Red Dawn, 2012: Imperialists, Insurgents, and Role Reversal

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I expected the 2012 Red Dawn remake to push jingoistic hyper-patriotic borderline-racist propaganda.  And it does.

I did not expect it to carry a subtext urging a re-evaluation of the War on Terror.  But it does that, too.

The original (1984) version of Red Dawn was a Cold War fantasy of Communist aggression and brave American teenagers heading to the mountains of Colorado as resistance fighters against a Russian/Cuban/Nicaraguan invasion. The kids call themselves the “Wolverines,” after their high school mascot.  The remake keeps that same basic plot, except the leader of the guerrilla band is a marine home on leave after a tour in Iraq, the action has been relocated to Washington state, and the invading enemy is North Korea.

“North Korea?” one of the young partisans says, incredulously.  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Well, there’s a bigger picture here,” his older brother replies, vaguely.

They’re both right.  It doesn’t make any sense, but there is a larger bigger picture.  That bigger picture might be called the real world.

In the real world of 2012, the United States was not being invaded — not in danger of being invaded — by North Korea or anyone else.  We were, however, winding up occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, two countries where we had faced ruthless, bloody insurgencies.  What Red Dawn asks of its audience is that we imagine ourselves in the place of the insurgents.

“When I was overseas,” the Marine lectures, “we were the good guys.  We enforced order.  Here, we are the bad guys, and we create chaos.”  The irony is cutting.  For in the story the movie tells, it is obvious that these American kids, fighting for freedom, defending their homes, are the good guys; and what does that suggest about Iraq?

He also says:

“I don’t want to sell it to you, it’s too ugly for that.  It’s ugly and it’s hard.  But when you’re fighting in your own back yard, when you’re fighting for your family, it all hurts a little less and it makes a little more sense.  For them, this is just some place, but for us this is our home.”

It’s the moment in the film when the subtext is most explicit, and it is so important that, with variations, the speech is repeated at the end of the movie.  But there are numerous other points when the War on Terror makes its uncomfortable appearance.  The Korean authorities, for instance, continuously refer to the rebels as “insurgents” and “terrorists.”  They create an internment camp for suspect elements, dressing them in orange jump suits and using shipping containers for cells — like the Americans did at Bagram Air Base.  Their propaganda and their oratory have an kitschy, cliched, Cold War aesthetic, but beneath the red veneer, there’s a standard hearts-and-minds kind of appeal.  In their speeches, the occupying army insists that “We are not your enemies,” but liberators — bringing freedom, delivering security, and rebuilding the country.  “Helping You Back On Your Feet,” one propaganda poster advertizes.  “Repairing Your Economy,” promises another.  What they ask in return is for “your cooperation in bringing these cowardly Wolverine terrorists to justice.”  The rhetoric sounds hollow, but no more hollow coming from a Korean commissar than it did from Paul Bremer.  The familiarity, as well as the falsity, seems to be part of the point.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised.  Maybe the anti-imperialist role reversal was there in the original.  Back in 1984, Andrew Kopkind wrote in The Nation:

“If you swivel the politics about 45 degrees to the left, Red Dawn begins to look more like a celebration of people’s war than a horror movie about the evil empire. . . .  [Director John] Milius has produced the most convincing story about popular resistance to imperial oppression since the inimitable Battle of Algiers.”

Kopkind goes on to compare the Commies’ summary execution of unreliable elements to the CIA’s Phoenix Program, targeting Viet Cong supporters.  He then suggests that we should “read Red Dawn as a parable of American intervention in Central America.”

Apparently the US Military didn’t get the memo.  The 2003 mission to capture Saddam Hussein was codenamed, “Operation Red Dawn,” and the two sites the Army searched were dubbed “Wolverine 1” and “Wolverine 2.”

The point I’m trying to make has nothing to do with the dangers of a Communist invasion.  It’s about propaganda and interpretation.  Politics are sometimes a struggle over meaning, and such meanings are never really fixed or settled.  But this observation raises more questions than it answers:  Given that there is always the possibility for subversive subtexts and resistant readings, how does one produce or evaluate political propaganda?  Is Red Dawn a right-wing movie, undermined and co-opted by left-wing critics?  Or is it a left-wing movie cheered by conservatives too dumb to understand what they’re watching?  Neither?  Both?

