By now, I hope that all of you guys will have seen the Snickersgate incident. In that incident, Snickers made an ad for the Superbowl which was shady on the gay side (I thought it was only shady, well, at least the ad they actually showed), but commentary outside the ad itself made the ad clearly homophobic, it showed that the company (and the ad company behind the ad) expected a homophobic reaction from the public. Actually, worse than expected: incited it.
Something similar went into play in 300. In 300, we follow Gerard Butler in the role of Leonidas, a Spartan who gathered 300 of his hottest warriors to stand up against an evil empire (without realizing that they, Spartans, were just as evil, but that's another story).
The movie is a nice technical achievement, I liked the grainy images, excellent photography, and I loved the costumes (or lack thereof):
It was nice to see that the buff guys had to suck their gut quite a lot, you can tell that; so, I'm not alone there. But the movie is not all that. It's not. The reviews have been (mostly) great; but I will have to disagree. It's not a bad movie, but you should not have high expectations. Unless, of course, all you want is to see this man:
Before going into the gay content, let me just say that I had a big problem with the racism in the movie. You can read about that at The Independent. I am not even going to try to go into the historic inaccuracies -- you can read about those at The Toronto Star.
Now to the gay review.
I will differ from a few of the reviews of 300 on the gay front as well. I did not really find it homophobic (ta-dah!). The movie itself is not homophobic, I think. People have been saying that Gerald Butler's character reference to Athenians as "boy lovers" is homophobic, and I can see where that comes from, for sure. But I think that to say that that is necessarily homophobic is incorrect: I believe the reference to Athenians is offensive to Athenians (not gays) on a different ground: Athenians would be pedophiles. While it is true that the two (gays and pedophiles) are unfortunately, and often, equated, the two are far from being the same thing and one would hope that a reasonably intelligent person would know that. So, to say that the "boy lovers" comment is necessarily homophobic is a bit of a leap. If you want to make an effort into seeing goodness behind people's shady comments, this would be a good time.
But that's not all. Another accusation of homophobia in 300 comes from Rodrigo Santoro's character being effeminate. The character is king Xerxes, who is portrayed as (someone who thinks he is) a god. A god full of flaws (and maybe his effeminate nature could be seen as one additional, or even the main, flaw), but it didn't really came out 
that way for me, and remember that I am the one who is usually quite sensitive about the way we the gays are portrayed. For a king to be effeminate is not a homophobic stance and that didn't really bother me (even though he is the villain). As I have said before, I love the fact that people can be seen as effeminate, even though I would prefer if they were not the villains in the movies.
On a slightly positive scene (the one in Rodrigo Santoro's tent), we see some girl-on-girl action, something I haven't seen mentioned anywhere. I think the scene was supposed to show the bacchanalian bent of the Persians, I guess; but again, that didn't bother me and I actually found that scene to be a little on the positive side.
But in the end, I will indeed give the movie a shipwreck score because of the "boy lover" comment (to a 
small extent) and because of a declaration from writer-director-asshole Zack Snyder (that's him on the left and on the right, "acting" in Dawn of the Dead). The "boy lover" comment, after all, isn't nice and some people unfortunately equate "gay" with "pedophile", and I bet a lot of the straighties in my theater (a packed theater that clearly predicted the strong opening) did just that mental association.
The stronger reason for my shipwreck score indeed does rest on Zack's comments, which relate to my opening thoughts: the real homophobia in 300 actually lies outside of it, it lies in the bigoted mind of Zack (by the way, I think the other people involved with the concept of the movie should also be put to blame). Here's Zack's childish question, posed in an interview to EW: ''What's more scary to a 20-year-old boy than a giant god-king who wants to have his way with you?'' So, he is indeed turning Xerxes into a homo who wants to have his way with Leonidas, and that is supposed to scare young boys (it should lure them, but whatever). Not nice. Zack was specifically referring to this scene, where Santoro "tops" Butler:
Frank Miller's stories already resulted in a movie with homophobic content: Sin City. Shame on them all for letting homophobic undertones into their work.
