12 Trouble in the Tehran

Multiplex: Xerxes, 300, and

300: Rise of an Empire in Iran
Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

I N T RO DU C T I O N
The bludgeoning Hollywood franchise that arose out of Frank
Miller’s (1998) graphic novel 300 is not alone in its fictitious use
of the ancient world. The films 300 (2007) and 300: Rise of an
Empire (2014) are both contributors to a longstanding tradition
of Western myth-making, which gained traction in the nineteenth
century. The mythology insisted that the battles between Greek city-
states and the Persian empire, the so-called “Persian Wars,” were a
showdown over the fate of Western civilization itself. Pre-eminent
historians of  the time believed that the defeat of Xerxes’ forces
helped preserve  the lofty Greek attributes of freedom of thought
and democracy.1 The victory over Persia was a brilliant moment
in the triumph of reason in the face of dark Eastern backwardness
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and sinister mysticism. This is a dubious view that some die-hard

conservative scholars in the West continue to propagate to this day
and such intransigent readings have, in fact, helped give voice to, for
instance, the far-right, anti-immigrant Golden Dawn party in Greece,
which holds ceremonies at Thermopylae, as Time reported in 2012,
chanting “Greece belongs to Greeks” in front of a bronze statue of
their slain hero, the Spartan king Leonidas.2
There can be little doubt that 300 and its sequel’s vision of
muscle-bound warriors chimes with the contemporary popular
taste for both a particular type of gym-bodied heroism and an
ever-mounting tide of intolerance of the “others” inside and out-
side of our communities. In the films, the Spartans and, latterly, the
Athenians fight bare-chested without armor in the “heroic nude”
mode so beloved in the ideology of ancient Greece, but they are
so gym-pumped with bulging muscles that they easily betray their

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 192 Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

roots in the American comic-book tradition of superheroes.3 Like

superheroes, the burly Greeks are on a mission to save the world. In
contrast, and as in antiquity, in the films the Persians are represented
with covered bodies, clothed in trousers, tunics, and turbans; their
bodies (when seen) are pale, weak, even deformed. They too have a
mission: to follow their master, Xerxes, end freedom, and bring about
his reign of terror.
Interestingly, King Xerxes’ body is put on display, but his is a dis-
concerting figure. Covered in gold chains and with a face and torso
lacerated with jeweled piercings, clean-shaven and bald-headed, his
eyes and eyebrows defined with thick layers of black kohl, he is a
huge (literally a giant at eight feet tall) figure of sexual ambiguity
and Eastern malevolence (Figure 12.1).4 The golden god-king com-
mands the armies of the dead (the Immortals), and cavalry units
of war-rhinos; his harem is composed of women whose limbs are
as deformed as their sexual morals; and even, in this heightened
world of Orientalist fantasy, an ibex-headed man serves as Xerxes’
court-musician, scratching out a rusty tune on a Persian kamancheh,
or bowed lute. Xerxes is described by the filmmakers as “coming
out of nowhere, [a] larger-than-life, Bizarro-land character” while
his ceremonial capital, Persepolis, was designed by the studio art
department to be

the very antithesis of the personal freedom and democracy then blossoming
in Athens. By combining ancient Middle Eastern motifs with inspiration
from modern fascist utopian visions, the result was an architecture that is
overwhelmingly oppressive but with a timeless opulence – Albert Speer meets
Dolce & Gabbana. That’s what we went for.5
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In Hollywood’s eyes Xerxes is far from heroic. He is, in fact, a

menacing despot. 300: Rise of an Empire shows us his transforma-
tion from a good-looking (dark-haired and bearded) Persian boy into
a demonic god-figure through his immersion into a pool of pure evil,
a golden baptism of the unholy where every bit of his humanity is
surrendered to give him the monstrous form he subsequently takes.
After his immersion into the realms of darkness he returns to Persia
and declares war on Greece: “For Glory’s sake . . . for Vengeance’s
sake . . . WAR!”
Referred to with some frequency throughout both films as the
“god-king,” Xerxes’ image is based on a Greek perception, which can
be traced back to Aeschylus, that the Persian monarchs saw them-
selves as divine. In 300 Xerxes confirms that “It is not my lash [that
my Persian subjects] fear, it is my divine power. But I am a generous

