Flight Papers

I understand how close we remain to elements of our childhood. Places, toys, television programs—things that would never make us blink as adults become treasured memories because we saw them as kids.

But Transformers? Really?

Why is that a feature of geek culture and not, say, Captain Planet? Are giant robots in some way intrinsically less goofy than elemental magic or blue flying dudes (and if so, how the hell did X-Men get made?)

These are important questions!

…Okay, that might be an overstatement. This post isn’t really about giant robots or flying eco-warriors, anyway.

A few months ago, I wrote what we might squintingly term a “review” of the movie 300. I shortly thereafter learned that apparently, I had thread-explodey.

I went to a midnight showing of 300. It scared the fuck out of me. Seriously. Not the movie, precisely. The experience. The experience of seeing 300 was disturbing to me, in a way that I have very rarely felt before.

It wasn’t the movie, precisely. I’m not squeamish. I don’t shy away from political views I don’t like or from depictions of violence. I knew walking in that this was going to be pretty Greek propaganda. I knew the Spartans were going to be the Heroes, and that the Persians were going to be the monsters, and we all know what the Heroes do to the monsters (though sometimes 300 of them die in the process). And I knew it was going to be violent, that it would exult in violence to such a degree that upon seeing it I would most likely step out of the theater and cut the throats of a pastel of orphans, simply to watch the pretty arcs of red, red arterial blood.

I was looking forward to that part.

I liked the mountain of baby’s skulls, because it showed (in their eyes) the Spartan’s dedication, and (in ours) their madness. That’s a juxtaposition that would never happen again.

I liked the moment near the beginning when the Persian messenger questions the queen’s presence and voice, and he is rebuked by both her and the king. Wow, I thought, maybe this will be a feminist testosterone-filled action flick! I should not have thought that.

I liked that when the king throws the messenger into the pit—and screams that line—you can see madness in his eyes. I liked that the people in the town’s square draw out their swords, and tear into the diplomatic envoy, because theirs is a warrior culture, and does not care overmuch for diplomacy.

I liked the oracle, not simply because Kelly Craig is beautiful, but because it seemed for a few moments like a celebration of her body and sexuality. Not simply as performance, not as useful for male pleasure, but as spiritually powerful unto themselves, something along the lines of the temple harlots at Babylon.

And then we learn that she’s kept perpetually drunk, that her beauty is a curse, that her purpose is to be raped by the priests and ignored by the king, and things do not get better from there.

The king is talking about freedom. In fact, everyone is talking about freedom. A lot. They’re very into freedom, these Spartans who have had every decision made for them by their society. And, to be fair, that irked me a little and it shouldn’t have. Extreme, over-the-top romanticization just gets to me a bit. When all the characters are running around bellowing “freedom!” at the top of their lungs for the better part of two hours, it begins to seem empty. I wanted to take them aside, gently, and tell them that though they kept using that word, I was not sure that it meant what they thought it meant, or indeed that it still meant anything at all.

But! Propaganda! Hyper-romanticized invocations of freedom! This is the good stuff! It’s one-dimensional, it’s a rallying cry—it’s supposed to be an anthem, not spoken fucking word. I can try to get behind this! Freedom, now and always. Do what you do because a free man would do it! Act as you are an Ubermensch, because your Will to Power is greater than any who would have you serve them! To serve, to kneel—even if for a moment, even in the name of political expediency, even if it is the only way to save your life, your family, your country—is wrong. It is a violation that no Spartan shall accept.

Oh, unless you’re a woman. Then you have to get raped.

I’ve never before actually considered walking out of a theater. It’s kinda funny how fast your opinion of an artist can drop through the floor and come out, gasping and seared, in a Chinese living room.

And this is where the theater starts to get creepy (or at least where I start to notice).

The audience is cheering on the Spartans. Gruesome coup-de-graces are met with laughter; decisive, usually dismembering victories with hollers and whoops. When Xerxes is wounded by Leonidas, the room momentarily explodes.

Okay, sure. This is what people do at movies like this.

But when you take just a step back… Okay, the audience is cheering on the Heroes. The “Spartans,” let’s not kid ourselves, look rather like some impressively grown-up Hitler Youths, save for a few mops of black hair. It’s understandable—I mean, you’d be that pale, too, if you spent all day training naked in the Greek sun!

Ahem.

But it’s stylized! Of course it is. But the style is such that the Spartans are straight out of a particularly homoerotic Aryan wet dream, and the Persians—those who aren’t masked or deformed beyond human recognition—are somewhat… darker. And as a direct result of this styling, there are about three hundred people sitting in a theater, cheering as white people slaughter brown people.

This made me uncomfortable. And, honestly, a tiny bit frightened. And also, even as I was thinking all this, some part of me was wondering why I wasn’t cheering. I mean, really, girl, what’s wrong with you? Don’t you want to belong? It’s just a movie.

I know the Greeks were racist, I know their myths will be racist, and hell, I know the Persians weren’t (and aren’t!) exactly a hotbed of shiny, happy liberal progressiveness themselves. There’s a difference between telling a racist story and invoking racism to tell your story. 300 does the latter—apparently, with a great deal of success.

This is where context matters. With the racism, it’s the cultural context the movie was made in. With the misogyny, it’s the context the movie sets up. I am not super-sensitive to portrayals of rape. It’s a grotesque power dynamic, and it has happened and continues to happen to women (and men) in ridiculously large numbers, and it has and must have a place in stories about the grotesque, power dynamics, violation, freedom, victimization, and such. 300 isn’t any of those things. The oracle’s plight isn’t an examination of the fallibility of religion and performative sexuality, it’s a gross-out take; Gorgo’s rape isn’t an explication of female power—or civilian political power—in a warrior culture, it’s a pathetic rehashing of a rape-revenge narrative that was cliche twenty years ago.

And that’s why seeing 300 disturbed me. Not because the ancient Greeks were racist, or treated women as property, or long ago spilled oceans of blood for vacuous invocations of thin ideals, but because when the very modern incarnations of those same prejudices are invoked, nobody from Frank Miller to the audience so much as bats an eyelash, and everyone cheers as the brown people bleed into the ocean.

A friend of mine read this, and afterwards told me she was glad I’d written it. Not because it was especially new or insightful, but because she felt similarly, but didn’t feel like she could say anything about it. The movie was, after all, really well-received. It wasn’t a Geek sacred cow, exactly, but it probably at least achieved sacred elk or beaver status. Conversations with geek boys simply aren’t and weren’t the place to discuss feminist reactions.

The common explanation at this point is that when you criticize an object of geek affection, you’re taking on the role of playground bully, kicking over our sandcastles. Geeks are kicked about by society in general; we tend to react badly to it.

That tells a nice story, but it’s clearly wrong. Nobody is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into movies that they think are going to be unpopular.

Which brings us back to Transformers. A multi-million dollar movie backed by one of the biggest producers and a major Hollywood studio, that many, many geeks will take as one of their own. That much cultural capital exerts a force on a subculture, especially a subculture which tends to exalt, canonize, and even obsess over fictional minutiae. We can’t touch the fiction as geeks, because we’re meant to love the fiction; we can’t critique it as outsiders, because outsiders just don’t understand.

And, of course, there will be geeks who couldn’t care less about the latest blockbuster film made out of the 80s. But that ultimately just means don’t have nearly as many movies to get excited about.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 7th, 2007 at 4:34 pm and is filed under geekiness, culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.