Barbarians at the Box Office: 300 and Signs as Huntingtonian Narratives

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Gregory A. Burris is a graduate student in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His other articles on film have appeared in CineAction and the Journal of Popular Film and Television. He wrote this essay while living abroad in Istanbul, Turkey with his wife Kathryn, whom he would like to thank for her loving patience and support.

Notes

1. Lewis sees cultural differences as “the roots of Muslim rage” which he locates in ancient history. “[W]e are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations—the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both” (60).

2. Fareed Zakaria contends that Osama bin Laden and his followers are the product of “a culture that reinforces their hostility, distrust and hatred of the West—and of America in particular” (24). Or, as Victor Davis Hanson puts it, “They hate us because their culture is backward and corrupt” (“Defending the West”). For these and other examples, see Abrahamian.

3. Leading neoconservative ideologue William Kristol even managed to construe the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon as an example of Islamist aggression against not just Israel but “liberal democratic civilization, whose leading representative right now happens to be the United States” (9).

4. My conceptualization of the Self and the normality it embodies is greatly indebted both to the discussions of nationalism by the political scientist Walker Connor and to the insightful writings on the topic of normality's role in the horror film by Robin Wood (“An Introduction to the American Horror Film”).

5. Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver, a staff judge advocate at Guantánamo, says the series’ main character, Jack Bauer, “gave people lots of ideas” in terms of interrogation techniques (quoted in Sands 62).