Ouch!
Posted on 03/15/2007 6:34:23 AM PDT by meg88
Why '300' so deeply troubles Hollywood
Posted: March 15, 2007 1:00 a.m. Eastern
In pondering the question of whether it was appropriate to present children with frightening images, C.S. Lewis answered:
"Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker."
Lewis understood something that the political left decidedly does not: young people, males especially, need worthy role models.
The few masculine heroes the left serves up – Mumia, Che, Leonard Peltier – are murderous thugs masquerading as martyrs, incapable of being emulated by the comfortable minions who admire them.
For the rank and file, progressive opinion shapers glorify passivity, petulance, self-absorption and sexual ambiguity.
(Column continues below)
The young guys on the left try to fashion themselves thusly, but their innate and undisciplined sense of aggression inevitably seeks an outlet.
From what I can see, that outlet takes the form of vile language – a recent survey showed "Daily Kos" to have 20 times more profanity to the page than "Free Republic" – and self mutilation through multiple piercings and tattoos.
Oh yeah, and occasionally graffiti. That's about it.
The young males who recreate themselves in this image can't feel very good about themselves. Neither can their "partners" of whatever gender.
These opinion shapers can sustain the worth of this image only because they monopolize the visual media. And when that monopoly is threatened, there is hell to pay.
This I discovered by happenstance.
Unaware of the controversy to come, I used the excuse of an overcast sky to duck out of yard work and into my neighborhood cinema for a Saturday matinee of the movie "300."
Directed by Zack Snyder and based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller, the movie tells the well-known story of Spartan King Leonidas and the battle at Thermopylae and does so in great visual style.
I went for no better reason than the previews intrigued me. Given its R rating, I was hoping that I would not be the only one in the theater at 1:30 in the afternoon. I wasn't. The theater was about 2/3 full. Something was going on here.
That something has the critical community in a snit. "It's not so much the body count or even the blood lust that's disturbing," opined CNN's Tom Charity two days before the opening. "It's that the film, with its macho militarism, seems out of step in a war-weary time."
Out of step were CNN's critic and his colleagues. The film grossed a stunning $71 million opening weekend, a figure twice as high as even optimistic projections, higher than the next nine films combined, a figure that defied the critics' best effort to cripple the movie at the starting gate.
And that $71 million is just the beginning.
Wrote one liberal blogger in summarizing the critical response, "I mean, even normally well-heeled mainstream film reviewers are really, really disgusted with the brazen orientalism, homophobia, sexism, racism and testosterone-heavy jingoism."
Had the audience known the film had so much added value – orientalism? – the opening weekend might have topped $100 million.
Still, the blogger's summary was not off the mark. A.O. Scott of the New York Times began his review thusly: "'300' is about as violent as 'Apocalypto' and twice as stupid."
It's not that Scott opposes violence. He found some of the images in Quentin Tarantino's "astonishingly violent" "Kill Bill" "rather thrilling." It is just that Scott opposes violence that serves a noble purpose like that in "300" or in any Mel Gibson movie.
At Newsday meanwhile, after debating whether the American military mission mirrored the Spartans' or Persians', the self-deluding Gene Seymour opined that it didn't matter because the movie is "too darned silly to withstand any ideological theorizing."
No, what upsets Seymour and Scott and their fellow cinematic travelers is that "300" is neither silly nor stupid.
These critics know the film will have a powerful effect on the audience. They know what that effect is, and they don't like it at all precisely because "300" is ideological to the core.
In the film, rather than appease "the thousand nations of the Persian empire," Leonidas and 300 of his best special forces ops take pre-emptive action against this imminent third-world threat.
While the 300 journey afar to confront the multicultural Persian hordes, the lovely and loyal Queen Gorgo tries to rouse a divided and even treacherous congress back home.
"We are at war, gentlemen," she reminds them. She then argues for a massive troop surge in the hope that the efforts of "a king and his men have not been wasted to the pages of history."
As is obvious to the viewer, these congressmen are no more "war-weary" than the film critics at CNN. They have sacrificed nothing and suffered nothing.
The queen exhorts them nonetheless to send reinforcements "for the preservation of liberty ... for justice ... for law and order ... for reason." Only a progressive film critic could mistake her unambiguous and unapologetic pro-Western message.
The Persians certainly got it. "Iranians outraged over movie '300,' calling it insult to ancient culture," blasted the headline from the Associated Press.
To be sure, the film is a bit over the top. The well-ripped Spartans could pass for the Chippendales in designer battle gear. And the androgynous Xerxes looks scarily like the artist formerly known as Prince but two feet taller and with killer abs.
Nor are the Spartans ideal role models for American troops. They have been bred to near perfection by a program of infanticide that even the critics find troubling – the Spartans had yet to invent the conscience salve of partial-birth abortion–and they take no prisoners, real or figurative.
That much said, the film presents an attractive image of disciplined male camaraderie that the left is incapable of even imagining.
