Red Dawn has been remade. The jingoistic, implausible American movie about the United States being invaded by the Soviets has been repackaged with North Koreans (substituting for the Chinese) invading the United States to steal everyone's guns and generally be dicks. In fact, it was remade several years ago but the movie has been sitting around on someone's shelf, and now it will finally be released to a dismal box office performance, critical thrashing and praise from unseemly quarters on the internet.
The trailer does not incline me to think that the movie will be anything but a disaster. Quoting my own remarks on YouTube, a considerable ammount of people will consider this movie to be a documentary. I especially enjoyed the American flag in the frame of the bad guy's planes dropping laughingly huge numbers of paratroopers. I suppose there wasn't enough time for the North Korean bad guy to eat and/or rape a puppy (not in that order, of course) but there's always the director's cut.
After this movie ingloriously crashes and burns, my expectation is that it will be considered a sign that the uber masclininity fostered during the eighties, when Americans were licking their emotional wounds from the disgrace of the Vietnam War and learned all the wrong lessons, namely that they needed to be super tough and that was why we lost to the goddamn Commies; and accelerated after 9/11, when the freedom-hating non-Christian foreigners attacked the sacred temple of American capitalism and Americans had to man up to bring freedom and capitalism to the Middle East, will finally have cratered. Unfortunately there will be enough people out there who will care to disagree.
On certain blogs and radio stations Red Dawn's failure will be attributed to squishy left wingers, or whatever the argument will be, the same way that Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 failed. I'm not going to counter the dubious supposition that America is fundamentally a conservative nation with the equally flawed proposal that in fact it is a left wing nation, but I think anyone who thinks that Red Dawn in some way reflects or is supported by some facet of America, its cultures or traditions or history, really needs to reexamine their premises.
Red Dawn has a spectacularly flawed concept: in addition to America's formidable military, the United States is geographically isolated enough to prevent easy invasion. At least the 1984 version was slightly more credible since the invading Soviets were augmented with Central American forces. Anyone who believes North Korea (as opposed to China, an equally unlikely opponent) is a clear and present danger to the security of the United States is mistaken (though it should not be underestimated as a regional security concern) and there isn't any any other country capable of fighting Americans on their own soil.
Conceptually that dosen't matter. The point is that Americans are defending their homes from the rampaging hordes---context is irrelevant, what is important are guns and a clear enemy to fire them at.
One of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games, the second I think (I have no desire in finding out) has the Russians invading America, inspired by Red Dawn. It is pandering to fantasies of half-understood memories of partianship and half-remembered stories of American patriots: the desire to redeclare American independence, though exactly against how is unclear. Muslims, certainly, but also Russians, who never got around to being nearly the threat alot of Americans would have liked them to have been. A confused, bloody snarl at the country's illusory enemies.
Its been a decade since 9/11 and the unsuccessful wars that followed it. For much of that time alot of pop culture, mostly video games though to a lesser extent movie and TV, has been devoted to following the military, and for too many anything less than uncritical praise would be construed as American-hating defeatism.
We are living in trying times, especially in the United States. While there is alot to dislike about Barack Obama's handling of the various problems facing the United States (namely, his timidity and circumspectness, and at times unwillingness to act like a left-winger), I truly believe that alot of the opposition is not based on common sense. Obama has tried to address America's problems like a grownup, and alot of people think that they are only a hearbeat away from the jackbooted thugs from kicking down their doors and dragging them off to the reeducation camps.
Thankfully, the United States is moving away from what I consider to be its worst impulses and towards a broader, more tolerant, more compassionate society. Would that it get there quicker and more effectively, but that is a matter to speak of later. Alot of people are scared of that: they remember a simpler time when white people and well behaved black people dominated, grounded half in the Fifties and half in the Eighties. Anything else scares them.
On my birthday a bigot went on a rampage against people who did nothing to deserve it; and following the Aurora shooting panicked Coloradans purchased as many guns as they could, exactly the wrong reaction. Red Dawn reflects a pernicious strain of thought in the United States, one that is slowly unravelling. Its going to take another decade at least culturally for Americans to move on, hopefully wiser, from the miasma of the 80s-00s mindset. Its going to be a long and bloody fight.
Its going to get worse before it gets better, and I sincerley hope the body count is as low as possible.
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