RUSSIAN INVADERS, AMERICAN HEROES

...Steel...

...Joined by a downed American pilot, the group becomes (in two months) a proficient terrorist group, carrying out desper119 ate raids on the Soviet oppressors...

...What happens when the child warriors grow up...

...After killing nearly everyone in sight, they too are killed by the Soviet Special Forces commander...

...Jed and Matt discover that their father has been sent to a detention pen at the Calumet drive-in theater...

...Beneath the canopy of elms and maples that lined our street, we took on the Russians with stones, hunting rifles, and the symbolism the epoch provided...

...But for Milius the implication is quite the opposite...

...Meanwhile, Erica and Danny, the lone survivors, make it to "Free America," with Danny whispering, "We're free now...

...Into this bastion of rectitude descends the quintessential Communist "other," a familiar enough theme...

...Jed and Matt Eckert, brought up as hunters, become the natural leaders of this small band...

...I am not certain how one measures such things, but I doubt that many people will be captivated by the historical scenario conjured up in Red Dawn—partly because the film is poorly written, directed, and acted...

...How much does the symbolism of political culture matter...

...This iconic representation of the small American town is the setting, as Ronald Reagan's "biographical" film at the Republican convention reminded us, of a classically American vision of order and virtue...

...By design or accident, in Red Dawn Milius exposes, briefly and in a very confusing way, a potent vein of imagery that is part of the symbolic terrain of our political culture...

...In the penultimate scene, Jed, mortally wounded, carries his dead brother Matt to the park where they played as kids...

...Mortally wounded, Jed and Matt return to the park their father brought them to as children...

...On the level of symbolism and subtext, Red Dawn attempts to answer this question...

...They plan a massive diversion for their escaping counterparts, an attack on the sector headquarters in Calumet...

...Given the politics the film expresses, it is not surprising that Milius has received much attention (and criticism) for his rather hysterical portrait of the international situation in general, and SovietAmerican relations in particular...

...After Vietnam it is hard to believe that a film of this sort—or, more accurately, the symbolic network it tries to reclaim—is a true reflection of who we are...

...III As A PIECE OF FILMMAKING, Red Dawn bears no comparison with such films as Gallipoli and The Deer Hunter...

...This potential is evident in its subtext...

...We recognize Milius's failure because we know the story so well...

...it is in fact buried deeper in the culture, a recurrent dream from which we cannot entirely awake...

...Calumet erupts into madness...

...Red Dawn opens on an early morning in Calumet, a small town in the northern Colorado plains...

...The Cuban and Soviet troops occupying Calumet not only speak a different language, they also belong to a different political universe...

...This message is hammered in relentlessly throughout the film...

...Clearly, those boundaries are cultural, and also political...

...II FILMS AS EXPLICITLY POLITICAL as Red Dawn are unusual, to say the least...

...It is as though our old political-cultural apparatus were some vast machine that cannot be turned off...

...The group hangs on for weeks, learning to provide for itself...

...Still, we should remember that many of the people who flew off to fight Communists in Vietnam justified their actions in terms of some of the potent cultural symbolism that Milius tries to master in Red Dawn...

...Of course, it does not save the hero himself or his nearly equal brother...

...How does one end a protracted guerrilla war starring adolescents...

...We always, all of us, are made to think about the world in terms of something, by means of something...

...It means, I think, that the old, symbolic substance of our political culture has enormous resilience...

...It is a bad film in most respects, made all the worse by the fanatically reactionary nature of its politics...

...By the film's end, the "Wolverines" have become an avenging band of child warriors that obsesses the Soviet and Cuban commanders and demoralizes their troops...

...The fact is, they can't grow up, and Milius does not let them...

...it promises to save the community as well...

...Though it is set in Colorado, Calumet might be Anytown U.S.A...

...Moments later, in the midst of a history lecture on Genghis Khan, parachutes blossom over Calumet High...

...Tired of fooling around, the enemy's sector commander, a Cuban colonel, brings in some special forces from the outside, which soon catch up with the rebels and kill half of them...