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 Trouble in the Tehran Multiplex 193
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Figure 12.1 Xerxes the god-king (Rodrigo Santoro); publicity images from 300
(2007) and 300: Rise of an Empire (2014). Warner Bros.

god.” Yet the Greeks were capable of more nuanced judgments too:
Herodotus, no great fan of Xerxes, nevertheless wrote that “Among
all these immense numbers [of Persians] there was not a man who,
for stature and noble bearing, was more worthy than Xerxes to wield
so vast a power” (7. 187). This was Herodotus’ nod to recognizing

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 194 Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

Xerxes as a leader of some considerable skill, the worthy successor

of his father Darius the Great, a facet of his character Xerxes himself
was keen to promote in his own royal propaganda:
King Xerxes says: By the will of Ahuramazda I am of such a sort, I am a
friend of the right, of wrong I am not a friend. It is not my wish that the weak
should have harm done him by the strong, nor is it my wish that the strong
should have harm done him by the weak . . . The man who is cooperative,
according to his cooperation thus I reward him. Who does harm, him accord-
ing to the harm I punish. It is not my wish that a man should do harm; nor
indeed is it my wish that if he does harm he should not be punished . . . This
indeed my capability: that my body is strong. As a fighter of battles I am a
good fighter of battles. Whenever with my judgment in a place I determine
whether I behold or do not behold an enemy, both with understanding and
with judgment, then I think prior to panic, when I see an enemy as when I do
not see one . . . As a horseman, I am a good horseman. As a bowman, I am a
good bowman, both on foot and on horseback. As a spearman, I am a good
spearman, both on foot and on horseback. These skills that Ahuramazda set
down upon me, and which I am strong enough to bear . . .6

Based on the eponymous Frank Miller comic-book series, the

Warner Bros. movies opted, then, to characterize the Achaemenid
king as (in the words of his actor-creator, Rodrigo Santoro) “not
human . . . a creature . . . an entity” lacking the nobility, piety, and
probity expressed by the historical Xerxes himself.7 His depiction in
the films as a multi-pierced, bejeweled creature is greatly contrasted
with his appearance immortalized on the palatial reliefs of Persepolis.
In and of itself, that is not an issue for me. I am not interested in the
question of how Hollywood gets history wrong, since lists of cine-
ma’s historical inaccuracies tell us nothing and get us nowhere. But
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questioning why Hollywood opts to recast history in a certain light is

of real importance.8 Vital too is the need to question how cinematic
reworkings read among different audiences. If, as Emma Bridges
puts it, Xerxes is “part drag-queen, part outlandish monster”9 (and
audiences in the West seem happy to accept that), then how does this
image resonate with a non-Western audience? What happens when
300 and 300: Rise of an Empire are viewed in Iran or by Iranians in
their worldwide diaspora? This chapter focuses on the way in which
300 and 300: Rise of an Empire have been received by an audience
whose ancestral past is plundered and brutalized and, most damag-
ingly, silenced by an American cultural creation that dominates much
of the globe. What happened when 300 hit Tehran?

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 Trouble in the Tehran Multiplex 195

