How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (19 page)

Because narcissistically deluded filmmakers are now as addled as starry-eyed fans, this new fictionalized
Alexander
isn't getting through to many people. I certainly doubt that it will inspire a young bookish boy somewhere to be a classicist, or a writer, or both.

—The New York Review of Books,
January 13, 2005

A
lthough the exact size and composition of the vast Persian horde that invaded mainland Greece in 480
B.C
. continues to be the subject of debate—Herodotus, eager to underscore his overarching theme of imperial hubris, puts the number of Persian land forces alone at nearly two million, although modern historians suggest it was likely to have numbered only a tenth as many, at the most—it is probably safe to say that the teeming Asiatic multitudes of the Persian emperor Xerxes did not include a corpulent, nose-pierced mutant humanoid with lobster-like claws in place of hands. Nor, as far as we know, did the barbarian host include bald giants, their teeth filed into points, who were kept in chains by their Persian masters until released, like antique weapons of mass destruction, on the unsuspecting Greeks; nor, at least as far as our ancient sources indicate, was Xerxes himself an androgynous, eight-foot-tall, shaved-headed Brazilian with a penchant for cheek piercings and a weakness for metallic eye shadow.

Such fanciful creatures are, however, likely to be indelibly associated henceforth with the Persian Wars in the minds of the millions of moviegoers around the world who have spent over $400 million to see
300
since its release in March. This hugely popular new movie, adapted
from the cartoonist Frank Miller's short 1999 comic book of the same name, takes as its Herodotean subject a historically pivotal and culturally loaded episode from the Persian Wars. In 480, as Xerxes'
grande armée
, having crossed from Asia over the Hellespont (which the grandiose monarch famously lashed for its recalcitrance), was inching its destructive way south through upper Greece, the ever-fractious coalition of Greek city-states, uneasily led by Athens and Sparta, decided to send a force to hold the enemy at a choke point in central Greece called Thermopylae—the “Hot Gates” beyond which lay easy access to the region of Attica, Athens, and the whole of Greece to the south. Not untypically, some of the perennially parochial Spartans had pressed to abandon the pass in favor of defending the Isthmus of Corinth much further to the south—a strategy that would have guaranteed the destruction of Athens while ensuring a more cogent defense of the Spartan homeland in the Peloponnese, below the Isthmus.

In August 480, the two armies met. Xerxes did nothing for three days, in order to let the comparatively puny coalition forces get a good look at the immense enemy they were to face; then he sent the first wave of troops in. (The Persian emperor had the canny idea of including in that first batch of warriors relatives of the Persians who'd been killed by the Greeks at Marathon, during the first Persian invasion ten years earlier.) The Greek forces, numbering around seven thousand, among them just three hundred Spartans under their king, Leonidas—the full Spartan army, numbering some eight thousand citizen-warriors, had declared itself unable to attend, since a religious festival was taking place back at home—held the pass with surprising success during two days of intense fighting.

But after the location of an alternate route around the pass was betrayed by a local man to the Persian command on the evening of the second day of battle, Leonidas realized that the Greek position was doomed and decided to make a suicidal last stand with his three hundred Spartans—and, it should be said, about two thousand others: four hundred Thebans, seven hundred Phocians from central Greece, and nine hundred Helots, the serfs on whose forced labor the Spartan economy depended. The time purchased by this small Hellenic force at the cost of their own lives made possible the retreat of the remaining Greek soldiers, and gave Athens more time to prepare for the great
naval battle at Salamis that would, the following year, decide the course of the war in favor of the Greeks.

 

The suicidal bravery of the tiny Spartan-led force against overwhelming odds has stood ever since as a model of military heroism—and, often, of the moral and political superiority of free Western societies over Eastern despotisms. In a 1962 film about Thermopylae called
The 300 Spartans
, which starred Richard Egan as Leonidas and Ralph Richardson as the crafty Athenian leader Themistocles, the Greco-Persian conflict became a convenient metaphor for the Cold War: in it, there's a lot of talk about how the Greek states are “the only stronghold of freedom remaining in the then known world,” while Xerxes dreams of “one world—one master,” and so forth.

Herodotus himself notably casts the Greco-Persian conflict as a battle between the forces of slavery (motifs of lashing and punishment are consistently associated with the Persians in his account) and those of liberty. But apart from a couple of shouted references to Greek “freedom,” neither Miller's comic book version of Thermopylae nor Zack Snyder's film version shows much serious interest in matters ideological. The primary emphasis of the book (which begins with the Spartans under Leonidas bravely marching off to Thermopylae and ends, more or less, with images of their arrow-pierced bodies) and also, to a large extent, of the film (which adds a bit of a subplot concerning Leonidas's queen, Gorgo—a decision made by the filmmakers, we're told, in order to enhance their product's appeal to women), is on the mechanics of the battle itself: the three successive days of intense fighting, followed by the culminating self-immolation.

Miller's book, which like many comic books revels in stylized tableaux of violence, captioned with inarticulate grunts (“AARR”), has a lurid, looming feel: much of the action—and there is little besides action—is strikingly conveyed in images that are, essentially, silhouettes. Snyder's film has its own eerily distinctive look. As with the comic book, the emphasis is on imaginatively realized images of violence. The director's wife and producing partner, Deborah Snyder, told an
Entertainment Weekly
reporter that she and her husband wanted to give the film's violence the stylized look of “a ballet of death”—a choreographi
cal task to which Snyder's previous Hollywood experience, as the director of a remake of the blood-spattered horror classic
Dawn of the Dead
, admirably suited him.

