I started to write this almost a year ago, at a time when the film 300 was still marginally current. (It had just come out on DVD, which is how I saw it for the first time.) I had trouble making my thoughts coherent so I put the essay aside, forgot about it, and only recently dug it up and tried to make it presentable.

***

Dana Stevens, the movie critic from Slate.com, didn't like 300. I mean, she really didn't like it:

If 300, the new battle epic based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, had been made in Germany in the mid-1930s, it would be studied today alongside The Eternal Jew as a textbook example of how race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth can serve as an incitement to total war.

(Also, making the Greek traitor Ephialtes into a hunchback seems a little gratuitous; why unnecessarily offend the hunchback-rights lobby? Ephialtes' villainy could have been just as easily telegraphed by having him wear a Republican Party pin and speak in a Texas drawl.)

Stevens continues:

[Director Zack] Snyder insists that he "really just wanted to make a movie that is a ride" - a perfectly fine ambition for any filmmaker, especially one inspired by the comics....But to cast 300 as a purely apolitical romp of an action film smacks of either disingenuousness or complete obliviousness.

***

Setting aside these comments for a few days and returning to them, I find myself wondering, how would history have played out if the Persians had been permitted to continue their expansion into Europe?

Athens, captured and burned by the invaders but rebuilt after their defeat, would instead have remained a ruin. (It's possible that Xerxes would have permitted its resettlement, but probably not by the original inhabitants - he held a particular grudge against the Athenians for their burning of the Persian town of Sardis during Darius' reign.) The 30-year-old experiment in Athenian democracy instituted by Cleisthenes would have ended before the rise of Pericles and what we now call Athens' Golden Age. Athens' population would have been enslaved or scattered among other Greek states. Would Socrates, Plato, Thucydides, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes have been born? Would they still have distinguished themselves? Might some other geniuses in other places have arisen to fill their historical roles?

I'm guessing Thebes, which took a pro-Persian line during the invasion, would have emerged as the new leading city in Greece. Thebes was intermittently democratic (it was Thebes that finally put an end to the power of aristocratic Sparta a hundred years after the Persian invasion), and might have remained so - the Persians were reasonably tolerant of political experimentation as long as it didn't undermine their control. (Supposedly the Persian general Mardonius, in the course of an earlier, unsuccessful expedition into Europe, took the time to reform the governments of Persia's dependencies in Ionia, whose tyrants he turfed out and replaced with democracies.) Still, it's hard to believe a free-wheeling Athenian-style democracy could have existed under Persian rule. Ultimately, the demos of Thebes would have been answerable to whichever satrap had been installed to oversee Greece.

In "our" historical timeline, the Persian empire was finally destroyed by Alexander the Great; but with Macedonia under Persian domination along with the rest of Greece, would Alexander have ever been anything but a minor subsidiary princeling? Anyway, Macedonian expansion was partly enabled by the power vacuum resulting from the disruption of the Peloponnesian War - a war that wouldn't have occurred, with no Athens-Sparta rivalry to incite it.

Would Persia have extended its rule westward and put a stop to the rise of Roman power, or could the Romans have checked their spread? Is it possible the Persian empire could have survived until the rise of Christianity? - But Christianity's rise depended on a lot of factors that would've played out very differently in a Persian-dominated world. If Rome hadn't ruled Palestine, would Jesus still have been crucified?

This is what Ashton Kutcher would call the Butterfly Effect. (Incidentally, in the context of timeline-tinkering, does the Butterfly Effect really refer to the cliché about a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil and stirring up a tornado in Texas, as this article asserts? When I heard about the movie, I assumed it was a reference to the old Ray Bradbury story where a time traveller goes back to the Cretaceous Period to hunt a dinosaur, accidentally stomps on a butterfly, and returns to his own time to find that history has radically changed.) It's impossible to know what the world would have looked like even fifty years after a successful Persian conquest of Greece, let alone two and a half millennia on. For those who value the contribution of the Athenians, it's hard to see how wiping them off the map could have made the world better. But it's possible that, in the long run, things wouldn't have turned out noticeably for the worse.

