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Microphones,
planes, and stereotypes
Those behind the making of “300”
Touraj Daryaee and Warren Soward
April 3, 2007
iranian.com
I have been following reactions to the movie
“300” and to
my article which appeared on Iranian.com as well as on
Payvand.com and in the
Orange County Register. Of course each of these venues has their
own constituency and so reactions have been somewhat different,
to say the least. But comments on Iranian.com merit a follow up
to my review which will come out to a wider audience in a
national newspaper. On the Iranian.com the comments by Parsa
Pezeshki and Darryl Narcisse caught my attention and interest.
The first by Pezeshki entitled “Ummm…it’s
a movie man,” calls my review “truly comical,” while
Narcisse felt that my reflections were bordering on absurdity.
Indeed, perhaps I have had my head buried in
the books for too long, but having taken courses on politics and
history through film (such courses are offered at major
universities in the U.S., especially for those who are
interested in American popular culture!), I am still quite
disturbed by the intentions of the film. In fact, it is these
scholarly pursuits that make me dig a bit deeper, past the
slogans and moralistic hyperbolae. I see now that the reason
that I reacted to “300” needs some explanation, in order that
our friends understand why this is not just a movie.
Yes, Zack Snyder’s “300” is just a movie,
based on a graphic novel, a form of comic book, by Frank Miller.
But let’s talk about some of the people involved in making the
film. Who is Frank Miller? Oh, he writes comic books. Do you
accept the premise that one’s political ideology and worldview
affects her or his creative work? If you say no, there is no
need for you to read another word of this article and please
either get an education or just head to the beach. Otherwise, if
you feel that intent might be important, let’s see how Mr.
Miller, Mr. Snyder, and their consultants see the world and the
“others,” i.e., the people of the Middle East.
Thanks to a friend, I was able to obtain the
transcripts of a recent interview with Frank Miller, made on
January 24, 2007, about President Bush’s State of the Union
address. Let me give you his responses and thoughts on the
current state of affairs in the world (I’ve highlighted the
important words):
(National Public Radio – NPR): Frank, what’s
the state of the union?
Frank Miller: Well. I don’t really find myself
worrying about the state of the union as I do the state of the
home-front. It seems to me quite obvious that our country and
the entire Western World is up against an
existential foe that knows exactly what it wants … and we’re
behaving like a collapsing empire…
NPR: A lot of people would say what America
has done abroad has led to the doubts and even the hatred of its
own citizens.
Frank Miller: Well, okay, then let’s finally
talk about the enemy. For some reason, nobody
seems to be talking about who we’re up against, and the sixth
century barbarism that they actually represent.
These people saw peoples’ heads off. They enslave women, they
genitally mutilate their daughters, they do not behave by any
cultural norms that are sensible to us. I’m
speaking into a microphone that never could have been a product
of their culture, and I’m living in a city
where three thousand of my neighbors were killed by thieves of
airplanes they never could have built.
NPR: As you look at people around you, though,
why do you think they’re so, as you would put it, self-absorbed,
even whiny?
Frank Miller: Well, I’d say it’s for the same
reason the Athenians and Romans were. We’ve got
it a little good right now. Where I would fault President Bush
the most, was that in the wake of 9/11, he motivated our
military, but he didn’t call the nation into a state of
war…”
Of course, I know that there are people who
hate Islam and all that it represents, but from certain American
perspectives, such as the one espoused by Frank Miller, if you
live in that part of the world, be you Arab, Persian, or any
other, you are on the side of those who have attacked the U.S.
on 9/11. Is anyone telling me that the moive has not then
consciously portrayed the Persian army of king Xerxes like the
Taliban terrorists and the Iraqi insurgents who use IEDs to kill
American soldiers?
What about Zack Snyder? I see him as more of a
man making a buck, something that the movie industry aims at
anyway. By all accounts he is successful. I very much liked his
Sin City. I thought it was good. He also gave an
interview which was, in short, about whether we should change
the world “Persian” to “Zoroastrian” because of the current
issues and to avoid offending anyone. An interviewer mentioned
that, before the movie was finished, it had been observed that
Leonidas, the king of the Spartans, came off like George Bush.
