A Mighty Whinge

SF Chronicle Usetabee columnist Cinnamon Stillwell (link via Mick LaSalle) watches 300 and reads herself some Victor Cotton Hill Hanson, predictably extrapolates practically everything completely ass-backwards, and mangles her own premises. Let's watch the fun, starting with the standard "they think they're smarter'n yew, Cletus!" boilerplate:

When it comes to the offerings of Hollywood, rarely does a film resonate strongly with both mainstream America and the largely liberal world of film critics. For the two seem to inhabit different universes, particularly when it comes to depictions of patriotism, war, religion and the age-old struggle between good and evil.

Jesus, the very first paragraph needs to be unpacked. For one, as LaSalle rightly points out, exactly what makes Stillwell so certain that film critics are "largely liberal", and what exactly does that mean, in terms of scope and degree? Of course it means nothing; it's just that it's easier to simply preach to the choir with the usual assumptions.

And maybe these negative characterizations of "patriotism, war, religion" yada yada were simply the result of them not being all that entertaining, or that they were simplistic or heavy-handed, or carried their own transparent agenda. Whatever. But because the neoclown kulturkampfers predicate their entertainment choices on how closely they jibe with their own preconceived political agenda, it doesn't even occur to them that maybe it was just an honest, objective assessment.

When bad reviews and huge box office numbers coincide, the gulf between critics and audiences is laid bare. Such was the case with "The Passion of the Christ" and "National Treasure," both of which Americans flocked to see even as critics shook their heads in disbelief.

The unprecedented success of the recent film "300" is further evidence of this pattern. While critics have largely panned "300," Americans clearly haven't been listening. The film's opening weekend brought in $70 million, with all 57 of its early IMAX midnight showings selling out, making it the highest-grossing March opening ever and third-highest opening for an R-rated feature. And its box office numbers have remained high ever since.

Uh, yeah. You could say the exact same thing about Wild Hogs (17% critics' rating, $135 mil box office in just five weeks) or Big Momma's House 2 (5% critics' rating, nearly $28 mil opening weekend). Perhaps these nameless smug, effete librul water-carriers just have it in for Martin Lawrence.

(Incidentally, Passion of the Gibson has a 51% critics' rating, while National Treasure (aka Indiana Cage and the Mope of Doom) has a 42% rating, not stratospheric but not universally panned, either.)

So. Three paragraphs so far, chock-full of bold assertions, and not a single one of them true. This is quite a batting average. Amazingly, it gets even worse, if you can do worse than zero.

While critics described the film as overly violent, juvenile, stupid, macho, right-wing, race-baiting and, according to Stephen Whitty of the Newark Star-Ledger, an expression of "Saturday-matinee xenophobia," "300" clearly has resonated with the masses. The reasons for this are obvious, at least to anyone who doesn't inhabit the ranks of the intellectual elite. The film's time-honored themes of bravery, honor, camaraderie, sacrifice, courage against all odds and, above all, the struggle between good and evil, are tailor-made for mainstream America during a time of war. Its success bespeaks a yearning for stories that tap into the ideals of a nation fighting for its survival.

Throughout "300" are references to the sort of absolutes and eternal values that undoubtedly led to the discomfort of some of its liberal critics. The militaristic Spartan culture, where young men were raised from birth to be warriors in service to protecting the city-state, is portrayed in all its brutal glory.

Is she serious? A nation of fat people drive fat cars to air-conditioned googolplexes to veg out and throw popcorn for a couple hours. Is there some sort of rallying cry all of a sudden for college Republicans to abandon their keg stands and internships and enlist in the Great Cause, or did I blink and miss it?

It seems safe to posit that perhaps Stillwell is projecting her own yearning for the transformative power of an epic cartoon to mobilize idealism, galvanize a populace entrenched in an existential struggle. The notion seems to be that this stylized distillation of the necessary John Wayne tropes can steel the proles' nerves for What Is Necessary. For people who get their foreign policy views from comic books and cartoons, this actually makes sense.

The film is definitely a bloody affair, and there are moments when the violence is almost pornographic. But given that it depicts battles fought with swords, spears, shields and, at times, bare hands, the film's gory details are likely historically faithful. Other sword-and-sandal epics have covered similar territory. Unlike films where the violence is gratuitous, the violence in "300" is part and parcel of the story and to omit it would be to omit the nature of the beast.

This is a crude bluff, and it should be called. This flies square in the face of every "what about all the good news" plaint, if you want to get right down to it. Why is "almost pornographic" violence practically a necessity to communicate the import of this false dichotomy they present us with in the cinematic portrayal, yet such stuff in the context of actual news reporting would be treated as demoralizing at best, and likely treasonous? We likes our blood and gore in CGI just fine, but don't show us the real thing, thank you very much. This is a peculiar tack to take for one who is steeling oneself for noble effort and sacrifice.

The whole article is worse than a mere lie, it's an abuse of language, of the reader's intellect. It's cheap sophistry and hortatory rhetoric poorly disguised as thumbnail scholarship. It presents a false choice between having to fight or having to capitulate, and couches it in the moral certitude of a cartoon based on a comic book. And that's just nonsense. We don't have to steel our nerves to be willing to fight, we have to do so to be willing to kill, to start another fight after getting tripped up in the last one we started, and they know it.

But they know deep down inside how repulsive that is, so they hide that impulse with these lame stabs at art criticism, in which a work is expropriated for their propaganda purposes, and imaginary liberal critics are calumniated for the same reason. We are not on the verge of being decimated by overwhelming forces; we are bogged down in a swamp batting at numberless mosquitoes with pipe bombs and AK-47s. We are being steered toward another pre-emptive war of choice by a crew of fools who said from the start that the destabilization they've created was a feature, not a bug. We are being lied to point-blank by politicians who use Baghdad shopkeepers for their despicable little stunt photo-ops.

This is the moral cretinism that runs our country and whose acolytes crave authorship of something, anything that might have a whiff of cultural importance. But because actual art and actual craft require some degree of observation and perception, they don't typically intersect with the inherently soothing cadences of true propaganda. That is, 300 might be a perfectly good movie; I might get around to catching it on HBO someday. At the very least, it looks extremely well-made. But whatever its qualities, they are not found in the squinting of the kulturkampfers, poring over an endless beach with their detectors, always sure that the next beep they hear will be that hidden treasure, and not yet another rusty bottle cap. They are sloppy thinkers, constructing shoddy arguments on flimsy premises.

The enemy with whom we are engaged have their own word for an epic, existential struggle between absolute good and evil, in which only perseverance and rightness of character can truly prevail. That word is jihad.