A Brief Return to Three Hunny

Slavoj Zizek takes a minute to dispel the mythical uproar surrounding the 300 film, reviewed by myself a matter of weeks ago. In his review, Zizek points out that the Spartans were the militarily inferior of the two fighting forces and, for this and other reasons, bear closer resemblance to Iran and Iraq than to the U.S.

Fine, fine. But this counter-reading brings up an interesting point about the assumptions people have brought to the film. What about the movie makes it appear to many journalists as a piece of American propaganda? Zizek doesn't go there, but maybe the answer is that Americans have so greatly internalized discussions of civilizational conflict that they believe Spartan society do be the ancestor of Westernism/Americanism and Xerxes' Persians to be the antecedents to some sort of Mid-Eastern bloc opposed to U.S. interests. One fears that Zizek himself may have fallen into the same trap by taking and legitimizing a view that, though it directly opposes much criticism heaved at the film, is trapped within the same dialectic. It is not really so important for 300's viewers to ask "Okay, who are the Americans? Who are the Iranians?" as it is to engage the many possible meanings of the film, be they relevant (or irrelevant) to America's and Iran's problems.

Perhaps Samuel Huntington casts so long a shadow that it dims the sight of America's best and brightest--that is, its film reviewers. This entire debate about 300's propagandizing, which has captured even Zizek to a small degree, might be more easily laid aside if one takes Amartya Sen's view of the condition of current global politics. From Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (which, not coincidentally, I just finished reading):

A uniquely divisive view goes not only against the old-fashioned belief that all human beings are much the same but also against the less discussed but more plausible understanding that we are diversely different. The world is frequently taken to be a collection of religions (or of "civilizations" or "cultures"), ignoring the other identities that people have and value, involving class, gender, profession, language, science, morals, and politics.

Despite the simplicity of Sen's idea (the entire book is largely devoted to fleshing out and illustrating the above-stated thesis), its reach is quite large. One might have a lot more to learn about 300 (someone should do a remake titled Three-Hundred) if he or she could take a less reductive view of the film and engage it along lines that don't merely address the civilizational argument. It appears clear to everyone that there are none-too-subtle overtones in 300, but there exists profound disagreement about what the movie actually means a posteriori.

It could be that 300's shocking, unclear message resembles the garbled language of terrorism. By spreading an aggressive, deeply cryptic message nestled in visceral terror and violence, the film provokes, even among the intellectual elite, a blustering and confused reversion to ideas that appear sound and comforting, in this case Samuel Huntington's Clash. More disturbing yet is the notion that real terrorist acts of the twenty-first century have done little to disengage the media from the civilizational debate, even over the subject of something so comparatively trivial as a fictional action movie based on a comic book.

Finally and tangentially, k-punk's jargon-laden, hard-to-follow backlash against Zizek. The dude is too old! He's sloppy! Maybe I took my tact because I didn't get this. Anyway both k-punk and I at least agree that Slavoj is missing the boat.