Pop-culture break - Frank Miller's "300"

I wasn't sure how I would react to the new Frank Miller film 300 which proports to tell the story of the Battle of Thermopolyae, via the medium of Frank Miller's own graphic novel retelling of this history. This film has been getting pooh-poohed in Left wing circles, so I was predisposed to be wary of it. And on a certain level, yes, to produce the film 300, at this specific moment in our history, with all the overtones to the present moment, at least in obscene Neocon private wet-dream fantasies...makes it at some level a fairly crude propoganda film, that, no doubt, neocons, militarists, and passionate Rightwingers and Cruise Missile Liberals will embrace quite uncritically and praise as their new anthem.

But putting that aside for the moment, and laying aside all the other politically correct sniping of the identity politics crowd, and the "historical accuracy police", and taking 300 on its own merits as cinema, I may damage my Lefty cred in saying so, but I rather enoyed the film...both as an action flick, and as a Foundations of Western Civ object lesson. It gave me a new admiration for the Spartans...not so much from the film itself alone, but from the interest it sparked in me to hit up Wikipedia after I got home and just read and read and read. I may go check out Edith Hamilton's The Greek Way again from Houston Public Library. It taught me that the adjective "Laconic", which I often am myself (and I admire fictional characters who are), stems from a region in Sparta, and it was an personality trait common to Spartans. Socrates also admired the Spartans...their ability to "play dumb", to hide their true wisdom. I've done the same thing periodically in my life, Inspector Colombo style.

For you see, as much as I admire Athens, and the Athenian way, until recently I was all Athens and No Sparta. This was unbalanced. I am getting back in touch with my Spartan past, my unbridled masculinity, love of guns, etc. In Texas universities, we have our version of Athens (UT-Austin) and Sparta (Texas A&M). It's no mistake I wound up at Texas A&M, and my first year there as a freshman in the Corps of Cadets was very much described by the adjective "Spartan"....no frills, ruthlessly utilitarian, harsh, military-life existence. My first semester of my Sophomore year was equally so. A tad more privileged but mostly still pretty Spartan.

Watching the end credits of 300 , with its blackened 3-D silhouettes meant to evoke the images of ancient Greek pottery, it sent chills down my spine. I felt a twinge of pan-Western Civ pride seeing the Greeks--particularly the Spartans--in their iconographic Greek helmets...Not Roman, but distinctly GREEK. The Cradle of Western Civilization, or at least one of its main legs. The Hellenistic and the monotheistic Hebrew heritages are the main superstructure of Western Civilization as we came to know it. I love the wisdom of Socrates/Plato/Aristotle, and the thought of Democritus before them, and the Historian Herodotous, a.k.a. "The Father of History", as understood in the Western Tradition. (and damn, I do love Gyros pita sandwiches too, for that matter). The Spartans were brutal bastards, but the Greek world might well have been wiped out and lost to history were it not for their military prowess.

Neocons will of course wet themselves with mental masturbation over this film, but the analogue to the present simply does not hold true. The Greek story that DOES carry over to the present moment is the story of Alexander of Macedon, aka Alexander The Great, and his eventual over-extention and collapse. Bush & Cheney are trying to one-up ol' Alex, knocking over a lot of the same territory because of the oil resources to be had there. There's also a Greek word worth learning for our present times---HUBRIS.

But to compare Bush's foreign wars and foreign entanglements with the Battle of Thermopolyae and the brave 300 that held that narrow pass against the invasion of Xerxes....that is offensive to their memory. Those were men directly defending their homes, their families, their way of of life. That is NOT what the US Military is doing today, no matter how much GWB may insist it is. No, we are engaged in an ever-expanding Imperialist enterprise, which like Alexander of Macedon, called The Great, and like the later Roman Empire after the fall of the Roman Republic, it is an enterprise that cannot be sustained over the long term.

Some criticize 300 for not accurately portraying the Persian Empire of Xerxes. They point out Xerxes was a short, fat man with a beard. All well and true, but in this celluoid vision of Persia, what is shown is Persia as reflected (and yes, distorted) in the fervid Western Imagination...and in that, 300 succeeds masterfully. It dramatically tells the tragic tale of King Leonidas and his brave 300 Spartan warriors who held the narrow mountain pass at Thermopolyae. It also softens some of the history...the man who survived the battle because he was ordered home by Leonidas to tell the tale of what happened...was in real life condemned as a coward. He did not--as the movie would have it--sustain a war wound which robbed him of an eye--but rather, caught an eye infection that rendered one eye blind. Another man suffered a similar infection, losing sight in both eyes, and he too was ordered by Leonidas back to Sparta, but on the way home he turned back and fought the in the final battle at Thermopalyae and was slain. The surviving man, who obeyed Leonidas's orders, was treated as a coward back in Sparta, but later redeemed himself in the ongoing war against Xerxes, but he was denied honors for valor because he was too recklessly suicidal in his fighting style, which was not the Spartan way, I learned to my surprise, and this humane aspect of the Spartan way I found most heartening, reading it later.

Anyway, I credit 300 with rekindling in me a love and interest for all things Ancient Greek, and that is surely a good thing. If it inspires the same in others, so much the better. It is through the study of "ancient" history that one learns a bit of humility, that, like Ecclesiastes proclaims, there's not much new under the sun...the "profound" ideas one may have in a lifetime you quickly learn were already said by some Greek, some Roman, some Hebrew, or some Egyptian, or some Ancient Chinese man thousands upon thousands of years before you, and said much better than you managed to articulate it yourself.

"Ancient" History, one learns, isn't so ancient after all. A lot of it becomes shockingly "modern", at times, under careful examination. One French writer, Bruno Latour, goes so far as to proclaim "we have never been Modern", as the title of one of his books has it. Michael Parenti's The Assasination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome really brought that home for me very strongly, as have other lecturers on the Classics, who are of recent vintage, recent enough to poke fun at Postmodern pretentions.

Anyway, for all its warts, 300 is a superb film and well worth the full-ticket price I paid for it.