Emotions, Ethics, and Cinematic Experience

New Phenomenological and Cognitivist Perspectives

Robert Sinnerbrink, Robert Sinnerbrink

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781800731462
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Since the early 1990s, phenomenology and cognitivism have become two of the most influential approaches to film theory. Yet far from being at odds with each other, both approaches offer important insights on our subjective experience of cinema. Emotions, Ethics, and Cinematic Experience explores how these two approaches might work together to create a philosophy of film that is both descriptively rich and theoretically productive by addressing the key relationship between cinematic experience, emotions, and ethics.

Chapter 1

Fascist Affect in 300

Carl Plantinga

The word “fascist” appears all too frequently in today’s political climate. It is often used loosely, so one had better take care when using the term. And yet in relation to the epic action film 300 (2007), the word fits well. Adapted from the 1998 comic series created by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, 300 tells the story of 300 courageous Spartan soldiers who, led by their ferocious King Leonidas (Gerard Butler), valiantly battle the threatening Persian army of 300,000 men until, after being betrayed by a hunchbacked Spartan outcast, they all are slaughtered. Their defeat, however, alerts the rest of the Greeks to the significance of the Persian threat, and promises future victory as the entire Greek nation rises up to battle the Persians. The story is loosely based on the Battle of Thermopylae during the Persian Wars of the fifth century BCE. Considerations of the film as history, however, are ultimately less interesting than analyses of the film’s political function in its contemporary context. 300 can certainly be seen as a political allegory that embodies tensions resulting from the Iraq War and conceptions of Iran as a node of the “axis of evil.” This chapter will instead discuss the film’s incipient fascism, a broad threat that resonates more powerfully today, given the events of the past few years.

300 is a highly stylized fantasy film shot almost entirely on blue-screen soundstages with digital backgrounds added in postproduction. 300 is notable for its striking visual style, for its idealization of the courageous Greeks (all handsome men who sport muscular physiques and wear only tight leather “short shorts” and capes), and for its vulgarization of the invading Persians (represented as monstrous and/or effeminate).

Illustration 1.1. King Leonidas and his buff Spartans stand proudly before a hill of dead Persians (300, Warner Bros., 2007).

Many scenes feature the preparation and training for combat, fierce chanting (“A-whoo, A-whoo!”), and forcefully intoned epithets (“We are Spartans!” and “No prisoners! No mercy!). Female characters get in on the slogans as well, for example, when Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey) sends her husband-king off to battle by telling him to come back “with his shield or on it.” The film’s centerpiece, however, is the fighting itself, which is represented graphically, often in slow motion, with fountains of spurting blood, decapitations, impalements, deep base choir intonations to suggest the powerful maleness of it all, and rhythmic drumming as underscoring. After the Greeks are slaughtered, the last scenes serve as a eulogy for the fallen heroes, with music and mise-en-scène suggesting the mythic significance of their mission and sacrifice. We see the dead Leonidas on his back, his body pierced by arrows, his arms splayed to the sides in an obvious reference to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross. The film did very well at the box office, with a lifetime gross revenue of over $450 million, which led to a sequel, Rise of an Empire (Noam Murro, 2014).

Director Zack Snyder’s wife and production partner, Deborah Snyder, described 300 as a “ballet of death” (Daly 2007). Perhaps it is this, in conjunction with the film’s implicit fascist ideology, that caused audiences at the Berlin Film Festival to walk out and to boo the film. 300 also provoked intense criticism in the Middle East for its portrayal of the Persians as monsters and deviants, with the Iranian Academy of the Arts lodging an official complaint against the film with UNESCO, calling it an attack on the historical identity of Iran. 300 has been called homophobic, racist, antidisability, tribalist, and militaristic. It is the film’s incipient fascism, however, that unites these tendencies within a unified ideology. 300 has been called “the ur-text of the alt-right,” “Hamilton for neo-fascists,” and “our Birth of a Nation” (Breihan 2017). New York Post critic Kyle Smith (2007) writes that the film would have pleased “Adolph’s boys,” while Slate’s Dana Stevens (2008) compares the film to the Nazi racist screed, The Eternal Jew (Fritz Hippler, 1940).

Are these charges of fascism fair? And should we take the sociopolitical and ethical experience offered by such an action/adventure fantasy seriously? This chapter will argue in the affirmative for both questions. Yet these charges of fascism are easily made, and this chapter goes beyond that to attempt to understand some of what makes fascist ideology, in a story format, attractive to many audiences. To do this, I will first discuss fascist art generally, then I will examine the moods and emotions that 300 attempts to elicit through the viewing of the film and in support of the fascist ideology that it exhibits. I call this “fascist affect.”