...John Milius has now made something very much like this fantasy into the film Red Dawn...

...Not surprisingly, they all revolve around a single figure, represented by Jed, the former high school quarterback who takes the lead soon after the story begins...

...Not only are they capable of violence...

...It is that stream of collective imagination and perception that Red Dawn dips into and follows to its grim conclusion...

...Milius lets us in once again on that nagging and deeply rooted fear, so curious in the context of American history, of the world outside the tidy boundaries of Calumet...

...This, I think, makes the film a bit more significant than merely a bungled attempt at cold-war ideology, though it is that, too...

...Jed and his brother Matt tell Robert, a novice hunter, that he must drink the blood of his first kill...

...If this is what life has suddenly become, who will survive and what public values will they be able to draw upon...

...Still, it is an interesting and perhaps even an important film, for it attempts to tap directly into the cold-war nerve of American politics...

...Springs...

...What are your legs...

...If writers John Milius and Kevin Reynolds had trouble getting into this remarkably unlikely story, they had even more trouble getting out...

...But an even deeper and less precise xenophobia surfaces here...

...Beneath the surface of civility, the real democratic citizen is a hard-ass, readied by his experiences of nature and violence to defend his home and town against all who threaten them...

...They return to town, and what they find there is Milius's version of 1984: a full-blown occupation, run by the KGB and a Cuban colonel, complete with posters of Lenin on the walls and reeducation camps...

...This begins a cycle of guerrilla actions and retaliatory executions by the Soviet forces, a spiral of violence that occupies the greater part of the film...

...Toughness is something that men teach to boys, and Red Dawn is loaded with images of fathers instructing sons in the arts of being tough...

...Not only does the skill of warfare realize the prowess of the hunter and the athlete...

...Our perceptions and judgments are always, inevitably, linked to the narratives, images, and symbols provided for us by our political culture, by a common political language and imagination...

...streets lined with big trees, now losing their last leaves...

...Miraculously, they escape the closing ring of Russian and Cuban troops and, after loading Jed's pickup with Coke, Campbell's soup, and guns, they flee to the mountains where they intend to wait out the war...

...But what does this attempt mean now, nearly 15 years after such imagery seemed to have been so thoroughly discredited...

...The film's heroes, all high school students, are on their way to class...

...main street and the town square...

...Milius thus appeals to the same cultural symbolism used by Peter Weir in Gallipoli, only he reverses it...

...The promise is portentous, for later in the film Robert becomes the most committed and lustful killer of all...

...But Milius concludes this episode in a way that extinguishes any possible moral ambiguity...

...But Milius does what Cimino and Weir did not do: he ties a particular 121 network of symbolism to an extremely conservative political vision...

...At the scene of early lessons in toughness, Jed, embracing his dead brother, falls into hallucinated conversation with their dead father...

...the symbolism that Red Dawn works on belongs not to its writers but to the culture as a whole...

...Certain of his own death at the hands of his torturers, he tells his boys to flee immediately and then, in one last, anguished appeal, to avenge his death...

...The boys do flee, but with a different purpose in mind...

...that it is still deeply rooted and formative, beyond any one event, no matter how traumatic and apparently irreversible...

...In spite of its artistic failure, Red Dawn reminds us that a particular pattern of political symbolism is not the product of a limited historical epoch called the cold war...

...Milius creates a sort of catalogue of essential American virtues, virtues that stand out in this fantasy of domination and rebellion...

...Still it is potent stuff, as Michael Cimino discovered in The Deer Hunter...

...In the final moments of the battle at Gallipoli, the boy athlete turned soldier recalls the words of his tough grandfather and trainer...

...In Milius's vision, what grounds the happy serenity of cold, autumnal mornings in small-town America is masculine toughness, the capacity to endure, and to inflict, punishment...

...In a bizarre and gruesome scene they meet him across a barbed-wire fence, surrounded by the screams of the victims of torture...

...The one I remember best was a non-nuclear, domestic version of an imaginary "World War III," pitting me and my friends against an invading army of Russian soldiers...

...they like it...

