The Hub-bub Over "300" Or, Why Telling The Truth is Not A Crime

My alma mater Cinematical was at the center of a bit of controversy this week (and yes, this is totally inside baseball, so if you have no interest in The Politics of Bloggery, click away now).

Here's what happened: Erik Davis was representing the site at Berlinale, and a couple of days ago, he filed a report from the press screening of Frank Miller's 300, where, he said, the comic book adaptation was greeted to a "chorus of boos." That report earned an inordinately large amount of comments for a Cinematical post -- mostly from fanboys/girls who could/would not believe such blasphemy. One particularly innane commenter slammed Erik for being "incapable of standing behind" his hopes that the film would be good in the face of its utter craptasticness. Warner Brothers, who are releasing 300, are corporate cousins of Cinematical, and Erik soon felt pressure from all sides to retract his report, on the grounds that it was, at the very least, unnecessarily harsh, and at worst, completely inaccurate.

But it wasn't inaccurate. How do we know? Because other bloggers rushed to confirm the information within. And it's not just friends backing up friends; bloggers have no incentive to lie for one another, because the entire circle jerk of bloggery would end were everyone to voluntarily agree.

The lesson: it's simply stupid for anyone who believes they're being slandered by a blogger to demand a retraction. If the blogger really is making something up, other bloggers will take the opportunity to point out why the first blogger is full of shit, and then the initial report will lose all power. But if the blogger is telling the truth (and most of the time, we are, because it's just not worth the possible fallout to make anything up), even if you scare them into backing down, chances are another blogger out there will continue the meme. Even if the Cinematical editors had immediately wiped the post off the site (and I'm glad they didn't), it would have been too late to suppress the idea that 300 was a) booed, and b) is, as Filmbrain put it, "the new Showgirls".

I'm not denying that a film festival report such as this can cause damage to a film -- I saw how a handful of French boos completely blocked Marie Antoinette from reaching its intended audience. But instead of wanting the chatter to go away, in this case, Warners should embrace it. This is priceless market research -- this tells them that though they have no chance with the film snob crowd, they've got a large comic geek base that will stand by them no matter what. Even better, at this point, bloggers that would have slammed the pic closer to its release will have heard enough to completely avoid it. It's a win/win!