Herodotus and the Persians/Hollywood and the Iranians/ Xerxes and BushMcCain
Initially I had no intension to contribute to the advertisement campaign for the Hollywood film that has now proved to have inspired even the Australian government in the choice of number of the additional solders to be sent to Afghanistan.
Then I received a circular e-mail from an Iranian contact in London going as far as saying it was every Iranian’s responsibility to sign a petition against this film.
But even this didn’t move me to go and see the film.
Not every film creates responsibilities. It was a choice to be made consciously.
Besides I’m not the sort to sign a petition against a filmmaker’s views of the world.
I must say though that if a film about the same subject had been made by a Greek director living in Greece I would have seen it shortly after release, but a Hollywood production and in the middle of this whirlwind ? No.
On the other hand I thought Iranians should get a life as this couldn’t be any different to the heated overreactions to the cartoons in the past i.e. the kind of reactions to ‘prejudices’ that in reality end up to prove that they were no prejudices after all.
Then I received a c ircular e-mail from a friend (= my ex husband) meant for a small group referring to a link.
This link gave me a feeling I had known before, namely the very likelihood that the Iranians in USA may be getting a rougher time being Iranians than the rest of the 3 million Iranians living outside Iran since the Islamic regime’s takeover.
This link also gave me the idea that instead of fighting in Iraq, the American soldiers should be given the task to educate the average USA citizens in subjects like Geography etc. This is what I would call a real crusade.
Then another person from the same small group responded to the link by stating that “Have to admit the same sort of result would probably happen in most countries…the things you hear on the Clapham omnibus!!! “.
But by then I had already dec ided that it was time to create a new responsibility for myself.
So Monday Eastern and an off c ity centre Odeon it was.
I already could see the effect of the film on the ticket seller. She was initially kind but as soon I asked which venue was showing it and fell into an extra kind foreign unsure attitude, she couldn’t hear me and got a worried look from behind the security glass.
I repeated the question although I remembered now that it would be on the ticket anyway. She said number 4 and wasn’t as kind as she had been initially. There was no queue behind me to have caused her irritation. But perhaps the job has programmed her to be nice to each buyer for 20 seconds only, and when the time is up her real self starts to show.
Walking towards the ticket control I had now probably a little bomb attached to me without even noticing it. The ticket controller saw number 4, grinned intentionally and tore the ticket looking in a manner which meant ‘believe me I don’t think you’re one of them and don’t take it too seriously, it’s a joke anyway’. It was 3 PM and there were altogether no more than 25 people in the venue. Thank gottalife London is not Hollywood.
What gave me a shock in the first instance when entering the venue was the smell of the chemicals used in the making of the chairs’ new fabric. Obviously there was no proper ventilation.
Now I was grieved by the thought of another 90 minutes in a smelly number 4 and decided the only way was not to smell. And once the visual fast moving stimuli started, this happened automatically without any effort, but if I was going to feel down after the film, I had to take into consideration an additional possibility of chemical effect on my mood as well.
When the film started I initially liked the background but then that was it.
It remained almost the same for the rest of the film. I knew beforehand that there were only 4 real sets but couldn’t count more than three.
Later I realized I hadn’t counted the bed scene. Does a bed count as a set for a film? But that must have been meant to show the preference the Spartans had for very basic and minimalist home and furniture. After all - like the Persians - they were originally a tribe.
So the king and queen scene (I am avoiding the s - - word just to stop attracting yet more spam) took place in what looked more like an ancient bed-sit to me.
As for the main actors, the most Iranian looking - but also the most irritating one (no connection between the two facts) to me - was the one who pretended to be king Leonidas.
He looked more like a bad Iranian actor in Iran trying to get to Hollywood by overdoing it.
The modern swimming pants made them all look like batmen stripped of being bats.
Obviously they didn’t want to use authentic colourful clothes for Persians most likely because the Spartan red had to be the only eye catching colour?
During the battles the camera was always on the side of the Spartans except for once.
I understand that the movie is based on a comic strip? (I won’t make the time to follow this up) but the only live thing about this one was the exaggerated display of hate and anger by the Spartans during the killings, whereas the Persians, who must have been fed up travelling such a long way only to satisfy their king’s need to keep his empire intact, had no faces at all hence no emotions.
A more real scenario however would have been to show Persians as being tired with wars and of being long way away from home. It should have really been them getting too angry hence losing their unjustified war eventually.
But the feeling one gets watching this film is not so much that the Spartans were angry but that the actors were angry. So much so that I thought perhaps king Leonidas had a fight with an Iranian while eating at a MacDonald restaurant in Los Angeles
Some have reviewed this film as being homophobic. I rather think this was a camp paedophilic movie, apart from the fact that Xerxes looked like the dream stripper of gay men and older women, who don’t care about beards and eyebrows.
I am more thinking of the customs of Spartans who not only separated boys from their mothers at the age of 7 and threw weak and disabled children over the cliffs, they also allocated by law each of these boys - as well as girls - to an older man called ‘lover’.
