Last week, because it was the 4th of July and because we’re such red-blooded, flag-lapel-pin-wearing patriots, we here at the Screengrab celebrated some of our all-time favorite Pro-America movies. And the week before that, because we’re also dirty rotten elitist commie pinkos, we focused on movies that dared to criticize the American Empire. And now, to complete our nationalist trifecta, we examine a third type of film: movies that are designed to make the U.S. look kick-ass, but actually wind up making us look kinda lame-ass.
THE PATRIOT (2000)
That great American Roland Emmerich first treated us to his overblown brand of Fourth of July fireworks in Independence Day, but that little-seen arthouse curiosity is covered later in the list. In The Patriot, Emmerich jumps back in time a couple hundred years to show us the true meaning of Independence Day. Which is, of course, the kicking of major British ass. Mel Gibson plays a wealthy southern landowner with no slaves who goes all Mad Max 1776 when the redcoats burn down his house and kill various members of his family. Arming his two youngest boys with rifles and himself with as many guns, knives and hatchets as he can carry, Gibson sets out to liberate his oldest son from the Brits who have seized him. The ensuing slaughter is shockingly savage for a summer popcorn flick, and for a moment you think the movie might actually be interested in exploring some areas of moral ambiguity. The moment passes. Emmerich isn't interested in any of the actual root causes of the Revolution; this world-changing event serves as mere window-dressing for a routine revenge thriller – an excuse for some flag-waving rah-rah to jack up the stakes and make The Patriot seem like it's about something.
COBRA (1986)
A perennial plank in every political campaign is law & order; no matter how low the statistics actually get, voters rank crime as one of their top concerns in every public opinion poll. Unfortunately, the law & order platform usually has an ugly side, and this movie couldn’t have been a more jaw-dropping cautionary tale about the dangers of a brutally empowered police force if it was actually trying to be. In 1986, post-Rambo and at the peak of his popularity, Sylvester Stallone starred in and wrote the screenplay to Cobra, in which he played the black-clad, submachinegun-toting police officer Marion Cobretti, opposing a shadowy outfit called the New Order, who you might think wanted to play gloomy, depressing post-punk songs at everyone in America, but in fact were even worse: they wanted to overthrow democracy and institute the rule of the strong over the weak. Deciding to beat them at their own game, Cobretti simply cruises around Los Angeles, dressed like a gay Nazi biker and, dispensing with democratic fripperies like due process and prohibitions against cruelty, simply massacres every criminal unlucky enough to wander into his sights. Torturing, burning, gutting, and gunning down dozens of people throughout the course of the movie, Stallone managed to alienate even some of his die-hard fans: while the movie made decent money and temporarily knocked Top Gun out of the #1 slot, a decent number of filmgoers as well as critics found its vision of law & order America as a place where the cops acted as little more than roving death squads pretty repugnant.
APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)
Francis Ford Coppola, debuting Apocalypse Now at the Cannes Film Festival, famously said, “My film is not about Vietnam; it is Vietnam.” And like Vietnam, it is something too sprawling, too massive, too chaotic and complicated to be assessed in a few simple sentences. At turns it seems heartily pro-war and virulently anti-war; it conveys the insanity of the entire interventionist approach while still seeming to lay the blame on soft, coddled grunts and incompetent civilians. This inherent contradiction isn’t just circumstantial: it arises from the fundamental clash of worldviews between the director and the screenwriter. John Milius, the writer of the original script, meant it to be simultaneously a rebuke to what he perceived as the weakness and unrealistic expectations of anti-war protestors and a celebration of the virtues of the warrior spirit. Much of this approach survives in the finished film, especially in the diffident portrayal of Colonel Kurtz, who at times seems more heroic than insane. Meanwhile, director Francis Ford Coppola meant for Apocalypse Now to be a straightforward adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”, with American anti-Communism taking the place of Belgian colonialism and Kurtz portrayed as a murderous madman. In the end, the movie, meant by one of its creators to be a celebration of the American intervention in Vietnam and another to be a condemnation of same, attains a terrifyingly uneasy balance between the two. After the torturous production of the movie had finished, Coppola said, “We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.” Much the same could be said about America in Vietnam.
RED DAWN (1984)
And speaking of John Milius...the aforementioned screenwriter directed this Reagan-era blood-wet dream (based on a story co-written with Kevin Reynolds) about a Russian invasion of Middle America (or, as many conservatives prefer to think of it, America), complete with terrifying imagery of the Golden Arches obscured by Soviet paratroopers...oh, the humanity! How evil are Milius’ commies? So evil that, shortly after landing in a field outside a high school in Calumet, Colorado, their very first order of business is to machine-gun an unarmed black teacher (nice touch, John) who wanders outside to see what’s going on. Because, y’know, that’s how commies roll: no algebra for you, capitalist pig-dogs! Forget attacking military bases or other strategic targets: this U.S.S.R. knows the best way to cripple Yankee morale is to cut off our access to fast food and varsity sports! Fortunately, the popular jocks of Calumet High know where to find guns and ammo in bulk, and before you can say “Second Amendment,” their one-time football team, the Wolverines, has transformed into a crack guerilla group of...um...insurgents, willing to engage in extreme acts of ultra-violence to drive the foreign superpower from their land. Probably best not to think too deeply about how the story would be different if the town under siege were, say, Tikrit, or if the Colorado teenagers with easy access to automatic weapons were nerds instead of jocks and the high school was in neighboring Columbine. In Milius’ world, the good guys are joyless, soulless killing machines, the bad guys are joyless, soulless killing machines in different uniforms (and, thus, bad) and violence is the only answer. WOLVERINES!!!!!!
