Greeks and Persians in Snyder’s 300
Saturday, April 14th, 2007Ahmad Sadri, College Professor of Islamic World Studies, Lake Forest College
I saw Zack Snyder’s 300 at a sleepy suburban movie theatre near Chicago. The lady behind me was telling her husband that she did not expect to like the movie because “it sounds too violent!” Those who came for that exact reason got their fill of digital gore. There were other dark premonitions. Hours before the movie I opened a forwarded Internet petition singed by some 10.000 bewildered Iranians who were shocked that their Persian identity could be just as savagely demonized as their “Muslim” heritage.
I didn’t sign. It is after all, a comic book movie made by a director whose last masterpiece was a remake of the “Dawn of the Dead.” Protests should be preserved for threatening preemptive invasions not fantasy flicks – even when they bang on the drums of jingoism. To my mind, Snyder’s 300 drinks deeply at the cauldron of rage that is still boiling over in the United States six years after that bloody Tuesday. Two invasions, a trillion dollars in smoke and three thousand dead Americans have not sated the Achellian anger in a remote part of the American psyche. The movie 300 unleashes that abiding desire to curse, brag and rave at “endless Asian hordes.” Bring’em on you barbarian slaves, you, you…, black, gay, effeminate, depraved cowards. Your friends are hunchbacks, deformed giants, midgets, magicians, eunuchs, perverts, lesbians and executioners. To hell with you all and your “mysticism and tyranny!” (more…)