Oh, and the acting was a-t-r-o-c-i-o-u-s.
The piece from EW is after the jump (where Snyder does concede that ''Some people have said to me, 'Your movie is homoerotic,' and some have said, 'Your movie's homophobic.' In my mind, the movie is neither. But I don't have a problem with people interpreting it the way they'd like to.'') Eff you too, Zack!
Double-Edged Sword
In all likelihood, Spartan warriors didn't actually do battle in nothing but clingy leather underwear and red capes. They wore body armor and loose drawers like kilts. But here on the Montreal set of 300 — a retelling of the Alamo-style last stand that a Spartan army elite took against a Persian army 250,000 strong — history is not the guiding force. It's what looks cool.
''That's the way Frank drew it,'' says director Zack Snyder. He's referring to Frank Miller, a cult-star comic-book creator best known for Sin City and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. Snyder, a buff, energetic 40-year-old who got his start in commercials and scored with 2004's Dawn of the Dead remake, debated tinkering with Miller's concept of Spartan attire, circa 480 B.C., but went with the nearly naked look. And therein lay a problem. It wasn't long before the iron-pumping cast, headed by Scottish-born Gerard Butler (Phantom of the Opera) as Sparta's bombastic king Leonidas, began to develop some peekaboo wardrobe malfunctions. ''I never thought I'd get sick of dealing with men's codpieces,'' says costume designer Michael Wilkinson. ''But I've kind of officially reached that point.''
The public's appetite for them these days is anyone's guess. In 2000's Gladiator, Russell Crowe famously bellowed, ''Are you not entertained?'' Back then, audiences certainly seemed to be. The bloody, R-rated saga grossed $458 million worldwide and won five Oscars. But a funny thing happened on the way back to the Forum. Even as studios rushed more historical epics into production, audiences — at least American ones — turned indifferent. Troy, starring Brad Pitt, grossed only $133 million domestically. Oliver Stone's lambasted Alexander, starring Colin Farrell's crazy blond hairdo, followed with just $34.3 million. And after opening in May 2005, Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven limped to $47.4 million.
By June 2005, Hollywood was nursing a nasty Gladiator-clone hangover. In the midst of all this, Snyder was taking meetings at Warner Bros., the very home of underperformers Troy and Alexander, to seal a deal on...another historical epic. ''In some ways, I was able to spin that whole bad-box-office thing,'' Snyder says. A little-known fact certainly helped: Troy, Kingdom, and Alexander each grossed about three times as much overseas as domestically. (Troy's worldwide gross reached nearly half a billion dollars.) With a story set mainly on the Grecian battlefield at Thermopylae and a largely non-American cast, 300 seemed well positioned to appeal to foreign audiences. And Snyder was promising not just a lot of blood, but new blood: ''I said, 'Listen. The genre is ripe for reinventing, because you have this glut of sword-and-sandal pics. So let's reinvent it.'''
Snyder's plan was to make a kickass, hard-R-rated action movie that felt like anything but a period piece. It would be shot almost entirely on bluescreen soundstages with computer-generated backgrounds added later. CG would also be used to create geysers of spurting blood worthy of Jackson Pollock, the better to control the precise level of the gore if the MPAA's ratings board found it all too much. The battle scenes would be filled not with conventional swordfights but with post-Matrixslow-to-fast-motion mayhem, heavy on impalements and decapitations. In short, it would be what Snyder's wife and producing partner, Deborah Snyder, describes as ''a ballet of death.''
The hardcore tone concerned Warner execs. They pushed Snyder to consider aiming for a PG-13. But as Deborah Snyder recalls, ''Zack put his foot down. Either they were going to do it as an R, or we were going to walk away and try to do it somewhere else.'' Says Warner president Jeff Robinov, ''As you looked at the storyboards on how he was going to shoot the movie, there was no real way around an R.'' The director won his fight. The catch was that he had to hack the budget to below $65 million — about one-third of what Troy reportedly cost. A tight 60-day live-action shoot began in fall 2005, and Warner got busy positioning 300 to the obvious fanboy-heavy, Sin City-loving audience. The studio organized a Q&A panel with Snyder and Miller last July at San Diego's Comic-Con International, where they showed preview footage so gory and spiked with nudity it couldn't be posted on the Internet, thanks to MPAA rules about trailer content.
