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“EVERYBODY LOVES A MUSCLE BOI”: HOMOS, HEROES, AND FOES IN POST-9/11 SPOOFS OF THE 300 SPARTANS Ralph J. Poole In 2007–2008, a significant accumulation of cinematic and other visual media focused upon the celebrated episode of Greek antiquity recount- ing in different genres and styles the stand of the three hundred Spartans against the Persians at Thermopylae. Among them are David Padrusch’s documentary The Last Stand of the 300 (2007), Zack Snyder’s feature film 300 (2006), Collision Studios’ video game 300: March to Glory (2007), Andy Signore’s short film United 300 (2007), and the Jason Friedberg/Aaron Selt- zer comedy Meet the Spartans (2008). Why did the legend of the three hundred Spartans seem so attractive for contemporary American visual media at that time? An anecdotal, yet telling account stems from the economic sector of society. Emerging at the dawn of the worldwide financial crisis, the fight of the three hundred Spartans served as point of reference for the serious loss of confidence in the banking system and also in national politics in general. William Streeter of the ABA Banking Journal specifically wondered about what was keeping bankers up at night:1 What a fragile thing confidence is. Events of the past six months have seen it coalesce and evaporate several times . This is what keeps central bank- ers awake at night. But then that is their primary reason for being, because the workings of economies and, indeed, governments, hinge upon trust and confidence . With any group, whether it be 300 Spartans holding off a mil- lion Persians at Thermopylae or a group of central bankers trying to keep a global financial community from bolting, trust is a matter of individual decisions. But these decisions are often influenced by events, peers, crowds, or a persuasive strong leader. Such a leader can convince others the best chance for survival or success is in overcoming fear and having confidence that together they can overcome the onslaught. Or, as Ben Franklin put it to his fellow revolutionaries, “We must hang together, gentlemen . else, we shall most assuredly hang separately.” 1 William W. Streeter, “Confidence Needs to Be Led,” ABA Banking Journal 100.1 (2008) 4, accessed June 4, 2010, http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/sb/ababj0108/index .php?startid=4. © Ralph J. Poole, 2013 | doi:10.1163/9789004241923_007 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. Ralph J. Poole - 9789004241923 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 12:58:10AM via free access 96 ralph j. poole This assessment draws an image of bankers as the last bastions of hope and confidence, as revolutionaries and fighters to a man – a curiously ambiguous image of the global finance market. Are the financial decision- makers carriers of hope or kamikaze fighters? If the bankers are the spear- heads of a credible battle, who then is the enemy? “Confidence, like string, can’t be pushed. It must be pulled – by actions” – Streeter’s final state- ment of the article. Even though the reference to the 300 Spartans stresses bravery in a just cause, there remains the silent implication of the histori- cal fact that all Spartans fell in this battle. In its historical precedent, the action – called for in the article and warranted by referring to Benjamin Franklin as reincarnated American revolutionary/Leonidas-figure – led to sure death. Certainly, the author wished no such fate for these bankers. Though this financial scenario is not necessarily typical for the broad reception of the story of the three hundred Spartans in contemporary America, it nevertheless shows to what extent the turbulence of the pres- ent is imbued by the notion of ancient heroism, be it within economic, political, or cultural scripts. For the remainder of this essay I will concen- trate on the latter of these by focusing on two such reinscriptions of antiq- uity in current filmic productions: the two spoofs Meet the Spartans and United 300, with Zack Snyder’s 300 serving as intertextual foil against which to assess the comic quality of the two parodies. To be sure, all three films are parodies, but of contesting partiality since only Meet the Spartans and United 300 push the parodic element to the point of excessive ridiculous- ness and can ultimately be read as political satires on the American “War on Terror” in the aftermath of 9/11. These films are therefore instances of what Martin Winkler has called “the extremes of unabashed embraces of the lurid and the ridiculous” within the longstanding cinematic tradition of retelling ancient myths and archetypes that filmmakers have used “con- sciously in order to comment on their own times.”2 Accordingly, I wish to view these films as parodies not only in their formal style as aesthetic interpretations of previous texts, but also and