three certainly helped me understand from where you were coming, and not to worry – I’m not about to be put off by one moment, not when I have the challenge of adding a useful comment or insight from my British perspective!
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In an article about being offended by everything, you managed to pinpoint one tiny other thing to get offended about! Are straight white Americans no longer allowed to make films? Does every single story now have to be rewritten to include Africans and homosexuals, (but apparently not Asian or Native American)? The fact that it’s mostly gays and blacks getting offended by everything tells you who has the strongest lobbying power. It’s not about inclusion. It’s about a couple of entitled groups throwing tantrums when they aren’t included. Other groups are allowed to tell their stories without including you.
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You’re making a Straw Man argument—I have not claimed that straight white men aren’t allowed to make films. What I have said is that straight white guys making films where everyone who isn’t straight, white, or physically perfect is a bad guy is offensive to people who aren’t straight, white, or physically perfect. Which is just the truth. I’m not throwing a tantrum—you are, by blatantly misrepresenting my argument and then trying to demonize gays and blacks.
No one is taking this movie away from you. You get to watch this movie and enjoy it if you want to. And I get watch this movie and criticize it. Just as you get to react to it as you do, I get to react to it as I do. You don’t get to tell me that I don’t find the movie offensive. If it makes you uncomfortable to hear that someone who is different from you reacts to it differently than you do, perhaps you need to think about why you’re scared to hear that.
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300 is an adaptation of a graphic novel that is obvious historical fantasy. That much should be clear to anyone. The Spartana are not portrayed as being a bunch of swell guys here, either. The audience is inclined to root for them, because the story is told from their perspective, but we are given plenty of reasons to find the Spartans to be a distasteful culture by modern standards. They were, however, portrayed to be great warriors who made a valiant stand against a much larger invading army. You can mix and match the colors of the people’s skin, the setting, or the armies involved, because this is just archetypal, standard, epic battle shit here. Any story of this type is going to end up biased by necessity, or the story is going to lack focus, and will not engage as much of the audience.
It fit the style of this pulpy and ultra violent historical fantasy to provide a contrast between the two armies. The Spartans are generally understood to have been white. There may be some debate as to how white, but that is just splitting hairs when you are talking about historical fantasy. So working from there, stylistically, it makes sense to portray the Persian army as being more exotic. It is just bad faith to presume that everyone involved with the making of the graphic novel, and this film, were consciously trying to depict some sort of race war. No, that much is likely just what you and your depraved ilk choose to read in to it, I’m sure.
One more thing. What in the fuck does sexual orientation have to do with anything in 300? You fucks are always going on about “straight white men”. Where,in this story is sexual orientation ever referenced? What is so fundamentally straight and white bout it, exactly? Are homosexuals victimized or slighted by this film somehow? What did I miss? Should a few of the Spartans have sported lisps and limp wrists or something? Should a few have been trans? Enlightened me please.
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Where is sexual orientation referenced? When Leonora’s disparages the Athens as homosexuals. Also, when he talks about the Spartans wanting to be at home with their wives. Also, when Leonidas has sex with Gorgo. Also when he thinks about her body as he’s dying. Also, when the oracle’s semi-naked body is shown writhing on the ground.
The film drips with heterosexuality.
“The Spartans are generally understood to have been white.” Not at the time they weren’t—the very concept of whiteness wouldn’t be invented for about 2000 years. And given that Persians are Caucasians, depicting them as looking dramatically different from the Spartans is problematic.
And no, the film shouldn’t have resorted to offensive cliches about homosexuals like the ones you resorted to. It should have depicted homosexuality as one of the foundational cultural practices of Greek society, because it was, far more so than romantic love between husband and wife, for which there is not much evidence in Ancient Greece.
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‘White people are seen as the embodiment of liberty, while non-whites are presented as enemies of liberty and the embodiment of absolute monarchy’
Sorry to break this to you but there is a large element of truth embodied in this depiction. It’s no consequence that white societies have historically been the global leaders in embracing the ideals of liberty, democracy and respect for human rights. Does the truth matter? Or should we grey-wash the achievements of all civilizations and peoples until we can’t tell them apart for fear of offending someone?
