Tag Archives: Red Dawn

We Live Here

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I’m not generally inclined to like right wing agitprop. Olympus Has Fallen and London Has Fallen were some of the worst films I’ve ever seen; cheerfully swaggering calls to genocide, unrelieved by either intelligence or any conviction beyond, “blow up those non-white people, yeeha!” Their bland irresponsibility was only rivaled by their cynical opportunism; the first used North Korea rather than China as the villain because the Chinese market means we have to pretend we don’t hate the people from that part of the world; the second deployed Morgan Freeman as vice president to show that non-white people are okay as long as they’re played by perennial comforting side-kick black person Morgan Freeman.

On the surface, Red Dawn, from 1984, is in the same vein as these turkeys. As in Olympus Has Fallen, the U.S. suffers an invasion—not from North Korea, but from Cubans and Russians raiding middle America from Mexico. And as in Olympus Has Fallen, the exciting fantasy is to see righteous Americans kicking the invaders butts. It’s all turning America into the scrappy underdog resisting oppression, a paranoid wish-fulfillment/fever dream in which someone does to the US what the US is always doing to everyone else, allowing us to expiate our guilty consciences in an orgy of xenophobic violence.

What makes Red Dawn different, though, is the ruthless, tragic vision. Olympus Has Fallen is a cheerful empowerment fantasy for macho imperialists; the heroes are a virile secret service agent and the American president. And the good guys unequivocally win; it’s a rousing ode to the awesomeness of coastal elites and the national security state. The right people are in the right place, and they’ll kick some terrorist ass.

Red Dawn, though, really thinks that the United States is on the verge of collapse. The heroes here aren’t the national security personnel, who, from the little we hear of them, are distant and probably incompetent. Rather, the protagonists are a group of high school football dudes—a scared, battered band who survive on team slogans (“Wolverines!”) and tearful determination.

The whole thing is preposterous, of course—the idea that the Cubans somehow gain immediate air superiority is as goofy as the fact that the Wolverine resistance fighters appear to have a virtually limitless supply of high tech weaponry. But the melodramatic details have the vivid, dumb terror of overdetermined nightmare. The way the black history teacher —the only black man in the film—is the first one shot by the enemy; the grizzled dad telling his boys through the concentration camp wire that he was tough on them in anticipation of just such a Communist invasion; the NRA sign declaring that you’ll remove my gun from my cold dead hand, flashed right before one of the Commies removes a gun from some poor bastard’s cold dead hand.

What makes the film, I think, is the yearning—for justification, for apotheosis, for death. People talk about liberal guilt, but I’ve never seen a film so utterly sodden in maudlin self-loathing, like a sentient sponge adrift in the stale beer of bad conscience. From the reflexive, furtive references to Native Americans to the Cuban officer recalling his own days as a partisan, America’s history of imperial atrocity wafts over the Wolverines like a ragged, hacking football cheer. The heroic deaths, one by one, seem both expiation and justification. When Patrick Swayze is asked what’s the difference between them and us he declares “we live here!” before standing by as one of his teen soldiers shoots another to death for treachery. That’s a pretty forthright stand against imperialism—or a forthright, desperate declaration that good football players like Swayze are incapable of imperialism, as the case may be.

Olympus Has Fallen is happy with the status quo; it just wants the same Americans to triumph who always triumph, with maybe a few more explosions and dead bodies thrown in. Red Dawn, on the other hand, is about an American heartland that feels both alienated from and implicated in power, and sees the only honorable resolution in apocalypse. It’s America’s death wish on screen, the last stand of god-fearing freedom lovers, knee deep in blood, building their own gulag.

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.

Return of the Yellow Peril

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The Yellow Peril is an old frienemy of ours. We officially made its acquaintance for the first time at the end of the nineteenth century, when the catchy comic book villain-esque name was coined as a popular term for underpaid Chinese laborers in the United States, playing on the fear that an influx of Asian immigrants would destroy Western civilization and values. The phrase came back swinging roughly half a century later, during World War II. This time, of course, the Yellow Peril was Japanese. The basic story remained the same, though, painting people of color – specifically those of Asian descent – as an inscrutable and exotic threat to the “true” America, otherwise known as white America. And stories, as we know, have consequences. Fear of the Yellow Peril fueled the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which placed some of the heaviest bans on free immigration in U.S. history. That same brand of fear inspired the internment of more than 100,000 Americans in 1942 – for the great and terrible crime of being born with Japanese ancestry.
 

