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Happy warriors

Frank Miller and Zack Snyder’s proclaimed fandom and friendliness toward acclaimed historian and bloodthirsty pro-war polemicist Victor Davis Hanson notwithstanding, I still agree with the majority of writers that reading political content into 300 is a bit like reading painstakingly rendered, absurdist, heavy-metal style violence into The Federalist Papers.

Nevertheless, King Leonidas definitely has something in common with today’s neoconservatives. The film’s only semi-human character, the ultra-violent King spends a great deal of time talking about freedom and justice, yet the society he defends has none of that on view.

First, there is the small matter throwing small, sickly, or deformed babies into wells. (Wwee…there goes me and most of my friends!) But I’ll let that go since I think we can all agree that the Spartans were not known for their compassion and since so many movement conservatives are suspicious of that particular emotion when applied to anyone not “Scooter” Libby.

Still, on the freedom and justice side, we’re talking about a society that forces all of its males into a particularly brutal form of military training and service at age seven, then encourages those military conscripts to steal from civilians to survive and perhaps even kill them “if neccessary.”

But, hey, I’d even give Leonidas a pass if he tried to defend the Spartan lifestyles as a necessary evil for the defense of the other, relatively free, less militaristic Greek republics. But his Spartans are not Greek Marines or Navy Seals who choose to be members of a warrior class, and their society is no freer than any military dictatorship. They view the Athenian “boy lovers” with contempt, while they prance mostly-naked through the snow like members of the Decapitating Polar Bear Clubs.

Sorry, but while I agree that “freedom is not free” I have a problem with invoking the word “freedom” as a pleasant sounding series of vowels and consonants while deriding the actual practice of freedom. Correct me if I’m wrong, but neocon idol Winston Churchill, a conservative and sometimes ruthless defender of empire as he was, never advocated turning his nation of shopkeepers into a nation of cold-blooded warriors to defeat the Axis threat. If memory serves, it was, you know, the other guy who wanted that.

Nope, in terms of counter-intuitive means of liberating our fellow humans, the Black Snake Moan approach makes a lot more sense. Really.

¿Quién es mas loco?

Of course, empty words and empty values in politics are old hat. In movies, I find them more disturbing. I expect lies from politicians, but not from filmmakers.

On the other hand, all that CGI imagery did look pretty darkly clear-yet-appropriately grainy when projected in DLP. Still, right now, I’d rather someone other than Zack Snyder was doing the movie version of Watchmen.

UPDATE: On a semi-related note the Sun-Times’ Jim Emerson has written the blog post I’ve been meaning to write everytime this whole question of whether film criticism is still “relevant” in the face of the fact that some movies with mediocre to bad reviews do very well. Emerson makes a number of salient points which I’ve been thinking but not writing.

He also makes asks an extremely salient question, and deliberately buries it. I’ll quote it here because it deserves to be highlighted:

Never mind that the vast majority of movies are losers at the theatrical box office whether they get good reviews or not. Could it be (and I think I’d better switch to boldface here) that mainstream movies used to have a broader, longer-lived appeal — to kids as well as adults, to the intellect as well as the emotions, to the heart as well as the gut — than they do now?