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.<\/p>\n
I saw 300<\/em> 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\ufffd\ufffd\ufffds 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\ufffd\ufffd\ufffds feelings higher than the desire to win. The hearty audience reaction to 300<\/em>, even more than the popularity of the Lord of the Rings<\/em> and Star Wars<\/em> series, reveals the utter failure of this indoctrination.<\/p>\n Naturally, this story followed standard, war-mongering procedure. First, make your adversary appear less than human. In this film, the \ufffd\ufffd\ufffdPersians\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd 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 \ufffd\ufffd\ufffdfreedom,\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd which may be nothing more than freedom from being killed, raped, or robbed by your enemies. I\ufffd\ufffd\ufffdm 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 \ufffd\ufffd\ufffdfreedom\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd was largely lost on this audience. No matter.<\/p>\n 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?\ufffds as, \ufffd\ufffd\ufffdI would rather die free than live as a slave,\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd or \ufffd\ufffd\ufffdFreedom is not free.\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd My favorite was the Queen\ufffd\ufffd\ufffds line when she is asked by the Persian ambassador upon what basis would a woman in Spartan society speak to a man: \ufffd\ufffd\ufffdOnly Spartan women give birth to real men.\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd<\/p>\n All of which is not to say that I\ufffd\ufffd\ufffdm happy about this dominating impulse, even if its grisly portrayal in this film is more or less accurate. I tend to share Huxley\ufffd\ufffd\ufffds revulsion of \ufffd\ufffd\ufffdindividual beings\ufffd\u0136condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder and be murdered in quarrels not their own.\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd 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.<\/p>\n 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\ufffd\ufffd\ufffdt like to see the petty conflicts that can envelop our sons. We certainly don\ufffd\ufffd\ufffdt want to see them carted off to war. But parents are also creatures of instinct, and I find that most fathers share this one\ufffd\ufffd\ufffda voice that says, \ufffd\ufffd\ufffdLet them at it, until there is a little blood, perhaps.” It\ufffd\ufffd\ufffds not about the problem being sorted out, it\ufffd\ufffd\ufffds 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\ufffd\ufffd\ufffdt learn the virtue of struggle from a blockbuster movie. The filmmakers learned it from the kids. The creators of 300<\/em> learned how to sell a classic story that taps into the collective unconscious of teen boys.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[4],"class_list":["post-5","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-movie-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n300<\/em> 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: \ufffd\ufffd\ufffdCool.\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd<\/p>\n