To me, this article demonstrates Slate at its worst. It's a tag line searching for an article; where is the argumentative content here? You've got this "contrarian" claim that just sort of hangs there. I honestly think the thinking here is "Most everyone thinks these movies are homoerotic; what if they aren't? Sounds like a Slate article!" I mean the actual argument, such as it is, doesn't appear until page 2, takes a whopping 4 paragraphs, and operates almost entirely by assertion.
"It is better—sounder both aesthetically and sociologically—to view the masculine pathos in films like Point Break in light of the tradition of heroically minded philosophy that runs from Aristotle to Nietzsche."
Umm, alright... why? Why is it better? Feeney doesn't say. He just asserts. Feeney claims that these films embody "the tradition of heroically minded philosophy that runs from Feeney is claiming unironically that there exists a philosophy of heroism that runs straight from Aristotle to Nietzsche... he doesn't know what he's talking about. The idea that the two of them could share a mutually palatable definition of heroism-- or masculine love-- is plainly wrong. Even if they did, so what? Why would their philosophy be particularly more valuable than any other? I suspect Feeney cites them because their names lend gravitas to an empty article. (ooh... a heurmeneutic circle... deep.)
And, again-- that may be true, maybe the love in these movies represents this "classical heroism" Feeney imagines. But that's just a counter claim. Just throwing it out there, without demonstrating why this view is superior to a homoerotic reading, doesn't do us any good. Why is that reading correct?
Lastly, as for the "young men from the vast heartland of this very conservative, Christian, pro-military country".... I disagree with with that characterization of our country, but okay, I'll go with it. What I won't go with is Feeney's suggestion that, if you say that 300 is a homoerotic movie, you are claiming that the 20 million people who saw it are "closet cases". This is a deliberate misreading of the claim. Nobody seriously suggests that everyone who went to see 300 is gay. What they suggest is that the central messages of the movie are troubled by alternate readings, readings which question and complicate the ultra-masculine ethos the movie tries to adopt. This is true of any homoerotic reading; the point isn't that the audience is gay. The point is that what they are consuming has thematic complexities which change the most basic premises under which the art works. Things aren't as simple (or stupid, as I would say with 300) as they appear, and there are other, alternative theories for the way the movie works. That's a far more sober argument than the "closet case" straw man Feeney attacks.
I enjoy a lot of what's written here but more and more often I find there's simply no editorial quality when it comes to the search for "provocative" writing. Slate's become a self-parody; write something, anything, that cuts against the grain of the conventional wisdom, and we'll publish it-- even if, as here, you haven't done anything much at all.
And, by the way, I would just suggest to Feeney that perhaps 300 isn't gay because of the men with chiseled bodies; maybe it's gay because it stars the Spartans, one of the few societies in history who have openly and unreservedly embraced homosexual sex. If the 300 in question are actually meant to represent historical Spartans, then the large majority of them would have engaged in homosexual sex in their lifetimes.
But stayed tuned for next weeks article where Feeney explains that engaging in gay sex isn't gay....
