This weekend, as we come together to celebrate Independence Day, let’s
do our best to remember what this holiday is all about. It’s more than
merely dodging DWI checkpoints on your way home from backyard barbecues
and trying to decide between the Jon & Kate + 8 or
Deadliest Catch marathons on TV; it’s also about embarrassingly
overwrought displays of jingoism. Here are but a few cinematic examples.
5. Rocky IV (1985)
The Cold War saw many proxy battlefields: Jadotville, Congo; the Bay of
Pigs; Lubango, Angola…yet perhaps no more decisive skirmish was fought
than in Moscow, USSR. There, two mismatched heavyweights (one 5’9″, one
6’5″), their punches landing like ICBMs, decided the fate of the globe.
Make no mistake about it, Gorbachev wasn’t cowed by Reagan’s demands to
“tear down this wall,” but by the very real possibility that Rocky could
demolish it with his bare hands.
4. Heartbreak Ridge (1986)
Remember that movie where a tough-as-nails badass reigns in a bunch of
punk recruits, molding them into an effective fighting machine just in
time for the climactic battle? Heartbreak Ridge is a lot like
that, except with much more homoeroticism (Clint makes at least a half
dozen references to taking warm showers with other men) and the not so
subtle political agenda of romanticizing the “liberation” of Grenada, a
military operation largely designed to distract us from Reagan’s retreat
from Lebanon.
3. The Green Berets (1968)
The dumbest thing about this, one of the Duke’s more egregious cinematic
missteps, isn’t a line like “Out here, due process is a bullet,” or the
stock war movie cliches (an Irishman named “Muldoon!”), or that
apparently Vietnam has pine trees. No, it’s the way Vietnames children
are allowed free access to American Army bases. Maybe if the Green
Berets weren’t so busy building public infrastructure and winning hearts
and minds they’d have been able to post a few sentries.
2. The Patriot (2000)
The producers scrambled to disassociate Mel Gibson’s character from its
original inspiration, Francis “The Swamp Fox” Marion, largely due to
allegations that Marion was a “serial rapist” who hunted Indians for
sport. These accusations came primarily from UK sources, who seem to
have gotten the crazy idea that the British are portrayed
unsympathetically in Gibson’s movies.
1. Pearl Harbor (2001)
The worst patriotic movies are those that confuse respect for your
country’s achievements with the need to paint everything it
has ever done in a favorable light. According to American
auteur Michael Bay, the Doolittle Raid was an overwhelming
success, Hawaii was primarily Anglo (not that it would have mattered,
for in Bay’s view racism was a minor historical hiccup), and one of the
most significant events in American history is reduced to background
noise for a Falcon Crest-level love story. Forget remaking
The Birds, Bay needs to snap up the rights to Triumph of
the Will.
This article appears in Jul 2-8, 2009.