Victor Davis Hanson wrote an excellent book ‘Carnage and culture’ that goes into great depth on how the individualism and equality of the Greeks was instrumental in their victory over the numerically superior but despotic Persians.
As Victor shows, the Greeks were mostly citizen soldiers with a strong personal investment in winning while the Persians were an army of slaves (relative to the Greeks), who had little motivation other than to avoid the ire of their elitist masters.
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I hate to break it to you, but the ancient Greeks weren’t ‘white’. The idea that they were is pretty much a product of 19th century ideas about race and nationalism.
Also, the cinematic Sparta is remarkably poorly positioned in the film to serve as champions of liberty. The film’s version of ‘freedom’ is unwavering obedience to a king who gets all his men killed for literally no reason (given that the film mangles the military details so badly as to make it incoherent). That’s not democracy–that’s fascism. The Persians were in many respects closer to modern society than 5th century Sparta was.
Also, keep in mind that Greek democracy was a sterile dead-end that did not lead to the establishment of modern representative democracy. That honor goes to 13th century England.
The Persian army was most definitely not an army of slaves. In fact, the Persian army employed a lot of Greek citizen-soldiers.
So you’re conflating a whole bunch of things in an effort to argue that white guys are somehow just morally better than everyone else.
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The Persian army contained not just Greeks, but Spartans. One of Xerxes’s advisers with the army had been the former Spartan king Demaratus, who had been deposed by his fellow king and fled to Persia. That, of course, is left out of the film, but then really, so is any political context. It shows the Persians demanding Spartan submission (Herodius’s “earth and water”), but nothing about why the Persians are there.
The sad fact is that ” ideals of liberty, democracy and respect for human rights” as we in the modern world understand it were largely nonexistent in most of the ancient world. They certainly didn’t exist in Sparta, which was run by a hereditary dual monarchy supported by an oligarchy of landholding elites whose farms were worked by slaves who didn’t have any civil rights at all.
They didn’t really exist in Persia either, to be honest, but at least in Persia’s case, there’s not really much evidence of slavery, and Persian tributary states were usually allowed a lot of cultural, religious, and internal autonomy, so hooray there, I guess..
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I laughed very hard after reading this. 300 never tried to be a series meant to be taken seriously. You would have to be an anti critical moron to take a movie like 300, a film that features a literal Persian god king, a baphoment demon, and various fantasy beasts with any level of seriousness, let alone using it as a method of informing yourself of history. I felt like I was reading an article by some late 70s American evangelical moralist. The movie is just silliness and spectacle and nothing more, any moral reading into it makes you hard to take straight faced. You might as well be writing video essays about the symbolism and themes of Godzilla Final Wars.
Also, the casting is fine. Greeks being brown turks is a modern Nordicist stereotype since the Ottomans ruled us. By modern standards Spartans were “white” (I am Pontic myself), but you can’t retroactively slap that label onto something that depicts Europeans in a time set centuries before such a concept existed. You are falling prey to the “anyone outside of Scandinavia isn’t white” shit that divide and conquer threads started by ethnocentrists on 4chan unironically believe without having traveled to Greece. Gerard Butler isn’t exactly a blonde snow white Nordic viking. Vast majority of people who are brown here are turkish migrants. Brown =/= olive btw like so many people seem to think, it just means not being pink like a pig.
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As I’ve said many times before, there’s no such thing as “just a movie”. The fact that a movie may not consciously intend to shape its audience’s views doesn’t mean that the movie doesn’t do that. It just means that people who think “it’s just a movie” (such as you) are particularly easy for the movie to influence. Hollywood (and Madison Ave) long ago learned that the way to influence people’s tastes was to make them think that they weren’t being influenced.
And given the consistently fascist elements of Frank Miller’s work, it’s pretty clear that Miller did have points he wanted his audience to accept.