***

A passing thought. The current rulers of Iran who condemned 300 as anti-Persian propaganda, and the numerous liberal critics who abominated the film's glamourisation of martial courage, in attempting to read the story of Thermopylae through the lens of current events, have assumed that the doughty Spartans must represent the United States, and that their dastardly Asian enemies must stand in for America's foes. Unsurprisingly, they complain that the story doesn't support their political agenda. That's because they've got their lens backward. I present to you, direct from the pages of Herodotus,

THE LEFT-WING THERMOPYLAE

Here are our heroes, the Greeks - a clannish, quarrelsome, deeply religious people, minding their own business in an obscure corner of the world. And here are our villains, the Persians - the ancient world's superpower, rich, cosmopolitan, decadent, and determined to impose their way of life on all their neighbours, by force if necessary.

The young Persian king, Xerxes, petulant and rash, has inherited a family grudge. His father Darius, when he was king, attempted to conquer the distant, backward land of Greece, but the proud Greeks would not submit to foreign rule. Now Xerxes is obsessed with teaching these inconsequential barbarians a lesson.

Some Greek exiles in Xerxes' court, keen on returning to their homeland to seize power, massage the intelligence in favour of war: "Any prophecy which implied a setback to the Persian cause [Onomacritus] would carefully omit, choosing for quotation only those which promised the brightest triumphs..."

Artabanus, former adviser to Darius, is skeptical and advises caution: "...do not run any such terrible risk, when there is no necessity to do so." But the pious Xerxes is convinced that God wants him to fulfill his father's goal of subduing Greece. So he assembles a massive army and goes on the march, pressing various allied nations into service along the way.

The outcome of the invasion is pre-ordained - the Persian army is far too mighty to be repelled. But at Thermopylae the suicide-warriors of Sparta, though small in number, cause disproportionate damage to the Persians, demoralising Xerxes and his troops and giving encouragement to the patriotic defenders of Greek sovereignty.

Although the invaders successfully occupy most of Greece, defiling its temples and outraging its women, the plucky defenders inflict a series of defeats on Xerxes' army. After numerous reverses, the embattled Persians are forced to contemplate a humiliating withdrawal...

Although Onomacritus and Artabanus didn't make it into the movie, there's nothing in 300 that contradicts the above reading. (Nor, I should say, is there anything that supports it.) If 300 can be interpreted as an "incitement to total war" it can just as plausibly be interpreted as a rebuke to the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive invasion. 

***

Incidentally, my defence of 300 is not meant to suggest that I actually think it's a very good movie. I'll admit I hated it a lot less than I expected; some parts, like the lobster-armed executioner, and the Persian throne room orgy, I rather enjoyed - as an "apolitical romp". I was pleasantly surprised by how much of the dialogue and action was taken directly from Herodotus: the chucking of the Persian messengers into the well; "With your shield or on it"; "Then we will fight in the shade". But whenever I began to relax and get into the movie, Xerxes would unleash another wave of vampire ninjas, the heavy metal would start to pound, the camera would swoop and circle around a slow-motion dismemberment, and my overwhelmed senses would retreat from the assault.

Letters (and pictures) from Texas.
Wed, 4 Jun 2008

An interactive map of my Texas vacation.

How I've been wasting my time.
Thu, 29 May 2008

I spent the last half of May creating an animated application for a job I have virtually no chance of getting. Meanwhile I haven't applied for anything else. My typically brilliant career strategy.

The video contains several lies. We haven't actually sold "dozens" of copies of our album. But saying we've sold "ones" of copies just wouldn't work.

Also, I'm not actually all that "proficient in desktop publishing and digital image editing software." My organisational skills aren't that great either. Don't tell anyone.