And to what degree is the meaning created in the social practices surrounding the text, as opposed to residing in the movie itself?  Do Blake’s “Jerusalem” and Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” become patriotic anthems because large groups of people treat them that way — “dark, satanic mills” and “the shadow of the penitentiary” notwithstanding?
Was Bradley’s more explicit 2012 Red Dawn a reclamation, a recompense for the US military’s tone-deaf and nuance-free embrace of the first film?  Or are both films just object lessons concerning what happens when action movies try to be too clever — or when critics do?

Works Cited

William Blake, “Jerusalem [from Milton],” William Blake: Selected Poems. ed. Ian Hamilton (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1994) 114.

Andrew Kopkind, “Red Dawn,” The Nation, September 15, 1984.

Red Dawn, dir. Dan Bradley (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 2012).

Red Dawn, dir. John Milius (United Artists, 1984).

Bruce Springsteen, “Born in the USA,” Born in the USA (Columbia Records, 1984).

Bio
Kristian Williams is the author of American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination, Hurt: Notes of Torture in a Modern Democracy, and an editor of Life During Wartime: Resisting Counterinsurgency.

Fighting Americans Fighting Americans for America

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Is the War on Terror over yet? It was written to be a mini-series. After the 2003 fall of Baghdad, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld outlined plans for an immediate invasion of Syria. Lebanon, Somalia, and Sudan were up afterwards, with Iran crowning the Bush Administration’s “seven countries in five years” plot.

It was a naive story, one modeled on World War II and the swift collapse of the Axis. A decade later, the American public can’t even stomach Syrian air strikes let alone a ground invasion. We would all like the War on Terror to be over, but it’s evolved instead. Now we’re stuck with a less combative but never-ending Cold War on Terror.

That could prove a problem for superheroes. Costumed crusaders make lousy diplomats. Captain America would just infiltrate those Syrian chemical depots. The Human Torch would take out Iran’s nuclear plants with a few fire balls. The Sub-Mariner wouldn’t negotiate with Russia; he’d fly in and grab Snowden by the throat.

It will take a few Hollywood mega-flops before superheroes change their big screen tactics, but I predict that change is coming too. Just look at the last time America’s legion of leotards faced a cooling of national attitudes.

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1954 should have been a good year for superheroes. Sure, the plummet in post-war sales wiped most superpowers off newsstands, but the Man of Steel had made the leap to TV. The first two seasons of Adventures of Superman were looking like a hit for ABC. No wonder Atlas (formerly Timely, soon Marvel) Comics decided to revive their golden age sellers. Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s Captain America cranked out a million copies a month during the war, with Sub-Mariner and the Human Torch right behind. Now the three were fronting their own magazines again. The Torch even returned atomic-powered, a happy side effect of the nuclear testing that awakened him from his desert grave.

Over at DC, superheroes hid on the home front during World War II. Except for a smiling, patriotic splash page selling bonds, you wouldn’t have known there was a war on. That’s part of why DC’s trinity—Superman, Batman, Wonder Wonder—were the only supers to survive the post-war plummet. They stayed out of Cold War politics too. The Man of Steel never came near the Iron Curtain. Instead of bashing Commies, Adventures of Superman softened Superman’s crooks into cartoonish comedy. DC stapled “the American way” to the old “truth and justice” credo, and that’s as far as the Red Scare crept into Superman’s true blue tights.

But at Atlas, superheroes remained bound to America’s real-world supervillains. So with Hilter, Mussolini and Hirohito vanquished to the Phantom Zone, they used the Cold War substitute. Sure, Joseph Stalin was dead, but Soviet sickles and hammers still replaced swastikas on Sub-Mariner’s first cover. Captain America stands with his shield raised in a self-congratulatory cheer below his new 1954 tag phrase “Commie Smasher!”

It made sense. Joseph McCarthy’s communist-vilifying absolutism was a good fit for unexaminedly violent supermen populating a patriotically distorted fantasy world of pure good and evil. The timing was right too. McCarthy’s popularity popped in 1950 with his never-substantiated charge that the State Department was infested with Communists. When Washington Post cartoonist Herbert Block coined the pejorative term “McCarthyism,” the Senator embraced it. His 1952 McCarthyism: The Fight For America even linked Communism to Hitler.

Atlas wasn’t the only comic book company backing McCarthy. Prize Comics hired Simon and Kirby to revive their brand of patriotic violence with another star-chested super soldier. Simon had titled his original Captain America sketch “Super American,” but he and Kirby went with Fighting American for their Cold War redo. Doing Captain America’s resurrection one better, Fighting American was literally a corpse, a dead World War II hero and right wing TV commentator reanimated and inhabited by his puny kid brother. And that’s the best definition of “MyCarthyism” you’ll even find.

