I have had a vague desire to see 300 since I saw trailers for it a couple of years ago; the photoshopped, crazed hyper-realism of it, a fetishism of gloriously bloody violence, all impossible slow motion decapitations and exquisite showers of carefully rendered drops of blood, seemed like it would be ridiculously entertaining. And indeed it was ridiculously entertaining: the sudden pull back to a carefully framed landscape view of the Spartan king, having just gravely intoned that this is not madness, but Sparta, planting his foot on the Persian emissary's chest and flicking him backwards into a perfectly circular large black hole, which lurks in the middle of a courtyard for no obvious reason, is quite beyond the idiotic in a really rather wonderful way.
Of course its politics are barely disguised fascism: anything that enjoyed violence quite that much could only avoid being hateful by placing itself in a world in which only relentless brutality could avoid abject subjection. The problem with Sin City, after all, was that it tried to locate itself in a world not totally distant from ours: where violence's victims are not just effectively nameless soldiers or evil beyond imagining, there is a way of getting along that means perfecting the art of killing is not the only way to live. If there was any other way of living a life, then a life which took all its meaning from the total destruction, the utter crushing, of other lives, would seem, as it is in reality, at best quite hopelessly gratuitous. When we cannot live together, then someone has to die, and their death may as well be glorious, whether that triumph is found in the killing or in the act of dying.
This is a vision of politics as a kind of impossibility, a negative-sum game where compromise means humiliation and if not enslavement, then a kind of betrayal. If political action is always and everywhere either submission or triumph, then that is what we are left with; a politics of rousing speeches and good deaths, of killings stylised out of reality and of honour become vengeance stretched into infinity. Its aesthetics may be wonderful - the glowing embers of the Spartans' cloaks, the sodium lamp sunrises, the snarling monochrome of the Immortals' masks, the sudden stop-motion of bodies flying away from and into sword and shield blows: it's all quite beautiful - but tragedy has always been heartarchingly beautiful from a distance and grindingly awful up close.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
7 comments:
I just couldn't get past the "barely disguised fascism". Sometimes I can get past that stuff (the second 'Matrix' film) and sometimes I can't (I agree that Sin City was quite a hateful piece of violence-porn).
300, sadly, was in the latter camp. And I wanted so much to like it, too.
Sin City was much worse, I thought. For one thing it had more women in it, and so its really quite vile attitude towards them was much more obvious. And it situated its paean to violence in institutions we live in and find not to be continually subverted by triumphs of brute force. No doubt Sparta had properly functioning politics and people who didn't totally pointlessly sacrifice themselves, but saying that it didn't isn't an attack on a set of institutions I know and want to be humane.
For 'fascism' read 'communism'. Blogger must be a student.
Ah, what would the internet be without trolls, particularly ones with such wonderful names?
It's not trolling if it's true.
Of course it's not. No, if I filled up every comments thread on the internet with truths about the number of times the letter 'e' appeared on various pages in various Jane Austen novels, that would not be trolling. Also, what you said's not true.
Ah, methinks you protesteth too much. Once a student, always a student. 'Youni' has that kind of effect on the weak-minded.
Post a Comment