‘300’ Won’t Juice US Youth Up for an Iran War
Gwynne Dyer, Arab News

Being cultural adviser to Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad must be one of the more thankless jobs on the planet, but Javad Shamghadri manages to keep busy. His latest foray is into the cultural space occupied by the teenage bloodlust demographic.

What bothers Shamghadri — and quite a lot of other people in Iran — is the new Hollywood hit “300”, an animated comic book of a film that shows impossibly buffed and noble Greeks seeing off an attempt by evil Persians to strangle Western civilization in its cradle 2,487 years ago. They think it’s “psychological warfare” against present-day Iranians, thinly disguised as a story about their wicked Persian ancestors.

Shamghadri is so clueless about the workings of Hollywood that you really want to take him gently by the hand and walk him through it. “Following the Islamic revolution in Iran (in 1979),” he says, “Hollywood and cultural authorities in the US initiated studies to figure out how to attack Iranian culture. Certainly, the recent movie is a product of such studies.”

I generally disregard what Gwynne Dyer has to write. He’s so locked up in a philosophical viewpoint of the world that his opinions are largely immaterial, appealing only to those who subscribe to his Euro-socialist cant. But this piece, appearing in Arab News is somewhat amusing.

While he notes that getting worked up over the film ’300′ us a bit much, he himself gets overwrought. He fails to note that the Frank Miller graphic novel was actually published in 1999, several years before George Bush was elected, and even more years before 9/11, Iraq, and today’s concerns about Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Miller sees himself as apolitical (as much as one can be), taking a stance only against stupidity. I’ve yet to see him claim powers of seeing into the future. Miller has said that anyone seeking a political message in this film is stupid.

Hollywood, for all its purely capitalistic bent, tends not to be very political, other than supporting the largely socialist tilt of Hollywood itself—anti-business, anti-government, anti-anything very moralistic. The producers of ’300′ saw this story as a good one, coming from a proven success (Miller’s earlier ‘Sin City’ did extremely well at the box office). It’s exploiting success, exploiting the current popularity of graphic novels turned to film, and exploiting the general popularity of action films. One errs in looking for deeper political meaning here.

You can read my review of the film at the Outside the Beltway website.

UPDATE: To get an idea of just how antipathetic Hollywood is toward supporting US government policy and actions, take a look at this article from The New York Times: Beyond the News, Reminders of the War