Snyder replied that he hadn’t thought much about it and if
Leonidas did sound like Bush, all the better.
Oh, still would you say, ‘umm it’s just a
movie, man, get over it?’ Frank Miller is just doing a comic
book and Zack Snyder is making a fun movie? So, has anyone read
the book 300: The Art of the Film? Does anyone know who
has written the forward to it? Since I deal
with “absurdities,” and I just can’t take things lightly, I
searched for the name of the person who has helped turn “just”
comic book into to “just” a movie. The name of that person is
Victor Davis Hanson. Who is he, you might ask? He is a professor
of Classics (Greek and Latin) at California State University,
Fresno and is an “expert” on the “Western” way of war, whatever
that means (for criticisms see "Speaker
debates 'Cheney's favorite historian'"). So why was a
historian of Greek warfare asked to write the forward to a book
about its making? So next time someone tells you, ‘oh there is
no real historical substance to the film,’ ask them why it was
necessary for an ancient historian to attempt to lend
intellectual legitimacy to it.
But for me, what is much more troubling is
who Victor Davis Hanson is, and what he stands for. Beside
his work on Greek agriculture and warfare, he does other things.
Mr. Hanson is also a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute,
Stanford University. If you do not already know about the
“great” Hoover Institute, then do some searching and ask people
in academia about it. Ummm, and what does Dr. Hanson do in his
spare time when he is not writing about Greek techniques of
warfare and how they saved Western Civilization from the
Barbarians (people like me)? Well, he writes, not on ancient
history, but on current events for William Buckley’s
National Review Online and other “conservative” (today they
are called Neo-conservative) news outlets, as well as his
website,
victorhanson.com. He has several interesting books which I
suggest you look at, such as AnAutumn of War: What America
Learned from September 11 and the War on Terrorism (2002).
President Bush and Vice President Cheney have met him and are
enamored by
his views. In fact Hanson’s AnAutumn of War is one
of Cheney's favorite recent books. In October 2002, during the
run-up to the Iraq invasion, Cheney invited Hanson to the vice
president's mansion for a meeting followed by dinner. Cheney
said little but
asked many questions. So Hanson provides the intellectual
force behind
Cheney’s views.
The fallacy in his historical outlook is clear
by such statement as:
“The phrase “300 Spartans” evokes not only
the ancient battle of Thermopylae, but also the larger idea of
fighting for freedom against all odds — a notion subsequently to
be enshrined
through some 2,500 years
of Western civilization”.
So he not only provides a skewed portrayal of
ancient history, he is also consulted by the so-called
compassionate conservatives for purposes of skewing present-day
matters of the Middle East!
Dr. Hanson’s other book, Between War and
Peace: Lesson from Afghanistan to Iraq (2004) includes such
interesting essays as: “Don Rumsfeld, A Radical for Our Time,”
“History Isn’t on the Palestinians’ Side,” and “Misunderstanding
America: We’re Not the Ones with the Problems,” and he has also
written on other things such as Why the West Has Won?
(2002); Ripples of Battle: How Wars of the past Still
Determine how We Fight, how We Live, and how We Think
(2004).
Even more troubling to me is yet another side
of Victor Davis Hanson’s writing, that which has to do with
seeing the non-Anglo immigrants as contaminating the pure center
of Western Civilization, the U.S.A. He is the author of
Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (2004) and with this book
he became an instant hero of the anti-immigrant movement in the
U.S. To quote one reviewer, “He (Hanson) argues that ‘cultural
relativism’ and ‘multiculturalism’ – which
contend that all cultures possess inherent value
– ‘have escaped from the university and circulate like an
airborne toxin in the popular culture’ (p. 6)
(review online by Walter A. Ewing, The American Immigration Law
Foundation) (bold words mine).
