Dean Christakos« Birthday Parties Gone Wrong | Main | Reflections on July 4th »
April 25, 2007
My Last Bit of Commentary on 300
Ok, I will stop writing about this movie as a means of having stuff to post about. Really. But here's my last extended commentary on 300...while I was home in NJ for Easter, a lot of us talked about having seen 300, given that my father's side of the family is Spartan. Of course almost all of us had seen it, and for those that didn't, my brother downloaded a bootleg and made copies. We also played some of the scenes at home, and I distinctly remember the ending scene where the narrator of the story turns out to be the 1-eyed survivor of the conflict leading a combined Greek army against the Persian troops for a final battle to keep Greece free of foreign domination (the Battle of Salamis got skipped over).
There's a line there that gets the entire Greek mindset of the time completely wrong. In his big speech, he declares that the battle is about saving Greece from "mysticism and tyranny." Forget about the tyranny thing for a second. And forget about the fact that being a "tyrant" wasn't a "bad word" in ancient Greek. I'm referring to the "mysticism" part.
There's a reference to Xerxes' "hubris" in 300. You know what hubris is? It's thinking you are as powerful as the gods, and I think that Frank Miller and the other script writers for the movie missed out on that aspect. The first things you have to remember in ancient Greek history and mythology is you don't go against the gods and the oracle is always right.
On the former issue, think about The Odyssey. Along Odysseus's journey, all of his crew are killed by Zeus. Why? Because at one point, the crew is instructed not to eat the cattle on the island of Thrinakia because they belong to the god Helios. Impiously, they do anyway, and they all get killed. The Greeks were big on piety.
On oracles, really, I can't stress enough how the oracle was so completely the final authority on everything for the Greeks. My personal favorite story about this is related by Herodotus who tells that Croesus, king of the Lydians in southwest Asia Minor went to the Oracle at Delphi for advice about whether he should attack Persia. The reply he received: "If Croesus goes to war he will destroy a great empire." The empire he destroyed turned out to be his own.
Contrast this with 300... the oracle is controlled by some inbred devious men who try to tell Leonidas that he shouldn't confront the Persians. No Greek story (and remember that 300 is a depicted as a story narrated by one of Leonidas's soldiers at Thermopylae who returned to Sparta before their last stand) would ever portray the oracle as giving bad advice. The story of Xerxes is a story of hubris-- defying the gods. The Greeks would never tell their own story as one in which they themselves defied the gods and won.
I'm going to lay some of this at the feet of Frank Miller, who's becoming progressively creepier over the years. His heyday was really in the 80s when he resurrected a moribund Batman with The Dark Knight Returns. Now, however, he's gotten older and more curmudgeonly and weirder. This has expressed itself in his increasingly hackish comic book projects as well as his wacky cranky bedwetting over the terrorist threat (I might note that that last link goes to a blogger who thinks this is just dandy, but you can check out another take on those sentiments elsewhere).
Incidently, another comics giant from Frank Miller's era, Alan Moore, who really showed that themes in comics could be modern in mindset and themes when he did Miracleman, Swamp Thing, and Watchmen, has declined into creepy porny comic experiments. The people who I think are doing the best comic writing these days are J. Michael Straczynski and Robert Kirkman.
Posted by Dean at April 25, 2007 8:05 PM
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