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