Early on, in fact, Leonidas distinguishes the mission of his men from that of the "boy-lovers" of Athens (and did that line send the critics howling!).
"A new age has begun," the king tells his troops, "an age of freedom, and all will know that 300 Spartans gave their last breath to defend it." Although the sets are virtual, the emotions are real and raw.
Unlike so many critically cherished Hollywood films, the violence in "300" is not purposeless. There is nothing camp or ironic about it.
Nor does the film stray all that far from historical accounts to create this image (although one interesting deviation is that the movie Spartans are undone by blowback from their eugenics program).
"If critics think that '300' reduces and simplifies the meaning of Thermopylae into freedom versus tyranny," writes classicist Victor Davis Hanson, "they should reread carefully ancient accounts and then blame Herodotus, Plutarch and Diodorus."
The U.S. Marines have never had a better recruiting film. The young males who dominate the audience will leave the theater not so much eager to behead a Persian as to examine their own, dare I say it, manliness.
The progressive media moguls, who have so dominated what these young men see and hear, can offer them no such visions "of brave knights and heroic courage."
They are losing constituents with every showing of "300," and they are howling mad about it.
Jack Cashill is an Emmy-award winning independent writer and producer with a Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue.
By the way, last August I was invited to the Oval Office along with VDH and Keegan for a one-hour sit-down with the Pres. on, among other things, military history and its lessons."
Are you joking? Who are you Bruce Heath? Donald Kagan?
The film is silly, maybe not stupid though. Its based on a comic book and isn't meant to be a historical recreation.
Jack is reading way too much into it. It gets tiresome when conservatives go crazy over any movie or show that seems to sport conservative values (i.e. the Passion, 24). Its just Hollywood, its about money and entertainment. The makers weren't trying to make a political statement, they are trying to sell ticks. More power to them.
I live in a conservative area of NJ. I went to see the movie last Sunday night in a small town hoping to avoid the crowds (I hate when people talk during movies). It was packed. The vast majority of theater goers were buzz cutted, well built young males and their dates who left the theater pretty pumped up. They were unapolgetic to say the least.
The success of this movie has not surprised me a bit. A pro-west, pro-military, movie will always crush some left wing dribble about a self hating socialist who lives in his mom's basement.
Have you had a chance to read "A History of the English Speaking People Since 1900" by Andrew Roberts? It is excellent and written by an unapologetic right wing Brit. Highly recommended.
Bingo. Today, we have the technology available so virtually anyone can create a professional movie. High-def video-cams and film editing software that 10 or 15 years ago would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars are now available to the masses. This year, some Superbowl commercials were even made by amateurs. No wonder Hollywood is nervous. Their monopoly is being subverted by the technology, and I love it.
Anybody see this at IMAX? I'm planning to.
I'm still waiting for a gooblockbuster showing the Romans and the Carthaginians during the Punic Wars and the absolute destruction of Carthage. I'll pay GOOD money to see that one.
Ah, yes, that old joke, though I'd heard the comment attributed to a Corinthian.
That just shows how it touched your soul. Granted, no one actually used a spoon as a weapon in the movie, but still.
One epitaph by Simonides, quoted by Plutarch, runs as follows:
"Once the Greeks, having driven out the Persians by the might of Victory [Nike] and the might of Ares, set up this altar of Zeus, giver of freedom, an altar common to a free Greece."
The most famous epigram on Thermopylae, usually attributed to Simonides, runs as follows:
"Tell them in Sparta, passer-by,
That here, obedient to their words, we lie."
O xein', angellein Lakedaimoniois hoti teide
keimetha, tois keinon rhemasi peithomenoi.
Yes, 'faggot' has the ambiguity of meaning a cigarette in British English (as does the shortened 'fag'), or a bundle of sticks.
The Brits have a perfectly servicable word for males who engage in homoerotic behavior: poofter (also pooftah), though buggerer is also current on the other side of the Pond, if a bit hard to say thanks to the er-er at the end.
I recommend that we adopt at least a part of Spartan culture. The Republicans kept a very angry and mistreated slave class, the Democrats.
"There were no metrosexuals at Thermopylae."
That is priceless.
I wasn't going to see this movie, but now I think I will, and I will take the kids (15 y/o). And I will hang a sign in the front windows of my motorhome with the above quote. I hope I still have windows when the movie is over.
Another priceless shot.
I'd better start writing this stuff down.
Ouch!
While not worth it's own page on FreeRepublic, I found the review interesting for it's inventive use of language "Dude nudity = dudity", imagery, "a movie where a pair of sentient boobs fights a werewolf." and practical production advice to Hollywood "Any directors reading this – IT’S OKAY TO JUST THROW IN NAKED HOTTIES. Can’t someone make a movie about naked Amazons and call it PAUSE BUTTON?"
The President obviously has good judgement on who he consults with regarding military history and its lessons.
This (not the claimed rationale of illegal bootlegging of copyrighted materials) is the real reason Hollywood wants shackles placed on technology available to consumers.
I immediately thought of AlGore, but I was not comforted.
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