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