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Red Dawn
Brad just doesn't know right-wing agitprop. My friends walked out, but I exited the theater, pumped my fist in the air and shouted, Wolverines! (That's when I first knew I was a rather odd Canadian - perhaps this was destiny.)
Comments are open if you have any idea what I am talking about - this will provide a test of Ben Domenech's thesis. My apologies if you are utterly mystified.
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on March 22, 2006 at 07:10 AM in Film | Permalink
Comments
Dan Klein and I saw this movie the first night it came out. We were disappointed, as I recall, I had been expecting something truly cathartic. Plus even then I had read even Alexander Cockburn to think the movie was not picking the right enemy. It should have been the Canadians invading.
Posted by: Tyler Cowen at Mar 22, 2006 7:38:17 AM
The best Red Dawn reference ever may be from the video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. A radio ad for the (in-game) chain of gun stores announces:
"Come by Ammu-Nation and register to win an anti-aircraft gun actually used when we whooped Australia's ass! This weekend is the Ammu-Nation Film Festival with free screening of the documentary Red Dawn!"
Posted by: James Grimmelmann at Mar 22, 2006 8:04:23 AM
Posted by: NCA at Mar 22, 2006 8:13:39 AM
Hi -
Man, I loved that movie when it came out. Reagan in the White House, El Salvador and Nicaragua in trouble, and I went to see it at a movie theater in what is probably Pittsburgh's most liberal neighbourhood. Came out wanting to yell at liberals. :-)
Told my father, a 1968 liberal, that I had seen the movie and his comment was "yeah, some of my students wanted to picket the movie".
Wolverines! And loved some of the technical details: they did a great T-72 in that movie, one of the best I've ever seen. :-)
Posted by: John F. Opie at Mar 22, 2006 8:53:41 AM
Can I add my enjoyment of this film to Tyler's previous post on absurd things in which one believes?
Posted by: hamilton at Mar 22, 2006 9:05:47 AM
One of the most politcal movies of the 1980s. It may have been wrapped in cheese, but it made a definite statement. Agree with the film or disagree, you can't say it doesn't say something.
Posted by: Ted Craig at Mar 22, 2006 9:21:13 AM
Maybe it's because I first saw it when I was young, but I simply love that movie. Now if only I could figure out a way to inflict this film on my liberal friends in Madison. That would at least double the entertainment value.
Posted by: Dave Milovich at Mar 22, 2006 9:22:55 AM
Ah, youth. I recall getting into this right about the same time.
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at Mar 22, 2006 9:41:59 AM
Wolverines. The high school sports team as rallying point. Understand now why the PC socialists are so hot to destroy those names? No future rallying points for opposition to them.
Posted by: Max at Mar 22, 2006 9:55:15 AM
The thing that strikes me about Red Dawn was how the movie bought into the myth of the power of the Red Army. The scene where the downed US fighter pilot is the best. Now does anyone thing the Cubans would have been able to overrun the southern US? At least they got our prewar intelligence capabilities right, we never saw it coming.
Posted by: Jason at Mar 22, 2006 10:00:48 AM
It was a guns-and-freedom movie, but it had interesting little bits pointed the other way. I haven't watched it years, but wasn't it a Cuban officer who made a little speech about becoming that which he hated?
And didn't the image of home grown teenagers setting IEDs to hit enemy army convoys come back to haunt anyone recently? You know, after 'they' airdrop themselves into 'our' backyard?
It certainly struck me two years ago that this film must have found a whole new audience.
Posted by: odograph at Mar 22, 2006 10:46:32 AM
Sigh...is there nothing liberals and conservatives WON'T fight about? Red
Dawn is just a silly 80's movie, and an enjoyable one at that, and
I really don't think you can read much of an agenda into it. After I saw
it I knew the minute the reds invaded I'd be in the forests plotting their
downfall(who said you can't be a gun-toting patriot at 13)
...and I'm a liberal!
Posted by: Alexander Wolfe at Mar 22, 2006 11:13:09 AM
I don't get why "red staters" would identify with the resistance in Red Dawn given that they were resisting occupation by outside powers. Whether or not we're right to be in Iraq, its hard to see how the red staters are in any way heroically resisting anything.
Posted by: cactus at Mar 22, 2006 11:24:54 AM
Young, impressionable teenagers carry out a guerrilla war against a foreign occupier based on political/religious ideology while the foreign troops were misled by their government about the nature of the enemy? Great movie to lionize.
