We red-blooded American males have been suffering for years. Denied our all-American heroes in the movies we have had lefty anti-heroes rammed down our throats for over a generation. Our anti-hero way of rage against the Man and the machine or the highway, said Hollywood’s creative finest.
Or, to paraphrase a famous American: Anti-heroes yesterday, Anti-heroes today, Anti-heroes forever.
When the United States was savagely attacked by rich Saudi Muslims, we were taught to worry about “why they hate us.” And Hollywood refused to provoke our moderate Middle-eastern friends. You know the ones that don’t just want to bury us. They want to kill us. After all, we are only infidels.
So now along comes a bunch of schmucks nobody’s ever heard of — graphic novelist Frank Miller, director Zack Snyder, and a couple of other writers — to pull in $70 million over the weekend with a movie about a handful of brave warriors who stand up against the limitless central-Asian hordes, iron men vs. effeminate oriental voluptuaries, and patriots against robotic slaves. How was this picture allowed to be made?
By now everyone knows that the movie “300” is not really a video-game style recreation of the battle of the Spartans against the Persians, but really... Nod, nod, wink, wink, know-what-I-mean.
So scriptwriter David Kahane is conflicted.
Help me out here, because I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around a few things: When, early in the film, a sneering Persian emissary insults King Leonidas’s hot wife, threatens the kingdom, and rages about “blasphemy,” the king kicks him down a bottomless well. And yet nobody in Sparta asks, “Why do they hate us?” and seeks to find common ground with the Persians on their doorstep. Why not?
Does that mean he can now write scripts about true American heroes smiting the mind-numbed robots of the world’s thugocrats? Or is it back to Nazis and crazed Christian militias?
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