Denouement: Two Takes on a Historical Event by Sara Lansing

I was browsing the DVD racks in my local Big W (Walmart, to US'ns) the other day and came across a re-release on an old classic, 300 Spartans, a movie I remember seeing when I was a youngster, TV Saturday matinee fodder. It was an early 1960s telling of the battle in which 300 Spartan soldiers held a pass and thus delayed the advance of the Persians until the rest of the Greeks could sort out their endless political squabbles and rally to the common defense of their land in the teeth of the greatest army that had ever moved across the face of the Earth.

Dramatic stuff, begging for the epic treatment, but it never got it in the old days. 300 Spartans is the Sunday School version of the story, in which battles have little blood, the nuclear family is foremost, and everyone in 5th century BC Greece is dressed like it's 1st century AD Rome (very proper, for a contemporary audience). That's my point here: the way that culture shifts imperceptibly around us, so that the different becomes palateable, and what would once have shocked and disgusted, overwhelmed and been banned without hesitation, becomes acceptable. Not to everyone, of course, but I'll get to that in a moment.

Why release an old sword-and-sandal outing in the modern environment? For the same reason Dino de Laurentis's best-forgotten 1976 remake of King Kong has recently been issued, on a two-for-one disk with Peter Jackson's recent remake. A cash-in. It was released only because Niel Gaiman's 300 was made a few years back. And therein lies the point:

300, as a faithful filming of Gaiman's comic, is everything the other is not. Graphic beyond words, with almost-naked warriors engaged in digitally-created slow-motion battle scenes that glorify violence in a way rarely seen before, with endless showers of digitally-animated blood spraying from each spear-gouged body. In one sense the film is being genuine to the carnage of ancient warfare, but in another even the most objective viewer finds the distinction blurring between the horrifying brutalities of the historic age and the gratuitous depiction of gore as modern entertainment. This is the modern offering up of Roman gladiators, slaughter for public consumption, the Violentia of Nero's time, and because nobody actually gets hurt, other than stuntmen who are paid well for their injuries and treated promptly, the melee becomes a work of art, not the carnage we historically disdain in the Roman world. And it is graphic in other ways, nudity is frankly handled, murder and betrayal are true to anitquity, and general wierdness is revelled in, from the diseased, perverse oracles to the hunchback who betrayed the Greeks, and the bizarre, totally fictitious portrayal of Darius (he wasn't black, he wasn't eight feet tall, and so forth...)

Denoument: less than half a century separates the two tellings of the story, but one is prim and proper, with American accents to comfort the viewer into a sense of here-and-now normality, with nothing to upset the sense that the battles are well and truly staged. The other attacks the senses with strangeness, cruelty from the first frame, and does everything in its power to deny that the world as we know it has any validity.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed 300. It's like the classic paintings of Frank Frazetta come to life, the digitally-graded colour and light evoking comic book printing techniques in a moving image, and the massively developed cast (some of those abs are surely digital...) are the visual feast, in terms of their graphic depiction, not their simple availability, many have waited for ever since Arnie first swung an axe in 1980. One might expect the performances to be lost in the visual stylisation but this is not so, Gerard Butler and David Wenham shine. The film is like a hammer taken to your skull, and you walk out breathing deeply and wondering what the human race is truly capable of, both its depths and it's heights, the spectrum of all the human spirit can obtain to within the brief, painful episode we call our lives.

But it's not an easy film to watch, and you have to be in the mood, otherwise the carnage is just that, a blow in the face. I'm not going to liken it to Saving Private Ryan, which had WWII veterans watcing through their fingers, it is quite clear that many battle shots are brilliantly composited effects in which nobody got hurt, but to take the savagery of a Frazetta painting and bring it to life is to raise violence to an artform all by itself. Is this a bad thing? If it inspires the precariously-balanced mind to act out the images burned so fiercely into, yes. As art, it is merely the cinema of the extreme. But at every turn one must wonder, where do we go next? Movies, as the spearpoint of the storytelling industry in modern times, play a game of one-up-manship, and for every movie that gets the formula right, there is another that goes over the top until the violence, the action, the size of the explosion, whatever, becomes laughable. Troy got it right, 300 is another matter entirely. Is it fair to compare them on a level playing field? Maybe not.

As I began, the denoument of the age is the point. If 300 Spartans was the mental arena of fifty years ago, and 300 is today's, what will the 2060 telling of the same story be like? As unimaginable to us as 300 would have been in the early 60s.

To place this in a writing context, is the written word immune to this issue? The word triggers visualisation and all the detail you can provide remains simply a release agent for the reader's own imagination. If the reader can't imagine a particular level of violence, drama, emotion, whatever you are trying to depict, you cannot make him or her; the writer points the way to the emotional experience, it is the reader's prior experiences that he or she connects with to generate the response. So do writers have to compete with movies for their bang factor, or is it enough simply to evoke discrete memories of those emotional torrents? I'd put money on the latter, but you have to be careful: too heavy a hand and you'll be called a plagiarist, or even worse, a cash-in artist.

In this much every writer, producer, director, painter and comics artist competes with every other in the same shared space we call the market, wandering through the limited range of themes and approaches for some element of originality to brand their own work as unique, and it's not easy to tell a story in a fresh way. My personal hope is to put fresh spin on ideas, and create fresh tellings which are sufficiently in tune with modern times to please a decent-sized audience: I'll be happy with that.

Ciao, Sara