:: SeT mE fReE ::

The Spartans! surely dress the part. They all wear leather-looking short shorts and crimson drapes that billow brilliantly during their bullet-timey battle scenes, offering accents on blood spilled and spurted. Thus they identify themselves and recognize others as such. Still, it’s not as if they need too much help in seeing who’s not them: their enemies are instantly visible. They’re Persian (here, black), misshapen (here, hunchback), and “Oriental” (identified by music cues and ninja-style outfits, complete with silver masks).

Xerxes (RODRIGO SANTORO) vents his rage at the losses sustained by his army while facing 300 Spartans

The Spartans’ chief enemy, the king of the Persians and so set off as Leonidas’ opposite, is a giant named Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro, digitally enlarged and boom-voiced), a self-proclaimed god-king with an affection for mascara and facial piercings. His abs are not nearly so defined as those of the Spartans!, suggesting that he spends his time not working out but instead wallowing in a perverse and girly way. Insisting that the Spartans! and Leonidas in particular kneel before him, Xerxes recalls Jaye Davidson’s Ra in Stargate, evoking manly men’s anxieties about transsexualism and unfathomable desire. (All this deviance is made manifest during an orgy scene presided over by Xerxes: lesbians dance and kiss, a hunchback traitor gets some, and the much-displayed skin is overwhelmingly dark: the lack of imagination that goes into this demonization is depressing.)

Anxieties about masculine identity lie at the heart of 300, though the film doesn’t exactly resolve them. During his early tête-à-tête with the Persian emissary, Leonidas scoffs at the Athenians, whom he calls “philosophers and boy lovers,” as they were unable to stave off the Persians. He means to go down in history as something else, fighters for a cause, namely, their manly rep. That this rep is so overtly eroticized here is hardly original: the ripped bodies and guttural soundings (and Leonidas’ hetero assignations with Gorgon) mark them clearly as leaning one way. But everything else about them leans the other way, which suggests why they fight so fiercely to kill of the others they can identify external to themselves. They thrust and assert themselves, they puff their chests and are spattered with bodily fluids. They are fierce.

Captain (VINCENT REGAN), Leonidas (GERARD BUTLER) and the Spartans stand ready to halt the advance of the Persian army

All this gayness is premised on a love for beautiful sameness: Leonidas rejects a wannabe soldier who’s a hunchback and so cannot raise his shield to match the height of the others (though the king does observe of his swordplay, “You have a fine thrust"). The devotion to sameness means that a disappointing subplot involving Gorgo, the only woman who speaks dialogue in the film, is set off awkwardly: she doesn’t fit aesthetically the rest of the tableau.

That is, she doesn’t have much to do except wait for word of Leonidas, though her waiting is fraught, as she endeavors to make her own deal with Theron, in order to send supporting troops to the site of the 300’s battle. Her battle is framed as sexual assault, making her the sign of her husband’s heterosexuality (because you might need reassurance) as well as the reason he’s doing all this homoerotic acting out: her body is his, and its loss to a churlish knave like Theron is tragic, a matter of property, honor, and even, in abstract terms, freedom.