Stranded at the Drive-In

by Garry Mulholland

  There is something about the invasion in Red Dawn, the suddenness and speed, the brutality and surrender, the end-of-life-as-we-know-it-ness of it, that outdoes any alien invasion or war movie you care to name. As soon as those parachutes land, and Red Dawn has successfully tapped into a source of primal fear, I’m just not interested in the hysterical pre-Tea Party political views of John Milius and co-writer Kevin Reynolds any more. I don’t care. I’m just . . . scared.

  Besides, no matter your views on right-wing propaganda, Red Dawn is, in the end, asking you to believe that the superpowers would simply agree not to fire nukes at each other. That being abandoned by NATO means that the Pentagon would just switch all the radar machines off. And that revolutionary America’s toughest guerrilla cell would be led by Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen. It’s not a documentary.

  Milius is pretty interesting in himself. This is the man whose scriptwriting talents provided the world with ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning’, ‘Do you feel lucky, punk? Well . . . do ya?’ and ‘Go ahead make my day’, from the scripts for Apocalypse Now and Dirty Harry, of course. He also wrote the USS Indianapolis bit in Jaws. He was the inspiration for the characters of John Milner in American Graffiti (see here) and Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski, has made two films about his hero Theodore Roosevelt . . . and invented the cage in Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). The man is entirely singular in the American arts – proudly macho, right-wing, pro-war, loves violence – and widely admired by people who aren’t. So the fact that his big war film as a director is also a teen movie is both as eccentric and fitting as Red Dawn’s inability to decide whether a vision of America being abandoned by the world and left to fight The Axis Of Evil alone (apart from ‘England’, we’re informed, which ‘won’t last long’) is horrifying or the sexiest thing in the world. Perhaps the forthcoming remake (the new invaders are . . . North Korea!!! Sadly, it’s not being directed by Trey Parker and Matt Stone) will sort out that bit of schizophrenia. Wouldn’t bet on it, though. They do love being John Wayne.

  Red Dawn occasionally resembles Milius’s attempt to remake Apocalypse Now in Colorado (actually Las Vegas, location-wise), minus the pretension and the billion-dollar budget. The fact that Milius is nowhere near as accomplished a director as Francis Ford Coppola helps this particular movie. The battle scenes in Apocalypse Now looked sexy, remote, exotic. Here, they look like a callous but somewhat flung together army wielding hardware they can barely use, causing chaos in remote fields and streets that look like sets that could be used for Back To The Future (see here). It feels like war might feel if it was being waged outside your front door. It’s loud and confused. It doesn’t lend itself to Doors songs or wry quotes about napalm. It’s a weird mix of action movie boys blowing stuff up and what you imagine Beirut or Baghdad might feel like under invasion. It’s tasteless. Few directors do the morally right thing and make war look tasteless.

  There are so many bombs and explosions that the orchestral soundtrack becomes a 114-minute take on that bit from the 1812 overture where the cannons are firing. Perhaps Ollie North was diverting some of those ill-gotten weapons to Milius. The US military do love him. The operation to capture Saddam Hussein was codenamed, you guessed it, Operation Red Dawn. Satire is dead.

  But Red Dawn is a great film because it’s a strange film. And it’s strange because it steadfastly refuses to do what it’s supposed to. It’s supposed to take time introducing you to its teen heroes before the action starts, showing you their teen angst and love interests and making you care about them. The paratroopers take care of that. It’s supposed to show you these plucky kids doing Goonies-style adventure capers where no one really dies and the peril stays resolutely mild. It doesn’t. It gets dark, pessimistic and kills lead characters. And it’s surely supposed to end when the great US military machine does its cavalry thing and arrives to save the day and give our heroes a Star Wars ceremony moment for having single-handedly scuppered the Russkie Death Star. It really, really doesn’t do that at all. The Wolverines – so-named after their high school mascot and football team – are overwhelmed by greater power, and have to settle for small, ultimately pointless victories. The cavalry never arrives. The great cities of America are destroyed. The USA remains occupied and enslaved. The end. Damn.

