A Film Canon

Like Sin City, 300 attempts a frame-for-frame remake of a Frank Miller comic book, in this case describing the fifth-century Battle of Thermopylae, in which a small collection of Greek states, unified under King Leonidas of Sparta, temporarily defeated the colossal Persian army. However, whereas Sin City alternated between blue-screen and on-location shooting, 300 is shot exclusively on blue-screen, meaning that all that the actors have to react against is each other. Although this might have made for an interesting crossover with classical drama, Zack Snyder's approach is to subsume all the film's natural and facial topographies into the perfectly chiselled bodies of the Spartans, turning the battle between east and west into a stand-off between a huddle of perfectly sculpted, airbrushed abs and a panorama of near-supernatural deformities and disabilities. By combining the fascism of American foreign policy with the fascism of a Calvin Klein billboard - and the warriors all have that vacant, panoptic Calvin Klein stare, gazing out across Persia from the top of Times Square - the film presents possibly the most concise and elegant Republican fantasy of the Middle East since 9/11, as elegant as its fusion of reality and CGI, or its seamless blend of history and fantasy. That said, it's not merely an erotics of this particular war as of war in general, positing war as the last pornographic threshold in an age in which national and tribal affiliation has been dispersed and deregulated. As war-porn, it unfortunately sinks into the bland, uninspired mechanics typical of most porn - for all the supposed ingenuity and beauty of the battle scenes, they're pretty much just a series of slow-motion/sped-up-motion thresholds, usually accompanied by some spraying liquid; a granulated aesthetic that's actually much more spectacular in the opening, pastoral sequences, in which the temporal deep-focus of sandbox games, the sense that time is moving more slowly in the background, and not even quite moving in real-time in the foreground, is quite spectacularly translated into cinematic language. For the most part, though, it plays as a fairly unimaginative, uninspired heterosexual porn film that's been reduced to the relationship between male actor and male viewer, or a particularly titillating first-person shooter or multi-role-player devoid of the masturbatory surrogate of the gaming console itself. In both cases, it feels like a film that's designed to both create and assuage a kind of reflexive impotence in its male viewer, or penis envy in its female viewer - and from that perspective, Xerxes' deity actually feels very real, since he's the digitally ripped power top whose altar the entire film both desecrates and worships, as if orthodox Muslim sexual politics were simply the logical conclusion of Republican sexual politics. Where Sin City opened up an interesting, experimental nexus between comic books, film and gaming, 300 ultimately makes film feel like a redundant middle term between the other two, producing a climactic anticlimax, a demotivating motivational rhetoric best watched at the gym, upon the treadmill, or as part of a particularly brutal frathouse hazing.