L O C AT I N G H O L LY W O O D ’ S WA R O N T E R R O R
George W. Bush began his presidency amid allegations of corrupted
election results and poll-rigging and ended it in the quagmire of
conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan and the collapse of America’s finan-
cial world supremacy. The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks
on America were the hideous catalysts that precipitated the chaos,
especially with the subsequent United States declaration of a “war
on terror.”10 Who, at the time, precisely counted as the harbingers of
terror was less clear. On one, official, level the Taliban and Al-Qaeda
took much of the culpability, although Bush himself was less keen on
exact precision: “We’re at war,” he said, “we’re going to find who did
this, and we’re gonna kick their ass.” For good measure, in a speech
delivered from Ground Zero, Bush’s bullhorn approach continued
in the same vein: “I can hear you! I can hear you, the rest of the
world hears you and the people who knocked these buildings down
will hear all of us soon.”11 In a more moderate, officially scripted,
speech of September 20, 2001, he took a more conciliatory tone,
noting that, “The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying, in
effect, to hijack Islam itself. The enemy of America is not our many
Arab friends.”12
The wording of the speech is significant. Iran, not an Arab country
either linguistically or ethnically, was overlooked by the president
and even though Iran had been one of the first countries to condemn
the horrors of the 9/11 attacks, Bush did not exonerate Iranians
by calling them “friends.” Was this an oversight by the president?
It is doubtful.13 In the Clinton years, American–-Iranian relations
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had shown signs of improving, especially so under the more liberal

Western-facing presidency of the Iranian leader Khatami. But the
9/11 crisis meant that the brief honeymoon period was over, as the
new Republican presidency reset the United States policy toward Iran
back to its former Regan-era years of mistrust and vilification. Daniel
A. Mehochko’s perceptive recent analysis of American–Iranian rela-
tions at the time of the 2001 crisis notes that:
The events of 9/11 . . . provided an unprecedented opportunity for a strategic
rapprochement between the United States and Iran. After 9/11, Iran not only
denounced the attacks and cooperated with the United States in Afghanistan,
but also offered to negotiate a comprehensive resolution of differences with
no preconditions . . . The Bush neoconservatives, dominating . . . policy for-
mulation process, viewed Iran through the same lens they viewed al-Qaeda,
the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein. Americans have a short attention span:
the administration responded to Iran through the context of [the Islamic
Revolution of] 1979.14

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 196 Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

Iran’s response to 9/11 might have surprised many Americans,

had they been given access to unbiased media coverage. There were
spontaneous candlelight vigils in Tehran in mourning for the dead in
America, the mayors of Tehran and Isfahan sent condolence messages
to the people of New York City, and Iranians observed a moment
of silence before a national soccer match. President Khatami even
requested permission from the United Nations to visit Ground Zero
in order to offer prayers for the victims.15
On January 30, 2002, Bush charged that Iran “aggressively pur-
sues these [nuclear] weapons and exports terror, while an unelected
few repress the Iranian people’s hope for freedom,” and he included
Iran (along with Iraq and North Korea) in the so-called “axis of
evil,” which he said posed “a grave and growing danger.” The Bush
administration argued that the US should continue to pressure Iran’s
Islamic Republic to end its support for Islamist movements in the
Middle East and give up its nuclear program, and US–Iranian ten-
sions continued to increase. In June 2003, less than a month after
sending American troops into Iraq, Bush complained that Iran was
meddling in Iraq and would pay the price.
Unsurprisingly, the level of Iranophobia within the United States
rocketed to levels unseen since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and
the American hostage crisis that had helped precipitate the fall of
Jimmy Carter’s presidency. According to the Public Affairs Alliance
of Iranian Americans (PAAIA), in the period 2003–8, nearly half of
Iranian Americans surveyed by Zogby International had themselves
experienced, or personally knew another Iranian American who had
experienced, discrimination because of their ethnicity or country of
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origin or appearance.
Once the American Dream’s Middle East branch, following the
fall of the shah and the establishment of the Islamic Republic, Iran
had been transformed into a repellent and frightening external other
in the American imagination. The hostage crisis of 1979–81 precip-
itated a wave of anti-Iranian sentiment in the United States, which
was fueled by a series of popular TV and film depictions such as
John Doe (2002), On Wings of Eagles (1986), and Escape From
Iran: The Canadian Caper (1981). The 1991 film Not Without My
Daughter told the nightmarish tale of an American woman who
traveled to Tehran with her young daughter to visit the Iranian-
born family of her husband, whose sojourn in his homeland sees
him transform from an educated and sophisticated citizen to an
abusive, backward peasant. Indeed, in Jane Campbell’s analysis, the
film “only serves to reinforce the media stereotype of Iranians as