  The basic plot is straightforward enough. The Commies take over America. When they hit Calumet, Colorado, a group of teens take to the hills with guns and supplies. When they realise that their families are dead, prisoners or in fear of their lives, they make themselves into organised insurgents. They plan and orchestrate daring raids on the alliance of Soviet and Latin American troops. The only problem is . . . they are still kids. Some are braver than others. Some are more stable than others. They are forced to become as ruthless and amoral as the enemy. And, if you’re going to be a successful army, those who won’t follow orders have to be sacrificed for the greater good . . .

  The rest is fantastic action scenes and a how-to manual on waging guerrilla war. The pure pleasure of seeing Jennifer Grey (see Dirty Dancing, p. 289, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, here) and Lea Thompson (see Back To The Future, here), looking as filthy and feral as the boys and wielding sub-machine guns with extreme prejudice, fabulous cameos from Harry Dean Stanton and, especially, Powers Boothe, as every cynical, hard-bitten Viet Vet in movie history rolled into one sneering, doomed ball of existential despair. Lord Of The Flies-style meltdowns, traumas, nobilities, betrayals, the initially most scaredy-cat boy becoming the most committed murderer, and one of the most shocking killings anywhere in this book, as befits a group of kids thrown into unbearable circumstances. The film could really have done without one of those scores that insists on telling you how to feel through every scene. But the basic foundation of conservatism is that people are incredibly stupid and must be told how to feel, so big surprise (the most depressing thing about growing into middleage, for me, was the slowly dawning revelation that the basic foundation of socialism is exactly the same).

  Swayze, Thompson and Howell are outstanding, forced to carry a preposterous scenario, and giving it levels of emotional truth that make a potentially dumb film into a compelling, dramatic adventure story. The ending of Red Dawn is melodramatic and riddled with clichés about noble deaths and mutual respect between enemy warriors. But it’s brave. Foolishly so. Sending American teens out of the cinema feeling that America would inevitably lose if it got invaded? This was a suicidal gambit in the gung-ho ’80s. Lea Thompson’s closing voiceover says, ‘In time this war, like every other war, ended.’ But doesn’t say who won or lost. The final seconds are a bizarre mix of valediction for all resistance fighters who die rather than collaborate, and immediate camp, as we get closing credits snaps of the cast posing like supermodels doing a military chic magazine spread over pummelling marching band music. Very, very odd.

  Yet Red Dawn was a reasonable commercial success and has lived on as a cult favourite, gaining the ultimate kudos of warranting affectionate parody by South Park and Family Guy.

  And there is sound battle advice, too. For example, if, after a carefully crafted set-piece raid on an enemy, you find that you have outflanked your shadowy nemesis, and crept up behind him with a gun . . . don’t pause for a valedictory ‘You lose!’ Just shoot him. In the back. This is useful survival info for a Spider Man and Buffy fan, trained to believe that there is always time for a pithy wisecrack before dispatching The Big Bad. In truth, they don’t stop to laugh bitterly. They just shoot you.

  FOOTLOOSE

  1984

  Starring: Kevin Bacon, Lori Singer, John Lithgow, Christopher Penn, Dianne Wiest, Sarah Jessica Parker

  Dir.: Herbert Ross

  Plot: Dance missionary Kevin Bacon brings civilisation to Hicktown.

  Key line: ‘If we let some punk push us around now, before long every standard in the community will be violated!’

  When writing Popcorn, my book about rock movies, I had a severe mental block about Grease. Couldn’t th
ink of a damn word to say about it. So I asked my wife Linsay for emergency aid. She’s been a lifelong fan of the movie, and kindly agreed to watch it with me and talk about it. I used the resulting conversation as the Grease entry. Readers seemed to think that worked pretty well.

  So, when I came to a similar impasse with Footloose, I went to my family for help again. The problem this time was what I’d already written for Popcorn . . . an essay which I thought summed up everything about the movie, even if I do say so myself. I had nothing left to say. Enter the cavalry, in the shape of my son Matt Stevens.

  Matt knew Footloose well. But he read my entry in Popcorn and took exception to it. As far as his generation was concerned, he reckoned (he’s 24, incidentally), Footloose was just ’80s kitsch. No subtexts. No themes worth exploring. Just dumb songs and comedy dancing.

  So I asked him to watch it with me and allow me to try and persuade him that Footloose was more than so-bad-its-good. I failed miserably, I suspect.