And yet—surprisingly for the filmmakers, we are told—it's the political implications of the Battle of Thermopylae that have caused trouble since the release of
300
. In particular the film's representation of the Persians as subhuman monstrosities has been seen as tapping into deep and unattractive cultural biases. (To say nothing of wreaking gleeful havoc with historical details. Not the least of the latter sins is the movie's suggestion that the only Greeks who stood up to the Persians were the macho Spartans: you occasionally glimpse a Phocian or two, but you'd never guess, from
300
, that there were brave Greeks other than Spartans present at this history-making engagement. The tag line that appears in the print ads for the movie is “See the Movie That Is Making History”: “making history up” would be more precise.) It's a measure of the international atmosphere at present that the cartoonish excesses of Snyder's film adaptation of Miller's comic book—the effete or monstrous Persian grotesques no less absurd, to be sure, than the hypertrophied bodybuilder types meant to represent the Greeks—have been taken with considerable seriousness in certain quarters. In Iran, where the film was immediately banned by the indignant government, an adviser to President Ahmadinejad called
300
“part of a comprehensive US psychological warfare aimed at Iranian culture”—a comment notable, perhaps, for its assumption of a coherence in U.S. war policy that is sadly unapparent to less fervent eyes.

In the United States, even more moderate spokesmen for Iranian interests have seen in the film's representation of the Persians symptoms of a cultural anxiety stemming, ultimately, from the September 11 attacks. Here is the judgment of Ahmad Sadri, a professor of Islamic world studies at Lake Forest College, in
Payvand
, an online journal of Iranian news and culture:

In a similar vein, a critic for
Slate
referred to the film as “a textbook example of how race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth can serve as an incitement to total war.”

To a certain extent, this is a tempting thesis. Railing against endless Asian hordes is, after all, a time-honored tradition in Western entertainment—one that goes back, as it happens, to the Greeks themselves. The stereotype of the decadent, despotic, effeminate, inscrutable, untrustworthy, servile, fawning, irrational, sexually ambiguous “Oriental” makes its first appearance in Greek literature, particularly in tragedy. The Eastern “barbarian”—whether in the person of the protagonist of
Medea
or of
Bacchae
's seductive Dionysus—often stands as the negative image of the idealized Greek self, which is presented as masculine, rational, and self-controlled. In this light, both Miller's comic book and Snyder's movie, with their scenes of hypermasculine posturing on the part of the well-muscled Spartans, and their consistent representation of the Persians as effete (and, strikingly, nonwhite—a portrayal that might have come as a surprise to the fair Persians), may be seen as quite faithful to a very old tradition indeed.

And yet it's hard to believe, as many of the film's critics do, that these cultural stereotypes, even coming at a tense moment in U.S. relations with the Middle East, are the reason for its enormous popularity. Among other things, the sheer hyperbole of the film's style—the monsters and freaks, the stilted, semaphoric visuals, the Tom of Finland physiques, the clanking, Cecil B. DeMille dialogue—militates against taking it too seriously; or, at any rate, against taking it more seriously than you'd take a comic book. I have seen
300
twice at enormous cineplexes, and I wasn't particularly aware of any anti-Asian sentiment roiling among the boisterous, hooting, applauding audiences at those showings. If anything, the audiences' expressions of derisive amusement, when presented with the images of Xerxes, for instance, seemed to suggest that people understood quite well that they were in the presence of an over-the-top, highly stylized representation that had little pretension to any kind of historical or even cultural verisimilitude. I somehow suspect that, despite the suspiciously burqa-like garb of some Persian sol
diers, few of the audience members found themselves inspired by the experience of watching
300
to change their feelings about Iranians or anyone else.

For this reason, it seems to me that indignant concerns about the film's covert politics or apparent cultural prejudices can be dismissed—just as we can dismiss the indignant repudiation of the film by some historians and classicists around the world who have denounced it on the grounds of historical inaccuracy. “We don't know that much about the Spartans,” one Australian film critic huffed, “but we have a fair idea of what they wore in battle, and it included leg and chest plates for protection.” In view of the presence of lobster-clawed mutants, it seems a bit beside the point to quibble over the precise details of Peloponnesian couture.

 

Far more worrying, to my mind, was what the tremendous popularity of the new movie suggested not about the current state of international politics, but about the current state of popular entertainment, and of cinematic art. It's true that for Frank Miller, the creator of
300
, the story he wants to tell is a deeply political and even moral one. “I've always loved this story,” he told an interviewer for an online film site:

As you flip through Miller's work, however, you wonder whether the key phrase in that impassioned statement isn't so much “do the right thing,” with its admirable ethics, as “damn the consequences,” with its macho swagger. Until the release of
300
Miller was famous primarily for
Sin City
, a series of self-consciously noir graphic novels which traces, among other things, the solitary and very bloody quest for justice by a hulking, overmuscled, much-scarred loner named Marv as he makes his way through a profoundly corrupt urban jungle called Sin City. Marv is given to cynical, Philip Marlowe-esque utterances that everywhere betray—with what degree of tongue-in-cheekness can only be guessed—a gleefully regressive indulgence in a vision of hard-bitten masculinity that, predictably, harks back to the dour heroes of the noir films of the 1940s.

This is evident not only in the stark and often strangely beautiful graphics, but in the dialogue that Miller gives his hero. Here's Marv as he tells a female friend about his thirst for vengeance against the mobsters who killed a prostitute he'd slept with: