Today In Zhdanovian Hackery

Slate‘s Dana Stevens says 300 is a cornball piece of propagandic shit.

This is enough to drive Ace and Dean Barnett to new levels of outrage on behalf of aesthetic Stalinism. By God, they’re really gonna line up now to trade in their Cheetos for popcorn and milkduds at the local Cineplex.

First Ace:

Awesome: Amateur Leftist Webzine Slate’s Politically-Corrupted And Pussified Reviewer Hates “300” With A Passion Usually Reserved For Bush

Then a thousand words of blah blah blah, ‘how dare you slag a potentially sweet piece of war porn’ kinda shit.

Then there’s Dean, who had my sympathy when he said movies based on comic books generally blow, but then lost it when he reacted to Stevens’s review like so:

I guess we now have to see “300.� VDH says it’s really good, and it seems like all the right people might wind up hating it.

VDH. The war-bloggers’ ersatz and totally pig-ignorant classicism is his legacy. But really, by Stevens’s review it sounds like 300 is one long soft-core gay/hard-core war flick. Which is fine if it’s art, but these guys hate teh gay no matter what.

For a long time now, whenever I’d read something by VDH I’d immediately think of that line from Airplane: “So, Billy, do you like to watch Gladiator movies?” I’m sorry, but the ironies to me are hilarious. The Spartan Buddy System. The Theban Sacred Band. Gay as Christmas! Seems like, if I remember Suetonius right, all but two of the first Twelve Caesars these fuckwits would like GW Bush to more emulate were bi. Then I think more about it, and the ironies start to iron themselves out. See, for the Super Macho Men of the 82nd Chairborne, it’s not about teh gay as much as it’s about the “masculine”. What they really want to see — and of course try to live vicariously — is the butchness of it all. So long as it’s some tough guy slaughtering ‘barbarians’ for the alleged benefit of Western Civ, well… they’d rather not think of the gay part of it, but so long as it’s not in their face, it’s ok. Really, it’s a simple moral calculus for them: Appreciation of ‘righteous’ slaughter outweighs innate aversion to ‘faggotry’. Bring on the butch!

Anyway, they want their propaganda (art? fuck art!), and they’ll be god-damned if some woman calls it for what it is. Andrei, somewhere, smiles at their efforts.

 

Comments: 72

 
 
 

Which is fine if it’s art, but these guys hate teh gay no matter what.

They say they hate teh gay. In fact they scream it. But it’s all because they fear they are teh gay. So it’s gotta be butch, the piercing phallic objects have to be metal and the spurting has to be blood. They are all just looking for their bull.

 
 

The reviewer at Reverse Shot also noted that it’s more than a little tactless, in the present ‘shall we, shan’t we invade Iran’ environment to make a film that portrays Persians as evil, retrograde barbarians. Still, if it looks like a computer game, no one loses, huh?

Link (sorry for being such a tech-dumbass); http://www.reverseshot.com/article/three_hundred

 
 

Mmm, love stereotyping. It may not have a plot but I’ll see it for the gore and beautiful sets. Can’t wait for Act 2, The Sacred Band of Thebes.

 
 

‘300’, a brilliant pro/anti-Bush/pro/anti-Iraq propaganda piece written in 1998. Miller is just that prescient.

 
 

Yeah, they say they hate teh gay. In reality, about the only way you could get any gayer than Sparta would be to go to a 1975 bath house in San Francisco.

It is interesting that the comic book/movie King Leonidas would talk about freedom & individuals when in reality Sparta was almost an early form of communism (with added benefit of slavery). In the end, it wasn’t a Persian horde that brought down Sparta, but their own ideals of racial purity and doing stupid things like leaving babies outdoors to see if they were tough enough.

 
 

What Splinterbrain said. I’m going to see this flick, and I don’t need to feel guilty about it. A movie is a movie is a movie.

 
 

You know, it’s funny, but I just started the book The Anatomy of Error, about notable military disasters in the ancient world and their relevance for today. (The authors make the point that they reference ancient battles since we’re less inclined now to unconsciously take sides, as opposed to, say, WW2, and so can see the military situation more evenhandedly.) And, of course, VD Hanson is listed as a reference; regardless of his present politics, he does seem to have a lot of knowledge about the Greek/Roman eras and the military then.

Which brings me to my point (“FINALLY already!”): VD should KNOW DAMN WELL some of the situations described in the book, the first one being an ideologically-motivated leader whose obsession with a foreign country and the “lies” of its leaders leads him to a disasterous defeat at the hands of a people he should have been more than able, with his massive military, to subjugate. (King Xerxes at Salamis) And, of course, Chapter 8 deals with “an emperor launches a war to enhance his image with his own subjects and loses it because of a disasterous delusion of his own grandeur”. Thank god nothing like that could happen NOW, eh?

VD should know all this. The fact that he overlooks examples from an era he’s edcuated in of military power being useless in a given situation and instead is willing to cheer on Bush’s stab at American world hegemony means he’s either unable or unwilling to see what’s in front of his damn face. Which makes him a wanker, in any case.

 
 

You know, it’s funny, but I just started the book The Anatomy of Error, about notable military disasters in the ancient world and their relevance for today. (The authors make the point that they reference ancient battles since we’re less inclined now to unconsciously take sides, as opposed to, say, WW2, and so can see the military situation more evenhandedly.) And, of course, VD Hanson is listed as a reference; regardless of his present politics, he does seem to have a lot of knowledge about the Greek/Roman eras and the military then.

Which brings me to my point (“FINALLY already!”): VD should KNOW DAMN WELL some of the situations described in the book, the first one being an ideologically-motivated leader whose obsession with a foreign country and the “lies” of its leaders leads him to a disasterous defeat at the hands of a people he should have been more than able, with his massive military, to subjugate. (King Xerxes at Salamis) And, of course, Chapter 8 deals with “an emperor launches a war to enhance his image with his own subjects and loses it because of a disasterous delusion of his own grandeur”. Thank god nothing like that could happen NOW, eh?

VD should know all this. The fact that he overlooks examples from an era he’s edcuated in of military power being useless in a given situation and instead is willing to cheer on Bush’s stab at American world hegemony means he’s either unable or unwilling to see what’s in front of his damn face. Which makes him a wanker, in any case.

 
 

AAH! frigin’ frigin’ fring frang confubulum!

 
 

You know, I was thinking of taking my students to this. (I’m a classicist, and right now teaching a class in which we have read Aeschylos’ Persians and Edward Said.) Now I’m wondering if I could sit through it. Ah well, seems like it would still serve as a good, if ham fisted, locus for the kind of work we’ve been doing.

Oh, and according to Plutarch, I don’t think that the Spartans merely exposed their deformed babies. I think they threw them off cliffs. As yes, they were taken to a “sort of chasm” (“Life of Lycurgus”). Golly, just quickly perusing that text one comes up with all kinds of goodies.

 
 

It is interesting that the comic book/movie King Leonidas would talk about freedom & individuals when in reality Sparta was almost an early form of communism (with added benefit of slavery). In the end, it wasn’t a Persian horde that brought down Sparta, but their own ideals of racial purity and doing stupid things like leaving babies outdoors to see if they were tough enough.

Strauss & Ober have a different take on the ultimate fate of Sparta, and, once again, no relevance whatsoever to our present situation:

“…Sparta’s elite was not merely untrained in diplomacy; it was untrained in making the compromises with reality which any kind of long-term success demands. Spartans lived by the comfortable illusion of their military omnipotence, and they died by it. Agesilaus and Lysander lost because they would not face up to rapidly changing internal and external realities. Unfortunately, theirs was far from the last such case in history.”

 
Qetesh the Shaved Abyssinian
 

Amateur Leftist Webzine Slate’s Politically-Corrupted And Pussified Reviewer

Gosh, all that? How do you ‘pussify’ someone? Enquiring minds want to know!

And I’ll have you know that I did visit the review, and saw a pic, and lordy lordy sweet jesus and all the saints, that costume? Where does that boy keep his change? Honestly, the outfit reminded me rather starkly of Borat’s ‘man-string’. What’s the good of prancing around in something like that? Unless you were running about (like, in the thick of battle) you’d catch some sort of chill, and if you were in the thick of battle, well, all I can say is those who didn’t die of their wounds would die later of the chafing.

Interestingly, though, Pere Ubu, you’re half right. Although being half right twice might equal one whole, eh?

Anyway, you’re right about the whole ‘leader with big army and lying liars of advisors being crushed’ part, but I think the social milieu of the US is quite reminiscent of Sparta. For starters, and clearly oudemia knows much more about this than me, but the US has a very worrying martial obsession that’s blatantly obvious from a distance (ie they’re mad about soldiers and war and stuff). And they’re (the society) somewhat dismissive of the finer points of culture (I won’t mention bathing), such as erudition and literature and poetry and ooh, not smacking everyone they meet with a sword.

Just thinking aloud. Hey, it’s time for supper! Fishy fishy fishy fish!

 
 

Wanna know why VDH is so up on 300?

Q: Zack Snyder: “In the Making Of book there’s a guy named Victor Davis Hanson who is a…�

Frank Miller: “We’re his fan club.�

Zack Snyder: “He’s a frickin genius. He’s a Greek historian and we showed him the movie because I wanted him to write a forward to the Making Of book. I was a little nervous to be honest, because I wasn’t sure how he’d react. And Kurt Johnstad who he and I worked on the screenplay together, he actually also is a huge fan of Victor Davis Hanson. He went up to show him the movie at his house. And about halfway through the movie, it’s the scenes where the Spartans are leaving for Thermopylae and they’re walking out of Sparta, Victor turned to Kurt and said, ‘Are the Spartans just going to be naked like this the whole time?’ And Kurt kind of went, ‘Yeah…,’ thinking that Victor was like, ‘Okay, wrong.’ But at the end of the movie he said, ‘You know, I’ve got to say that the movie in some ways,’ and I’m going to post on the website just a little excerpt from it because I feel like it’s a cool thing for people to read because it actually puts a lot of it in perspective as far as from an historical standpoint. He says that, ‘Look, if you have a problem with distilling the Battle of Thermopylae down to freedom versus tyranny, you need to read Herodotus because he’s the one. It’s his fault, not modern culture’s fault. He did it.’ He references a lot of things like that because he feels like the spirit of the book and of the movie are very close to the Spartan aesthetic. That’s really kind of what he feels.�

Frank Miller: “When I started work on the comic book I said, ‘Okay, let’s see how the accurate version works.’ Imagining 300 slow-moving beetles wearing skirts coming across the field to face off, rather than these huge, muscular guys running with these red capes and those really scary Corinthian helmets. I mean, jumping back to Victor Davis Hanson, it was right in the middle of maybe our first conversation that Zack brought his name up, not realizing that he was citing my favorite non-fiction writer in the whole universe. I kind of felt we were starting to get along.�

Heh. Regards, C

 
 

The movie looks awesome, although Frank Miller would probably agree with the propaganda people are trying to attatch to it.

In his own words:

For some reason, nobody seems to be talking about who we’re up against, and the sixth century barbarism that they actually represent. These people saw people’s heads off. They enslave women, they genitally mutilate their daughters, they do not behave by any cultural norms that are sensible to us. I’m speaking into a microphone that never could have been a product of their culture, and I’m living in a city where three thousand of my neighbors were killed by thieves of airplanes they never could have built.

On the other hand, this part of the Slate review was pretty silly.

In a classic example of the epic understatement known as litotes, Variety’s reviewer observes that the picture’s vision of the West as a heroic contingent of sculpted badasses and the East as a cauldron perversion and iniquity “might be greeted with muted enthusiasm in the Middle East.” Replace the words “muted enthusiasm” with “a roadside bomb,” and you’ve got yourself a tagline for the Baghdad premier

This movie will embolden the terrorists! Don’t see it!

 
 

You’ll know a fascist by his/her obession with masculinity.

As far as “300” go… it may have the worst preview in history. It’s like watching someone play World of Warcraft while someone else yells in your ear. It’s headache inducing. Still a cast of ridiculously ripped guys in speedos; i may have to get the DVD so i can watch it with the sound off.

 
 

I’m speaking into a microphone that never could have been a product of their culture, and I’m living in a city where three thousand of my neighbors were killed by thieves of airplanes they never could have built.

And yet we keep having to invade them ’cause they’ll be building a nuke any day now!

Funny, innit.

 
 

Let’s put it this way, if the movie featured a band of 300 Persian soldiers (or any brown persons of the Semitic race) fighting an all-powerful Roman army (swarthy but mostly white Europeans), Right Blogistan would be apoplectic.

I’ve watched a couple of clips of 300. The artistic style is interesting, but it seems way too serious. I’ve watched dubbed Go Nagai anime with better dialogue. In my opinion, it looks silly, not cool.

 
 

lol at Pere Ubu. I never even caught that.

It saddens me that Miller could be so stupid. I also like how he thinks Iraq declared war on us. What the hell, man.

 
 

Actually, objecting to a flick on the basis of the political message you’ve read into it would be the Zhdanovian thing to do. This is an overblown, fanciful, histrionic, adolescent cartoon (hey, remember those cartoons where they’d paint characters onto a filmed background? Now we film the characters and paint the backgrounds – are we fucking advanced or what?). Sure, I could get all worked up that mythologising a militarised proto-fascist state like Sparta while restyling the Persians as bizarre cross-breeds of mutant orcs and every Orientalist stereotype you can name feeds into the kind of mentality we could probably do without right at the moment, if I wanted to take this film, or myself, seriously. Or I could follow the advice of Bill Hicks.

Take a deep breath – look at it again.
“Oh! It’s a piece of shit.”
Exactly – and that’s all it ever was.

 
 

Saw it last night, and the wingers will love it because on the surface the film is pure authoritarianism, complete with “freedom comes with a cost” quotes and the juxtaposition of The Noble Warriors and the slimy diplomats etc.
However when you step back and look at the bigger picture, it’s not so clear-cut. Spartans had no freedom to choose their path in life, all male Spartans were soldiers. In the Movie they saw themselves as free men, and refer to Sparta as a free society, when it is clearly not. It sort of underlined the “I love Freedom as long as your towing the Party line” mentality of the right.

Historically the Movie is way off on Spartan society, portraying them as heroic freedom fighters, when in reality the Sparta was the only city state in Greece that enslaved other Greeks. Spartans were viewed with distaste by other Greeks because of that.

