So while watching 300, I realized that there is a little emphasis put on the love between Leonidas & his queen. This reminded me of two other movies based on historical events with romances intertwined, Pearl Harbor and Titanic. Now, why do you think a director would add a love story into a movie that deals with something as important as our history? Do you think this in some way prevents the viewer from understanding the whole story? Maybe in order to fit the whole romance the director might cut the translation of the historical event short. Or does this enhance the viewers perspective of the event? Allowing us to see how certain people were affected. Or maybe it does both or neither. What do you think? I can't wait to see all of your opinions!! (try to be specific on how translating a historical event into a romantic movie enhances or worsens that certain event)
15 comments:
In respects to adding the element of love to stories/movies such as 300, Titanic and Pearl Harbor, love not only appeals to a wider audience (cause let's face it, planes, wars and boats are stereotypically "guy" things) but also brings a deeper emotion into account. With all this hatred and fear, a counter-acting emotion should be in place: an emotion to combat and triumph over the hate and fear.
I speak for myself when saying this, so please feel free to comment if you do the same, but I become more involved in the storyline if there's a love story. I see myself caring more about the characters as if they were real people. I put myself in the female role's place and my boyfriend in the male's role (Guilty of this every time). I experience the same emotions and go through the same process as the characters do as movie/book goes on. By doing this, I kind of "heighten" the situations and atmosphere in which the scenes are trying to convey and become, as I said before, more involved.
In 300, because there is that element of the love between Leonidas and his queen, the audience views this "Spartan King" not only as a mastermind of war but also as a regular human being who has worries and hopes. The audience sees another side of Leonidas which makes it easier to "side" with him and to support his efforts.
I'm sure if there had been a scene showing that the God-King Xerxes had a family that was being held hostage, only to be freed if he conquered the world that angry feelings towards him wouldn't be so harsh: "He did kill a lot of people... But... He was trying to save his family, so I guess it's ok."
As for adding love to a historical event, I believe that love makes the situation more relevant instead of some distant occurrence in time. Love gives people today something to relate to and an emotion to experience. Not everyone can understand the anger of King Leonidas as he kicked the Persian messenger into the deep well (Or the fear people felt when Titanic was sinking or the frustration of the Pearl Harbor soldiers), but at some point in their lives, the audience can understand how it would feel to leave a loved one knowing they may not come back. Love makes the audience more sympathetic to the characters' plight and shows a side that the textbooks usually ignore. Texts focus on the facts, numbers of casualties, the warriors and the end result. Love manipulates the situation to make it more "home-hitting" because, seriously, history can be boring.
I think the love story between Leonidas and his queen was for several reasons. The book never talks about the Queen of Sparta and even Leonidas is not known in History other than this particular battle against the Persians. First off, who doesn't love a great love story.. something so pure. It also served to show the Spartans as more than a bunch of heathen warriors it showed the respect they had for each other even the women as the queen had just as much to say in the matter of denying Xerxes "earth and water". Their love showed the respect for free beings and the equality in Sparta which points again to the idea of justice and reason. In another sense bringing the queen into the movie plot showed the womens' strength as well. While the men went to fight these women were left to take care of the household and be brave knowing their husbands wouldn't come back...the bravery and honor in Sparta was not merely among the men. In any case, I loved that the romantic aspect was brought into the plot, I don't think it took away from the plot at all and I think in fact it brought out the emotions and feelings of loss even more for the brave 300 men. The director wanted to bring out this ethos to bind the audience with the movie which is exactly what happened. Overall, LOVED the interpretation on film.
I think that the love story added in 300 wasn't necessarily a "love story" like in the movies Titanic and Pearl Harbor. In 300, I believe that it was necessary for the director to add in the relationship between Leonidas and his queen. The queen played a strong role in defending her husband's decision into going to war. Also, the movie makes a point to describe how "rough" and "tough" Spartans were. By having this "love story" the audience is able to see how Spartans had soft sides, much like the story of the man who saw his son get decapitated in combat. We think that he is too strong to have feelings, yet he breaks down at the sight of his son's death. Leonidas only had his wife to lose in this fight and she is the only one that defended him with his decision.
In the cases of Titanic and Pearl Harbor, I think that they are true "love stories" because they do distract the audience from the true point of the film. The plots of these films may have been based on historical events, but the main focus is not what happened in history. Instead, it is what happened between Jack and Rose?! After 300, I was thinking about the actual war against Leonidas and Xerxes. I was not really concerned about the love relationships involved in the film. As for Titanic and Pearl Harbor, I thought mostly about the relationships. In 300, I think that the love between Leonidas and his queen enhanced the viewer's ability to see what a strong role the queen played during that time of combat. As for other films, I think that the perspective of the historical event is completely lost.
