300

This post was pub­lished over 700 days ago and there­fore may not rep­re­sent cur­rent Out­side Con­text think­ing or opin­ion. Please, do not let that detract from your enjoy­ment of it!

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 A styl­is­tic phase that is now out of fash­ion and no longer valid as a future medium.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

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