300 Against 70,000,000

Hollywood as apparently succeeded in inadvertently doing what even a hawkish Bush Administration has failed to do: turn Iranian public opinion against the West. I suppose that the visuals in the movie were all put in just to make things look cool. But in retrospect, portraying Persia’s grandest emperor in history as a blood-crazed, bald, bizarrely-ornamented, barely-clothed barbarian probably was not a move calculated to engender mutual respect. But then, it’s likely no one was thinking of that.

I’m reminded of a story I just read about the start of the 1857 Indian “Mutiny.” The British military recruited its infantry from the local peoples, and only imported its officers. The cultural tensions were high but manageable with the help of the local militias. But, in 1857, new breech-loading Enfield rifles were introduced, which required the soldier to bite the cartridge open to load it into the weapon. The cartridges were initially lubricated with a grease made from rendered pork and beef fat, thereby requiring both Muslim and Hindu soldiers, which was basically all of them, to eat foods both socially and religiously taboo to them. By the time the British realized their oversight, it was too late and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people would die in an unsuccessful two-year revolt against British occupation.

I don’t think I thought of how Iranians might have reacted to the film 300 myself, but then again I’m not one of the producers of the film and I’ve not even seen it yet. I had been very interested in the story, but I’m turned off by the cartoonish look of the previews. I would have thought that the actual story of the Battle of Thermopylae would have been dramatic enough to make a really good movie, with plenty of action and mayhem, without adding magic and monsters and other sorts of superfluous things. World War II movies don’t hold back showing the Germans as an effective and powerful fighting force; that makes the American/British/Russian forces that fight them all the more heroic, and you don’t need to give the Nazi supernatural powers to make them by a scary adversary and a triumph over them a feat worthy of respect. So too with the Persians at Thermopylae.