"Zack Snyder's 300, the saga of the 300 Spartan soldiers who sacrificed themselves at Thermopilae in halting the invasion of Xerxes' Persian army, was attacked as the worst kind of patriotic militarism with clear allusions to the recent tensions with Iran and events in Iraq - are, however, things really so clear? The film should rather be thoroughly defended against these accusations"
Zizek wants to say that the US should be compared to Xerxes' multi-cultural empire and the 300 are those who wish to keep with the enlightenment program of standing against mysticism.
"Xerxes's words when he attempts to convince Leonidas to accept the Persian domination, definitely do not sound as the words of a fanatic Muslim fundamentalist: he tries to seduce Leonidas into subjection by promising him peace and sensual pleasures if he rejoins the Persian global empire."
"against the reign of mystique and tyranny, towards the bright future," further specified as the rule of freedom and reason - sounds like an elementary Enlightenment program, even with a Communist twist!"
The problem is that both accounts are political while the majority of Americans aren't. The 300 are portrayed as courageous and strong and people will identify with them regardless of the fact that they (the people) are neither. In their unsensuous imagination, or as a pure matter of signifiers, people can identify with them and enjoy the pseudo-visceral experience which contemporary action movies have. This won't fuel any political fires. Rather the point is that movies like this allow the average person (with the little amount of humanity they actually possess) to entertain infantile wishes of omnipotence though they are so out of proportion to the way that they are living (their lack of strength and will-power).
Marx said revolutionaries must make the masses fear themselves (what they've become, their way of living). Most socialists focus on inequality and justice but it obviously does nothing to appeal to altruism or what's in the best interets of people. They want capitalism because they are allowed to daydream (there is enough isolation that they can hide in their houses without being reminded of their mediocrity just like the Dostoevsky's Notes man did with books more than 100 years earlier).
About Me
- TCP
- “The historical sense (or the capacity for quickly guessing the order of rank of the valuations according to which a people, a society, a human being has lived; the ‘divinatory instinct’ for the relations of these valuations, for the relation of the authority of values to the authority of active forces)... has come to us in the wake of that enchanting and mad semi-barbarism into which Europe had been plunged by the democratic mingling of the classes and races: only the nineteenth century knows this taste, as its sixth sense.... ‘historical sense’ almost means the sense and instinct for everything, the taste and tongue for everything- which immediately proves it to be an ignoble sense... a dissatisfaction with what is one’s own, and admiration for what is foreign” -Nietzsche