300: A Gay Porn Movie?

On the other hand, many commentators, on gay blogs as well as the Internet Movie Database have accused 300 of being homophobic. It’s easy to see, and even agree with, the gist of their arguments, since Snyder has pitched his film on the visual images of the strong, manly, sexy Spartans fighting what seems to be an army of oriental- ized freakish looking Persians. It can’t be an accident that Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) is portrayed as a mutant Ru Paul-esque queen with full makeup, piercings, and jewelry. Indeed, the manly demeanor of the Spartan 300 exists, to a large degree, by the “girly” appearance of their Persian foes. 300 articulates not so much an overtly homophobic attitude, as a rampant desire to separate Spartan men from their Persian counterparts. 

This might all be interesting in a postmodern sort of way, if 300 had any creative impulse pushing it forward. But, alas, as Gore Vidal said about the New York premiere of the San Francisco drag troupe The Cockettes, “not having any talent isn’t enough.” 

The screenplay of 300 is dismal. As penned by Snyder and Kurt Johnstad it is a ramshackle copy of any junky 1960s sword and sandal mini-epic—Hercules (1958), The Giant of Marathon (1959), Revolt of the Slaves (1960), Queen of the Amazons (1960), The Colossus of Rhodes (1961), The Rebel Gladiators (1963), etc.—without much of the intentional wit. (Although to be fair, some of these films were made by great directors: Jacques Tourner directed The Giant of Marathon and Sergio Leone directed The Colossus of Rhodes before his career-making spaghetti westerns.) 

The dialogue in 300 is wooden and feels as computer generated as the imagery. They might as well have called it Pulp Diction. Whatever talent these performers have, all of them—Gerard Butler as the brave King Leonidas, Lena Headey as his wife Queen Gorgo, Dominic West as the traitorous Theron (who looks distractingly like the caveman in the Geiko insurance commercial), David Wenham as Dilios —are lost in a bad script and overwhelmed by flashy images.  

300 is obviously cognizant of its debt to the film world of the late 1950s and early 1960s, but it is also perfectly happy to negate the essential meaning and politics of those films. It is obvious that the draw of these movies is the bare-chested guys in scanty peplums (the short skirt these film heros wore, giving it’s name to the genre) flexing their muscles and furrowing their brows as they think of their next line. 

It is no surprise that many of the past peplum-wearing performers— such as Steve Reeves, Gordon Scott, Ed Fury, Kirk Morris, Reg Park, Mickey Hargitay, Mark Forest, Alan Steel, Dan Vadis, Brad Harris, Reg Park, Peter Lupus, Rock Stevens, and Michael Lane— were often professional body builders. In the 1950s and the early 1960s body building for men—what was called physical culture, now called gym culture—was essentially a large- scale cultural project, articulated and unarticulated, for reinventing the male body after WWII. 

Interestingly, as the male body was being redefined as both strong, sexy, and vulnerable, the gay rights movement was taking root and gay male culture—especially muscle magazines like Physique Pictorial —were not only gaining in popularity, but also influencing mainstream culture. Indeed, many of the performers in the peplum films had their origins in the gay muscle magazines.  

But what we get here are straight, frat boy buddies who make fun of the Athenians for being “boy lovers.”

None of those films openly embraced their incepient homoeroticism, which is understandable given the time frame. But in the 45 years since those films were made the world has become far more open. It would have been refreshing if 300 had at least made a nod to the fact that Spartan soldiers engaged in complicated (depending on the source of information) same-sex activity and relationships. But what we get here are straight, frat boy buddies who make fun of the Athenians for being “boy lovers.” In some sense 300 wants to be a beefcake film that entices a teen boy audience with violent, sexy male bodies and then tells them that it’s okay to be homophobic. 

Snyder and Kurt Johnstad don’t have enough imagination to make 300 interesting, or take any chances with it. They don’t even have enough nerve to define their position on state power and it’s political implications. Is this a parody of the Administration’s Iraq policy or a rejection of it? Ironically, the pep- lum films of the 1960s almost always had an anti-authoritarian impulse. They were, in some sense, the beginning of a counterculture. 

But at this time in history irony doesn’t play well. It would be a stretch to say that 300 was playing with the ideas of consciously being, simultaneously, a pro and anti-Iraq film. Or at being both homophobic and homoerotic. It is, however, an example of the dumbing down of political discourse in popular culture: a film that wants to say things about both and has nothing to say about either of them. . 

Z 

Michael Bronski is the author of Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps (St. Martin’s Press).