As you flip through Miller’s work, however, you wonder whether the key phrase in that impassioned statement isn’t so much “do the right thing,” with its admirable ethics, as “damn the consequences,” with its macho swagger. Until the release of 300 Miller was famous primarily for Sin City, a series of self-consciously noir graphic novels which traces, among other things, the solitary and very bloody quest for justice by a hulking, overmuscled, much-scarred loner named Marv as he makes his way through a profoundly corrupt urban jungle called Sin City. Marv is given to cynical, Philip Marlowe-esque utterances that everywhere betray—with what degree of tongue-in-cheekness can only be guessed—a gleefully regressive indulgence in a vision of hard-bitten masculinity that, predictably, harks back to the dour heroes of the noir films of the 1940s.
This is evident not only in the stark and often strangely beautiful graphics, but in the dialogue that Miller gives his hero. Here’s Marv as he tells a female friend about his thirst for vengeance against the mobsters who killed a prostitute he’d slept with:
There’s no settling down. It’s going to be blood for blood and by the gallons. It’s the old days. The bad days. The all-or-nothing days. They’re back. There’s no choices left and I’m ready for war…. Hell isn’t getting beat up or cut up or hauled in front of some faggot jury. Hell is waking up every god damn morning and not knowing why you’re even here.
A similarly gleeful defiance of PC attitudes colors virtually the entire novel, from its adolescent vision of its female characters as either helpless damsels or busty dominatrices to its offhand references to—well, the barbarian East. “Sin City falls away behind me,” goes one of Marv’s reveries. “Noisy and ugly as all hell. The Mercedes hums and handles like a dream. She may look like some Jap designed her, but the engine’s a beauty.”
To be sure, Miller is working here within a well-defined noir tradition and taking it to an extreme. But it’s hard not to feel that the defiant swagger he so admired as a boy, on seeing The 300 Spartans, has been internalized and then expressed in heightened aesthetic terms in his work—and not only in the Thermopylae-themed 300, which everywhere betrays the same heated investment in exaggerated masculinity and, ostensibly, heterosexuality. (The Athenians are ridiculed by the Spartans as being effete “philosophers” and “boy-lovers”; in the case of the latter, given what the historical record indicates, this is demonstrably an instance of the pot calling the kettle black-figured.) The emotional core of the book—more, even, than of the movie, in which the character of the Spartan queen has been enhanced—lies in this relentless celebration of the defiant, strutting, physically superb Spartan male. Miller and Snyder might be startled to learn that Aristotle, in his Politics, describes the Spartans as gynaikokratoumenoi, “ruled by women.”
The film’s pubescent preoccupation with magnificent male musculature becomes, indeed, a crucial plot-point in its retelling of the old story. In Herodotus, we learn that the man who betrayed the secret back route to the Greeks’ position was a local named Ephialtes, who like many other residents knew the location of the path, and who expected to be rewarded for his betrayal of his fellow Greeks. In the Miller/Snyder version, Ephialtes is, significantly, a grossly deformed, hunchbacked Spartan who betrays his countrymen because they won’t let a physically inferior specimen fight for them. Given the film’s overwhelmingly young, male audience, it is hard not to feel that this fetishizing of masculine posturing and masculine physiques, rather than its representation of the Persian enemy, is where a good part of its appeal resides.
And even this may not be the real key to understanding why 300 is the biggest movie of the year. Critics who have disdained it as bloody and visually cartoonish have gone out of their way to deride it as (unsurprisingly) the cinematic equivalent of a comic book: flat, episodic, lurching from one visually explosive moment to the next. But what’s really striking about the film is that it doesn’t even have the aesthetics of a comic book, to say nothing of a graphic novel—the best examples of which, at least, show considerable concern for subtle narrative rhythms. Apart from the awkwardly larded-through story of Ephialtes and the equally clanking, meanwhile-back-at-the-ranch subplot about Gorgo (who in this version uses her considerable rhetorical and sexual wiles to manipulate the Spartan senate into sending reinforcements to her husband’s outnumbered band—gynaikokratoumenoi, indeed), 300 consists primarily of consecutive scenes depicting the Spartans mowing down the ever more scary-looking Persian antagonists who keep coming at them. First there are the ordinary Persian foot soldiers; then the so-called Immortals, here inexplicably represented as wearing metallic, vaguely Kabuki-like masks that conceal grotesque mutant faces and slobbering, fanged mouths; then the freaks and elephants and monsters, all culminating in a last defiant stand in which Leonidas wounds Xerxes himself before being annihilated in a shower of Persian arrows.
