Two Studies in Militant Self-Pity

The thirty-fifth birthday of John Milius' Red Dawn may lead to some overdue reassessments; it is to be hoped that a few will be less superficial than the one by Ed Power in the Independent. Red Dawn is not gung-ho, it is not simplistic, and its vision is not black and white. The Russians have a perfectly rational motive for taking over America (their harvest has failed catastrophically), and aside from one villainously-bearded KGB cackler, the invaders are presented realistically, as fed-up sex-starved squaddies. A trouble-shooter who is eventually brought in to solve the teenage guerrilla problem is even shown to share the heroes' hunting-and-fighting values. A downed pilot brings bleak news of Europe's collapse (Britain fights on, though this time without the benefits of Lend-Lease) and observes that there may be good reasons for not fighting: "maybe they thought twice in a century was enough." Most significantly in terms of Milius' frontier philosophy, and entirely unnoticed by the Independent's Red Dawn correspondent, the invaders include a sympathetically characterised Latin American commander who comes to see the whole business as a corrupting Faustian bargain which takes rebels and turns them into cops.

An interesting contrast might be made with Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter, released seven years earlier to vast acclaim. The enemy in The Deer Hunter are the Vietnamese: North Vietnamese, who are jabbering fanatics in black pyjamas who force American boys to play Russian roulette, and South Vietnamese, who are Frenchified decadents in white suits who get off on watching American boys play Russian roulette. The Deer Hunter must be one of the very few films about Vietnam combat trauma in which no combat is shown, or even much implied: the invaders are martyred solely by the obsessive Oriental addiction to dangerous sports. It must also be one of the very few war films whose most exciting scene (really very good) is a forty-minute pre-trauma wedding party. Although The Deer Hunter is spectacularly shot, brilliantly cast and nicely acted, it deserves Red Dawn's reputation for simple-minded stoicism far more than does Red Dawn itself. Cimino's film ends, apparently in all solemnity, with a calamitous rendition of "God Bless America;" Milius' film ends on a monument to the dead, and doesn't even tell us how, or whether, the war eventually ended.