300 seconds

Just as we were leaving the house for the 5:30 p.m. Sunday matinee of “Zodiac,” Adrian and I realized that the kitchen clock was 30 minutes behind. Dead battery. We dashed downtown anyway, but, believing we were too late to see the beginning of “Zodiac” (anathema to movie lovers), we entered the screening room for “300″ instead. In no more than five minutes, we looked at each other, stood up, and walked out. Three hundred seconds may set a record for the least amount of time I’ve ever allotted to my evaluation of a movie’s worth.
Instead, we snuck into “Zodiac” to see the rest of it – about 5/6 of it or more – and were very glad we did.

Regarding “300″ – I had NOT read any reviews of it beforehand, though I was aware of all the buzz – we were unambivalently appalled by its sadistic, unapologetic images of child abuse – Spartan customs notwithstanding.

I mean, my conscience is very clear on this: you have to
tell these Hollywood schmucks what you will tolerate and what you will not. I just can’t accept entertainment based on violence towards children.

Not that ANYBODY besides us is telling them. Well, film critic A.O. Scott of the New York Times did: (I read his review afterwards) “300 is about as violent as ‘Apocalypto’ and twice as stupid,” he wrote. (Friday, March 9/20007)
But who’s reading? The IMAX showing of 300 at Regal Theaters/ Pleasanton has been sold out, show after show, for days. It’s playing on multiple screens in every theater in the area. My students are raving about it. The film grossed $68 million in its opening weekend.
I had studied the Spartans in high school, but that was a long time ago. So I came home and went to the Web. What we had seen in the first three minutes of the film was all corroborated by the literature. Weak babies left to die at birth: check. Boys sent away from mama at age 7 to be trained as soldiers in an all-male society: check. Toughening rituals, running the gauntlet, manipulation and replacement of the ethical individual ego with a code of subservience to the glory of the State: check. Fascism, anyone? Let’s call it what it is, though the Samurai Code and U.S. Marines Corps also come to mind.
So why is it that the historical violence shown in a movie such as Schindler’s List, for example, is acceptable to me as a film viewer, while that of 300 is not? While I pondered this, Adrian summed up the difference in one word: intention. Is it the intention of the filmmaker to excite us with his scenes of staged violence – or to make us feel – morally, aesthetically, viscerally – repelled by it? I think that’s essentially it.
What worries me is that our revulsion to such scenes in “300,” or in “Apocalypto,” seems to be the response of a shrinking minority. What worries me is that millions upon millions flock to see it, and experience no such response at all.
Sparta is not a place I would have wanted to live, even though women citizens enjoyed more freedom than anywhere else in the Ancient Mediterranean world, and equal attention was paid to the development of their minds and bodies as to those of men. But it was a militaristic, proto-Fascist state nonetheless, and I can’t admire it. Perhaps the film goes on to explore and reveal the nuances and suffering caused by this configuration of society – though that’s not what I’ve read. I’ve read about its glorification of militaristic self-sacrifice in the name of a dubious so-called freedom. Spartans were not free. It was a slave-based economy in which even those on top (the “true Spartans”) sacrificed their lives to the maintenance of state power, immersed in the seductive ideology of the uber-self.
I shudder to think about the thousands of history-ignorant youths around the world who, abused at home or brutalized by whoever holds the power in their lives, will see the film and imagine themselves as warriors in training, ideologically empowered to unleash their justified fury in whatever cunning, macho ways they can find. Adrian also ventured that there might be plenty of abusive parents out there who could find in the film justification for cruel treatment of their dependents in the alleged interests of “toughening” them up.
Normally I don’t believe in criticizing something you haven’t seen – completely. But to my experienced eye, certain things were immediately clear: it was not cinema. It was a video game, without the participation, and with a pretension to history that tries to justify its sadistic anti-soul. I’m not buying it.
“Zodiac,” on the other hand, is a film that is more about obsession, and the desire to arrest violence, than a
vehicle to vicariously ENJOY violence, as are so many movies today. Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr. and even Jake Gyllenhaal were all superb.
Of course I also enjoyed the portrayal of that era — not the LSD or hippies or war protests, but the nature of every day life in the 70s, as lived by San Francisco cops and reporters. Having just visited the Chronicle newsroom last week made it especially fresh.
In the late 80s, as a reporter for the rival paper, the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner,  I actually KNEW Paul Avery, the reporter played by Robert Downey – a bit. After burning out at the Chronicle over the Zodiac case he had come over to the Examiner for a spell, while I was working there. I remember him as a skinny, eccentric man with graying hair who had a certain mystique and immunity around the newsroom – he was one of a few “untouchables” who NOBODY told what to do — but I had no idea WHY, since I was at college on the East Coast while all this was happening. It wasn’t until 12 years after my graduation that I worked at the Ex. The end credits say that Avery died in 2000.
I do remember, however, reading the Zodiac stories in the SF Chronicle every time I came out to Berkeley/SF to visit my father in the late 60s and 70s. I recall the spookiness and the generalized fear that infected California because of the Zodiac killer; the sense of the spoiling of the Summer of Love and its beautiful legacy.

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