Why you're supposed to hate 300, and why nobody cares

There are many types of films. But when it comes to my money, movies can fall only under two categories: those worth the 10 bucks for at the theater, and those only worth waiting for on DVD.

Or TBS if they're Gigli.

Then there are those films I've been told I really need to see but preventing this, is the political and moral divide existing between my pocketbook and those involved in the making of said films. This is not a short list, mind you, but one that certainly includes anything involving the likes of Rupert Murdoch, Frank Miller and Mel Gibson.

Unfortunately, the aforementioned are often responsible for those movies America will probably love and I will probably hate; thus I must absolutely watch.

So what am I to do if I want to hold on to my convictions (read: hold on to my money -- I just found out I'm part Jewish, it makes perfect sense) while continuing to keep my finger on the pulse of American mainstream society at the same time?

A friend of mine asked me if it was okay to watch Apocalypto while it was on the big screen last year; something about the unfair portrayal of the Maya, a boycott, and Mel Gibson being crazy.

I had just watched the film with several friends with whom I'd taken a Yucatec Maya language course the previous summer. We were curious to see if, four months later, we could understand the movie without checking the subtitles too much.

I was able to report that the movie was gorey, historically inaccurate, and who does Mel Gibson think he is, using postcolonial Yucatec language in a precolonial context and did he really think nobody would notice?

Man, he really is crazy.

So I recommended that if she still wanted to see it, she get a bootlegged version. This conversation, I can now trace back, marked the birth of a third category of films: those I can’t morally condone paying for but are worth watching so let’s allow piracy distribution to let them distribute their way into my computer somehow.

I don't know how it happened so easily with the movie 300, but it did. (Okay, I do know how it happened but if I told you I'd have to kill you, and I'm a pacifist so things could get pretty complicated.) But here I am, in Guatemala, watching a homosexual God-king mentally sodomize an impossible set of abs that I’m supposed to believe are not computer generated.

Can I just go down on the record saying that fellas, please breathe out. At least one heterosexual female out here thinks that abs that abnormal are not kute.

They're abnormal.

And not kute.

I'd like to think that that was Frank Miller's point -- that killing machines are sooo not sexy and that he and I are finally beginning to agree on something. But according to at least one online source with a bazillion, gazillion members, at no other time have I ever been so wrong.

Below is a very condensed list of the Facebook groups on American college campuses that popped up soon after 300's release:

"AFTER I SAW 300 I WANTED TO KILL SOMEONE"
"After I saw the movie "300" I wanted to go kill something!"
"After I watched 300, i definately wanted to go outside and stab somebody"
"After 300 i decided i want to be a spartan warrior"
"After seeing 300 I wish I was a Spartan"
"After seeing 300, everyone wishes they were Greek like me."
"Actually Duncan, to be honest, watching 300 made me feel less manly"
and
"After seeing "300", I joined 300 "300" facebook groups"

How's that for keeping my fingers on the pulse of American mainstream society?

Before I continue with the serious problems I have with 300, allow me to admit that it is a visually stunning film. Almost every scene looks like it came out of an exceptionally drawn comic book.

Duh.

But, I do appreciate that. I can't say I came out of it wanting to kill someone, and I certainly didn't want to be Greek. (Seriously, Greek?) But yes, the cinematography was breathtakingly worth my time. In short, I recommend watching it -- but get yourself bootlegged copy. It's a moral imperative.

Miller would like us believe that anyone who wasn't Western in 480 BCE was abnormal, deformed and/or animal-like -- lobster-clawed; mindless turbaned drones; burn victims from the womb which rode atop massive rhinoceroses (rhinoceri?) -- don't forget about the rhinoceri.

Not unlike the rhinoceri they ride on today.

These monsters are the ancestors of those we -- Team America -- are "up against" in the Middle East right now --

"the sixth-century barbarism that these people actually represent."

After all,

"the contention that all cultures are equal and that every belief system is as good as the next, is utterly reprehensible. We have to understand that some cultures are superior and some cultures are inferior. Our culture in the West is superior than their culture."

