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2 'Axis of evil' seeps into
Hollywood By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
No doubt about it, four years after his
famous and also infamous "axis of evil" speech, US
President George W Bush's crusade mentality has
finally found its cinematic counterpart - in
300, a major motion picture centered on the
epic battle between the Persians and the Greeks in
480 BC.
It is part history, part fantasy,
safely buffering itself against potential
criticisms, eg of its historical distortions or
shortcomings, by the cinematic license optimally
exploited
meanwhile to preach to the
audience about the values of freedom against the
evil forces of unfreedom.
Portraying the
past world in a contemporary language with the
help of voiceovers in case we missed the message,
the dramatic feature plunges into the midst of a
violent battle that fully resonates with the
contemporary discourses on "clashing
civilizations".
More than pure
entertainment, it is a movie that wants people to
reflect on what they are seeing, by teaching a
lesson or two about history, by eliciting sympathy
for its exalted Spartan heroes and heroines
standing up to the world's first superpower, the
Achaemenid Persians.
Saturated with
not-so-subtle Persianphobia, the movie calls for
the interrogation of the political agenda behind
it, at a time when Iran is constantly threatened
with military invasion and "all options are on the
table" in Washington. In Los Angeles, the
cognitive assault has been raging for some time.
In Into the Night, a leading
actress is asked what is her biggest turnoff and
answers: "Persians". In Steven Spielberg's movie
The Peacemaker, actor George Clooney utters
four-letter words when referring to Iran. In the
more recent Syriana, Clooney, playing a
rogue Central Intelligence Agency operative, blows
up Iranians in downtown Tehran with a broad smile
on his face.
There is a very large
population of Iranians in Los Angeles county, many
of them affluent professionals and successful
businessmen. Many live in luxurious mansions in
Beverly Hills, but you would not know that by
watching Hollywood's movies. In House of
Sand and Crash, we only see struggling
immigrants on the margins of society.
California may be America's ultimate
melting pot, but Hollywood's tall walls of
exclusion and discrimination have yet to crumble
when it comes to the movie industry's persistent
misrepresentation of Iranians and their collective
identity immersed in a long thread of history.
Speaking of history, it is simultaneously
a rich yet exceedingly difficult source material
for the art of movie-making, and Hollywood has at
best a mixed record on "getting it right",
notwithstanding the controversies swirling about
Oliver Stone's political movies, or those of Mel
Gibson and the like.
When Hollywood
seemingly succeeds on this tough terrain, as was
the case with Glory, a movie about black
soldiers during the American Civil War, or Clint
Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima, the
critics' response is lavish praise. Yet somehow on
the egregious flaws and shortcomings of
300, particularly in its intense
anti-Persian myth-making, the same critics have
been largely quiet.
But who can deny the
"reality effect" of 300, to paraphrase the
late French literary critic Roland Barthes, in
today's context of "West versus the rest"
verbiage, also known as the "clash of
civilization" thesis? Stylistically fresh and
innovative, 300 is fairly conventional in
its storyline and uses the cinematic apparatus to
offer a morally textured, ideologically correct
exaltation of a civic virtue in short supply in
the age of "war on terror" and other related
Western-origin wars, that is, self-sacrifice and
patriotic heroism.
As in a 1978 film about
the Vietnam War titled Go Tell the
Spartans, 300 taps into the famous
asymmetrical battle at
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