300 is gay?

[Big F'n Dave]

According to this guy it is. And that's one of the reasons it's such a hit:

 

7. The men.

 

A Spartan boy is bred to militarism. He's taken from his mother and, as the movie says, is "thrown into a world of unspeakable cruelty" (or, as the English call it, boarding school). Spartans are the tough guys, the bully boys, the warrior class, fighting and dying for other Greeks who may lack their mettle. Leonidas chides the Athenians as "those philosophers and boy-lovers."

 

Yet the movie is totally gay, a romp in Homer eroticism. Male body worship abounds; the actors, who seem pumped up on Hellenic growth hormones, hardly need shields or swords. Their pecks are their breastplate; their tumorous abs are their body armor. (Thee closing credits list two "personal trainers to Mr. Butler, so I guess the muscles aren't all CGI.) They boast and tease each other about their physiques, which to me sounds like flirting. At times these ancient bodybuilders look like their own statuary, heroic and sometimes headless.

 

Even the Spartans' nobility is homoneurotic. They rhapsodize about "a beautiful death," and figure in military hagiography somewhere between Wagner's Siegfried and the Third Reich's S.S. (I mean that in a nice way.) "It's an honor to die at you side,"one officer says toward the end to Leonidas, who replies, "It's an honor to have lived at yours." If this movie dialogue were between a man and a woman, I guarantee the audience would spill their popcorn in giggle fits. But the crowd I saw 300 with suffered all this strained seriousness in respectful silence.

 

In his last battle, Leonidas gets an enemy arrow in each tit, and soon he's Xerxes' pin cushion. The image may remind you of Saint Sebastian in a medieval painting, or Toshiro Mifune in Kurosawa's Throne of Blood. To me it recalled some of the more extreme photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe.

 

I know nothing of the sexual orientation of Snyder or Miller. And I'm not criticizing, only describing, 300's iconography. But I'm surprised by the movie's broad appeal to the movie block of young American males, many of whom still use "gay" as the second-worst slur, and can still see homosexuality as something to laugh at or fear. Maybe the success of 300 will encourage other, better, directors to make dead-serious movies on ancient-history subjects. And maybe, then, we'll hear kids come out of the theater burbling, "I loved that movie, man! It was totally gay!"

 

 

Edit to add: Since when can't we use italics in topic titles?

Edited March 15, 2007 by DMD

[Pope Flick]

In his last battle, Leonidas gets an enemy arrow in each tit, and soon he's Xerxes' pin cushion. The image may remind you of Saint Sebastian in a medieval painting, or Toshiro Mifune in Kurosawa's Throne of Blood. To me it recalled some of the more extreme photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe.

 

 

I would like to see which Mapplethorpe photograph he is referrring to. An arrow in each tit? I didn't notice that, then again I wasn't looking for it.

 

Some people see a pro-homosexual film brought to you by the decadent Hollywood class. The Randall's of the world see this as a pro-war hit piece on Iran to get us ready for the inevitable. This despite the fact that most all of the filmmakers have contributed to the Democratic Party.

 

That's the great thing about art, it's so subjective.

 

Me, I've read Frank Miller's acrhtypal comic books for years and artistic icongraphy of warriors-bred-to-die is quite common.

[Big John]

 

Edit to add: Since when can't we use italics in topic titles?

 

Formatting of titles was never allowed.