Outside Context

Not since ancient times has a movie so polar­ized crit­ical opinion.

Is the movie racist? Was it boo’ed in Ger­many? Did the Lon­don Metro really give it 1 star?

It seems that the Spartans con­tinue to con­found today’s com­ment­at­ors as much as they did their con­tem­por­ary Greek states. I saw the movie last night in a packed cinema along with my brother and here I am going to review the film, script and the per­son­al­ity of the Spartans. Because never have I read more stu­pid and ill informed reviews than those of this film.

Style is some­thing that cine­mat­ic­ally speak­ing is like mar­mite; you either love it or hate it.

Styl­ish laiden movies have spawned entire themes of film mak­ing. Move­ments that we today totally take for gran­ted and there­fore totally for­get the risks these films were tak­ing at the time. Film noir is one such style. The Film Noir style is, these days, only shown as a cari­ca­ture of itself. A piss take. Older film noirs like The Third Man, Maltese Fal­con and such like are now lauded as clas­sics of a lost genre. A styl­istic phase that is now out of fash­ion and no longer valid as a future medium. In effect judged as too styl­ish. But then film is like fash­ion in more ways than one; they both come back around again. Con­sider that the sword and sandaled genre was deader than dead and then con­sider that it came back with a bang. Super hero comic adapt­a­tions, WW2 movies, mon­ster flicks, etc.

It is a new ver­sion of the noir.

Film noir is a cine­matic term used primar­ily to describe styl­ish Hol­ly­wood crime dra­mas, par­tic­u­larly those that emphas­ize moral ambi­gu­ity and sexual motiv­a­tion. Hollywood’s clas­sic film noir period is gen­er­ally regarded as stretch­ing from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. Film noir of this era is asso­ci­ated with a low-key black-and-white visual style that has roots in Ger­man Expres­sion­ist cine­ma­to­graphy, while many of the pro­to­typ­ical stor­ies and much of the atti­tude of clas­sic noir derive from the hard­boiled school of crime fic­tion that emerged in the United States dur­ing the Depres­sion.

Film noir, after it dropped out of fash­ion last rota­tion, went to the comics. Where the large shades of black lend them­selves well to the comic struc­ture of heavy print, short prose and lar­ger than life action. The comic has embraced this genre because of the dark under­belly it presents.  The nar­ra­tion fits the simplistic depic­tion of good and evil and the abil­ity to amp up characters.

Frank Miller is con­sidered the one of the most pop­u­lar and suc­cess­ful of these writers. This com­bin­a­tion has led to the pro­duc­tion of a new cinema style; noir movie com­ics. Sin City is the lead­ing example. High tech replaces true shad­ows, col­ours that exist only in the mind, impossible film shots gen­er­ated through com­puter and viol­ence expan­ded and writ­ten large on the screen. Con­sider Sin City; noth­ing much hap­pens and a lot of people get dead. Yet still it is con­sidered a great film. A comic book story, its char­ac­ters painted so large and in black and white that the movie didn’t even attempt to add depth. Instead it relied on its act­ors to carry the story unspoken through looks, smiles and sexual tension…

Ah! truly then the noir is back! Sexual ten­sion is the core to all good noirs.

And so we come to 300. An adap­tion of a comic noir that is itself adap­ted from a real his­tor­ical event. This story is not a myth. This actu­ally happened.

On paper the Spartans are per­fect for the noir movie comic treat­ment. Col­or­ful, amaz­ing, lar­ger than life, ana­chron­istic, lac­onic, brave, viol­ent and most immor­tally kick-ass. What bet­ter story could their be than the stand of king Leoni­das and his 300 against over 250,000?

Sadly, the major­ity of the reviews have totally missed the point.