In the film there is only a vague hint when the queen’s son is brought to her by the second king? (Another custom of Spartans was to have 2 kings) who then violated the mother and was killed later by her - quite nicely - in the city’s Supreme Court.
She passivated him permanently while repeating the words she had received from him earlier on during the violation. This was the only part of the script that I liked, but I can’t help to think I had read or heard it before but where? I think it was something like: This will be slow but you won’t enjoy it? Bad news if I’m not even sure about the only good part of the script.
We know that Spartans were ruled by their elders who made up the Supreme Court and that young citizens didn’t have equal rights to those over the age of 30.
All men were to be warriors. So they forced the people of the neighbouring lands to produce food etc for them. For this reason the Spartans’ concern and comments in the movie about slavery by Persians is totally Hollywood.
We know that Xerxes and the Persian courts in general had eunuchs and kaneez (female slave) as domestics, but at the time the slavery as a production mode was specific to ancient Europe and not to Asia.
In Athens which had the most advanced democracy at the time only ‘citizens’ could vote and not their slaves, simply because slaves did not count as ‘citizens’. So when Herodotus mentions slaves it doesn’t mean that he is critical of slavery. For that we had Spartacus.
As for Persians they had 4 castes like the 4 major castes of India today.
These were Magi (Zoroastrian priesthood), warriors, artisans and farmers. It is likely that the two latter castes were made up solely of the indigenous people living in the area between Caspian Sea and the Persian Golf when the Persians invaded the plateau coming from the north.
For the Persian kings’ imperialistic wars ordinary soldiers were hired. These could belong to the artisans’ as well as the farmers’ castes.
In general every occupied land was left to continue with their mode of production. The empire expected yearly tax from these satraps. And as each of these satraps had their own king it was normal for the Persian king to call himself the king of the kings (shahanshah).
In a war between the two sides it is obvious that the Persians of the empire who were from 46 nations at the time would have been much more frightened to loose to Greeks than the other way round, simply because they knew that they could end up as slaves working in the fields for the rest of their lives.
Xerxes on the other hand is known to have demanded from the Babylonians 50 healthy and good looking adolescents every year. This is likely to have been his idea of keeping the population of the rebellious Babylon under control.
For this reason I believe he must be the figure who became Zahak in the Persian mythology.
Zahak lived on Mount Damavand and had two snakes’ heads sticking out of his shoulders. These snakes threatened to eat his head unless he offered them the brains of two young people on a regular basis (for 50 Babylonian youth this would mean 2 brains every 2 weeks or 1 brain for the two, for every week of their moon calendar). He was eventually killed by Kaveh the Blacksmith.
Today in surrounding areas of the Mount Damavand the occasional sounds coming from the inactive old volcano are still described as ghahghaheh Zahak (ghahghaheh= loud laughter).
Back to the venue, it must have been just after 40 minutes (the natural time span for the concentration capacity of the human brain before needing a break) that I started to yawn. They were coming from such a depth that my jaw nearly dropped.
I didn’t think at the time that it could be the effect of the chemicals in the air; the movie was enough of a motivator to initiate a yawn therapy session on its own.
The killings got so fast that it slowed down everything else in the venue.
I started to show my profile to the people sitting in the back rows during the yawning; it would make such a lovely contrasting silhouette to all that guff and glue running on the screen.
I sensed everyone behind me was slowing down as well.
In the front- two rows closer to the screen- there was only one man and in front of him a small group of friends.
Only the lone man’s body indicated that he was on the same speed as the movie and busy identifying and killing the Persians. The rest were getting increasingly unsure and detached, although still looking at the screen. When the film ended, no one looked at anybody else’s face and everyone left quietly.
Herodotus and the Persians:
It is in his Seventh book (supposed to have been divided into 9 books by another writer later) that Herodotus describes the battles of Thermopylae
Herodotus was born in Ionia and adapted a critical attitude to the qualities of the Ionian people in general - except those of Samos where he took refuge - because he found them being readier to accept Persian rule.
Having been born in Persian Empire had of course sharpened Herodotus’ Hellenic patriotism. Nevertheless he was exceptionally tolerant of Persians and admired some of their customs e.g. the fact that even the king did not have the right to order the execution of someone who had committed a crime for the first time, and also the fact that the children socialized only with the mother and the women in the extended family until the age of 5.
Herodotus was interested in customs and was a good storyteller. It is important to bear in mind that he wrote about the battle at Thermopylae about 50 years after the event, and as he was the first to record battles that were taking place at the time, he must have relied mainly on the memories of some old ex soldiers and folklore storytelling.
He has been described as the ‘father of history’ as well as the ‘father of lies’. The latter more perhaps because of his description of a land in north where the sun never sets (true for summers) and the people there having only one eye in the middle of their forehead.
But this should not discredit some of his other observations. Perhaps on one of his journeys he took some hallucinatory drug common in west Asia at the time – like bhang or soma (huma) – which could cause such visions or perhaps he meant the third eye or was visited by Ra while multiplying or drunk.
