300 -- Sex, Blood and Sexual Politics

Today, I got an email from my friend, who happens to be from Iran, which read as follows:

Friends,
As some of you may have heard, recently the Warner Bros. Pictures has made
a movie about the famous battle of Thermopylae between Persians and Greeks
at 480 B.C called 300. In this movie the Persians were pictured as some
monstrous savages and animals. My friends have created a petition against
this unethical action. Please join us to sing it and forward it to all
people you know as well. You can find the petition online at:

http://www.petitiononline.com/wpci96c/petition.html

First of all, this is absolutely ridiculous. Even without having seen the movie, bitching about the political correctness of a movie depicting a war that happened over two millenia ago is absurd. It is even more absurd when the present day Persians from Iran are being vilified because of a small percentage of the population that is radically fundamentalist and anti-West. A gladiator movie is not the most effective place for geo-political hell raising, especially when much more serious distortions of the Iranian life and character occur daily in American media and politics. Objecting to the Persians portryal in this movie is like objecting to the depiction of white slave holders in the South before the Civil War because it makes Caucasians look like monstrous savages and animals. Attempts at world domination aren't something to be proud of for any culture, whether it be Persia in 480 B.C. or the US in 2007.

Having been prompted by the email, I had to break down and go see the movie tonight, just so I wouldn't feel completely culturally isolated. JulieAnn has already commented on her blog about the movie in the context of parenting and some feminist issues. As usual, I don't completely agree with her, but nothing new there.

As I sit here trying to digest everything, I feel a bit overwhelmed, because there are so many ways to take this movie. In case you've been living in a cave the last little bit, 300 is based on the ancient Battle of Thermopylae, in which a contingent of 300 Spartan soldiers hold up a vastly superior force of Persians -- kind of Ancient Greeks and Persians do the Alamo. Now that we got the plot out of the way, I'm going to go with my subtitle -- Sex, Blood and Sexual Politics.

SEX

The best I could do for a sexy picture was the one at the top of the blog of the dancing drunken oracle in diaphanous array, complete with the occasional peek-a-boob moment. Queen Gorgo also provided some sexy toga costumes that should be a big hit next Halloween.

I wanted to post a picture from the love scene between King Leonidas and his wife, but alas I couldn't find one. The sex scene was pretty routine as sex scenes go, but you did get the sense that this was a loving couple. And Queen Gorgo looks like she's actually enjoying it for a moment or two.

I hope to have my gay readers chime in, because they will be better equipped to give you an analysis of the homosexual underpinnings in this movie. Xerxes, an androgynous, rock star God of a dictator, runs around demanding that everyone kneel at his feet. You almost expect him to start saying in the digitally altered voice -- Kneel human and suck my cock. It is that obvious. There is one time the Spartan King, asserting his heterosexuality, mocks the "boy lovers" from Athens, but that moment of derision is counterbalanced by the fact that the rest of the movie looks like something straight out of Tom of Finland.

So as for sex, the movie gives a little bit to everyone -- straight or gay, male or female. There is even a lesbian kissing scene in Xerxes den of iniquity.

BLOOD

Everybody bleeds in this movie. Digital blood flies faster and more furious than sperm in a porno. Decapitations and all sorts of mayhem spew across the screen. Elephants fall off cliffs and blow apart on the rocks below. The violence is comic book violence of the most brutal and sadistic kind. Animals, humans and children are all destroyed. Oddly (with one notable exception that I'll discuss below) no women are injured in the slightest. Male children are beaten, abused and killed. Animals --wolves, elephants, horses, rhinoceros -- tend to die the most ignoble deaths. Women, apparently because of the valiant efforts of their male protectorates are unscathed.

SEXUAL POLITICS

The most intriguing part of this movie is the sub-plot. Queen Gorgo is left behind while her husband is out fighting in blood and she is left to deal with the lack of political will at home to send reinforcements to help the King. Her rival in the counsel is Theron, who has been conspiring unbeknownst to everyone with the Persians. Realizing that even as Queen her standing as a woman in this testosterone based political system is unlikely on its own to be persuasive, she knows that she must deal with the leader of the civic council, Theron. She meets with Theron and they negotiate. He demands sex as payment for his support for her cause with the council. Gorgo, without any hesitation, mirroring her husband's willingness to go into battle allows Theron to take her. He is the proverbial ass about it, adding to his already villainous nature the feeling that this isn't Gorgo agreeing to sex, but rather him taking it.

Gorgo made a choice and used the ammunition at her disposal to attempt to achieve her ends, which was to get aid to her husband. It is the inverse of the choice made by the women in Lysistrata in which the women deny the warriors sex until they stop fighting. Gorgo consciously chose to submit so the warriors could keep fighting. To say that it wasn't her choice weakens her as a woman and demeans her character. She may not have wanted sex with Theron, but she'd do it no matter how distasteful if she thought it would achieve her ends.

The strength of her character is born out even further when she discovers that Theron is not abiding by their agreement in front of the counsel and instead is trying to use it to discredit her. Once Theron has broken the code of honor that Gorgo and the Spartans abided by, all bets are off. Gorgo reacts promptly and violently. She grabs a sword from a guard, the most handy replacement phallus she can find and fucks Theron in the gut with the sword, uttering the words back to him that he had said to her when he took her -- "This will not be over quickly and you will not enjoy it" -- as she slowly moves the knife around in his lower abdomen. This is not the action of a victim or a weak woman. She is just as brutal, ruthless and committed as her husband.

CONCLUDING GEO-POLITICAL THOUGHTS

Ultimately the appeal of the show, apart from the sex, violence and graphical magic, is that we like to cheer for the underdog. As I filled out my March Madness brackets today, I realized that we love to have battles where David beats Goliath, 300 beat 300,000, a 15 seed beats a number 2 seed. I know that David sleeps with Bathsheba, all of the 300 are killed and a 15 seed is never getting to the Final Four. Reality kind of sucks that way -- the big guy usually triumphs out in the end.

I read with some interest that 300 hasn't screened well in Europe because the Europeans see this as being American propaganda since the Greeks spend most of the time spouting slogans from the Revolutionary War like "I only regret I have one life" and "Give me freedom or give me death." I can certainly see the Europeans point of view, but like any history lessons can be learned from both sides of the story. In the Revolutionary War, England invaded and was the global super power fighting the rag tag insurgents. In the Battle of Thermopylae, Persia invaded and was the global super power fighting the insurgents. Our current world situation has the United States as the super power invading and fighting insurgents. The human drive for self-governance is strong. Before he allows himself to be killed, Leonidas turns down an offer by the "benevolent" and all-powerful Xerxes to be war-lord ruler over all of Greece, if he would but bow down to Xerxes. Xerxes rhetoric is the rhetoric of George Bush, Xerxes just happens to have a cool digitally altered voice and the side benefit of having died over two thousand years ago.

So what did I learn from the movies today? We all like sex. Violence has its appeal, too. Look out for tough women. And history teaches us nothing unless we pay attention to it -- even when it is dramatized and digitally enhanced.