I think that the director chose to emphasize the love between Leonidas and his queen to balance the naturally “hardened” nature of the Spartans. Theirs was a culture very different from our own, and such an extreme foreign nature of the characters and event might have turned the audience away. Adding this element of love is something relatable and human, something that people can understand and believe.
As for preventing the understanding of the story, I don’t think it interferes with the overall message that the 300 went to war to defend their land and their homes. Since the movie was based off Frank Miller’s version of this piece of history, I think the romance worked well. It fueled a second plot line, that of the queen’s fight to get the counsel to listen to her, which allowed the director to show more of the political aspects of Leonidas’ choice to go to war during the Carneia.
I think this an extremely interesting topic as so many directors, screen writers, novelists, etc. have taken it into their hands to "romanticize" a historical story. In the case of 300, I would have to agree with all of my classmates who have posted so far, by saying that the love story between Leonidas and his Queen only enhanced the overall storyline and quality of the characterizations made of the Spartans. It made the movie and the characters much more endearing.
I also agree with Candace that the directors, writers, novelists, etc. can take the process of romanticizing their work a bit too far. For instant a movie that I enjoy, yet dislike at the same time is "One Night with the King". Set during almost the identical time period as 300 yet that movie is about Persia and the Hebrew exiles living in the Persian capital. The story is based off of the Biblical story of Queen Esther who married King Xerxes. This particular version of the story overly romanticizes the absolute horrors that were inflicted on hundreds of young women. The movie portrayed their story as if they had been taken to some sort of beautiful, luxury spa, when in reality they had become life long sex slaves, completely destroying all of their hopes of an honorable role in society. Although I like the movie, I feel that they were far from accurate in their portrayal of what was really going on historically. So again, how far is too far in saying that a story is historical? In my opinion some manage to walk the tightrope of romanticizing a story and others don't.
Adding romance to the movie is an iffy subject in my book. On one hand, it shows the viewer how the the characters, in this case a king and a queen, are people. In Sparta they happened to lead the lives of few emotion and all battle, but the love story between the two helps us see that yeah, they were a bunch of men trained to kill and defend, but they were doing it because they cared about the people that they were protecting. But on the other hand, what if they didn't love each other? What if they really were just men trained to kill and they didn't really care about the others. Sounds inhumane but in a society were babies were cast off because they had imperfections and small children were taught to show no mercy, anything is possible. I appreciate the love story, but there's a part of me that will always question if it was right or not. It is endearing that the queen is so involved in protecting her husband's name, but was that because of her role as a queen? Or because she did love him. This question sure brought up even more questions! While trying to answer them I remember that it is only based on history, and it is not a documentary and it makes me feel so much better about enjoying the movie, and that it is history. We know the basic story but how accurate is it really? By adding in a love story the director was able to add in some details that make the movie take you to what might have happened in the age of the 300's.
The primary purpose of most feature films, novels, plays, is to entertain. Many have other motivations like informing the audience about a historical event or calling the audience to action, but it's still in the form of leisurely entertainment. I know I'm a sucker for a good love story and it can definitely draw me into a movie or book that I normally might not be interested in. It can be hard for us to relate to historical events that happened 100 or 500 or 1000 years ago, but a love story is something most people can relate to. I totally agree that in 300 the relationship between leonidas or gorgo was not a distraction from the battle which was the focus, but in other cases like titanic. Titanic fits squarely in the romance genre. This isn't a bad thing, the historical aspect is not the focus and that's just the way it is. Personally, I think when the romantic storyline is secondary to the main plot and not distracting, I think it adds an extra layer of intrigue and can help engage the audience and get the main point across.
I think that as viewers we like to see different aspects in our movies. Any movie that comes out today, that is popular in America has a little humor, violence(mild or drastic) and love in it no matter what the movie is. I believe that love stories get added to the equation so that audiences can better relate to them. In the case of 300, titanic and pearl harbor all those movies are historical and they deal with a lot of pain and suffering of people. The love story gets added in to take off some of the edge of the violence and sadness that those movies have. Most viewers don't want to see just a purely historical movie they want other elements to keep them interested. I think that for translation purposes adding in things like love and romance to the story makes it a little more interesting and keeps the audience interested. I think that you need just a little romance to keep the story alive. I also believe that if you take a historical event where there was no romance make it into a movie and add too much romance it can take away from the historical significance of the story.
When adding romance to a historical tale, there will always be a fine line between too abrasive, and overly romantic. Push the film too far to any one side and you loose some of the intended audience along with some of the integrety of the history itself. In 300 the director was able to maintain a balance between the two sides that afforded the audience with a relatively historical account of Leonides and the 300 while also entertaining.
I assume it would be difficult to adapt any purely historical account into a major motion picture or best selling novel. I believe it is in the best interest of the director or author to add possibilities here and there.