According to Snyder, Warner had given up on trying to appeal to a female audience. Then a pair of test screenings changed all that. ''We got, like, a 100 percent recommend from women under 25,'' says the director. ''They don't even get that kind of score on a romantic comedy.'' Why did women respond? In Miller's original graphic novel, Leonidas' wife, Queen Gorgo, appears only in passing. In the movie, Queen Gorgo (Brit Lena Headey) is a front-and-center partner to Leonidas, calming his nerves in bed (while both are very, very naked) and getting her own new subplot about political corruption as Leonidas marches off to war.
''At first I very much disagreed with it,'' Miller says. ''My main comment was 'This is a boys' movie. Let it be that.''' But the Snyders felt strongly that Leonidas needed something specific to fight for, and that female ticket buyers needed someone to identify with. The preview scores vindicated them. ''Those numbers came back, and Warner said, Wow, we need to rethink this a bit,'' says Snyder. Instead of spending big on one 30-second Super Bowl TV spot, Warner sprinkled previews into more female-friendly TV shows, including Grey's Anatomy, Heroes, Lost, and American Idol.
Marketing the movie overseas may turn out to be more vexing. The studio had banked on how well sword-and-sandal movies play abroad, but when 300was unveiled at the Berlin Film Festival in February, the filmmakers got some hostile reactions from journalists. ''I was getting bombarded with political questions,'' says Snyder. Some Europeans saw Leonidas' lone-wolf march against the Persians as an allegorical defense of President Bush's incursion into Iraq. ''When someone in a movie says, 'We're going to fight for freedom,' that's now a dirty word,'' says Snyder. ''Europeans totally feel that way. If you mention democracy or freedom, you're an imperialist or a fascist. That's crazy to me.''
But movies become what their audiences make of them, whatever a director might intend. Which brings us to one more wild card in the 300 launch: the gay factor. While Queen Gorgo's topless interlude will get the hormones of adolescent males firing, it's hard to predict what they'll make of Xerxes, the eight-foot-tall Persian conqueror who looks like a glam-rock refugee. He's played as a fey, sexually ambiguous figure by Brazilian-born actor Rodrigo Santoro (currently an ill-received new character on Lost). ''He's this giant,'' says Santoro of Xerxes, ''who believes he's a god. He's very manly, but at the same time has a feminine side.'' And why is that? ''Because, being a god, he's allowed to have every quality.'' The scenes of a bejeweled, long-fingernailed Xerxes offering King Leonidas peace in exchange for ''submission'' have a decidedly sexual undertone. Snyder says that's not accidental, that it's intended to make young straight males in the audience uncomfortable: ''What's more scary to a 20-year-old boy than a giant god-king who wants to have his way with you?''
The movie, true to Miller's vision, is also loaded with sweaty hunks running around in those tight leather Speedos and capes. None of this is played for gay appeal, but could induce snickering among some teens. Snyder shrugs it off. ''Some people have said to me, 'Your movie is homoerotic,' and some have said, 'Your movie's homophobic.' In my mind, the movie is neither. But I don't have a problem with people interpreting it the way they'd like to.'' As long as they buy tickets first.
DEATH MATCH
Empires rose and fell over centuries. But Hollywood's on-again, off- again affair with ''sword-and-sandal'' flicks rises and falls much faster.
SPARTACUS (1960)
Tinseltown's first ancient-warrior fad peaked with this Stanley Kubrick epic. But by the mid-'60s, the genre was played out.
AIRPLANE! (1980)
When Peter Graves, as a pilot, leered at a little boy, ''Do you like movies about gladiators?'' he made such flicks a punchline.