I also found it amusing that there was a line in the film where Leonidas derided Athens as a society of “Philosophers and Buggerers of boys”. This certainly smacked of the ‘pussifing’ of the anti-war left so common in conservative circles. The historical truth is Sparta practiced State enforced homosexuality starting at age 7 when Spartan citizens were sent to the agogi (training barracks) to learn how to be a Spartan/ hoplite. (Again There was no distinction. All male Spartan citizens WERE hoplites). All Greek hoplites had homosexual relationships as it was felt that this improved the bonds of loyalty that were so important to the tight unit cohesion that made the hoplite phalanx unstoppable. The Spartans took it, as they took everything, to an extreme.

However all that being said it was still an enjoyable movie. If you think you would be inclined to like this kind of film, (i.e. More visual than mental, and pretty bloody, if you have seen the trailer, you get the idea, there’s no big suprises).
I liked it, but then again… I’m a pretty big nerd.

 
 

I’m sorry, but I have to agree that this movie looks like a piece of shit. Sin City without the hilariously hardboiled dialogue. “Looks like we’re in for a wild night”??? Really? That’s in the original Herodotus?

 
 

Rob, propaganda can be art, but cornball propaganda rarely makes the grade. I’m not saying Stevens isn’t a Zhdanovian hack. I am saying that I know Barnett and Ace are.

 
 

If 300 does boffo box office then I am going to corner the market on mineral oil before they do the remake…

 
 

The fact that so many of the yellow elephants of the wingnut-o-sphere have now inducted Cpl. Matt Sanchez, aka Rod LaBranche, into their band of brothers notwithstanding his prodigious career as a gay porn star and gay escort reinforces HTML’s point about their secret fascination with teh butch gays and steamy sessions in the barracks with six-packed sergeants.

 
 

Not an expert on Sparta by any means – but didn’t the wingnuts see the PBS series on the Spartans? Don’t they know that the night before the battle at Thermopylae, the Spartans spent combing each others’ hair and oiling up their bodies and equipment? Also, it seems that the Spartans lived communally, with the men taking every meal together and disdaining commerce and the pursuit of personal wealth. Not to mention,as above, the ruthless disposal of the post-pre-born when they didn’t meet Sparta’s exacting physical standards. Doesn’t sound very Republican to me. But if Lyonidas really did look like Gerald Butler, I wouldn’t have minded helping him oil up his equipment. No, not at all.

 
Marion in Savannah
 

Not that I was planning on seeing it anyway, but the New York Times savaged 300, and the review in Salon made me squirt coffee through my nose I laughed so hard.

 
 

Doesn’t sound very Republican to me.

It may not sound like the Republican reality but it is most definitely what the Republicans (or more accurately 101st FKists) imagine themselves to be. If only the homeland were to be invaded, then we would all see their bravery and macho preening. They love Red Dawn and gladiator movies and anything involving honor because, quite frankly, it’s the only way they can ever experience bravery. In their heart of hearts they know they”d lay down and collaborate faster than any Frenchman they make fun of.

 
 

The problem with Suetonius is of course that he had a tendency to make stuff up and not to fact-check lurid urban legends that only arose long after the deaths of many of the emperors he described. And baseless accusations of what at the time were seen as sexual perversions always were a popular tactic.

steve_e

Re. your question about movie about Semites fighting Romans etc.: Didn’t they make a film of the siege of Masada? Also, I would guess more than a few would probably enjoy a movie about Hannibal (Note: unfortunately “Hannibal Rising” is about a different guy).

Canucklehead

Sparta was far from being the only Greek polis to enslave other Greeks, that was just standard procedure for treating prisoners of war and the populations of conquered towns. The Athenians could be just as nasty, if not more so, vide their treatment of the Melians during the Peloponnesian War (men massacred, women and children sold into slavery, the island of Melos repopulated with other people). What scandalized many Greeks much more about Spartan society was the much more “liberated” position of their women (for instance, one author saw it as one of the most sure sign of the failure of Spartan society that so much of its real estate was owned by *gasp* females).

Also, most Greek states tended to look on their entire male population as soldiers in the event of their frequent wars (the main difference to Sparta being that in other poleis they did not spend their entire youth and adult life training to be warriors) and did not look kindly on dissenters, frequently driving them into exile (vide the institution of ostracism in Athens and how Themistocles, the victor of Salamis, wound up in Persia in his later years).

 
 

There has been a lot of academic work done on the links between wartime experience, masculinity, and a propensity to fascism.

One only has to read the work of Ernst Junger (Storm of Steel) to know what I am talking about. Junger was a highly decorated WW I vet who waxed lyrically in distinctly homoerotic tones about the ‘comradeship’ of the trenches. This was accompanied by a visceral hatred of women, and “girlish” men. Junger early flirted with the Nazis though, to his credit, he turned against them in the 1930’s and hid out the rest of Hitler’s reign.

