Dir: Zack Snyder

The tagline for 300 is ‘Prepare for Glory!’ which is ludicrous because it’s a story about losing.  But then one must realize that this isn’t a movie about ancient Sparta at all; make no mistake, 300 is very much about America in 2007.  At times it seemed as though it was ghost-written by Karl Rove, in a last ditch effort to save face while confronting inevitable defeat, like the last stubborn and tattered American flags protruding from car windows after September 11^th. We may have been bested by the filthy middle-easteners and homosexual perverts, but, damn it, God was on our side!  300 is a jingoistic barely masked pro-Bush military diatribe, with dialogue lifted right from the Declaration of Independence and, I think, the Patriot Act.  It pummels into us the wonderful Bushian abstract of ‘freedom,’ and the enemies, who hate ‘freedom’ (I mean, who really hates freedom?), and about keeping the troops fighting until they’re dead because those who want to withdraw are pussies.  But it’s all fable and myth—both the source material for the film and Bush’s foreign policies.  King Leonidis is fighting at the head of his army; Bush is off apparently studying existentialism.  What they share is a common enemy of the Middle East—Persia, or as it’s known these days, Iran.  The connection certainly hasn’t been lost on the Iranians, with headlines in Tehran proclaiming ‘Hollywood Declares war on Iranians’ and the cultural adviser to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calling it, "American psychological warfare against Iran.

But it’s more than just an exaltation of Bush’s military policy; it also covers his domestic agenda.  This is a movie with Bush’s Family Values platform at the forefront.  For a homophobic movie, it’s baldly homoerotic—with more bulging, leather-pouched genitals than in the display window of ManZone and near-naked, ripped men slapping each other on the back and saying things like ‘Nice thrust’—but homophobic it is.  This is a world of Fundamentalist Christian values (King Leonidis even dies in a cruxification pose) where the enemies are condemned for their pagan and mystical religions, which is odd, considering this was well before Christ.  And aren’t the ancient Greeks poster boys themselves for paganism?

Men are men in Sparta/Bush’s America.  They have their women in hand, they train their sons to be men and not prancing sissies, as they chortle and guffaw and make slurs like ‘The Athenians are philosophers and boy lovers!’ (which is worse? Adlai Stevenson and Al Gore lost the presidency, in part, because they were intellectuals.  Intellectuals cannot be trusted, are somehow not real Americans; they lack fibre, and are probably queer) or accusing each other of ‘showing your backside to thespians’.

The only offense worse than being a Persian is being a big fag.  Look at Xerxes, the Persian usurper. Xerxes a flamer: lip gloss, movie star nails, jewelry, weak mouth, liquid eyes with the brows plucked and painted on like a drag queen.  He may have riches, but he’s a coward, he winces, and he shows up for final battle on a Gay Pride Parade float.  His court is filled with perverts and homos, like the lesbians, who, as if it’s not monstrous enough just to be gay, have their faces all disfigured.  Homosexuality equals perversion equals deformity.  If you’re not with us, you’re a godless, unnatural, deviant: when the traitor is revealed in court, he not only takes Leonidis’s queen, he pointedly takes her from behind.  Isn’t it just like those gays to always want to soild the true nature of Christian Right procreative love?

The movie is a huge success in America and this struck me as odd, considering the jingoism in a decidedly anti-Bush climate. It’s hard to imagine such a racist, homophobic, insular film being popular during the Vietnam era.

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