Kushner/Keane/300

Today I read the next fifty pages of Rachel Kushner’s 2008 debut novel, Telex From Cuba. As the chronology of the book moves closer to the successful conclusion of Castro’s revolution, the tensions in the book start to increase. de La Mazière is becoming increasingly paranoid thanks to his simultaneous dealings with several regimes in several different countries, but the paranoia is something he seems to embrace. The American expatriate community in Cuba seems more distanced from reality than ever, as they have to work harder than ever to ignore signs of the impending catastrophe, especially when those signs include members of their own families going over to the rebels’ side. What’s missing in this complex picture, of course, is the perspective of the rebels themselves. This is not exactly an absence or weakness in the novel but instead a reflection of the kind of novel Kushner has chosen to write, or to be more precise, the point of view from which she has chosen to tell this story. One can’t help but yearn, however, for the voices of those on the other side, rather than bizarre cameo appearances from Ernest Hemingway (!).

I also read the next fifty pages of John Keane’s Reflections on Violence. Although he argues for the presence of a certain amount of violence within civil society, it becomes clear within this section of the book that Keane does not want to dispense with the concept of civil society altogether. Consequently, Keane rejects what he sees as pessimistic arguments about the inevitably violent nature of democratic states by pointing to the existence of phenomena such as peace movements as evidence of what he calls the politics of civility within civil society, a politics that constitutes a kind of resistance to violence. More importantly, it’s in this section of the book that Keane, in the context of acknowledging that ‘violence’ is always going to be a controversial and contested concept, offers his own baseline definition of what violence means to him: “Violence is better understood as the unwanted physical interference by groups and/or individuals with the bodies of others.”

In anticipation of the imminent release of 300: Rise of an Empire, I watched Zack Snyder’s 2006 movie     300, perhaps the most homoerotic, and certainly one of the most over the top films ever made. It’s not difficult to see the reasons for the film’s popularity. First, despite Snyder’s disingenuous denial of connections between the film and post-9/11 current events, the parallels between Sparta (a beleaguered nation) and the US (a nation that sees itself as beleaguered even though it is in fact the world’s only remaining superpower) are obvious. Similarly, the mystical, tyrannical, and perverse Persians act as a transparent synecdoche for the Bush-era ‘axis of evil,’ or more abstractly, for any foreign other that threatens the purity and freedom of Sparta/the US. Objections to these analogies have been unrelenting and unrelentingly unpersuasive, especially those that argue that 300 is so silly that to posit any connections between the film and the real world are equally silly. The problem with this argument, of course, is that it ignores the fact that 300’s silliness is the reason for its appeal. What could be more silly than the most powerful nation in world history portraying itself as relentlessly under threat rather than the source of threat? And yet such a view of the US is alarmingly common among many people who should know better, not to mention among those who don’t.