Let us con­sider this film. The whole story is told as a flash­back. This is used as a device to setup the over the top’ness found in the story. The nar­rator is Aris­to­demus, who (in RL) was the last sur­vivor of the 300 and sent back to report on the Spartans and what they died for. In the film this was por­trayed as a polit­ical man­euver on the part of the king to gal­van­ize his resigned nation to action and to inspire them and this inspir­a­tion is what Aris­to­demus is doing as the film opens to the Spartan army about to fight the Battle of Plataea.

In real­ity Aris­to­demus did sur­vive until Plataea but he was con­sidered a cow­ard for leav­ing the 300 and his manically fevered fight­ing con­duct only isol­ated him further.

So, who were the Spartans?

The Spartans were Dorian, that is made up from one of the prin­ciple Greek tribes of the BCE era. Their dom­in­a­tion of the Greek world (before Alex­an­der) was a short lived but they were for 30 or so years the most power­ful force in the ancient world. Their soci­ety was based on a mixed com­bin­a­tion of demo­cracy and a strange dual king­ship. Con­sidered bar­baric and basic by their con­tem­por­ar­ies, their lives were totally focused on war, and from age 7 to 60 a Spartan man could eas­ily be called to battle.  The Spartans killed any of their young that didn’t meet their bio­lo­gical require­ments.  This is a prim­it­ive form of Eugen­ics found in many small nation clans such as the ninja’s of Iga who did exactly the same. This pro­gram of indoc­trin­a­tion and harsh train­ing bred a large a very skilled army of pro­fes­sional sol­diers that really stood out in combat.

Back then the middle-class pro­fes­sional sol­dier was the norm and mer­cen­ary troops plied their skills up and down the Greek pen­in­sula fight­ing for city states along­side the cit­izens them­selves. Since a pro­fes­sional sol­dier had to sup­ply his own armor and weapons battles were often more a case of work­ing out who was on which side (espe­cially when they often switched mid-battle). In con­trast Sparta provided all its war­ri­ors with their equip­ment and thus the Spartan battle form­a­tion really stood out and this means that their appear­ances on the bat­tle­field are well recorded.

The Spartan fight­ing man in the film is shown almost how he looked in life except for a few things. Firstly the Hoplite war­rior was, for his time, very heavy infantry.

The word hoplite (Greek ???????, hoplit?s) derives from hoplon (?????, plural hopla, ????) mean­ing an item of armor or equip­ment and con­sequently the entire equip­ment of the hoplite (but not spe­cific­ally the cir­cu­lar shield, which is some­times incor­rectly referred to as a hoplon, though it was in fact called an aspis). These sol­diers prob­ably first appeared in the late sev­enth cen­tury B.C. They were a cit­izen–mili­tia, and so were armed as spear­men, and assumed a phalanx form­a­tion, which are rel­at­ively easy to equip and main­tain; they were primar­ily drawn from the middle class, who could afford the cost of the arma­ments. Almost all the fam­ous men of ancient Greece, even philo­soph­ers and play­wrights, fought as hoplites at some point in their lives.

Socrates for one.

One of the main things the film changes is that the Spartans don’t wear armour. In real life the Spartans were used to act­ing as shock troops and of course wore heavy breast­plates to pre­vent, you know, death from sharp objects…

Any­way, it is a fact that on the march to battle they did not. The armour was so heavy that it was only put on just before the battle star­ted. The other thing that is miss­ing is that the Phalanx relies on much longer spears than those shown on screen. This is a more for­giv­able error since a movie depict­ing a battle as a simple push and stab would have been very bor­ing and looked slightly silly to mod­ern eyes.

The scenes in Sparta and in the home­life of the king build the ten­sion well as he wrestles with his decision to go to a war he may lose. How­ever in real­ity Leoni­das sent the 300 because it was all he thought he needed to hold the pass and the polit­ical shenanigans depic­ted is not actu­ally accur­ate. The scene with the Oracle pro­noun­cing that Sparta should not go to war actu­ally went some­thing like this:

O ye men who dwell in the streets of broad Lacedae­mon!
Either your glor­i­ous town shall be sacked by the chil­dren of Perseus,
Or, in exchange, must all through the whole Lac­onian coun­try
Mourn for the loss of a king, des­cend­ant of great Her­acles.
He can­not be with­stood by the cour­age of bulls nor of lions,
Strive as they may; he is mighty as Jove; there is naught that shall stay him,
Till he have got for his prey your king, or your glor­i­ous city.