Letters from Texas, part IV.
Thu, 28 Feb 2008

In Houston last week I saw the new George Romero zombie flick, "Diary of the Dead". I was pretty disappointed. Romero's films have never been very well-acted, and the dialogue has never been that great, but usually the movies get by on ideas and images. The new one is a mock-documentary - it's about a bunch of film students recording events as the zombie apocalypse sweeps across Pennsylvania - so the stiff acting and unnatural dialogue really stand out. Plus - you'll have to excuse me, because I'm about to totally give away the ending. Romero is attempting to satirise our whole culture of media-addicted video exhibitionism, right? Most of the movie is filmed from the POV of the main character, the film student who is holding the camera, and who continues (implausibly) to film even as he and his friends are fighting for their lives, even as his friends beg him to please put down that damn camera and help us kill zombies. Now, the logical (and funny) ending would be for the film student to be bitten by a zombie, die, return from the dead, and continue filming. A zombie with a videocamera, get it? Then it really would have been a "Diary of the Dead". Instead - so lame! - he gets bitten by a zombie and shoots himself in the head, and that's the end.

I mean, I'm not just saying my ending is better. I'm saying my ending is the only conceivable way this movie could have been salvaged. About halfway through, I said to myself, "Ah, I see where Romero is going with this. Pretty clever." And from that point on I was prepared to forgive the movie's many flaws. But the flaw-redeeming ending never arrived. So all we're left with is a mediocre zombie movie with a totally underwhelming ending.

Letters from Texas, part III.
Wed, 20 Feb 2008

Sunday we went to church. This is Lakewood Church, the largest congregation in the United States, which meets in the converted basketball arena where the Houston Rockets used to play:

Quite a show. There's a sixty-person choir, full rock-n-roll band (with horns) on a hydraulic platform that rises up behind the pulpit, giant electronic screens on either side, and a jumbotron up above. Olin told the volunteer at the door that we were visitors from Canada, so we were ushered to prime seats, third row centre. I admit I went in expecting an arena full of white guys in short-sleeved shirts and ties, with wives in frumpy dresses following two steps behind. But it was a diverse and multi-racial crowd, and the sermon was uplifting and non-judgemental, with no snake-handling or speaking in tongues. If I only believed in God, I'd have no problem going to a church like this.

The pastor, Joel Osteen, is kind of over-moussed and creepy looking, but he's an engaging speaker. But we were treated to a guest pastor from California, who told us that God has the power to erase the sins of our ancestors from our DNA. Why would my ancestors' sins show up in my DNA? This is meant as a metaphor, right? Olin thinks it was meant literally. Anyway, because there was no polite way to avoid it, Olin and I took communion, so I think that means our DNA is clean for the time being.

Letters from Texas, part II.
Thu, 14 Feb 2008

Yeah, so, the Rockets game. It was kind of a blowout through the first three quarters, then Houston's offense collapsed and the Sacramento Kings crept up to take a one-point lead in the last thirty seconds. Houston got the ball and gave it to some white guy who barely ever comes off the bench, and he scored a three-pointer with two and a half seconds left in the game. And the crowd went wild, and the loudspeakers played "We Will Rock You", and the cheerleaders jumped up and down. Olin got us seats right near the floor - we were in row A, seats 1, 2, and 3 - and conveniently adjacent to the area where the cheerleaders hang out. I don't know if that was deliberate, but it probably was.

But my favourite part was when they dragged some young woman out of the stands to participate in a contest, one of those time-filling things they do to keep the mob entertained between quarters. The mascot, a bear-like creature named "Clutch", put a blindfold on her and she was supposed to hunt for some object which had been hidden on the basketball court. But while she was blindfolded they snuck a young guy onto the court, and he kneeled at the center line, and then they whipped the blindfold off the woman, and the guy (who was wearing a mike, I guess) says "These last ten months have been the happiest of my life, I know Valentine's Day isn't till tomorrow, but I want to spend every Valentine's with you from now on, will you marry me?" And the woman looks at the ring and at him, horrified, and bends over to whisper something in his ear, then straightens up and blurts, "I'm sorry, I just can't," and scurries off the court, to the boos of some members of the crowd. And Clutch puts his arm around the dejected suitor and leads him up into the stands. Awkward silence prevails.

