As widely expected from the trailers and such, 300 is a bad-ass amazingly visual movie. No one will be disappointed who wants some well shot, visually stunning action scenes, blood splattering and dismemberment set to cool background music.

However bad-ass the movie is, the ideals presented in the film cause me to think and move me to the keyboard to craft a blog entry on the subject. As mentioned in Slate and elsewhere, there is an unsettling rather fascist strain of thought going through the movie:

If 300, the new battle epic based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, had been made in Germany in the mid-1930s, it would be studied today alongside The Eternal Jew as a textbook example of how race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth can serve as an incitement to total war.

I was particularly distressed by the conflation of physical beauty with moral goodness. All the “bad guys” were overweight or handicapped or black/brown. The good guys were all perfectly chiseled white men. Of course it is Greece vs. Persia, so obviously the skin tones have to reflect that, so I’m not gonna go nuts calling the movie racist as some other reviews have, that is just the material they are working with. The handicap issue though is what sticks out in my mind.

It really seemed to reflect Nazi ideals of eugenics and racial purity and such. The Spartans were the epitome of Nazi & Nietzschean “uber-men”. Perfect physical specimens, perfectly willing to sacrifice their lives for the good of the people regardless of wisdom or consequence. Put them in brown shirts and Adolf would cream his shorts.

An example of this:

Another of the Spartans’ less-than-glorious customs is the practice of eugenics, hurling any less-than-perfect infant off a cliff onto a huge pile of baby skeletons. Unfortunately for the 300 at Thermopylae, this system of racial cleansing isn’t foolproof: One deformed hunchback, Ephialtes (Andrew Tiernan), manages to make it to adulthood and begs Leonidas for a chance to serve Sparta in the 300. Sure enough, when he’s turned down, the hunchback confirms his moral weakness by accepting Xerxes’ offer to join ranks with the Persians.

It was a rather sad story in the movie. This disfigured man comes up to Leonidas and tells him he wants to honor his father and honor his city. He said he had been trained his whole life by his father for just such a moment. He demonstrated all the ideals of the Spartans, but he was rejected because he wasn’t the ideal physical specimen of the other Spartans. He then switches camps and is welcomed by the Persians who don’t judge him because of his deformity. Xerxes offers him kindness which is made to be a sinister offer.

The whole thing is one big nationalist, macho, fascist orgasm on film. 300 glorified war more than any movie I can recall seeing.

Of course all of the elements making me uneasy, the blind nationalism, eugenics, fascist appeals to honor, glory and the like weren’t just made up for the movie or the comic. They were amplified by the movie, but they were true to Sparta. So to be uneasy with the movie is to be uneasy with classical morality. Which I decidedly am. Nietzsche glorified the moral code of Sparta, the “master morality” as he puts it. Cherishing the strong and powerful. He contrasted it directly with Christian morality, “slave morality”, that maintained all people were equal. Of course Hitler took this ball and ran with it before ending up in a “ditch covered in petrol” as Eddie Izzard is fond of saying.

Of course many movies nowadays seem to have this ideal. The typical action packed guy movie with lots of explosions is usually a shade of this ideal of strength and power. None are as blatant as 300 however. No philosophy do I disagree with more than Nietzsche’s and his so-called master morality that he based on that of the Greeks & Romans. So the unhinged promotion of it in 300 is certainly a cause for unease.

Still looks bad-ass though.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 17th, 2007 at 5:46 pm and is filed under Personal, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.