Soviet Union suffers worst wheat harvest in 55 years... Labor and food riots in Poland. Soviet troops invade... Cuba and Nicaragua reach troop strength goals of 500,000. El Salvador and Honduras fall... Greens Party gains control of West German Parliament. Demands withdrawal of nuclear weapons from European soil... Mexico plunged into revolution... NATO dissolves. United States stands alone.
- Opening of
Red Dawn
I just watched the old American movie
Red Dawn last night. It was...kind of disturbing, to say the least. I think by 1984 it was pretty obvious that America was finished, and American popular culture got...really weird by then.
Red Dawn wasn't the weirdest of American 80s pop culture, but it certainly was creepy enough. The premise is basically that the entire world falls to communism (or "communism", since God knows capitalism's still alive and well) except for the United States of America, and the Soviet Union decides to invade the USA to finish what they've started.
The evil Soviet invaders are fought by a team of small-town high school football players in Wisconsin called the Wolverines, and this is meant to be heroic. Of course, the Soviets still win at the end, but the guerrilla force manages to go out in a blaze of glory. It's presented that these are the good guys, fighting against the evil Soviet jackboot, and the film uses pretty much American blockbuster filmmaking trick in the book to try and get you to root for them, but what really struck me was just how fucked up that movie got. Honestly, I think everyone kind of knew the real America was finished, so they put as many torture scenes and mass killings of Soviet soldiers as possible. The townsfolk are herded into an internment camp/repurposed drive-in theater, and Strategic Air Command is knocked out by Cubans pretending to be Mexican immigrants, all while the ATF's filing system is used to track people's guns so the Soviets can steal them.
I'm not even kidding, it's that paranoid, racist, and generally shitty. I'm almost certain that this movie inspired some of those crazy survivalists and militia nuts in the former USA.
Honestly, I was kind of surprised at the production values of the movie. It looks pretty much almost as good as a comparable Russian movie of the 1980s. It's just that the creepy nationalism, blood-obsession, utter hate for the Soviet Union, unambiguous endorsement of child soldiers, and general craziness kind of shows through. It was pretty kitschy, I guess, but underneath all of the 80s was some...really weird writing, I'll say that. It was definitely a product of the US right wing.