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 Trouble in the Tehran Multiplex 197

terrorists who, if not actively bombing public buildings or holding

airline passengers hostage, are untrustworthy, irrational, cruel, and
barbaric,”16 a sentiment shared by the Islamic Republic News Agency,
which claimed that “[the film made] smears . . . against Iran” and
“stereotyped Iranians as cruel characters and wife-beaters.” Oliver
Stone’s blockbuster Alexander of 2004 brought the ancient Persians
to the big screen, although few critics or moviegoers recognized the
mute, inactive, and ineffectual onscreen Persians as the ancestors of
America’s most vilified creation.17 That opportunity was rectified in
2006 with the release of Zack Snyder’s 300. Even in America it was
criticized for its racist portrayal of combatants in the Persian army
at the battle of Thermopylae. Reviewers noted the political overtones
of the West-against-Iran storyline and the way Persians are depicted
as decadent, sexually depraved, despotic, and animalistic in contrast
to the noble and infinitely heroic Greeks.18 Bootleg versions of the
film were available in Tehran with the film’s international release and
news of the film’s (somewhat surprising) success at the United States
box office prompted widespread antagonism in Iran.

T R O U B L E I N T H E T E H R A N M U LT I P L E X
During the Now Ruz (New Year) celebrations of 2007, Iran, it
seemed, erupted in indignation. Everyone was talking about 300.
Azadeh Moaveni, a journalist for Time Magazine, recalled the scene:
All of Tehran was outraged. Everywhere I went yesterday, the talk vibrated
with indignation over the film 300 – a movie no one in Iran has seen but
everyone seems to know about since it became a major box office surprise
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in the United States. As I stood in line for a full hour to buy ajeel, a mixture
of dried fruits and nuts traditional to the start of Persian new year festivities,
I felt the entire queue, composed of housewives with pet dogs, teenagers,
and clerks from a nearby ministry, shake with fury. I hadn’t even heard of
the film until that morning when a screed about it came on the radio, so I
was able to nod darkly with the rest of the shoppers, savouring a moment of
public accord so rare in Tehran. Everywhere else I went, from the dentist to
the flower shop, Iranians buzzed with resentment at the film’s depictions of
Persians, adamant that the movie was secretly funded by the US government
to prepare Americans for going to war against Iran. “Otherwise why now, if
not to turn their people against us?”19

Several governmental newspapers in Iran featured headlines

such as “Hollywood declares war on Iran” and “300 AGAINST 70
MILLION” (Iran’s population) while even Ayende-No, a more liberal
independent Iranian newspaper, said that “[t]he film depicts Iranians
as demons, without culture, feeling or humanity, who think of nothing

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 198 Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

