The Daily Show did a segment about 300 and various jokey parallels with U.S. politics, and then the Daily Dish gathered up links to the clip and to several blog discussions of the film’s (not very strong) sense of history.
I saw 300 a few months ago and didn’t have much of a reaction except this: its Sparta-Persia matchup seems like a dream image of how the Taliban might see the world. There’s the scrappy band of underdogs who live the hard but good life and who will fight and die before they accept comfortable submission to a debauched empire. And then there’s the debauched empire, where women don’t wear a lot of clothes and men put their tongues in each others’ ears. The empire has money and numbers on its side. The underdogs have nothing but courage and morality.
Where the parallel falls down is that the Persians are dark and from the east, the Spartans white and from the west. Apparently those factors beat anything else involved.
I haven't seen 300, but Sin City (the flick) struck me as porn for Al Quaeda. Frank Miller's desire to do a Batman Vs. Al Quaeda comic may be indicative of some cognitive dissonance.
There's a long history in the West of portraying the East as debauched, hypersexed, exotic/erotic, near queer, etc. I see the narrative you draw…but the depictions in 300 are quite common racist/homophobic/sexist representations of East by West…so much so that I was kind of shocked that they could get away with it quite so easily (and profitably) in a film made in 2007 or 2008 (or whatever). That really was a bad bad movie–not as bad as Superman IV, but pretty horrible
"There's a long history in the West of portraying the East as debauched, hypersexed, exotic/erotic, near queer, etc. I see the narrative you draw…but the depictions in 300 are quite common racist/homophobic/sexist representations of East by West."
Well, yeah. Why "but"? I guarantee, my post is not based on the assumption that the west doesn't have the above-listed long-standing biases against the east.