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I don’t think 300 is satire in the same way that Starship Troopers is satire but that doesn’t mean it’s sincere either. It’s best viewed as an exercise in exploring the nature and efficacy of propaganda and modern notions of heriosm that are inextricably linked with military worship, especially in the west. Basically it asks “what does it take to make us root for a eugenicist military dictatorship against the forces of multiculturalism?” and the answer, for a lot of people, is “make them extremely buff and good at killing.”
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Jan 3, 2021 01:01
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Quoting an old post of mine but Starship Troopers satire was seen as pro-fascist when it first came out as wel. ruddiger posted:He (Verhoeven) famously hated it (to the point that he didn't even read it), but Starship Troopers, like 300, was absolutely seen as pro-fascist by its critics at the time, not just fringe reactionaries. (...) ruddiger fucked around with this message at 01:28 on Jan 3, 2021 |
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Jan 3, 2021 01:23
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Parody and satire often seem to get conflated in unfortunate ways, and Starship Troopers is separately both a parody of the original book and a satire of American culture at large. Having stuff like slaves in the shots comedically undercutting the Spartans' grand speeches or whatever seems like it would push 300 more into that parody territory, when I think Snyder's point was specifically for the movie itself to walk the line where viewers find themselves wanting to root for the Spartans despite their badness. I think I fundamentally disagree with this: quote:And even then, Starship Troopers wasn't recognized as satire by a very large portion of its viewers, so clearly both works had issues communicating 'the subject of our film is not admirable' to a general audience regardless of what they were trying to do. Whatever the merits of subtlety in the arts, I don't think it's controversial to say that a satire that's unrecognizable as a satire isn't as effective a satire as it might have been. The whole point is to draw people in and entice them with bad ideas, so in my opinion big dumb portions of the audience accepting it uncritically is a sign that the work is specifically working as satire. I'm not even arguing that 300 is perfect as satire, I just think your quote goes far in the wrong direction. Martman fucked around with this message at 01:46 on Jan 3, 2021 |
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Jan 3, 2021 01:37
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Leonidas, declaring war on Persia: You threaten my people with slavery and death... Dilios, shortly afterward: And no Spartan - subject or citizen, man or woman, slave or king - is above the law. The fact that Sparta has slaves is actually fairly important to the narrative, as you can see, because they specifically include dialogue stating that Leonidas considers “his people” distinct from Sparta’s slave population. That’s really more than enough to colour any and all talk of “freedom.” And it’s not just that slavery is conspicuously absent; work in general is simply not shown. Who’s tending all those amber waves of grain? However: Ephialtes. Leonidas and Dilios define Ephialtes by what he isn’t. He’s not a warrior, not a true Spartan, etc.... And that’s because, in reality, Ephialtes was a shepherd. He was also from Trachis (i.e. not Sparta) - and his particular tribe was previously subjugated by Sparta. Note the line above, distinguishing “subjects” from “citizens”. Trachis was one of many Greek cities that supported Persian rule. So, the film actually presents a version of events where “working class” Ephilates attempts to betray Persia for Sparta and Athens - but is dissuaded from doing so by Leonidas. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 02:47 on Jan 3, 2021 |
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Jan 3, 2021 01:53
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The real lesson of 300 is you shouldn't be learning your history from a lovely comic book even if the movie of the comic was pretty good
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Jan 3, 2021 02:31
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RBA Starblade posted:The real lesson of 300 is you shouldn't be learning your history from a lovely comic book even if the movie of the comic was pretty good It really is.
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Jan 3, 2021 02:35
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RBA Starblade posted:The real lesson of 300 is you shouldn't be learning your history from a lovely comic book even if the movie of the comic was pretty good As cool as it was that a lot of people learned about the Tulsa massacre from Watchmen, it’s a horrible indictment on the approved education curriculum and how this country actively hides its genocidal history.