You can watch the video here.

Later on, after the game had resumed, Olin got talking to an attractive female Houston Rockets employee who was standing at the end of our row, and she revealed that the whole marriage proposal was a setup, that the young woman and the suitor were plants. Pure theatre! I'm impressed, frankly, by the quality of the acting. If I hadn't been told otherwise - if Olin hadn't been present to flirt with this cute girl - I would've come away believing the drama was legit.

Letters from Texas, part I.
Tue, 12 Feb 2008

I've been listening to a lot of Rush, and Sean Hannity, and Michael Savage, and other right-wing radio blowhards over the last few days as I drifted around southern Texas. And while their programs are pretty entertaining - and I'm starting to understand why they're so popular down here - their political analysis is self-serving. It benefits hard-right conservatives to peddle the argument that without their support, Republicans can't win the presidency. It allows them to keep the candidates in line. The reason that Rush and his colleagues hate John McCain isn't because they think that with him as the candidate, the Republicans will lose the next election. It's because they're worried he can win, with crossover support from independents and Democrats, that he'll win without being indebted to the far right - and that he'll then be free to go forward with immigration reform, and climate change initiatives, and balanced budgets, and shutting down Gitmo, and all the other policies he supports that the foamin'-at-the-mouth conservatives detest. And he'll go on thumbing his nose at the Jesus-peddlers and waterboarders in his party, and they won't be able to do anything about it except go on the radio and complain. The far-righters would rather lose with a "true" conservative, and keep their power within the party, than win with a moderate.

I think McCain definitely beats Hillary, and it's a toss-up against Obama. Olin has joined the Obama cult - even donated some money to the cause - and while I'm sympathetic, I don't really see what Obama's nebulous "change" mantra adds up to beyond "I'm a black dude and my name is neither Bush nor Clinton." Not that this isn't a powerful argument in itself. Choosing a president isn't just about choosing a set of policies, it's also about choosing a figurehead - the Colonel Sanders or Tony the Tiger who will stand for America on international magazine covers and TV news reports for the next four years. With George Bush, Americans selected a figurehead that represented all the negative qualities that the world attributes to America - cockiness, unearned privilege, simpleminded piety, bad grammar. Obama represents all the positive qualities - cultural diversity, equal opportunity, and, frankly, sexiness. While I'm not sure that the average mujahideen will notice the difference, it should improve America's image in the eyes of the French and the Germans and us sexy Canadians.

An observation. Now that McCain has pretty much sewn up the Republican nomination, he's free to start positioning himself for the general election - which means emphasising his bipartisanship and git-'er-done common sense, and distancing himself from the conservatives he had to court to win the nomination. Meanwhile Hillary and Obama have no choice but to keep on spicing up their rhetoric to win over the true-believer liberal Democrats who vote in the primaries. This means talking up, for example, their anti-war credentials. Isn't this the wrong time to be running on an anti-war message? The situation in Iraq has improved substantially since "the surge" began last year, to the point where it's now debatable whether Iraq or Afghanistan is the more dangerous war. John McCain's message looks a lot more appealing at a time when America appears to be, for the first time, not losing in Iraq. Another reason I think the Democrats should be worried.

An evening at the races.
Mon, 20 Aug 2007

(Here is the animated invitation to our Marquis Downs excursion.)

I won sixteen dollars on the first race of the night. Off a five dollar bet. Horse's name I've forgotten, jockey's name was Valentino McBean. My eleven dollar profit subsidised my losses on a whole night of ill-advised Valentino McBean bets. In each succeeding race, his horse finished further and further behind. In race four or five, as the rest of the pack thundered across the finish line, Valentino McBean and horse slowed to a halt on the far side of the track, paused to sigh at the futility of it all, turned, and shuffled back the way they'd come. I tore up my losing five dollar ticket and, as Jenn had instructed me, tossed the pieces dramatically into the air. Still infatuated with his name, I bet on Valentino McBean in the following race, but only a toonie. Lost that too.

