“Wolverines!”

There are some welcome ideological surprises lurking within the script’s 104 pages.  Shockingly, Hollywood actually seems to accept the premise that if the Chinese and Russkies invade the United States we are justified in fighting back with hot lead instead of teach-ins and choruses of Kumbayah.  But the script also displays a bit of the moral illiteracy we’ve come to expect from the Hollywoodoids – naturally, the script has to imply that we kinda brought the invasion on ourselves and that resisting tyranny somehow means becoming just as bad as the tyrants.

The re-imagining of Red Dawn will be released later this year and does very little actual re-imagining of the original’s simple plot.  We first meet some all-American teenagers.  They play high school football, party, and talk and look like CW series cast members – not real bright, but pretty (the pretty part in the script).  For some reason, the Soviets (replaced here by the Chinese with a Russian assist) invade America and seize their hometown.  Their town’s tactical significance appears to be that invading it advances the plot.  Anyway, the teenagers go up into the mountains, score some of the firearms our prescient Founders ensured we’d always have the right to keep and bear despite the best efforts of those gun control-loving wusses, and launch a bloody guerrilla war against the invaders. 

Sure, that sounds awesome in theory, but John Milius’s original Red Dawn was – well, let me be diplomatic – probably one of the silliest movies ever made.  And I loved it.  When you combine killing communists with unbelievable camp – like the teen warriors’ giggle-inducing battle cry of “Wolverines!” and Harry Dean Stanton’s memorable scene that ends with him hollering “Avenge me!” – and then add some beer, you’ve got one hell of an awesome time at the movies.  In the quarter century since its release, it’s inspired a cult following.  A young captain even adapted the title as the name of the Army operation that rounded up the late, unlamented Saddam Hussein.

Now, I’m not here to evaluate the aesthetic worthiness of Carl Ellsworth’s script.  I’ll leave that task to someone with the expertise to properly critique its unique aesthetic qualities – like noted reviewer Hackey von Hackenheimer.  I will say that Ellsworth must have sat through a few of those screenwriting seminars because you can set your watch by the predictable action beats (“Hmmm, we’re three quarters through the script, so time for Act III to begin:  {*types into FinalDraft 8*} ‘MCGUFFIN ENTERS and provides motivation for climactic battle sequence.’”)

Let’s just say you won’t walk out of the theater feeling that your prior conception of what “cinema” is has been radically redefined.

—–

Of course, there’s no Patrick Swayze here.  Boo.  And the new Red Dawn also unforgivably omits the cry of “Avenge me!” in favor of a much lamer substitute.  Those interested in specifics of the plot, such as it is, can peruse this spoiler-filled synopsis.  As John Nolte memorably put it, we’re here to spot the liberal sucker punches for you, not to reveal fanboy-centric plot points like whether Boba Fett’s helmet will be dented on the right side or the left side.

The hero is Jed, probably because Hollywoodoids think everyone who lives east of the I-5 is named “Jed,” or possibly “Zachariah” or “Cletus.”  Jed is a 22-year old Marine who has come home after fighting in Iraq.  I guess the fact that he’s not portrayed as a raving psycho counts as something like progress.  The script’s view of Iraq is ambiguous, as demonstrated by Jed’s exchange with a local hick who incoherently swings between gung ho belligerence and neo-isolationist cliches. 

Returning vets do get into those kinds of conversations, but it’s usually with Blue State quarter-wits sounding off with Mother Jones talking points.  Whatever – we should just be grateful Jed doesn’t launch into a speech about how Bu$hitler lied and his buddies died, or how Dick Cheney, in association with the Carlyle Group, hid WMDs in oil wells to raise Haliburton’s stock price.

There are a couple of nice scenes.  Early on, the escapees get to a cabin and decide to arm themselves with the firearms stored there.  The script does not see this as odd or unusual – it rightly assumes that every American should always ensure his or her ready access to weapons in order to be able to do their duty and defend their society in time of emergency.  However, the cabin’s owner had failed to stockpile a sufficient amount of ammunition, and the script properly points out this major lapse.  All real Americans should always be ready with adequate supplies of arms and ammunition – after all, “Bang” is the sound an American makes while maintaining this country’s freedom. 

