Yes, 300 is fascist

Unintentional fascism

Both Frank Miller’s comic 300 and Zach Snyder’s film adaptation have deeply fascist sensibilities. I feel certain that neither creator intended this, or even knows it, but there it is.

I have read most of Miller’s work. I am sure he would reject any reading of his work as fascist since he sincerely hates Nazis and US conservatives, and he often is a political satirist. But fascist themes recur in his work. Someday I have to write a thorough examination of them in his masterwork The Dark Knight Returns, but that is a big undertaking; for now, I will just note that at the climax of the story has Batman arrive as a man on horseback (literally), his mere presence immediately turning the violent energy of young men away from the perversion & chaos permitted by decadent elites, turning them toward a restoration of purpose & order, and that then spreads through society.

I also confess to enjoying many of Snyder’s films as a guilty pleasure, including 300. Patrick H. Willems’ video-essay Our Himbo Auteur examines Snyder’s whole filmography; like me, he concludes that Snyder’s tendency toward fascist themes is unconscious. Snyder is well known for seeing himself as a libertarian — he dreams of someday making a film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead — which I feel confident that he would offer as inherently opposed to the authoritarianism of fascism. But the fascist sensibility includes more than just authoritarianism.

Both creators describe 300 as apolitical, just a gripping yarn animated by romanticized ideas of heroism and bravery. In that too I take them as sincere … and wrong. I think both were trying to embrace the violence as self-consciously Bad Wrong Fun but stumbled into reproducing fascist themes along the way. All stories have politics, and it is difficult to imagine a more thoroughly fascist work in either medium which is not intentional propaganda.

Fascist themes

• Presenting & romanticizing the Spartans as a society in which men define themselves entirely as warriors, in which war is necessary, noble, and good for the creation of a strong society. Every man a violent hero.
• Presenting this warrior ethos as making the Spartans superior to the other ancient Greeks — superior as men and superior as guarantors of civilization — because the other Greeks are devoted first to their trades and crafts. (A familiar, ahistorical reactionary fantasy.)
• Presents the Spartans as defending Western civilization from decadent, perverse, dark-skinned, monstrously inhuman queer-coded hordes from distant countries with different cultures determined to destroy their society.
• Offering just a glimpse of the other institutions of Spartan society, casting them as hopelessly corrupt in contrast to the soldiers. Miller emphasizes the parasitic priests, Snyder the cowardly ruling council which demonstrates that “democracy” is a sham.
• Depicting Spartan society as made great through ruthless eugenic elimination of the unfit and traumatizing training of boys to be men who refuse to admit any fear, pain, or weakness.
• Presenting Leonidas pitching Xerxes’ herald into a pit as a seeming mistake which proves to save Greece, romanticizing visceral emotion producing violent action as superior to calm, reason, openness, and such.
• Romanticizing the bodies of athletic men, framed in terms which vigorously insist that this is not eroticized.

These fascist themes are not inherent in the story of the Battle of Thermopylae, even as the Greek propagandist-historian Herodotus told it. Miller thanks Victor Davis Hansen at the start of 300; Hanson is a notorious militarist racist neocon enthusiast for the Iraq war whose misreading of Thucydides has long been notorious and pernicious. Every change to the real history in both the book and the film point in the same, fascist direction.

And I have to underline that 300 offering the Spartans in contrast to the decadent queerness of Xerxes, his army, and the other Greeks is a particularly funny and ugly touch if you know anything about the historical Spartans.

B-b-b-but satire!

Defenders of 300 say that its divergences from history are justified by the ending, which presents everything we have seen as actually a telling by the surviving Spartan Dilios, who has romanticizized Thermopylae to gain Greek support for the war against the Xerxes.

Thus, they claim, the hidden meaning of 300 is a satire of fascist propaganda, just as Snyder’s Sucker Punch attempts a critique of its surface text.

Snyder would make this point in an interview with Total Film, stating that he sought to place audiences in a tight spot by showing the Spartans’ savagery in blunt terms as people who are prepared to throw newborn children off a cliff if they’re insufficiently healthy, and posing the question “These are the people you’re supposed to go with on this journey?” Elaborating on the point, Snyder felt that “part of the fun” of 300 was to depict a society leaving its sons to fend for themselves as children and only prepared to allow them to return home if they survive, and asking “Those are your heroes?”

But that does not stand up on examination of the actual film. When we see the “real world” of Dilios telling the story, it looks exactly the same. Nothing in the text of either work suggests that the fascist themes are deceitful, or bad in any way.

“But it shows the Spartans doing obviously bad things!” cry its defenders. But everything bad is shown to us as not bad but romantically badass.

These defenses point to its portrayal of Spartan eugenicist infanticide as showing that the story is unsympathetic to the Spartans. Yes, the sensible reader or viewer should find infanticide morally repulsive. But does the story itself share that reading? Both book and film offer the infanticide quickly, to frame other events which it lingers over.

It shows us King Leonidas as a child, facing a test of manhood in the wilderness, fighting a wolf. That he would be compelled to do such a thing is abusive, but the story revels in how this shows that Leonidas is a badass.

It shows the Spartans encountering the deformed Ephialtes, who survived infanticide and aspires to join the Spartans in their ranks. Ephialtes is presented as disgusting. Leonidas gently turns down his help, which is not just portrayed as a kindness but too much a kindness, since the story goes on to have Ephialtes betray the Spartans to the Persians, who seduce him with queer-coded debauchery with other deformed figures. Ephialtes in the story proves as weak in spirit as he is in body, another fascist theme.

Contrast 300 with Verhoeven’s film adaptation of Starship Troopers, which is a satire of fascist propaganda. Troopers does what 300’s defenders claim 300 does: it presents fascist propaganda on its own terms, expecting the audience to supply its own ironic reading. But unlike 300, the fascist voice of Troopers is not remotely seductive. The soldiers are not badass, they are incompetent. We get not the glorious sacrifice of 300 but screaming agony and mutilitated soldiers. The fascist sensibility is never cool, it is cringe-inducingly absurd. Fascist aesthetics get marked increasingly unambiguously, culminating in a major character wearing an imitation of an SS uniform. 300 includes nothing similar.

It is not satire when a work presents bad ideas. It must actually, y’know, satirize them.