Workin' in a coal mine, or possibly a salt mine.
Tue, 03 July 2007

Sunday afternoon I came back from grocery shopping to a message from Jay: "Do you want to be an extra in a country music video shoot in Warman? Call me back." An acquaintance of his is a makeup artist and she was working on this video for some American country singer named, I believe, Dirk Rattan. I'm not sure about the Dirk part, but I'm pretty sure about the Rattan part, because when I asked the Assistant Director to repeat the name he said, "Rattan like the wicker furniture."

Update: Actually, it's Deric Ruttan, he's Canadian, and the video in question can be seen here.

It was at this old concrete factory in Warman, where Dirk Rattan and a couple dozen hot girls were pretending to have a spontaneous blue collar country jamboree. The girls were all dressed in denim miniskirts or Daisy Dukes, cowboy hats, and high heels. They were obviously being paid to be there. Scattered among them were a few fat people, ugly people, and nerds like me & Jay, who were obviously there cos they had nothing better to do. The song was about working in a coal mine, or maybe a salt mine. I don't know why they chose to shoot it in a concrete factory, or for that matter, in Saskatchewan. I guess cos it's cheaper to film up here. Imagine how much Daisy Duke girls must charge by the hour down in Nashville.

We showed up pretty late, so we only got to be in a few shots where we clapped our hands above our head while Dirk Rattan did that thing country musicians do where they kind of hold the guitar off to one side of the body and pretend like they're strumming it really hard. Rock musicians invented that move, but it seems nowadays to be mostly a country thing. Also, bad goatees and singing like Eddy Vedder used to be exclusively a rock thing, but now they've both migrated over to country. I guess country is like rock's younger sibling who has to wear all rock's no-longer-fashionable castoffs.

Dirk Rattan seemed pretty nice. He signed autographs and posed for pictures with all the extras, some of whom may even have known who he was. Jay got to chat with his makeup artist friend, which is the main reason we went. We've got a short script requiring special makeup effects that we may like to film in the nearish future.

Afterward Jay showed me some footage from the video we shot in Vonda last weekend. The video is looking a little dicey just now. It's not that any of the individual shots are especially bad, it just doesn't flow together all that well when you put it to the music. But even more importantly, I look really stupid. All my hair is mysteriously piled up on the back of my head so it looks like I'm wearing a lumpy yarmulke. Why didn't someone say something? Something like, "Hey, beanie boy, pat down your hairdo, it looks like you're trying to hide a Pizza Pop up there"? At least in that other video my face was covered by a mask for all but the last thirty seconds. I should wear that mask all the time. Or I guess a hat would be easier.

So Jay and I played around with the footage for a couple hours until he got depressed and we gave it up. I figure there are two possible ways he can salvage the video. A) He can do the whole thing in slow-motion, to make it look all dramatic and intense. B) He can do it all in fast-motion, to make it seem funny. Or maybe C) we can shoot some footage of me and Andrew playing the song, to break up all the stuff in the restaurant. Damn, I wish I'd thought of this earlier. We could've piggybacked on Dirk Rattan's concrete factory shoot. The  lights and the fog machine and the girls were all there already, all we had to do was sneak up onstage while Dirk was in his trailer having his goatee groomed.

The ink ghost.
Sat, 5 May 2007

I'm seventy pages into Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" and I'm wondering whether to bother going on.

A couple chapters back (page 55 in the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition) I came upon this sentence:

His little bureau is dominated now by a glimmering map, a window into another landscape than winter Sussex, written names and spidering streets, an ink ghost of London, ruled off into 576 squares, a quarter square kilometer each.

