What We Can Learn From a 2004 Puppet Show

So there I was last Friday night, walled off in a room with two of my friends, eschewing more social weekend fare primarily because of the weather (or laziness). Yet my inertia was to be rewarded as Comedy Central's Secret Stash came through with an uncensored airing of the brilliant Team America: World Police. Yes, the marionette-staged spoof of the War on Terror and its domestic response through the lens of of Bruckheimer and Bay action flick pastiche may have garnered more publicity for its dispute with the MPAA over a puppet sex scene, it is perhaps the most cogent statement pop-culture has offered on the post-9/11 culture war. Sadly, the statement as a whole was largely misinterpreted or discredited and not because of the movie's crudity, which is something most viewers have learned to look past in the works of Trey Parker and Matt Stone (creators of South Park). Few critics found the movie lacking in comedic value, but many dismissed the overall message as one of universal scorn, a mean-spirited jibe at the jingoistic right and overly idealistic left without offering a conciliatory or advisory note. As Roger Ebert wrote in his review, "I wasn't offended by the movie's content so much as by its nihilism. At a time when the world is in crisis and the country faces an important election, the response of Parker, Stone and company is to sneer at both sides -- indeed, at anyone who takes the current world situation seriously. They may be right that some of us are puppets, but they're wrong that all of us are fools, and dead wrong that it doesn't matter." However, a closer examination of the movie finds that it delivers a more coherent statement.

To begin with, there is an artistic reason to use the background of conventional action and war movies. When we are first taken to the headquarters of "Team America," a super secret organization inside of Mount Rushmore, we see the romanticized vision of the US military brought to us by such Hollywood movies as Top Gun: A technologically dazzling mission control center, filled with a young, fresh-faced elite task force led by a debonair silver-haired old gent. This is more than just an excuse for a note perfect send-up of the hollow dialog ("sometimes believing is all we have"), contrived, forced romance amid combat ("maybe feelings are feelings because we can't control them") and "meaningful" camera angles that rarely reveal anything more than the inability of the leads to act. Given the movie's opening shot, a puppet show on the street in Paris, which zooms out to reveal the "real world" also inhabited by only slightly less realistic marionettes, isn't there something to be said for the movie's commentary on the relationship between art and life? That this conception of the military as a cool, high-tech spy organization exists somewhere in the recesses of our minds from watching such films? Even the usually leftist use of the phrase "military-industrial complex" (coined by Eisenhower) conveys such an image and leads us to attribute a degree of competency to the armed forces that we would not usually expect, cynical as we tend to be about government.
Nevertheless, the movie gives a detailed account of the military's shortcomings in the War on Terror. Most obviously, there is the collateral damage blithely ignored, as when Team America accidentally blows up the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre in pursuit of terrorists. We also have the inability to connect with or "win the hearts and minds" of the locals, the sorry state of our espionage (one going undercover in the Middle East is given extensive "plastic surgery" which amounts to brown makeup, cotton balls glued around his jaw and a towel over his head) and
overall intelligence (represented as a computer with a dim-witted human voice). Coupled with the general population's Americentric view (all foreign locations in the film are listed in terms of distance from America, and the speech of Arabs and French alike are reduced to stock phrases like "Mohammed Jihad, durka durka" and "sacre bleu") and the conflation of Kim Jong-Il with classic Hollywood villains (he is seen feeding Hans Blix to a tank of sharks, and is given the obligatory moment where he gets to explain his side of the story to the camera), a hilarious burlesque Right is given the first half of the movie.
Few people (at least that I heard) complained about this depiction. But the second half, which spends time skewering activist celebrities like Sean Penn and Tim Robbins, was not as widely praised. To many, it seemed like a played-straight regurgitation of ridiculous rightist rhetoric about the Dixie Chicks being a threat to America. Others, like Slate's David Edelstein were willing to laugh, but didn't find it politically relevant: "Hey, this anti-Bush liberal has no problem in principle with both sides getting skewered. But when Alec Baldwin, Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, and Janeane Garofolo moronically align themselves with Kim Jong-il and start wielding automatic weapons against Team America, well … Leftist actors learned from Vietnam not to cozy up to dictators."
That's not the point. Obviously, no American actor went around wearing a black turban as a "gesture of support for the Taliban" like Diego Maradona. However, the problem is not from "anti-American" or peacenik rhetoric. It's where it's coming from. The narrative of actors becoming slowly and subtly disconnected from reality in our celebrity-worshiping culture is a familiar one to anybody who's watched E! True Hollywood Story or has followed the "OMG you will not believe what Paris/Britney/Lindsay/Tara just did" cottage industry. The problem is that the actors who are out of touch with America, which is in turn out of touch with the rest of the world, those that actually believe that they can have an impact on the world, and it is somehow their responsibility to do something, get so caught up in their cut-and-paste 60's rhetoric that they actually believe that if America stopped fighting, then all the world's problems would go away and that we can all just get along. Not only is this "we're, like, the real terrorrists, man" logic dangerous when given the reductio ad absurdum treatment by its own proponents, but it's the hollow peacenik line that detracted from more serious and coherent arguments against the Iraq War, and allowed hawks to unfairly accuse the opposition of being cowards, traitors and enemies of freedom.
Roger Ebert states in the aforementioned review, "If I were asked to extract a political position from the movie, I'd be baffled. It is neither for nor against the war on terrorism, just dedicated to ridiculing those who wage it and those who oppose it." In this passage, he reveals the exact sort of bipolar, absolutist divisions that the film criticized: In an era with divisive rhetoric from Bush and Michael Moore alike, everybody is forced to take one of two untenable positions. Either you support an aggressive anti-terrorism policy without regards to collateral damage, or you hope the entire world can just get along, talking through and resolving our differences. This is why centrist small-government conservatives were cowed into supporting the war and the Patriot Act. This is why the Democratic Party fell apart in the post-Clinton years, unable to decide whether it should rally the base behind the banner of Bush-bashing, much like the Republicans rallied against Clinton in the 90's, or whether they should stake out the middle and hope the Ron Pauls of the world would rally to their side. This is why the already unconvincing John Kerry was forced to explain in 2004 why he had voted for the war not two years ago and was now campaigning against it. Team America is decidedly ambivalent about embracing either conventional position on the War on Terror. Roger Ebert expecting them to make a clear-cut choice is no less reasonable than Bush telling the non-aligned nations that they must make a choice between us and the terrorists.
Now the movie's central thesis as such is expressed in a sexual organ metaphor, that is repeated twice, once during the movie's climactic scene: "We're reckless, arrogant, stupid dicks. And the Film Actors Guild are pussies. And Kim Jong Il is an asshole. Pussies don't like dicks, because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes: assholes that just want to shit on everything. Pussies may think they can deal with assholes their way. But the only thing that can fuck an asshole is a dick, with some balls. The problem with dicks is: they fuck too much or fuck when it isn't appropriate - and it takes a pussy to show them that. But sometimes, pussies can be so full of shit that they become assholes themselves... because pussies are an inch and half away from ass holes." They're not saying that everyone is wrong, but that in a sort of Freudian balance, we need to determine logically when the use of military force is necessary. Because endless use of force will only cause a self-perpetuating cycle of violence from which we will never escape, and withdrawing the option entirely will only leave America vulnerable. There were many good reasons not to invade Iraq, primarily that there was no reason to believe Americans at home and abroad would be safer because of the invasion. And it's the role of...well, pussies to temper and moderate our military appetites, not to suggest wholesale castration. And it's up to the dicks to accept that sometimes, it's better to just go home than to make a 4 AM visit to a Vietnamese brothel just to avoid going home unsatisfied.