So why didn’t any of these superpowered pinko-pounders last even a year? Captain America and the Human Torch went down in flames after just three issues. Sub-Mariner dribbled out ten. Stan Lee blamed the flop on the “stridently conservative scripting,” the same script McCarthy was working from. As a Senate chairman, he accused the U.S. Army of harboring masked Commies, and so the Army-McCarthy hearings kicked off in April 1954. On newsstands the same month, the first cover of Fighting American boasted: “Where there’s Danger! Mystery! Adventure! We find The NEW CHAMP OF SPLIT-SECOND ACTION!”  The hearings ended in June, the cover date of the last issue of Human Torch. The last Captain America was removed from newsstands the following month. Which means Atlas made its cancellation decisions during the hearings. Commie-bashing superheroes fell with their Commie-bating role model.

Instead of cancelling, Kirby and Simon went a different but equally anti-McCarthy direction. June-July is the last non-satirical issue of Fighting American. Prize introduced a redesigned logo for August-September, and the new cover includes two clownish communist villains and the ironic warning: “Don’t laugh—they’re not funny—POISON IVAN and HOTSKY TROTSKI.”
 

Fighting American cover

 
Jingoistic superheroism was literally a joke. The Senate condemned McCarthy in December, while Fighting American joked his way into Spring. Simon and Kirby had an eighth issue ready, but Prize never printed it.  When McCarthy died in 1957, he stayed dead too. Captain America rose a decade later, but he was a changed man. Marvel even declared that 1954 guy an impostor. Stan Lee said he wanted to express his own “ambivalent feelings” through the new Captain and “show that nothing is really all black and white.” Or white and Red.

If history repeats itself, superheroes will be a joke again soon. But first our contemporary McCarthies and their “stridently conservative scripting” would have to flop. The GOP’s polls plummeted after the shutdown, but Senator Cruz and his Tea Party cohorts look fine in their gerrymandered districts. According to his filibuster transcript, Cruz even believes he’s a member of the Rebel Alliance fighting the Evil Empire in Star Wars. It’s not a comic book, but the two-dimensional thinking is the same. The Tea Party is happy as long as they have that pinko Obama to bash in the name of the American way.
 

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The Hollywood Superhero vs. 9/11

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The culminating twist of Iron Man 3, declared Anthony Lane in The New Yorker, “signals both the making of Iron Man 3 and, with any luck, the possible unmaking of the genre.” It was an early review, so Lane had to be coy about specifics, but a few weeks and a few hundred million box office dollars later, we can take the spoiler gloves off and just say it:

“This war is not a means to any end but rather is the end in itself. Not only is it the end itself, but it is also its own fuel: it is precisely this endless war – justified in the name of stopping the threat of terrorism – that is the single greatest cause of that threat.”

Oh, wait, sorry, that’s not Iron Man 3. That’s Glenn Greenwald on Assistant Defense Secretary Michael Sheehan’s testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee that the twelve-year-old foreign policy franchise formerly known as the War on Terror has another two decades of sequels left in it.

What I meant to write is completely different. That Iron Man 3’s supervillianous corporate  technology genius invented his own Osama Bin Laden to mask his R&D and drive up government demand for his ever-expanding arsenal of military products, locking American and the rest of the planet in a self-perpetuating cycle of unwinnable war. But that’s just a movie. The kind that now pretty much defines the Hollywood blockbuster. Director Shane Black even goes the extra metafictional mile and includes the villain’s blue screen movie studio, the same corporate tech keeping Tony and his pals alive.

Iron Man and War Machine without the CGI

“From here on,” writes Lane, “the dumb-ass grandeur around which superheroic plots revolve can no longer be taken on trust.” Greenwald thinks the same about Obama. The war on terror, like the Hollywood superhero, will never end on its own because so many “factions reap a bonanza of benefits from its continuation.” Black lifts the edge of the curtain, but that glimpse will hardly unmake or even marginally slow the onslaught of forthcoming productions. Captain America 2 is shooting in D.C. as I type. That’s D.C., our nation’s capital, and so not technically a Warner Bros or Marvel Entertainment branch office.

