Why the movie 300 falls on its own sword

Being the cultural adviser to Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad must be one of the more thankless jobs on the planet, but Javad Shamghadri manages to keep busy. His latest foray is into the cultural space occupied by the teenage bloodlust demographic.

What bothers Mr Shamghadri - and quite a lot of other people in Iran - is the new Hollywood hit 300. It's an animated comic-book of a film that shows impossibly buffed and noble Greeks seeing off an attempt by evil Persians to strangle western civilisation in its cradle, 2,487 years ago. They think it's 'psychological warfare' against present-day Iranians, thinly disguised as a story about their wicked Persian ancestors.

Mr Shamghadri is so clueless about the workings of Hollywood that you really want to take him gently by the hand and walk him through it. 'Following the Islamic revolution in Iran [in 1979],' he says, 'Hollywood and cultural authorities in the US initiated studies to figure out how to attack Iranian culture. Certainly, the recent movie is a product of such studies.'

After pausing for a moment to savour the notion of 'cultural authorities in the US', let us pass on to the Tehran paper Ayandeh-No, which is quite close to the regime. Under a headline screaming 'Hollywood declares war on Iranians,' it complains that: 'The film depicts Iranians as demons, without culture, feeling or humanity, who think of nothing except attacking other nations and killing people. It is a new effort to slander the Iranian people and civilisation before world public opinion, at a time of increasing American threats against Iran.'

So can we all just laugh at those stupid, paranoid Iranians for getting their knickers in a twist about a dumb, harmless film cleverly disguised as art? I'm afraid not. It really is war propaganda of the crudest, nastiest kind - even though the people who made the movie have probably never had a consciously political thought in their money-grubbing lives.

It's not a plot: it's just how things work. The filmmakers had a great story to work with: the battle of Thermopylae in 480BC was an epic part of Greece's successful defence against conquest by the nearest Asian empire, Persia. They had the images from Frank Miller's comic-book retelling of the story; and they knew that Iran is next on the US hit list.