except attacking other nations and killing people.” Javad Shamaqdari,

the cultural advisor to President Ahmadinejad and Deputy Minister
of Culture and Islamic Guidance for Cinema, accused the film of
“plundering Iran’s historic past and insulting this civilization . . . This
is psychological warfare against Tehran and its people.”20
Four Iranian Members of Parliament called for all Muslim countries
to ban the film and a group of Iranian filmmakers wrote to UNESCO
highlighting the misrepresentation of Iranian history and culture.
According to The Guardian report of March 19, 2007, Iranian critics
of 300, ranging from bloggers to government officials, described the
movie “as a calculated attempt to demonise Iran at a time of intensi-
fying US pressure over the country’s nuclear programme.”
For her part, Azadeh Moaveni keenly identified two factors that
fueled the intensity of Iranian indignation over the film: first, its
release on the eve of Now Ruz was certainly badly timed and per-
haps inauspicious, but second, the box office success of 300, com-
pared with the relative flop of Oliver Stone’s Alexander, was widely
seen by Iranians as cause for considerable alarm, signaling perhaps
more ominous American intentions. Social media within Iran and
beyond its borders solicited many diverse reactions. One Facebook
conversation-thread, for instance, showed a strongly polarized
East–West response:21
The whole “us versus THEM” theme in the movie was just very disturbing.
The Persians tell the Spartans to lay down their weapons, and the Spartans
shout, “Come and get them, Persian!” This constant “Spartan” and “Persian”
expressions are filled with rage and hatred . . . how can this material NOT be
racist? [signed] JehanZeb
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Long live the 300! Long live the memory of Sparta! And if Iran attempts
to attack us we shall prevail and we shall crush them! Sincerely, [signed] A
Patriot.
[Iran is] a country who probably is making nuclear weapons, doesn’t barely
know what the fuck is going on in the rest of the world and their president
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a fucking psychopath . . . They’re just pissed cause
now the entire world knows that their nation’s history is full of pussys [sic],
[signed] C. Robin.
While, by and large, Zack Snyder stayed clear of any political debate
that touched on Iran’s reaction to 300, Frank Miller was happy to fan
the flames of cultural and political polarization with some incendiary,
and historically and culturally uninformed, comments:
For some reason, nobody seems to be talking about who we’re up against,
and the sixth century barbarism that they [the Persians] actually represent.
These people saw people’s heads off. They enslave women, they genitally

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 Trouble in the Tehran Multiplex 199

mutilate their daughters; they do not behave by any cultural norms that are
sensible to us. I’m speaking into a microphone that never could have been a
product of their culture, and I’m living in a city where three thousand of my
neighbours were killed by thieves of airplanes they never could have built.22
Reacting to Miller’s diatribe, but unaware of what was yet to
come, one vociferous Iranian social media blogger noted that “300,
the Movie is the greatest cockamamie, Bull Shite, Hero Worship,
Falsification of History, Hollywood Spoof made so far in the Twenty-
First Century!”23 And yet upon its release in 2014, 300: Rise of an
Empire, the 300 sequel, took Orientalist stereotypes to a new nadir
of darkness and also triggered considerable controversy (not unlike
another recent Warner Bros. movie, Argo (2012), a contemporary
drama about the American Embassy’s ordeal in revolutionary Iran).
The sequel got mixed reviews and did not enjoy the wave of enthu-
siasm associated with its forerunner, with many critics suggesting
that onscreen machismo was no compensation for the lack of a tight
plot or a compelling storyline. Historical liberties abounded (most
notably with the death of Darius, killed fighting at sea) and for The
Guardian the film was the same “massive gilded embodiment of
orientalism from last time round.”24 Indeed, the Persians of 300:
Rise of an Empire remain the incarnation of every Orientalist cliché
imaginable: they are as decadent and oversexed as they are weak
and spineless. They are also incapable of winning battles without the
help of a Greek traitor: Artemisia, a woman who may be costumed
like Xena, warrior princess, but whose heart is consumed by a crazed
desire for power and destruction. “My heart is Persian,” she declares
darkly. Iranians were once again left baffled:
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Here is another Western-centric film . . . which is factually flawed to the point

of being downright offensive . . . it screams, “Hey, look! Not only are the
Middle Easterners out to get us now – they’ve always been after the West!”25

WHOSE XERXES?
I R A N I A N C O N C E P T S O F T H E H E RO I C
In Iran there is a highly developed sense of the “heroic.” This is
manifest in many ways: there are, for instance, the many tales of
heroism in the Persian national epic, the Shahnameh (Epic of Kings)
by Ferdowsi, a poem of over 50,000 couplets written over 1,000
years ago. It tells the largely mythical story of the kings and heroes
of ancient Iran until the time of the Islamic conquest of Iran in the
seventh century and is populated with commanding male figures such
as Rustam, Arash, Siyâvash, Zal, Sam, and Sohrab, all strongmen of