...It is expressed by the fantasy of domination and rebellion, and the more or less constant juxtaposition of Calumet's familiar landscape with the outside world of foreign invaders: Cubans, Nicaraguans, Salvadorans and, of course, the Russians...

...I think it matters a great deal...

...It keeps on spinning out the same mythical and symbolic narratives...

...What are your feet...

...Whatever bad end we are to come to at the hands of the Soviets, most people, I think, don't believe it will be this one...

...Thinking they are American troops blown off course, the black history teacher goes outside to see, and is promptly gunned down by automatic-rifle fire...

...Perhaps this is Milius's way of complicating a simplistic scenario...

...Milius's story is indeed reactionary in its implications...

...it has become one of the stories that can tell us who we are and what we think...

...At times the mood of the film is very much like the Martian pictures of the 1950s and '60s, in which aliens take up residence in the neighborhood, and for which Invasion of the Body Snatchers was in some sense the prototype...

...Although it is not worth getting worked up over his political vision, it is worth paying attention to, and perhaps worrying a little about, the political symbolism he attempts to tap...

...Jed Eckert, former football star and recent graduate of Calumet High, races back to the school to retrieve his brother, Matt, and friends...

...The phrase that links the athlete to the soldier, and the combativeness of sports to real combat, is spoken just before the hero vaults out of the trench to a certain and absurd death...

...It is thus in death that the circuit of father and sons, and the formative lessons of childhood, are completed...

...You have to drink the spirit of the deer," Jed and Matt explain, an act, they promise, that will forever change him...

...That Milius is working with symbols is clear in the film's opening moments, which consist of evocative, early-morning shots of Calumet: white, wood-frame houses...

...We learn that Jed is named after Jedidiah Smith, legendary American hunter—as the boys bend down to gut a deer...

...This tangle of associations of masculinity with hunting, violence, blood-letting, and spirituality is very far from original...

...people on their way to school and work...

...Down to only four members, the band decides to call it quits, with two heading for freedom in the unoccupied zone, and Jed and Matt remaining behind because they are just too "burned out" to go on fighting or, presumably, living...

...Under their occupation, Calumet becomes a demented dreamscape, a nightmare world where the drive-in theater is transformed into a place 120 of torture and death, and where KGB agents prowl about Main Street looking for teenagers to interrogate...

...Similarly, Jed's success as a military leader is tied to his prowess as a football player and hunter, and his training in the schools of nature, athletics, and stern parental guidance...

...Consumed by the violence of the guerrilla war, Jed and Matt commit a kind of suicide by returning to Calumet for one final, glorious adventure...

...I was hard on you boys growing up," Tom Eckert says to his sons over the fence of the drive-in turned prison camp, "but you can see now why I was...

...I also suspect that its scenario is too extreme...

...But as time goes by, curiosity and loneliness undermine their determination...

...I was part of a guerrilla band of children, striking the enemy without warning from bedroom turrets, then miraculously slipping away into the shelter of garages, backyard bushes, and fence lines...

...In Jed's character, this masculine toughness is bound up with other formative experiences...

...But where Cimino sets Robert De Niro apart from his community through his nearly mystical relationship with the deer and the hunt, Milius suggests that Jed's prowess as a hunter is somehow the root of community, emblematic of the masculine toughness that cements the citizens of Calumet to one another and to their traditions of freedom...

...Red Dawn invokes a warrior ethic where physical prowess and courage become the principal social virtues and the precondition for a return to normal life in Calumet...

...Still, it is hard to take the film's explicit politics seriously...

...The band calls itself the "Wolverines," the symbol of the Calumet high school teams...

...Troops land everywhere, supported by armored cars, tanks, and jet fighters...

...The film could have been powerful, and disturbing...

...On a chance encounter with three Soviet soldiers in the mountains, they become adult guerrillas...

...And what the film does get right is that this particular arc of symbolism has been more often tied to a heroic view of war than to an antiwar view, to the politics of Milius rather than the politics of either Weir or Cimino...

...Surely, the Vietnam experience has altered our political culture in certain ways...