Which is not exactly “stay at home” mes­sage given in the movie. Still I noticed people being stirred by that scene of tit­il­la­tion fol­lowed by the sex scene between the king and queen that quite set the mood and raised the blood in time for it being let loose in the battle.

This sort of cine­matic and clas­sic emo­tional cross over tech­nique is used in almost all movies. But never the less, even though I was aware of the tech­nique, I was tit­il­lated along with every­one else.

The Battle.

The basic premise set­ting up the battle of Septem­ber 480 BCE is not quite cor­rect. The Per­sian empire was not totally made up of slaves and the Spartans were not totally free­dom lov­ing Demo­crats, but the basic fact is that their way of life was dir­ectly threatened by Xer­xes invasion.

The fact that the Spartans had slaves them­selves is neither here nor there. Ancient peoples can­not be judged by mod­ern stand­ards. To do so is a total waste of time and some­thing we should not encour­age the future gen­er­a­tion to do to us!  Nev­er­the­less the comic sens­ib­il­it­ies is clearly drawn into black and white by the King ask­ing the Thespi­ans what their pro­fes­sions were and receiv­ing “Pot­ter and sculptor” as the replies!

Once in place the events of the first day and the sub­sequent end of the great war­ri­ors (thus giv­ing away noth­ing you don’t already know) is almost accur­ate and mixed in with the Queen’s polit­ical struggles back home. How­ever, while the depic­tion of the Medes (ancient Ira­nian people) is cor­rect in their attire and mar­tial prowess, the depic­tion of mon­sters is frankly silly. One could be for­given for think­ing that you were watch­ing Lord of the Rings at one point, with the hero bat­tling a giant Troll…

…I mean Maniac one-on-one. The shots echo the Aragon-versus-Troll battle (at the end of the Return of the King) almost frame by frame. Moreover the depic­tion of Xer­xes him­self is also almost funny as he appears as a giant 7ft tall andro­gyn­ous fruit­cake rather than the land hungry, irate bas­tard he was said to have been.

I was put in mind of the main ant­ag­on­ist in the movie Stargate.

or

Oh, and there were no Oliphants… I mean Ele­phants, in the real battle.

This apart the story of the battle is almost cor­rect. The real Immor­tals actu­ally wore scale mail-like plate amour and car­ried wicker shields and bows.  They were more suited to desert war­fare where there is space to move and retreat they faired no bet­ter that the Medes against the Phalanx, some­thing Xer­xes should have seen com­ing. In the movie they are a cross between samurai, ninja’s and Stormtroopers.

How­ever by far the worst depar­ture from the real story is the char­ac­ter of the traitor; Ephi­altes. Here he suf­fers from the same treat­ment that Shakespeare meters out to Richard the III is that he is a hideous hunch­back. Again clearly delim­it­at­ing between the per­fect Spartans and their adversaries.

The name Ephi­altes is the archetyp­ical word for traitor in the Greek lan­guage, much in the same way one might call someone a “Judas” or “Quis­ling”. I sus­pect that he was not a pop­u­lar chap with the Greeks and legend has it he moved abroad soon after the battle.  The after­math of the battle is handled quite cor­rectly: The Spartans died to a man with their king’s corpse being mutil­ated by the Per­sians as a warning.

This did not have the required effect and soon both the film and the real his­tory pass on to the Battle of Plataea. This took place in 479 BC between an alli­ance of the Greek city-states of Sparta, Athens, Cor­inth, Megara and oth­ers against the Per­sians and with it the Per­sians were expelled from Greece forever.

In other words, the sac­ri­fice of the 300 worked.

