300 and politics


Too many people are seeing only what they want to in this film
I saw 300 on Sunday night and I thought it was pretty good. But I am amazed about everything that people are reading into it.

So is Neal Stephenson.

Thermopylae is a wedge issue!

Lefties can’t abide lionizing a bunch of militaristic slave-owners (even if they did happen to be long-haired supporters of women’s rights). So you might think that righties would love the film. But they’re nervous that Emperor Xerxes of Persia, not the freedom-loving Leonidas, might be George Bush.

Our so-called conservatives, who have cut all ties to their own intellectual moorings, now espouse policies and personalities that would get them laughed out of Periclean Athens. The few conservatives still able to hold up one end of a Socratic dialogue are those in the ostracized libertarian wing — interestingly enough, a group with a disproportionately high representation among fans of speculative fiction.

The less politicized majority, who perhaps would like to draw inspiration from this story without glossing over the crazy and defective aspects of Spartan society, have turned, in droves, to a film from the alternative cultural universe of fantasy and science fiction. Styled and informed by pulp novels, comic books, video games and Asian martial arts flicks, science fiction eats this kind of material up, and expresses it in ways that look impossibly weird to people who aren’t used to it.

It's just a story. Stylized, bloody, graphic, and taking all sorts of liberties with history, but just a story.

I have to wonder if the reason progressive filmmakers see political conspiracies in film is because their films have such a heavy subtext.

Maybe that's why the "right" movies don't do well at the box office.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Wed - March 21, 2007 at 05:34 AM  Tag


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