Saturday, March 24, 2007
300
Dear readers, do any of you indulge in historical strategy games, like Age of Emipes or Rise of Nations? If you do, you'll recall that such games typically have a victory option called Wonder, whereby you can win the game non-militarily by building and maintaining cultural or scientific achievements which ensure the immortality of your civilization.
I thought about this as I watched 300, which is a retelling of the ancient Battle of Thermopylae. You'd never want to play for the Wonder victory option if you were Spartan. Every Western imperialistic civilization from the ancient Romans to the modern Americans has had a big hard-on over Sparta, the legendary warrior society. Yet, despite that the Spartans dominated much of Greece for various periods, all we know of the them comes to us from other people. The Spartans themselves have given us nothing. No poetry, no history, no sculpture, no architecture, no science. As a civilization, they barely existed.
The plot, in brief, for those of us who have forgotten our Greek history lessons: in 480 BC, the Persian king Xerxes I sent a massive invasion force against Greece, but suffered gigantic losses and was critically delayed because a tiny force of Greeks, led by 300 Spartans under King Leonidas, held them off at the narrow mountain pass of Thermopylae ("Hot Gates"). Sparta had not sent its full army against the Persians due to political machinations at home which were resolved too late to help the valiant Leonidas and his men.
If you are looking for a good history lesson, look elsewhere. As director Zack Snyder eloquently put it "this is an opera, not a documentary."
This is a movie that is trying to convey a message, and so it should be judged on that message.
The movie frantically tries to deliver the pro-Republican, post-9/11 message that freedom comes at a cost, namely the cost of eternal vigilance and defence. This is a perfectly good message which I don't dispute in the slightest.
However, the film ignores (except, perhaps, by inadvertent implication) the much more important message that we can easily destroy freedom by trying too hard to defend it. As in everything, balance is key. The Spartans were so preoccupied with military defence that everything in their society was enslaved to it. Even slightly deformed infants were summarily killed. Children, in the name of "training" were subjected to every imaginable form of physical and mental abuse. The economy was a proto-communist one in which every aspect of society existed for the sole purpose of feeding the war machine.
And this is a civilization held up as an example of "defending freedom"?
But of course it is easy for us to understand such hypocrisy, since we live with it. We live in a society in which the secret police have the right and ability to monitor the lives of every citizen and to arrest and hold people without charges or a trial for extended periods, all in the name of "defending freedom".
Most likely, everything that America is doing in the modern day "Persian War" (i.e. Iraq) is every bit as justified as the actions of King Leonidas in the ancient one. But, in a free society, this should never be assumed and should perpetually be questioned. Further, anyone who tries to shout down such questions in the name of patriotism is really no patriot at all.
The central question of our age is: How much of our freedom are we willing to sacrifice for our security? We must never stop asking that question.
This movie, for all of its pretentions, provides no answers, only more of the same slogans we have heard over and over again during the past four years.
posted by The Propagandist @ 10:53 AM,
