Hi, been a minute! Apologies for the space between posts, i was busy getting married and starting a staff writing position at Popular Science. Yes, i am bragging. Just a little bit.
Anywho, let’s dive in to a new one:
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Speaking of getting married — last month, a day or so before the wedding in Las Vegas, i was sitting one afternoon in the La-Z-Boy at M’s parents’ house. Her dad and i were watching television, watching the History Channel. And on the History Channel was the painstakingly researched, historically accurate narrative feature film known as Zack Snyder’s 300.
Here’s the part where i opine about the sad, sordid, decades’ long decline in History Channel’s respectability and trustworthiness. Here it is———and there we go. Moving on.
i remember when 300 came out. i was in high school in Mississippi, and everyone was talking about how badass it was. Given that it’s got sabertooth tigers and colossal elephants and ghoul executioners with axe-hands and a 9-foot-tall Xerxes speaking in a pitch-altered baritone, no one was talking about its authenticity. They just talked about how badass it was.
So badass. Fuckin rules. Gotta see it, man. Dope as hell.
And so i went to go see it, because fuck it why not. And i would be lying if i said i didn’t think some of it was badass. Sure, why not? it’s got sabertooth tigers and colossal elephants and ghoul executioners with axe-hands and a 9-foot-tall Xerxes speaking in a pitch-altered baritone. Fuckin rules.
But i was also sad and worried by it. Because i noticed the skin.
There are two skin tones in 300: brown, and bronzed. Brown is suspicious, sinister, bad guy skin. Bronzed is tanned, oiled and anointed by the Greco-Roman gods, Abercrombie & Fitch. Bronzed is good and honorable and strong
i pointed it out to a friend at my synagogue’s Sunday school later that weekend. i said 300 was racist. He half-jokingly told me, ‘i don’t think 300 is smart enough to be racist.’
And he was sort of right, right? There are few 21st-century films as painfully unaware as Zack Snyder’s 300. There are plenty of arguments in favor of the movie’s concerted xenophobia, its post-9/11 Iraq War Era fear-mongering and militarism, its precision-grade bullshittery. i think all that’s also correct. It’s both. The movie is pointedly, purposefully, proudly unaware.
And so of fucking course it’s the official national film of the United States of MAGA.
Look at any random five pictures from the January 6 Putsch and tell me you can’t spot at least one sign/patch/flag/t-shirt referencing Sparta and/or Spartans. And we owe it all to 300.
Well sort of. Here’s what Myke Cole had to say much better than me for The New Republic back in 2019:
“Ancient Sparta’s influence is all around us, providing a litany of patron saints for spectacular last stands. There’s a word for this mania in Western cultures: laconophilia, taken from Laconia, the region the Spartans hailed from. Most of us have never heard of laconophilia, even as we live in a world so dramatically shaped by it… There are at least 39 municipalities named after Sparta in America alone, and I gave up counting the number of American and Canadian high school sports teams named “the Spartans” once I hit 10…
You should probably just ditch this essay and go finish theirs.
But anyway, Okay, so we don’t owe it all to 300. It goes much deeper than that. But Snyder’s homoerotic hymnal provided a reinvigorating rallying cry for every AR-15 toting motherfucker out there. And here we are now.
Let’s call laconophilia’s modern iteration “Spartan Syndrome.” It’s a serious and grim cancer. And it’s almost 100-percent fatal.
Not to the person suffering from Spartan Syndrome. More often than not, Spartan Syndrome is deadlier to the people around the person actually infected by this malignant MAGA tumor. But it is its own pandemic, and i don’t see any goddamn vaccine on the horizon.
i truly can’t think of a more destructive piece of modern pop culture than 300. Even if you only have the vaguest awareness of actual history and human psychology, you will find it difficult to pay attention to anything in the movie other than its grotesque fascistic fetishism. Go pirate it and tell me i’m wrong.
i don’t begrudge anyone associated with that movie. As my friend said back in high school, i don’t think most were smart enough to know they were making the cinematic equivalent of The Turner Diaries. But i think every single person involved should disavow it and its legacy. Even you, Michael Fassbender. i know you’re reading this.
(((EC)))
Thank you! I've been trying to come up with a short-hand to describe the peculiar psychopathology of the MAGAverse and "Sparta Brain" captures it perfectly!