Well, that was a mess.

I just got back from a viewing of "300," such an unironic celebration of white masculinity as I never hope to see again in my life. All the Spartans were tall, muscled and white. The Persians were various shades of brown, and were usually really ugly. Xerxes wore eyeliner and loads of jewelry. Women were only good as warm bodies or sources of inspiration to go and die (Leonidas' wife looks a politician in the eye and declares, "Freedom isn't free"). Male comerades joked calmly in the face of death. Blood splattered lovingly in pretty much every shot. Lines like, "We are at the beginning of a new age, fighting mysticism and tyranny on behalf of reason!" were uttered with a straight face.

There was voice-over narration. I'm not kidding.

Luckily, there were only three of us in the place (it was a 2:30 showing on a Tuesday,) so there weren't too many people to be bothered by the fact that my friend and I shaking with laughter at the absurdity of it all. I could swear that there were deliberate references to Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ - the feminization of Xerxes and the way he tempts Leonidas, offering him rulership of Greece if he'll just kneel to the Persian god-king, reminded me of Gibson's Satan. Which I guess makes Leonidas a forerunner for Christ. Is there a point where the fetishization of violence takes on an irony of its own, regardless of the intentions of the fetishizers?