GLADIATOR (2000)
Remember when Russell Crowe was known as a hitmaker, not a phone thrower? He kicked the sword-and-sandal thing back into fashion.
ALEXANDER (2004)
Then Colin Farrell pretty much killed it. Director Oliver Stone reedited this twice for DVD, but alas, audiences were largely not entertained.
I saw 300 with a friend from Germany, and his comment as we walked out was, "Goebbels would have loved this movie." To him, it was an excuse film for America's invasion of Iraq. Me? I was so friggin' pissed off at the deliberate misrepresentations to add to the racism and homophobia of the film, I couldn't discuss it...not till I'd had a couple beers.
My main reason for feeling the movie's homophobic? It's not just the "boy-lovers" comment. It's not just that idiot, Zack Snyder's, boast in EW. It's not just Xerxes being made into a queen instead of being presented as the intelligent masculine king he was. No, it's ALSO the fact that the Spartans were made into total heteros and the whole notion of theirs that having their warriors sexuallg involved with each other made them better warriors was completely ignored. And in this day of don't ask, don't tell, where a top general can call queers "immoral" and keep his job while some dumb white talk-show idiot gets canned for repeating something that you can hear on just abot any hip=hop song.
And on top of all THAT, it presents the idea of eugenics as a good thing, showing what will happen if you DON'T kill off the deformed at birth.
Maybe it's not big deal to this site, but to me, this movie and everyone associated with it ought to be horse-whipped.
Posted by: jemmytee | Apr 27, 2007 at 12:25 PM
Writer Frank Miller has er, issues here, to say the least... On the one hand his blustering, macho comics present a less-than-charitable attitude to gays (see this great feature: http://www.afterelton.com/movies/2007/3/300.html).
On the other hand, he wanted to see the Spartans showing off their abs, something that would have been suicide for men facing lethal bow and arrow attacks. And lets not even go into the homoerotic basis of Spartan culture...
Posted by: John C | Apr 03, 2007 at 09:50 PM
;-)
Posted by: Queer Beacon | Apr 03, 2007 at 12:04 PM
I haven't seen 300 yet -- doesn't really sound like my cup of tea --but if I did I would probably find the "boy lover" comment a bit problematic, if only because -- as has been said -- so many lump homosexuality in with pedophilia, so you always wonder if some unenlightened screenwriter is simply using "boy lover" to suggest "gay." It's unlikely that we'll ever get a movie -- at least from Hollywood -- that actually goes into the Greeks' attitudes toward and indulgence in homosexual behavior.
Posted by: Bill Samuels | Apr 03, 2007 at 05:25 AM
Hey Shannon, what an interesting interpretion of the "boy lovers" comment, it makes sense: it's all about being a bully and a fighter...everything else is looked down upon.
However, I still think the pedophile association is more at play here ;-)
Thanks for your comment!
Posted by: Queer Beacon | Mar 18, 2007 at 04:10 PM
If I may, I would like to disagree with you on the “boy lovers” comment. I have always read that line, as you did, to be more of a slur on the Athenians, but for me it has always read as “those Athenians, ha, men who would rather make love than Fight. What kind of man is that?” Rather than any negative reference to gays or as a reference pedophiles.
And yes, the directors comments about the scene where Xerxes and Leonidas talk, that was out of line. But he does have one point. MY reaction to Xerxes was very much don’t touch me. But I am female and this is the ENEMY, so my reactions would be different from a 20year old boy. For me, it was: here is this man, who is taller, and stronger than me (not stronger than King Leonidas) and he’s got the whole crazier than a June bug thing going for him, thinking that he is a god, so I have to say my reaction was to him as the character Xerxes, not to anything he might or might not represent.
On a side note, I think that the reason why 300 will (hopefully) do better in the box office than the previous movies mentioned is that unlike Troy or Alexander, it is not trying to take itself historically accurately. It is taking a true story and event and extrapolating on it, not presenting itself as if this where historical fact. It is, after all, historical fiction.
Posted by: Shannon | Mar 18, 2007 at 02:47 AM