[lit-ideas] 300 Shocker

  • From: "Lawrence Helm"<lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "Lit-Ideas" <Lit-Ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 15:52:41 +0000

Are there cracks in Hollywood's Leftist edifice?  David Kahane's review of 300 
would make it seem so.  This article was sent to me by my friend in Iraq.  He 
also sent me an article about Iran's outrage over the movie.  I'll send that in 
a subsequent note.

Lawrence

 



March 12, 2007, 8:15 a.m.

300 Shocker
Hollywood takes a detour to reality.

By David Kahane

Okay, this is weird.

Since about, oh, September 12, 2001, every writer, producer, director, and suit 
in this town has known one thing to be true: Don’t make fun of our so-called 
“enemies.”

Don’t stereotype them as bad guys. Don’t mock their beliefs. Don’t even 
mention their names. And for heaven’s sake, don’t make them mad.

Instead, try to understand them. Celebrate their diversity. And realize that, 
in a world (as the voice on the trailer intones) in which black is really 
white, up is really down, an attack is really self-defense and self-defense is 
really a provocation, we ourselves are actually the enemy.

This made things really easy. Out went any script that ascribed anything but 
the purest of motives to Arabs, Iranians, and Muslims. Back came everybody’s 
favorite villains: ex- and neo-Nazis (I haven’t met any, but I hear they’re 
everywhere) and crazed Christian fundamentalists, lurking out there in flyover 
country, itching to pull the triggers to establish a theocracy in a country we 
all know perfectly well was founded by unarmed vegetarian multicultural 
atheists.

Not even Jim Cameron could get a picture like 1994’s True Lies — in which 
the current governor of California slaughters hundreds of Arab terrorists 
single-handedly — made anymore, and he’s the King of the World. Instead, we 
got things like Kingdom of Heaven, in which the Christian ruler of Jerusalem 
becomes a hero by surrendering the Holy Land to the noble Saladin.

So now along comes a bunch of schmucks nobody’s ever heard of — graphic 
novelist Frank Miller, director Zack Snyder, and a couple of other writers — 
to pull in $70 million over the weekend with a movie about a handful of brave 
warriors who stand up against the limitless central-Asian hordes, iron men vs. 
effeminate oriental voluptuaries, and patriots against robotic slaves. How was 
this picture allowed to be made?

I’m talking, of course, about 300, a gory retelling of the Spartans’ 
defense at Thermopylae, which has got the whole town buzzing, and not just 
about its first-weekend grosses. Is it an ode to Riefensthalian fascist 
militarism? A thinly veiled attack on the Bush administration‘s insane 
war-mongering? Or is it something else?

Help me out here, because I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around a few 
things: When, early in the film, a sneering Persian emissary insults King 
Leonidas’s hot wife, threatens the kingdom, and rages about “blasphemy,” 
the king kicks him down a bottomless well. And yet nobody in Sparta asks, 
“Why do they hate us?” and seeks to find common ground with the Persians on 
their doorstep. Why not?

The Spartans mock the god-king Xerxes (whose traveling throne resembles a 
particularly louche Brazilian gay-pride carnival float), mow down his armored 
“immortal” holy warriors clad is nothing but red cloaks, loincloths, and 
sandals, and generally give their last full measure to defend Greek 
civilization against superstition and tyranny. Where are the liberal Spartan 
voices raised in protest against this blatant homophobia, xenophobia, and 
racism?

The only way this bunch of refugees from a Village People show can whup our 
heroes is by dangling some dubious hookers in front of a horny hunchback who 
makes Quasimodo look like Tom Cruise, and by bribing a corrupt legislator to 
tie up reinforcements with various legalistic maneuvers. When the queen finally 
kills the councilor, the others call him a “traitor.” Isn’t that both 
blaming the victim and questioning his patriotism?

You’d think 300 was a metaphor for something…

I heard the other day that one of the creators of this film is… yes, a closet 
conservative. And now he, whoever he is, is a rich closet conservative.

As screenwriter-god Bill Goldman says, it’s all about the next job. So that 
noise you hear this morning is the wind created by hundreds of writers from 
Playa del Rey to Santa Barbara, sticking their fingers in the air to see if the 
wind’s suddenly shifted, wondering if they can shelve their metrosexual 
Syriana and Babel knockoffs and conjure up some good old-fashioned “men of 
the West” material.

Because the dirty little secret is, we used to write these movies all the time. 
Impossible odds. Quixotic causes. Death before surrender. Real all-American 
stuff, in which our heroes stood up for God and country and defending Princess 
Leia and getting back home to see their wives and children, with their shields 
or on them.

And the dirtier little secret is: We loved writing them. Even a blacklisted 
commie like Carl Foreman came up with High Noon, in which a lone Gary Cooper 
defends a town full of ungrateful, carping yellowbellies and then throws away 
his badge in disgust at their cowardice. Sure, John Wayne hated it at the time, 
but today the Duke would be doing handstands to get his teeth into a part like 
that.

But then came psychiatrists and psychologists and Ritalin and global warming 
and racism and sexism and homophobia and the enlightened among us said the hell 
with John Wayne and Gary Cooper. Hollywood became one big Agatha Christie novel 
in the last chapter — you know, the one where the survivors of the homicidal 
maniac gather in the drawing room and realize: The killer must be one of us!

And then came September 11th and that was that. But now, I’m beginning to 
wonder.

Beginning to wonder if a $70-million opening weekend for a picture that was 
tracking at $40 million will get somebody’s attention. Beginning to wonder if 
a movie that has no stars, the look and feel of a video game, and the moral 
code of the U.S.M.C. might have something to say, even to audiences in New York 
and L.A.

But most of all, I’m beginning to wonder what it feels like to be the good 
guy.

 — David Kahane is a nom de cyber for a writer in Hollywood. “David 
Kahane” is borrowed from a screenwriter character in The Player.
National Review Online - 
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZjM0NDEyZjM1M2JlNjE0ZGMwNDEwMzk5MzlkZjJmYjA=

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