Comic Book History

The Iranians are hopping mad at the US. The bone of contention is not anything we have said about their nuclear weapons program or their involvement in Iraq. This time around, the Iranian ire has been aroused by a Hollywood movie, 300. According to Javad Shamqadri, art advisor to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (I copied the names which I could never have spelled correctly, from the English edition of People’s Daily Online), this film, which purports to treat the battle of Thermopylae, is “part of a comprehensive U.S. psychological war aimed at Iranian culture.”

Like many people whose bark is bigger than their bite, some Iranians apparently lie awake all night wondering what Americans think of them. As I have told friends in Canada, Serbia, and the UK, Americans never think of them, except, in the case of Canada, as a forested wasteland where fish are plentiful, or, in the case of Britain, as the home of soccer louts and romping royals. Americans have such short memories that few of us can even remember why we were once angry with Iranian students. Something about an embassy and some guy with a beard named Ayatollah, wasn’t it?Setting aside their paranoia, I find this display of Persian patriotism absolutely charming. Regimes rise and fall; Medes are displaced by Persians, who are displaced by the more primitive Parthians, who get toppled by a Persian dynasty claiming descent from the Achaemenid kings, and they are finally thrashed by the Romans before falling to the Muslims . . . And yet, the Persians endured. After the Muslim conquest, Persians retained their language and many of their traditions. They wrote poetry, extolled the virtues of wine, and developed an interest in secular learning that has helped to give Islam a false reputation for civilization. Persia was one of several oases in the howling Islamic wilderness, and it would be unfair to deny that the Persians have been one of the world’s great nations. (That was certainly the point of view of the Greeks who often hated but could not help admiring them.)

Before the religious zanies drove him out, the last Shah tried to revive Iranian historical consciousness, and I well remember the lavish celebration he staged in 1971 to commemorate some 2500 years of Iranian monarchy. How many Americans can tell you who preceded Ronald Reagan in the White House? (Hint: This was the President whose failure to rescue American hostages in Iran guaranteed his defeat.)

Actually, the Iranians should take heart from 300, revealing, as it does, the imbecillity (in both sense of the word) of the American people. It should be obvious that the Bush administration is incapable of making any propaganda based on ancient history, and, if our cultural commissars attempted such a feat, the Persians would be portrayed as a benevolent empire come to free the helots and spread equality. 300 is, however, a concrete manifesto of American historical amnesia. The film is based on Frank Miller’s “graphic novel,” which was preceded by his comic book series, which commemorated Frank Miller’s memory of seeing the movie The Three Hundred Spartans (1962). Directed by Rudolph Maté (a famed cinematographer, who also directed D.O.A.), The Three Hundred Spartans is as close to an accurate film on ancient history as Hollywood is capable of. Naturally, there were howlers, but the script (by a team of Italians with screen credits for Hercules movies, TV shows, and Spaghetti Westerns) follows something like Herodotus’ narrative, while the one-liners mostly come from Plutarch.

300, according to rather minute descriptions given on film websites, ignores history in favor of—what else—a comic book approach that cannot distinguish Leonidas from Wolverine. New characters are invented with hilarious names, such as “Captain Artemis,” and little effort is made to recreate the peculiarities of the Spartan commonwealth. That little is mostly wrong. As someone says on the trailer, the film “is accurate but not in the sense of historical accuracy.” This means, I infer, that the death of each Spartan—to say nothing of the mean-old Persians—is depicted in loving (if you are a homosexual sadist) detail. Leonidas is given an entirely fictional background, his wife virtually runs Sparta in his absence, no other Greeks do any of the fighting at Thermopylae, and the traitor is converted from a local opportunist into a deformed Spartan reject.

Anyone interested in history, whether as amateur or professional, serious historian, will be as disgusted as Ephraim Lytle in the Toronto Star—though readers should be cautious about Lytle’s extreme aversion to Spartan society. (It is simply not true, as he implies, that Athenians uniformly disliked Sparta. Plato obviously admires their commonwealth, and Xenophon actually lived there and wrote admiringly of the Spartans.) In listening to the film-makers’ teenage jabber on the trailer, one would swear that Frank Miller was a combination of Leonardo and Dante instead of being the tacky violence-obsessed adolescent that he is.

Yes, 300 is drawn as the tale of a patriotic resistance movement, but from what I can see, neither Miller nor the film geniuses who are bringing him to the giant silver comic book, have the slightest understanding of our debt to the Greeks or the threat represented by the Persian Wars. In our tradition, the Greeks are unique. As the great scholar Walter Burkert observed, every subsequent culture has been informed and inspired by the Greeks, while the Greeks did not have the Greeks and had to create the basic forms of our civilization. (This is not to deny their appropriation of what they found useful or beautiful in Egyptian and Middle Eastern cultures.) The Romans, Medieval Christendom, modern Europe and America, even the Persian Empire before the end of the Fifth Century, are in their debt. What seems to us a universal theme of high art—the realistic but idealistic portrayal of the human face—can be traced from the Greeks to India, whither it was brought by Alexander’s conquests, and ultimately to China and Japan.

Forty-five years ago, Hollywood could—with the use of a little money and a director with a visual sense—turn out a piece of entertainment that communicated something of what Thermopylae has meant to the West. Today, we turn not to Herodotus for our history but to Frank Miller. To us the death of Leonidas 2500 years ago means less than the recent, much-heralded death of Captain America. Ancient history is all one big comic book, a blood-drenched Superbowl with gladiators, Braveheart with bronze helmets and horsehair crests. In losing touch with Greeks and Romans, and every civilization that has preceded us, we lapse back into the sullen barbarism of our ancestors. Nietzsche observed of the Germans, in breaking free of the Church, they were free to return to their swinish roots. This was far too harsh a judgment on the Germans, who (as he knew) were producing great historians, scholars, and poets in his lifetime, but it fits us to a T. As Zora Neale Hurston used to say with such wisdom and sadness, "My people, my people.”