The movies could not be more different from each other. "300" is the stylized story of the Spartans of Thermopylae, a deliberately artificial combat movie filmed in a sepia tone, full of grotesqueries and gore, nearly all its lines delivered in a scream.

"Blades of Glory" is a comedic farce, a colorful, absurd and very funny satire of championship ice skating.

Abu Musab al Zarqawi, of course, was the late, unlamented leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq who was destroyed in an American airstrike on June 7, 2006.

What the three have in common, strangely enough, is the use of beheadings.

Maybe this is a bit off the subject of what is normally considered homeland security, but there is an interesting cultural aspect to the current war on terror that is relevant here.

In "300," there are a number of very graphic beheadings, but they're fairly unsurprising given the bloody nature of the subject. Nonetheless, in battle and in executions, the camera lingers in slow, loving motion as heads are severed from bodies in order to give the viewer the full impact of the action.

In "Blades of Glory," the beheading is used for comedic effect. A coach relates how he once attempted a daring maneuver called the "Iron Lotus."

It was so dangerous only a crazy regime like North Korea's would allow it. In a flashback filmed in a black-and-white, pseudo-documentary style, the camera is high over an ice skating rink in North Korea as army legions goose-step on parade and a male skater spins a female skater and throws her in the air. While she somersaults, the male skater spins with one leg extended. The woman lands on her feet, apparently successful in the maneuver, falls to the ice and her head separates, cut clean off. The male skater runs over, trying to put the head back on.

The audience laughs.

When the two heroes of the movie attempt the same routine, you know that the stakes are high and the cost of failure is extreme.

The real world intrudes

In the real world, of course, Abu Musab al Zarqawi perfected the use of beheadings to shock and terrorize the West and his enemies in Iraq.

He wasn't the first. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, personally beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl on film in 2002. There were other beheadings in Iraq before Zarqawi effectively institutionalized them, recorded them on video and posted them to the Internet.

Indeed, they seem to have been too much even for Ayman al Zawahiri, Al Qaeda's number two, who warned Zarqawi that they were alienating Muslims from fundamentalist ideology.

The terrorists' use of beheading was intended as the ultimate audience shocker, and Hollywood seems to have absorbed the lesson--when a shock is required, take off a head.

Perhaps it's extrapolating too much to draw a cultural trend from just two movies. But the fact that beheadings would appear in two such different films--one for general audiences--and the fact that beheadings rarely appeared in movies in the past, or were discreetly avoided when necessary (not showing the actual action, for example) seems to me, anyway, to indicate that a cultural boundary has been crossed. We have absorbed another baleful import from the East.

Is this some kind of earthquake in our sensibilities? No, but it's just one more coarsening of our culture under the influence of war and terror.

It sometimes seems that when the Twin Towers fell they released all the evil that had been suppressed beneath the structure of civilization. As the clouds of dust and debris rose into the air, so too did hatred, suspicion, fear, brutality and blind fanaticism. America became a country that could torture its captives and imprison people without trial and wage wars of conquest without compunction. Now we're people who can laugh at beheadings.

I don't want to spoil anyone's fun, but I do fear for the future and what our next cultural import may be.