In images from January 6th, 2021, numerous participants at what has since been dubbed “the Capitol Riots” can be seen wearing stylised Spartan helmets, often painted red, white, and blue, or emblazoned with Donald Trump’s name and slogans. These helmets seem anachronistic in a crowd rife with men and women dressed in full tactical military gear and MAGA caps but they are, in fact, profoundly contemporary. The ahistorical Spartan helmet was largely popularised by Zack Snyder’s film 300 (2006), based on the 1998 graphic novel of the same name by Frank Miller. Snyder’s position as a masculinist, populist auteur whose appeal lies in his perceived ability to speak the language of both visionary auteur and faithful fanboy (Scott 2013, 440), alongside Miller’s eye for iconic design, may help to account for the popularity of these helmets generally but does not explain their ubiquity in the mise-en-scène of what is broadly understood as an attempted right-wing coup. 

The co-option of cinematic and pop cultural iconography by right-wing political figures and movements is not new (one needs to think only of Ronald Reagan’s references to Rambo) but 300 and its enduring influence provides us with key insights into contemporary politics and culture. Indeed, 300’s tacit endorsement of eugenics and obsession with the muscular male body and the aesthetics of its martyrdom further mark it as an integral text in the pop culture inflected late fascist imaginary. In an attempt to unpack the potent afterlife of this pop cultural text as it circulates and mutates in an increasingly fractious public sphere through digital, material and corporeal cultures, this article focuses on 300 as an example of a cinematic deathworld, a metapolitical cultural formation that assists in disseminating formerly fringe far-right politics into the mainstream (Burley 2017). Such a form is concomitant with the late fascist adage that “politics is downstream from culture.” As Alberto Toscano notes, in our contemporary moment “the superstructure sometimes seems to overwhelm the base, as though forces and fantasies once functional to the reproduction of a dominant class and racial order had now attained a kind of autonomy” (2023, 112). This superstructural excess partially explains the use of pop cultural touchstones to signal political views in the U.S, but increasingly these cultural texts are updated and resituated in order to play out contemporary political fantasies and to ensure memetic circulation within a “digital ecology that is increasingly conducive to social harms” (Gerrand et al 2025, 1). In this way, 300’s cinematic deathworld functions not only as a fictionalised and ideologically loaded re-telling of an historical event used to signal political allegiances, but as what James Gibson (1994) calls a “warrior dream.” Gibson argues that, in the late 20th century, as white men lost confidence in the government, economy, their identity, and their future, they began to dream; “to fantasize about the powers and features of another kind of man who could retake and reorder the world” (11). In doing this “the whole modern world was damned as unacceptable” (12) and new worlds had to be dreamt up. The deathworld of 300 is one such world.

From the outset 300 highlights death as an integral part of Spartan society. The opening of the film features a detailed account of the Spartan practice of killing new-born children found to be in any way weak, sickly, or misshapen, and closes with the willing sacrifice of the three hundred Spartans. Further to this, 300 positions the dead soldiers as martyrs, presenting the hero’s death as a form of triumph and aestheticizing it in hyper-stylised comic-book influenced tableaus. Pulling from Achille Mbembe’s (2019) notion of “necropolitics” and Jack Z. Bratich’s (2021) elaboration on this concept, “necropopulism,” I argue that this obsession with death in 300 heralds the reactionary preoccupation with martyrdom and sacrifice on the contemporary right in the U.S and explains, in part, their continued fixation with the Spartan helmet. As Bratich states, “necropopulism traffics in performative memories of the never-existing and of the dead, invoking ghosts of the Southern ‘Lost Cause,’ medieval and ancient warrior masculinity, and lost empires” (262) and in 300 the mythos of one such lost warrior empire is presented in a highly-stylised blockbuster film with a focus on its own famous moment of sacrifice.

