The Movie 300 and Whiteness

At the end of her book $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan, A. Kiarina “the wonderful” Kordela asks the question “Who are we when we see those strugglers [‘terrorists’] as psychotic murderers? What and whose gaze is this, which desires so badly to be killed by the other?” While I don’t pretend to understand the book in its entirety and may read it again, this final makes me immediately think of whiteness. This premonition is reinforced by reference to my own memory of being a pre-adolescent half-Jew-in-America, obsessed with the holocaust and full of desire to have been a survivor of it.

Whiteness, as I and others have argued elsewhere, is another name for the totalizing system of our day (patriarchy, heteronormativity, etc, or most commonly and completely—capitalism). It is unique, however, in that it is a perspective that is both substantive and symptomatic. That is, it is simultaneously a lived identity (I am white, I am not a racist, whether or not I may be one) and thus whiteness possesses a real subjectivity as opposed to a media-based caricature, but is also made invisible—it is a repressed, but normative identity, and therefore when it returns it reveals much more than itself.

What is a good way to understand this identity? There are many ways to approach this problem (see particularly Richard Dyer’s extraordinary book White to which I owe most of the ideas presented here) but I will choose to do so through a recent, massively successful film that holds a strangely non-ideological place in that any attempt at interpretation immediately becomes political but it is precisely interpretation itself that is refused by nearly all critics, not to mention the director, writers, and original book author. Which film? In this case, I am referring to Zack Synder’s 300.

300, bad-assly refusing letters, is the story of the three hundred Spartans who held off a vast Persian army thus allowing Greece to come together to expel Persian invaders, as immortalized by Herodotus and Frank Miller. It is an epic comic-book battle between ‘slaves’ and ‘free men’ which “selectively idealizes Spartan society in a "problematic and disturbing" fashion, as well as portraying the "hundred nations of the Persians" as monsters and non-Spartan Greeks as weak.” Ephraim Lytle, professor of Hellenistic History at the University of Toronto, quoted above as well (see Wikipedia) suggests that the film's moral universe would have seemed as "bizarre to ancient Greek as it does to modern historians"”. Replete with dramatic sex scenes of oracles enslaved to hideously deformed religious figures counter-posed to (also dramatic) sex between the main character (the king of course!) and the Spartan queen who simultaneously speaks as the mother of the world’s only “real men” and is completely subordinate to the male-dominated social system (a perfect woman, non?), mockery of Athenian boy-lovers (regardless of the happily supported homosexuality of real Sparta), and so forth.

Moreover, and moving to the central umpf of the movie, Sparta’s freedom, which (as Arendt would remind us) is precisely the freedom of those who have escaped necessity by virtue of having slaves (who are never mentioned, shown, or implied in the film), is defended from the invaders whose society is based on ‘slavery’ to an emperor/god whose central demand is to be bowed down to, and who has a vast army that has conquered “the entire world”.

We have in this movie, then, a classic imperialist reversal on a number of levels, with Sparta serving as a defender of civilization in a ‘clash of civilizations’ manner (USA! USA!). These reversals are created by setting up a dualism between a free, ‘western’, civilized, totalitarian militarism, and an ‘eastern’, Persian, Iraqi, religiously tinged, slavery-based, barbaric, empire. Two primary reversals are at play here. The first is a typical one whereby the aggressors reframe themselves as those attacked, the defenders of X, in this case freedom, (the US or Israel in relation to terrorism for example), and therefore justify their imperialist practices through increasing their (already existing) aggression. 300 does this via reference to historic analogy which (p.s.) was Goebbel’s favorite mode of propaganda.

The second reversal is more interesting in that it displaces precisely the conditions of capitalism (which has indeed conquered the world)—the dominance of money over people, and slavery (“the freedom to sell one’s labor on the market”)—onto the attackers and therefore positions Sparta as at once a 1)stand-in for America, 2) the most extreme form of single-ideological-self-enforced-totalitarianism imaginable, and, precisely because of this totalitarianism, this sole purpose, 3) the defender of a free way of life under assault. And this assault from the forces of slavery, money, physical grotesqueness/disability, and ‘false’ or manipulative sexuality are external (as it is a deformed Spartan who is rejected from the army who is corrupted by and exchanges sex and money to betray the otherwise undefeatable army who he later attempts to usher into his newfound paradise) and internal (like the traitor who attempts to discredit the queen after falsely agreeing to support sending more troops in their support in exchange for sex (predicated on the condition that “you [the queen who otherwise experiences ‘uncorrupted’ sexual enjoyment] will not enjoy it”).

And while it is tempting to say that the desire stimulated by the Spartans in this movie is the ‘natural, spontaneous, ease’ desired by anarchism (and Tibetan Buddhism), it is rather precisely the individualist, capitalist desire that has seized both fascist and so-called individualist ‘anarchists’ alike, a single desire split between the total obedience to a single, unquestionably correct code of Law/Honor whose pleasures are a pure and controlled form of the ‘instinctual’ and ‘driving’ pleasures of sex and violence or the total obedience to solitary individual desire...just as in the Godfather the ‘primitive’ mob-based-rejection of modern capitalism (and whiteness) is precisely the conditions of modern whiteness (and capitalism) itself.

