Page 2 of 2 'Axis of evil' seeps into
Hollywood By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Thermopylae as a paradigm of Western
morality. "Courage," Dan Rather, a former
television news anchor, used to finish his program
with, and what better example of courage than that
displayed by the Spartans, who chose death over
retreating before the storming Persians - although
the battle scenes show so many Arabs to convey the
message that they are all part of one and same
"Asian horde"?
"Pile the Persians high,"
orders the film's main protagonist, the
defiant
King Leonidas, although
there is no evidence in history books that
he ever uttered such a thing. Indeed, none of the
subtleties and nuances of the 1962 film The 300
Spartans, which showed a feeble attempt to
portray the Persian King Xerxes correctly, remain
in 300, and instead our senses are stormed
by a crude binary ideology that separates the good
Greeks, frontier soldiers for the Western world,
from the monstrous Persians who look every bit
evil.
Discursively, the movie owes more to
Tom Holland's book Persian Fire,
meaningfully subtitled The First World Empire
and the Battle for the West. The movie's tacit
message is clear: two and a half millennia later,
that battle is still going on, and the West had
better resurrect the Sparta paradigm, albeit with
a feminist twist, or it is doomed.
It
would be futile to knock down this movie for its
historical distortions, given its self-promotion
as a fantasy/adventure. The opening scene, showing
the Spartans throwing the Persian emissaries down
a well, actually relates not to Xerxes but to an
earlier king, Darius, and Herodotus explicitly
refers to it as a "crime" and goes on to say that
when two Spartans offered themselves to Xerxes in
retribution, the Persian king "with truly noble
generosity replied that he would not behave like
the Spartans".
Obviously, it would be too
much to expect the film's producers even to hint
at such virtuous behavior on the part of evil
Persians, irrespective of the Achaemenid kings'
place in history as relatively benevolent
empire-builders who freed the slaves and set new
standards for peaceful co-existence among nations.
Instead, 300 portrays them as
bestial, dark forces descending on the civilized
world, without once mentioning that their
opponents, the Spartans, were slave-holders who,
per the accounts of Herodotus, forced serfs known
as Helots to war against Persians at Marathon,
Thermopylae and elsewhere.
Nor does the
movie bother with the slightest accuracy about
Persian attire, while omitting any such casualness
about the Greeks' outfits. This discrepancy alone,
meant to lend visual impetus to the movie's
Manichaean depiction of a timeless battle between
the good Westerners versus evil Easterners,
betrays its built-in prejudice piled on prejudice,
leading to excesses bordering on character
assassination of historical figures, eg by
depicting King Xerxes as homosexual and Persian
women as lesbians, etc. With their unbounded
Persianphobia, the filmmakers could not of course
let Xerxes go completely unpunished, thus the
facial wound inflicted by the flying spear of
Leonidas at the movie's conclusion, meant to draw
applause from the gullible audience.
To
bruise history, and re-stage it on the screen with
brutal manipulation for set political aims, could
not be complete with the king completely intact,
no matter the lack of any corroborating evidence
in history books. Hollywood writes its own version
of history not so much to complement as to
displace history as we know it through books, and
in 300 it succeeds where books and
narratives cannot possibly pass through the narrow
gates of studios ran by a few moguls with known
sympathies.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi,
PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New
Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview
Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's
Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs,
Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa
Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear
potential latent", Harvard International Review,
and is author of Iran's Nuclear
Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
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