Careful Mr Ahmaninejad, in this latest, neocon-envenomed big screen stand-off, the figure-of-speech Spartans are onto your case. Well, three hundred of them at least—and the pan-Asian genocide they want to see beats Abu Ghraib hands down.. The rest of the Spartans—a metaphor for corrupt congress-people, East Coast liberals, reactionary palaeocons (terribly wrinkled), Nancy Pelosi--are relaxing back at home (and Pelosi’s going to Syria), fouling up the true patriots’ vision of what the film calls a ‘New Age of Freedom’. Betraying America yet again—and with so few of the truly enlightened left.

In this new ‘axis of evil’ allegory, as if daily scenes from the Baghdad morgue and ‘our’ casualty figures weren’t enough, US foreign policy for dummies rears its unbeautiful head. ‘Idealists’ to a man like the neocons—hard to miss the fateful words in the film script—the chosen 300, master-race prototypes of Rumsfeld’s leaner, meaner (and cheaper) killing machine, are stabbed in the back (yet again) by the ‘realists’ and ‘opportunists’. The ones who, like Clinton and Henry Kissinger, mess with Oriental potentates, accepting their oil and gold. (But not George W. of course.) It’s all in the film, disguised a bit sometimes, but most certainly there.

‘Typological allegory’ they call it with Virgil: you know, where Aeneas equals Augustus, and myth’s the same as history, more or less. Blurred distinctions, confusing fact with fantasy. The fascists did it a lot: Rome, the ancient Germans, any old mythical ur-volk in fact: we owe our national and racial character to that, anyone else is an interloper, rub them out or send them packing. Especially coffee-coloured types like the Persians in this film. (Would have been Egyptians in Virgil’s day, all that bad feeling over Anthony and Cleopatra.) That’s not just BNP policy: it’s the hidden, domestic agenda behind Samuel Huntington’s—anti-multicultural--‘clashing civilizations’ idea as well. If there’s going to be any globalization, the barbarian hordes had better watch out, it’s got to be on our terms, and our terms alone.

Stab in the back’s common enough too. Starting with Vietnam--remember Rambo, victim of East Coast liberal chicanery?—Adolf of course before that, and now this treacherous, once more East Coast liberal turn-about on Iraq, leaving poor Bush and ‘idealists’ like Perle and Wolfowitz in the lurch. By analogy with Richard Hofstad’s ‘paranoid style in politics’, the paranoid style in comic book history you might call it. And yes, what with Pelosi going to Syria, any softening up on Iran (the Persia of 300, get it?) is another–this time virtual—stab in the back. Virtual, in the sense that there isn’t enough money, men, or willingness for a real war.

So, less expensive (as in cost-cutting ‘neo-liberalism’), we do the war on film. Not that it was always so easy to distinguish Hollywood from all the ‘mission accomplished’ stuff or saving private-whatever-her-name-was in Iraq. But this one is a real simulated, culture wars, comic book foreign policy, computer graphics job. Not politics (given that up) but war by other means, something like Clausewitz meets Baudrillard, with plenty of room for development by the cultural studies boys.

Or perhaps its psy-ops: make what W.B. Yeats called ‘all vague Asiatic immensities’ seem so monstrous, so bizarre, so multicultural, and the rot in the American soul is abated. Well, either that, or the civilized in America go in for a bit of ethnic cleansing, try their hand, J. G. Ballard Super Cannes fashion, at some inter-communal violence—that’s the beauty of 300, it works both ways, skewers the internal and external enemy at one and the same time. Gives you outward and inward facing allegories of all that’s un-American (like multiculti lesbo slave-girls and rotting palaecons), and no good for the cause of Mom and apple pie. As Todorov says of the exotic, it’s the allegorical function that counts: who cares about ancient history, the Hurons, or Tahiti? The real question is who’s living next door and benefiting from welfare and big government.

I mean, an awful lot of these Persians, besides going in for body-piercing (not Bravo company type tattoos) are actually BLACK—you know, the buck n….r archetype, if you’ll excuse the expression—the sort of thing that brought the neocons onside with Rambo and the rednecks when that culture war business broke out.

And so, point number one, unless it just stays on-screen (perhaps cheapest and best), the New Age of Freedom’s going to be pretty bloody, with lots of purges of undesirables. As it says in the film script, point number two, no despots or mystics--though I suppose the ban on mystics does get rid of the other, Californian New Age. No Africans and Asiatics either (not if they’ve got pierced ears and noses, are good at archery, or wear Samurai masks like the film’s Immortals), no dodgy Arabian trans-sexuals (can’t remember seeing that bit, it’s in the credits though), no boggling at multiculti girl on girl action or Clintonian hankey panky for traitors like Ephialtes (a hunchback with bad teeth). No hip hop as such, but quite a lot of bling in the lesbo slave girl sequence. Can’t have that. And (lost count of my bullet points) certainly no coffee-coloured Xerxes types—body pierced all over the place, too tall, the owner of some over-sized elephants and a mutant rhinoceros, the kind of countercultural nightmare you might meet in some dodgy New York bar. And to go by his glam rock eye-shadow, most likely a bit gay I should think.

