I finally saw it, and I must say I’m impressed and deeply saddened.
I loved it. It translated the techniques of the comic medium to film with surprising fluency. It was exciting and it evoked very credibly, even through it’s comic book conceits, what it could possibly be like to think like a Spartan. The Spartans, by the way, would have detested us.
This is the most brilliant piece of fascist propaganda I have ever seen, and few are talking about this fact. The Spartans practice eugenics. The foreign invaders are alien, mutated, decadent and feminine haters of freedom. That freedom, by the way, is based on trumpeting the rule of law but side-stepping it when it becomes inconvenient. Diplomacy is for fagots. The racially impure among us are weak and will betray us, but ultimately Whitey can whoop every other race you can send at them from all the corners of the world because we have the will, we have the discipline, and our culture is superior.
This is a fascist masturbation fantasy.
Never mind that the Spartans are only white by revisionism. The Aryans weren’t exactly what we’d call white either. If you want to draw parallels to our modern world, keep in mind that we are not the Spartans. We are the decadent, feminine, lustful and avaricious mutants who worship false idols and want the world to kneel before us. But never mind that. This film will be de rigeur for the next generation of wanna be race warriors who won’t recognize that in this story we are the Persians.
We cannot let people forget that this is a fantasy. It did not take place in our world, and we have seen what becomes of trying to make such stories come true. We cannot let people forget where this kind of thinking leads.
I think that your investment in a movie adaptation of a graphic novel that was loosely based on an extraordinarily old account of an undocumented battle is perhaps greater than average.
I finally caught the film myself, and I would have been more deeply offended by the racism and homophobia if the film hadn’t been, on a purely aesthetic level, so incredibly painful to endure in its own right. Tedious macho-bullshit-posturing pretending to be “action”, characters that are largely interchangeable and uninteresting, and a “story” devoid of any drama, tension, or emotional investment. Plus ugly as sin to look at (and if that was the filmmaker’s goal: mission accoplished!).
I, personally, am deeply astonished that a movie based on a Frank Miller comic book would have undertones of fascism and homophobia. No one could have predicted this.
I’ve gotta agree that 300 had some deeply fascist undertones, though I wouldn’t have put it that way. It did occur to me, half way through, that Hitler would have liked it. That doesn’t mean that everyone that likes it is even a little bit like Hitler–I imagine he liked chocolate milkshakes, as well–but the movie does do a great job of setting up everyone who isn’t Greek as “other”–not just other people, but creepy, alien, decadent. It’s a world where opposing sides could never co-exist. When that’s orcs vs. humans, that seems better than when its “vaugely British” vs. everyone else, mostly brownish. It’s a movie that helped me understand facisim.
This isn’t to say it’s a bad movie–I loved it–or even to say it’s a “facist manifesto”–mayhap instead it’s a much more cynical look at human nature than it appear on first glance.
And either graphic arts (and their spawn) are real art, in which case one should be passionate about them, or they are fluff, in which case they can be dismissed.
I agree with the OP. You can’t just dismiss the message of a movie with “well, it’s just a movie.” People watch movies and take values from what they see. It’s not irresistable mind control - you can watch The Birth of a Nation without deciding to join the Klan or Triumph of the Will without becoming a Nazi - but they do have an impact.
And the content of 300 was a fascist fantasy. For all that everybody said that they were fighting for freedom, nobody actually had any - freedom was just an empty slogan that was used to get the soldiers in a fighting mood. And the themes of “our country is better than any other country in the world and our people are better than any other people in the world” and “the law is holding us back - we need to ignore the law in order to fulfill our destiny” and “you have no worth as an individual - your worth comes from being a part of the state” all fit in well with the fascist mindset.
I don’t know why you’d pick out *Hero * in particular, but the problem with Triumph of the Will and Starship Troopers was that they weren’t nearly as good as this film. This movie is really making a mark as pure entertainment. And frankly, I don’t suspect the film-makers thought making a fascist film was what they were about in making 300. But people will get such ideas out of it.
I laugh off a lot of morally dubious films that send the wrong kind of message. I love the Dirty Harry movies and indeed any film in which deep-rooted problems in society can be dealt with in 90 minutes by killing the right people. But we can’t laugh off as ironic a subtext we never confront to begin with.
I know it – the only non-allegorical Vietnam film made during Vietnam, while most Americans still thought we were winning. Made war look glamorous, honorable. I don’t know if I’d call it fascist, but I’ve noticed that John Wayne gets mentioned often when Vietnam vets write what they thought they were in for as they signed up. Also, it was a pretty happening song.
Yes: the Spartans are interchangeable–all nearly identical. The enemy comes in ALL sizes, shapes, colors, and genders. As I’ve mentioned before, it seems to demonize the very concept of diversity.
The big idea of Hero was that a nation needs a great leader who will be above the rules and who the people must follow without question. That’s certainly a concept that fascist (and other totalitarian) movements would welcome.
And–sorry, missed this–Hitler no doubt liked chocolate milkshakes. But you don’t look at a chocolate milkshake and say to yourself, “Hitler would really like that.”
