Page 2 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA GI Joe, post-American hero
By Tom Engelhardt
Although born on the cusp of the Vietnam War, Joe prospered for almost a decade
until anti-war sentiment began to turn war toys into the personae non gratae
of the toy world and, in 1973, the first oil crunch hit, making the 12-inch Joe
far more expensive to produce. First, he shrank and then, like so many of his
warring kin, he was (as Hasbro put it) "furloughed". He left the scene, in part
a casualty, like much of war play then, of Vietnam distaste and of an American
victory that never came.
Despite being in his grave for a number of years, as the undead of the toy
world he would rise again. In 1977, paving the way for his return, George Lucas
brought the war flick and war play back into the child's world via the surprise
hit Star Wars and its accompanying action figures that landed on Earth
with an enormous commercial bang. Between them, they introduced the
child to a self-enclosed world of play (in a galaxy "far, far away") shorn of
Vietnam's defeat.
In 1982, seeing an opening, Hasbro's planners tagged Joe "a real American hero"
(which for once wouldn't have had to be spelled out), and reintroduced him as a
set of Star-Wars-sized action figures, each with its own little bio/backstory.
Hundreds of millions of these would subsequently be sold. The Joe team now had
an enemy as well, another team, of course, and in this case, though the Cold
War was still going full blast in those early years of Ronald Reagan's
presidency, it wasn't the Russians.
As it happened, Hasbro's toymakers did a better job of predicting the direction
of the Cold War than the CIA or the rest of our government. They sensed that
the Russians wouldn't last and so chose a vaguer, more potentially long-lasting
enemy - and in this, too, they were prescient. That enemy was a bogeyman called
"terrorism" embodied in Cobra, an organization of super-bad guys who lived not
in Moscow, but in - gasp - Springfield, USA. (Hasbro researchers had discovered
that a Springfield existed in every state except Rhode Island, where the
company was located.)
In story and style, the Joes and their enemies now left history and the
battlefields of this planet behind for some alternate Earth. There, they
disported themselves with bulked-up weaponry and a look that befitted not so
much "real American heroes" as a set of superheroes and supervillains in any
futuristic space epic. And so, catching the zeitgeist of their moment, at a
child's level, the crew at Hasbro created the most successful boy's toy of that
era by divorcing war play from war American-style.
The next war, on screen and off
Twenty-seven years later, Joe, who lost his luster a second time in the 1990s
but never quite left the toy scene, is back yet again with his new movie and
assorted products. Whether this iteration proves to be another lucrative round
for the franchise depends not just on whether enough American boys turn out to
see him, but on whether his version of explosive action, special effects, and
up-muscled futuristic conflict is beloved by Saudis, Poles, Indians and
Japanese. Today, for Hollywood, when it comes to shoot-em-ups, the
international market means everything.
Abroad, GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra opened smashingly in South Korea and,
in its first week, hit number one in less-than-all-American China and Russia as
well. It took in nearly $100 million overseas in its first 12 days, putting its
US take in the shade. Here, it started strong, but fell off quickly in a deluge
of terrible reviews.
Whatever his fate, Joe, we know, can't die. On the other hand, that
all-American tale of battle triumph shows little sign of revival. Admittedly,
the new GI Joe movie does mention the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
in passing and one member of Joe's force is said, again in passing, to have
been stationed in Afghanistan. In addition, the evil arms maker's company
produces its super-weapons in that obscure but perfectly real former Soviet
SSR, Kyrgyzstan, where the US rents out a base to support its Afghan War
activities. Otherwise, the film's only link with real world battlefields comes
from those borrowed Pentagon Apache helicopters and Humvees - and the fact that
some of the military extras lent by the Pentagon have been unable to see the
film because they're now stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan.
And did I even mention that those missiles around which the movie's plot (such
as it is) revolves are filled with "nanomites," supermicroscopic, potentially
world destructive robots? Whether blasting into the Eiffel Tower or a bus, they
produce a signature green fuzz that looks like a potentially useful replacement
for Styrofoam. Anyway, nanomites, typically enough, are not yet on this Earth.
