It’s no wonder that “Red Dawn” (1984) is a simple movie that invaded the imaginations of many people, esp. young men. Here’s a link to one discussion that is thorough and thought-provoking.
I see the film as a mixture of Portland in the Forties when we played “guns,” and maybe “War Party” (1988) which was filmed on the Blackfeet rez and casts the whites as “the enemy.” Another link for me is Ben Johnson, a hero since the Fifties Westerns and a figure of traditional power reserve. Once I was waiting for Bob to do some business about a statue of “Tornado,” the famous bucking bull. I stood for a while behind the holding pens, staring at Johnson, for whom this was a natural context he knew well. He’d been part of the Grand Entrance, galloping with flags. Now he saw me gaping and came over. “I’m Ben Johnson,” he said kindly, as though I didn’t know. I was SO impressed! He made "Red Dawn" seem real.
In the Sixties in Browning we were very much living this thought-scheme of possible invasion ("The Russians Are Coming" (1966)), of being listed as gun-owners, having to escape. (The people behind chain link fences echoed our border today.) Korea was recent, a snow war like this one filmed on the high prairie of the Rocky Mountain east slope, maybe in Colorado. Probably much of the military equipment was surplus from Korea but the helicopters at the end must have been studio-made and almost Star Wars futuristic. The horses are from “War Party.” The Russians were working with Cubans, which allowed a second point of view from the enemy side. It’s quite familiar and doesn’t include the destruction of cities like the more recent dystopias. Adam and Eve at the end, of course. Swayze and Sheen were teens. They could not have remembered the French resistance to the Nazi German invaders. There’s such irony in Sheen portraying the American President as a progressive idealist.
That movie didn’t deal with the reverberations from the Vietnam war or the destruction of urban settings. What makes the film relevant today is its use as code for emails in a much subtler and more complex sort of invasion.
The ‘Red Dawn’ Emails in the NYTimes.
April 11, 2020 at 8:38 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard
“As the coronavirus emerged and headed toward the United States, an extraordinary conversation was hatched among an elite group of infectious disease doctors and medical experts in the federal government and academic institutions around the nation,” the New York Times reports.
“Red Dawn — a nod to the 1984 film with Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen — was the nickname for the email chain they built. Different threads in the chain were named Red Dawn Breaking, Red Dawn Rising, Red Dawn Breaking Bad and, as the situation grew more dire, Red Dawn Raging.”
The writers were not renegades or outsiders — they were the people the President ought to have been listening to but instead ridiculed and suppressed. He never has understood the power of the internet to record history and lay out ideas. Even as he labels the New York Times “fake,” it has been honest and complete enough to nearly be regarded as a branch of government as it ought to be.
“The email chain was intended to provide thoughts, concerns, raise issues and share information among top-ranking medical experts. Members of the chain worked for the Health and Human Services Department, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Homeland Security Department, the Pentagon, and other federal agencies.”
I haven’t read the NYT article because it would mean registering with them and I don’t want my name on such enticing lists. But I think they address:
- the uncontainability of the virus
- the lack of any meds or vaccines
- social isolation and the closing down of sports, worship, schools and so on.
- modeling of the course of the disease (looking at ships as closed environments)
- necessity of good tests widely used
- realization that the battle was lost, particularly realizing that people without symptoms were contagious
- need to act quickly
- seriousness of consequences
- hotbed for conspiracy theories
One strand of environmentalism has been worrying about the impact of overpopulation. We’d press at the edges of how many people could be crowded together, and then someone would devise some new way of employment or living that took some pressure off. At the same time, the fertility level, the widespread use of birth control, economic pressure, and so on have pressed reproduction down enough that to some degree we are dependent on immigration. But among the darker suggestions was the lemming theory — that we should number off by threes or fours and require one fraction to march into the sea. It appears we’re actually doing something like that. Cynics remark, "We're well off without old and disabled people," but the young and healthy also die.
Small towns like the one I’m in may actually find themselves growing as people try to find safe places, though they often bring danger with them. Cities will be hit harder. Lack of maintenance over the past decades will hit us hard. Optimism is taking a hard hit.
How is it that our safeguards, which have generally protected us from the Trumps and McConnells for so many years, have failed us this time? Is it that movies have corrupted our sense of reality? Is it that so many don’t do much except push numbers and watch other people do things that actually have consequences? It seems to be a planetary greed and corruption, not just the US. Putin launders his money here. McConnell makes his money in Ukraine.
Most solutions seem to suggest more consolidation, more universal oversight, but my impulse is the opposite, to break things up and install layers that can be more direct instead of dependent on representatives. No more electoral college. Voting by mail with no designation of class or color. Regional consortiums of governors so they can resist federal domination. Term limits. Mental acuity tests. Age limits on both the too young and the too old. These things will be bitterly opposed by those who make a personal power-based career out of what was always meant to be guiding and protecting the country.
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