And I’m well aware that whiteness is a modern concept. I’ve mentioned that in a number of my reviews. And that’s part of the problem with the film–it draws a rigid distinction between its white Greeks and its non-white Persians when in fact ancient people wouldn’t have made such a rigid distinction. But modern viewers do, so it matters an enormous amount that the white guys are the good guys and the non-whites are the bad guys.
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Some people really like looking at beautiful, straight, white guys. It’s not a crime, If it makes you feel insecure, you have some inner work to do.
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As a gay white guy, I have no trouble looking at beautiful white guys—it’s something of a hobby of mine. The problem comes when you demonize anyone who’s NOT perfect white guy, which is what this film does. The mom-white, imperfect Others are all villains, implying that being non-white or no beautiful are inherent evil qualities.
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You are overreacting and trying too hard to appear woke. It’s a super cool movie. Let Xerxes fight his own battles. Stop playing the victim. If this triggered you so hard, you would never be able to handle being a woman. You wouldn’t be able to watch most movies, TV shows, or read most books. And you’d definitely have to stay off the internet. Drop the victim story. It will only make people annoyed at you.
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I’ll point out that misrepresenting my argument, accusing me of claiming victimhood (which I haven’t), asserting that I am ‘triggered’, and claiming they I am unable to handle the pressures of society if I weren’t make suggest that you are the one over-reacting. You seem to be highly emotional here, as if my post were a personal attack on you instead of a calm, reasoned analysis of a film.
You say ‘let Xerxes fight his own battles’. I could just as easily tell you to let Frank Miller and Zach Snyder fight their own battles.
So what do you see as being at stake here? Why does my analysis seem so
threatening to you?
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Well that hit a nerve! And, that’s exactly the defensive way you respond when you get triggered. As I said, a lot of inner work is needed…
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Sorry, but you’re way off base if you think I’m having an emotional reaction to something a stranger on the internet says about my writing. As a professional academic, I get far harsher critiques than this every time I present my research at conferences, and that’s stuff that actually matters to me. If I can dispassionately handle that, I can shrug this off pretty casually.
So I’ll ask you again, what’s at stake for you here? Why does my analysis matter to you at all. I’m just a guy on the internet who’s never met you. So why should my reading of this film make enough difference to you that you’ve responded repeatedly (and somewhat emotionally)?
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Oh god this is an old thread but I appreciate the response.
You are only as easy to influence as you let yourself be. You are using the soccer mom argument of you are what you watch. Which might be true if you’re dumb and easy to manipulate like a puppet. I don’t think people who make rule of cool action films are two dimensional villains who rub their hands and wish to see people become fascists for no reason. In the same way actual fringe thinkers believe that _very same_ Hollywood you say is lead by white supremacists is actually led by Jewish Zionists to push anti white propaganda and lead to white genocide. Yes hollywood is led by many Jews and yes it pushes a progressive line often pretty blatantly, but even when its pushing a blatant propagandistic message, its not for some overly simplistic cartoon caricature goal. They don’t care about you or me, they care about their box office revenue. You also need to ask yourself when YOU are the one projecting a message because its something definitely not uncommon, because maybe you yourself are easily manipulated into believing certain things so out of paranoia you try and find it whenever you can to avoid it.
And onto race, the fact the persians aren’t white and we greeks are, as you’d call it, is as I said retroactively judging history. The fact of the matter is that we Greeks and Persians are disparate populations with unique phenotypes and genomes, that is the only thing you can say about our genes. The fact _some_ people (like yourself) would see it as whites vs darkies is their mentality and a pure projection onto the event that will change over time too, just like it always has. that is what you must realize. and mentalities come and go with generations, what becomes new is now fringe and so on. Its not the directors fault our peoples look a certain way more often than not. he simply did not consciously care about our races when casting, he just chose what actors fit best as their roles in Greek and Persian shoes. This is further evidenced by most persian infantry having their faces covered in the first place, so if he wanted to drive something home about race he failed considering I could never see 95% of persian faces anyways . And yes the Persians had sub saharan slaves and some Persians have very minor SSA admixture as a result. The only reason our races would matter in any way is for believability and stuff like genetics research. Otherwise all meaningless philosophical.