Fascist Art

Fascism is a political ideology with a constellation of associated social and ethical commitments (Hayes 1973; Payne 1980). This constellation of commitments has existed since the rise of fascism in Italy in 1922, and is a consistent threat to reemerge now and in the future. Fascism is historically associated with the political formations in Germany, Italy, and Japan before and during World War II, and to some extent in Spain until the fall of Francoism in 1975. As a political ideology, fascism is above all nationalist, elitist, and antiliberal. It is a form of extreme nationalism that attempts to unite a favored people (the “folk”), sometimes with an appeal to a mythic and glorious past, under a strong leader figure who is acceded complete control. Walter Laquer writes that fascist movements were “headed by a leader who had virtually unlimited power, was adulated by his followers, and was the focus of a quasi-religious cult” (1996: 14). Japan had Emperor Hirohito, Germany had Adolf Hitler, and Italy had Benito Mussolini. Italian fascism looked to the Roman era for its inspiration for the rebirth of a muscular Italy for the present.

Fascism evinces an ethos of ethnic and national purity, favoring the strong, healthy, and pure over what is thought to be weak, diseased, and impure or inauthentic. Fascism believes not in political democracy and cultural liberalism, but in the “natural” social hierarchy and the rule of the elites. Fascism is, as Yuval Noah Harari argues, a form of “evolutionary humanism” (as opposed to liberal or socialist humanism) that considers humans to be a mutable species that might evolve into superhumans or devolve into a degenerate species. Thus, all social policy must be designed to protect humankind from this degeneration and to promote evolution into superhumans (Harari 2011, 258–263). This ethos led to the Holocaust during World War II, during which the Nazis murdered millions of Jews, homosexuals, political dissidents, and anyone thought not to contribute to the development of a strong and pure Aryan people under the leadership of Adolf Hitler.

Fascism is also imperialistic in that it promotes the right of the “naturally superior” to colonize, exploit, and even kill the inferior and “defective.” Fascism celebrates militarism and physical power, and often sentimentalizes “glorious death” for the good of the people. One sees this in the chilling images of regimented military might highlighted in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935), and in the employment of suicide attacks by Japanese fighter planes on American forces during World War II. It foregrounds a sense of discontent, crisis, and/or impending danger, thus making nationalism and militarism seemingly necessary (Laquer 1996). In sum, fascism is about total stability, control, and homogeneity under the headship of an idealized leader. It appeals to a mythic and idealized nation and points to a glorious rebirth. As Benito Mussolini put it: “We have created our myth. Our myth is a faith, it is a passion, in our myth is the nation, and to this myth, to this grandeur we subordinate all the rest” (quoted in Laquer 1996, 25).

Our idea of fascist art has been influenced most by documentarian, photographer, and Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl by way of Susan Sontag’s famous essay, “Fascinating Fascism.” Of course, Riefenstahl was already famous for her documentaries made during the Nazi era, including Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938). The former film celebrates both militarism and uniformity with scenes featuring massive formations of military personnel marching in lockstep. It also features the emotional adulation of Adolph Hitler, as he first descends from the skies in his plane, like some kind of god sent to save Germany, and later addresses the 1934 Nazi Party rally to thunderous applause. Of fascist dramaturgy, Sontag writes that it “centers on orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets, uniformly shown in ever-swelling numbers. Its choreography alternates between ceaseless motion and congealed, static, ‘virile’ posing” (1981: 91).

Olympia is less political, but it puts the Olympic Games into a kind of mythic context by emphasizing their roots in the ancient world and a devotion to the beauty of the athletic human body. The Sontag essay was a meditation on Riefenstahl’s 1973 book, The Last of the Nuba, a book of photographs of the men of Nuba, an African tribe. As Sontag writes, fascist art “displays a utopian aesthetics—that of physical perfection.” “Painters and sculptors under the Nazis,” she goes on, “often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy” (1981, 92). Fascist art celebrates “the ideal of life as art, the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage, the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community; the repudiation of the intellect, the family of man (under the parenthood of leaders)” (1981, 96).

When one looks at 300, one sees clear examples of these and other aspects of what various scholars have called “fascist aesthetics.” Fascism attempts to build on the supposed cultural achievements of former cultures thought to evince the heroic qualities toward which contemporary society ought to return and to provide models for regeneration. Thus Mussolini and Italian fascism looked to and idealized ancient Rome, to an era when Rome dominated the world. The Nazi architect, Albert Speer, developed a “theory of ruin value” for buildings of the Third Reich, as Mark Antliff writes, “to ensure that they would resemble Greek and Roman models after centuries or even thousands of years had passed (1998, 28). Zach Snyder’s 300, of course, looks back to ancient Greece, to the Spartans who ostensibly modeled heroic masculinity, courage, and sacrifice in significant quantities.