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Jan 3, 2021 02:38
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ruddiger posted:As cool as it was that a lot of people learned about the Tulsa massacre from Watchmen, it’s a horrible indictment on the approved education curriculum and how this country actively hides its genocidal history. Americans are one of the most heavily propagandized peoples out there, so, yeah
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Jan 3, 2021 03:15
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Drakyn posted:Hey. McCloud commented on a source ripping on Sparta I posted in the Wonder Woman '84 thread, I suggested that there might be a better place to have a likely-divisive conversation about that, and he linked me here. it was over 2000 years ago op
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Jan 3, 2021 03:19
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ruddiger posted:As cool as it was that a lot of people learned about the Tulsa massacre from Watchmen, it’s a horrible indictment on the approved education curriculum and how this country actively hides its genocidal history. They got to double learn it from Lovecraft County on the same network as well, as a kind of weird aside.
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Jan 3, 2021 04:54
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Darko posted:They got to double learn it from Lovecraft County on the same network as well, as a kind of weird aside. I was shocked how many people I knew who never heard the term Sundown Town before they watched that show.
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Jan 3, 2021 05:46
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Ghost Leviathan posted:The funny thing is it sometimes works, in that the ruling classes or at least large amounts of the chattering classes have lost their loving minds now there's a channel for the proles to talk to them unfiltered. Mike Goldberg destroying his opportunity at his dream job because he couldn't stop yelling at people tweeting at him on their lunchbreak or whatever reamins the best example since it was purely twitter that ruined it for him.
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Jan 3, 2021 05:55
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Horizon Burning posted:it was over 2000 years ago op Hate to break it to you, but the movie is not that old. I personally don’t think 300 is a work of satire, since that’s giving it credit it does not deserve. In my mind, it’s a shallow visual spectacle that obsesses over certain details from the graphic novel without stopping and thinking why it does. So, much like Snyder’s work in general. BigglesSWE fucked around with this message at 09:19 on Jan 3, 2021 |
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Jan 3, 2021 09:16
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I, too, am unconvinced by the "300 is a satire" argument, and interpret it instead as primarily an exercise in style and aesthetics that is unconcerned with its own potential for analogic political significance, like a Sergio Leone western.
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Jan 3, 2021 09:22
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All waters are shallow if you refuse to dive.
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Jan 3, 2021 09:53
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BigglesSWE posted:Hate to break it to you, but the movie is not that old. All the best film analysis happens by assuming the director is a moron and what occurs on screen was the result of an accident.
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Jan 3, 2021 10:31
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YOLOsubmarine posted:All the best film analysis happens by assuming the director is a moron and what occurs on screen was the result of an accident. The opposite (i.e. assuming a product is profound because *I* like it) is certainly very good analysis too! I don’t think Snyder is a moron. I just don’t think he’s a good moviemaker, and what you can take from his movies are, IMO, barely anything beyond the surface level. [edit] I’ll leave it at that since I haven’t watched any of his movies since 2016, because, you know, I tend to not go back to movies I don’t like. I’ve given my 2 cents on the subject, and while I’m sure one can dig up a specific frame in the 2nd act of each movie that will brilliantly expose the horrors of humanity, I really don’t care. Peace out. BigglesSWE fucked around with this message at 11:22 on Jan 3, 2021 |
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Jan 3, 2021 10:56
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Drakyn posted:
First of all, I appreciate this huge effort post, it was a good post in good faith, and I agree with you that the fetishation of a slave state like sparta is, to put it mildly, unfortunate, as is the fact that many took the film 300 at face value and that it gave the Spartan myth a boost in the arm. But to clarify, when we say that this film is satire, we do not mean that the goal of the film was to show how horrible the spartans or their society was, because I don't believe that was the point of the film. 300 is not about how Sparta is a society of jerks and child abuse and why you should hate them. Like YOLO said, it's a story that concerns itself mostly with propaganda, who's telling the story, how they frame events and themselves. The film does tell us that spartan society is hosed up because it's built on the murder of babies and engage in gross child abuse, even if the storyteller paints that as some sort of hosed up "this is how men are raised" thing. The reason people miss the point is because it trusts the audience to go "Oh, they murder babies, that's hosed up", the film itself doesn't elaborate that this is a bad thing, it's counting on you being able to do that yourself. This of course leads to the problem you mentioned, where some folks take it at face value and somehow come off thinking the spartans are some sort of ubermench. Which leads us to your point about subtle satire being weak. The issue of how obvious a work of satire should be is probably one of those topics that's been done to death by far smarter people than me, but for my two cents I agree with what Martman said. You make satire too pointed and it veers into parody, and I don't think that's the intention of 300. Deciding how obvious you should be when making a satirical work is probably a tricky needle to thread, and one can arguably say 300 failed in that sense because of how many took it as seriously as they did. but by that metric movies like Fight club failed too, because scores of young men saw that movie and missed the point about toxic masculinity and instead literally started their own fight clubs, and as Ruddiger pointed out, Starship troopers was thought to be a serious sci fi film when it came out. This is the hallmark of every Snyder film imo, there's always metaphors, allegory and themes to unpack in his work. He puts a lot of thought into his films, which is something I admire and appreciate. BigglesSWE posted:Hate to break it to you, but the movie is not that old. My dude, there's literally a scene where the spartans are fighting strawmen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0xSqLrG-ow&t=17s
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Jan 3, 2021 11:23
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The goal isn't usually to assess how many fathoms it is to the bottom of a movie, is it?