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 200 Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

impeccable goodwill, who fight, slaughter, and kill for the good of
Iran and its people.26 Even Xerxes appears in Shahnameh, although
in (later) disguise as the hero Esfandiyar.27 Always loyal, always
brave yet willing to shed a tear of sentimentality, Esfandiyar/Xerxes
and his fellow heroes still occupy a centrality in popular Iranian
thought and their deeds are as well known to school children as they
are to the old men sitting in coffee houses.28 Whether filtered through
traditional storytelling performances in public squares or via internet
cartoons or interactive apps, the national heroes of Shahnameh have
molded Iran’s sense of the heroic.29
Described as “tangled up with the soul of Iranian peoples,” the epic
heroes of Persian tradition found a physical embodiment in the figure
of the Pahlevan, or wrestler.30 Since antiquity the Pahlevani have
practiced for sport within the special confines of the zourkhaneh,
or “house of strength.” The original purpose of these institutions
was to train men as warriors and instill in them a sense of national
pride in anticipation for the coming battles, but by the twentieth
century some Pahlevani were reaching superstar status within Iran,
and today varzesh-e pahlavaˉni (strongman rituals) is touted as the
reason why Iranians are regular winners at international wrestling
and weight-lifting events. The art of the Pahlevan fuses elements of
pre-Islamic Persian culture (particularly Zoroastrianism, Mithraism,
and Gnosticism) with the spirituality of Shi’a Islam and Sufism, and
his body brings the idea of muscular development centrally into the
Iranian concept of the heroic.
Finally, but of real importance, there is the heroism of martyrdom
that is so central to Iranian Shi’ism (although the Shahnameh suggests
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there was a pre-Islamic origin for this national ideology). Shi’ite beliefs
center on the martyrdom of the Imams Ali and Hussein, the relatives
of the prophet. Their self-sacrifice is commemorated in mosques,
squares, cafés, and hotels; it is in the music and performance tradi-
tions of Iran, including the tazieh passion-plays performed during the
Shi’ite periods of mourning, Muharram and Ashura.31 In Iran today,
those who died in the 1979 Revolution and the millions of soldiers
who died in the Iran–Iraq War are also considered martyrs and are
treated with great respect. The Behesht-e Zahra (Fatimeh’s Paradise),
Tehran’s main graveyard, is mostly given over to martyrs; it even has
a theater that plays dramatic re-enactments of battles from the war.
In Iranian cities, towns, and villages many street names and school
names bear the names of martyrs, and photographic portraits of
deceased soldiers still line the streets and hang from the walls in local
mosques. Student activists in the 2009 so-called Green Revolution

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 Trouble in the Tehran Multiplex 201

began calling those killed during protests “martyrs.” When Neda

Agha-Soltan, a young student, was shot and killed during a protest,
her image became a symbol of resistance for the “freedom fighters”
and was used to gain international political support.
All of this has implications for the way in which Iranians reacted
to 300 and 300: Rise of an Empire since Iranians are, in many ways,
more in tune with how heroism and national pride are interlocked.
This is not to belittle any Western regard for the heroic and the way in
which, for instance, the dead of successive wars are honored in annual
acts of remembrance, but in no country other than Iran is the con-
ception of the heroic so deeply ingrained in a people’s daily existence.
Of course, much of the youth of Iran are feeling increasingly remote
from the Revolution and the war of the 1980s, and an increasing
trend in displays of nationalism among the general population can be
witnessed in a spike in pre-Islamic Persian names for babies and the
ever-present farvahar pendant, the pre-Islamic Zoroastrian symbol.
As important as the Shahnameh is to Iranian nationalism, the tales
are largely mythical and are not an accurate history of Iran, but in
fact, Iran has a rich history that stretches back over 2,500 years to
the Achaemenids.32 Cyrus the Great and other Achaemenid kings
were heroic figures who built an empire on (as far as the Iranians are
concerned) tolerance and respect for all. This history has provided a
rich foundation of heroic stories on which are built Iranian identity
and national pride.33 Leaders of Iran have used the history of Cyrus
the Great, and in general the history of the Achaemenids, to great
effect.34 In the 1970s Mohammad Reza Shah compared himself to
Cyrus the Great and even changed the Iranian calendar from Islamic
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dating to “Achaemenid dating” to make it coincide with the reign of