We have seen that fascist aesthetics values representations of the ideal male body rooted in works of Greek sculpture. We see this, of course, in the representations of the Spartans in 300, who are all represented with traits that the film takes to be bodily perfection: muscular physiques, shining blue eyes, and full manes of hair. It is interesting that although actual Spartans would have worn full armor when engaging in battle, these cinematic Spartans are nearly nude aside from their helmets, capes, and tight shorts. Thus 300 partakes of the aestheticized body characteristic of fascist art, and has clear affinities with Leni Riefenstahl’s The Last of the Nuba and Olympia. As the boy Leonidas kills a wolf, the voiceover narrator intones that his hands are steady and “his form perfect” as he kills the outmatched animal.

The romantic inspiration drawn from an idealized past and an interest in the perfection of human form are both important elements of the fascist aesthetic. My primary interest in this chapter, however, is what I call “fascist affect” in 300. What do I mean by this? By affect here, I am primarily interested in mood and emotion, both examples of affect that I will examine in more detail below. No types of moods or emotions are fascist in themselves. Anger in itself is not fascist, any more than a mood of earnest seriousness is. It is only affects in relation to their rhetorical uses that can properly be so called. But moods and emotions can be marshaled in the context of a narrative to assist in highlighting the appeal of the fascist imagined order. Fascist moods and emotions are affects that are used to sell the fascist program. Certain moods and emotions, though not fascist in themselves, tend to recur in fascist art and storytelling. When they occur in combination, and when they occur in support of fascist ideas, then we can call them “fascist affects.”

What the remainder of this chapter does is identify a constellation of moods and emotions at work in 300 and describes the use of mood and emotion in providing an experience of fascist ideology as it is played out on the screen.

Mood in 300

Moods and emotions are both examples of human affects, but emotion is thought to have a stronger cognitive component (Plantinga 2009), as I will briefly explain in the next section. Moods, as human affects, are a bit trickier. My sad mood in real life may not stem from any particular incident. I may simply be sad for some unknown reason. But a sad mood in a screen story is different. When a person has a mood, it is a mental state. When a screen story has a mood, it must be something else, quite obviously. Whatever that something else is, it is likely to have a fittingness or affinity with human moods; but unlike a human mood, it cannot itself be a mental state.

Moods in screen stories, as I have argued elsewhere, have two essential components. Such a mood is (1) the affective character or tone of a scene or entire screen story (2) that serves as an expression of the perspective of a character or group within the story and/or the expression of the perspective of the narration as a whole on the story (Plantinga 2018; Sinnerbrink 2012). Mood depends in part on the sort of events that are depicted. Obviously, the mood of an auto accident scene will tend to differ from that of a birthday party, as the affective character of a funeral scene will differ from that of a wedding scene. Filmmakers are not typically satisfied to let the represented event signal mood by itself. The mood of a screen story is also developed through the manifold registers of style and technique in the rich medium of moving images: cinematography and videography, special effects, music and other sound, editing, production design, editing, acting, and much else. These elements are orchestrated and/or designed to effect a mood that serves certain ends. A sad mood or tone, for example, is typically designed to suggest that the events depicted are sad or that a certain character is sad. Thus moods embody and/or help develop the cognitive orientation of the narration toward the events depicted (Plantinga 2018).

How does this play out in 300? The film presents some extreme perspectives and behaviors undertaken by the Spartans, for whom viewers are meant to have allegiance. Yet the eugenics practiced by the Spartans, for example, would be considered to be reprehensible to most viewers. Spartan baby boys are examined at birth, and if found to be small, puny, sickly, or “misshapen,” are discarded and killed. When engaged in battle, the Spartans chant “No mercy! No prisoners!” We see the Spartans, after a successful fight against the Persian hordes, piercing wounded enemy soldiers with swords, casually killing them as they engage in lighthearted post-battle banter. The 300 Spartans who eventually face a massive Persian force in the film’s climactic action expect only to be able to slow the Persians down and to demonstrate the ferocity with which the Greek nation will face them if they pursue their invasion further. But the 300 all expect to die, to sacrifice their lives for the sake of their nation.

The mood established by the film is designed to justify all of this, to make it seem appropriate and fitting. Filmic moods are often difficult to describe in language; their qualitative feel is often beyond linguistic expression. To be best understood, they must be experienced. Yet moods have a strong effect on the rhetoric of a film and may encourage cognitive biasing (Carroll 2003). Thus, moods have implications for an ethics of spectatorship. The mood of 300 can be described, however imprecisely, as a kind of fierce, melancholic foreboding in the face of urgent crisis and threat. The extreme militarism, aggression, cruelty, and violence of the Spartans are played against a background established and justified by mood.

The film’s mood is in part established by the narrative events the film depicts and by what the viewers are shown. The characters, settings, and ev...