  Me: I didn’t even go to see Footloose at the time. I didn’t go to see dance movies with silly synth pop songs when I was 21. I took myself far too seriously. I’d just moved to London. It came out in the year I met your mother.

  Matt: Well, no wonder you didn’t see it! You’d just moved to the big city to find your rhythm and your rock ’n’ roll . . . The exact opposite of what Ren McCormack is doing in Footloose. This small town Beaumont is like March. [March is a tiny town in Cambridgeshire where Matt’s mum hails from. It is Matt’s and my shared vision of hell.] Except March hasn’t got those picturesque mountains in the background. But anyway . . . that’s the point. Everyone’s got a concept of what Footloose is without actually watching it.

  Me: John Lithgow is brilliant as the Bad Dad, Reverend Shaw Moore. I’m not sure the film would work without him. Most actors would just be bug-eyed over the top as the Evil Priest. But Lithgow’s real.

  Matt: Would you say Kevin Bacon’s good-looking? Was he seen that way at the time?

  Me: He’s very good-looking for a man who has a face like a rodent. He looks like he’s constantly gnawing cheese. But I do think he’s charismatic. I will give bad films a chance if Kevin Bacon is in them.

  Matt: With these kind of films, it’s always ‘small towns’ . . . but these towns are fucking huge! Thousands of students and thousands of young people who all have completely different likes and dislikes. That’s not a small town! [Matt grew up in a really small town in Suffolk.] This place is like Brighton. If you can imagine Brighton, right, where all of its young have been forcibly thrown back to the 1950s. Doesn’t Lori Singer look kinda like Kevin Bacon?

  Me: Yeah . . . never noticed before, but you’re right. The same strange rat-nose thing going on.

  Matt: The stars aren’t that beautiful . . .

  Me: But I think they wanted the audience to relate to the characters. It’s like Jennifer Grey in Dirty Dancing; she’s not a conventional pin-up.

  We reach the scene where Ren bumps into aggressive bumpkin Willard (Chris Penn) and charms him completely with one lame insult.

  Me: If only it was that easy to turn around the meathead school bully . . .

  Matt: You know what I mean? In the real world he would’ve just punched him in the face. Is Willard supposed to be a bully? It’s not really made clear . . .

  Me: No. He looks like one at first glance and then becomes every boy’s gay best friend.

  Matt: How old are they supposed to be? Bacon and Penn look about 28 . . .

  Me: But teens largely weren’t cast in teen films until the ’90s. The exceptions were the art movies . . . Kes, The 400 Blows. But in the mainstream they went for actors in their twenties . . .

  Matt: Perhaps that’s why they worked so well. The internet has changed things, hasn’t it? Back in the ’80s you wanted to see these dream worlds. Now we know too much about what’s out there, and we need to see kids playing kids’ roles because we’re addicted to reality. Back then you wanted to believe you could just rebel and dance and everything would just work out, partly because you look older than you actually are. That the world’s a better place than it actually is. Today’s youth are too cynical for that. Teen films have become bleak. But why do you need films telling us how bleak our lives could be? It’s a strange idea.

  Me: Sadly, film directors convince themselves that if nobody smiles in a film, it must be deep.

  Matt: Ren is like the first Metrosexual, isn’t he? He’s manly, but understanding. And in touch with his feminine side while doing incredibly gymnastic things on monkey bars.

  Me: The chicken race scene is genius. This is such a hick town that they have to race on tractors.

  Matt: I dunno. I think a chicken race with tractors is pretty badass.

  Me: Badass . . . yes. But not sexy.

  Matt: Oh my God . . . they race to ‘Holding Out For A Hero’ by Bonnie Tyler? I’d completely forgotten about that!

  Me: Footloose is not lacking in irony.

  Matt: But this is also the most homoerotic thing in the movie. Two raging hormonal guys hurtling towards you in tractors to ‘Holding Out For A Hero’?

  Me: I dunno. I’m not really taking tractors as seriously as you obviously do. It must be all those years living in the country, mate. Tractors just don’t have the same sexual connotations to us dashing urban types.