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Phil May, The Mongolian Octopus

 

Fast forward to the twenty-first century. November 2012 saw the release of action-adventure blockbuster Red Dawn, the thrilling tale of evil North Korean terrorists invading an American town, where they’re fought off by a bunch of white kids. Barely four months later, in March 2013, the theaters treated us to Olympus Has Fallen, the thrilling tale of evil North Korean terrorists invading the White House, where they’re fought off by the white President and his white Secret Service buddy.

Now, this narrative premise – although a bit tired and recycled by now – isn’t inherently a bad one. The Korean War, a distant memory for most Americans, is technically still alive and well on the Korean penninsula. The past year has seen some alarmingly aggressive rhetoric from Pyongyang, culminating in its third nuclear test in February 2013, along with threats of military action against both its South Korean neighbor and the United States. The art of storytelling – whether on paper, stage, or the silver screen – makes an excellent vehicle for examining the nuances and complexities of real life tensions, and the current North Korean government definitely serves up plenty of fodder for discussion.

The trouble is, movies like Red Dawn and Olympus Has Fallen aren’t interested in nuances or complexities. They just want to rehash the tale of the Yellow Peril for a modern audience, and North Korea makes a convenient vehicle. A secretive totalitarian state with nominal Communist sensibilities and nuclear ambitions? It’s practically a Hollywood wet dream. Never mind that even fueled by its pervasively militaristic culture, North Korea’s standing army remains both under-trained and under-equipped. Never mind that the North Korean governments’s infamous human rights abuses – ranging from slave labor to public executions – have been overwhelmingly directed toward actual North Korean people, not foreign enemies. Never mind that North Korea can barely afford to feed itself, and in fact relies heavily on aid from the U.S., South Korea, Japan, and a plethora of other foreign nations, just to stave off starvation. North Korea is far from the friendliest kid on the international block, but the vast majority of victims on the receiving end of North Korea-related atrocities aren’t American, or even South Korean. They’re North Korean.

You wouldn’t know any of that, from watching either of these movies. The North Korean antagonists are monstrously powerful, utterly unrepentent, and have somehow magically gained the resources overnight to go from starving and insular to suddenly, invading Washington, D.C. with top-of-the-line weapons tech. You’d think that – having apparently unearthed the goose that lays the golden egg – their first order of business would be to fix that pesky yet rampant malnourishment problem, but Hollywood logic will be Hollywood logic.

Now, Hollywood has never exactly been a beacon of accuracy. We go to the movies for entertainment, and if entertainment means larger-than-life fight sequences and gun fu, so be it. But there’s a difference between handwaving the laws of physics and promoting white nativism and race-based fearmongering. These are the facts: the main heroes of both Red Dawn and Olympus Has Fallen are white, and the villains are people of color. The heroes are played, respectively, by Chris Hemsworth and Gerard Butler. The villains are played, respectively, by Will Yun Lee and Rick Yune.

Here’s the thing. Chris Hemsworth is Australian. Gerard Butler is Scottish. Meanwhile, Will Yun Lee and Rick Yune? Both born and bred Americans. In a movie that’s all about patrotism and standing up for the United States, we’ve got the hometown heroes played by foreigners and the villainous invaders played by Americans. That in itself might not be so bad – after all, stepping into someone else’s shoes is what actors are paid to do, and Butler and Hemsworth wouldn’t be the first to play outside their nationalities – except that the lines are drawn so very starkly. Asian-Americans don’t exist in the world of these movies. No, Red Dawn and Olympus Has Fallen teach us that real American heroes are white, even when they spend the whole movie awkwardly trying to conceal non-American accents. On the other hand, if you’re Asian, you’re obviously some inscrutable foreign Other, concerned with nothing but tearing down the good old USA. At best, you might be a really sneaky evil Asian guy pretending to be a nice Asian ally – a la Rick Yune the North Korean terrorist posing as a South Korean diplomat – but by the end of the film, you’ll inevitably show your true colors as a scary anti-American evil-doer of supervillainous proportions.

