The Dread of Difference

That cool and smart-sounding title is taken from a book I read in college. The book, a collection of essays discussing the role of gender in horror movies, posits that the horror genre is entirely rooted in gender, “particularly in anxieties about sexual difference and gender politics.” While I disagree that all horror films are gender-based (I believe some are responses and critiques of politically repressive and conservative times), it’s still an awesome film analysis book. For example, one essay discusses Carrie as being about the male fear/hatred of women’s reproductive power, and another examines The Shining as being about the inevitable collapse and the consequences of a patriarchal society. Good stuff.

I stole this title because that book was all I could think about last week after seeing 300, a truly awful movie that treats racial and religious differences the same way the horror genre treated gender difference—as horrific monstrosities encroaching on, and threatening to, the harmonious, utopian world of white men.

300 is another film adaptation of the Spartan resistance to Persian forces at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. It introduces us to the white Spartan forces as noble, brave men who are willing to sacrifice their lives in the most noble of pursuits: warfare. The film then shows us the evil empire endangering these walking white bastions of freedom: grotesque caricatures of Africans, Asians, and Arabs, along with the requisite giant gay king who offers hedonistic and materialistic glory to those who fall to his temptations.

The terror with which these “others” are drawn is so complete, so obvious in its representation, that I was hoping there was some sort of irony to it. But there was none. The Persians are not simply the bad guys in the story. They are shown as amoral and monstrous and sometimes, literally, as monsters. The idea of “others” as evil runs rampant throughout the film. Our white hero king, in some of his many speeches to his troops, mentions that his white fighters are “free men,” and that they would surely rather die than to bow to the armies of dark-skinned slaves surrounding them. I swear, it's like a D.W. Griffith movie with CG backgrounds.

Oh, and for the ladies? You’ll be happy to know that your importance is to "make real men.” Thanks for playing, sister.

I guess the easy way out is to claim that the filmmakers were being true to the vision of the Frank Miller graphic novel. If that’s the case, then Frank Miller’s one racist motherfucker. But Miller is from my hometown, so I’ll say only this: That movie is one racist motherfucker.