Jed trains up his guerrillas and they start killing the Chinese occupiers.  That’s cool.  Some might scoff at the notion that a bunch of armed rural folks could have any effect against a professional army.  I would note the fact that we don’t speak with an English accent and enjoy our beer cold rather than warm and by the pint.  I would also note the example of a Finnish hunter who personally took out at least 705(!) Russian soldiers, and observe that deer are harder to hit than people.  Now, the training scenes are a bit perfunctory (I’d have gone for an 80s-style musical montage myself) and the “Wolverines” go from high school kids to steely-eyed killers pretty quickly – though they sure babble about their feelings a lot.   A lot.

There is also a rudimentary explanation of the theory of insurgency – Ellsworth rightly does not seem to think his kids can win by literally forcing the stronger enemy to flee by inflicting damage, rather than by forcing their departure by setting conditions among the populace that make further occupation too painful to bear.  Guerrillas who get in stand-up firefights with counter-insurgents tend to become dead guerrillas. 

And there’s a refreshing take on the proper response to those foreigners who murder Americans – the script actually agrees that you fight back and kill them.  I wish I could share the exact quote, but just seeing that sentiment on the page of a Hollywood script is a revelation.  Did someone at a Rodeo Drive bistro secretly spike Ellsworth’s Pellegrino with Awesome Coolness Pills, because Hollywood needs more of that kind of clarity and old-fashioned can-do.  I need a cigarette after reading something like that.

It’s not all awesome.  There are a couple of throw-away lines where the Chinese invasion is explained, in part, by the massive liberal-spending binge debt we owe them.  There are lots of reasons to worry about foreign debt; I’m not sure the threat of repossession is one of them.  The explanation for how the wily, inscrutable Asian enemy (and the script does portray them as wily and inscrutable) pulled off the invasion is pretty lame too. 

Also, there’s an unintentionally hilarious scene where the junior varsity guerrillas get a drop on some US commandos, the leader of which introduces himself as a lieutenant in the Delta Force.  Ummm.  Well, that bunch does not take inexperienced lieutenants.  And they don’t tell outsiders they are from “Delta Force.”  And pulling an AK-47 on one of those guys is a good way to get a 7.62mm suppository – if you’re lucky.

There are no real sucker punches, but there is at least a sucker tap.  The script really falls down on the job toward the middle, where Jed momentarily devolves into the kind of dork who spews the type of moral equivalence that might seem profound to a pampered UC Berkeley sophomore but that is, in reality, really stupid. 

He whines that because he’s using guerrilla tactics that he is now just like the jihadi scumbags he fought in Iraq.  His girlfriend Toni inarticulately disagrees.  This is supposed to be a moving moment, but it only served to move my lunch back up my esophagus.

The character of “Toni” should have smacked some sense into Jarhead Jed since the script didn’t have his drill sergeant around to do it.

You know, the audience is watching an uplifting and inspirational tale of shooting communists and all of a sudden this nonsense pops up.  Just stop.  Let’s try another example.  Nazis liked oxygen.  Hey, Americans like oxygen too!  Ergo, Hitler and Americans are the same, right?  Nimrods.  The fact that we kill bad people for killing us does not make us bad too.  For the perpetual sophomores out there, the test of the morality of a conflict is the cause you fight for; the tools you use are largely irrelevant.  American bayonet – good.  Nazi bayonet – bad.  I blame the public schools for this kind of nonsense and muddled reasoning – the “critical thinking” they purport to teach is actually anything but. 

Let’s clarify for those who remain unclear – the act of shooting, blowing up, bludgeoning or otherwise eliminating those who threaten and murder Americans is an unambiguously good thing. What al Qaeda terrorists, Taliban, Shiite militias, Republican Guards, Viet Cong, North Koreans, Nazis, Imperial Japanese soldiers and their ilk feel or felt deeply in their little hearts and warped minds about their various causes is irrelevant and unworthy of attention — except to the extent that understanding their thought processes facilitates defeating them.  Their destruction was and is a moral necessity and unquestionably morally right; their fighting Americans was and is unquestionably morally wrong.  Always.  End of story. 

Any questions?  No?  Good. 

However, the script is admirably forthright on how best to deal with American traitors and collaborators.  Let’s just say due process comes quickly and in pistol form.  That’s refreshing.  As a lawyer, I appreciate trials and such, but as someone who has known folks killed and wounded by such bastards, my perspective is different.