above all in their pragmatic functionality, i.e., to address their respective ideological implications. As much as they can be called comic parodies, it has to be stressed that they apply a mimetic technique that according to Jonathan Culler implies “a serious statement of feelings about real prob- 2 Martin M. Winkler, ed., Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema (Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 2001) 3. Ralph J. Poole - 9789004241923 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 12:58:10AM via free access homos, heroes, and foes in post-9/11 spoofs of the 300 spartans 97 lems or situations.”3 The films’ specific moment of transgression results from the tension between formal double-voicedness and political critique or, as Linda Hutcheon concedes: “Parody is a form of auto-referentiality, but that does not mean that it has no ideological implications.”4 Indeed, these films, I claim, are both highly self-reflexive in their aesthetics of parody and highly ideological in their politics of insinuation. Harking back to Greek antiquity is phantasmatic and mythologiz- ing when the reliance on a legend like that of the 300 Spartans is used to assess a current sensibility. Significantly foreshortening the myth of Greece as cradle of Western civilization, this brings antiquity to the pres- ent in order to reenact fantasies of violence and male heroism without questioning the underlying ethos of homosocial fraternity. The parodic invective – and the rhetoric applied in Meet the Spartans and United 300 may be understood as such – opens up to an aesthetic and ideological minefield. Adapting the Greeks of former times to a universal “we” of our times here as in other cases of such referencing surely triggers the ques- tion: “it’s Greek to whom?” Scott Bravmann has provocatively posed this question in his study on Queer Fictions of the Past:5 One important way of beginning to address this question is to consider alongside these metaphoric and literal ‘returns’ to Greece the use of new, or alternative, or resistant, ‘national’ discourses in the struggle over possible meanings for queer historical subjects. Bravmann calls queer such subjects operating within imagined cultural geographies, when there occurs the contesting of a “false (or at least falsely universalizing) characterization of ‘Greece’ as a significant locus of cultural truth for us.” Adding to this, I would also claim as queer textual strategy the spoofing performed in Meet the Spartans, where a historical allegory like 300 crudely gets counteracted and is turned into its grotesque-comic opposite. We should ultimately ask, therefore, in what ways these spoofs make fun of 300’s reenactment of the belief in America’s Manifest Destiny (see Solomon’s essay) and the adjoining cult of Spartan heroism? 3 Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Litera- ture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975) 153. 4 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000) 28. 5 Scott Bravmann, Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, and Difference (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 61–62. Ralph J. Poole - 9789004241923 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 12:58:10AM via free access 98 ralph j. poole Herodotus and the Legend of Heroic Sacrificial Death The historical origin of all the aforementioned films is first and foremost the account of the Spartans’ uprising led by Leonidas against the Persian slave empire of King Xerxes of 480 bc. Already Herodotus in his Histories, which serve as major source for this now legendary story, speaks of Spar- tan manly heroism as best exemplified in the mythicized scenario of the “last stand.” This fight to a man in its later reception has either served to glorify heroic martyrdom as the epitome of the Spartan democratic ethos, or has led to acerbic criticism and deriding laughter of these exaggerated male virtues. And it is not only recent examples in the American context that have called upon this heroic sacrificial death for contemporary politi- cal purposes: Hermann Göring also referred to the battle of Thermopylae to legitimize the battle of Stalingrad in 1943 as a fight of “no surrender.”6 Writing a generation or so after the war, Herodotus relates the events of the battle of Thermopylae in the seventh book of his Histories. Even though the historical validity of Herodotus’ accounts have been contested (on the one hand they are most detailed descriptions of historical events, on the other there is compelling evidence of fake “eyewitness” accounts), the fascination with his “history” remains unbroken.7 Books 7 to 9 are about the Persian Wars against Greece. Book 7 ends with this important battle which marks the advent of the Second Persian War as well as the death of Leonidas I, who reigned as King of Sparta from 490 to 480 bc.