THE CAINE MUTINY (1954)
The film adaptation of Herman Wouk’s wildly popular 1951 novel The Caine Mutiny was a mess. Wouk had been contracted to write the screenplay himself, but was fired after turning in a script that was over four hours long; difficulties in casting plagued the production, which also went highly overbudget; and director Edward Dmytryk felt that Columbia Pictures kept too tight a rein on him and didn’t let him make the movie he wanted to make. In addition, there was a great deal of political pressure on the production; in order to secure the Navy’s cooperation in making the picture, the studio had given all sorts of assurances that no one would be made to look bad, and with anti-Communist fever sweeping Hollywood and the American public much less certain about the Korean War than it had been about WWII, everyone was walking on glass to make sure the story, about a mutiny aboard a minesweeping ship commanded by the unstable, paranoid Captain Queeg, didn’t come across as too anti-military. All of these factors and more contributed to the uncomfortable ending of the film: after the mutineers are acquitted by a court-martial tribunal following a dramatic meltdown on the stand by Queeg himself, their defense attorney turns on them, calling them goldbrickers, cowards and gutless wonders. He saves most of his rancor for the cynical intellectual Lt. Keefer, who he accuses of having masterminded the entire situation just because he thought he was smarter than everyone else. The whole thing ends up ringing rather hollow, both dramatically and philosophically, and defuses the rest of the movie’s far more interesting conflict (one’s duty in wartime balanced against the malfeasance of one’s commanding officer) for a simple-minded pasty, sneaky egghead vs. upstanding macho man one. For a movie that sets itself the task of questioning the meaning of honor and duty to end up claiming it’s better to follow a deranged lunatic into battle than listen to some smart-ass college boy does no service to the military tradition it goes to such lengths to protect.
INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996)
Appropriately enough, I first saw this movie on July 4th weekend, in Atlanta, Georgia, where I was killing time waiting for the Olympic Village to be finished. There wasn't much to do, so to get out of the heat until the Braves game started, I ducked into a theater that was screening this Roland Emmerich atrocity. What stuck with me over the years isn't so much its incompetence or its bombast – it's really no worse than any number of other alien-invasion flicks, and it's been outdone dozens of times since then in sheer alienating volume – but its coldhearted determination to ruthlessly exploit every noxious Hollywood stereotype in existence. In a movie which purports to be patriotic, from its name right down to its 'fightin' president' character, it instead turns out to be jingoistic, as the nations of the world are helpless to do a thing against marauding extraterrestrials until the good-hearted Yanks do what they've done since the Great War: pull their foreign fat out of the fire. Aside from the horrendous stereotypes embodied in the main cast (including Will Smith as a wisecracking fighter pilot, Randy Quaid as a crazy kook no one believes, Vivica Fox as a hooker with a heart of gold, Margaret Colin as a bitchy career woman, Brent Spiner as a misguided intellectual, Harvey Fierstein as a mincing queen, and Judd Hirsch as a Jewish caricature so odiferous its only competition comes from Julius Streicher cartoons), there's also the astonishing montages that occur when the alien motherships are disabled: African tribesmen hoot and holler, waving spears (!) around and looking as if they accidentally left home without the bones in their noses, and gibberish-spouting, kaffiyeh-clad Arabs ululating mindlessly, unable to even make themselves understood until a helpful white man gets on the blower to explain the situation to his American brethren. What purports to be a feel-good action blockbuster, more than ten years later, now plays like a cartoon of the invincible ignorance of American foreign policy.
FORREST GUMP (1994)
In the Year of Our Lord 1994, there was no middle ground in America: you were either Pro-Gump or Pulp-ist. You either looked at life as a box of chocolates or as an overpriced Martin & Lewis milkshake. And if you were the kind of gal who dressed as Mrs. Mia Wallace with a hypo full of adrenalin sticking out of your breastplate or the kind of guy who dressed like Jules or Vincent in a skinny tie and black suit jacket that year for Halloween, then you probably weren’t all that surprised when the groundbreaking instant classic Pulp Fiction lost the Best Picture Oscar to the revisionist history of the sixties and seventies where all the peace-loving hippies were fools and dupes who never accomplished anything but their own self-destruction and the good-natured dimwit who accepts the status quo at face value is rewarded with happiness and, of course, obscene wealth. Unlike Being There, which used Peter Sellers’ blank-slate gardener, Chance, to satirize the willful, self-reflexive gullibility of the American people, Robert Zemeckis’ insidiously reactionary comedy pretends to celebrate simple American values while actually championing the type of anti-intellectual, head-in-the-sand, cross-your-fingers-and-hope-you-win-the-lottery malaise that led to eight years of the recent Voldemort administration and (egad) the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company.
Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce
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