The german psychoanalyst Klaus Theweleit published a brilliant, if somewhat loopy two-volume book on the links between homosociability, war, misogyny, homosexuality, homophobia, violence and genocide entitled “Male Fantasies.” It also worth a look.

Shorter synopses of these themes can be explored in Robert Wohl’s “The Generation of 1914” and in the work of the pioneering historian George Mosse. There is also some discussion in Dagmar Herzog’s “Sex After Fascism.”

There are strong correlations between militarism and homoeroticism.

The only thing these assclowns are lacking, of course, is the actual military experience.

 
 

By the way, a few weeks ago the review of the movie “300” in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (interestingly written by a confirmed comics connoisseur and Donaldist, Patrick Bahners) also panned the film and noted it was filled with shots that Leni Riefenstahl would have loved. And it concluded: “In (modern) Germany such a film could not be made. A loss we can get over.”

 
 

Wasn’t the Persian invasion a pre-emptive strike by the ruling superpower against two rogue states that had been supplying weapons and expertise to insurgents in Asia?

 
 

VDH is a natural bottom…not that it’s a bad thing…I’ve noticed a lot of Bush supporters bend that way.

Maybe we should ask the Logcabin Publicans for an analysis…

/butt jokes

 
 

Yeah your totally right Menshevik, All Greeks took other greeks as slaves. I confused the Heliots with slaves in general. However the exceptionally harsh treatment of the Heliots caused them to be the only slave population to Rebel against their masters.

 
 

Also, they left out the Greek armada. The story is a good one though, I think, the original, I mean, not the comic book one. I love all that stuff about the ancient world. These neo-facists we have now certainly would not care for the matrilinear society we had back when we worshipped the moon, instead of the current situation of worshipping the sun.

 
 

Suetonius, coulter, franken, hewitt?

Peri blasphemion -Greek Terms of Abuse

re those leather.. ..uniforms.. i was going to note that the spartans are credited with the invention of saddle soap, and this caught my eye. give me some of that cowboy magic fella! “silky protein” indeed.

 
 

My lack of desire to see 300 has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with the fact that Frank Miller is a power-worshipping, misogynistic, jingoistic chest-thumper and this mentality is borne out by almost everything he’s ever written.

Oh, wait.

 
 

Setting aside the historical errors, the silly costumes and the wooden dialog, the thing that kills me about 300 is the conflation of a GREAT story with weird imaginary creatures and other comic book bugfuckery. I happen to be very attached to the story of Thermopylae, for me it is truly courage distilled to it’s raw essence. I’ve been going to write a piece on this travesty, and this oughta serve to get me off my ass to do it. Instead of sitting through this piece of dreck, go get Stephen Pressfield’s “Gates of Fire” for a much more human approach to the events of that sweltering week in August 480BC…

mikey

 
 

Truthlover–

Yeah, I’ve been really amused by the Tom of Finland take that so many of the Cheeto fans have on the military. For such a homophobic bunch, they sure do come off as a bunch of leather enthusiasts.

 
 

ah, fuck this movie sounds like so much crap I actually resent having to learn enough about it to comment on it!!

I like Kenneth Turan of the LA Times’ comment:

With costumes designed by Michael Wilkinson, “300” pays a lot of attention to what its characters wear. The Spartan look — tight metal helmets, giant shields, long red capes and what look like black leather Speedos — is quite effective, though at times it makes “the fiercest soldiers the world has ever known” look like an especially fit group of Santa Monica lifeguards taking part in the Doo-Dah Parade.

Regarding the “freedom isn’t free” money quote – uh, in the movie isn’t the character who says that a woman? What freedoms and rights did women have in ancient Sparta, anyway?

the fact that there is a serious cohort of political pundits who see their views affirmed by a fucking comic-book gladiator movie is depressing enough.

 
 

-From “The Lives of the Twelve Caesars” by C. Suetonius Tranquillus

“He (Nero) castrated the boy Sporus and actually tried to make a woman of him; and he married him with all the usual ceremonies, including a dowry and a bridal veil, took him to his house attended by a great throng, and treated him as his wife. And the witty jest that someone made is still current, that it would have been well for the world if Nero’s father Domitius had had that kind of wife.”

I can only wish that George H. W. Bush had taken that kind of wife as well…

 
 

I’m seeing 300… because it’s always been an excellent story. 1000 guys holding a pass against overwhelming odds? Yes please.

Does this mean I lose my leftie credentials?

 
 

Doc –

I actually diagnose it as a bit of a wish-fulfillment complex. They have built up this ideal of masculinity that few men could ever hope to live up to, and which they certainly cannot live up to. So they project their anger about this fact onto others, denouncing Democrats as girlish, homosexual, wussy, etc. In turn, they fetishize soldiers, the military, and militaria, but can’t or won’t serve in the military themselves. Of course, all this has been discussed ad nauseum by other commentators on the Chairborne brigades.