The film’s dir­ector stated in an inter­view that “The events are 90 per­cent accur­ate. It’s just in the visu­al­iz­a­tion that it’s crazy… I’ve shown this movie to world-class his­tor­i­ans who have said it’s amaz­ing. They can’t believe it’s as accur­ate as it is…[the films is] an opera, not a documentary”.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/rev2007-03-07vdh.html

So whats up with the reviews?

It is in the lack of under­stand­ing of the ancient Greeks that has mostly led to the mixed reviews of the crit­ics. Some don’t real­ise that this event actu­ally happened and that it is not like “Troy”. Oth­ers point to the cor­rel­a­tion of good and bad, demo­cracy and mon­archy and draw par­al­lels with the Iraq con­flict.  At some high level the stu­dio prob­ably real­ised that there could be a cor­rel­a­tion and thus green lighted the film, but and it is a big but, the film itself does not draw this link. The ori­ginal mater­ial on which the story is based, the accounts of the Greek his­tor­i­ans etc, is very clear about how the Spartans felt and what they thought of the inva­sion. If you want to blame someone, blame the his­tor­ies, not the movie. One dis­il­lu­sioned review I read this morn­ing called the Spartans fas­cist. This shows an unbe­liev­able lack of under­stand­ing of what fas­cism is. Firstly fas­cism is undefined. Strictly speak­ing only Itali­ans dur­ing Mus­solini can even be fas­cist. Mod­ern inter­pret­a­tions can cover any form of author­it­arian gov­ern­ment such as the US and the UK.

Frank­lin D. Roosevelt said that fas­cism was:

The first truth is that the liberty of a demo­cracy is not safe if the people tol­er­ate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their demo­cratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism–ownership of gov­ern­ment by an indi­vidual, by a group, or by any other con­trolling private power.

This is very clearly not the Spartan way and indeed shows that simply point­ing to a cul­ture over a thou­sand years prior to the word Fas­cism was even inven­ted and labeling them in a half assed review to make your­self look smart is pathetic. As George Orwell, remarked:

…the word ‘Fas­cism’ is almost entirely mean­ing­less. In con­ver­sa­tion, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farm­ers, shop­keep­ers, Social Credit, cor­poral pun­ish­ment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Com­mit­tee, the 1941 Com­mit­tee, Kip­ling, Gandhi, Chi­ang Kai-Shek, homo­sexu­al­ity, Priestley’s broad­casts, Youth Hos­tels, astro­logy, women, dogs and I do not know what else … Except for the rel­at­ively small num­ber of Fas­cist sym­path­isers, almost any Eng­lish per­son would accept ‘bully’ as a syn­onym for ‘Fas­cist’. That is about as near to a defin­i­tion as this much-abused word has come.

Other people get­ting the wrong end of the stick was the Ira­ni­ans themselves:

On March 22 2007, the Ira­nian mis­sion to the U.N. pro­tested the movie 300 in a press release say­ing “While recog­niz­ing that this is not a doc­u­drama and its con­tent is largely fic­tion­al­ized, that it is a fantasy ver­sion of a his­tor­ical past, non­ethe­less it seems judi­cious to invest­ig­ate why the film fails to con­vey a bare min­imum truth about Ira­nian his­tory and indulges in invent­ing per­verse, demonic images of Per­sians? The movie is so overly racist, so over­flow­ing with vicious ste­reo­type of Per­sians, as a dan­ger­ous, bes­tial force fatally threat­en­ing the civ­il­ized “free” world, that con­veys an impli­cit acqui­es­cence to the con­tem­por­ary dis­courses of hatred espous­ing a clash of civil­iz­a­tions”, the press release adds “dis­tort­ing the image of Ira­ni­ans should not be a tool to sell tick­ets. It is like re-writing his­tory with poison.”

