On July 19, 1984, the producers of Red Dawn had a problem. In less than a month, they were due to release the director John Milius’s pro-gun, survivalist action film depicting a Communist invasion of the United States, and the theatrical trailer and movie posters—both of which featured Soviet troops in or near a McDonald’s restaurant—were already completed. But those materials now had to be changed because the previous day, a well-armed paranoid survivalist named James Oliver Huberty had entered a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, Calif., and killed 21 people (including five children) with an Uzi submachine gun. The movie’s marketing team recalled some of the posters and removed the McDonald’s scene from the trailer. (The opening scene, in which the invaders gun down kids in a school, was left intact.) Red Dawn went on to become a cult classic and helped lead a generation of young men—yours truly included—into the military.
This Thanksgiving, Red Dawn emerged again, but without Milius’s explicit Second Amendment politics. And like the original, the new Red Dawn is in the awkward position of celebrating gun-toting teens on the screen as America mourns a mass slaughter of children in real life.
In the days ahead, we may finally start a serious conversation about gun violence in America. That conversation should include these films, for they are part of the problem, too. They, and similar films and video games, break down the barriers between violent fantasies and violent action, strengthen the entrenched opposition to common-sense gun laws, and contribute to the continuing militarization of American society and culture.
The conversation about gun violence should include these films, for they are part of the problem, too.
The original Red Dawn was part of a family of Reagan-era military films that gave Americans new ways to feel patriotic again. The plot device was clever: Instead of refighting Vietnam directly (à la Chuck Norris’s Colonel Braddock or Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo), the heroes of Red Dawn “win” by becoming insurgents. Following an improbable Soviet invasion of the United States—made easy by federal firearms laws that helped the invaders locate gun owners—a small band of Colorado teens takes to the hills, forms the “Wolverines,” and launches guerrilla attacks against the Communist occupiers. In the end, only two of the Wolverines survive and escape to an unoccupied “Free America.”
The remake is different. Filmed by cash-strapped MGM in 2009, it featured a Chinese cyberattack and subsequent invasion and conquest of most of the United States. But when MGM executives learned that the story line would keep the film out of China’s $2.5-billion film market, they engineered a solution. Scenes were reshot or dubbed (badly) from Chinese to Korean, and the opening sequence was adjusted to turn scary Asian invaders into well, scary, slightly different Asian invaders.
The result is a ridiculous premise: A joint North Korean-Russian invasion of both coasts with nary a mention of China. And, instead of dying as insurgents, most of the 2012 Wolverines survive and become a professional unit, performing operations that would tax the most capable Special Forces teams today. By the end of the film, they have stolen the North Koreans’ cybertechnology and inspired a nationwide insurgency that begins driving the barbarians from the gates.
The Kobal Collection
In the 2012 remake of “Red Dawn,” the young fighters are led by an active-duty Marine against a joint invasion of the United States by North Korea and Russia.
The stories told about guns and violence in the two films are also different. Milius—who was the Coen brothers’ inspiration for John Goodman’s gun-loving wing nut in The Big Lebowski—intended the 1984 film as an explicit defense of gun rights and a warning about government tyranny. The opening scene features a National Rifle Association bumper sticker, as a well as a pistol from Milius’s own collection. The script’s reference to the “form 4473s"—the actual federal form for registering gun sales—was red meat for extreme gun enthusiasts who fear that monitoring gun sales will enable a violent conquest of the United States. And, with 134 violent acts per hour, Red Dawn held the Guinness world record for most violent film ever made. It was also the first film to be released with the new PG-13 rating, which the remake received as well.
Milius continues his gun politics off the screen too: He is a longtime member of the NRA’s Board of Directors, and a leader of the “moderate” faction that brought in the current executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre. (LaPierre recently made news by recommending police departments place armed guards in every public school in America.)
There are no explicit Second Amendment politics in the new Red Dawn, directed by Dan Bradley, but the depiction of guns is problematic in a different way. The original Wolverines used pistols and hunting rifles until they stole Soviet weapons; the heroes in the remake have access to the full arsenal available to the American consumer. Teens gun down the enemy with Intratec Tec-9 and MAC-10 machine pistols (both legal and cheap); others wield M249 Squad Automatic Weapons and M4 carbines: military weapons currently used in Afghanistan. All told, there are 21 different firearms featured in the film, including Glock and SIG Sauer pistols—which the Newtown, Conn., shooter carried with him into Sandy Hook Elementary School. (One wonders how MGM’s prop team chose the weapons, and if the various gun companies facilitated their products’ placement.)