"Free" Greeks going up against barbaric Persians in the battle of Thermopylae should serve as a reminder that history is repeating itself today and we must back, not question, our fearless leader if (SPOILER ALERT:) the western civilization the Greeks sacrificed 299 Spartans for, is to be saved.

Yes, one survived. Even if he came home missing an eye.

Not unlike our troops today.

I was curious to watch 300 to see if I could re-prove (see: Sin City) to myself Frank Miller is an asshole. I'd been warned by equally insufferable graduate students who, for fun, can critically analyze an ice cream scoop by using the words "Foucauldian," "discourses," "panoptic," "essentialize," "constructionist," "gaze," "hegemony," "poststructural" and "postcolonial" all in the same breath, who, after watching Miller's latest installation came back reporting that the movie 300 proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Frank Miller really is an asshole.

I suppose that in order to catch the connection one would have to step away from 300's hypnotic cinematography that has you rewinding each time to say, "Fuuuuuckk.... that shit was awwwwwwwesome!" and first question why a film would want to depict all Greeks as humans while depicting almost every Persian as deformed and animal-like.

Of course, in order for anyone to believe this might be untrue, one would first have to believe that Persians in 480 BCE were actually of the human species. I think it's safe to say that they were. Their descendants, who don't have lobster-like qualities, are still around today and are actually quite hott. I get mistaken for one all of the time at airport security checks.

We call them "Iranians." And a rose by any other name would look just as hott.

(That's two "t's.")

Azadeh Moaveni, author of "Lipstick Jihad", wrote about 300 in an article for Time shortly after the movie came out. She described how Iranians all around Tehran were convinced that the CIA funded Miller’s latest project in order to prepare the American psyche for war.

Iranians may not be wrong about Miller's intentions. But how effective has 300 been at beating drums for a war with their country?

Does it take someone with a trained critical eye to decode Frank Miller's larger project?

Does it take actual Persians to catch on to Miller without having to hear him spew out his orientalist diatribe on NPR?

Catching up with an Iranian friend on the phone this morning, I asked him if he'd yet seen 300.

He hung up on me.

Actually, it was more like an awkward pause that lasted 2 seconds but it felt much longer which made me think he had hung up on me.

“I refuse to watch that movie,” he finally replied.

On the other end of the spectrum, my Lebanese friend, Matt, says he watched the movie, thoroughly enjoyed it, and admits he didn’t read that deeply into it.

“I just couldn’t get over their abs!" He raved. "I thought they were spray-painted on, but no – they were real."

Matt is currently a college student majoring in economics at one of the country's top universities. Matt is also from a country bombed out last summer because of nut jobs sharing Miller’s political ideology who differ only slightly from Miller in that they:

A) actually have their finger on the button
and
B) probably can’t draw

I've had plenty of undergraduate males from other leading universities concur with Matt's take on their new favorite movie.

"The lead actor was just on the cover of my Men’s Health magazine where they show his work out," says another one of our best and brightest. "Now I can’t wait to get started at the gym."

Speaking of gay, there exist entire groups of Persians mostly pissed off that the wardrobe department made Xerxes look like a homosexual: bejeweled face, liquid liner, fabulous eyebrows, and an eye shadow combination which I swear looks like it came straight out of my MAC makeup bag.

The humanity.

But I think all of their anger is quite misdirected. I say that what we should really be pissed off at instead is that Rodrigo Santoro’s eyebrow plucking secrets never made it into any Cosmo article.

Those eyebrows were art. Infallible, apolitical art.

Comic book fans have told me in no uncertain terms that the day Frank Miller drew better webs on Spiderman's costume was the day Frank Miller became a God. Certainly, if taking issue with Frank Miller's irresponsible depiction of Persians does not score as high a moral imperative than does the pre-Miller depiction of Spiderman's costume, then ... well, I envy you.

I really, really do.

I hope you never lose that.

So in short, this KABOBer's review of 300 recognizes that Frank Miller's latest installation seethes as an orientalist allegory for the U.S.'s wars in the Middle East -- a blatant propaganda tool to raise support for yet another war, perhaps this time with Iran.

But to think that the average viewer is really taking all that away from this movie would be giving Americans too much credit. We're just not that bright, Frank.

We're just not that bright.