Freedom, Liberty, Mysticism, Reason--Oh my!
“This is madness!”
“This is SPARTA!”
— 300
Though I doubt few would deny that Zack Snyder’s 300 is a sausage-fest of a film, 300 surprisingly (and somewhat refreshingly) also functions as an interesting example of the changing nature of social and international relations as manifested in new media. In his book The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord claims that society has degraded from being into having and finally into appearing (Thesis 17). The emphasis on visual representation in Debord’s analysis seems to indicate that the spectacle as a kind of centralized entity has grasped onto the proliferation of images as a way to ensure its survival, to ensure its hold over society. At the same time, Ronald Deibert in his book Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia depicts the current hypermedia environment as fostering multiplicities in the form of identities, media, and purposes, as a challenge to a more centralized network of power. 300 both literalizes and (whether intentionally or not) satirizes the traditional ways in which we both view (and preview) films—as hyper-represented, -glorified, and as a tool for an increasingly unraveling and unstable structure.
For Debord, society’s reliance on visual appearances makes it susceptible to the power of ideology:
Ideological entities have never been mere fictions—rather, they are a distorted consciousness of reality, and, as such, real factors retroactively production real distorting effects; which is all the more reason why that materialization of ideology, in the form of the spectacle, which is precipitated by the concrete success of an autonomous economic system of production, results in the virtual identification with social reality itself o an ideology that manages to remold the whole of the real to its own specifications. (Thesis 212)
Ideology is a dangerous yet effective tool used by society in order to maintain a fabricated and illusory status quo. Instead of lived or real experiences, the spectacle instead “erases the dividing line between self and world … it likewise erases the dividing line between true and false, repressing all directly lived truth beneath the real presence of the falsehood maintained by the organization of experiences” (Thesis 219). Or, in other words, the spectacle has blurred the line between the real real and the unreal real—or the real that we now perceive to be the true real. The spectacle has changed all that was “directly lived [into] mere representation” (Thesis 1)—and, as Debord seems to argue in the theses that follow, representation or the spectacle “is a concrete inversion of life” (Thesis 2) and “the very heart of society’s real unreality” (Thesis 6). Ideology no longer represents a choice but a social hallucination in which history and process is lost; now, it is simply reality, ahistorical, permanent.
Thus, freedom from this social situation relies on “self-emancipation … from the material bases of an inverted truth” (Thesis 221) and this self-emancipation depends on restoring “all their subversive qualities to past critical judgments that have congealed into respectable truths—or, in other words, that have been transformed into lies” (Thesis 206). The device Debord proposes to carry this out is détournement:
Détournement is the antithesis of quotation … Détournement, by contrast, is the fluid language of anti-ideology. It occurs within a type of communication aware of its inability to enshrine any inherent and definitive certainty. (Thesis 208)
Perhaps 300 is a kind of manifestation of détournement not only as a story but also as a work of film-art...
By channeling an older medium (the graphic novel), the physical framing of the film actually creates the atmosphere of watching a moving comic strip. Additionally, the use of color and the excessive violence make the film self-conscious and self-aware of its intention: why not give the audience exactly what they ask for? In the sense that détournement is the antithesis of quotation and, in fact, promotes plagiarism (Thesis 207), 300 seems to achieve this with its grotesque displays of masculinity and its infamous word-choice. (One needs look no further than David Denby’s review of 300 in the New Yorker for the typical critic’s tirade.)
However, it is the film’s choice of specific words and phrases that seems to reveal the naturalization and co-optation of specific words by the Bush administration into its war on terror: freedom, liberty, mysticism, reason. Debord argues that it is détournement’s ability to maintain distance from what has been made a credible truth that is its “defining characteristic” (Thesis 206). What seems to occur throughout 300, then, is a kind of reclaiming of language. By both plagiarizing the language and (arguably) completely separating itself from any modern incidents (what better way than to situate the film in the distant past to make one forget about the Iraq War?), 300 simultaneously embeds itself within the spectacle while attacking the spectacle’s ideology.