As an historian, I know that analogies are lazy and often obscure more than they illuminate, but having read selected winger rhetoric, they really sound, to me: like the semi-fascist Italian futurists, with their celebration of destruction, war, and the masculine virtures, and their denigration of the left as impotent, insidious and polluting; and the small coterie of French fascists who clustered around Robert Brasillach and Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, obssessed with masculinity, purity, and corruption.

As an aside, I’ll also point out that after the Nazi regime collapsed, Rochelle had the good grace to commit suicide, while de Gaulle had Brasillach shot.

I am wary particularly of violating Godwin’s Law, but the similarity of the obssessions between the winguts and early 20th century winguts is uncanny, and not in the good Freudian way.

 
a different brad
 

Everyone, please, just bear one thing in mind.
300 cannot possibly be as bad as Troy.
Granted, a close up of Rush Limbaugh’s asshole defecating for 2 hours wouldn’t be as bad as Troy was, but still.
I liked it better when Hollywood stuck to pissing all over ancient Rome.
If they ever put an Alcibiades flick into production I may have to kill a few people.

 
 

I just hate this ‘movies from graphic novels’ shit. Fuck graphic novels.

The flicks always *look* neat, and some are okay, but could be so much better with some plot tinkering and a lot of dialogue work.

If 300 is a good movie, I don’t give a shit what its politics are — hell, I like the first Dirty Harry movie, and that’s the one Pauline Kael had a cow over, calling it fascist several times in her review. But it doesn’t sound or look like it’ll be a good movie at all. And I hate that especially because Themopylae is such a cool story.

If they ever put an Alcibiades flick into production I may have to kill a few people.

Are you kidding? The wingnuts would beat you to it. According to Plutarch, Alcibiades was a bit of a fop with a pronounced lisp. An accurate portrayal would totally fry their idea of butch.

 
 

Didn’t they make a film of the siege of Masada? Also, I would guess more than a few would probably enjoy a movie about Hannibal

There was a TV mini-series back in the 80s (IIRC). It was after the Jonestown incident, because I remember people discussing the thing in context of that. (I remember Masada being discussed again after Waco, too.)

As far as Hannibal goes, he has had two separate shows on both History Channel and the Discovery channel in the past two months, and he was highly featured on Engineering an Empire, Carthage edition.

300 cannot possibly be as bad as Troy.

I will admit it: I liked Troy. It was probably the first time I’ve seen the material handled where everyone in the audience didn’t despise Achilleus. Every other time I’ve studied the story or seen it dealt with, the common reaction was that Hector was the hero and Achilleus was the villain. And OMG, if I hear one more group of students complain that Achilleus can’t be a hero “because he cries to his mama” or is a “whiny crybaby”, my head will explode.

My main thought on leaving the movie was “Wow: a version of the story that made Helen sympathic and understandable, almost as it she were…a person. That’s fucking imressive.”

Handling these two (very difficult) characters well makes up for a whole lot, to me.

 
a different brad
 

See, that’s exactly the problem, html. So, so many ways it could go wrong.
Could become a gay rights polemic, with Ian McKellen as a non-platonic Socrates and Spartan sympathies and defection becoming all about adult ass fuckin.
Or could end up making Nicias into the hero and make it a treatise on manliness. N mine the abundant gay jokes in the culture, turn Socrates into comic relief via a half assed theft of Teh Clouds.
That’s why it’s dangerous. Enough there it could be an interesting idea, but zero chance of hollywood doing it justice.
Ah well, not likely a real risk.

 
a different brad
 

But, Dorothy, they accomplished that by turning Achilles into a vacuous little shit who just wanted to hear his name chanted. They made him sympathetic to your students by making him an American Idol contestant.
The treatment of Helen was, I agree, fairly well done.
Except, was that really an element in The Iliad, the question of Helen’s wishes?
It’s been a long time since I read it, so I’m genuinely asking, can’t really recall.

 
Herr Doktor Bimler
 

The set design was fun… Troy looked like a weird post-modern mish-mash of Egyptian pylons, the Mycenean lion gate, Assyria, and Babylon. I reckon the set designers dropped a few tabs and spent a night wandering around the British Museum going Wow!

 
 

So what is the dealio with Helen in the movie? I mean, with respect to her wishes? (Never saw it.)

 
 

And on a (sort of, barely) related note. Today seems to be Archilochos day at The Corner. First Derbyshire quoted him without knowing who he was (the “some barbarian is dancing around with my shield” poem). Then a reader writes in to inform/correct him on the subject. And now Kudlow is talking about the “one good idea” of the hedgehog (if memory serves, it’s really “one big trick,” but ok), without knowledge (it seems) of the source (our pal Archilochos).

 
 

Regarding the “freedom isn’t freeâ€? money quote – uh, in the movie isn’t the character who says that a woman? What freedoms and rights did women have in ancient Sparta, anyway?

Way more than elsewhere in Greece back then, actually.