Ironically, the recent release that arguably best deconstructs the problems with the whole “beware the non-Caucasian” narrative is a fellow member of the action-adventure genre – and initially looked like it had all the trappings of yet another Yellow Peril film. Iron Man 3 hit theaters in May 2013, a couple months after Olympus Has Fallen, and featured the villain known as – you guessed it – the Mandarin. Here we go again, we thought. We all saw the previews of half-Indian Ben Kingsley in the samurai topknot and the ambiguously foreign-looking robe, playing the ambiguously brown terrorist. We braced ourselves. What else were we supposed to expect?

Except, it turns out, the Mandarin is a sham. The Mandarin persona is quite literally the creation of Aldrich Killian, the true antagonist of the piece: a white guy who invents a fictional, scary brown villain – complete with a hodgepodge set of “Oriental” iconography and props – so that Killian himself can profit from the ensuing public panic. It’s a deliciously meta-filled plot twist straight out of Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism, published in 1979, in which the Palestinian-American scholar wrote, “The imaginative examination of all things Oriental was based more or less exclusively upon a sovereign Western consciousness out of whose unchallenged centrality an Oriental world arose.” In short, says Said, the idea of the “Orient” – that unfathomable, exotic Other – is nothing but a fanciful product of Western imagination.

The Mandarin of Iron Man 3 is the Orient personified. Like the cartoonish North Korean villains of Red Dawn and Olympus Has Fallen, he’s an elusive fiction who inspires fear and panic, but to no productive end. Similarly, in the wake of Dawn and Olympus, we saw such gems on Twitter as, “I now hate all Chinese, Japanses, Asian, Korean people. Thanks” and “Just saw Olympus has fallen. I wanna go buy a gun and kill every fucking Asian.” Those tweets are just the tip of the iceberg. There are hundreds – maybe more – comments just like them, all spouting the same antipathy toward anyone who might trace their heritage to the other side of the Pacific. Spelling and grammar issues aside, these reactions point to a disturbing trend of xenophobia, jingoism, and ultimately, ignorance-fueled racism.
That’s not patriotism. That’s hate. We may be more than fifty years past Japanese-American internment, and more than a century past the Chinese Exclusion Act, but we obviously haven’t moved past the myth of the Yellow Peril. Korean-American actor John Cho, of Harold and Kumar and Star Trek fame, has remarked, “It’s very difficult to find an original thinker in terms of casting when you’re talking about race at all. And really, although more egregious versions of Asians have fallen by the wayside and become unfashionable, new Asian stereotypes [continue to] pop up.”

Given the political climate on today’s world stage, a North Korea-centric film isn’t necessarily a bad idea. A thoughtful, well-written, and well-performed North Korea movie – rather than fueling ignorance, which fuels fear – has the potential to enlighten and educate the American public on a real and pertinent topic. Such a film could, moreover, easily contain a place for Asian-American heroes, shelving that damaging, long-overused “white man versus the man of color” trope, in favor of something fresher, bolder, and ultimately, a far more interesting tale to tell.

We need stories that speak to a broader American identity, reminding us that we are a nation of immigrants, that so many of us began as the poor, the tired, the huddled masses, before finding our way home to American shores. We need stories that remind us that the “true” America isn’t just white; it’s white and brown and black and yellow and red and a technicolor mix of everything in between, a country full of hyphen identities and roots stretching far across the globe. It’s a legacy of diversity that infuses our cultural traditions with richer flavors, and offers us the gift of variety. And in today’s world, where globalization pushes the borders of disparate cultures closer and closer together, we – with our varied roots, our many languages and entwined histories – are uniquely placed to communicate across those borders. We are in a position not merely to tolerate that which is different, but to understand it. We are in a position to offer empathy instead of fear. That’s not something that deserves our scorn and resentment. That’s something that deserves our pride.