Topher's Movie Review of 300

Ladies and Gentlemen,History has left the building
Topher - wrote on 08/13/07

300 masturbates with the blood of its own repressed homoeroticizism. Unwilling to face its desire for oiled-up, scantily clad male bodies, the film releases its sexual fury in an orgiastic cyclone of violence.

Forget about history when you watch 300: this film is about the American Perspective circa 2006. Like the US during the Bush Era, this film is saturated with the rhetoric of freedom, democracy and glory.

By the terms of this rhetoric, the only thing protecting democracy from hoards of Middle Eastern evil-doers is a small elite force of warriors. The Persian fighters are protrayed either as quasi-supernatural demons with monstrous features or as pathetic slaves under the whip of a cruel despot, who happens to be nine feet tall and speak with the voice of a god. The Spartan Men, on the other hand, despite their inferior numbers, gather all their strength from the nobility of their cause, their willful manliness, and, yes, all those years of superior training.

Of course, as with Fox News, we can get closer to the truth of things if we simply reverse the terms. Democracy, for these Spartans, happens to be a monarchy, and "freedom" is something to bellow about when your king orders you to die for your country. Historical Sparta was a slave-holding society, where the small fraction of the population that was "free" was actually a warrior-caste bound to the authority of the state. The Spartan system of indoctrination, glimpsed upon in 300, was the model for the Nazi Youth. But, as I've said, this film isn't about Sparta: it's about America.

And we've seen this imagery before -- in the Aryan Fantasies of 1930's Germany. By the analogical rhetoric of this film, the American Soldier stands in the same relation to the Spartan Hoplite as a Nazi Soldier to his legendary Aryan forefathers: the film-goer is admonished to remember a pseudo-historical event (the battle of 300) where his imaginary predecessors secured his present way of life (democracy) and is then urged to emulate their superhuman courage. In this way, the present day soldier (or young man) draws energy from the symbolic counterpart, conceiving of himself as part of an historical continuum, where past deeds are honored and history will be the judge.

It is not difficult to imagine why an American audience would find this imagery appealing in the Bush years, especially considering the omnipresent atmosphere of paranoia and fear which finds representation in the Persian Hoard. But the film can be explained neither by these terms nor by the terms of imperialism: the chief spectacle of 300, ultimately, is the male body.

Threatened by the Middle Eastern Menanace, 300 is a spectacle of superior manliness. The question of the film is Who's The Bigger Man -- the Middle Easterner or the Champion of Democracy? Everything about the warriors -- from the way they speak to the way they kill -- is meant to be worshipped. This is what a man is supposed to be like, the film suggests, as it displays nearly every sweaty inch of the male body contorting in all manners of physical efforts. Even the words "glory" "freedom" and "democracy" are used to connote a superior male.

The imagery suggests that the threat Bush America felt in the Twenty-Odds was not so much a threat to democracy as a threat to the masculine character of the United States. Of course, this masculine character is actually a worship of the male body which finds expression in Action Flicks and Governor Arnold -- a worship of the body which must be denied, because to the desire the male body is to be effeminate by this view point -- and is therefore repressed and channeled into violence.

It is no coincidence that the major politics of the Twenty-Odds concerned the War in Iraq and Gay Rights: the underlying question is the masculine identity