One thing is clear: If Herodotus and later Xenophon had not written about the Persians, their wars and customs, the Iranians’ knowledge of their nation’s ancient past would have been very minimal like many other lost cultures in the world today.
The name takht-e Jamshid (Persepolis) says it all. It was thought to have been built by a king Jamshid (Persian mythology).
And although Hafez lived in Shiraz –not very far from Persepolis – he does not seem to have been aware of the connection between Alexander of Macedonia and takht-e Jamshid at least through folklore. And in Persian poetry of middle ages Alexander in general represents a positive figure. It is only from the middle 19th Century that the Iranians learned more about their ancient history as distinct from mythology.
Hollywood and the Iranians
To be honest initially when Iranians continued to comment about this film on the web I wondered if at least one Iranian had a share or investment in this movie, but then I decided to be more trusting towards the community and attribute it to the lack of insight of how the market works.
Having seen the film it is now apparent that this is more a reminder of the 1950’s Hollywood film making which suffered from a total illiteracy in history and an understanding of its significance for today’s societies and their evolution.
These boys who made the movie knew more about the Spartans and wanted to show less, and they knew less about the Persians and pretended to know more.
For instance Xerxes would never even dream to see himself as god.
The Magi were extremely powerful in the Persian courts and the Zoroastrian concept of the light and the dark symbolizing good and evil being in constant struggle with each other would not allow a king to see himself as Ahura Mazda.
On the rocks that show relief of kings of Persia the presence of Ahura mazda or an angel depicts their blessing for the king rather than his representation of god in an earthly character.
The king basically belonged to the warrior caste himself which definitely was not counted as superior to the caste of Magi if not inferior.
However it is possible that the Persian king would be seen as god by the people of some of their satraps who believed in earthly gods.
But to take this seriously for a Persian king would have been deadly.
In ‘Asian production mode’ only a king who could ensure water supply for the farmers and cities could remain a king. If he couldn’t he would be disposed of by another warrior who had a better idea in solving the water problem.
As a matter of fact the idea of the king being a representation of god on earth was born in Constantinople during the middle ages and spread westwards with the assistance of the crusaders. At this time there was a real competition amongst the kings of Europe to bring back or buy what they thought - or wanted to think - were various relics of J.Christ from the holly land.
And it must have been during this time that the Europe’s Christians started to call Jesus a ‘King’ as well.
Anyway the film is low budget which is not a problem, but it is also cheap (arzoon) which is a problem, and I don’t mean the price of the ticket.
Never mind that it is shown in cinemas, but for it to be seen as a video at home by children would be dangerous, not only because of its representation of Persians as faceless creatures, but because the actors look like seriously disturbed children, and more so because of bad taste, which makes it like junk food: bad for the health.
Xerxes and BushMcCain
One of the reasons the Iranians have become so angry about this film - as audience - must have been the initial confusion in watching the film with no Iranian faces there to identify with. There are I believe only 3 - 4 faces that are to be seen and the rest are masked.
This means an empire army or super power that dresses like a small terrorist group as we imagine them today.
One of these faces to be seen belongs to Xerxes who in contrast to his army shows his body as well. It is true that Herodotus reports a Greek witness who had seen Xerxes crossing the bridge and had exclaimed in awe something like: Why did Zeus bother to bring an army of Persians with him when he could have conquered Greece all by himself anyway.
From this we can at least guess that Xerxes had an extraordinary physical and mental presence that appealed to all, regardless of their earthly common national taste.
So never mind if Xerxes of the movie has not appealed to Iranian men in particular, in any case even the closest choice of actor to the real him would not have been a figure for the ordinary audience to identify with.
On the other hand the other faces were only shown for less than a minute which does not allow them to be perceived as characters so the Iranian audience would be totally lost with king Leonidas pretending to be an enemy.
The solution for the Iranian cinemas is straight forward. This film is so simple that it can be dubbed to smash any nation’s enemy. All they need to do in Iran – and elsewhere where films are dubbed but perhaps not as good as it is done in Iran - is to change the word ‘Persians’ in the film to ‘Americans’ and it will work. The Spartans could easily be Iranians as they were ruled by the Council of Elders (gerontocrats/gerontocracy) and if Bush and McCain started to do some body building they could soon look at least as good as the Xerxes in the film.
Yes go for it!
As for me, if they dubbed the word ‘Persians’ for the word ‘spammers’ I would have loved the film, but as it is, if I ever happen to bump into Zecki in LA – perhaps outside MacDonald? – I would see it as ‘only natural’ for him to reach into his pocket and reimburse me for the ticket and the attention paid.
As for you, if you haven’t seen it yet, well don’t bother as it hasn’t got a life, instead go and see the Lives of Others which is about what art CAN do.
Although I must add, it would take a spammer much longer to change his attitude and the way of life than it took for the character of the STASI spy in the latter film to see the light and repent.