In all honesty some of the horrors of the past are just too difficult to absorbe on their own, we need some sort of emotional release to process somethings. Take the hollacaust for example. Not too long ago a movie came out called "The Boy in the Striped Pijamas" which portrays the time of the Nazi's internment camps from the perspective of a boy whos father is a Nazi general. Without the addition of the boy's secret friendship with a jewish Nazi prisoner, also a little boy, the movie would have been unbearable. It portrayed some of the lies and propaganda the Nazi's spread during their reign that are just horrofying. These are the peices that make us want to continue watching; the bond between friends even of such different backgrounds, or the love between a king and a queen. These emotional additions allow the reader or audience to hope, to put themselves or their loved ones in the positions and situations that are presented. It leaves them with an overall sense of compassion. To be passionate about something we must have an emotional tie to it, and cut and dry facts hardly foster an emotional response.
Historically speaking that little boy probably never exhisted, but does that make the atrocities in the film any less real? Not to me. Would "Titanic" have been as big of a hit without Rose and Jack's seeminly eternal love? Probably not. Can a movie go too far and compromize the historical asspects? Probably, but the only way to bring historical events to life is to relate them to a universal constant: emotion. It's how they make the story real and tangeble. Without the emotional attachment it would just be another historical event that people couldn't relate too.
I think it's really interesting to read everyone's comments bearing in mind that we are all women. Personally, I was always one of those kids who gagged during the romantic scenes, so the addition of romances into the plot does not further enhance the movie for me. However, I can see how it makes the movie more relatable to modern audiences, much like edifani already stated.
In 300, I assumed the love story was added so that the movie would have at least one hot female character for the audience to enjoy among the sausage fest.
A lot of us have been saying that the love story added a necessary "soft side" to the tough-skinned Leonidas; I agree, but I want to look at it from a slightly different angle.
Instead of saying that the love story demonstrates the soft side of a soft/tough binary, I think that the love story enhanced the story of Sparta by demonstrating that the Spartans were a strong, passionate people, both on the battlefield and within their relationships.
I don't want to deviate from the love story too much, but I think that the depiction of the relationship between the Captain (can't remember his name; Leonidas' second in command) and his soldier son also demonstrates this aspect of Spartan culture.
In the "Thermopylae" history text that we read, it mentions that a crucial part of Spartan training was the comradery built among the soldiers from such activities as living together and eating meals together. This added to the Spartan strength, because they fought alongside each other as brothers, not merely soldiers, and certainly not slaves (as it's implied is the case for the Persians).
Adding more about the relationships seems to enhance the sense of Spartan comradery, and a deep sense of love - for country, for friends, and for family. The love story between Leonidas and the Queen may have been fictional, but so was the relationship between the Captain and his son. Both were intense, and in the end quite touching; Leonidas' last thought is of his wife, and the Captain's only regret is not telling his son how much he loved him.
I think that adding a romance can (and in this case does) enhance an historical story. In writing and theatre, we talk about the importance of showing vs. telling. In other words, the audience engages more with a story when you show them what happens (i.e. depicting the passionate, live-free-or-die-hard attitude toward life) rather than telling them ("The Spartans were a very passionate culture who valued freedom.") I suppose a love story could distract somewhat from historical fact, but if it helps the audience identify with and understand the characters, I think it's more helpful.
@hjm: good point. Maybe the filmmakers just thought 300 needed a little male-oriented sex appeal.
I just had another thought, though: all of the scenes back in Sparta that took place while the soldiers were out fighting were also fabricated. However, I felt that they gave the film/story a more rounded, complete feel, and it became more of a story about Sparta vs. simply a story about one battle.
By understanding the love between Leonidas and the Queen, we could understand why the Queen went to such measures as practically letting herself be raped in order to have a chance to get some help to her husband. In this way, the Queen's character is also clearly driven by a love for country and for family, and thus contributes to the larger picture painted of Spartan culture.
I believe, as many of you have said, that the love story in 300 served to make the Spartans seem more relatable and human. It would have been a rather different story if there had been no show of emotion throughout the entire story. Leonidas and the queen, as well as the captain and his son, helped to illustrate that the Spartans gad something that they were fighting for. They had families and friends and a home that needed defending. If the movie had only chosen to look at the military aspect of the battle, it would be leaving something out. In Thermopylae 480 BC, as Sarah Parro mentioned, a large part of Sparta’s military success was built upon the camaraderie of its soldiers. If these soldiers did not have such close ties to their friends and community, they would not have been as successful in war. They cared deeply about each other and their own personal standing (it would be embarrassing to be seen as a coward by people that you have so much respect for, people whose respect is important to you). In this instance, I do not feel that the love story was out of place. Most of the personal interactions that were included served to enhance the characters, not to detract from their actions.
The discussion of romance in 300 made me wonder about the use of humor in the graphic novel and the movie. Did it enhance the characters the same way romance did? Or did it just soften/break up the otherwise continual battle scenes?
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