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Deibert approaches the possibilities for a society united by its (literally) unreal existence from a much more pragmatic perspective than Debord. For Deibert, the historical trajectory from the printing press to new technology and media (the Internet, especially) challenges traditional models of sovereignty and state-centered authority. Thus, while for Debord, the spectacle looms over as a single, yet wholly universal and perpetually universalizing, source of power, Deibert seems to say that the increase in number of media has in fact dissipated the central location of power: “rather than a single ‘gaze,’ the hypermedia environment has dispersed and decentralized the centers of surveillance to a much wider domain” (169). Debord’s universal power seems to attempt homogenizing its society into one falling under the jurisdiction of the spectacle; Deibert’s, however, seems to argue the opposite, in that his “postmodern imagined community is thus hyperpluralistic and fragmented—the very antithesis of the modern mass community” (195).
The fragmentation of this “modern mass community” by the hypermedia environment also signals a fragmentation of the traditional political system. Deibert argues that the “bombardment of transnational, decentered, personalized ‘narrowcasting’ and two-way communications in the form of computer networks, video-on-demand, direct satellite broadcasting, and the so-called ‘500 channel’ cable systems” works to dissolve the traditional structures of “shared ‘public’ or ‘national’ information experiences” (196). Or, in other words, perhaps in its own form of détournement, the multiplicity of forces initiating their own challenge to a centralized form of power is found in the increasing number of media outlets—YouTube, Facebook, MySpace. For, if Deibert is right and my “postmodern-sense of individual identity is characterized by a historically contingent, multiple or ‘decentered’ self,” then how is my virtually real identity (screenname, “handle”) part of my fractured and decentered supposedly real identity (182)? And, what does that say about my identification as a recognized citizen? Or, does it say anything at all? Perhaps yes; perhaps no. Deibert also seems to advocate for the identification of groups beyond geographical locations, commenting on the “extent to which they are not bound by traditional notions of ‘territory’ or ‘place’ as prerequisites for membership … communities coalesce around shared interests in the ‘virtual’ spaces of the hypermedia environment”—or, no longer those endorsed and manufactured by the spectacle (198). Thus, even though nationalism is replaced with nichelism—“a polytheistic universe of multiple and overlapping fragmented communities above and below the sovereign nation-state”—the process and presence of nichelism seems to still maintain the underpinnings of an overarching network, no matter how decentralized it may actually be (198). The network is the hypermedia environment and its citizens are constantly divided and fractured postmodern selves, thus making “the perception of a tightly bound planet community … hard to deny in a world that is constantly bombarded with images and reminders of the global reach of hypermedia” (199).
Though Deibert may regard this growing hypermedia network as a democratizing force with the potential to challenge the old, state-based system, Debord seems to think otherwise:
Imprisoned in a flat universe bounded on all sides by the spectacle’s screen, the consciousness of the spectator has only figmentary interlocutors which subject it to a one-way discourse on their commodities and the politics of those commodities. (Thesis 218)
The elimination of geographical space seems to indicate an increasing importance and dependence on speed: the faster I can surf the Internet, the less I need to physically move from where I am and this reaps “distance internally in the form of spectacular separation” (Thesis 167). These new and innovative instruments not only reinforce the power of the spectacle over society, but also further isolate individuals from one another. Despite thinking I am more connected with my peers by using these new means of communication, I in fact only further isolate myself. As the spectacle inundates me with more and more images, it blurs the line between real and non-real to the point where I have given it more and more power over me: “the isolation of the population has become a much more effective means of control … images that indeed attain their full force only by virtue of this isolation” (Thesis 172). Thus, I am isolated and society is one without a sense of community (Thesis 192).
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In the quote that begins this paper, King Leonidas has just been visited by a messenger sent to him by Xerxes, God-King over the Persians. All diplomatic immunity ignored, when he is threatened, the messenger cries out to King Leonidas: “This is madness!” Leonidas’ retort that Sparta is beyond madness (and, as it were, beyond reason) perhaps serves as an interesting example of détournement. Things in Sparta are simply what Sparta requires them to be; there is no naturalized or historical definition of “reason” or “madness,” no luxury and excess (violence and tempers, excepting). Sparta neither archives (the pile of bones in the opening sequence of the film) nor relies on its surrounding networks (Leonidas’ refusal to obey the word of the oracle; the brush-off of other neighboring troops). Thus, perhaps we can think of 300’s Sparta as the embodiment of détournement; at once glorified and straightforward, but utopian and utterly impossible.