Or, beautiful men killing each other excites me
'300', which I saw for the first time last night via On Demand TV, is visually one of the most impressive movies I've seen in a very long time. There is an epic, mythological feel to the imagery that goes a long way toward compensating for deficiencies in dialogue and acting.
Not that the dialogue is particularly stiff or wooden (or no more so than in many other action-flicks -Arnie's work springs to mind) but it suffers from the imposition of an alien political message. This message is straightforward and constantly repeated - that the struggle of the 300 Spartans is a defense of rationality, 'freedom' and 'democracy' in the face of Asian tyrrany, debauchery and perversity. There is a less overt subtext regarding nationalism woven into the movie's fabric as well. The underlying assumption regarding Leonidas' motivation in taking the Spartans to war with Xerxes is that it is a defense of 'Greece'. Greece as a coherent nation state didn't exist at the time of Leonidas and Xerxes. Sparta, like Athens, was a city-state that controlled surrounding territories and exacted tribute from other cities it had conquered. 'Greece' was a matter of linguistics, not of state power.
There have been a series of movies in recent years that deal explicitly with the ancient roots of Western culture, and make it obvious through the use of a certain set of shared themes (rationalism, democracy, freedom, tyrrany, national existence and unity in the face of an existential threat) that what is engaged in is an active re-imagining, an attempted revitalisation, of those things which are assumed to constitute Western civiilisation and its core values.
Troy; Alexander; The Gladiator (to a certain extent); and now 300.
To what degree they work, to what degree they reflect historical realities, and to what degree they distort those realities through the imposition of an alien set of values, are all matters of debate I'm not really interested in - though they wouldn't be off-topic if someone chose to introduce them in a response.
Certainly one of the issues of ancient culture that is obvious by its absence is the ancients attitude to pederasty. Pederasty is an aspect of what we now refer to as paedophilia. We treat the entire topic with unmitigated disgust and prurient fascination. Pederasty to an ancient was simply a part of the educative process. Older men, respected in their communities, mentored young boys - but the mentoring explicitly included accepted sexual relatyions between man and boy.
The boy took a passive role in the sexual act, the man an active role. Stigma only became attached to these relationships if a man continued in the passive sexual role into adulthood. Pederasty of this educative sort was commonplace throughout the ancient Greek city states - and Spartans were as familiar with it and accepted it as readily as did any other community. Amid the homoerotic imagery of 300, Leonidas's quip to the Persian ambassador that if even the boy-lovers of Athens had the spirit to reject Xerxes' demands then nothing less could be expected of Sparta, betrays an anxiety that's entirely modern and alien to the Spartans themselves.
They were known as the most ferocious, the most disciplined and the most devastating in battle of the Greek warrior elites. They were also known for braiding each other's hair and painting their faces before conflict. They were known for actively encouraging homosexual relations among their most elite troops, because it was thought a man fought harder and more bravely and was less liable to succumb to fear, if he fought with and before his lover. The fear of being made ashamed before the face of the Beloved, or worse still of bringing shame to the Beloved through failure or cowardice, was greater than any fear of death.
The homoeroticism of 300 is more subtle and understated than that in either Troy or Alexander (in both of which it sticks out like two very large and sore thumbs. But its as much of a presence in the movie as it is in the two others. I have no problem admitting that I find the sight of beautiful male bodies (because it's the bodies that excite, not the men inhabiting those bodies) pretending to kill each other through extreme and graphically portrayed violence (and the thoughts such images arouse of actual beautiful bodies destroying each other) sexually arousing.
The connection between sex and violence is not unknown in Hollywood, either. But almost always in American cinema, until very recent times, that connection has been made metaphorically through male symbols placed in violent juxtaposition with other symbols that can be equated with the feminine. These juxtapositions can be as crude as the portrayal of rape, in which the focus of the camera is invariably the face of the female victim so that male audiences can vicariously place themselves in the role of the rapist; to sensitive discussions of the 'rape' of the environment.
Only in recent times has the connection between sex and violence been played out exclusively in depictions of the male body in action against other male bodies alone (without the symbol of the feminine used as both justification for violence as well as a proper cause of violence), and with such enormous expenditure designed to ensure that the violence is stylistically as beautiful as possible while at the same time being as realistic as possible in its depiction of the consequence of that violence.
decapitated bodies fountain blood - and fall to the earth with the grace of a ballerina.