In fact the best way to know the nature of the Spartans is to look at the accounts of their con­tem­por­ar­ies. Here one finds that they have an large group men­tal­ity brought about through train­ing. War­ri­ors, yes, but intensely dis­cip­lined and not told to sell them­selves short in battle:

A strong emphasis was placed on hon­our and car­ry­ing out acts because it was the ‘right thing to do.’ Xeno­phon wrote about the Spartans as he observed them dur­ing an Olympic game:

“An eld­erly man was try­ing to find a place to sit and observe the Olympic Games, as he went to each sec­tion. All the other Greeks laughed as he tried to make his way through. Some ignored him. Upon enter­ing the Spartan sec­tion all the Spartans stood and offered the eld­erly man their seats. Sud­denly the entire sta­dium applauded. All the Greeks knew what was the right thing to do, but the Spartans were the only ones who did it.”

Leoni­das obvi­ously thought that the sac­ri­fice of the 300 was worth it because it was the right thing to do. In fact mark­ing the spot where the battle took place is the fol­low­ing poem:

Go, tell the Spartans, stranger passing by,

That here, obed­i­ent to their laws, we lie.

It is easy to like the Spartans.  Uncom­prom­ising people are always attract­ive.  For example the Samurai are often exposed a war­rior poets with large appet­ites for sex and drink and per­haps in one sense they were, but in another sense their life was AMAZINGLY harsh. This is how it is for the Spartans. The life of a Spartan war­rior was hard bey­ond the point of which people could stand it now.  Fan­at­ical is the best way to describe them.

So what does the film say? 

Clev­erly it mostly stays away from the com­plex­ity of ancient demo­cracy and espe­cially Spartan gov­ern­ment and paints this part of their cul­ture with a light brush.  On the other hand no film has spoken of the male con­di­tion so deeply since Fight Club.  In this mod­ern world we are no longer war­ri­ors (speak for your­self!) and there are no longer any great battles to be fought.  The clear­cut male­ness, given full expres­sion through broth­erly love (the Spartans were one of the few non-gay Greek tribes — but cer­tainly not homo­phobic) and male bonding.

How do males bond?  How does a male ori­ent­ated soci­ety work?  What is the value of Hon­our?  All these ques­tions are answered in the film dir­ectly through the medium of their Spartans actions.  In fact this brings me to the final, and most exas­per­at­ing, cri­ti­cism I have read of this film.  Namely that the Spartans are pun­ning all the time. I will let the Wikki answer this one:

A “Lac­onic phrase” is a very short or terse state­ment, named after Lac­onia, an area of mod­ern and ancient Greece. Lac­oni­ans focused less on the devel­op­ment of edu­ca­tion, arts, and lit­er­at­ure. Some view this as hav­ing con­trib­uted to the Lac­onian char­ac­ter­ist­ic­ally blunt speech. The Spartans were espe­cially fam­ous for their dry wit, which is called “lac­onic” after the region and its people. In mod­ern par­lance, “lac­onic” is used to describe speech and writ­ing which uses few words and is terse and concise.

If 300 por­trays a group of ste­reo­typ­ical, macho, gruff, stoic, muscle bound, long haired super war­ri­ors it is simply because the Spartans are the people that this ste­reo­type is based on!  Ser­i­ously!  These people were amaz­ing, but amaz­ing in the same way that a super nova is amaz­ing; you wouldn’t like it close up.  They wound up and con­fused their con­tem­por­ar­ies as much as they have the crit­ical review­ers who don’t know their his­tory.  Per­son­ally that makes me smile.

300 is a well acted movie with amaz­ing visu­als and fine com­bat scenes.  It is about 85% accur­ate to one of the greatest mil­it­ary achieve­ments of all time and moreover is a story about a small band of men fight­ing for what even­tu­ally turned into West­ern Demo­cracy (very even­tu­ally).  It has beau­ti­ful people in it, kick­ing ass, tak­ing names and stand­ing brave in the face of death.

I give it a 9.

Basho

Tech­nor­ati tags: 300, movie review, spartans