A Racist and
Insulting Film
300 vs. Iran
(and Herodotus)
counterpunch.com
Weekend Edition, March 31 / April 1, 2007
By GARY LEUPP
I
always take in the Hollywood period dramas set in ancient
Greece or Rome. My film-buff son is into this too, so we went
last week to see 300, the Warner Brothers' blockbuster
produced by Zack Snyder and based on the graphic novel by Frank
Miller about the epic battle of Thermopylae between the Greeks
and Persians. It had by that time grossed over 100 million
dollars and no doubt influenced a lot of minds.
The film tells a familiar
historical tale. (Rather, it ought to be familiar, but
history instruction in our public schools is not necessarily
comprehensive.) In 480 BCE, Greece was threatened by an invasion
by the Persian army, the greatest war machine of its day. The
empire of King Xerxes extended from the Indus River to Egypt,
and drew its troops from the ends of the realm. The king
personally led them in battle against the Greeks.
Or rather, some of the Greeks.
Greece at the time was a collection of city-states, politically
disunited, divided as much as unified by dialect and culture.
Some city-states, including Argos and Thebes, actually aligned
themselves with Xerxes. Herodotus, the "Father of History" and
perhaps the world's first professional historian, paints a
picture of a "free" Greece united against an oppressive "Asia."
But that is a chauvinistic simplification. The fact is, Persia
and the Greek city-states were all slave-based societies whose
notions of "freedom" had little in common with our modern
conception.
According to Herodotus (our
sole source), 300 Spartan warriors alongside 700 Thespian
volunteers defended the pass of Thermopylae against the
invaders, inflicting heavy losses on Xerxes' forces. Led by
Spartan King Leonidas, they went down in defeat but gave rival
Athens time to prepare the fleet that decisively defeated the
Persians at Salamis a few months later.
The story has been dramatized
before, notably in the 1962 Hollywood production 300 Spartans
starring Richard Egan as Leonidas and David Farrar as
Xerxes. This new version is distinguished by what one critic
calls the "monochromatic, cartoonish quality of [its]
computer-generated special effects"---and by its timing.
Warner Brothers had been planning a remake of the 1962 film
since the late 1990s, based on a novel by Stephen Pressfield
entitled Gates of Fire, with Bruce Willis in the role of
Leonidas. But that project fell through, paving the way for
300---just in time to help subliminally shape the
movie-going public's perception of Persians prior to the attack
planned on today's evil empire by Vice President Cheney and his
neocon staffers.
Persia is Iran. (I want to say, "Persia, of course,
is Iran." But I can't assume that all or even most Americans
make the connection.) The word comes from "Fars," a region of
modern Iran, while "Iran" is related to the word "Aryan" and
connotes "land of the Aryans." In 1935 the Persian shah opted to
use the name "Iran" but the two terms are basically
interchangeable. "Persia" just doesn't have the emotional
baggage of "Iran." During the Iranian Hostage Crisis of 1979-81,
many dealers in Iranian rugs decided to call them "rugs from
Persia." Persia on occasion has thus served as the good
Iran, the historical cultural Iran, as opposed to the modern
evil enemy. But 300 makes Persia evil too.
The Iranian government has
protested the film; last Wednesday President Ahmadinejad in his
Iranian New Year's address called it part of a "psychological
warfare" campaign against his country. Javadd Shamaqdare, a
cultural advisor to the Iranian government, also denounced the
film as "psychological warfare," accusing its producers of
"plundering Iran's historic past and insulting its civilization"
Editors of the Iranian newspaper Ayandeh-No declared that
the film "seeks to tell people that Iran, which is in the Axis
of Evil now, has long been the source of evil and modern
Iranians' ancestors are the dumb, murderous savages you see in
'300'." Iran's UN mission has stated that the film is "so
overtly racist, so overflowing with vicious stereotyping of
Persians as a dangerous, bestial force fatally threatening the
civilised 'free' world", that it encourages "contemporary
discourses of hatred ... [and] a 'clash of civilisations'."
Some western film critics have
echoed Iranian objections. Dimitris Danikas notes that 300
depicts Persians as "bloodthirsty, underdeveloped zombies"
and feeds "racist instincts in Europe and America."
Slate's
Dana Stevens calls it "a textbook example of how race-baiting
fantasy and nationalist myth can serve as an incitement to total
war."
On the other hand film critic
Dale McFeatters calls the Iranians "picky, picky," alleging
(quite falsely), "Well, your leader did threaten to wipe Israel
off the map." And Stanford history professor Victor Davis
Hanson, reportedly admired by Cheney and his (professional
historian) wife, posts his opinion on the right-wing "RealClearPolitics"
website: "We rightly consider the ancient Greeks the founders of
our present western civilisation and, as millions of
movie-goers seem to sense, far more like us than the [Iranian]
enemy who ultimately failed to conquer them."
Even if Zack Snyder and Frank
Miller had no intention of making an anti-Iranian film, or
promoting any sort of "psychological warfare," they've made a
film in which Iranians are indeed generically depicted in the
worst possible light. A Warner Bros. spokesman says, "The film
300 is a work of fiction inspired by the Frank Miller
graphic novel and loosely based on a historical event. The
studio developed this film purely as a fictional work with the
sole purpose of entertaining audiences; it is not meant to
disparage an ethnicity or culture or make any sort of political
statement." But it does disparage.
Herodotus depicted the Persian
ruler positively enough: "Among all this multitude of [Persian]
men," he wrote, "there was not one who, for beauty and stature,
deserved more than Xerxes himself to wield so vast a power" (Persian
Wars, Book VII, 187). But the Miller-Snyder Xerxes is not
even an Iranian-looking man but (like some other Persians in the
film) a distinctly African figure, who happens to be effeminate
and wholly vicious. Leonidas in contrast is white and manly and
wholly heroic in his fight for "freedom."
