Meet the Spartans (2008)

Meet the Spartans arrived in January of 2008, opened at number one, and grossed eighty-four million dollars against a thirty million dollar budget. It is a parody of 300, which is to say a parody of an adaptation of a comic book, assembled by two men who built a career on stapling together references to whatever was on television that month. Ugly Betty appears. Sanjaya appears. A penguin appears. The film has no interest in persuading anyone of anything, and that indifference turns out to matter for our purposes.

The comic engine here is mockery of the body and of sexual ambiguity. A recurring gag concerns the Spartans' uncertain preferences, played for derision, which puts the film on the far side of any affirmative treatment of that subject. A Vietnamese baby is adopted as a punchline. A deformed Paris Hilton is a visual gag, later cured of her hump as payment for betrayal. A slightly unfit soldier exists to be laughed at. We looked for representation and found incidental casting. We looked for racial consciousness and found stereotype. We looked for body positivity and found a funhouse mirror. There is no climate anxiety, no class anger, no revisionist reading of Thermopylae.

The film also lectures no one, which is not a virtue so much as a vacancy. It is a crude, dated, widely loathed comedy that offended plenty of people for reasons entirely unrelated to the progressive sensibilities we are tasked with cataloguing. Critics called it lazy, and they were correct, though laziness and ideology are different charges. This is a null case, a film with nothing on its mind but the box office receipts of other films. Null cases have their own austere dignity. We record it accordingly, with the sober precision the work demands.