 
 

g – – –

‘Regarding the “freedom isn’t freeâ€? money quote – uh, in the movie isn’t the character who says that a woman? What freedoms and rights did women have in ancient Sparta, anyway?’

It is generally acknowledgted that Spartan women had more freedoms and rights than the women of other ancient Greek societies (to say nothing of Persia etc.). Young women in Athens, Thebes etc. were as a rule confined to their homes, young Spartan women were free to go around in public places. Spartan wives were permitted to have children with men other than their husband (with the latter’s consent). Spartan women also could own property (Aristotle ascribed the decline of the Spartan state in part to the fact that nearly two fifths of Spartiate lands was owned by women), which IIRC was not easy for women in the US until well into the 19th century.

 
 

The problem with Suetonius is of course that he had a tendency to make stuff up and not to fact-check lurid urban legends that only arose long after the deaths of many of the emperors he described. And baseless accusations of what at the time were seen as sexual perversions always were a popular tactic.

Sure, and it’s been a while since I’ve messed with the literature on it, but please. Ok, Suetonius probably did throw-in every rumor ever when it came to Tiberius, Caligula and Nero, but c’mon, *that* stuff is exotic even for the Romans. Garden variety ganymedery, on the other hand, wasn’t. And that’s all I was talking about, the bi- and homo-sexuality.

 
 

Hey, naked Spartan wrestling is NOT teh gay. Just ask General J.C. Christian.

 
 

Brokeback Areopagus with Alcibiades and Socrates would indeed (heh) cause right-wing apoplexy, but I’d love to see it. It would put the lie to all of their “western civilization” cant, since it’s the hero of critical questioning, the founder of western philosophy, who loved boys and played cocktease to Alcibiades (even as erastes). All the while he earned praise for being a fearless soldier (Athenians had slaves, but they didn’t do the don’t ask, don’t tell crap).

And while we’re at Classics that Destroy Right-Wing Synapses, how about Aeschylus’s Persians?

 
a different brad
 

Well, metic women in Athens had it even better than Spartan women, tho I don’t know about whether they could own land. Probably not.

 
Qetesh the Shaved Abyssinian
 

Pere Ubu said,
March 9, 2007 at 16:53

I’m speaking into a microphone that never could have been a product of their culture, and I’m living in a city where three thousand of my neighbors were killed by thieves of airplanes they never could have built.

And yet we keep having to invade them ’cause they’ll be building a nuke any day now!

Funny, innit.

Funny indeed. The doofus also forgot to mention that “I’m part of a society whose every mechanical and engineering contrivance is built on Arabic numerals”. Whoopsie. Then there’s algebra, and astronomy, and refusing to eat rotten meat (unlike, say, the Crusaders), bathing (ditto), drinking only clean water (double ditto), and medical procedures more advanced than, say, leeching as a cure-all (you get the idea).

No, what did those damned Arabs and Persians ever do for us? And yes, I do know that Persians are not Arabs.

The thing that really gets me about crap like this is that those who brag of all the accomplishments of ‘our civilisation’ act like they did it all themselves. How many of these idjits even know how a microphone works? Yet they’re ever-so-ready to claim that ‘our team’ made them up, so ‘our team’ is better than ‘their team’.

Pah. I would spit them from my mouth.

 
 

The Persians is very lovely and almost mind-blowingly sympathetic. My favorite, The Trojan Women, is searingly anti-war. But of course, even the stuff they jack off to doesn’t mean what they think it means.

 
 

Speaking of “gay”, Al Gore is looking for volunteers to beta-test what he’s calling the Al Gore (TM) Personal/Global Methane Collector. This is a tank-and-probe apparatus designed to collect the farts of “global warming” fetishists, for recycling. Beta models are worn like a sort of low-slung, buttocks-hugging scuba pack. Gore is putting the word out to left-leaning websites for green volunteers who fear the planetary effects of their own methane.

 
 

That poo smell has returned…

 
 

HTML: fair enough.

Although after the wholly ridiculous flap over the wholly ridiculous V for Vendetta I’m starting to lose my enjoyment of winkling out subtext.

 
 

Fidel Cigar, do you have a blog? You should have a blog. I’m serious, dude. These liberals here, they’re like, so dumb and stuff. You know what they should do– bottle their farts!! Pwned!!!theloneliestnumber!!11! And Gore’ll make ’em do it! Oh man, I’m so linking to your comment…

 
 

Every other time I’ve studied the story or seen it dealt with, the common reaction was that Hector was the hero and Achilleus was the villain.

Well, even the Greeks considered Hector a heroic figure. Achilles may be the “hero,” but by modern standards he is a petulant, arbitrary butcher. Hector, in the meantime, is defending his homeland against invaders.

Of course, there are no real villains in the Iliad, which is something that’s probably difficult for modern Western readers to understand.

 
Qetesh the Shaved Abyssinian
 

Achilles may be the “hero,� but by modern standards he is a petulant, arbitrary butcher. Hector, in the meantime, is defending his homeland against invaders.

