Reinterpreting Red Dawn
This Brad Delong post about the new conservative WaPo blogger (?) and his love for the "greatest pro-gun film of all time" raises an interesting question. Of course, many, many people will remember the film, Red Dawn, in which a team of red-blooded American high school students fight the Red Army and their Cuban allies in a guerrilla war in the Rocky Mountain states, after a Soviet invasion of the U.S. Now, this film was a kind of rightwing porn for the Reagan years--the Commies arrested people based on the gun registration and license lists at the hardware store and set up re-education camps at drive-ins.
But, given the current state of things in Iraq, don't we have to re-interpret the actions of the high schoolers ("Wolverines!")? I mean, I watched the movie about a month ago--I admit it, I'm a sick man, but it was on cable, what was I to do?--and it sure looked to me like those high schoolers were gutless cowards, unwilling to take on the Red Army head-on, and thus hiding in the shadows, even as a kind of, er, "insurgency," planting booby traps--we didn't know the term IED back in the Reagan years--blowing up a Soviet recreation facility, etc. I mean, that's terrorism, isn't it?
OK, sure, the Soviets had invaded the United States, so I guess that makes it OK for the Americans to mount an insurgency. No, wait, that can't make it OK.
Like I said: the rightwing fantasy turned rightwing nightmare.
posted by Number Three @ 6:50 PM
1 Comments:
Oh no he ditint!
Listen, dude, I'll let you get away with a lot of things. But not this. You will not dis RD.
Having not had the benefit of living in the United States when the movie came out - or of ever being a nerd - I never did understand that it was rightwing porn, I just knew that me and every other kid I went to school with loved the hell out of it. Now maybe it was because the sound of jet fighters (actually, at that time they were A-10's, which aren't really jets in the way that F-16s and F-15s are with their loud-as-hell afterburners; the warthogs have more of a high pitched whine) puncutated my sleep, school and recreation time, but I don't think so. I think it was true of most adolescent boys, regardless of where they were in proximity to the military. (As it turns out, later references in college confirmed that every male I knew had a strong affinity for the movie. Again, I will admit that this didn't include over-analyzing nerds, a species I only came to know, and in a couple of instances like, in law school.)
I thought of RD the other day when I was reading a story and it mentioned C. Thomas Howell. In the parenthesis next to his name it, as articles sometimes do, gave a movie title so that readers could put a face with the name. I actually became irritated when I saw the movie title: Soul Man. I mean, Soul Man? Is that a joke? He was Robert, for God's sake. Robert, whose parents are killed for 'aiding guerrillas.' Robert who carves into the butt of his shotgun a slash for every person he's killed and when Powers Boothe says "all that hate's going to burn you up, kid," he replies that it keeps him warm. Robert, the only Wolverine who has the balls to kill a fellow group member who betrayed them. Robert, who squares off against one of those scary looking Soviet helicopters with an RPG (and is then killed by it when the RPG is ineffective). Soul Man? Gimme a break.
As you probably guess I could go on at length about the movie but that would be silly. (Jennifer Grey before her nose job! Lea Thompson before Michael J. Fox! Charlie Sheen before hookers!)
Instead I'll just mention this.
The "insurgency" in Red Dawn is not the result of a simple invasion (a surreptitious invasion, you'll remember, that started when commandos took over commercial airliners and flew into the US on the sly). It was not even the result of the Soviet/Cuban paratroopers shooting everyone they could in the high school they landed on. It was the result of the Soviets lining up a group of American citizens and gunning them down after they forced them to dig their own graves.
The behavior of the Americans in Iraq, no matter what lense you look through, is nothing like that of the Soviets in the Red Dawn.
I know all your smart friends will make fun of you for watching that movie (which is why you felt the need to apologize) but you don't have to hide it from me. It's okay to admit that part of you still likes some adolescent boy stuff. Until you subscribe to Maxim; and then it's not okay.
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