Red Dawn: No retreat, no surrender
As pure a piece of American propaganda as ever created, the neocon fantasy came just at the right time to boost Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign.
It was the summer of Ronald Reagan and Bruce Springsteen. Of Ghostbusters and Gremlins. Of Prince singing “When Doves Cry” and starring in Purple Rain.
It was 1984. Orwell’s year. I had just graduated from high school, and I felt particularly aimless. College at Ohio State was coming, and I felt no hurry to get there. My mother was selling the house I had grown up in. Life was going to push me forward whether I wanted to move on or not. But the bigger, wider world beyond my hometown never felt farther away. Springsteen’s lyrics that summer may have summed up my ennui. Man, I'm just tired and bored with myself
But maybe the real song of the summer was Springsteen’s “No Surrender:” Blood brothers on a stormy night, with a vow to defend
I’ll back up. That year, Reagan was running for re-election against Democrat Walter Mondale. It never seemed like he would be seriously challenged at any point, but in August, he made an ill-timed joke before his weekly address about bombing the Soviet Union. The president hadn’t realized his soundcheck was being transmitted to radio stations across the country.
Once word of the joke spread, the Soviets reacted as you might think they might–- officially and dramatically furious. Mondale condemned the comment as irresponsible, and other critics viewed the remark as proof of Reagan’s narrow view of geopolitics or that he was slipping mentally, or both. His approval ratings dropped, and Democrats, for a brief moment, had some hope he could be defeated.
That same very week in August 1984 Reagan made his gaffe, a movie called Red Dawn hit theaters. If you are of a certain age, this image is already in your head:
Mind you, I am not suggesting Red Dawn is the reason why Reagan swiftly recovered, and went on to win the presidency in a historic landslide. But let’s just say it was an extremely helpful in-kind contribution to his campaign.
The movie is one of those probably better known for its premise than its actual story and in that way has a cultural cachet that extends far beyond its limitations as a cinematic work. A group of rag-tag high schoolers take on the Russians. What’s a better logline than that? Unlike my sorry self back in Ohio, these teens had a purpose.
Red Dawn contains perhaps one of the most slam-bang openings of any action movie in history: We find ourselves in the mountain town of Calumet, Colorado. We barely know who our young protagonists are before paratroopers drop outside their high school. Their history teacher is shot dead before their eyes. The school is bombed. School buses are set on fire. The town’s residents are slaughtered in the streets. And our young heroes (nicknamed “the Wolverines” after their high school mascot) end up on the run into the Colorado mountains, led by former high-school jock Jed as played by Patrick Swayze. Blood brothers on a stormy night, with a vow to defend
The Soviets, aided by troops from Cuba and Nicaragua, have invaded and for some reason that’s never entirely made clear, they’ve decided to start in the sparsely populated middle of the country. We were told in an opening intro that a famine forced the Russians to invade Poland. Weak-kneed liberals in Europe refused to stand up to them. NATO fell apart, leaving the U.S. alone.
Apparently, the Soviets had already struck key targets around the country leaving American forces unable to respond to the invasion. How this all happened without anyone in town knowing about it is never explained. Nobody in Calumet watches Walter Cronkite? What about listening to Paul Harvey?
The invasion force quickly occupies the town, throwing its leading citizens into a drive-in that’s been turned into a re-education camp. The local theater is already showing movies about Russian hero Alexander Nevsky. Now that is efficiency! We’re even told, off-hand, that the local Jewish population (huh?) has been killed in one of many cringe moments.
Yes, there is a poverty of subtlety in Red Dawn. Early on, the camera shows a bumper sticker on a pickup that references the line about taking a gun “from my cold dead hands” and then cuts to a Soviet soldier doing exactly that to a fallen citizen. Point made. The troops also use the local “gun registry” to track down residents who may have firearms. And we are told later that American bases were overwhelmed after enemy agents “infiltrated” them by crossing the porous U.S. border with Mexico.
If this all sounds like the film was a fantasy written and produced by the editors of the National Review, you aren’t far off. Famed Hollywood conservative and all-around tough guy John Milius was given the assignment of directing the film. As a writer, Milius was best known for his contributions to movies such as Dirty Harry and Apocalypse Now. As a director, he made the far superior The Wind and the Lion with Sean Connery. Milius was legendarily lampooned by John Goodman in the Coens’ The Big Lebowski.1
But Milius, amazingly, was given help shaping the film into a hardcore anti-Soviet vehicle by none other than Alexander Haig, the former NATO commander and U.S. secretary of state who was member of the board at MGM studios at the time.
Together, Haig and Milius took a script with anti-war overtones and turned into something the studio felt was in sync with the vibe of the moment — the conservative turn the country had taken under Reagan. In doing so, they fashioned as pure a piece of American propaganda as anything put on celluloid during World War II. The Soviets and their allies are shown to be bloodthirsty cartoon characters, so blinded by their Communist worldview that they can’t see the foolishness of attempting to subjugate a freedom-loving people.
The transformation of high school kinds into a guerilla fighting force that beats back the occupiers is made literal in the movie’s final act, when the Wolverines on horseback fight helicopter gun ships looking all the world like the mujahadeen battling the Soviets in Afghanistan. That country is even name-checked by a Russian in the film, flagging for the audience the sheer improbability that the U.S.S.R. would take on the United States while struggling back home to defeat a smaller, more backward enemy.