It's no accident that our models of physical perfection in adult males derive from surving sculptures of Greek athletes from the ancient period The Spartan fighting elite were not only ferioucious and extremely skilled killers, they were athletes to an extreme barely equaled among the athletes of our time. In order to take part in the movie the cast took part in a program of exercise designed to take their feeble 21st century selves into mirror images of physically perfect ancient masculinity.
The bodies that leap and stab and hack and bleed (fake blood that's completely convincing - until you cut yourself and see the real thing, at which point you realise that the only thing that really looks like blood is blood), despite the portentous voice-overs about freedom and democracy, and the actors' attempts to convince us that we are actually watching persons and not simply the balletic performances of articulated meat, are the real stars of 300.
In what's clearly intended to reassure us that Leonidas (and by extension the Spartans as a whole) really are heterosexuals in good standing, the only simulated sex that's meant to look like fucking and not killing that takes place in the movie occurs between Leonidas and his wife.
The reality of life for Spartan women did not include the right to speak in front of her husband - or any other free male. It did not include the right to appear in public. And it most certainly did not include the right to address august conclaves of men gathered to discuss the politics of the day. The role of the Queen in 300, while an excellent performance, is a complete fabrication. In relation to the actual center of the movie and its power to hold the audience, the battle-scenes, the Queen is an irrelevance whose real role - as opposed to the actresses's performance of the part - is to provide a further screed as to the supreme value of freedom: which, she says, is never paid for except in blood. Freedom for whom? The freedom of slave-holding property owners (who were the only free creatures in Sparta)? The freedom of the rights-bearing individual in a liberal mass-party republic whose state-officers are chosen in elections?
Freedom may be bought in blood. But neither freedom nor democracy are what they were in ancient Sparta. The Queen is there to say that democracy is good and does so over and over again. The fact that democracy then is barely capable of bearing comparison to democracy now is simply passed over. Democracy is good.
Penetration is the single commonest act portrayed in the movie. And just as the role of the Queen is obscure and unrelated to the reality of what's portrayed, so Leonidas's heterosexual qualification is conveyed to us through visual metaphor and intimation. Much unlike the scene in which Alexander fucks Roxanne, where it's evident that what is being portrayed is raw carnality, the sex between Leonidas and his wife is vague, ethereal, pretty.
In contrast the sex between spears and swords and bodies is graphically portrayed and, even in representation, penetrating. Penetration as it's used in the movie is every male's fantasy: indiscriminate, violent and imperative, Spear heads smash through torsos, swords lop off limbs. The violence serves to enhance the beauty of already beutiful bodies that now gleam and shine with sweat. Men fucking men to death has never been portrayed with greater grace of movement or more perfctly arrainged choreography. Bodies fly through the air as they did in the Matrix movies; but here the intent is to impress through the reality of what happens to a body when subjected to overwhelming, focused violence, not through an Otherworldly unreality.
Bodies subjected to such violence open in flowers of blood and viscera - they don't bounce. And the extremity of this violence does two things. It holds the attention of the audience like nothing else can. And it reinforces the new nyth that all these movies communicate - that the West came into being as a noble enterprise in defence of Reason, Freedom and Democracy and that now as then these values are threatened by Degeneracy, Barbarity, and Tyrrany.
Nothing wrong with that as a myth per se. But it's one that has a history extending back 5000 years, one which is now thoroughly played out and in which no Westerner actually believes any more. If they did the West wouldn't be dying on its feet. We are rotting from the inside out and all out myths are rotting away right along with us.
And that's also OK, per se. Cultures become diseased, senescent, and die just like men do, to be succeeded by others - or by newer, stronger re-inventions of themselves, as China is proceeding to do. And that's why, despite the presence of overblown language dealing with freedom and democracy that the movie is obsessed by images of carnage. The oldest myth of all is that it's in violence that we find and renew ourselves.
In 300 maleness returns to its sources in an attempt to disentangle itself from a culture that has no use for maleness as maleness has always understood itself, as an epitome of violence. The fact that the movie also denies all those elements of ancient cultures that gave birth to that violence and masculinity simply reveals how confused we currently are.