It's all a bunch of Bush-huggin crap, godammit!
When South Park came out first, I was a big fan. It seemed like a quantam leap in terms of what broadcasters could get away with, something that even people who'd been brought up on stuff like the Simpsons might shirk at.
It seemed like few people could watch it who'd been born more than 30 years before, whereas the appeal of the Simpsons and King of the Hill was more universal. I liked the fact that I was still young enough to get the jokes and not be offended. For a while there at the turn of the last century I was doing more Cartman impressions than I was making Simpsons references.
But somewhere along the way my entusiasm waned. I noticed that episodes didn't stand up to repeated viewings the way Simpsons episodes did. After the initial shock value dissapted, it seemed there wasn't much to laugh at. These days, while I still wait eagerly for every Simpsons episode, I only casually watch South Park when channel-surfing.
Nevertheless, I caught up with the South Park teams latest cinematic offering, Team America: World Police, the other day. I figured I had little to lose, apart from an hour and a half of my time and €5. It got reviews on both sides of the Atlantic, but what made me want to see it was that either Parker or Stone had said that he found it was easiest to satirist the extremists on both sides. One of the things I used to love about their show was that they showed no-one any mercy. It's easy to offend the religous right in America, and to be fair, a lot of people here found the Uncle-Fucker song a tad risquee as well. Offending the left takes a bit more effort, as we're generally open-minded sorts who belief in freedom of speech, but that time they went to the Amazonian rainforest and Stan and Kyle concluded that biodiversity wasn't worth saving did rankle a bit.
But usually the Colorado setting of the show made it perfectly placed to satarise the growing split between left and right in the contemporary US. As I found out from reading Fast Food Nation, Colorado is a state that used to be populated largely by alternative types in towns like Boulder but is experiencing an influx of Right-Wing suburbanites fleeing the growing multiculturalism of places like Orange County. In the TV show they were just as good at portraying the right, in the shape of the two hunters who'd been to the 'Nam and one of whom needed a voice-box, as the left, in the shape of the politically correct mayor.
Post-9-11, this seemed to change. The attacks on what they percieved as PC intensified while the right seemed to get an easier ride.
In an episode dealing with protests against the Iraq war, Cartman ended up concluding that America could accomodate both shades of opinion, which was fair enough, but that the Hippy, Rock-music loving protestors needed the red-meat-eating, fox-news-watching country music fans to protect them from "terrorists... or China". I thought this was really irresponsible as I would have thought that the authors would have known better than to suppose that the war in Iraq had anything to do with terrorism. It made me think differently about how they'd portrayed Sadamm Hussein in the past, especially in the first big-screen movie. I thought when I first saw it that they were satirising America's demonisation of the Iraqi dictator by comically exagerating how evil he was, the man who wore the pants in a gay relationship with Satan. I began to think, to my horror, that they'd been helping to soften up America for an attack on Iraq all the time.
Still, I was willing to give the new movie a chance, especially after promises that the extremists on both sides would be satirised. I don't take the Manichean view that seems to have taken hold of much of the world at the moment, and I'm of the opinion that a war can be between two sets of bad guys. I really don't thinkl the Christian Right in the US are that much better than the people that they wage war against. Their "moral values" seem incredibly twisted to me, a person that thinks attacking a country with the loss of 100,000 lives is worse than having two men who love each other get married. I was looking forward to having them have the piss taken out of them.
Some people are fed up with Bush-bashing, not even opening the latest email attatchment that portrays Dubya as a monkey. Me, the first thing I do when I open the paper is look for an article that tells me the latest thing that his gang of thugs and idelogues have done to the planet so I get can indignant and thankful that I don't live in the US.
Unfortunately, Team America did nothing to satiate my addiction for anti-GOP invective. Despite the promise that they were going to satirise the extremists, it was actually the moderates in the US that took the brunt of their humour. An inordinate chunk of the movie was spent taking the piss out of supposedly self-regarding Hollywood stars who opposed the war. What sort of intellectual gymastics allow Parker and Stone to regard anti-war Americans as "Extremists"? They're clearly not in favour of a victory for Islam in the supposed Clash of Civilisations, and their opposition to the war is based, at least I'd hope, on a knowledge that the Iraqi war had nothing to do with the war on terror. But by muddying the waters and implying pretty clearly that the people who opposed the Iraq war were on the side of the terrorists, the makers of this movie show that their sympathies are actually with the extremists on the American side. As if to ram the point home (as it were) there's a speech at the end where where they use the sort of language that may shock some readers where they actually state fairly transparently, that while the Good Guys may do damage they're still the good guys. The opening scene where the terrorists are foiled only at the expense of knocking the Eiffel Tower into the Arch de Triomphe seemed a lot less funny after that.
In another scene Alec Baldwin is seen at a loss for words and just blurts out "Corporations... global warming..." How ironic is that? It's the Bush admistration that's been ramming home the same vapid soundbites about the war on terror and the fight for freedom for the last three years, while people like Baldwin have tried to open up a debate, however egregiously, about the Bush admistrations real motives for the war.
To top it all, one of the opening scenes is in a Broadway theatre where the play is about AIDS, which panders to the predjudices of Red-Staters about both the the city of New York and the acting proffesion and their association with the mythical "liberal elite"
On the other hand, there were no caricatures of George Bush and the people around him, all of which should be ripe for satire. Also, the events that took place in Abu Gharib were too ghastly for the sensitive souls who weren't afraid to get some cheap laughs by showing some puppets butt-fucking.
I'm aware that America is a big country with more shades of opinion than the simple red/blue dichotomy might suggest. I know that the republicans draw their support from a wide coalition, many of whom might have been genuinely offended by this film. But Parker and Stone are clearly on their side. I want my €5 back.
