Zetetical Society Meeting Notes

Nothing remarkable to report, although Alex and I did watch the Prestige. I had seen it before, but I really enjoy the movie. The casting was superb. There is a nice layering to the narrative. I recommend it.

I have to disagree with a lot of reviewers who didn’t see a current political dimension to 300. It maybe just comes down to a question of timing. If a movie based on the Lysistrata appeared now, it would be hyped as being about the wars in the Middle East. The movie’s PR people would be mentioning it in the context of the current war. So, if you release a movie in which the best of the Spartan military state give their lives to fight off the Persian hordes for “freedom” and to save the Western world while we’re at war with Iraq and pondering war with Iran, it automatically picks up political overtones. It’s the anti-Lysistrata. I think this is true regardless of how you feel about war or the current war. This is a neutral proclamation.

It’s getting a free pass because it’s stupid enough that it doesn’t feel like it’s worthy of being a message film.

There were two things that I thought were odd about the story in 300. The first is the omission of the most moving aspect of the story: the 300 Spartans, 700 Thespians and 2000 Spartan Helot slaves remained behind to allow the escape of a larger Greek force during the Persian encirclement. That necessary tactical sacrifice is totally omitted. The second is the weird insistance on making the story about preserving “freedom” when even the movie itself is making Sparta out to be a military dictatorship with a eugenics program. Just because everyone in the well-muscled master race feels that the State policy is noble doesn’t make it good. See grade school-level lessons of WWII that every American should know if that’s not clear. Again, it gets a pass since it’s about freedom from foreign rule, but you just can’t say freedom that many times in a post-9/11 movie without making one think of current troubles.

So, we’re left with a dumb comic book movie full of melodramatic macho hand to hand combat porn, and I enjoyed that part. Penny Arcade’s review about sums that up. The reviews that point out that it’s dumb, cheap entertainment are absolutely right. There’s a place for that.