300 (spoilers)

Persians: Can We Join Your Fraternity?

Spartans: No. You go to hell and you die.

So, like, there’s this fraternity of warriors. They are so tough, their children are thrown out to die if they aren’t perfect. At age seven they are thrown naked into the winter wilderness to fight demonic wolves or die trying. Because of this,  warriors - definitely not potters, farmers, artists, or god forbid homosexuals – populate the entire city. They leave that amby-pamby stuff to other city-states. And they spend all their time practicing for war.

There’s this other group of people, and they are a diverse group. Mutants, certainly, are welcome, as are blacks, lesbians, Eurasians, Indians, and more. A flamingly gay baritone with an ego leads them.

This is not going to end well for the brown people.

300 is the fanciful story of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., where 300 Spartans died defending Greece from an attack by thousands of Persians under King Xerxes, who is a flamingly gay man who likes orgies (played by Rodrigo Santoro.) Several critics have compared the themes of 300 to paving the way for a war with Iran. I’ve also seen reviews commenting on the theme of extremely buff white men overcoming masses of possibly gay and definitely black and Asian soldiers in combat. Let’s put the film in context, a context I’m sure director Zack Snyder and comic writer Frank Miller never intended – this film is about destroying diversity.

The “New World Order” of the Persian Empire – where it’s okay to be whatever you want, as long as you bow to Xerxes – is strong, powerful, multicultural and devoid of morality, loyalty, real strength, and host of other values. It’s scary stuff for the mono-cultural Spartans, who think their fellow Greeks are lazy, homosexual effetes unprepared for war. In fact, the only Spartans that ally themselves with the Persians are hideously deformed priests and the monstrously deformed Ephialtes, who lack moral courage and prefer gold and concubines to remaining loyal to Sparta. The one handsome, buff traitor is the politician Theron (Dominic West) who rapes the Queen of Sparta who solicits his support in sending reinforcements to the trapped and doomed 300. When he reneges on his promise of support in the Spartan Senate after the rape and charges her with adultery, she stabs him, revealing his moral corruption in the form of Persian gold. Curiously he bleeds gold coins and not blood, when blood flies everywhere during the battle scenes. But he’s as morally bankrupt as the rest of the Persian Empire.

The lesson, which must be approved by the Bush administration, is that white people are perfect and moral and when you start mixing races, you lose the essential fiber of morality. Everything that is Persia – from the Spartan Priests who forbade the Army to go to war during a harvest festival, to the traitor Ephialtes who leads the Persians to surround the Spartans, to the lesbians at Xerxes’ gay orgy – are all deformed in some way. Their differences have led to a decay of values, and the only way to save humanity is to beat out all compassion and humility and turn your children into vicious killers for the state.

If you get past the hammer-blows against diversity, 300 is kinda fun, if you like bloody combat scenes. I saw it with a predominantly African-American audience. Judging from the catcalls and comments I heard during and after the movie, they weren’t too concerned with the portrayal of Africans in all of the bad guy “minor boss” roles. Also African-Americans are used to seeing people who look like them portrayed as bad guys all the time, so they may have chosen to overlook that fact as just another Hollywood convention. Snyder, like many directors, is overly concerned with slow motion, which by now is an overused technique. Directors would be wise to avoid this filmmaking tool, or at least use it far more sparingly, as it is on the verge of becoming its own cliché. Hopefully up-and-coming directors will rely on careful fight choreography that can capture the action in real time without resorting to slow motion to emphasize the fighting skills of the action stars.

300 has a lot of flaws, the most serious of which is a moral that borders on Nazi ideology of the übermensch. If you’re someone who can get past white men slaughtering brown men in droves while spouting off about their moral and ethical superiority, go and enjoy. If you happen to be a brown person, or read the newspapers about the coming war with Iran (modern-day Persia) you might find this far less enjoyable.