Posted by: Mark at Mar 22, 2006 11:31:15 AM
If it annoys DeLong it must have something going for it. But, are there really people here who equate 1980s USA with Saddam's Iraq?
Posted by: Patrick R. Sullivan at Mar 22, 2006 11:55:28 AM
I protest: I know "Red Dawn"; I like "Red Dawn"; "Red Dawn" is a friend of mine. But Ben Domenech claims that "Red Dawn" is of deep cultural-political significance: not "just another cheesy throwaway Sunday afternoon movie." But it is just another cheesy throwaway Sunday afternoon movie. That's its point.
Posted by: Brad DeLong at Mar 22, 2006 12:09:02 PM
This is a joke, right? I've always loved that movie and I always will, despite the fact that my political idealogy has shifted significantly in the last 20 years. I can't believe that anyone actually takes it seriously. Sure, you might over-identify with it or strongly disagree with its message (meager as it truly was), but it's freakin' Red Dawn.
I was very young when it was released and so never saw it in the theater. Did people actually walk out because of its "political" message? On the bright side, it again appears that the world has always been insane and recent happenings are only par for the course and not something radically different from the norm.
Posted by: Stretch at Mar 22, 2006 12:31:13 PM
>Sigh...is there nothing liberals and conservatives WON'T fight about? Red Dawn is just a silly 80's movie, and an enjoyable one at that, and I really don't think you can read much of an agenda into it.
Ahh, but it points the differences out spectacularily. Fighting against occupation by the UN/ZOG/Commies is *good*, yet fighting against occupation by the USA is *evil*. I used to watch it at least once a month when I was under the thrall of the cold war. Now, like others, I wonder if there is an Arabic subtitled version being used as a recruiting film for the Iraqi Wolverines/insurgency.
I think you forget that to many of the intended audience of Red Dawn, there are a million UN troops about to invade the US. Or black helicopters around every corner. Just look at the pseudo conspiracy about DOT labels on the back of street signs. Supposedly they indicate where to set up detention camps to house all the RedStaters when the UN invades.
Posted by: Peter at Mar 22, 2006 1:20:21 PM
I think right-wingers love that movie because they kill latinos.
Posted by: Andrew at Mar 22, 2006 1:43:27 PM
That was bad taste, I meant it as a joke but it's not at all funny.
Posted by: Andrew at Mar 22, 2006 1:43:54 PM
Who can forget the scene in Red Dawn where C. Thomas Howell loads a car with explosives and drives into a crowded church full of Americans?
Yep, that Iraqi insurgency is just like the movie. Spooky!
Posted by: Don at Mar 22, 2006 1:54:31 PM
I saw the movie for the 1st time with some French teenagers (really), and the best part was seeming them freaked out by the idea of the Greens taking power in Germany. As in fact has happened, at least as part of a coalition.
What I love about Red Dawn is that it took seriously the idea that real political changes can happen and that the detente status quo wouldn't last forever. They and Ronald Reagan were right about that, while my high school government teachers and a lot of foreign policy mandarins were wrong.
IMHO the best lessons movies can teach about politics is to help us realize history isn't over and to imagine alternatives to the status quo. Unfortunately they are about as accurate as the CIA at guessing which alternative futures will matter.
Posted by: DK at Mar 22, 2006 2:32:23 PM
Some useless trivia (the best kind): Red Dawn was the first movie ever to be released with the PG-13 rating.
Posted by: halleck23 at Mar 22, 2006 2:46:07 PM
So, I take it that I am the only one out there that views the Mayor of the town featured in Red Dawn to be a very, very typical western state Republican (read: french surrender monkey)? I always thought the Wolverines, and specifically the father figure, Harry Dean, to be libertarians. I have always found republicans (like democrats) to be very comfortable with Soviet style centralized big government.
Posted by: Johnny at Mar 22, 2006 2:48:16 PM
I think right-wingers love that movie because they kill latinos.
If I could speak up for my fellow gun-toting "right wingers," for the moment, we love the movie because they kill commies, not Latinos.
WOLVERINE!
And lastly, the film was pure John Milius. Enough said.
Posted by: Guns & Butter/Korea Liberator at Mar 22, 2006 3:27:24 PM