For Hanson, all cultures are not
equal and should not be appreciated. And not only is he
in a state of panic about the Mexican immigration attacking the
America which he once knew, but others are not so welcome
either. One of my students, after reading Hanson’s chapter in a
book called What if? hypothesizing an alternative
history in which the Persians won the battle of Salamis in 480
BCE, and which suggested that, as a result, freedom and
democracy would not be alive today? My student had asked the
author, “Do you think I am an uncivilized person because I am
coming from an Iranian civilization?” and he was answered by
Hanson that, “If you are from that civilization, I think you are
uncivilized, but I think you are part of Western civilization
now.”
Dear readers, these are the people behind the
book and the movie “300.” You can not say that such individuals
have been just writing a comic book and just
making a movie with the aid of a ethnocentric historian.
I hope that that my “absurdities” have become
a bit more clear, and I also hope that it is clear that “300” is
not “just, ummm, a film, man,” but that it is informed by an
pseudo-intellectual force that is behind many of these types of
projects which portray the ancient Persians as the epitome of
the modern enemy of the United States. For Hanson, what is
unfortunate is that the war between the Greeks and the Persians
is still not over but rather has been carrying on for the past
2,500 years. A very sad mindset, indeed. Once we allow this type
of stereotyping to continue to bombard the American viewing
audience, many whose main mode of learning is visual, you will
generate an even more negative view of “others” and also of us
Persians/Iranians in the United States. It is these subtleties
that I believe are most dangerous to us as immigrants living in
the U.S.
When you allow books to appear, without
criticism, which call for the “encampment” of Muslims in the
United States (Michelle Malkin,
In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in
World War II and the War on Terror (2004, selling over
100,000 copies) or for stopping immigration from the Middle East
by the same author, Invasion: How America Still Welcomes
Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores
(2004, selling almost 300,000 copies), combined with films
portraying the Persians attacking Western values, killing their
women and children, hanging them on trees, and crucifying their
heroes, I warn you, we will be discriminated against even more.
If one does not criticize and articulate the phobia and hatred
of these people, then it is easy to end up in a concentration
camp somewhere in Nevada or Arizona, because the popular culture
has prepared the population of this nation for seeing all of us,
be we Arab, Persian, Turk, Muslim, Jewish, Bahai or Zoroastrian,
as the head-covered, turban-wearing lunatics who want to destroy
the American way of life, freedom, and democracy.
What we need is an articulation of Iranian
history in an intelligent and coherent fashion, one that is not
wrapped in nationalist language. The Irish and others had a very
tough time when they immigrated to the United States in the
nineteenth century. There were signs outside bars and other
places stating no dogs and no Irish were allowed, and now it may
be our turn if we do not stand up. When was the last time a
Persian or Iranian was shown in a positive light in Hollywood?
Lunacy on either side does not help our cause, but confronting
racism, Iran-bashing, and the bashing of the ancient Persians,
which “300” has done in many ways, has changed my aim in life.
It has certainly enlisted me to spend part of my time writing
not just articles for academic journals which are read by maybe
fifty people, but rather on a wider scale for the American and
English-speaking population to understand that in the sixth
century BCE, Peloponnesus (Greece which indeed was and is a
great civilization) was not the only place on earth that had a
culture, and that Persians, among others, contributed enormously
to this World Civilization (that is what needs
to be emphasized) who brought to the world such things as
backgammon, chess, and polo, the Persian rugs which the world
cherishes, the Persian cats that they are willing to pay so much
for, and that it was Persians such as Razi who found the
medicinal use of alcohol, and, Khawrazmi who formulated algebra
and algorithm (the word algorithm derives from his name).
Somebody should ask Frank Miller how his microphone could work
and his planes could fly if it wasn’t for some of these
contributions from Persian civilization.
About
Touraj Daryaee is Professor of Ancient History at California
State University, Fullerton. Warren Soward is his graduate
student.
See:
*
Academic page
*
TourajDaryaee.com
* Sasanika.com
*
Features in iranian.com
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