As I sat watching this progression during my first viewing of 300, I was reminded of something, but it wasn’t comic books. It was only a few days later, when I was playing video games with my kids, that I realized that the experience most closely approximated by a viewing of Snyder’s movie was not even that of reading a comic book, but that of playing one of the newer, graphically sophisticated video games. In such games—for instance, Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, a favorite of mine—the player is often an embattled warrior, charged with making his way through enemy territory in order to reach a certain goal (a spaceship, a treasure, etc.). In order to reach the goal, of course, you have to eliminate vast numbers of enemies—aliens, robots, freaks, whatever. These latter are, with each successive “level” of the game, increasingly powerful, scary, and difficult to defeat; the game gets harder as you progress through its imaginary world. There’s no plot or overarching structural dynamic involved; the only meaningful activity is killing a sufficient number of enemies to get to the next level. It’s true that there’s usually some background, some history that seems to provide a kind of “plot” for the proceedings, which comes in the form of a narrative voice-over that plays before each new level of the game begins. (In Jedi Outcast, for instance, you’re told that your mission is to prevent the villains from decimating the Jedi Academy on planet Yavin 4.) But these token narratives, such as they are, are discrete elements detachable from the experience of playing the game itself—indeed, you can just skip over them and go right to the slaughter that is the real point of the game.
All this is as good a description as any of what 300 is like. Whatever its intermittent and feeble preliminary invocations of noble sentiments such as “freedom” for the Greeks and the importance of “reason” as opposed to Eastern unreason (neither of which notions, it must be said, would likely have had much appeal to the historical Spartans, members of a slave-based and deeply, almost stupidly superstitious culture), 300 is wholly lacking in nearly every element we normally associate with drama in even its most debased popular forms. Gone are the distractions of motivation or character—or even dialogue, apart from posturing slogans. (“We are SPARTANS!!!!!” Leonidas screams as he pushes some Persian envoys into a well, a line that got a huge laugh both times I saw the film.) Gone, too, is any sense of a plot more rudimentary than the one you get in the setup for Jedi Outcast. Herodotus’s narrative of the Second Persian War does have grand and overarching plots, although these clearly weren’t interesting to either Miller or Snyder. For Herodotus there is, on one level, the great organizing moral dynamic, as predictable as physics or mathematics, of overweening pride laid low: in Darius, in his ancestors, in his son Xerxes, all of whom trust foolishly to wealth, size, power, the things that, as time and experience teach the wise person, are ultimately evanescent. And on the Greek side, the plot, indeed the drama, resides in the craftily, excruciatingly drawn-out uncertainty whether the perennially quarreling Greek city-states will ever become a coalition capable of repulsing Xerxes’ army—a plot that is not only suspenseful but also deeply political.
What gives structure to 300, by contrast, is not so much an
evolving narrative as simply an increase in the number and ugliness of the combatants who keep pouring toward the Spartans, who blast their way through greater and more savage onslaughts of freakish enemies until the final, gory extermination takes place—all of it punctuated occasionally by slogans about freedom and so forth. But just to talk about “freedom” and “reason” is not, of course, the same as dramatizing the importance of freedom and reason. Snyder’s film, like Miller’s comic, lingers on the avenging violence while giving only the most superficial nod to the concepts that, we are constantly told, motivated that violence. For that very reason the violence, of which there is a great deal, isn’t exhausting or affecting, because it has the candy-colored, hallucinatory, stylized quality that the violence in video games has; it hasn’t been contextualized, it’s not tethered to anything that we might feel. It’s just the colorful stuff that happens to the cardboardy figures on the screen before they disappear and new cardboardy figures need to be dealt with. And then—GAME OVER.