Basically if you do not actively care what people’s genetic composition is, then you wouldn’t try to extrapolate any arbitrary meaning from it. THAT is what you promote because its truth. Biology has whatever meaning you want it to because it has none inherently. And trying to retroactively extrapolate meaning from the genetics of two warring groups is something that can be done by anyone in any time, it just makes them stupid and doesn’t change the event itself. So promote all of what is true without falsification, like no a philosophical meaning to genes and their only importance is genetic research, and debunk stupidity in all forms and time periods.
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“You are only as easy to influence as you let yourself be. You are using the soccer mom argument of you are what you watch.”
I would phrase it as “you’re only as easy to influence as your willingness to analyze allows.” A population that is trained to not analyze is incredibly easy to manipulate, as fascists have repeatedly demonstrated. Indeed, Hitler’s discussion of propaganda in Mein Kampf is specifically rooted in that assumption.
I definitely don’t assume that we are automatically the media we consume–if I did, there would be little point to this blog. I’m trying to model a thoughtful analysis of film primarily from an historian’s perspective, which means that I go far beyond the “are the facts accurate?” model and dig into things like culture, gender, and so on.
I don’t think that Hollywood is overrun by fascists. I don’t even think that Miller and Snyder are consciously fascists themselves. But I do think that their work has strong fascist themes–it’s a pattern that turns up in many of Miller’s graphic novels, and in at least two of Snyder’s films.
“Basically if you do not actively care what people’s genetic composition is, then you wouldn’t try to extrapolate any arbitrary meaning from it” Forgive me, but that’s a rather naive understanding of how these work. One does not have to have a conscious intention to express a particular idea in order for one’s work to be supportive of that idea. To switch gears for the sake of example, I doubt that any toymakers have actively racist motives, and yet studies have repeatedly demonstrated that toys profoundly shape children’s views of race–the absence of black dolls had a powerful impact on both black and white girls, who tended to absorb the idea that white was beautiful and black was ugly, to the point that young black girls had a strong preference for white dolls and would declare black dolls ugly. If you’ve ever run across discussions of systemic racism, this is what is meant by that–no individual has a conscious racist intention but the system of toy production still produced deeply racist results.
Stepping back to 300, we can see the same dynamic here. A film in which all the good guys are white, heterosexual, and physically perfect will tend to encourage viewers to assume that white hetero males with ideal bodies are simply inherently superior to everyone else even on a moral level and should therefore be given whatever they want–women, power, wealth, etc. Combine that with a message that ‘freedom’ means ‘following a bad leader to your death’ and you are getting extremely close to HItler’s literal message to Germans.
So did someone sit down and consciously decide to make a film that actively resonates with fascist ideals? No, of course not. As you say, Hollywood follows the money. And yet, no one seems to have pointed out that the film offers only non-whites as bad guys, only only bad guys as physically imperfect, and only bad guys as homosexuals (this last one even though the film was about perhaps the most homophile culture in human history). It is the product of a film-making system that actively if unconsciously promotes the interests of white men above everyone else. The bro-fans demand ‘realism’ on the point that men are stronger than woman and therefore ought to be the main action heroes, but then ignores realism when it comes to allowing rather ugly 50 and 60 year old men to be in romantic relationships with hot 20-something women. It’s a product of a system that has struggled to depict homosexuals as worthy of love and affect (although that’s changed considerably in the past decade, we still don’t see male action heroes actively depicted as gay or bisexual, Deadpool being an active example of this failure despite his pansexuality being a long-established feature of his character). It’s the product of a system that has rarely if ever allowed actors with any form of disability to be leading performs (consider Marlee Matlin’s career as an example– an Oscar winner who’s never been offered the lead in another major film, so far as I can tell). No one actively intends for films to be sexist, homophobic, and anti-disability, and yet the system continues to produces results that are demonstrably that way.
