300

Posted by Marc Hodak on March 10, 2007 under Movie reviews | Read the First Comment

For those of you who have been concerned about the sissification of America promoted by our politically correct schools, this adrenaline-charged, ultra-violent movie should calm you.

I saw 300 with my two boys. Like all kids, mine have been inundated since pre-school with the virtues of sharing and niceness, or at least the appearance of such, and the vices of ownership and competition. It���s not overstating things to suggest that the liberated, educated mothers and teachers in the lives of these boys have sought to tame their innate, male thirst for conquest and transform it into a kind of sensitivity that holds a regard for other���s feelings higher than the desire to win. The hearty audience reaction to 300, even more than the popularity of the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars series, reveals the utter failure of this indoctrination.

300 is a morality tale about boys becoming warriors. The point of the story is not subtle or ambiguous. While my sons were hardly ready to join the marines upon viewing this film, their visceral reaction to the Spartan ethic and how it manifested itself into the willingness to slaughter thousands and to die with glee for their ideals was revealed in a simple reaction at the end of the film: ���Cool.���

Naturally, this story followed standard, war-mongering procedure. First, make your adversary appear less than human. In this film, the ���Persians��� were largely portrayed as grotesque, Orc-like creatures. Second, communicate their motivation as the crude desire to take away your stuff, your women, and your way of life. The bad guys are given those lines pretty much verbatim. Third, portray the good guys (the ones that look like us) as driven by ���freedom,��� which may be nothing more than freedom from being killed, raped, or robbed by your enemies. I���m sure that the irony of a Spartan society that took its young from their parents to martially indoctrinate them into the service of the state claiming to be fighting for ���freedom��� was largely lost on this audience. No matter.

The best way to go into a theater, of course, is to accept it for what it is. In this case, the movie is the rendering of a lush, red-tinged graphic novel (tragic strip?), pretty much page by page, onto the big screen. Critiquing such an art form in terms of historical or logical consistency misses the point. Nevertheless, the historical connection in this story to the battle at Thermopylae is fairly good. The raw, emotional appeal of this film is more or less the very basis upon which Greeks revere this part of their history. The corny phrases spouted by the cartoon characters have the power to move boys and men precisely because Western civilization was born of such clich?�s as, ���I would rather die free than live as a slave,��� or ���Freedom is not free.��� My favorite was the Queen���s line when she is asked by the Persian ambassador upon what basis would a woman in Spartan society speak to a man: ���Only Spartan women give birth to real men.���

All of which is not to say that I���m happy about this dominating impulse, even if its grisly portrayal in this film is more or less accurate. I tend to share Huxley���s revulsion of ���individual beings�Ķcondemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder and be murdered in quarrels not their own.��� But, I am not a pacifist who would assume away the existence of the state or ignore its fundamentally violent nature. I understand that every nation, however effervescent its production of art and science, necessarily began in the ruthless bloodletting of its adversaries, and would end that way if it did not threaten its rivals with worse. I believe that we ignore that reality, and the psychological basis for it in our sons, at our peril.

For better or worse, our youth seems immune to such de-sensitizing. Our boys seem to have an abiding antagonism toward the bad guys, however arbitrarily defined. They seem moved on a deep level to defend against challenges, however mundane. We don���t like to see the petty conflicts that can envelop our sons. We certainly don���t want to see them carted off to war. But parents are also creatures of instinct, and I find that most fathers share this one���a voice that says, ���Let them at it, until there is a little blood, perhaps.” It���s not about the problem being sorted out, it���s about the process of sorting. We believe it’s important for them to be able to do that without us, because some day they will have to. My sons didn���t learn the virtue of struggle from a blockbuster movie. The filmmakers learned it from the kids. The creators of 300 learned how to sell a classic story that taps into the collective unconscious of teen boys.