I think the problem is that Pynchon has a Shakespearean - and here I'm using the word in its least flattering sense - love of his own voice. Just as Shakespeare can't let a messenger or a crowd of tradesmen cross the stage without giving a speech or engaging in some irrelevant japery, Pynchon can't bring himself to compose a simple expository sentence: "His little bureau is dominated by a map ruled off into 576 squares, a quarter square kilometer each." Would that be so damn hard? Pynchon himself is the ink ghost, shimmering his fingers spookily between your face and the text, keening "Oooooo! Notice me!"

I've previously read "The Crying of Lot 49" - twice - and although the same irritating over-writing is on display, the story moves along briskly and I never found myself tempted to just chuck the whole thing in. But "Lot 49" is only a couple hundred pages, while "Gravity's Rainbow is over seven hundred. Maybe if I push in a little deeper the story will come into focus and I'll be more indulgent of Pynchon's showoffiness. "Gravity's Rainbow" is, after all, a Twentieth-Century Classic. It's a book one should read, if only so one can say, Yep, I've read it. Don't see what all the fuss is about.

But then, life is short, and there are bunches of books I've never read that I have reason to suspect I would actually enjoy reading. All those "minor" Dickens novels - "Dombey and Son", "The Old Curiosity Shop", "Martin Chuzzlewit". And didn't Graham Greene write, like five hundred books? Every one of them, I'd bet, more fun to read than "Gravity's Rainbow".

But then, I recently forced myself to complete Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury", and found myself coming around from my initial hatred to a measured admiration of the book. The experience of having read is distinct from the experience of actually reading. In my mind, I can now skip backward and forward through "The Sound and the Fury" and pick out the parts I actually liked, and ignore the reams of bullshit. I suspect "Gravity's Rainbow" is the kind of book one might enjoy having read. If only I could have read it without having to read it.

Children of Men.
Mon, 30 Apr 2007

"Children of Men" was a pretty good movie, but I'm not altogether sure it made sense.

As you probably know, the premise is that, for reasons never explained, the human race has become infertile. It's been eighteen years since the last child on earth was born, and everyone's pretty tense and bitter about it. Okay, so far so good. I think it's a safe bet that people would be tense and bitter under these circumstances. Now the job for the filmmakers is to fill in the details of what this world would look like. And I found myself thinking that a lot of those details were exactly wrong.

For instance, when the hero wandered past a wall dotted with graffiti, I wondered, would there really be graffiti in a world with no teenagers? At another point, some characters driving through the countryside are ambushed by a band of brigands. And I thought, would brigandage really be a major issue in a future where there was a shortage of young people? Wouldn't there be lots of high-paying entry-level jobs available? And with all the old folks dying off, real estate in the city must be cheap. Is the life of a highwayman really the best these twenty-somethings could hope for?

As I've said, it's not surprising that the infertile inhabitants of the near-future would be grumpy, but it's never explained why the British government would take out its grumpiness on illegal immigrants. In a world with no younger generation coming up to replace aging workers, wouldn't the sensible thing be to encourage immigration? The real threat in an infertile world would be people wanting to leave the country, not people trying to get in.

The director of the movie is Mexican, and it's pretty obvious that he's unhappy about the scapegoating of illegal immigrants. Fair enough. Judging by all the images of brown people cowering before barking dogs, and prisoners having black hoods pulled over their heads, he also seems to be righteously angry about the Bush administration, Gitmo, the War on Terror, and so forth. And again, that's fair enough. But I'm not sure if "Children of Men" was the vessel into which his righteous anger should have been poured. Making a movie "topical" may cause politically-conscious audience members to nod their heads in recognition, but if current events bear little relevance to the story you're trying to tell, all those nodding heads can distract you from enjoying the movie.

If they were so hot on exploring the immigration issue, the filmmakers should've created their own entirely original dystopian sci-fi thriller about illegal immigrants oppressed by the government. Then someone else could've come along and made a movie about mass infertility that actually had something to do with mass infertility. Both movies would probably be worth watching, I'm just not so sure I want to watch them at the same time.