300 Ways to Teach the Epic
Mary Ann Tobin, PhD
Pre-published Excerpt from
Teaching Comics and Graphic Narratives: Essays on Theory, Strategy and Practice. Ed. Lan
Dong. Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2012.
Film critics, several academics of my acquaintance, and even Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad panned the movie 300 (2007) for its fantastical and inaccurate portrayals of the
Battle of Thermopylae (480 BCE). In their critiques, they disparage the unlikely event of a battled-decked rhinoceros careening across that particular battlefield, the possibility of a giant lobster-clawed executioner, the demonization of Persians, and, apparently most disconcerting of all, a seven-and-a-half-foot nearly-naked Xerxes. Conversely, others praise director Zack
Snyder’s use of choreographed performances before a blue-screen in order, as Todd McCarthy says, to “sumptuously realize” (par. 13) Frank Miller’s graphic novel 300 (1998)—itself a retelling of the second-hand account of the conflict written by Herodotus a half-century after the event took place. Regardless of 300’s flaws, it relies on the ancient conventions of the epic to depict Spartan concepts of honor, duty, glory, combat, and victory. It offers an engaging means of teaching epics like the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid to students of the YouTube generation.
Beyond illustrating epic conventions, in its use of the current cinematic and video-game method of narrative suture, 300 presents opportunities to explore the form and function of epic poetry as oral history, helping today’s students to appreciate such texts in an entirely new way.
Stephen Heath defines “suture” as “the dual process of multiplication and projection [forming]
the conjunction of the spectator as subject with the film” (par. 40), in which “a character in the film com[es] to take the place of the absent one posed by the spectator” (par. 21). In other words, the action in the film is typically shown from the viewpoint of one or more of its characters, and the audience sees the action through those eyes. This method has been adopted by the video- game industry for use in role-playing games, wherein players select a pre-programmed or customizable Player Character (PC) with its own complement of weapons and, one could say, cultural ethos. In directing their PCs’ movements, players formulate their own narratives as they encounter new scenarios and incorporate new actions virtually every time they play. In order to advance to new levels within the game, players must rely on the wisdom gained from their previous plays. The application of narrative suture has also been embraced by amateur videographers, whose submissions to YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and other Internet-based social networks feature innumerable revisions of stories from television and film. The videographers literally weave themselves and their figurative points of view into their chosen narratives.
Despite complaints of the mind-numbing qualities of video games, television, and movies, today’s students have a lot of practice suturing themselves into narratives, as well as following and recalling the kinds of multiple narrative threads and long digressions we typically find in epic poetry. These are cognitive efforts not usually attributed to Generations X and Y.
Stephen Johnson, for one, seeks to dispel this stereotype in his article “Watching TV Makes You
Smarter,” in which he argues that, ever since the debut of Hill Street Blues in 1981, the “Sleeper
Curve,” as he calls it, “is the single most important new force altering the mental development of young people today [and] it is largely a force for good: enhancing our cognitive faculties, not dumbing them down” (par. 4). He explains that “to keep up with entertainment like 24, you have
to pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships. This is what I call the
Sleeper Curve: the most debased forms of mass diversion—video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms—turn out to be nutritional after all” (par. 4). Similarly, the ancient epic storyteller relied on elements of audience participation—that his audience was engaged in active listening, would follow his tale over the course of several hours (or even days), and inferred their own cultural ethos by tracking the social relationships among the many characters in the poems. These are the very skills our students hone while watching episodic television shows and movies with multiple plot-lines and large casts made up of recurring roles, while making their own videos, or while taking on the persona of a Spartan warrior in the Halo videogame series. As my student B. Nedinic reminds us, the virtual real-worldliness of role- playing video games is a great feature, but “would be a wasted tool if not properly supported by .
. . an interesting and engaging story” (2). The same is true for graphic novels and films like 300 that, via vividly stylized illustrations and computer-generated imagery, tell a story through realistic yet fantastic virtual worlds. Thus, the graphic novel and film 300 present practical, accessible, and entertaining ways to approach epic poetry, which, through fantasy, conveys to readers generally accepted universal truths.
By aligning the audience’s point of view with that of the Greek army before battle,
Dilios, 300’s storyteller in both the book and the film, weaves his tale for both an external audience and an internal one, inspiring both to adopt his cultural ethos. In this sense, readers and viewers are sewn (or sutured) into the narrative, much as the listeners of an oral poet would have been as they were regaled by their cultural history, like gamers are when they select their PCs, and like amateur videographers are as they record their own deeds for posterity. As Andrew
Dalby tells us, the oral historian relies on formulae to master and re-create “a repertoire of
stories” passed down from one generation of poets or singers to the next and, in the process,
“develops the skill of producing, on demand, a poem that will satisfy the audience” (189). Epic storytellers always personalize their narratives in order to captivate their audiences while retaining the original tales’ characters, plots, dialogues, settings, and themes. However, Dalby cautions that the learning of those formulae “does not mean that any singer is compelled to repeat them without changing them” (189) or adding new twists to engage his listeners.
Therefore, while we may cringe at the sight of a battle-decked rhinoceros, a lobster- clawed hatchet-man, or a super-sized Persian king, 300 re-envisions and reanimates the ancient art of oral history, thereby offering a practical means of teaching an often neglected element of the epic: neither the Illiad nor the Odyssey were meant merely to lie dormant on a page; they were to be performed before live audiences in order to awaken the imaginations of their hearers.
Gamers and YouTubers, therefore, should be very comfortable with such concepts and should find approaching the epic in this manner more appealing than reading a static text.
Moreover, as historian Victor Davis Hanson argues in his interview for Adapting the
Graphic Novel, 300 “is consistent with a long line of interpretation . . . whether it’s vase painters in the fourth century or Herodotus in the fifth, each person is trying to convey this wonderful event” in his own way for his own time. Similarly, as Ruth Scodel asserts, “In a tradition of this kind, performers neither memorize fixed texts nor improvise freely. An aspiring performer learns stylized diction, performance style, themes, and the outlines of narratives and recombines them before audiences” (1). In speaking of his own participation in what he calls the “long, worthy history of stylized violence” (Adapting the Graphic Novel), Miller spins the same thread that
Scodel traces in the works of the epic poets and singers.
Works Cited
“Adapting the Graphic Novel.” 300. Dir. Zack Snyder. Perf. Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, David
Wenham, and Dominic West. Warner Brothers, 2007.
Dalby, Andrew. Rediscovering Homer: Inside the Origins of the Epic. New York: Norton, 2006.
Heath, Stephen. “Notes on Suture.” Screen 18.4 (1978): 48-76. Rpt. The Symptom: Online
Journal for Lacan.com. Web. 10 Oct. 1997.
Johnson, Steven. “Watching TV Makes You Smarter.” New York Times Magazine 24 Apr. 2005.
New York Times.com. Web. 18 Oct. 2007.
=slogin>. McCarthy, Todd. Review of 300, dir. Zack Snyder. Variety.com 9 Mar. 2007. Web. 28 August 2007. “Making of 300.” 300. Dir. Zack Snyder. Perf. Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, David Wenham, and Dominic West. Warner Brothers, 2007. Nedinic, Boris. Response to “The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowmind.” Student essay. 11 Oct. 2007. Scodel, Ruth. Listening to Homer: Tradition, Narrative, and Audience. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. “300.” The Complete Works of Frank Miller. Moebius Grafix. Web. 29 Dec. 2009. 300. Dir. Zack Snyder. Perf. Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, David Wenham, and Dominic West. Warner Brothers, 2007.