Racism? This is Sparta!

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This Issue...

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Hollywood's 300 is 100% American.

By: Kent Haeger on April 20th, 2007 at 9:40 AM

300 is easily the manliest movie in recent memory. Lots of blood, decapitations, slow-mo, nudity, and of course some eminently quotable one-liners – what more could you want from a film? Thus, it makes perfect sense that a wide variety of interests would converge to decry the movie as ‘racist’, ‘ideologically oriented’, and even ‘homophobic’. Way to go, guys. What a bizarre planet we live on when world leaders find it necessary to make statements denouncing a movie based on a graphic novel.

For those of you who’ve been living under a rock on Mars, the film is loosely based on the ancient Battle of Thermopylae, when a small force of Spartan warriors held off a much larger Persian army in a narrow pass. Though 300 does take some creative liberties – I never knew the Persians bred sewer mutants, for example – several world-class historians have praised the movie as true to the source material of Herodotus, on which it is based. So if it’s a fun film that is at least somewhat faithful to history, what reason is there to attack it?

Politics. From the film’s opening day, Iranian interests decried it as a thinly-veiled allegory for the present-day standoff between America and the Middle East. Our wonderful and ideologically-neutral media, of course, seized upon the movie as yet another piece of neocon propaganda, designed to whip up the sheeplike populace into racist frenzy against anyone of Persian descent. Ah, clever bastards – you’ve foiled our schemes again. President Ahmadinejad of Iran himself denounced the movie as a clever American ploy to spark tension with Iran. Careful now, Mr. President. Don’t be too much of a drama queen, or you’ll end up looking like Xerxes. Hmm, maybe history does repeat itself.

Even further off the deep end are the accusations that the movie is prejudiced against homosexuals or cripples. It’s true that the androgynous King Xerxes of the Persians stands in constant to the manliest of men, King Leonidas of the Spartans, and that all of the deformed characters are on the Persian side, but that is less an indication of bias than a brilliant depiction of the subjective nature of battlefield tales. To a soldier recalling the most terrible battle of his life (the film is narrated by the warrior Dilios), a particularly mighty soldier may very well be remembered as a monster, and the enemy king be shown as the opposite of everything the Spartans stand for – including masculinity. The director himself said that he was trying to achieve a ‘surreal’ effect with 300, and the deformed Persian troops and their bizarre king work well towards this aim. It’s just “missing the point,” in his words, to ascribe any particular bias or ideology to a product designed purely to entertain.

How unfortunate that our society has become so sensitive that men cannot be men without squeamish girly-men igniting a firestorm of criticism over imagined racist sentiments. 300, regardless of all the whining, is an awesome experience for the inner Spartan in all of us. More than that, it’s a genuinely artistic interpretation of an historical event. If you haven’t done so already, I urge you to go see it before it leaves theaters. Just try to resist the urge to smack up a Persian or two. Because, you know, we’re a nation of racist pigs.

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