300

A lot of ink has been spilled over this movie, and even more about the battle it is based on. I won’t be digging into it much here. There are a lot of threads you could chase about this film, and most of them don’t have much to do with it as a story. Pointing out that the Spartans were a fascist race of slavers, or that the European obsession with the battle can be traced to 19^th-century racist theorizing may be perfectly valid points, but others have already tilled that soil.

Instead, rather than dwell on all the troubling philosophical underpinnings and plentiful historical inaccuracies, I am going to try to look at the film as complete in itself – as a story about a battle and the men who fought it – rather than anything else. Because I think so many people have picked apart the subtexts that the actual text gets lost in the shuffle.

Because 300 is not a historical document, and it is very plain up front that it is not even going to try to be. Even within the context of the movie we have the additional layer of Delios’s narration, framing the story as a version of events told by a narrator who is definitely exaggerating to make a better story for his audience. In the movie, Delios is telling the story for a purpose – to try and rouse Sparta, and in fact all of Greece, to fight the invading Persians. Thus he is absolutely making shit up to tell a better story at every chance he gets. So we have a story inside a story inside another story, presaging the obsession with this kind of multileveled storytelling that would later result in Snyder’s masterpiece SuckerPunch.

So 300 is not a version of history, but rather an example of mythologizing it. The Spartans are all courageous and meet death with a smile, the Persian invaders are barely human beings, consisting of hordes of terrified slaves driven by cruel overseers. The Persian Immortals are like Kabuki-masked demons, complete with a hulking, berserking giant. The emperor is attended by an executioner who’s arms have been replaced by saw-blades for better decapitations, and entertained by a goat-headed man playing the fucking zither. Xerxes himself is shown as a giant possessed of possibly godlike power – someone so far removed from human he is more monster than man.

But if you showed this movie to someone without any knowledge of the historical/cultural baggage, they would still be blown away by an intense, stylish, and visually arresting war story. There’s a reason why this movie was showered with mixed reviews and a shit-ton of money at the box office. The storytelling devices it uses are obvious and unsophisticated, but they fucking work. This is a classic story of desperate men fighting to the death against overwhelming odds.

Firmly in the tradition of Sword & Sorcery, the Spartans are not shown as being what we – as modern observers – would call good men. They are a warrior culture, and they are plainly depicted to love warfare and battle, and seek it out. Like so many of Howard’s heroes, they prize valor above all things, and throw themselves into the fury of war with a gladness that modern war stories avoid showing. Leonidas is a king, but a warrior king, and his duty is to lead his people into war and to victory.

Another barbarian trait of the Spartans is their prizing of honor above life. The 300, after all, did not survive the stand at Thermopylae – they died. But it is plain they would rather have died than retreat. Even when they know they are betrayed and have the chance to escape, they stay. Partly they stay because of their code of honor, but part of it is the sheer exaltation of a battle to the death. Like Conan and Kull, they will meet death smiling. The famous Laconic wit (“Then we will fight in the shade”) is something Howard’s warrior-heroes would have understood completely.

The battles themselves wallow in an almost entirely fantastical landscape, with enemies masked, veiled, and deformed into parodies of human beings. They ride strange beasts, throw bombs, and fight with inhuman fervor, their fanatical devotion to their god-king contrasted against the Spartan’s own iron-hard code of honor. Neither of these motives is entirely understandable to the modern mind, and they are attempts to depict an older way of believing and behaving that is also commonly found in S&S stories

With its ferocious warrior heroes, enemies like monsters from the dark corners of the world, the whispers of magic out of ancient times, and a bloody battle against invaders from an elder world, 300 conjures almost every Sword & Sorcery trope there is. If Xerxes had turned into a giant snake at the very end, it would have been inescapable. In the end the movie proves that whether they are based on history or made up out of whole cloth, stories like this work for a reason.