An Iranian official on Sunday lashed out at the Hollywood movie "300" for insulting the Persian civilization, local Fars News Agency reported.
Javad Shamqadri, an art advisor to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, accused the new movie of being "part of a comprehensive U.S. psychological war aimed at Iranian culture", said the report.
Shamqadri was quoted as saying "following the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Hollywood and cultural authorities in the U.S. initiated studies to figure out how to attack Iranian culture," adding "certainly, the recent movie is a product of such studies."
The movie's effort wound be fruitless, because "values in Iranian culture and the Islamic Revolution are too strongly seated to be damaged by such plans", said the Iranin official.
The movie was the top box office hit this weekend in North America, with receipts grossing $70 million.
I get bent at anti-Americanism in movies, particularly when it is blatant or doesn't really have much point (see Billy Bob Thornton's jab, "If I were building a weapon of mass destruction, you couldn't find it" in The Astronaut Farmer). But sometimes a story is just a story. This is one of those times.
300 is based on Frank Miller's graphic novel of the historic Battle of Thermopylae. It was the Greek version of the Alamo, if you will.
But the story is, well, a story, and in stories you have good guys and bad guys. Despite the modern need to undestand why all bad guys are bad, sometimes people write stories without psychoanalyzing why the bad guys are evil or hate the good guys. In real life, we know there may be reasons bad people do bad things. On the other hand, there is real evil in the world and it defies explanation.
Worrying about the portrayal of a 2500-year-old battle in a movie should be pretty low on the list of worries to the Iranians. If they want to worry about generalizations, they could start with the whole "Great Satan" thing.
It's far, far worse than that.
ReplyDeleteAccording to the author of "From Cyrus to Alexander", a massive tome on my bookshelf which I've only read parts of, "One of the most remarkable pecliarities of Achaemenid history is that, unlike most conquering peoples, the Persians left no written testaments of their own history." Pretty much everything we know about Xerxes comes from the Greeks, or from satrapal records; there is no source material describing the causes and origins of the war from the Persian side.
That's the only quotable source I have in front of me, but it jibes with my experience; I once spent several months trying to find a coherent narrative history of the Persian empire, and *failed* ... because the sources aren't there; either the Persians didn't write one or it didn't survive, and the surviving state records are too fragmentary to put one together.
So what, then, do the Iranians expect the movie to be based on, if not the writings of Herodotus? Modern Iranian myths about their ancient history which aren't supported by documentary evidence?
Many American film "critics" also failed to simply watch this tremendously entertaining flick for what it is ... repeate after me, people, IT'S JUST A FRIGGIN MOVIE!
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