Stranger Than Fact
by Aemilia Scott
The battle for the American mind is no longer being fought on the terrain of the news media. Or rather, that battleground is so destroyed from increasingly powerful rhetorical bombs, it'll be a while before any really good ideas can grow there again. It's no news that Fox News is a full-on conservative circle jerk, and other more seemingly unbiased news sources like CNN have tarted themselves up like showgirls on the information superhighway in order to compete for viewers' attention. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are political satire, but the real meat of their critique is of the news media itself, and the reason why these shows are so damn funny is because they live off that sinking feeling that the American news media has contracted The Clap.
The point is that America could not conceivably care less about the news. Anyone who thinks differently is invited to watch Wolf Blitzer spend four hours a day, for seven solid days, discussing the minutiae of Anna Nicole Smith's death in The Situation Room. If it bleeds, it leads. But also: if it gives or receives a blowjob, it leads. If it comes out as gay, it leads. If it falls from grace, it leads.
See, America doesn't just want the facts. America wants a good story. People don't go to the theaters and enjoy Batman with their entertainment brain, and then go home and screw on their civics brain to watch CNN. Americans now have one standard by which they judge everything that comes into their eyeholes and earholes.
If Americans are being entertained by the news, then they are being informed by fiction. This brings us to what was not so long ago the number one film in America, now out on DVD: 300. Like the ancient Spartans, Americans are free people, except we exercise our freedoms by ignoring the almost unanimous chorus of critics screaming, "Don't see this movie! Hollywood is crapping in your eyes and calling it a blockbuster!"
And thus at the opening night of 300 in Chicago, the auditorium was packed full of people, most of whom had by now already heard the critics telling audiences to wear goggles, lest they suffer an eyeful of doo-doo. Most people were there because they loved Sin City. Some were there because they love violence. I was there to support my male friends with latent homosexual impulses. We all have our reasons.
The plot of 300 goes like this: Leonidas, the benevolent warrior king of Sparta, hears that the Persian army is rolling through Greece. Persia is ruled by Xerxes, a king who looks like the divine child of Aladdin and Rupaul, and who lives in a 24-hour lesbian orgy tent. Leonidas wants to go to war with Persia, but both the Oracle at Delphi and his own Senate tell him that it is illegal to mount a Spartan army during the holy season. The Senate's main advocate is an inarticulate rapist named Theron, who is constantly pissing on Leonidas' parade by talking about the rule of law and non-military negotiation. Fifty percent Kofi Anan, fifty percent Marcus Aurelius, one hundred percent freedom-hater.
Needless to say Leonidas mounts his army anyway, and he fights some incredible battles while massively outnumbered. His wife the Queen exhorts the senate to send additional troops into the battle. To summarize: Undeclared war. Persia. Troop escalations. 300 is the Iraq War in a codpiece. Got it. Next question: why is the audience, almost seventy percent of whom are against the Iraq War, so juiced on this movie?
Fiction. The platitudinous vomit that 300 passes off as philosophy can only be held down in the realm of fiction. When deliberating about taking his men to war, Leonidas actually says the words "freedom isn't free," and argues that freedom must be paid for with blood. If you were to ask any one of the audience members in the theater what they thought of Lee Greenwood's patronizing, propagandistic joke of a folk song, "God Bless the USA," they'd make fun of it just as every comic from David Cross to Trey Parker has done. Looking at the song in the cold, unforgiving light of the real world makes it a pathetic and easy target. But push "God Bless the USA" one tiny step into the realm of fiction — put Lee Greenwood in some man-sandals, throw him a lyre, and have him wail: "Well I'm proud to be a Spartan / Where at least I know I'm free" — and it's enough to make Uncle Sam himself cry tiny little American flags. Those audience members who themselves enjoy making fun of unthinking, violent patriotism will eat it the hell up.