The modern superhero movie first took flight in 1978 with Superman: The Movie (the subtitle says it all), with the total number of productions tipping just over forty in 2001. How many since 9/11?  Fifty. In less than half as many years. So, no, 9/11 is not the box office superhero’s origin story. It’s merely the transformative accident that doubled his powers. Like the Golden Age’s Blue Beetle. When his comic book incarnation debuted in pre-war 1939, the Beetle was just another mystery man in a domino mask and fedora. Listen to his first radio broadcast a worn-torn year later and the guy’s ingesting the power-inducing 2-X formula from his pharmacist mentor.

Novelist Austin Grossman recently told my Superheroes class that when he started writing his supervillain-narrated Soon I Will Be Invincible in 2001, he had to ask himself, “Am I just writing about a terrorist?” Austin’s brother, The Magicians author Lev Grossman, penned his own superheroic response, “Pitching 9/11.” The short story is a sequence of failed pitches for adapting 9/11 to screen. Here’s my favorite:

“Lonely, misunderstood Dominican elevator repairman (John Leguizamo?) finds himself trapped by fire after the second plane hits. In agony from the heat and smoke, near death from asphyxiation he jumps from the 83rd Floor. Instead of falling he hover in midair, then rockets upward. The trauma of the attack, and of his impending certain death, has awakened latent superpowers he never knew he had. A handful of others have undergone similar transformations—they hover in a cluster over the collapsing buildings, like so many swimmers treading water. As the roof sinks away below them into nothingness, they choose colorful pseudonyms and soar away together in formation to take vengeance on evil everywhere.”

Lev’s other pitches include scifi thriller, Discovery Channel documentary, and a filmed performance piece, but superheroes are the ready-made absurdity 9/11 was meant for. Diverting the path of an airliner? That’s a job for Superman. The pre-emptive prequel would star Batman. According to The 9/11 Commission Report, President Clinton was so annoyed with the lack of options for taking out Bin Laden he said to one ofhis generals: ‘You know, it would scare the shit out of al-Qaeda if suddenly a bunch of black ninjas rappelled out of helicopters into the middle of their camp.’”

Substitute “ninjas” with the superhero team of your choice and you’ve got your very own dumb-ass grandeur plot.  But according to Blake Snyder (a friend leant me a copy of his Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting That You’ll Ever Need), the Superhero genre isn’t just about “guys in capes and tights.” It’s what happens when an extraordinary person is stuck in an ordinary world. In addition to Bruce Wayne and the X-Men, Russell Crow’s Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind are his go-to examples of misunderstood Gullivers shackled by Lilluputians.

I’m more than a little skeptical about Snyder (he argues Miss Congeniality is a better film than Memento), but he has a point. Especially when it comes to U.S. foreign policy. Superheroes soared after 9/11 because Hollywood cast America as the planet’s mightiest super being and the rest of the word population as those moron Lilluputians willfully misunderstanding him. Weren’t they listening when Bush Sr. explained the New World Order?

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. was the lone superpower, to be loved and respected by a planet of grateful mortals. When some of those ingrates go and topple the Fortress of Solitude, what choice does America have but to declare a War on Lilluputianism? “It is hard to resist the conclusion that this war,” laments Greenwald, “has no purpose other than its own eternal perpetuation.”

But then in his own superheroic plot twist, Obama, days after his Assistant Defense Secretary was arguing for an unlimited renewal of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, declared: “This war, like all wars, must end.” The Associated Press boiled the President’s 7,000- word speech down to a sentence: “Barack Obama has all but declared an end to the global war on terror.”

Congress is balking of course. And so is our Democracy’s fourth branch of government, Hollywood. While Obama declares war on perpetual war, Marvel has two superhero franchises in post-production (Wolverine, Thor), three filming for 2014 release dates (Captain America, Spider-Man, X-Men), and another four announced for 2015 (Guardians of the Galaxy, Fantastic Four, Avengers, Ant-Man). Throw in the S.H.I.E.L.D. TV show that premieres next fall, and the superhero war isn’t dialing back—it’s surging.

But all those capes and tights flying across our screen have been an inverse shadow of real troops on the ground. So what happens when we finally leave Afghanistan? What happens if the drone war on al Qaeda really does die down? I’m no pre-cog, but the pop culture tea leaves are telling me 2015 will be the last big year for dumb-ass superhero grandeur. Though I wouldn’t underestimate Hollywood’s shapeshifting powers either. Both Iron Man 3 and Star Trek Into Darkness were already in theaters, literally blowing up their representations of the U.S. drone armada, when Obama dropped his own policy bomb of a speech.

Box office superheroes will endure. Just scaled back to their pre-9/11 levels, where they belong.