Something, indeed, seems to be over, if the extraordinary success of this movie is to be taken seriously. A curious part of the story of Thermopylae—a part that didn’t make it into Miller’s 300, perhaps because it has to do with those boy-loving, philosophizng Athenians rather than the manly Spartans—concerns the origins of the tragic theater. There is a long-standing tradition that when Xerxes abandoned his forces and returned in humiliated defeat to Susa, he left behind his opulent tent, which was among the spoils taken from his general, Mardonius, when the Greeks finally vanquished the invaders at Plataea in 479. According to some sources, this fabulous trophy came to be used as the backdrop in the theater of Dionysus at Athens; the Greek word skênê, from which we derive the word scene, in fact means “tent.” Another fascinating, if perhaps apocryphal, story holds that timber from the Persian ships destroyed at Salamis was used in the construction of yet another theater.
The presence of Xerxes’ tent on the Greek tragic stage—a visible (if eventually fraying) trophy snatched from a hubristic imperial overlord—would have constituted a remarkable material symbol of the interweaving of history, politics, and art that you got in the then-new genre that came to be known as tragedy. At the very least, it would certainly account for a number of striking references in early Greek tragedy to opulent Eastern cloths and weavings. In Aeschylus’s Agamemnon (458 B.C.), for instance, the returning Greek king’s hubristic decision to tread on a sumptuous carpet—fit, as the text reminds us, for an Eastern potentate—heralds his imminent demise; in the same playwright’s Persians (472 B.C.), there are repeated allusions to the soft, lush, ornate fabrics with which the Persians adorn themselves. All such references would, of course, have taken on powerful additional meaning for the original audience if the very artifacts of Persian hubris were visibly present in the theater.
This is merely a way of saying that it’s quite possible that the battle that inspired Frank Miller’s comic book, and now Zack Snyder’s movie version of the same, was intimately tied to the origins of the Western theater itself. If so, the connection was not merely a superficial, material one (the tent, the broken planking) but rather something larger. For the grand themes that seemed to inhere in the lived history of the Persian Wars—the foolishness of overweening arrogance; the way in which moral conviction can be a match for sheer power; the dangers inherent in underestimating a disdained “other”—were to provide tragedy with its own grand themes over the seventy-five years of its magnificent acme: a period that began with the end of the Persian Wars and ended with the exhausted conclusion of the Peloponnesian War, the conflict in which, as Herodotus seems to have foreseen, the Athenians themselves eventually came to resemble the blustering, despotic Persians of old. To better serve its themes of spectacular rises and terrible falls, the tragedians honed and perfected the array of elements and techniques that became the cultural inheritance of the Western theater: the organically coherent plot, which suggests that endings are the logical and necessary outcomes of beginnings; character development as expressed in both monologue and dialogue; the meaningful dynamics of entrances and exits, of visual spectacle counterpointed by lyric rapture.
To various degrees, these elements have provided the underpinnings for every kind of theatrical entertainment ever since, from Venetian opera to soap opera, from Shakespeare to Star Wars. That Zack Snyder’s flatly stylized 300—which invokes the dramatic history of the Persian Wars but which has no quality of drama, no serious interest in history whatsoever—has packed some of the largest audiences in movie history into our theaters makes you wonder whether the tradition that began at Thermopylae might well have ended there, too.
