03-12-2007, 05:39 AM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->A Movie Only a Spartan Could Love by Dana Stevens, Slate Magazine
If 300, the new battle epic based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, had been made in Germany in the mid-1930s, it would be studied today alongside The Eternal Jew as a textbook example of how race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth can serve as an incitement to total war.
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In at least one way, the film is true to the ethos of ancient Greece: It conflates moral excellence and physical beauty...
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Gay men (not gay in the buff, homoerotic Spartan fashion, but in the effeminate Persian style). <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
The movie appears to be pure homoerotic fantasy. The essentially homoerotic western mind projects its homoerotic fantasies and fears onto the east. I do not think there is a similar discourse in the east regarding the "west". Probably, we should get behind the reasons for this western obsession, as difficult as it may be.
If 300, the new battle epic based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, had been made in Germany in the mid-1930s, it would be studied today alongside The Eternal Jew as a textbook example of how race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth can serve as an incitement to total war.
.....
In at least one way, the film is true to the ethos of ancient Greece: It conflates moral excellence and physical beauty...
.....
Gay men (not gay in the buff, homoerotic Spartan fashion, but in the effeminate Persian style). <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
The movie appears to be pure homoerotic fantasy. The essentially homoerotic western mind projects its homoerotic fantasies and fears onto the east. I do not think there is a similar discourse in the east regarding the "west". Probably, we should get behind the reasons for this western obsession, as difficult as it may be.