Color is kept to a minimum in
the film; the warriors appear in shades of black and white, with
the Greeks' red cloaks standing out provocatively around the
uniformly chiseled abs of the heroes. The Persians in contrast
are ugly or deformed.
"The Greeks will know that
free men stood against tyrants," says the cartoonish Leonides
(Gerard Butler) preparing for his suicidal defense against the
evil Persians. Greece is the "world's one hope for reason and
justice" versus the "dark will of the Persian kings." "We rescue
the world from mysticism and tyranny," he declares. "No retreat,
no surrender. That is Spartan law. A new age has dawned, an age
of freedom, and all will know that Spartans gave their last
breath to defend it."
The message is indeed clear.
Sparta = Greece = the Western World = freedom. Persia = slavery
and oppression. This was perhaps the gist of Herodotus' message;
he did write that while the Greeks knew that men were free, the
"Asiatics" knew only that one (the ruler) was free. But
that was a skewed notion in his time and can only dangerously
circulate in our own, while Iran is in the neocons' crosshairs.
Again, I think the Iranians might be over-concerned, since much
of the film-viewing crowd won't even associate the ancient
Persians with the modern Iranians, but the "clash of
civilizations" theme is definitely there.
I would propose that those
exposed to it imagine a different Xerxes that the nose-pierced
caricature in the film. Imagine a Xerxes who addresses the
American audience, including the Christian fundamentalist
audience, as follows:
"I am Xerxes, Emperor of
Persia, son of Darius, grandson of Cyrus. My grandfather
Cyrus liberated the Jews from their Babylonian exile and let
them return to Judea and rebuild their temple. My father
Darius urged our people to revere the 'God of Daniel.' I
myself married Esther, a Jew."
"I come from a long line
of believers in the One God preached by Zarathustra, our
Persian prophet whose teachings have influenced the Jews
during their exile among us. I refer specifically to their
concepts of Satan, Heaven and the future Messiah which
weren't part of their pre-exile belief system and are
clearly borrowings from our Persian religion.
"I am now embarking on the
conquest of Greece, a backward region populated by primitive
polytheists who worship capricious amoral deities and
practice absurd religious rites. But my ancestors and I,
having already conquered many Ionian Greeks, respect Greek
philosophers and indeed have many of them in our employ. We
have established a multi-ethnic empire. In that empire,
Greeks fill important roles from the Mediterranean to India.
"These Spartans
confronting us at Thermopylae are cruel men who
annually--for sport!-- make war on the defenseless helots
that live around them. They have nothing to tell us
Persians---or the world in general---about 'freedom.'!"
The writer of such a script
could claim Biblical authority. In Isaiah 44:28, the God of
Israel declares through his prophet that Cyrus "is my shepherd,
and he shall carry out all my purpose." Throughout Chapter 45 of
Isaiah he speaks directly to Cyrus---"his anointed"---calling
him "righteous" and informing him that "the wealth of Egypt and
the merchandise of Ethiopia" will "come over to you, and be
yours." The Book of Ezra opens with King Cyrus issuing an edict
declaring, "The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the
kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a
house at Jerusalem in Judah." In Daniel 6:26 a King Darius
issues a decree that "in all my royal dominion people should
tremble and fear before the God of Daniel." Esther 2:15-18
describes Xerxes' marriage to the Jewish maiden Esther. None of
this is historically reliable; Daniel and Esther are indeed
novelettes rather than history. The point is, these texts
revered as Holy Writ by many if not most Americans depict Persia
positively.
The Greeks, on the other hand,
cause "many evils on the earth." They build a gymnasium in
Jerusalem, for example (1 Maccabees 1:8). The Jews don't approve
of that sort of Greek thing, so Judah rises up in rebellion
against Seleucid rule in the second century BCE. Their rebellion
against the "free," "rational" Greeks is depicted as heroic.
The Greco-Roman world
continued to make war on Persia off and on up to the end of the
Roman Empire. But Alexander the Great, having defeated the
Persian King Darius a century and a half after the battle of
Thermopylae and acquired his vast empire, admired Persian ways
and actively promoted the cultural synthesis we call Hellenism.
Roman troops brought the worship of the Persian god Mithras back
to Rome from their Persian campaigns; the cult of this god born
on December 25 was a formidable rival of Christianity to the
fourth century. The greatest of the late Roman philosophers, the
second century Neoplatonist Plotinus, admired and sought to
learn from the Persians. Manicheanism, founded by the Persian
prophet Mani, was another religious rival to Christianity from
its inception in the third century. The knowledge of the Persian
Magi (Zoroastrian priest-astrologers) was respected in Rome and
Magi of course appear in the New Testament (Matthew 2:1-12).
In short: 300's
depiction of the battle of Thermopylae is not merely inaccurate,
as any film adaptation of a graphic novel has the perfect right
to be. It's what the Iranians say it is: racist and insulting.
It pits the glorious Greeks with whom the audience must
sympathize against a "mystical" and "tyrannical" culture posing
an imminent existential threat. It is, de facto, an
anti-Persian/anti-Iranian propaganda film, and should be rated
appropriately: not just R (for racist) but X---for extremely
stupid and vicious and dangerously ill-timed.
Gary Leupp
is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct
Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of
Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa
Japan;
Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan;
and
Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women,
1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's
merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and
Yugoslavia,
Imperial Crusades.
He can be reached at:
gleupp@granite.tufts.edu
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