It’s nice to see that in Red Dawn, Hollywood is at least inching toward ideological sanity.  The Americans are the good guys.  The people trying to kill the Americans are the bad guys.  In this way, if in no other, the new Red Dawn is just like real life.

–

This “noble savage” archetype, embraced by the romantic primativists of the past and today by those who stopped their intellectual development as UC Berkeley sophomores, has been around for centuries.  In Avatar, James Cameron substitutes his blue-skinned Na’vi aliens for American Indians and it’s off to the races with Seen That Before taking an early lead and Gimme A Break a close second. 

Now, the purpose of this cliché is to critique Western culture by comparing the culture of the children-of-the-Earth, in-touch-with-nature, “authentic” natives with the hero’s repressed, emotionally-stunted, alienated-from-nature, technology-obsessed Western culture.  This cliché requires that the natives be portrayed as paragons of moral and physical perfection – and that those of the hero’s culture be shown as just the opposite. 

But in doing so, filmmakers necessarily infantilize the natives.  To portray any group as flawless is to make them something other than human – they stop being individuals and start being caricatures instead of characters, symbols instead of people.  American Indians, contrary to the old Hollywood stereotype, were not just bloodthirsty savages.  But in contrast to the new Hollywood stereotype, neither were they just paragons of virtue.  Instead, they are human beings, with strengths and weaknesses – but treating them like human beings doesn’t help the agenda so their humanity must be sacrificed on the altar of political expedience.

The other problem is that embracing the cliché means ducking the hard questions.  In Avatar, apparently civilization will end if the humans do not get the minerals beneath the Na’vi land.  So, is Cameron’s view that we should just sit back and die as penance for despoiling the Earth?  He doesn’t dare answer that question.  Certainly many of the climate change scammers would be thrilled to see our civilization crumble as punishment for our refusal to shiver in the cold and darkness of their Luddite utopia, but most of us don’t embrace the notion that our only moral course of action is ritual suicide. 

Filmmakers can decry the conquest of North America, but they never actually grapple with the implications of their position.  Would they really prefer the Europeans had lost?  The brutal struggle between Native Americans and the Europeans had plenty of atrocities on both sides, but the world is enormously better off by the rise of the United States and Canada.  Would Cameron have it otherwise?  Well, at least we wouldn’t have to put up with the hype about Avatar.

What is also interesting is how this view simultaneously slags our culture and that of the indigenous people.  It holds that our culture must somehow be controlled, regulated and constrained in order to control these horrible capitalist/military tendencies.  Clearly, this is a job for our liberal overlords.  But the natives themselves, being innocent children, must likewise be protected and overseen.  Why, that’s also a job for our liberal overlords.  Funny how giving liberals more power to control people’s lives always seems to be the answer no matter what the question is.

And we’ve seen the practical consequences of this attitude suffered by the American Indians.  The liberal prescription during the last century was to bureaucratize the reservations, creating what James Watt memorably called “an example of the failure of socialism.”  The only thing that got the liberals madder than Watt’s accurate assessment is the fact that many tribes have finally found the prosperity they deserve thanks to capitalism – their casinos are a wonderful example of prospering by finding a need and filling it.  

Now, simply because a Western character encounters members of a non-Western culture does not necessarily trigger the cliché.  Lawrence of Arabia was the true story of an Englishman’s work with Arab tribesmen during World War I.  It hardly portrayed the Arabs as perfect – in fact, much of the film’s conflict revolved around their failings.   

Other films use Western characters solely as eyes to allow the audience to see into the native culture.  In Zulu the European missionary is merely an observer as the Zulus prepare for battle.  His dialogue with his daughter and interaction with the warriors provide the viewer information, but in no way does he have any influence on the situation.  Of course, the Zulus did not need any help – they were one of the few native peoples to ever fight a large Western force and win.

In Avatar, the white guy (representing Western civilization) coming along to save the natives meme is particularly heavy-handed, but then the movie is hardly subtle about anything.  His natives aren’t noble savages; they’re just noble.  We’re the savages.  But we savages are also the noble natives’ only hope.  Or something like that.  

But trying to decode the mixed messages of movies like Avatar will only give you a migraine.  So save yourself some time and some Tylenol – just accept that Western civilization is the root of all evil and the message will have come through loud and clear.

