The thing that initially baffled me about this movie is why Leonidas was given a Scottish accent, but then it all clicked into place. The ethnic stereotype that Americans (and Canadians) currently associated with the Scottish is that they, despite the woollen skirts, are the manliest of the manly men on all of God's green (and manly) Earth. They're beer-drinkin', football-riot startin' he-men, and even if they occasionally screw their sheep (so goes the stereotype), you better believe that they're girl sheep! So Leonidas is a good, solid British hero, but the most masculine kind of British.
And that's what bothers me the most, I think, that all the Greeks are, not just white, but Anglo, while the Persians are basically African, and I'd go as far as to say African-American, which is somewhat distinct. The harem/orgy scene features a shot of a dark-skinned woman wearing a distinctly 70s 'fro. That's an American image, in its pose and composition. She's a solid-gold dancer from one of the most recent eras in American history in which blackness was cool.
But that's not historically accurate, and although it was never the aim of anyone on this film to be historically accurate, they were much more concerned to accurately reproducing Miller's book, this particular change makes a difference. The Greeks lived in spitting distance of the Persians. They fought back and forth over the centuries, but they also mixed and mingled, which is always what happens when people fight. War brides, slaves taken in battle, switching allegiances, taking each other's territory. You end up with a lot of "fraternizing" with the enemy, and you end up with a population that is neither lily white, nor coal black. To be fair, there certainly must have been extremely dark-skinned people in the greater Persian Empire, but there must have been really dark-skinned Greeks, too. I mean, where do you think all that curly black hair comes from? Northern Africa was part of their world.
By casting the Greeks as Anglo-whites and the Persians as Afro-blacks you create a totally false sense of clear racial lines between the two groups, which I can't help but think really wouldn't have existed. But this is part-and-parcel to the clear social coding that goes on through uniforms. The Spartans wear a uniform of a leather thong, a red cape, and their arms. The Arcadians have their bondage wear (they're potters and painters, therefore they must be "boy-lovers," and our current code for that is leather straps; see previous post), and the Persians, of course, have their faces covered to make them look like identical "Asian hordes" with no individual identity.
(By the way, the very concept of a military uniform wouldn't be invented until the mid-1700s, if I'm not mistaken, so Ephialtes' desire to wear a Spartan uniform is yet another anachronism, and one that, I'm sorry to say, is yet another testament to how American this movie really is. When Spartan warriors yell "Ho ha!" they've just be turned into naked marines.)
But making the two opposing sides as racially different as possible is yet another part of keeping the fight as clear-cut as possible. This is Greek rationality, democracy, and freedom versus Persian decadence and king-worship. Never mind that Leonidas is a king. Ignore the fact that the Spartans had slaves. I mean, look at the movie! One side's white and the other's black. They must be total ideological opposites, right?
Posted by orion at March 13, 2007 9:44 PM