300 and the Poetics of Terrorism

Sparta!

Perhaps the most apt critique of Zach Snyder’s 300, apt anyway for the blogsophere, would be to list 300 problems with the film. However, given the option of reading (or writing) 300 separate complaints or reading (or writing) politically trenchant criticism, I think we can all agree that the criticism is the less painful of the two options. That being said, at this point any critique of 300 comes rather late in the game. I think most people are aware of the problematic political implications of the film so I will try to make this brief or as brief as possible. What can I say? I live the graduate student life and contrary to popular expectations this life does not include champagne wishes and caviar dreams; it does however include trips to the dollar theater where films like 300 are still being showed and are still quite well attended.

Before, I discuss what I would call the films “poetics of terrorism,” I would like for a split second to discuss the films incredibly problematic gender politics. The film manages to seem entirely homoerotic and homophobic, and here I mean phobic in its most literal sense, at the same time. Triumph of the Will move aside, there’s a new contender in town. While the film delights in the eroticism of masculine muscularity, it shows that the scariest thing that can happen is for one to “worship the divinity” of a queer giant black man (Xerxes of Persia) or that one could be a “philosopher and boy lover” like those Greeks in Athens. However, overriding these queer concerns is how the film deals with its central woman character, Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey). To say that Frank Miller has had a problem hoeing the P.C. line when it comes to feminism would be more than an understatement. Indeed, Miller seems to go out of his way to present seemingly one dimensional female characters. For instance, in Richard Rodriguez’s adaptation of his Sin City, all the female characters are either strippers, prostitutes, naked, dead, or some combination of these things. In fact, the female characters that we are most supposed to sympathize with and admire are Basin City’s prostitutes, who manage to maintain their independence from the corrupt police and city officials by skillfully parlaying their wares and by being ninjas. What Miller tends to admire in his female characters is a mixture of strength and submission.

It comes as no surprise then that a similar articulation of womanhood is to be found in 300's Queen Gorgo as well. While her husband, King Leonidas (Gerald Butler) is off fighting the Persians, Gorgo attempts to persuade the Spartan city council to send him reinforcements. Unfortunately, this means trafficking with Theron (Dominic West) who is resisting helping his King, not because of his stated love of constitutionalism, but because he is in league with the Persian Empire. Theron tells his queen that he will change his vote if she will go to bed with him. Gorgo does so, justifying her decision because of her love of her husband and Sparta, and because as she puts it, “Freedom is not free.” Given the phrase, the parallels to the contemporary political situation should be fairly obvious. Ultimately, Gorgo’s prostitution proves to be a miscalculation as Theron betrays her in front of the council by telling them about their tryst and by insinuating that Gorgo has been unfaithful many times before in order to secure political power. Not willing to stand for this level of disloyalty to both herself and her country, Gorgo grabs a nearby sword (these are always around when you need them in the military state of Sparta) and runs it through Theron. As he dies, Persian gold falls from his purse, revealing his treachery. While Gorgo is righted, the principle that motivates her tryst with Theron is not refuted. Although she did not calculate for Theron’s true political loyalties, she did the right thing. She put love and country before her personal autonomy. She proves to be a good woman, and better yet a good citizen because she proves that she has the strength to be subservient and ultimately because she has the strength to kill Theron when his manipulation of democracy goes to far. Freedom is not free, after all.

Now if at this point you find yourself rolling your eyes because of the overbearing and ridiculous nature of the slogan “freedom is not free” than the film is not for you; it is a film that is purposely overbearing and it this type of overbearing-ness that enables the film to produce my so-called “poetics of terrorism.” The overbearing nature of the film can be perhaps be most centrally located in the fact that its narrator, Dilios, the Spartan warrior-rhetorician (David Wenham), has to tell you everything that is going on on the screen and just exactly how to interpret it. Indeed, the film’s narrative hand is so heavy that Dilios is forced to even tell the audience and his Greek listeners about events that he could not have witnessed. Regardless of the facts – and here the audience can question whether or not were watching the events as they happened or merely Dilios’s account of them – the story has to be kept if we’re going to fight those Persians.

What ultimately reinforces the poetics of terrorism is the film’s centerpiece, Leonidas’s resistance at the Battle of Thermopylae. Unable to raise a proper army, Leonidas goes to the edges of Greece with his 300 best soldiers and the support of some fairly wimpy Athenians (chest hair aside). Outmatched by the Persian hordes of Asia (the film’s terms, not mine), Leonidas devises a scheme wherein he will funnel the Persian forces into a narrow area between two cliffs and the sea. The superiority of the Persian army’s numbers will therefore be nullified and Leonidas’s 300 will be capable of repelling the Persian forces with their superior intelligence and fighting ability. And thus the film proceeds to treat us with a visual ballet of graphic violence as the 300 repeals and defeats successive waves of Persian oddities: slaves, Persian giants, freaks with blades for arms, Middle Eastern ninjas (I wonder if they know the prostitutes from Sin City), CGI elephants, and a fairly monstrous rhinoceros. All of these waves prove to be ineffective in the face of all those Spartan muscles. Indeed, it seems all is lost for poor Xerxes until the Greeks are betrayed by the deformed and thus rejected Spartan, Ephialtes (Andrew Tiernan) who shows the Persians a way around the cliff in exchange for money and sex with Persian prostitutes (again, I wonder if they know the girls of Sin City).

Ideologically, in order to produce a poetics of terrorism, these waves of Persian threats have to be both literally fantastic and full of spectacle as they have to be inevitably undefeatable. They have to be terrifying, threatening, and only temporarily defeatable. While I’m not one to often enjoy allegorical criticism, it would seem to me that the constant barrage of threats coming from Persia correlates quite nicely to the waves of threats that we have come to long endure under the Bush Administration. These villains are neutralized or defeated much like those that have supposedly threatened the Brooklyn Bridge, Fort Dix, or most recently at JFK Airport. However, much like the Bush Administration has told us for the past six years, eventually the terrorists will succeed and we will have another 9/11 failure. The failure of Leonidas is in fact the true strength of the film for those who would like us to more actively engage the Islamofascist threat with direct military violence. His loss and gloriously documented crucifixion – complete with arrows to evoke St. Sebastian – justify what the film and all the film’s loyal Spartan characters have wanted all along: full on war with Persia. And so the film ends with Dilios beating the drums of war by retelling the film’s story just before the full assemblage of Greece’s troops defeat once and for all the menace of Persia. Freedom is not free. Sometimes it takes a crucifixion to get you to fight (a crucifiction perhaps?) and sometimes it takes a movie with a runtime of 117 minutes. Next time I might just as soon take the earlier than the latter.