So that’s East Coast liberals, perverts, rock festivals, multiculturalism, and the disabled seen to in one blow—all to the good, I suppose, if you have a clashing civilizations or Michael Moore type living next door—even before we get round to Mr axis of evil, Ahmaninejad himself. (Myself, I thought I saw a lot of openings for free-trade, consumer niches for things like eye-shadow and better teeth, with these pan-Asian hordes. But then Sparta’s pretty protectionist, or only laissez nous faire I guess, what with interleaved shots, borrowed from Gladiator, of nodding wheat stalks in the Lacedaemonian Shires—or perhaps it’s the Mid-West of that pitchfork and Bible picture, American Gothic. Alternatively, the sub-text could be the Boer utopia, another job lot of warrior-farmers, spreading civilization with god’s help? It’s got to be some golden breakfast type of apartheid anyway, even if the shots are postmodern ‘irony’, wheat’s always a very bad sign.)

Come to think of it, though, perhaps the Spartans are a bit gay as well. I mean, what do you make of leather thongs, six-packs, no armour except helmets and shields, English accents (wasn’t that reserved for Pharoah in the old Fifties Hollywood epics? but then neocons like Perle try to sound mincingly English), upmarket version of Stallone type pectorals (as drooled over by arch neocon Norman Podhoretz, according to the gay ex-Republican author of Blinded by the Right). It can’t be get you ducky ormolu queen, too Asiatic, too coffee-coloured like Xerxes, more Tom of Finland, Derek Jarman or YMCA. White and manly, if you know what I mean.

But at least the Spartans are fighting for freedom and reason (book on that, absolutes, the Enlightenment, universals and so on, by the vice-president’s wife Lynne Cheney) so perhaps we should forgive them a thing or two. Like toppling a heap of rotting Persian corpses onto their hordes-of-Asia brethren as they edge their clashing civilization uncomfortably close to Greece. (Looks a bit like bulldozed corpses at Belsen, that sequence, but then I suppose it’s only the Persians this time.) Need to defend real civilization, you see. That’s why young Spartans, some with Beckham type shaved heads (but no pins in them) are brutalized from birth—with Mom’s consent of course. We’re introduced to that at the beginning, boys toughened up by a bit of face gouging and being left out in the snow with wolves: frontier spirit, Bravo company, I guess that’s what that bit’s about, one on from Baden Powell. Lantern jawed Spartan Moms wanting their sons reared in, and inured to, violence from day one.

Mind you, not all of the Spartans are so virtuous and patriotic: the Queen of Sparta, wife of Leon-eye-das (Leonidas to the rest of you), has to submit to a nasty bit of East Coast liberal buggery—one of those filthy un-Spartan ‘opportunists’ like Clinton—in exchange (she thinks) for extra troops to help out her commander-in-chief husband with a much needed anti-Iranian surge. Fair enough, I would have thought, what with Xerxes whipping all kinds of weird shit up, from as far afield as India—worse than Tolkien, at least it’s mostly only dwarfs, Gothic North and Wagner, in that Middle Earth stuff. And what would soccer Moms do if the epicentre of globalization took an Eastward turn in the direction of the monstrous, inscrutable, and decadent lands ruled by Xerxes (not to mention the un-American politics and forces he stands for)? If they lost control of the whole shebang, wouldn’t an awful lot of master-race bodies, and not just those of the film’s three-hundred, be coming back on their shields?

Add to which deformity, bad teeth, and miscegenation are severe Asiatic defects—but with parallels, it should be said, to point up this allegorical, external/ internal enemy thing, in the East Coast liberal and palaeocon camps. So we get these monsters from India, giants with very bad teeth, a no neck executioner fatty with claws for hands—counterbalanced by leprous reactionary ephors (a Spartan type of magistrate: more bad teeth) trying, like Clinton, to jig jig their size 0 girl oracle and, like the palaeocons, obstructing Leon-eye-das in his efforts for homeland security—plus, of course, to switch back again to the other side, the indeterminate race, no bad teeth but over-tall and gay bar-ish Xerxes himself. (A lot of the Asian trash, including the out-sized elephants, gets pushed over a cliff in one scene.) Then there’s the fifth columnist Ephialtes, hideous hunchback with bad teeth that he is: no cripples in the neocon utopia—same as in Adolph’s--only those capable of doing work outs and killing wolves in the snow.

I suppose the Christian right will love it—it’s bit like mad John Martin and the Book of Revelations in places—but Jesus himself isn’t in it (perhaps a problem with those three wise men: Persian mystics, you see), nor is the last Shah of Persia (though he could be, as a puppet of the old corrupt and pre-idealist, ‘don’t immediately reach for your Clausewitz’ USA.) The story-line, apart from the kicking ass and the gore, is mainly about Reason and Freedom (as well, I think, as the dollar bill’s novus saeclorum ordo, a combination of hidden hand—or golden breakfast—and iron fist): perhaps it’s all a bit too abstract for American Christians, even if they’ll be good (long practice with Satanism) at decoding the myths.

