Digital parapraxis

Not since Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ has Hollywood produced anything so rabidly, ferally frenzied. 300 feels as if Adolf Hitler had come back from the dead, got hooked on gay fisting web-sites, done the best digital film course in the world, then stalked into liberal-Jewish Hollywood and convinced them to give him $60m to make a movie...

For hours after I saw 300, I puzzled over how a film industry like Hollywood's - soft, liberal, formulaic - could give birth to such a snarling, unique beast. Then I remembered Freud's 1916 lectures on parapraxis. That's what 300 is: a slip of the tongue (or camera), an inadvertent "mistake" produced by the Hollywood system....the liberal surface of American cinema overlays conflicting, strongly held impulses that are far less liberal.

-- Mark Cousins in the May edition of Prospect on a film that has already grossed half a billion dollars at the box office.