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Jan 3, 2021 11:27
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Bongo Bill posted:I, too, am unconvinced by the "300 is a satire" argument, and interpret it instead as primarily an exercise in style and aesthetics that is unconcerned with its own potential for analogic political significance, like a Sergio Leone western. It depends how much weight you want to put on the word "satire", really. There's another interview quote that I couldn't dig up this time where Snyder talks about wanting to lead the audience down the path so that they're rooting for the baby-murdering psychopaths and that's enough for me to pitch the movie-ball into the satire box. I'd certainly agree that the primary concern is aesthetic though. He really wants to take the dynamic comic pages and put them on screen and everything else is just a vehicle to making a good movie while doing that. Plus as well Snyder's lack of regard for political readings of his films, which is not to say they're apolitical, just that at this point he's definitely not moving to cut off any particular allegory in the way that BvS does with its array of talking heads.
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Jan 3, 2021 11:39
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McCloud posted:My dude, there's literally a scene where the spartans are fighting strawmen ... eh? they're not literally fighting strawmen in this scene. e: oh right there is one guy with some straw on his costume
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Jan 3, 2021 11:53
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Necrothatcher posted:... eh? they're not literally fighting strawmen in this scene. Pay closer attention, and you'll start seeing them all over the place. I counted around 7-8 of them. They're dressed in a burlap sack with straw coming out of their feet and with sticks for hands.
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Jan 3, 2021 12:45
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It's still amazing how many people rabidly defend their arguments in CineD over movies they barely remember watching and on pressing eventually admit they were drunk and mostly slept through.
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Jan 3, 2021 12:59
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Necrothatcher posted:... eh? they're not literally fighting strawmen in this scene. Must have been an accident. Pay it no mind. Snydsr is good with visuals, but they don't actually mean anything.
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Jan 3, 2021 13:02
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BigglesSWE posted:Hate to break it to you, but the movie is not that old. This is just silly.
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Jan 3, 2021 13:20
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Its good to remember that in any given scene in a movie, you have 50 different people who went to school for their particular art conferring on every part of that scene; from lighting to consuming, to acting, to direction - and that all portrays itself in that scene. Hard for meaning not to slip out with that happening. Sure, in like made for TV Lifetime movies, there's an air of "just get this done in time," but when talking a movie where a director is allowed to do what they please; everyone typically is trying to express themselves artistically.
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Jan 3, 2021 13:22
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BigglesSWE posted:The opposite (i.e. assuming a product is profound because *I* like it) is certainly very good analysis too! This is a profoundly smug and backhanded comment, lmao. [edit] I watched the Red Letter Media review of WW84, and throughout it they kept ragging on how bad the story and script were, attributing most of — if not all — of the blame to Patty Jenkins. In contrast, they also kept praising how great the first film's story was and how Patty didn't write it, but they couldn't even bother to acknowledge or mention that Zack Snyder has a story credit for the first film because... I guess maybe they gotta stay on brand and ensure their audience doesn't get the wrong idea? teagone fucked around with this message at 15:19 on Jan 3, 2021 |
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Jan 3, 2021 15:12
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BigglesSWE posted:The opposite (i.e. assuming a product is profound because *I* like it) is certainly very good analysis too! Oh come on, you clearly care enough to be annoyed that people take his work seriously. At least give one example of a reading that can contribute to discussion. After all, if your "two cents" are worth anything, it should be extremely easy, right?
