Red Dawn v2
Aug. 15th, 2012 08:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
danalwynI've been reading a lot of the early commentary from the international relations wonks about the remake of Red Dawn and I've found that some of it mirrors some very perceptive comments made about some video games, like Homefront and Modern Warfare 3. It's a recognition of a trend that I find disturbing in a way that's hard to quantify.
Namely, America really, really, really wants to be the Taliban.
We want to be the ones wearing the ski masks and hefting AK-47s as we fight foreign occupiers from the ruins of our own towns. It matches our view of heroism, of the plucky little guy fighting insurmountable odds though skill, guile, and the willingness to take risks. We don't want to be on the side with all the firepower, or all the people, or all the rules, because that takes the fun out of it. We want to feel the exhilaration of taking incredible risk, of the adrenaline rush of danger after danger. We want to be the perpetual victims, so that our righteousness covers all possible actions and is rarely dimmed. We want to be the ones avenging a family wantonly slaughtered by foreign bombs. We want to sit, huddled beneath an outcropping of rock near our shattered house, and laugh at our latest narrow escape, because that's what heroism is for us, that's the kind of person we want to be. Who wants to be the foreign occupier who has to trudge back to home base and fill out paperwork? Given a fight between an outnumbered band of locals and a well-organized foreign army, we instinctively go for the locals every time.
You could talk about a lot of things here. You could talk about the inherent sexism - righteous revenge requires atrocity, atrocity requires victims, and in American media victims often require women. You could talk about modern racism - the most recent versions of this trope tend to make the enemies uniform in race, and non-white at that. You could talk about the almost pathological need Americans have to be a victim, as it's the only way we can safely dim our moral hazard lights, to ignore that voice of our consciousness. You could even point out that all you would have to do is change some names and digitally add American flags to the occupying, foreign forces and you would turn a Hollywood movie into a Taliban recruitment video.
But it's difficult to talk about the final lesson. This isn't the US. This isn't us. This is not the America that exists in this world. This is no longer what we are. For the foreseeable future America will remain on the other side. And it bothers me to see us continue operations on foreign soil, often in the role of occupiers, when at home we yearn to be the ragtag bunch of civilians, waiting in ambush for the foreign troops to walk by.
Namely, America really, really, really wants to be the Taliban.
We want to be the ones wearing the ski masks and hefting AK-47s as we fight foreign occupiers from the ruins of our own towns. It matches our view of heroism, of the plucky little guy fighting insurmountable odds though skill, guile, and the willingness to take risks. We don't want to be on the side with all the firepower, or all the people, or all the rules, because that takes the fun out of it. We want to feel the exhilaration of taking incredible risk, of the adrenaline rush of danger after danger. We want to be the perpetual victims, so that our righteousness covers all possible actions and is rarely dimmed. We want to be the ones avenging a family wantonly slaughtered by foreign bombs. We want to sit, huddled beneath an outcropping of rock near our shattered house, and laugh at our latest narrow escape, because that's what heroism is for us, that's the kind of person we want to be. Who wants to be the foreign occupier who has to trudge back to home base and fill out paperwork? Given a fight between an outnumbered band of locals and a well-organized foreign army, we instinctively go for the locals every time.
You could talk about a lot of things here. You could talk about the inherent sexism - righteous revenge requires atrocity, atrocity requires victims, and in American media victims often require women. You could talk about modern racism - the most recent versions of this trope tend to make the enemies uniform in race, and non-white at that. You could talk about the almost pathological need Americans have to be a victim, as it's the only way we can safely dim our moral hazard lights, to ignore that voice of our consciousness. You could even point out that all you would have to do is change some names and digitally add American flags to the occupying, foreign forces and you would turn a Hollywood movie into a Taliban recruitment video.
But it's difficult to talk about the final lesson. This isn't the US. This isn't us. This is not the America that exists in this world. This is no longer what we are. For the foreseeable future America will remain on the other side. And it bothers me to see us continue operations on foreign soil, often in the role of occupiers, when at home we yearn to be the ragtag bunch of civilians, waiting in ambush for the foreign troops to walk by.