zack snyder says he can't be a fascist because 300 is the gayest movie ever made. he's half right.

via Consequence, Dark Horizons and PinkNews

Somebody at Variety asked Zack Snyder this week, straight out, whether he is a fascist filmmaker. He said no, obviously. Then he produced his evidence.

"Obviously I'm pro-gay," he said. "I made the gayest movie ever made." In case the jury needed it spelled out: "300 is one of the gayest movies ever made." And the closer, which we would like carved somewhere: "there are few movies where people come in straight and come out gay, and 300 is one of them."

Reader, he is not wrong about the film. 300 is two hours of oiled Spartan thighs in leather briefs, filmed like a Tom of Finland plate that learned to do slow motion, and an entire generation of us can tell you exactly where we were sitting. Nobody needs to argue him down on this one. Take the win.

The trouble is the second half of the syllogism. Homoeroticism is not a politics, and it never has been. That film is also the one where the invading horde is a pierced, bejeweled, sexually ambiguous Persian court, decadence rendered as threat, and the free men defending civilization are the ones with the abs. Dark Horizons notes 300 has been taking criticism for homophobia and xenophobia for years, which is the awkward bit: both readings are true at once. A movie can be horny for men and frightened of them. Most of the twentieth century managed it.

All of this is in service of The Last Photograph, which premiered at Toronto and landed badly enough that PinkNews put it at 18 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Compare Nick Offerman, who sat on three years of Ben Shapiro and then defended a gay episode of television by going after the critic's reading comprehension. He never once put the episode forward as a character reference for himself. That is the difference between standing behind the work and hiding behind it.

You cannot cash in our canon as a character reference. But we will keep 300. We had it first.