The new Red Dawn‘s technological seduction is made all the more easy by the fact that viewers experience none of the things that temper some combat veterans’ fondness for firearms: the smell of blood and feces, the sight of bone and brain, and the sounds people make when bullets rip through their lungs and other organs. The violence is also sanitized in another way: Unlike the cold-war Wolverines, the new heroes do not kill civilians, either intentionally or unintentionally. All this obscures important truths about guns and war: Mistakes are common, the wrong people die, and even when they don’t, the corrosive effects of killing destroy souls, psyches, and families for decades after the shooting stops.
The representation of the armed services is also different in the two films. In the original, the only military man is a downed Air Force pilot; the Wolverines’ leader, Jed Eckert (Patrick Swayze), is a former high-school football star who works at a gas station. The new Jed (Chris Hemsworth) is an active-duty Marine who fought in Iraq and takes inspiration from the Viet Cong and the Afghan mujahedin. Moreover, the new Wolverines are neither amateurs nor a militia—they are professionals, trained by Jed and a handful of other Marines. The script is also replete with Marine jargon: “Ooh-rah!” “Semper fi, Wolverines!” and “Marines don’t die. They go to hell and regroup.” By the end of the film, the Wolverines have even joined forces with the “Free American Army,” who are—you guessed it—all Marines.
This emphasis on the nation’s most aggressive military service makes for a harder, more militarized set of characters. In the 1984 version, Colonel Tanner (Powers Boothe) urges the Wolverines to lay down their arms and let go of their anger, lest it consume them. His 2012 counterpart, Sergeant Major Tanner (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), has a different message. “It’s a good day to die, gentlemen,” he growls, as the Wolverines set off on a daring raid to steal the enemy’s cybertechnology.
Both films are also commentaries on America’s failed (or potentially failing) attempts at counterinsurgency. The original Red Dawn was a celebration of militias, a retort to the loss of Vietnam, and a stick in the eye to the Soviets, who were fighting a real U.S.-backed insurgency in Afghanistan. Its cultural effect was to help remasculinize America, to create a cinematic universe wherein violent forms of patriotism made sense again. The film’s conclusion offered the most important restorative for a society still smarting from defeat: Even if the Americans lost Vietnam, it doesn’t mean the fight wasn’t worth it.
The remake has a different message. Instead of rewriting Vietnam into “morning again in America,” the new Red Dawn erases Afghanistan entirely (the word never appears in the film), and eventually sends the Wolverines into the kind of fight America loves best: a conventional war fought entirely by combatants. The film ends with the surviving Wolverines certain of their cause and vowing to fight on until victory. All that is needed, we are assured, is exactly what is lacking in our current war: staying power.
The implicit recoding of Afghanistan as a conventional, winnable war is remarkable, not least because the new film’s lead character provides us with the reason that no such victory is likely. As Jed explains it: “When you’re fighting in your own backyard, when you’re fighting for your family, it all hurts a little less and makes a little more sense. That’s our biggest advantage. For them, this is just a place. For us, this is our home.” The Taliban have been saying the same thing to us for well nigh a decade.
Even the reason for the North Korean invasion speaks to America’s strategic and economic dilemmas. Our country, we learn in the opening montage, is fighting multiple wars in the “Middle East, South Asia, and Korea,” and is now deeper than ever in debt. With America’s military spread all over the world, the homeland is left undefended. Whether intentionally or not, there are hints here of the very real warnings that the Yale historian Paul M. Kennedy issued first in 1987, in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, and again in The Washington Post just before the start of the 2003 invasion of Iraq: “Imperial overstretch” limits options; costly wars are often at the heart of why great powers fall. Want to prevent the coming Asian invasion? Don’t let security commitments overwhelm available resources.
Sadly, these ironies will probably be lost on most viewers. Most will get only the dominant message—an appealing, but misleadingly simplistic narrative of war and violence that renders both morally unproblematic. When framed in the glowing light of a red dawn, shooting and killing becomes an easy choice between self-respect or surrender, defending family or giving in to enslavement. That’s fine for a Friday-night movie, as long as one admits that accepting this story line has its own effects. It reconfigures all military operations—including the war in Afghanistan—as a defense of America, a position that seems increasingly at odds with the facts. It gives boys and young men expectations of military service that will eventually crash against the hard and confusing reality of complicated wars.
And it celebrates the weapons that help kill some 31,000 Americans a year across the country, almost five times as many as have died in Iraq and Afghanistan over 11 years of continuous combat operations.