A few words about mise-en-scene in 300. The major problem with the comic-book-to-movie transition in Sin City was a lack of awareness of how time flows differently in comics than in films. In film, generally, textual and visual time flow all at once. People speak and events occur simultaneously.
In comics, however, text and visuals are on very different temporal lines. Each panel is a slice of a moment. It's frozen, and achieves the illusion of movement and fluidity only because of this weird propensity, seemingly universal, of the human brain to take disparate images and connect them. McCloud calls it "closure," and Eisenstein called it "montage," but it amounts to the same thing. McCloud's symbol for comics, the open and then the closed eye, embodies that idea (and it's a nifty little graphic, too).
The textual line does not match the visual. Text, by its nature, isn't the same kind of snap-shot, at least not phonetic/Western text. Only a single letter can be as temporally stable as a panel. Anything more, any sequence of letters, involves linear processing of spelling and/or grammar. My point is, while the text can go off in various prosey directions--Miller's faux-Noir ramblings in Sin City (the comic book), for example--the panel remains the same. Comics can freeze a visual moment and allow text to keep going. They can also allow visual narrative to carry you without text, but film can do that, too, so it's not at issue in this discussion.
Not understanding those (hastily described) dynamics of film leads to such visually ridiculous shots as Clive Owen taking a good 15 seconds to leap out of a first-story window and hit the ground because they needed time for his Noir voice-over. The same problem crops up when he's in the car with del Toro's dead body. That police car seems to wait an awfully long time for him to pull over! These moments would not seem temporally incongruous in a comic book because the visual line can, and indeed will, wait for the textual line to finish its work. By containing text in a panel, you marry it to the visual.
300 is not a text-heavy piece. There's actually more text in the film than the book, and it's all really useless exposition, too. But they face a similar problem in representing the composition of the comic-book page/panel. The glory of action shots in comics is that they are frozen moments that we can drool over for as long as we want to, whereas in film, those moments go by all-too quickly (especially considering how much they cost).
The solution to that problem is and has always been to alter the flow of time. From the earliest days, camera operators realized that they could just crank the machine faster and the events would appear slower when projected. Sparta in 300 is the land of slo-mo. By going from full speed to slo-motion, fluidly and without cutting, 300 simulates the internal experience of reading comics. We look at the panels and fill the intervening action in ourselves, in our heads. In 300, that translates to a few moments of (unintentionally homoerotic) slo-mo glory bracketed by fast-motion shots that lead to the next glorious bit of slo-mo.
The parallel effect is the ultra slo-motion tableau effect of, for example, pushing the Persian soldiers off the cliff. Without even checking, I know for certain that that is a single panel in the comics, and they simply depicted it in ultra-slo-motion (and with an annoying voice-over to kill time) so that we could linger on the composition: the silhouetted bodies and the tumble of Persians falling off the cliff like a spilled box of crayons.
The ingenuity of the composition of the film is not to be dismissed, but much like watching Triumph of the Will or Birth of a Nation, it's hard to separate that ingenuity out from the horrifyingly offensive content (not that I think 300 is anywhere near as technically sophisticated as either of those two films, or as offensive, come to think of it.).
Imperialism is all bound up with heteronormativity and Eurocentrism. The latter are two of the ways to shore up the power of the former, and vice-versa, of course. It's difficult to have empire without ridiculous, unattainable notions of racial purity, and it's tough to organize people if you can't stick them in nice predictable little family structures. In 300, imperialism is mostly expressed in terms of the discourse of enlightenment and justice. As Chomsky says, "terrorism is what they do." The same is true of wars of aggression and barbarism. I actually burst out loud the first time one of the characters in 300 claimed that if Persia won the war, the only light of justice, freedom, and reason would be snuffed out. We have heard this so many times before, and to state it without any awareness that that's exactly what the Persian Empire would have claimed in its own discourses.
We all know that the Spartans had slaves. That's common knowledge. So the claims of freedom and justice coming from the Spartans are really just elaborate justifications for "we'd like to not be wiped out in a war and occupied by an imperial force." If they'd made that argument, I actually wouldn't have objected. Nobody wants to be in that situation. But I doubt that the over-all Greek/Persian conflict was just based on Persian expansionism. When two cultures that are roughly equal in terms of military power and fight back and forth over the centuries, I have trouble believing it's one-sided, you know?
What's the most frustrating about imperial language in this film is not that it's super complex and buried under layers of subterfuge. It's that it's obviously a lie, or at best, the result of monumental ignorance. And what's the most frightening is how often people just buy into the big lie because it's what they've been told, over and over. They generally don't actually believe it, per se, but it's so much work to resist that lie, over and over again, that they just give up. We know, for a fact, that many of our elected leaders (no names) have been lying to us about matters of life and death since the day they took office. Literally, life and death. And what do we do? We shrug. We grumble. We watch The Daily Show and think we've done enough for the day.
I guess I don't have any clever quips, today. I don't know how to make fun of apathy in the face of horror.
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?
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.