even this fundamentalist identity of the Spartans is more ambiguous. A programmatic statement towards the end of the film defines the Greeks’ agenda as “against the reign of mystique and tyranny, towards the bright future,” further specified as the rule of freedom and reason—which sounds like an elementary Enlightenment program, with even a communist twist! Recall also that, at the film’s beginning, Leonidas outrightly rejects the message of the corrupt “oracles” according to whom the gods forbid the military expedition to stop the Persians—as we learn later, the “oracles” who were allegedly receiving the divine message in an ecstatic trance had in fact been paid by the Persians, like the Tibetan “oracle” who, in 1959, delivered the message to the Dalai Lama to leave Tibet and who was—as we now know—on the payroll of the CIA!
But what about the apparent absurdity of the idea of dignity, freedom, and reason, sustained by extreme military discipline, including of the practice of discarding weak children? This “absurdity” is simply the price of freedom—freedom is not free, as they put it in the film. Freedom is not something given, it is regained through a hard struggle in which one should be ready to risk everything. Spartan ruthless military discipline is not simply the external opposite of Athenian “liberal democracy,” it is its inherent condition, it lays the foundation for it: the free subject of Reason can only emerge through ruthless self-discipline. True freedom is not a freedom of choice made from a safe distance, like choosing between a strawberry cake and a chocolate cake; true freedom overlaps with necessity, one makes a truly free choice when one’s choice puts at stake one’s very existence—one does it because one simply “cannot do otherwise.” When one’s country is under foreign occupation and one is called by a resistance leader to join the fight against the occupiers, the reason given is not “you are free to choose,” but: “Can’t you see that this is the only thing you can do if you want to retain your dignity?” No wonder that all the eighteenth-century egalitarian radicals, from Rousseau to the Jacobins, imagined republican France as the new Sparta: there is an emancipatory core in the Spartan spirit of military discipline which survives even when we subtract all the historical paraphernalia of Spartan class rule, ruthless exploitation of and terror over their slaves, and so forth—no wonder too that Trotsky himself called the Soviet Union in the difficult years of “war communism” a “proletarian Sparta.”
Even more important is, perhaps, the film’s formal aspect: the entire film was shot in a warehouse in Montreal, with the entire background and many of the people and objects digitally constructed. The artificial character of the background seems to infect the “real” actors themselves, who often appear like characters from comics brought to life (the film is based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel 300). Furthermore, the artificial (digital) nature of the background creates a claustrophobic atmosphere, as if the story is not taking place in “real” reality with its endless open horizons, but in a “closed world,” a kind of relief-world of closed space. Aesthetically, we are here steps ahead of the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings series: although, in these series also, many background objects and persons are digitally created, the impression is nonetheless one of (real and) digital actors and objects (elephants, Yoda, Urkhs, palaces, etc.) placed in a “real” open world; in 300, on the contrary, all the main characters are “real” actors placed against an artifical background, a combination which produces a much more uncanny “closed” world of a “cyborg” mixture of real people integrated into an artificial world. It is only with 300 that the combination of “real” actors and objects with a digital environment has come close to creating a truly new autonomous aesthetic space.
The practice of mixing different arts, of including in one artistic form the reference to another, has a long tradition, especially with regard to cinema; many of Hopper’s portraits of a woman at an open window, looking out, are clearly mediated by the experience of cinema (they offer a shot without its counter-shot). What makes 300 notable is that in it (not for the first time, of course, but in a way which is artistically much more interesting than, say, Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy) a technically more developed art form (digitalized cinema) refers to a less developed form (comics). The effect produced is that of “true reality” losing its innocence, appearing as part of a closed artificial universe, which is a perfect figuration of our socio-ideological predicament.
Those critics who claimed that the “synthesis” of the two art forms in 300 is a failure are thus wrong because they are right: of course the “synthesis” fails, of course the universe we see on the screen is traversed by a profound antagonism and inconsistency, but it is this very antagonism which is an indication of truth.
History and family in Frankenstein
There is, however, a more fundamental question to be raised apropos the family myth as interpretive tool. It seems obvious that the first task of the critique of ideology is, of course, to treat the family narrative as an ideological myth which should be handled like a dream’s explicit text, which should be deciphered back into the true struggle obfuscated by the family narrative. What if, however, one follows here the homology with the Freudian logic of dreams to the end, bearing in mind that the true focus of a dream, its “unconscious desire,” is not the dream-thought, but something that, paradoxically, inscribes itself into a dream-text through the very mechanisms of the transposition of the dream-thought into the dream-text? In other words, the unconscious desire in a dream is not simply its core which never appears directly, which is distorted by the translation into the manifest dream-text, but the very principle of this distortion—here is Freud’s unsurpassed formulation of this paradox:
The latent dream-thoughts are the material which the dream-work transforms into the manifest dream. [. . .] The only essential thing about dreams is the dream-work that has influenced the thought-material. We have no right to ignore it in our theory, even though we may disregard it in certain practical situations. Analytic observation shows further that the dream-work never restricts itself to translating these thoughts into the archaic or regressive mode of expression that is familiar to you. In addition, it regularly takes possession of something else, which is not part of the latent thoughts of the previous day, but which is the true motif force for the construction of the dream. This indispensable addition [unentbehrliche Zutat] is the equally unconscious wish for the fulfillment of which the content of the dream is given its new form. A dream may thus be any sort of thing in so far as you are only taking into account the thoughts it represents—a warning, an intention, a preparation, and so on; but it is always also the fulfillment of an unconscious wish and, if you are considering it as a product of the dream-work, it is only that. A dream is therefore never simply an intention, or a warning, but always an intention etc., translated into the archaic mode of thought by the help of an unconscious wish and transformed to fulfill that wish. The one characteristic, the wish-fulfillment, is the invariable one; the other may vary. It may for its part once more be a wish, in which case the dream will, with the help of an unconscious wish, represent as fulfilled a latent wish of the previous day.13
Every detail is worth analyzing in this marvelous passage, from its implicit opening motto “what is good enough for practice—namely the search for the meaning of dreams—is not good enough for theory,” to its concluding redoubling of the wish. Its key insight is, of course, the “triangulation” of latent dream-thoughts, manifest dream-content, and the unconscious wish, which limits the scope of—or, rather, directly undermines—the hermeneutic model of the interpretation of dreams (the path from the manifest dream-content to its hidden meaning, the latent dream-thought), which runs backwards the path of the formation of a dream (the transposition of the latent dream-thought into the manifest dream-content by dream-work). The paradox is that this dream-work is not merely a process of masking the dream’s “true message”: the dream’s true core, its unconscious wish, inscribes itself only through and in this very process of masking, so that the moment we retranslate the dream-content back into the dream-thought expressed in it, we lose the “true motif force” of the dream—in short, it is the process of masking itself which inscribes into the dream