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Well, Basil, you kind of made my point that the author is a white guy trying too hard to appear woke. It was TL but I DR 😉
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@aelarsen “white hetero males with ideal bodies are simply inherently superior to everyone else even on a moral level and should therefore be given whatever they want–women, power, wealth, etc.” is sounding very INCEL. I would disagree with you that “No one actively intends for films to be sexist.” I think men have very much created films that are intentionally sexist, while at the same time intentionally inclusive of black people since the 60’s and intentionally sexist yet intentionally inclusive of gays since the 90’s. These are the double standards of the male dominated left that turns so many people off (and perhaps in part led to recent political backlash…). The left leaning movie industry bends over backwards to prove it’s inclusivity where (black) race and homosexuality are concerned yet flagrantly continues to create a hostile environment for women and girls (though lately, less so if the females are gay or black or, only occasionally, other races.) Re: your point about the history of depicting gross, old geezers coupled with beautiful young women that women have had to endure for decades, along with plastic surgeried Barbie dolls as the female leads-and the Barbies have come in various colors-I know for a fact that a lot of women were very happy with the casting of 300! Women so rarely get to enjoy male pulchritude in the same vividly provocative way that women’s bodies have been so exploitatively used in all media. You asked why my earlier comments were so “emotional”, and I kind of ignored that because I didn’t feel really emotional about this thread. (I believe you were projecting.) I think what I did feel was that you were claiming racism and homophobia in a film that has little of either if any, and my spidey senses said, “Why this film?” It seemed odd and quite a stretch. (And, also, just general annoyance at the foot stomping about race and homophobia when misogyny and rape culture is much more prevalent and gays and some minorities actually often enjoy favored treatment as opposed to discrimination) I wonder if your real issues with the film are being cloaked under popular wokeness, when what you are really disturbed about is the depiction of so many spectacular male bodies-no plastic surgery there!-and like so many males who had no problem with women’s bouncing body parts bandied garishly across the screen, who then suddenly become quite prudish and offended when breathtaking male bodies are put on titillating display. It will take a LOT more films like this one to make up for all the “naked women with fully clothed men” films that women have suffered through. Now, I see you are stretching your earlier complaint to describe this film as fascist, yet the heroes are rugged individualists who stand outside Greek society and are crushed by the invading, greedily acquisitive Persians. You are clearly aggrievedly butthurt about this film. I wonder if a gym membership might be in order, or just relax and let the women (and men) enjoy the view.
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Siggy, I’ve given you repeated opportunities to actually discuss the film instead of making insulting ad hominem attacks on me. Since you don’t seem to want to do that, I’m not going to bother responding to you any further. If you make another ad hominem, I’ll block you.
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I loved this movie and I only watched it because, I love muscled fit good looking men! I really liked to to dude fooling around and they were “HOT!” You, got I’m gay and proud of it! God, decides what we all should be in our mother’s womb. It is what it is!
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I loved this movie and I only watched it because, I love muscled fit good looking men! I really liked the two dudes fooling around and they were “HOT!” You, got it, I’m gay and proud of it! God, decides what we all should be in our mother’s womb. It is what it is!
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OMG I can’t beleive how crazy and over reaching the analysis of this movie is. Yes its just a movie, and its a fun movie and not meant to be historically accurate or uber sensitive. And BTW it was based off a comic book lol. Oh my gosh… we need to change Batman now because he’s doing the wrong thing now and not being sensitive enough to the Joker. What about sensitivity to the artists? By going around bashing movies you take away from the credit due the artists’ who worked super hard and created this historically inaccurate film. Everyone already knows this movie is not supposed to be an historical ode to ancient Greek and Persian culture. Its Batman vs. Joker and this time the Joker wins. You are writing from 2014 about a 2007 movie based on a 1998 comic about something that happened thousands of years ago and you are getting offended about it. Racist this and fascist that and homos and heteros and every buzz word you can think of. Wow… Man why don’t you go make a better version of this movie and then come back and analyze and criticize your own work and then we’ll see your true perspective. In the mean time if you want to see the movie again just ask me to take off my shirt lol.
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The fact that you’re so outraged over my analysis means that you know this isn’t ‘just a movie’—if it was, you wouldn’t care. So stop pretending and admit that the analysis scares you because you see that there’s more going on in the film than you thought.
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