Tuesday, March 13, 2007
When 2 plus 2 equals 300
Today I watched a great episode of Voyager that I'd never seen before. "Living Witness" details how an entire alien culture has developed over 700 years, based on an account of an encounter with Voyager that is made up of distortions and half-truths. It's a good parable of how history is written by the victors and, in the words of Obi-Wan "that you'll find that many of the truths we cling to depend on our point of view".In the real world, though, these nuances don't take 700 years. They can occur in just a few decades.
Case in point: the People's Daily from China reported on an Iranian official's announcement that the new film 300 insults Persian civilization.
According to Javad Shamqadri, President Ahmadinejad's art advisor, the film is
"part of a comprehensive U.S. psychological war aimed at Iranian culture...following the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Hollywood and cultural authorities in the U.S. initiated studies to figure out how to attack Iranian culture...certainly, the recent movie is a product of such studies."
If only Javad had checked the internet for all of five minutes before he spoke, he might have been able to discern this film is based on a graphic novel and was not hatched out of some psychological warfare unit in Tinseltown, but a cash machine ready to take another gamble on a film from the creator of Sin City. While the film does cast aspersions on the Persian army, it's the same kind of demonization that's down to the enemy in all of Hollywood's films. Declaring it as anything more involved is simply hyperbole.
Now for an intelligent rebuttal to the film, listen to Ephraim Lytle, Assistant Professor of Hellenistic History at the University of Toronto.
Labels: Hooray for Hollywood, Politics, Retcon
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