It should be funny but it is really quite sad how in the movie 300 the Spartans were sold as the army defending Democratic values and “freedom,” in the modern sense of the term, when it was the most aristocratic, anti-Democratic City State of them all.
The nobility of the Spartans, the masculine ethos, was converted, Hollywood style, into the blabbering Athenian rabble.
Some wonder why certain movies are allowed to be made or how certain ideas and themes are permitted to find their way to a vast audience.
The answer is simple: to a system using more insidious methods of mass control, selling the idea that it is for freedom, free-speech, and individual choices, calling itself “open,” this public airing is part of its living-up to its own theoretical principles.
But it is also a way of immunizing a more literate, educated public, with access to information unprecedented in any previous period of human history, to certain ideals and ideas.
It is inevitable that in an information age censorship will only result in closer scrutiny, so exposing the public to information in a particular way satisfies this need to know, and it plays into the system’s own pretense.
Some threatening concept may be permitted to enter the psyche of the public, but only by first placing them within moralistic contexts which deface them and smear them.
It is usually from some particularly vile, ugly, degenerate movie character that we come into contact with ideas that cannot be silenced and so must be connected to a particular emotional reaction…and aired out.
The audience will then relive the connected emotion, the sensations they felt when they first came into contact with the idea/l, and they will forever associate it with it.
This is a form of psychological immunization against certain mimetic “contagions.”