{"id":160,"date":"2004-10-18T23:25:32","date_gmt":"2004-10-19T04:25:32","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=160"},"modified":"2004-10-18T23:25:32","modified_gmt":"2004-10-19T04:25:32","slug":"the-far-side-of-irony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=160","title":{"rendered":"The Far Side of Irony"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Having seen <cite>Team America: World Police<\/cite> last Friday on its<br \/>\nopening night, I&#8217;m amused by the mainstream-media spin that this movie<br \/>\nis an anti-right-wing satire too subtle for the yokels to get.  In<br \/>\nfact, I think it&#8217;s it&#8217;s something much more peculiar and interesting<br \/>\n&mdash; a movie that hides a strong fundamental patriotism and appeal<br \/>\nto traditional values under a veneer of scatology and sexual crudity.<\/p>\n<p>The MSM can&#8217;t see this, because in the MSM&#8217;s universe the kind of<br \/>\npatriotism for which the movie ultimately plumps is at best a joke to<br \/>\nbe sneered at and at worst actually toxic.  But the South Park guys<br \/>\ntip their hand early, during a sequence in which the the protagonist<br \/>\nGary visits the Lincoln Memorial and other national monuments while<br \/>\nwrestling with a question of duty.  The soundtrack is country music<br \/>\nof the most teeth-gritting, lachrymose awfulness &mdash; but the steel<br \/>\nguitars and schmaltzy vocals fail to obscure the fact that the song is<br \/>\nasking a serious moral question, and that the right answer (for Gary<br \/>\nand for the rest of us) is that he must accept his duty to defend<br \/>\nfreedom.  The entire rest of the plot follows from that decision.<\/p>\n<p>This scene is a microcosm of the movie. In this satire, it&#8217;s the<br \/>\n<em>satire<\/em> you&#8217;re supposed to see through. Irony is enlisted to<br \/>\nanti-ironic purposes.  In another early scene, Gary is cosmetically<br \/>\nmorphed for infiltration purposes into a caricature of the generic<br \/>\nIslamo-terrorist so extreme that pained laughter is the only possible<br \/>\nresponse &mdash; and his teammates think it&#8217;s a perfect disguise. But<br \/>\nnever once is this pointed jab at American parochialism allowed to<br \/>\nobscure the genuine evil of the type he is disguised as.<\/p>\n<p>Throughout the film, Team America is clumsy, parochial,<br \/>\nhamfisted and inadvertently destructive.  But this is emphasised mainly<br \/>\nin order to point up a continuing underlying message that it&#8217;s better<br \/>\nto be a dolt with traditional American intentions than a sophisticate<br \/>\nin the service of evil.<\/p>\n<p>In this and other ways, this movie seems profoundly conservative to<br \/>\nme.  I don&#8217;t often use the label &#8216;conservative&#8217; as a compliment, but<br \/>\nsuch use is merited here.  Team America knows it&#8217;s their job to defend<br \/>\ncivilization, to conserve it.  Part of the humor in this movie comes<br \/>\nfrom the contrast between that fundamental conservatism and the<br \/>\nprofane, obscene, and jejunely disgusting moments that occupy much of<br \/>\nthe film.  These are not your father&#8217;s conservatives, a point the<br \/>\nSouth Park auteurs make early by showing two of the characters<br \/>\nsprinting a lust-a-thon through a marrionette kama sutra of sexual<br \/>\npositions.<\/p>\n<p>And maybe that&#8217;s the most interesting message of this movie.  We<br \/>\nwatch it blowing up scenery in a parody of the Bruckheimerian action<br \/>\nflick, but what&#8217;s really being exploded is the fixed categories of the<br \/>\npost-1960s culture wars.  The South Park guys are trying to divorce<br \/>\nthe muscular self-confidence of a healthy civilization from the<br \/>\ncultural-conservative and religious fixations that confidence has<br \/>\nusually been married to.  There is not one single reference to<br \/>\nChristianity in the entire movie.  The good guys drink, swear, and<br \/>\nscrew like frenzied minks, but they&#8217;re good guys just the same.<\/p>\n<p>Ultimately, what matters about them most is that they never give<br \/>\nup and never compromise with evil.  That&#8217;s what makes this vulgar<br \/>\ncomedy ultimately a serious parable for our time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Having seen Team America: World Police last Friday on its opening night, I&#8217;m amused by the mainstream-media spin that this movie is an anti-right-wing satire too subtle for the yokels to get. In fact, I think it&#8217;s it&#8217;s something much more peculiar and interesting &mdash; a movie that hides a strong fundamental patriotism and appeal&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=160\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Far Side of Irony<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}