“Was that racist, or did it just
seem racist?” That was the basic idea of the conversation that my friends and I had as we left the movie theater in the spring of 2007. We had just borne witness to
300, Zack Snyder’s gruesome orgy of CGI blood-spurts and thunderous group-grunts. The movie had been a sensory experience, every frame made to look like a Frank Frazetta painting or a funeral doom album cover. And we were buzzing from it, having fun recounting all the oh-shyt decapitations and inexplicable mutant attackers and portentous catchphrases. But as soon as the buzz wore off—and it wore off pretty quickly—we had to ask ourselves if this was all supposed to be some sort of sly
Starship Troopers-esque comment on totalitarianism or whether it really was as fukked up as it appeared. And it probably
was that fukked up.
Snyder famously did whatever he could to make the movie echo its source material, a 1998 comic from Frank Miller, as closely as possible. Individual shots are precise recreations of comic-book panels. Grotesque, distended character sketches are rendered in loving detail. Snyder shot the whole thing on a green-screen set because real, actual mountains and cliffs wouldn’t jut and loom the way they’d done in the books. This wasn’t the first time someone so slavishly recreated one of Miller’s comics; Robert Rodriguez had done the same thing with
Sin City in 2005, even giving Miller a co-directing credit. But
300 was even more striking in its fealty, partly because it’s a more sweeping, immersive cinematic vision and partly because it more closely mirrors Miller’s worldview. And Frank Miller happens to be fukking crazy.
Miller was a comics hero, the guy who’d turned
Daredevil into a noir fever dream and helped inaugurate a new era of grimly sophisticated storytelling with 1986’s
The Dark Knight Returns. Once upon a time, the darkness and misanthropy of his work made him a fascinating, transformative figure. These days, every time he writes a bitterly disgusted blog post about Occupy Wall Street or whatever, it becomes increasingly obvious that the darkness isn’t a put-on. He really lives it: He really is a paranoid reactionary with an active imagination. That helped produce some great art, and it also led him to tell the nakedly fascistic story he told in
300, a story that became all the more jarring when Snyder rendered it as blockbuster entertainment.