On a cinematic level, the movie is almost unapologetically paint-by-numbers, with gruesome violence, histrionic acting and c-level character development. The two standouts are the young women freedom-fighters, played by Lea Thompson (!) and Jennifer Grey (!!). When she starts sporting a beret and a machine gun, Thompson looks a bit like Patty Hearst. And Grey has one of the great death scenes an actor can ever have in these movies, as she leaves a live grenade under her bullet-ridden body to be found by a Soviet solder. Dirty dancing, indeed. As for the boys, C. Thomas Howell becomes a remorseless killing machine while Swayze and a very young Charlie Sheen barely register.2
But to its credit, the movie never lets up. It stays ridiculously over-the-top from start to finish, granting just about every guilty pleasure imaginable. Harry Dean Stanton shows up briefly as Swayze’s father, imprisoned at the re-education camp. “AVENGE ME!” he cries. And when you start wishing that some crusty scene-swallower like Powers Boothe would simply parachute into the movie and take it a level up, there he is, slinging dialogue like, “All that hate’s gonna burn you up, kid.”
Red Dawn was a hit, the biggest one of the late summer of ’84. It made back double its budget. More than that, to Reagan’s political benefit, he had a film in the theaters that literally portrayed a Soviet invasion of the United States that was repelled in part by a bunch of plucky, good-looking kids. Just a few weeks earlier, the U.S.S.R. had boycotted the Olympics in Los Angeles, All of it fed Reagan’s political narrative.3
While I was already out of school at the time, the politics of Red Dawn felt familiar to me. My suburb wasn’t all that different from that fictional Colorado town, conservative, white and driven by athletics. The Democratic Party was at a low ebb nationwide but especially in places like that. As if to drive the point home, Reagan in October would appear at a campaign rally on the Ohio State campus, where I was now a freshman, drawing a fervent legion of supporters.4 By that time, his re-election victory felt assured.
All of this is why I started the Nuclear Theater project in the first place. It’s a way of reminding readers – and myself – of what it was like to grow up under the shadow of an ever-present threat of global annihilation. For every movie like The Day After that warned of the dangers we all faced, there were others, like Red Dawn, that seemed to relish the idea of a final conflict. All of it contributed to the sense of inevitability we felt then. As Boothe’s character notes ruefully: “Two toughest kids on the block, I guess. Sooner or later, they're gonna fight.”
In that respect, it’s not so different from now, when there are forces at the margins that appear hungry for some kind of showdown that could alter the fabric of the nation. They want to play guerilla warrior just like the Wolverines. But in this case, the enemy wouldn’t be the Soviets or any outside army, it would ourselves.
That conflict wouldn’t be nearly so clean. Who would be the heroes then?
WHERE CAN I WATCH IT: Red Dawn is currently playing on MAX. (Because of course it goes to the max.)
HEY ISN’T THAT: Famed character actor Harry Dean Stanton was mentioned above. How about Ron O’ Neal, who plays the increasingly disillusioned Cuban Commander Bella. O’Neal remains best known for his role in the blaxploitation classic Superfly. O’Neal grew up in Cleveland and briefly attended Ohio State. See how this all fits together? It’s a tapestry.
ARMAGEDDON INDEX: 8/10: We’re told nukes were used, but we never see them. America endures but it still seems bad. (Especially for residents of D.C.)
DUST CLOUDS: To put a final bow on the Springsteen element of all of this: In September, at a campaign rally in New Jersey, Reagan would attempt to co-opt Springsteen’s song “Born in the U.S.A.” as a campaign theme. Springsteen swiftly responded at his next show by playing a cut from his less-than-optimistic album Nebraska, pushing back that he was contributing to the Reagan message.
But at least one conservative commentator has noted that Springsteen may have inadvertantly aided Reagan anyway. The iconography of the Born in the U.S.A. album plus the roaring anthemic title track played into the president’s hands, Kyle Smith has argued:
Sticking in the top ten all summer, Born in the U.S.A., featuring Springsteen’s white T-shirt and blue jeans in front of the flag’s stripes, was emblazoned on America’s retina. It was an unintended gift to Reagan’s reelection campaign. It helped make America feel good about itself, even great about itself.
WHAT ELSE I’M WATCHING: TV: “Ripley” (S1, Netflix); Movies: Sherlock Jr. (Keaton, 1924), Brats (McCarthy, 2024), The Night of the Hunter (Laughton, 1955), Hit Man (Linlater, 2024)
Comments or suggestions: nucleartheater@gmail.com
LAST ENTRY: Greenland (2020)
NEXT ENTRY: Argo (2012)
Milius was a more complicated figure than he seemed, a long-time friend of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. He worried that the film had become too one-note and jingoistic.
Grey and Sheen would reunite in 1986’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off while Grey and Swayze would team up to…well, you know. But just don’t call them a Brat Pack. FWIW, here is my take on Andrew McCarthy’s recent HULU documentary on the Brat Pack. I think he missed the target. He should be angry with whoever convinced him to star in St. Elmo’s Fire and Mannequin.
The Reagan campaign that year released a highly effective campaign ad called “Bear” that obliquely referred to the threat posed by the Soviets. The commerical featured a grizzly wandering through the woods. "There is a bear in the woods. For some people, the bear is easy to see. Others don't see it at all,” the narration said. “Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it's vicious and dangerous. Since no one can really be sure who's right, isn't it smart to be as strong as the bear? If there is a bear."
Reagan’s diary entry from that day: “The O.S.U. students were on fire. Another small heckler group only added to the fun. By this time I was so in love with young America I was all choked up. For lunch we went to the Teke house (T.K.E.), my fraternity.”
Bruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuce.
Great piece. Love this blog.