—The New York Review of Books, May 31, 2007
It’s Only a Movie
Kill Bill: Volume 1, the fourth movie to be written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, is about a number of things, but violence isn’t really one of them. This isn’t to say that it is not a violent film. Of the various controversies that have surrounded the movie since it began shooting—the first over the surprise announcement by the producers that they were going to cut what was to have been one movie into two parts (Volume 2 will open in February)—none has been as fierce as the one that has raged about the extent of the movie’s graphic gore. In Kill Bill: Volume 1, you get to see (among other things) a fight to the death between two young women, one of whom ends up impaled by an enormous kitchen knife before the wide eyes of her young daughter; a pregnant woman being savagely beaten and then shot in the head at point-blank range on her wedding day; a man’s tongue being pulled out; a graphic decapitation with a samurai sword; torsos sliced open; impalings with various instruments; and, in a scene that you’d be tempted to call climactic if the movie had any kind of narrative arc whatsoever, a twenty-minute-long pitched battle between a lone American female and dozens of Tokyo gangsters, in which the limbs of a great many of the latter get lopped off. It’s saying something about the sheer amount of battery and bloodletting that Tarantino works into this film that the final act of killing comes almost as something of a relief, and strikes you as being almost dainty: a young woman in a kimono has the very top of her head sliced off, quite neatly, in a tranquil, snow-covered Japanese garden.
A good deal of intense brutality is, of course, nothing new to Tarantino fans. Reservoir Dogs (1992), the first feature that he both wrote and directed, contains an almost unwatchably savage torture scene that, at the time, seized the imagination of audiences and critics and has become infamous ever since: in it, a sociopathic petty criminal slowly cuts off a young policeman’s ear, to the accompaniment of some upbeat pop music, and afterward, he douses the cop with gasoline, meaning to burn him alive. This was a harbinger of things to come; since then, all the films that Tarantino has either written or directed are characterized by scenes of a sadistic and quite graphic violence, set in the context of random and, sometimes, unmotivated crime.
True Romance, the first commercial feature that Tarantino wrote (in 1987; it was directed by Tony Scott and released in 1992), features a stabbing with a corkscrew and the prolonged beating of a young woman; both True Romance and Tarantino’s breakout popular success, Pulp Fiction (1994), show men being kicked and shot in the genitals; Pulp Fiction ends with a scene of S&M torture and homosexual rape. (It also famously depicts a man plunging a syringe full of adrenaline into the chest of a woman who has OD’d on heroin.) Natural Born Killers, written in 1989 and directed by Oliver Stone, was about an amoral young couple on a crime spree; From Dusk Till Dawn (1995) is a gory vampire extravaganza set in a Mexican cathouse, in which an unsuspecting pair of criminal brothers—one’s a bank robber, the other’s a sexual predator played by Tarantino—are waiting to meet an associate. All of Tarantino’s movies are, in fact, about low-level criminals involved in complex crimes that get fouled up, and it’s not hard to see why: double-crossed thieves and drug dealers tend not to have many scruples about observing the Sixth Commandment.
What has upset many people about the violence
in Tarantino’s movies isn’t the violence per se—as bloody as they are, they’re no more brutal than, say, the typical Terminator movie, and no more repellently graphic than any of the Alien films, which are far more popular—but rather the offhand, occasionally even comic fashion in which the violence in his films is presented. To many critics of Tarantino’s work, the violence—like the ear-cutting in Reservoir Dogs—has too often seemed gratuitous, included not so much to further the plot or illuminate character, as to punish the audience—to see how much it can tolerate. This notion may seem outlandish, but it gets support from Tarantino himself. “The audience and the director,” he recently asserted in a New Yorker profile that was timed to coincide with the release of Kill Bill, “it’s an S&M relationship, and the audience is the M. It’s exciting!” Both the content (“the audience is the M”) and the tone of the remark (“it’s exciting!”) are revealing: watching Tarantino’s films, it’s hard not to wonder whether the “S” is not somehow compensatory, betraying the kind of anxieties about masculinity and, indeed, about sexuality that you associate with high school locker rooms. In Reservoir Dogs, one of the thieves is vexed to learn that his alias will be “Mr. Pink”; True Romance and Pulp Fiction feature telling scenes in which male characters react violently to homoerotic teasing. (The latter is the film whose climax is a homosexual rape.)
Because of a violence that is presented without any apparent moral comment, because of the embarrassment about adult sexuality in his films, Tarantino—who was born in 1962 and is thus of the first generation of directors to have been raised on cable television and video recordings, with their promise of endless repetition—has become, in the minds of many, the poster boy for a generation of Americans—mostly male—whose moral response to violence, it is feared, has been alarmingly dulled by too much popular entertainment.
How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken Page 18