These reversals are enacted with animated yet real looking he-man muscles, capes, dramatic, stylized violence against monsters, while epic (if not literal) flag-waving creates a new brand of media fascism…and whiteness…perfectly fitting the core of capitalism whereby instead of displacing corruption on Jews, for example, it is the entire foreign (and internal), monstrous, racially non-white, effeminately male (and perhaps vaguely gay), world which is based precisely in the existing ‘underside’ (true form) of capitalism itself, such that the heroic white warrior proves himself in defeating that of which he is both creator, slave, and master (the current global order), a rather amazing feat of self-abjection and self-glorification (the split subject).

As a white man leaving the movie I was filled both with the dramatic casting forward of purpose based in the absolute of some historic age, the thrill and pleasure of enacting righteous violence and sex, and the deep sense of glorious, defensive, inevitable victory tied to some future ongoing threat. A threat that, as a condensation of capitalism into terrorism, is sure to be with us…from us…well into the future (assuming other more real and more important us-caused dramas like climate change, peak oil, etc, don’t piss us away first). This is the soul of whiteness, this desire for unleashed, righteous, bestial, greatness, in the heart of buggifying bureaucracy; certain, absolute purpose supported and sustenance in the heart of an emptying decadence and increasing economic decline; the savior and the warrior, the king and lover, the household master and father—a Nietzschean greatness that uses capitalism as both the ground of its magnificence and its rejection of the present.

Of course, as the initial quote suggests, this is not the only enactment of whiteness; indeed, it is the limit case of a necessarily-desperate ideology built on the reversals (repressions, and history,) demonstrated above, the substitution of power for defensiveness, of freedom for slavery (and slavery for freedom), and the combination of righteousness and sexual violence (and violent (reproductive (land possessing, etc) sex).

It is from this basis that we can begin to understand the desire for ‘the real’ in suffering which is so important today, in its justification of racism (sexism, homophobia) and bitter attacks against political correctness through (obvious) misidentification (as in my own holocaust fantasies, in other’s appropriation of black culture, particularly hip hop, etc). In suffering, we white men have the possibility of ‘being’ the ideology we inhabit, most particularly if we suffer at the hands of our (pure evil) ‘enemies’. Moreover, these enemies are constructed as pure evil because they are (within the silenced acknowledgement of the ideology) not viewed as a consequence of the actions of real men but as the embodiment of the psychotic and murderous underside of whiteness itself. Similarly, with the desire to be killed by the terrorists, we display both an ‘intentional’ ignorance of its causes and an almost ejaculatory political and personal relief in being victims of ‘evil’ (and of ourselves!). In being killed by terrorists, a foreign based entity, we can simultaneously (as in 300) glorify our righteousness and goodness, our being under-attack, and assert our (alienated) power in being able to ‘seek out and kill all the terrorists’ (chilling words that freaked out but didn’t deter Democratic Party zealots in the uselessness of elections, in this case Kerry vs. a Turd Sandwich).

However, internal pressures have proven the most dangerous to this white ideological framework, as it is the coming to light of internal oppressions through resistance that have proven or had the potential to prove to whites in the US that they are not righteous, that they don’t have a purpose in the world, or at least not a good one, that they are not defenders but aggressors, and so on. It is here then that the white savior as well as the self-defeating, impossible animalistic minority, the corrupted family, the subordinate sexual woman, the anti-societal queer, the stealing, non-English speaking immigrant, come in. This is particularly relevant in our present anti-political-correctness bile, which is right insofar as political correctness is a deeply hypocritical and implicitly racist discourse (a development of whiteness!), in that it transparently supports the current, racist social order while ambivalently proposing obviously inadequate fixes—a typical and disgustingly white liberal solution. This hypocrisy is then re-directed by conservatives to (implicated) minorities and is re-described against them as a source of tyrannical power under the name of racism. And it is this reversal against racism which is used to defend and expand a real racism upon which whiteness is organized. As such we can see that in its fundamentals, the ideology of whiteness, like the laws of capitalism, have not been significantly altered despite being transformed from one phase to another.

And even if one sees in “capitalism” a better description of the cause of today’s ills it cannot be denied that in the United States, and hence throughout the world, it is in the language of whiteness that capitalism is spoken, justified, and fought out in the political system of the world’s most powerful pseudo-democracy. And just as it is the failure of an anti-(or alternative)-whiteness is based in its insignificant anti-capitalism, so is the failure of anti-capitalists an effect of having failed to sufficiently understand and take into account the subjectivity of US capitalism, whiteness in its critique, and to do so in a way that confronts the subjectivity itself.

Here I must rest my analysis and leave it to others, who stand in a different relation to the powers that be, to consider the effects of this whiteness in the US, and to ask in what ways, and in what discourses, capitalism holds subjectivity from other positions and in other and all areas of the world. And just as A.K. Kordela rightly insists that a new world must be both at the level of bodies and language and that this can only be done by acknowledging the effect of fantasy and enjoyment, as opposed to ignoring them as illusory or constructed, so must those theorizing the abolition of whiteness ground their critique in the rock of whiteness itself and its own basis in the global history of which we all play a part.

How we are to do so, how we are to reconstitute ourselves as subjects of now-time as opposed to empty historical time (Benjamin), how we are to organize and joyously and strategically live a new world into being will be left for another day, though I would be most interested if the author of $urplus (and others) would apply her (and their) critical gaze to books which, in the most delightful spirit of the anarchist tradition, attempt to provide an informative framework and concretely address issues of practice…particularly two recent contributions to a radical transformative project—Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, by David Graeber, and Getting Free, by James Herod, both of which are readable for free online.