Film is a powerful medium. It has the ability to improve your quality of life, but it also can wait until you leave the house, break in, and sodomize your house pets. I respect this power.
In past columns, when I am feeling humanistic, I refer to my younger brother Eric and how he comes from “good stock,” represents a “shining beacon in the young adult nebula,” and is “13.” He’s such a good boy. His singular goodness though is perturbing for it is drastically different from what I myself have become.
Much of the blame lies squarely on my father. On my eleventh birthday, Dad warmed me up for depravity with “Beavis and Butthead Do America.” A year later, outside of my mother’s watchful bifocals, we saw the blazing new (en)trails flick “The Relic” and the gleefully perverted James Spader do wonders with ice cubes in “2 Days in the Valley.” At the still tender age of 13, Dad took my flabbergasted friend Zach along with us to see vibrating genitalia in Howard Stern’s “Private Parts” and then we father-son bonded with “Wild Things” (tasteful ménage a three, full frontal of Kevin’s Bacon).
There is a fine line between traumatizing a young lad and enhancing his aesthetic sensibilities. Thanks, however, to the sultry embraces of Lady Luck, I turned out fine and dandy (with the occasional transgression).
Apparently, in the case of my brother, my parents have read Dr. Spock or some other jargon-spouting sissy pants and have decided to rear Eric “correctly.” Hogwash. The wildest movie Eric has seen is probably a tie between “Babe: Pig in the City” and one of Seagal’s environmentalist films. What happened to a good ol’ cinematic jolt to the superego in the name of self-improvement?
Thus, I have the solemn duty of kin to rob my brother of his innocence. The poor kid is going to be Bar Mitzvah-ed in a little over a month. What’s the good of manhood if you do not know what you are supposed to do with it e.g. sex and violence?
I did not want my parents to catch on to my crafty scheme though, so I decided the perfectly subversive choice would be the new release “Team America: World Police,” good patriotic-sounding fare entirely starring marionettes. Little did they know I had done my research.
Firstly, Peter Jackson has proven with “Meet The Feebles” that profligate puppets can break up the tranquility of one’s psyche even more so than their flesh and blood counterparts (the walrus on kitty cat sex scene is still sinfully emblazoned on my eyelids). Secondly, “Team America” is a production by the moral reprobates who bring us “South Park” (Trey Parker and Matt Stone). So with blissfully unawares brother and his 15-year-old friend Ian in tow, we embarked on our quest to corrupt.
The film itself is quite an achievement. The titular “Team America” battles terrorism in places like “France,” 3,635 miles from America, and in the process vaporizes several of the monuments (The Pyramids and others) they are trying to protect. The members of “Team America” fly jets garishly decorated in stars and stripes as they embody to the tee the international criticism of Americans as geo- and ethnocentric annihilators of other cultures.
The film’s central premise is spot-on hilarious and elastically apt in that it parodies both extremes of the spectrum: American patriotic rhetoric that reduces terrorists to laconic arch villains and self-serious, ineffectual liberal whining (the Sean Penn character repeatedly reminds everybody: “I went to Iraq”). The satirical tack the film takes, coupled with its inherent insincerity (marionettes!), enables a “let ‘er rip” mentality with countless racist (the Arabs speak a nonsense language in which every other word is “jihad” and “Allah”) and homophobic (Tim Robbins heads up the fictional Film Actor’s Guild) vulgarisms to the supreme satisfaction of viewers that have had their conscience lifted for them.
All in all, the film is a daring gambit that pays off astoundingly well because the cinematic world Parker and Stone have created has its own verisimilitude. The marionettes are all very expressive: the male members of Team America have the dewy eyes and square jaws of a Bruckheimer action hero (read: Ben Affleck). Cinematographer Bill Pope (The Matrix), faithful to his pedigree, accurately approximates the look of an action film down to the quick cuts and virtuosic camera movements.
The script brilliantly sends up the stilted dialogue (occasionally word for word) and narrative structure of blockbusters while still deftly shepherding the plot on to the next bit of hilarity. The songs, just as in the South Park movie, along with Parker and Stone’s adroitness at lampooning pop culture, are utterly non-pareil (highlight: “Everybody has AIDS” from “Lease: The Musical,” a spoof on “Rent”).
“Team America” does not let up for a second; it is a visceral assault on mind and body. Parker and Stone sometimes take the joke too far, leaving the viewer uncomfortable, and dizzy, instead of amused. I find it very scary to think of the people who might take this film without the grain of salt it demands (if not a whole salt shaker). A teenager sitting a few seats over from me was quoting lines during the film with the fervor of an acolyte, and it had just come out the previous day.
Viewed with the ironic detachment it merits, “Team America: World Police” waves the flag harder and longer than even the most fervent zealots but remains ever versatile in the ideologies and prominent figures it skewers (Michael Moore as a suicide bomber!). This makes for a foolproof mix of polemics and humor you cannot argue with (marionettes!) because it’s just a joke.
Back to my brother. When I eagerly tried to gauge the extent to which I had warped his fragile psyche, it suddenly came to light that I had been all wrong. Eric had been sneaking viewings of the “American Pie” Trilogy, “Freddy vs. Jason,” and others. “Team America” was just a drop in what was already a very moist bucket… or was it? “Team America” boasts a scene in which two marionettes, devoid of genitalia, bang their pelvises against each other from every possible angle, Kama Sutra-style. Eric, in a stunning reversion, drew himself up into fetal position and whimpered. I queried him about the movie (“It was good”) and the scene, to which his only response was an onomatopoeic “bwwahhhh.” Ian (the friend) and I did the secret done-with-puberty handshake. Then I reveled in my partial success at demoralizing my little brother all the way home.
A good marionette-on-marionette scene will uphold the power of the medium anytime.
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