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Last Updated: May 30th, 2008 - 11:49:13 |
The new movie “300” reminds me of the time I stood atop the high Corcovado mountain overlooking Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In a country with the largest population of Blacks outside of Africa, I scoffed at the up close and monumental Christ the Redeemer statue with its Willem Dafoe-like European features and straight hair. It was then that the author Tony Browder reminded me that it made perfect sense for the conquering Portuguese to erect a God that looks like them. "I don't blame White people,” he said. “They did what they should do—make a monument to yourself, celebrate your own image.”
Of course, most of the movies we watch do the same thing—celebrate White people. And we have become accustomed to that and comfortable with that to some extent—even as we find new and better ways of making movies that celebrate us too. But sometimes a movie comes along like “300” that asks too much of us.
This movie asks a lot of us by overwhelming us with its powerful cinematography, special effects and extreme violence. Amid all the visual punch, the film makes the historic Battle of Thermopylae (480 B.C.) about the depicted White Spartans against the world’s Black, Brown, Yellow and Red people, all of whom seem to reside in Persia.
To the extent that we consider “300” in the realm of drama and not comedy, the fierce battles of “300” are about manly ferocity and courage against undisciplined and hapless fighting. The battle is pride and integrity versus slavish devotion to a Black king who has the nerve to call himself a god. On a deeper level, it also about the traditions adopted by Greece and Rome, which developed into today’s European-based system of so-called democracy, versus the “mysticism” of Asia.
To create this powerful, modern fable, filmmakers Zack Snyder and Kurt Johnstad don’t depict Sparta as the militaristic and aggressive state that is was. They take their version of history from the graphic novel by Frank Miller (“Sin City”), which is more focused on the idea of bravery and sacrifice than historical accuracy. Historians today rely almost entirely on the history of this conflict as told by the Greeks and it is hard to believe that the war-like Greek Spartans were just chilled out, minding their own business, when the nasty Persians came along and started something. Also, though this film depicts Persia as hedonistic (with the Persian King Xerxes made to look like a Harlem drag queen), in reality Sparta is documented to have had a controversial custom of man-boy love.
My friend, the author Makani Themba-Nixon, reminds me that film is considered by many as the new history text, that many of us learn about the world through what we see on the big screen. It is because of this trend (like “The Last King of Scotland” being based on a novel) that those of us who know better must say something when a skewed version of history is being presented on such a big and powerful stage (and when the skewed history just happens to prop up today’s U.S. militarism, Persian Gulf wars, anti-Muslim propaganda and the so-called War on Terror.) Be all that you can be! Even the outnumbered can be mighty! What a celebration!
Esther Iverem's forthcoming book is We Gotta Have It: Twenty Years of Seeing Black at the Movies, 1986-2006 (Thunder’s Mouth Press, April 2007).
© Copyright 2006 SeeingBlack.com
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