Well-informed people tend to laugh at previous generations for falling into the traps of misinformation and evil. Why didn't any German citizens see National Socialism coming? Why didn't anyone realize that they were subject to party-line propaganda in the form of well-produced motion pictures? Why didn't anyone realize what a nut job Leni Riefenstahl was? And yet, earlier this year, Hollywood spit out the prequel to Triumph of the Will, and it made $70 million its first weekend.
Even more baffling than 300's undeniably fascist read on the Iraq war is that it seems no one, from director and screenwriter to second assistant director and script intern, seemed to understand that they were making a propaganda film. Either that, or it is the most well-orchestrated and well-concealed plot to influence public opinion since Leni Riefenstahl and Dorothea Lange. Probably not.
What that reveals is the deeper, sadder truth that while people don't necessarily hate democracy, the strong, steely-eyed gaze of autocracy makes a way better story. These themes are recycled again and again in fiction because they are just more damn exciting than subtle arguments. Which makes a better screenplay: Leonidas listening to the slow, stately deliberation of the Spartan Senate, which after due discussion and a public vote decides that yes, they should allow Leonidas to take a small army out to confront the Persian Forces? Or, Leonidas, the single-minded, uncompromising warrior, who ignores the cries of the Oracles and the Senate and takes 300 of his best men to fight an impossible battle? The answer to that question is the same as the answer to why a progressive will never win an argument with Bill O'Reilly. It's just that with 300, progressives root for O'Reilly.
Considering Western history as one of thousands of years of progress, America and the principles on which it is founded are still a tiny, scared baby. Democracy is hard, and the rule of law seems like an impractical pair of shoes you'd love to kick off when you're trying to run from radical Islamic terrorists. Maybe it is America's continual struggle with its own founding principles that makes its citizens so ravenously hungry for stories of those who are above the law, either by birth or by force.
This is why there have been plenty of tales told of the shot heard 'round the world, or of the battle of Gettysburg, but there haven't been any epics written about the Continental Congress. "Coming to theatres this summer: The framers of the Constitution argue for four long months on the language of this most sacred document! It's clause after clause of excruciating, heart-pounding, rhetorical compromise!" The framing of our Constitution is possibly the most important period of our nation's history, and it is a story so unsexy that it would be green lighted by Hollywood right after National Lampoon's: A Remembrance of Things Past.
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But 300 is a hopped up, sexed up, juiced up, one-hour-and-change commercial for the Marines. And the real danger with the film is not that it is truthful, but that it is fictional. The problem with fictionalized propaganda is that it lets otherwise very intelligent and enlightened pacifists cheer like crazy for one of the most warlike societies in Western history. It makes those who most hate and resent our President for unilaterally starting a purposeless war and shedding American blood with impunity, ogle the screen lustily while warriors in crimson undies go to war without the approval of their Senate. That — that feeling of watching something Greater than yourself — is why when Mussolini started the parade, there was no shortage of people to march.
300 has this same effect today because while people have learned to identify the stripes and stars of traditional propaganda, we haven't quite mastered spotting it in the realm of abstraction. Come on, who doesn't love Die Walküre, right? Now that's some good marching music.
Fiction is the most powerful tool conservatives in general, and warmongers in specific, have against the Republic. Civil Libertarians should not be worried about Bill O'Reilly defending the existence of Guantanamo Bay; instead they should be worried about how fucking awesome it is when Jack Bauer goes dark and interrogates the Russian Ambassador by breaking his nose and chopping his fingers off with a cigar clipper. Jews should not be worried about Mel Gibson's anti-Semitism; instead they should be seriously worried about a movie theater full of people totally on board with Spartan eugenics. That — that amazing, intoxicating feeling of being swept up in something so badass that you can barely stand it — that is the real enemy of those who fight for principles like the rule of law and civil liberties, principles that are exercised more for those in the minority than those in the majority. That feeling is what starts the parade.
E-mail Aemilia Scott at aemilia at gmail dot com.