Cyrus the Great 2,500 years ago, and in more recent times, in the
wake of the disputed presidential election in 2009, Iran’s President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, hoping to regain a measure of legitimacy,
began to recast himself as a nationalist leading a struggle against
foreign foes. “Talking about Iran is not talking about a geographical
entity or race,” Ahmadinejad said at the opening ceremony of an
exhibition of the Cyrus Cylinder on loan to Tehran from the British
Museum, adding, “Talking about Iran is tantamount to talking about
culture, human values, justice, love and sacrifice.”35
Iranians may be relatively naive about the realities of ancient
Persian empire building, but what is clear is that they are deeply
proud of their pre-Islamic heritage. The Warner Bros. films were
therefore regarded with bafflement by Iranians. Azadeh Moaveni,
echoed the feelings of many:

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 202 Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

I’m relatively mellow as Iranian nationalists go, and even I found myself
applauding when the government spokesman described [300] as fabrication
and insult. Iranians view the Achaemenid empire as a particularly noble
page in their history and cannot understand why it has been singled out for
such shoddy cinematic treatment, as the populace here perceives it, with the
Persians in rags and its Great King practically naked. The Achaemenid kings,
who built their majestic capital at Persepolis, were exceptionally munificent
for their time. They wrote the world’s earliest recorded human rights declara-
tion, and were opposed to slavery.36

One critic of both films, Touraj Daryaee, a scholar of ancient Iran

and himself a Persian immigrant to the United States, proffered a
more sardonic summary of 300 upon its release, drawing clear paral-
lels between the Spartan and Persian hostilities and American foreign
policy in the Middle East, and suggesting that Xerxes and his forces
were intrinsic to the film’s prejudiced agenda:
What do you get when you take all the “misfits” that inhabit the collective
psyche of the white American establishment and put them together in the
form of a cartoonish invading army from the East coming to take your
freedom away? Then add a horde of black people, deformed humans who are
the quintessential opposite of the fashion journal images, a bunch of veiled
towel-heads who remind us of Iraqi insurgents, a group of black-clad Ninja-
esque warriors who look like Taliban trainees, and men and women with
body and facial piercings who are either angry, irrational, or sexually deviant.
All this headed by a homosexual king (Xerxes) who leads his motley but vast
group of “slaves” known as the Persian army against the 300 handsomely
sculpted men of Sparta who appear to have been going to LA (or Montreal)
gyms devotedly, who fight for freedom and their way of life, and who at times
look like the Marine Corps advertisements on TV? You get the movie 300.37
Copyright © 2018. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

In no other chronicle of antiquity is Xerxes a hairless, bejeweled

creature of camp fetish with a violent streak. This corrupt and cor-
rupted version of a Persian king sits uncomfortably with Iranian
audiences, not just because they see the Warner Bros. movies as
thinly veiled forms of Western antagonism toward their country,
but because the concept of heroism that is so central to their idea of
the national self is not allowed any meaningful articulation in either
film. Fighting neither for freedom, country, people, nor ideology,
the Persians of 300 and 300: Rise of an Empire blindly follow their
demonic god-king into the brutalities of a meaningless war. Justice,
faith, or mercy, the qualities of Iranian heroism, are pushed aside and
the Persian troops slaughter and maim indiscriminately; their aspi-
ration for empire is nothing more than a violently bloody land-grab.
A cartoon published in a satirical newspaper in Iran in March 2007
captures the Iranian bepuzzlement perfectly (Figure 12.2). Sitting

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 Trouble in the Tehran Multiplex 203

Figure 12.2 The Great King Xerxes looks at his Hollywood image through a
distorting mirror. Iranian cartoon, March 2007. Author’s copy.