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Jan 3, 2021 16:50
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"Don't forget, we're the bad guys." -Dilios
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Jan 3, 2021 17:16
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It continues to boggle my mind that someone could watch any given Snyder film and not realize that there are themes and messages deeper than "film pretty", esp. considering how often Snyder quotes Excalibur as his inspiration. Dude is obviously setting out to do more than film for the sake of filming. Maybe people disagree with the message and refuse to acknowledge that there is one? I don't get it.
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Jan 3, 2021 17:17
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It's just a function of disliking something I think, things get dismissed as not worth thinking about and it leads to some weird statements. I remember seeing someone talk about The Last Jedi, where at the start Luke sarcastically says "you need my help, sure let me go out alone with a laser sword and face down the whole empire" and then at the end he goes out alone with a laser sword and faces down the whole empire, and they referred to it as if it was a plot hole, like he'd forgotten that he said earlier he wasn't going to do that
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Jan 3, 2021 17:45
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teagone posted:This is a profoundly smug and backhanded comment, lmao. They don’t like Zack Snyder. They’re not going to like Zack Snyder. They’re just people.
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Jan 3, 2021 17:54
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teagone posted:This is a profoundly smug and backhanded comment, lmao. It's okay to call them hack frauds.
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Jan 3, 2021 18:00
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300 is primarily a movie fascinated by the aesthetic spectacle of violence in ancient battle and the absolutely crazy mindset a culture and peoples would need to glorify it the way Spartans did while framing the story as a campfire legend meant to rile up an army. Theres a purity to its perspective on how an ancient society like Sparta would accept and encourage such brutality in life and pushes it to extremes to make a clear point about how insane these dudes were, for better or worse(turns out worse in the long run). Its really not even that complex, the text and subtext is pretty fuckin blatant and upfront.
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Jan 3, 2021 18:23
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They like what they like, can't fault them for that even if they have an extremely limited idea of what a comic book film "should" be. d I don't watch Half in the Bag anymore because I understand their tastes and, especially with these kinds of films, I know exactly what they'll say.
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Jan 3, 2021 18:27
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Jimbot posted:They like what they like, can't fault them for that even if they have an extremely limited idea of what a comic book film "should" be. "Good" 
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Jan 3, 2021 18:40
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McCloud posted:First of all, I appreciate this huge effort post, it was a good post in good faith, and I agree with you that the fetishation of a slave state like sparta is, to put it mildly, unfortunate, as is the fact that many took the film 300 at face value and that it gave the Spartan myth a boost in the arm. Thank you for taking my enormous post at face value. That's not me being sarcastic; I wasn't sure how the gently caress it would be taken, and I have a terrible habit of taking forever to either write a godawful wall of text or write a godawful wall of text and then spend even longer chopping it down. I get what you and Martman and SMG are saying re:satire, subtlety, even if I personally believe that if you had to have a satire collapse due to either over-subtlety or over-obviousness that being obvious to everyone to the point of utter parody is a more forgivable fuckup because at least it's still recognizable it as a failed attempt at something, whereas if literally nobody recognizes it as anything but earnest it's just more of what you were trying to needle (and yes, I agree that I do think of Starship Troopers and Fight Club as being defined to some degree as failures of satire; encouraging the thing you're targeting as lovely can't be regarded as a pure and uncontaminated win). I can agree to disagree on that, just as I still disagree that the film is intentional satire. That was, as I said, an attempt at openness rather than the main point. I understand what you argue when you say that the film is not specifically about Sparta being lovely. I think that's a real shame because frankly I think the world could've used a modern depiction of Sparta as being a horrific lesion on history's anus idealized by the priveleged and deluded moreso than it could've used a depiction of Sparta-as-propaganda, satirical or not, but I can understand what you're saying when you say it's a depiction of propaganda. Where I still DO find something to quibble over is if the film's display of Spartan propaganda is actually the best way to portray...Spartan propaganda. Spartan citizens weren't shy about