Soon after the film begins, a caption announces, Star Wars-style, that
we're "in the not too distant future", and immediately you know that you're in
Hollywood's comfort zone, a recognizable battle landscape that is no part of
what once would have been the war movie. Also recognizable is that loaned
Pentagon equipment and the fantasy weaponry mixed seamlessly in with it -
"That's a Night Raven!" - that make the film "advertainment" as well for the
techno-coolness of the US military. The Pentagon, you might say, is perfectly
willing to make do with post-historical battle space. It may be ever less
all-American, but it's where the recruitable young are heading.
For Hollywood, deserting actual American battlefields isn't the liberal thing
to do, it's the business thing to do. In fact, those planning out the film for
Hasbro and Paramount reportedly wanted to transform the Joes into an
international special ops force based in Belgium, where NATO is headquartered.
However, fan grumbling at the early teasers Paramount released for the film
(and evidently a Pentagon reluctance to help a less than American force) caused
them to pull back somewhat.
Still, one thing is certain: if the American car has gone to hell, Hollywood's
products still rule the globe. And yet, in that international arena,
American-style war, as in Iraq or Afghanistan, is a complete turn-off and
real-world all-American triumph just doesn't fly any more. That's certainly
part of what's happened to the American war film, but far from all of it.
After all, how long has it been since all-American mythology and imagery - the
bluecoats' charge, the marines' advance (as the marine hymn wells up in the
background) - has brought a mass audience to a movie screen. The last such
film, in 1998, was Saving Private Ryan, and it was already an anomaly.
Today, as close as it gets is the parallel universe that passes for World War
II in Quentin Tarantino's new hit Inglourious Basterds.
So here's something to contemplate in the moments of lame dialogue that lurk
between Joe's explosions and chases: American audiences seem largely in accord
with the international crowd. They may not want their Joe force stationed in
Belgium, but they don't want to see real war American-style on a recognizable
planet Earth either. They voted with their feet most recently on a bevy of Iraq
films.
Given the couple of hundred years that made triumphalism a kind of American
sacrament, it's nothing short of remarkable that the young are no longer
willing to troop to movie theaters to see such films. If you think of Hollywood
as a kind of crude commercial democracy, then consider this a popular measure
of imperial overstretch or the decline of the globe's sole superpower. Only
recently has a mainstream discussion of American decline begun in Washington
and among the pundits. But at the movies it's been going on for a long, long
time.
It's as if the grim reality of our seemingly never-ending wars seeped into the
pores of a nation that no longer really believes victory is our due, or that
American soldiers will triumph forever and a day. There may even be an
unacknowledged element of shame in all this. At least there is now a consensus
that we fight wars not fit for entertainment.
As a result, war as entertainment has been sent offshore - like imprisonment
and punishment. Hollywood has launched it into a netherworld of aliens,
superheroes, and robots. Something indelibly American, close to a national
religion, has gone through the wormhole and is unlikely to return.
Joe lives. So does war, American-style - the brutal, real thing in Afghanistan
and Iraq, at Guantanamo and Bagram, in the Predator and Reaper-filled skies
over the Pakistani tribal borderlands, among Blackwater's mercenaries and the
tens of thousands of private, Pentagon-hired military contractors who now
outnumber US troops in Afghanistan. But the two of them no longer have much to
do with each other.
If the Chinese, and South Koreans, and Saudis, and enough American young men
vote with their feet and their wallets, there will be another Joe film. And if
Washington's national security managers have anything to say about it, there
will be what's already regularly referred to as "the next war". Film and war,
however, are likely to share little other than some snazzy weaponry, thanks to
the generosity of the Department of Defense, and American kids who will pay
good money to sit in the dark and then perhaps join up to fight in the
all-too-real world.
Succeed or fail, the screen version of GI Joe is now the new normal. Succeed or
fail, the war in Afghanistan is also the new normal.
In this way, an entertainment era ends. The curtain has come down and the
children have gone off elsewhere to play; meanwhile, behind that curtain -
Americans would prefer not to know just where - you can still faintly hear the
whistle of incoming mortars, the rat-a-rat of machine guns, the sounds of
actual war that go on and on and on.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