  Matt: We were doing it in Suffolk all the time. Fuck sex and Elvis. Break out the scrumpy and drive JCBs at each other. Mind you, if someone had actually suggested that to me at 16 I would’ve been well up for it . . . [There is a very funny long shot which shows just how slowly the tractors are ‘hurtling’ towards each other] . . . OK . . . fair enough. They’re taking the piss. Tractors go way faster than that, by the way. Also, Ren’s tractor is much, much bigger than the other guy’s. He’s got a huge vehicle . . . AHA! Sarah Jessica Parker. The best actress of our time. She was mildly attractive when she was younger, though. Compared to now. When a cartoon calls you a ‘transvestite donkey witch’, I think that says it all.

  Me: That was South Park, yeah? But she’s a very successful transvestite donkey witch. She’s braying all the way to the bank. And she’s married to Matthew Broderick.

  Matt: Really? And life promised so much for Ferris Bueller.

  Me: You’re losing focus. Back to Footloose. Both Ren and Ariel are completely driven by the need to impress absent fathers . . .

  Matt: Yeah. But it’s a very soft version of adolescence. I mean, Ren’s stepfather isn’t too bad. The house is quite nice. And no one bullies him at school, despite his Metrosexuality. He’s made loads of friends. He’s a bit of a wuss.

  Me: Ah . . . the warehouse scene. The dance routine that shaped a generation. People say that Tom Cruise miming in his pants in Risky Business (see here) is the ultimate ’80s movie scene. But I think it’s Kevin Bacon and his dance stunt-double dancing camply in a warehouse to ‘Never’ by Moving Pictures. Montage plus bad dance routine plus dodgy synth-rock. It’s a triple threat. I mean to say . . . at least in Dirty Dancing they hired Patrick Swayze because he could dance.

  Matt: It’s not quite The Black Swan, is it? But nowadays people expect the commitment and skill that Natalie Portman showed in The Black Swan. Any film using a dance double so blatantly now would be laughed out of cinemas.

  Me: You say that, but Travolta and Karen Lynn Gorney did their own dancing in Saturday Night Fever way back in 1977. Footloose is unusual in being a dance movie where none of the leads can actually dance.

  Matt: I’m just gonna throw this out there. But . . . if I wandered into an abandoned warehouse in the middle of the night and found a guy doing that, I wouldn’t be yelling, ‘Whooh! Big Time!’ I’d be like, what the fuck? I’m not going anywhere near that guy. And with your whole feminist angle . . . Ariel wouldn’t strike me as a feminist icon. She doesn’t know who she wants to sleep with. She’s in denial. She’s naive and scared. That doesn’t seem too feminist to me. The opposite.

  Me: But in pop movies it’s more what
you do than what you’re driven by. She isn’t a girlie girl. She’s defiant. She won’t be pushed around by men.

  Matt: But the men aren’t strong enough to push her around. Chuck’s a dumb hick, Ren’s a girl and Dad’s having a mid-life crisis. She’s a dominant female in a world of weak men, who doesn’t seem to do anything with that power except work out how to fuck someone and get other girls to do her dirty work.

  Me: Wow. You’re not keen on her, are you? Don’t you just love this whole emasculating bit with the train and her ever-present death wish, though?

  Matt: I’m more interested in the idea that fun in Beaumont involves just going up to the train tracks and standing there. Whooh! Big time! And that the peril comes from another really slow-moving vehicle.

  Me: It’s a metaphor for how slowly small-town life moves.

  Matt: I see. So she moves to a city, sees a Porsche and just faints dead away. And let’s not even think about planes . . . [We reach the scene where Ariel confronts Daddy on the dark sinister staircase in their home] . . . Why is she so scared of him? ‘It doesn’t get much better’ . . . that really is a strange line, isn’t it?

  Me: That whole scene has a strange sexual undertone I can’t quite get to the bottom of.

  Matt: I’m gonna put this out there, too: this town doesn’t seem too bad. No one has said, at any point, that if you dance you’ll be arrested. It seems like the punishment for breaking this law is . . . a really dirty look from an adult.

  Me: You’re right. At the beginning it promises that the cops are gonna be out there cracking the heads of anyone who taps their foot to a show tune. People are making cracks about the evils of reading and you think Beaumont is going to be a fullon fascist fiefdom. And then . . . mild disapproval is as bad as it gets.