The moral?—get out of the way of the multicultural hordes (and any war of course) by signing up for a place in one of those nice gated communities like Celebration, you always know where you stand with Disney and good dentists. Still, a few questions remain:

John Bramble

Notes
1. Did these servicemen (and more important woman) who are constantly on TV sail into Iranian waters because they knew the film was on release? To swell the box office takings, I mean. Were Blair and blue Labour behind the too good to be true timing, the apparent ‘coincidence’? To coin a phrase—or echo Le Monde on 9/11—‘we are all conspiracy theorists now’.

2. Does this paranoid, incitement to racial hatred type of film-making bespeak a crisis in the ownership and direction of globalization? Is Asia doing too well (again)? Is the USA getting left behind (especially while saving us from tyrants and mysticism in Iraq)?

3. This is clearly a bad case of ‘Orientalism’ in Edward Said’s, ‘negative’, put-down-the-Orient sense. But what do we make of the British camel corps and eccentrics like the ‘white Arabs’? Yes, certainly, Lawrence was gay and enjoyed a good whipping (plenty of that in 300): but were these ‘affirmative’ Orientalists perhaps deformed and misbegotten, maybe even coffee-coloured, like the hordes they affected to admire? Or were they just English public school boys—or even worse Toryentalists--out on a romantic imperialist prank?

4. Comic book history leading to comic book foreign policy. Is this a fair comment on the neocons’ showing in the Middle East? Could this be an FO examination question if John Buchan, Rider Haggard, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, and the Indian Civil Service ever ride again?

5. How much of the whole tragic-comedy, 300 included, do we put down to Leo Strauss, the German emigre classical scholar who thought he held a secret key to the ancient world? After all, he taught some of the older neocons, and influenced the younger ones through his disciple Allan Bloom (another gay, but more on the six pack than the body pierced side of the fence, who believed in the eternal, Plato to Nato truths of ‘great books’. Of ‘great comics’, in this case, I guess—but this is Bush-era democracy, and education is dead). There’s a study of Leo Strauss and American foreign policy by Harvard scholar Anne Norton that looks suggestive in this respect. Get the ancient world wrong, get the modern world wrong, come up with a foreign policy reflecting both sets of errors: a universal history of Western supremacy and clashing civilizations then has a fair chance of shoving us all over that cliff at Thermoplyae. (Unless we live in a gated community of course.)

6. Do the neocons hold toga-parties? And why Sparta this time? Isn’t that a bit too close to Adolph, hardy warrior cult and rolling about in the snow? It used to be Rome (Mussolinian, comic opera Fascism) or Athens (democratic, comic opera imperialism, as per Richard Perle’s ‘Trireme Associates’ jab at the global market, its dirty Middle Eastern dealings exposed by Seymour M. Hersch). This Spartans vs oriental hordes thing looks like an ominous change for the worse, a ratcheting up of pro-war hysteria—unless, of course, the neocons are finished and, back to the wall, they’re letting it all hang out in one last torrent of venom.

7. The Scottish actor playing Leon-eye-das: is this a tribute to Tony Blair and the other neo-imperialist ‘teach them how to do it’ Scotties in blue Labour who—thereby ensuring the secession of Scotland from the Union--have fellow travelled with the neocons’ wars so far? I think it was Josef Goebbels who wrote of the need for a ‘steely romanticism’: hardly portending too well for the future, since 9/11, we’ve seen that acted out on many planes.

8. What will happen when the GSCE in Ancient History is abolished? More along the lines of this offensively racist, ‘do what you want with history’ tripe? Is the projected abolition of Ancient History another new Labour plot—designed to make people soft headed and malleable for want of other perspectives, and so more prone to fall in with the myth-historical, comic book form of ‘special relationship’? After all, the first thing that (real) tyrants do is to draw a line under history and proclaim a new calendar. War on memory to ensure that no-one harbours any illusions about other ways of ordering the world. Comic books, sound-bites, and the media, equating with Blair’s ‘education, education, education’, are all that anyone needs.

9. Was Iraq II the first Play Station war, and is 300 a blue-print for a follow-up? Aimed at the type of myth- and imagery-junkie moron who, against all the evidence, would go along with an out and out, life-imitating-art war against Islam? Thomas Mann described the politics the politics of interwar Germany as ‘a politics of myth and the unconscious’. Is a version of that on the return?

10. Isn’t the world sick of being rescued (from mysticism, multiculturalism, bad teeth, tolerance, tyranny etc) by the US cavalry? Of seeing Israel’s wars fought by the neocons, as Eric Laurent puts it (and that by shoot first, Israeli means)? What about banning the film on grounds of incitement to racial hatred? How does ‘freedom of expression’ stand, when something on a level with those old KKK shots of lynchings in the South is shown freely in world cinemas? This isn’t to approve of Mr A and his recent coup de theatre—more to ask if it’s wise to be seen as privy to neoconservative America shitting, Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib fashion, in its own nest. Yet again.