It seemed like few people could watch it who'd been born more than 30 years before, whereas the appeal of the Simpsons and King of the Hill was more universal. I liked the fact that I was still young enough to get the jokes and not be offended. For a while there at the turn of the last century I was doing more Cartman impressions than I was making Simpsons references.
But somewhere along the way my entusiasm waned. I noticed that episodes didn't stand up to repeated viewings the way Simpsons episodes did. After the initial shock value dissapted, it seemed there wasn't much to laugh at. These days, while I still wait eagerly for every Simpsons episode, I only casually watch South Park when channel-surfing.
Nevertheless, I caught up with the South Park teams latest cinematic offering, Team America: World Police, the other day. I figured I had little to lose, apart from an hour and a half of my time and €5. It got reviews on both sides of the Atlantic, but what made me want to see it was that either Parker or Stone had said that he found it was easiest to satirist the extremists on both sides. One of the things I used to love about their show was that they showed no-one any mercy. It's easy to offend the religous right in America, and to be fair, a lot of people here found the Uncle-Fucker song a tad risquee as well. Offending the left takes a bit more effort, as we're generally open-minded sorts who belief in freedom of speech, but that time they went to the Amazonian rainforest and Stan and Kyle concluded that biodiversity wasn't worth saving did rankle a bit.
But usually the Colorado setting of the show made it perfectly placed to satarise the growing split between left and right in the contemporary US. As I found out from reading Fast Food Nation, Colorado is a state that used to be populated largely by alternative types in towns like Boulder but is experiencing an influx of Right-Wing suburbanites fleeing the growing multiculturalism of places like Orange County. In the TV show they were just as good at portraying the right, in the shape of the two hunters who'd been to the 'Nam and one of whom needed a voice-box, as the left, in the shape of the politically correct mayor.
Post-9-11, this seemed to change. The attacks on what they percieved as PC intensified while the right seemed to get an easier ride.
In an episode dealing with protests against the Iraq war, Cartman ended up concluding that America could accomodate both shades of opinion, which was fair enough, but that the Hippy, Rock-music loving protestors needed the red-meat-eating, fox-news-watching country music fans to protect them from "terrorists... or China". I thought this was really irresponsible as I would have thought that the authors would have known better than to suppose that the war in Iraq had anything to do with terrorism. It made me think differently about how they'd portrayed Sadamm Hussein in the past, especially in the first big-screen movie. I thought when I first saw it that they were satirising America's demonisation of the Iraqi dictator by comically exagerating how evil he was, the man who wore the pants in a gay relationship with Satan. I began to think, to my horror, that they'd been helping to soften up America for an attack on Iraq all the time.
Still, I was willing to give the new movie a chance, especially after promises that the extremists on both sides would be satirised. I don't take the Manichean view that seems to have taken hold of much of the world at the moment, and I'm of the opinion that a war can be between two sets of bad guys. I really don't thinkl the Christian Right in the US are that much better than the people that they wage war against. Their "moral values" seem incredibly twisted to me, a person that thinks attacking a country with the loss of 100,000 lives is worse than having two men who love each other get married. I was looking forward to having them have the piss taken out of them.
Some people are fed up with Bush-bashing, not even opening the latest email attatchment that portrays Dubya as a monkey. Me, the first thing I do when I open the paper is look for an article that tells me the latest thing that his gang of thugs and idelogues have done to the planet so I get can indignant and thankful that I don't live in the US.
Unfortunately, Team America did nothing to satiate my addiction for anti-GOP invective. Despite the promise that they were going to satirise the extremists, it was actually the moderates in the US that took the brunt of their humour. An inordinate chunk of the movie was spent taking the piss out of supposedly self-regarding Hollywood stars who opposed the war. What sort of intellectual gymastics allow Parker and Stone to regard anti-war Americans as "Extremists"? They're clearly not in favour of a victory for Islam in the supposed Clash of Civilisations, and their opposition to the war is based, at least I'd hope, on a knowledge that the Iraqi war had nothing to do with the war on terror. But by muddying the waters and implying pretty clearly that the people who opposed the Iraq war were on the side of the terrorists, the makers of this movie show that their sympathies are actually with the extremists on the American side. As if to ram the point home (as it were) there's a speech at the end where where they use the sort of language that may shock some readers where they actually state fairly transparently, that while the Good Guys may do damage they're still the good guys. The opening scene where the terrorists are foiled only at the expense of knocking the Eiffel Tower into the Arch de Triomphe seemed a lot less funny after that.
In another scene Alec Baldwin is seen at a loss for words and just blurts out "Corporations... global warming..." How ironic is that? It's the Bush admistration that's been ramming home the same vapid soundbites about the war on terror and the fight for freedom for the last three years, while people like Baldwin have tried to open up a debate, however egregiously, about the Bush admistrations real motives for the war.
To top it all, one of the opening scenes is in a Broadway theatre where the play is about AIDS, which panders to the predjudices of Red-Staters about both the the city of New York and the acting proffesion and their association with the mythical "liberal elite"
On the other hand, there were no caricatures of George Bush and the people around him, all of which should be ripe for satire. Also, the events that took place in Abu Gharib were too ghastly for the sensitive souls who weren't afraid to get some cheap laughs by showing some puppets butt-fucking.
I'm aware that America is a big country with more shades of opinion than the simple red/blue dichotomy might suggest. I know that the republicans draw their support from a wide coalition, many of whom might have been genuinely offended by this film. But Parker and Stone are clearly on their side. I want my €5 back.
posted by seamus @ 3:23 pm
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