Many feel this ballad is a touching hymn that gives voice to man’s yearning for a better world.  They are wrong.  “Imagine” is a cloying, boggy, sonic swamp of numb-skulled sentiments that sound like they were recycled from a bong-fueled, 2 a.m. bull session between a couple of pampered, credulous UC Berkeley lit majors.  It’s the national anthem of the hopey/changey crowd — all at once pretentious, smug, tiresome and intellectually bankrupt. 

“Imagine” should – no, must – be banned and all remaining copies of it destroyed.  Its continued existence makes mankind a stupider, more boring race.

Some shortsighted people might consider this assessment a bit harsh.  They are wrong.  Sure, it was a hit in 1971 and still today Imagine remains a radio staple.  It has sold millions of copies and inspired a legion of cover versions.  Rolling Stone even ranked it third on its roster of the Greatest Songs of All Time.

But these are not testimony to the song’s transcendent quality.  They are signs of the apocalypse.

The song begins with a dull piano chord progression that telegraphs to the listener that Something Waaay Profound is in-bound.  Then Lennon’s atonal voice pipes up.  Let’s leave aside the lyrics for a second – he sounds awful, like some over-earnest troubadour trying too hard to impress the four friends he guilted into coming out on a Wednesday to see him play his new tune over at the Common Grounds coffee house’s weekly open mike.

It’s so ponderous and booorrrinng, seeming to go on forever.  It’s the musical equivalent of passing a kidney stone, only not as much fun.

What was Phil Spector, who produced this mess, thinking?  Right now, he ought to be thinking that “Imagine” was the second biggest mistake of his life.

And the lyrics – give me a break.  Never have so many fawned so shamelessly over such utter nonsense.

The first lines are: “Imagine there’s no heaven/it’s easy if you try.”  No, it isn’t, because if there’s no heaven then there’s no hell, and we know that there’s a hell because when this song is playing we’re in it.

And how about “Imagine all the people/Living for today?”  Yeah, he’s put his finger on our problem – too many people planning ahead and preparing for the future.  This is the kind of powerful, incisive reasoning that led a guy who could take his pick of pretty much any woman in the world to shack up with Yoko Ono.  Let me put it another way for emphasis – this guy chose to see Yoko Ono naked.  Many times.  The only response to someone with that kind of judgment is to listen carefully to what he says and then do the exact opposite.

There’s also the gratuitous commie babbling:  “Imagine no possessions/I wonder if you can/No need for greed or hunger/A brotherhood of man/Imagine all the people/Sharing all the world.”  To quote a better song by the infinitely more talented Frank Zappa, a man with an admirable lack of patience for such treacle, gag me with a spoon.

I’m not sure of the Lennon timeline, but didn’t he write this nonsense about the same time he ditched England because of the tax bite he was taking to help pay for its socialist welfare state?  Sure, depriving a rapacious lefty government of revenue by moving to someplace with a more sensible tax rate is clearly the morally correct thing to do, but isn’t the transparent hypocrisy of this poser a bit much to stomach?

And if all that’s not insipid enough, we also get:  “You may say that I’m a dreamer/But I’m not the only one.”  Oh, please.

The most galling thing about “Imagine” is how it urges the listener to assume the mantle of that “dreamer,” thereby joining the ranks of the free spirits, bohemians and other assorted loafers, chislers and social parasites who are only too happy to belly up to the table that is our society but who are nowhere to be found when the check arrives:

“Sorry, I can’t be bothered to work to build something or to fight to defend anything – you see, I’m a dreamer, so you just let me know when you’ve gotten everything ready for me to enjoy.  Until then, I’ll be here relaxing on my parents’ sofa, pretending to read Gravity’s Rainbow. ”

The only bright spot is that so few folks actually seem to pay attention to its inane lyrics.  How else could one explain American Idol’s David Archuleta, the all-American Mormon kid, covering an ode to atheism that even Lennon conceded was pretty close to being the Communist Manifesto set to music?  Simon Cowell should have slapped him.  Several times.

Fortunately, there’s plenty of music out there that rejects this kind of hippie crap.  Sadly, for every one kid whose mind is opened by, say, The Clash or Husker Du, dozens more will sit slack-jawed and nodding vacantly at the moron-bait songs like “Imagine” dangle in front of them.

For me, I smile when I imagine a world without “Imagine.”  I guess that would make me a dreamer, except I have a job.

Note:  No, I do not actually think that George W. Bush was a war criminal. Even though I was undercover, I felt dirty just wearing the shirt.