For the Spartans, saving Greece for their sons (the theme of patrilineage runs throughout the film) can only be achieved through a martyr’s death, a death which no other Greek is willing to accept or is capable of achieving. This notion of a political, valorised, and liberatory death is connected intrinsically with the end of empire. As the Persian forces subjugate Greece the film posits that only a sacrificial death can prevent total collapse. This same mode can be seen in cultures of sacrifice in the contemporary U.S, as it retreats somewhat from the world stage as geopolitical power shifts take effect and it negotiates its ineluctable decline. This slow collapse of empire is a significant part of what prompts these cultures of sacrifice, with such clear examples as anti-mask and anti-vaccine protesting and “thank you for your service/sacrifice” military culture. Bratich notes that 

before the anti-maskers, we saw this collective homi-suicidal display in the alt-right street demonstrations of 2015–2017. The pro-Trump assemblies often looked like a costumed re-enactment of dead regimes. Roman gladiators, Spartan fighters, medieval knights, and Nazi troopers were all re-mixed into a cosplay gathering for fans of lost empires (2021, 261). 

There is a reason a number of these fascist and quasi-fascist groups cosplay as Spartan warriors; the mythicised battle of Thermopylae provides a historical antecedent for collective liberatory death enacted in an attempt to save a (eugenicist) warrior empire.

Cosplay, a term developed from the words “costume and play” (Rahman, Wing-sun, Cheung 2012, 318), is a way for proponents to express their “fandom and passion” for a pop cultural text. It is “a form of personal expression and manifestation that...enables enthusiasts to imitate the personas of their adored characters and to recreate an imaginative self in reality” (320-321). Attendees at these right-wing demonstrations are taking part in a cosplay which imitates dead regimes, but they are also “recreating an imaginative self in reality” as in, they are clothing themselves in signifiers of ancient masculinity and violent strength in an attempt to make their warrior dreams real. These men are not wearing the uniform of the dead Spartan regime, they are wearing the costume of the Spartan warriors in 300. When these men wear the uniforms of the Nazis or Romans the uniforms become costumes but, in this case, the Spartan garb often seen at these demonstrations is already a costume – a costume which becomes further reduced to base signifiers of masculine strength, no longer invoking Sparta as much as the film, or Spartans as much as Gerard Butler’s performance as Leonidas. The cinematic deathworld constructed in 300 is brought into reality through this form of cosplay. The recreation of an imagined self in reality requires the recreation of an imagined world for that self to inhabit.

The aesthetic and political appeal of the anachronistic Spartan helmet on the contemporary American right can be unpacked through an interrogation of this cinematic and necropolitical mode. Leonidas’ cry of “no retreat, no surrender” is both an appeal to military might and dominance, and a suicidal chant by an army on a morbid crusade. The prevalence of the helmet at contemporary right-wing events indicates a certain late fascist commitment to an abstracted and aestheticized conception of death and martyrdom propagated by the film 300. The martyrs’ corpses, musclebound and helmet clad, are presented heroically in a tableaux at the close of the film. Julia Kristeva notes that “the corpse, seen without God and outside science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life” (1982, 4). I argue that the corpses of the dead Spartans by the close of the film are not abject, despite being seen without God and outside science, as “death infecting life” is a central desire of fascism. It is culture “not as lifestyle, but as deathstyle: a subjectivity that gives to itself a mode of non-existence” (Bratich 2021, 261). It is a desire for annihilation of the Other and the self, propelled by a death drive of which the essential goal is “the ultimate form of discharge, namely self-extinction” (Theweleit 1989, 278). 

While this cosplay-inflected self-eliminationism may seem paradoxical, as Walter Benjamin (1968) famously posits, fascism seeks to “experience its own destruction as an aesthetic enjoyment of the first order” (242). At the film’s close the Spartan body “becomes the martyr’s uniform” (Mbembe 2019, 89) and as a corpse it functions just as the Spartan helmets do for the contemporary American far-right; as a signifier of lost, but regainable, national power.

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