I'm oddly impressed by this film. It manages to hit every major high-note of heteronormative, Eurocentric imperialism. It's a catalogue of propaganda. The movie looks very good, for all of that, and it seems to have solved some of the problems of direct adaptation of comics to film, which Sin City demonstrated, but I'll get to that later.
Let's take our propaganda terms one by one. The movie expends a great deal of effort to disavow homoeroticism and deny well-known Ancient Greek standards of sexuality. Within the first few minutes, Leonidas, the king of "free" Sparta (we'll get to that), refers to the Athenians as "philosophers and boy-lovers." Already, we're rewriting heteronormativity onto the Spartan soldiers, who were famous for taking lovers from within the ranks, despite having wives at home.
This is followed, quite closely, with a "love" scene between Leonidas and his queen, Gorgo. The scene consists of a nekkid Leo staring out the window (shot from behind), who then proceeds to the bed and runs his hand up Gorgo's back, who languidly twists herself half around and says, "Your lips could finish what your hands have started..." So far, I'm happy. I actually think that there's a distinct lack of loving, affectionate sexuality in film. I quite like seeing people in movies who seem genuinely passionate about each other expressing that passion in unequivocally sexual terms. Ours is a sexophobic society.
But the scene takes a turn for the groan-worthy (and not the good kind of groaning) when we get into the actual sex. There is, by my memory, a five-shot montage of their "love" making, which consists of screwing in five different positions. Montage is most often implicitly metonymistic practise. It uses short bursts of imagery to stand for something bigger or longer (no pun intended). The shots of Leo and Gorgo making "love" implicitly stand for the entire span of sexuality that exists between them... which is him fucking her in a handful of positions. The only kind of male sexuality that this montage allows is penis-in-vagina penetration. No kissing. No other forms of erotic touch.
Just to make that point even more plain, the scenes focus almost entirely on Gorgo's writhing body. Now, kudos for showing a woman's pleasure. I'm a big fan of that. However, by isolating her in the shots she goes from enthusiastic participant to sexual spectacle pretty quickly. This is the double-bind of erotic images in a male-oriented, heteronormative context. On the one hand, it's all about male pleasure. On the other hand, showing a man actually experiencing sexual pleasure makes him look vulnerable, which is fallaciously assumed to be a sign of "weakness", a point this film makes quite explicitly when Leonidas can't say "I love you" to his wife, because, as the narration explains, "In Sparta, no man can show softness. No man can show weakness." Because we all know that softness just is inherently weak. Ironically, a father standing over the corpse of his beheaded, warrior son is allowed to weep, scream, and "fill his heart with hate." Emotional attachments, it seems, are allowed only between warrior father and warrior son, and must be a catalyst for more violence. But I digress.
Leonidas is edited out of his own love scene because watching a man experience pleasure sets off homoerotic alarm bells, which makes a lot of male viewers distinctly uncomfortable. I would argue that that's because those viewers are trained to automatically assume that they're supposed to identify with any sexuality that appears on film, therefore they engage with the homoerotic imagery as if it were aimed at them, and then don't know what to do, but that's pretty speculative. It's interesting to note, also, that when Leo does actually appear in the montage, he's always positioned above Gorgo, either behind her or on top of her. Heaven forbid we should see a man lying on his back during sex. Much better to focus on the her body as she rides him.
What's really disconcerting about these scenes, to me, is that the male erotic gaze is invited, but then male sexuality is placed in a very small box (again, no pun intended). If I had more time, I'd compare this montage to the pleasure tent/harem scene that occurs later, on the Persian side of the battle. In it, dark-skinned, mostly naked temptresses dance and fondle each other while a traitorous Spartan watches in lust, but they don't actually touch any men in the scene, except for the end when they crowd around the traitor. Until that moment, the film commits the ultimate act of cutting men out of a male fantasy: it uses faux lesbians. But I'd only talk about that if I had time.
So that's heteronormativity. I think I'll tackle Eurocentrism and Imperialism tomorrow.
Posted by orion at March 12, 2007 3:46 PM