on a high-backed throne, a long scepter in his hand, King Xerxes,

crowned and bearded, views himself through a mirror. The ornamen-
tal mirror top is crafted in the shape of the Marvel Comic’s Batman
logo, and it is through the prism of the American graphic novel that
a surprised Xerxes is forced to see himself. No longer the dignified
Achaemenid monarch of the Persepolis reliefs, he has morphed into a
Copyright © 2018. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

thug – bald, half naked, muscly, covered in body-piercings, holding a

battle mace, he is the pseudo-Xerxes of the genuine Persian past and
the supervillain of the West’s Persian Wars mythology.
There is something glorious in this little cartoon, though. Against
all the Hollywood hype, and against all Western political rhetoric
that rants against Iran, the cartoon casts a wry smile. Iran is aware of
how it is (misguidedly) perceived among hostile Western (and other)
forces, and while the politicians and mullahs may rant their own
vitriol against the West, most of the Iranian people use a far stronger
weapon: the ability to laugh.38 They are aware of the primacy and
antiquity of their culture and the depth of feeling that unites them
as Persians, even though they may be scattered far and wide across
the earth’s surface. Ultimately the little newspaper cartoon wins out
because it scoffs at the West, it laughs at the United States, and makes
a laughingstock of Hollywood and of Frank Miller. That is heroism.

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 204 Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

NOTES
1 Bridges, Hall, and Rhodes (2007); Samiei (2014).
2 Kakissis (2012).
3 For images see DiLullo (2007).
4 DiLullo (2007: 70, 71).
5 Aperlo (2013: 40, 58).
6 Old Persian inscription of Xerxes (XPl) based on the tomb inscription
of his father, Darius (my translation).
7 Cited in Bridges (2015: 194).
8 See further Llewellyn-Jones (2018).
9 Bridges (2015: 195).
10 On post-9/11 films, see further Tomasso in this volume.
11 Pavlich (2014).
12 Bush (2001).
13 None of the nineteen 9/11-terrorists were Iranian; all were Arabs – fif-
teen were from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates, and
one each from Egypt and Lebanon respectively. For its part, Al-Qaeda
had been increasingly singling out Iran and Shi’ites, describing the
“Persians” as the enemy of Arabs and complicit in the occupation
of Iraq. The powerful anti-Iranian thrust of Israeli politics played an
important part in the United States’ vilification of Iran; see Ram (2009).
14 Mehochko (2013: 1). See also Bill (1988) for a discussion of American–
Iranian tensions post-1979.
15 See generally Mousavian (2014).
16 Campbell (1997: 180).
17 See further Curley in this volume.
18 Karimi (2007).
19 Moaveni (2007).
Copyright © 2018. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

20 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6446183.stm.
21 Sadly, the Facebook conversation which was started in 2006 was deleted
from the site in 2015. These transcripts come from my records.
22 Frank Miller’s Talk of the Nation interview on NPR (January 27, 2007).
In part to counteract Miller’s claims, Dana Stevens (2007) stated that, “If
300, the new battle epic based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller and
Lynn Varley, had been made in Germany in the mid–1930s, it would be
studied today alongside The Eternal Jew as a textbook example of how
race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth can serve as an incitement to
total war. Since it is a product of the post-ideological, post-Xbox 21st
century, 300 will instead be talked about as a technical achievement,
the next blip on the increasingly blurry line between movies and video
games.”
23 http://iranpoliticsclub.net/history/300.
24 Von Tunzelmann (2012).
25 https://iranian.com/main/2007/xerxes–0.html.

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 Trouble in the Tehran Multiplex 205

26 Omidsalar (2011).
27 Stoneman (2015: 14–15, 95–109, 206–10).
28 Friedl (2014).
29 Omidsalar (2012).
30 Di Cintio (2007).
31 Korangy (2017); Varzi (2006).
32 Mozaffari (2014).
33 Ansari (2012).
34 Mitchell (2014).
35 https://en.trend.az/news_print.php?news_id=1749295.
36 Moaveni (2007).
37 Daryaee (2007).
38 Föllmer (2013).
Copyright © 2018. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

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