The Far Side of Irony
<p>Having seen <cite>Team America: World Police</cite> last Friday on its<br />
opening night, I&#8217;m amused by the mainstream-media spin that this movie<br />
is an anti-right-wing satire too subtle for the yokels to get.  In<br />
fact, I think it&#8217;s it&#8217;s something much more peculiar and interesting<br />
&mdash; a movie that hides a strong fundamental patriotism and appeal<br />
to traditional values under a veneer of scatology and sexual crudity.</p>
<p>The MSM can&#8217;t see this, because in the MSM&#8217;s universe the kind of<br />
patriotism for which the movie ultimately plumps is at best a joke to<br />
be sneered at and at worst actually toxic.  But the South Park guys<br />
tip their hand early, during a sequence in which the the protagonist<br />
Gary visits the Lincoln Memorial and other national monuments while<br />
wrestling with a question of duty.  The soundtrack is country music<br />
of the most teeth-gritting, lachrymose awfulness &mdash; but the steel<br />
guitars and schmaltzy vocals fail to obscure the fact that the song is<br />
asking a serious moral question, and that the right answer (for Gary<br />
and for the rest of us) is that he must accept his duty to defend<br />
freedom.  The entire rest of the plot follows from that decision.</p>
<p>This scene is a microcosm of the movie. In this satire, it&#8217;s the<br />
<em>satire</em> you&#8217;re supposed to see through. Irony is enlisted to<br />
anti-ironic purposes.  In another early scene, Gary is cosmetically<br />
morphed for infiltration purposes into a caricature of the generic<br />
Islamo-terrorist so extreme that pained laughter is the only possible<br />
response &mdash; and his teammates think it&#8217;s a perfect disguise. But<br />
never once is this pointed jab at American parochialism allowed to<br />
obscure the genuine evil of the type he is disguised as.</p>
<p>Throughout the film, Team America is clumsy, parochial,<br />
hamfisted and inadvertently destructive.  But this is emphasised mainly<br />
in order to point up a continuing underlying message that it&#8217;s better<br />
to be a dolt with traditional American intentions than a sophisticate<br />
in the service of evil.</p>
<p>In this and other ways, this movie seems profoundly conservative to<br />
me.  I don&#8217;t often use the label &#8216;conservative&#8217; as a compliment, but<br />
such use is merited here.  Team America knows it&#8217;s their job to defend<br />
civilization, to conserve it.  Part of the humor in this movie comes<br />
from the contrast between that fundamental conservatism and the<br />
profane, obscene, and jejunely disgusting moments that occupy much of<br />
the film.  These are not your father&#8217;s conservatives, a point the<br />
South Park auteurs make early by showing two of the characters<br />
sprinting a lust-a-thon through a marrionette kama sutra of sexual<br />
positions.</p>
<p>And maybe that&#8217;s the most interesting message of this movie.  We<br />
watch it blowing up scenery in a parody of the Bruckheimerian action<br />
flick, but what&#8217;s really being exploded is the fixed categories of the<br />
post-1960s culture wars.  The South Park guys are trying to divorce<br />
the muscular self-confidence of a healthy civilization from the<br />
cultural-conservative and religious fixations that confidence has<br />
usually been married to.  There is not one single reference to<br />
Christianity in the entire movie.  The good guys drink, swear, and<br />
screw like frenzied minks, but they&#8217;re good guys just the same.</p>
<p>Ultimately, what matters about them most is that they never give<br />
up and never compromise with evil.  That&#8217;s what makes this vulgar<br />
comedy ultimately a serious parable for our time.</p>