Odd, I’d have thought that by modern US government standards, Achilles is the hero, and Hector is an insurgent leader.

Just sayin’…

 
 

Qetesh the Shaved Abyssinian said,

March 10, 2007 at 1:14

“Pere Ubu said,
March 9, 2007 at 16:53

‘”I’m speaking into a microphone that never could have been a product of their culture, and I’m living in a city where three thousand of my neighbors were killed by thieves of airplanes they never could have built.”

And yet we keep having to invade them ’cause they’ll be building a nuke any day now!

Funny, innit.’

Funny indeed. The doofus also forgot to mention that “I’m part of a society whose every mechanical and engineering contrivance is built on Arabic numerals�. Whoopsie. Then there’s algebra, and astronomy, and refusing to eat rotten meat (unlike, say, the Crusaders), bathing (ditto), drinking only clean water (double ditto), and medical procedures more advanced than, say, leeching as a cure-all (you get the idea).

No, what did those damned Arabs and Persians ever do for us? And yes, I do know that Persians are not Arabs.

The thing that really gets me about crap like this is that those who brag of all the accomplishments of ‘our civilisation’ act like they did it all themselves. How many of these idjits even know how a microphone works? Yet they’re ever-so-ready to claim that ‘our team’ made them up, so ‘our team’ is better than ‘their team’.

Pah. I would spit them from my mouth.”

Well, to play devil’s advocate for a moment, at present there is one Islamic country that has built nuclear bombs, Pakistan, but are there any building jet-powered passenger airliners?

By the way, what you say at the end also goes for the achievements you so sweepingly claim for Arab/Muslim culture. “Arabic numerals” for instance were not invented by Arabs but come from India, and in a lot of the other stuff you mention they adapted and built on what they learned from Greeks, Romans, pre-Islamic middle-eastern cultures etc. Yes, it is astounding how far in advance the Islamic world was of the Occidental world 900 years ago in many (but not all) respects, but it is also rather remarkable how soon Christian Europe managed to catch up and overtake it in science, technology etc. while they stagnated in Arabia, Persia etc. (Which is not to say that in the future Islamic countries could not once again be at the cutting edge of scientific etc. progress).

To play Devil’s Advocate for a moment, we know that one Islamic nation has built an atomic bomb – Pakistan – but who here has seen a passenger jetplane built in Iran or an Arabian country?

 
 

‘300′, a brilliant pro/anti-Bush/pro/anti-Iraq propaganda piece written in 1998. Miller is just that prescient.

To which one may justly reply:

“Who the hell is Miller? This is by Zack Snyder, Kurt Johnstad and Michael Gordon.” Any source, let alone a graphic novel, can have a completely foreign set of political intentions written into its movie adaptation, as V for Vendetta was carefully scrubbed of any explicit anarchist content and made the vehicle for the director’s and writers’ politicizing.

 
 

Wait.

This is a film with a few hundred hardbodied, well, chiseled, oiled-up men in black leather Speedos……and I’m supposed to not go see it because of its politics?!

Why are you oppressing me with your politically correct bullshit? Bring on the Speedos! Where’s my popcorn? Is there any naked, oiled-up wrestling in it?

Because that would be hot.

 
 

Yes, but these are digitally-enhanced pecs. It would be like masturbating to Battle of the Planets. (Jason was actually pretty hot . . .)

 
 

To play Devil’s Advocate for a moment, we know that one Islamic nation has built an atomic bomb – Pakistan – but who here has seen a passenger jetplane built in Iran or an Arabian country?

If you include turbo prop planes, there’s the new Iran-140 passenger plane, for example (Google is your friend).

If you don’t include smaller planes, it might be instructive to think about how many major jumbo jet manufacturers there actually are at the moment.

 
 

[…] then there is 300, which is doubtlessly a piece of shit just like every other comic book movie. Sadly, No! Collects some reviews. Apparently they’ve added a political dimension to the whole thing. If […]

 
 

I’ve noted some reference to slaves in sparta, which really doesn’t make sense if you think about it. First off, slaves in the traditional greek sense were taken as prisoners of war, which spartans didn’t take. They either killed everyone or died.

Additionally, slaves wouldn’t have much use in spartan life. When they weren’t fighting, Spartans had horrible horrible lifes(assumming they grew up), that’s why they went crazy in fights. The boys were fed so little that they had to steal and fight to survive, and when they finally became warriors their diet subsisted on raw pork.

Additionally, Sparta at the time wasn’t actually under the rule of the king as the throne had been recently compromised(King Leonidas was very real, but just not an endall political figure). They elected two men to rule over all issues domestic, and the King remained as a sort of general.

Not seeing 300 because there are some scant similarites to current Iranian is like not watching a western because you don’t like western expansion.

-SH.

 
 

Biggest swinger and sex dating portal in the world. Have sex tonight!…

 
 

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