Thinking Thanksgiving, part 1: on '300'

I am a big fan of the film '300.' My admiration for the film survives the liberties it takes with history, which might just mean that I'm not an historian. More interestingly, my admiration also survives the film's ethical flaws. I mention this now, today, because I think Thanksgiving Day counts as a holiday for me, rather than as a day of mourning, for the same reason that '300' counts as a piece of entertainment rather than (just) as a piece of propaganda. The reason: I've become quite skilled in the fine art of judicious bracketing. By the time I finish this post I hope to have decided whether this is a good thing.

Bracketing is what enables me to separate the Millerite ideology in '300' from the remarkable cinematic experience that Frank Miller's graphic novels inspired. In referring to Miller's ideology I have in mind the crypto-libertarian, hyper-masculinist, hetero-normativefoundationalist (can I say that?) cultural conservatism that marks all of Miller's mature work, from the Batman graphic novels to Sin City and beyond. This ideology is nearly the only thing that explains the way '300' lumps together all of today's culture war bete noires as enemies of manly freedom and womanly virtue in the pre-Christian mediterranean. If you haven't seen the film, you may be surprised to learn that ninjas, veiled and turban-wearing bomb-throwers, burly black men, tawny and nubile sexual libertines, and, apparently, disability rights advocates joined an androgynous Latino Persian man-god in a bid to conquer the hearty, salt-of-the-earth white people that made 5th century Greece the cradle of western civilization. 

There's plenty more to say about '300,' but this isn't the place for it. I'm interested in the film right now because its efficacy as propaganda has little bearing for me on its value as the occasion for an aesthetic experience. Make no mistake, it is a quite remarkable piece of propaganda: I find myself in awe of the the terrible efficiency with which the film transposes the culture warrior's worst nightmare - a multicultural, free-loving, interracial horde overrunning proper civilization - into the idiom of the historical fiction film. But in addition to being great propaganda for late twentieth century culture-warfare, it is also a masterful piece of industrial filmmaking, one that provides its viewers with a stunning visual experience (especially when seen on the big screen, as all proper films should be). 

This is not a point about the imperviousness of artworks to ethical criticism. I'm perfectly happy to say, for example, that D.W. Griffith's 'Birth of a Nation' is a worse film, aesthetically, that it is worse qua film, than it would otherwise be entirely because of its thoroughgoing commitment to and endorsement of white supremacy. A claim like this is in principle available for '300,' and I'm tempted to endorse it - to say that it would be a better film had it not tried so hard to earn the Margaret Thatcher/Samuel Huntington seal of approval. This claim only tempts me, though, instead of convincing me, because it may be false. '300' might be as good as it is in part because it tries so laughably - remember the ninjas - to shoehorn its ideology into a story about ancient Greece. But that's a thought I'll have to pursue some other time.

My thinking right now is that I do with '300' what non-targeted demographics have always done with mainstream films: we become what film theorist Manthia Diawara once called 'resistant spectators.' These are people who construct their experience of a film in ways that take them down paths other than the ones the filmmakers seem to have had in mind. Building on a germinal argument from Laura Mulvey, Diawara makes the point in a reading of 'Birth of a Nation.' He points out that the film clearly imagines its viewers adopting what we might call a 'whitely' gaze or point of view - sympathizing with the white characters, fearing for the white girl being threatened with sexual assault by the white-actor-in-blackface that the abolition of slavery has loosed upon white womanhood everywhere, and so on. He then points out that black viewers (which, importantly, doesn't just mean the viewers we would count as black if we filled in their census forms for them) could see through this, and resist being positioned in the way the film required. Black viewers know, or should know, that Griffith's picture of the Reconstruction era is a pernicious fiction, systematically refuted in detail by, among many others, Du Bois's Black Reconstruction as early as the 1930s. And knowing this, we can experience the film - and relevantly similar films, like "Gone With The Wind" - in different and richer ways. 

My favorite example of resistant spectatorship from my own life comes from watching that old, wretched film "Zulu." This is an early sixties film about a nineteenth century clash between the armies of the British and the Zulu, in what we now know as South Africa. I saw it on TBS, in the early days of cable, late at night, and will never forget rooting for the Zulus to win, while knowing both that they didn't, ultimately, and that I was supposed to be rooting for the Brits. The film was apparently billed, if IMDB is right, as an 'epic story of courage, honour, and pride,' but I could see it only as a story of colonial incursion, even though I didn't have the language for it then.

Anyway, to the point: I am supposed to root for the Spartans in '300' - to put it very crudely, the film wants me to root for them - because they are virtuous, which is to say that they are not libertines and they know that a disability is a disability and they know that one man and one woman is what God intended and they love freedom and family and they're not black/brown/Muslim/Asian. I know better than to root for them on this basis. But I still root for them, mainly because Gerard Butler is so deliciously campy as the Spartan leader, and because the non-ideological prompts that distinguish the good guys and the bad guys are so easy and clear that it's like listening to the blues: you know what the form is, and the fun comes in seeing something so familiar still turned into something new and entertaining. In addition to rooting for the heroes on other grounds, I can enjoy the film despite its ideological content because the fight scenes are so thrilling, and the images on the screen are so well-constructed, and the overall cinematic experience is so effectively managed. (It surely matters also that the ideological content is so over the top that the film bears almost no relationship to the actual political views that it in some sense propagandizes. Again I say: ninjas.) 

This is a form of resistant spectatorship, I think, and it foregrounds a dimension that is crucial to my experience of many of our national holidays. I began by calling it 'bracketing,' by which I mean the willingness to compartmentalize, to wall off, to quarantine, the ethically toxic dimensions of something, which is the first step toward experiencing it in a different way. This doesn't have to mean denying the ethical toxicity; it might mean accepting it - as in the case of '300' - while exploring the other resources the thing provides for the construction of experience.

Now: it is one thing to make this sort of point about a movie, but another thing entirely to apply it to the real-life choice between mythologies of national origin (Thanksgiving) and eulogies for victims of genocide (The Day of Mourning). I will try to think through this difference tomorrow, in part 2 of this post.