Red Dawn Would Like You to Die for America

Slowly, the group uses guerilla tactics to ambush and kill Soviet patrols, making a name for themselves as the Wolverines (after the varsity mascot, naturally). They are somehow even better at guerilla tactics than the Latino Soviet officer who gets saddled with being the face of the exasperated enemy in the movie (Ron O’Neal). By the time they’re joined by a downed F-15 pilot (Powers Boothe), they’re already known and feared by the enemy.

The one thing too ridiculous for a movie about a landlocked state with almost no strategic value being the site of an actual land war is the idea that the Wolverines will actually win that war. They stage one final rout of the enemy to avenge their fallen friends and family, dying valiantly in the attempt, and we see the pretty monument erected in their honor.

“I just think there are lots of grandparents out there in this country, like me … that what we all care about and what we love more than anything are those children. That we can’t lose our whole country, we’re having an economic collapse. So my message is let’s get back to work, let’s get back to living. Let’s be smart about it and those of us who are 70-plus, we’ll take care of ourselves. But don’t sacrifice the country, don’t do that, don’t ruin this great America.” —Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, on Fox News a couple weeks ago.

The “boogaloo” is the impending upcoming civil war, as weird paranoid right-wingers online have it, and it’s a deeply weird, seemingly fated detail that Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, where the word originated, and this movie that is the Platonic ideal of the modern use for the word both came out in 1984. The opportunity to be a man—a REAL man—only can come about when all is death and want, and you get to grit your teeth and give in to your base instincts. It is especially fun to watch how silly this idea is in Red Dawn precisely because it’s being play-acted by fresh-faced, big-eyed young people. Everybody from Milius on down to the least well-drawn member of the star-studded cast is playing the whole thing so straight-faced that you can’t even be mad at them.

Sure, democracy and freedom and all that are wonderful things, but they’re for soft times. The real heroes, the real patriots, are the ones who live on the hard ground and hoard ammo and would totally never take advantage of a girl half their age who’s sweet on them. The best thing they can do—the best thing you can do—is go die on the field of battle, like a true American. You’re much more useful to the state that way than alive, and therefore wanting, needing, thinking and questioning me when I am just trying to boss the food and ammo and women.

Look out your window, and ask yourself: Who, now, is out there fighting? What does that fighting look like? It’s mostly being done by grocery store clerks, who every day risk contagion, all for the worst wages our societal will allow. Their battle is feeding people. The nurses, too, are in an epic struggle for the very lives of the sick, even as they daily risk their own, supplied with inadequate equipment and working grueling hours. Nobody is going to etch their names into a wall when they die. Thousands of others sit at home and sew masks, or operate local groups that try to help where they can. Young people who live alone try to check on their friends and maybe the elderly folk next door to them. We self-isolate out of concern for our fellow Americans and queue up a silly movie like Red Dawn and feel a pang of guilt, because is there anything else we could be doing, maybe, for someone other than ourselves?

Not a one of us would be helped by a bullet or landmine right now—when the military is helping, it is doing so by constructing field hospitals, building instead of destroying. The enemy is not some faceless evil army of other, browner men, but a virus that can be undone by nothing more complicated than hand soap and binge watching that show your ex-girlfriend said was interesting four years ago. The cavalry coming to carpet bomb the fuck out of the enemy and save us rides not in Thunderbolts or Eagles, but syringes.

Many years hence, we are going to get more snarling, stupid movies like Red Dawn, in love with their fatalism. It’s a testament to Red Dawn itself that those movies will probably not be nearly as fun to watch, and it’s a testament to humanity’s folly that the writers will probably not think to consult a nurse.

Kenneth Lowe is the honcho around here, sport. You can follow him on Twitter and read more of his writing at his blog. You can also donate to the Arts For Illinois Relief Fund to support Illinois artists and arts organizations during the pandemic here.