their society's brutality and shittiness; some of the very few things attributable to their citizens include sayings where Spartan citizen women deride and shame women citizens from other cities for DOING things like weaving, like some filthy pathetic slave instead of a proud free citizen. Other ancient greeks - elite snobs who were perfectly happy to live atop brutalized slaves - raised their eyebrows at how lovely Spartan citizens treated the Helots, and the non-citizens of Sparta were incredibly open to each other in their hatred for their masters. Sparta wore its blood and feces and murdered slaves on its sleeve without shame. Internally it couldn't avoid this; the Helots were kept in check through open and acknowledged terror (every year the ephors formally declared war on them!), and violent suppression of open slave revolts was a yearly business even outside the historically noted huge uprisings. By omitting so much of Spartan society as it was - which again, the historian is criticizing pop culture for via the modern example of 300 - the film doesn't portray what a Spartan citizen propagandist would've displayed proudly. Rather, it portrays what modern propaganda about Sparta would find appealing: macho men who kick rear end, bereft of the graphically awful excesses that the macho men would have loudly celebrated, including the enslavement of more than nine out of ten of the humans that occupied that society. Even piles of infanticided baby skulls are so much more safe and acceptable to the modern forward-thinking eugenicist creep than an earnest display of a society that openly and proudly scorns anyone who does anything productive (America has to pretend the poors are leeches first, rather than openly saying 'work is bad, those who work are vermin who we may kill without care') and regards it as the height of adolescent accomplishment to stab a defenseless slave to death from ambush. Casual dialogue even frames pedophilia as something that Spartan citizen society doesn't practice and looks down upon, which has 'this is for the benefit of the American audience' all over it. Of course, this disagreement becomes a totally moot point if what you mean by the story 'being about propaganda' specifically refers to it being a story not about what SPARTAN CITIZENS thought about Sparta, but what AMERICANS think about Sparta. Then the film's omission and softening of so much Spartan horror that Americans would balk at but that Spartan citizens would've found perfectly acceptable makes sense. Regardless, I stand by the series of articles as a good read even if you disagree with their author's interpretation of 300 as nonsatirical because it gives a lovely overview of how nearly every single part of the society as shown on screen was an idealized depiction of an evil garbage fire of a failed state utterly removed from reality. Which we're all agreed on no matter what. Horizon Burning posted:it was over 2000 years ago op  Thanks again everyone. Apologies for only specifically replying to the people who quoted me; I promise I read you, even if I misunderstood you. I hope you'll forgive me when I inevitably taper off from this. Drakyn fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Jan 3, 2021 |
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Jan 3, 2021 19:13
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I think it should be taken as analogous to modern times rather than a satire/parody of what Sparta was like and how it would propagandize itself.
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Jan 3, 2021 19:32
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Although the concept of satire is obviously vexing for many, it’s worth noting that people are equally confounded by art that is not satirical. After all, the assertion that 300 isn’t satirical is fundamentally an assertion that [i]this is what a normal movie looks like. And normal movies are, I guess, blandly innocuous and/or intensely didactic. We can look at 300’s sister film - which is, obviously, Mad Max: Fury Road - as an example. That’s a film that’s not commonly considered satirical - but it’s a film that’s narrated to us by a character literally called Insane Guy, whose protagonist is (however initially) part of the futuristic equivalent of the SS. So, are these aspects of the narrative to be accepted uncritically, or just ignored altogether? What do the characters actually stand for? Do we deny that the “War-Boys” are quotable and appealing? That a character literally called Imperator Furiosa rises up above the masses at the end? Now, how about James Cameron’s Avatar - which is likewise the story of a compelling fantasy-world that’s explicitly narrated to us? The failure to read 300 as satire is a product of a more general failure to read, well, anything.
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Jan 3, 2021 19:33
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CelticPredator posted:They don’t like Zack Snyder. They’re not going to like Zack Snyder. They’re just people. Not like Snyder is fine. Stating that viewers can’t find meaning in a movie that the director did not intentionally and explicitly put there is inane. Even if Zack Snyder is the dumbest and most superficial man alive that doesn’t mean you can’t possibly find meaning in his movies. YOLOsubmarine fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Jan 3, 2021 |
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Jan 3, 2021 19:34
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