The Movie "300": A Critical Review by Hamid Dabashi

Here is an excerpt from Hamid Dabashi's provocative review of the movie "300" that I read yesterday. It's quite insightful about the power and trickery with which media can actively shape and manipulate images in the minds of the public.

Those interested might also like to read his review of Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran that was predicated on the same critique of Orientalist imagery and its contemporary link to power and dominance. See my post on Orientalism here. I also mentioned this movie in another post (here) which was on the role the global media (like Hollywood) plays in establishing the cultural/ideological hegemony that Dabashi speaks about.

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The '300' Stroke

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2007/856/cu1.htm

"The peculiar manner in which the visual Imperium of 300 operates in the post-9/11 George Bush led imperialism is by an act of emotive reversal, projecting the American imperial practice back in time and space to something called "the Persians" and instead assuming the identity of a band of Spartan soldiers that now speak and act on behalf of "the West" -- the imperial provenance of American identity. In this emotive swap, the US as "the West" wants to have its cake and eat it too -- act as the Achamanid (what they call "Persian") Empire did but assume it is a small band of Spartans defending freedom and democracy against a horde of foreign invaders. Flaunting and flexing the most deadly military machinery in human history, the US can now partake in the delusional feat that Miller and Snyder have cooked up for it to see itself as a small band of guerrilla fighters resisting a predatory empire. Here "the Persians" mutate and stand for (among other things) what the terrorising propaganda machinery of the US empire calls "Islamofascism" .

Cinema is a miraculous (for those who abuse it treacherously) medium. It reverses angle on you (the filmmaker) without your even noticing it. Snyder has gone through all this trouble and these expenses to demonise an ancient and forgotten empire only to give a perfect picture of the empire in which he lives and which he, however inadvertently, serves -- just lower the loud volume of 300 and watch it and ask yourself between Bush and an anonymous leader of Iraqi resistance who has more claim to Xerxes and who to Leonidas?

Leonidas' mission in Snyder's 300 is an act of suicidal violence -- a suicidal violence that if performed by white people in remote corners of history is heroic but if by Palestinians or Iraqis then it becomes sign of barbarism. So what Miller/Snyder effectively want is yet another example of having their cake and eating it too -- stealing the strategy of suicidal violence from those desperate measures of resisting imperialism of one sort (US) or another (Israel) and cast the enemy as imperial. It is a complete reversal of fact to make spectacular fantasy -- stealing resistance of the poor coloured folks and white--identifying it, while projecting your own imperial barbarity to some remote point in history and calling it The Enemy, "The Persians". This is a remarkable act of reversal, a projection backward. You become the enemy you abhor and you catapult the abhorrence you are to your enemy. 300 thus amounts to a CGI-engineered sense of tragedy and valour for an otherwise carnivorous empire that has just inflicted unfathomable pain and suffering on millions of Afghans and Iraqis.

What Snyder actually portrays (for the whole world to see) is the best picture of the US army in action. That monstrosity that Snyder pictures marching towards Thermopylae is the American empire -- and that band of brothers that stood up to that monstrosity are those resisting this empire: they are the Iraqi resistance, the Palestinians, Hizbullah. Thermopylae, in 300, becomes a floating signifier. "The West", Miller and Snyder, have no control over it. 300 is thus too smart a thievery for its own good. It is a robbery completely -- from beginning to end -- caught on closed caption camera. Today the Palestinian, Lebanese, and Iraqi resistance to US/Israel imperial warmongering have a far more legitimate claim on being the Spartans of their time than Americans, British, or Italians do.

The reversed projection of Miller-Snyder, now seeking to provide the Bush-Cheney project with an ideological hegemony they otherwise lack, ipso facto casts a claim on the absolutist militarist culture anachronistically attributed to the Spartans -- all narrated around their presumed infanticide practices, where children deemed useless to the military culture were killed at birth. This is Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis in a nutshell -- where the only citizens worth living are citizen soldiers. There is a scene in Snyder's 300 where King Leonidas makes fun of a regiment of Greek soldiers that has come to help him in the battle. He asks the Greek soldiers what their professions are. They respond by stating their ordinary professions before they became soldiers. He then turns to his soldiers and asks them the same questions, and they respond in unison that they are all nothing but soldiers. This is not just the end of history. This is the end of humanity. This is the US military projected back into history -- a professional and heavily privatised army entirely divorced from the will and wishes of a polity and a democracy that does not have to invest its own sons and daughters in its military adventurism.

"The term "Persian" in both Miller's comic book and Snyder's gory tale is much in need of decoding. Iranians of "the Persian Diaspora" persuasion are presuming too much thinking that it refers just to them. Having opted to call themselves "Persian" ever since the American Hostage Crisis of 1979-1980, Iranians have failed to watch carefully and read Snyder's "Persians". They are not just Iranians. Look at them carefully. They are also Arabs, Indians, Turks, Afghans, South and East Asians and Latinos. They are also gays, lesbians, and transvestites. Snyder's "Persians" are the nightmares of the White Christian America, the semiotic summations of all their undesirable elements -- all the racialised minorities, all the vilified foreigners, all demonised in the interest of a white gang of patriarchal warriors who do not hesitate even to kill their own children if they fail the military standard of thuggish buffoonery. Look also carefully at the graphics of Miller and the cinematography of Snyder. The Spartans are not just that. There is a blatant Christian Christological disposition about King Leonidas and his soldiers. In one final frame where King Leonidas and his Spartan soldiers are lying dead after the battle is over there is a powerful portrayal of a crucifix that unmistakably invokes the European tradition from Michelangelo to Titian, Tintoretto and El Greco. Miller and Snyder's King Leonidas is the alter ego of Christ running amuck. There is a Dantean demonology about the manner in which Miller and Snyder depict the entirety of the world they hate for being other than white, male, Christian, and heterosexual (the only woman in 300, Queen Gorgo, is a cut in her warmongering between Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, Maryam Rajavi and Condoleezza Rice -- all coming together to provide the German Gestapo ideal of womanhood).

But we, the demonised minorities that Snyder sees like monsters swarming around him, can look back through his own camera and reverse his angle. To this "Persian", that weird looking giant coming down from his throne to meet with the leader of the resistance looks amazingly like Bush going to Iraq for a quick visit -- and those obsequious "immortals" bending to accommodate his feet on their backs remind me of the members of the US congress abrogating their constitutional responsibilities and consenting to an immoral and illegal war against Afghanistan and Iraq. Fearful of all the racialised minorities in and out of the United States -- Jews, Muslims, Asians, Africans, Latinos -- gathering storm around his white-washed racism, Snyder has quite unbeknownst to himself given a perfect picture of the way the world sees Bush's army. He could not possibly have been more accurate.

* The writer is a professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York."