Page 1 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA GI Joe, post-American hero
By Tom Engelhardt
The prequel: In my childhood, I played endlessly with toy
soldiers - a crew of cowboys and bluecoats to defeat the Indians and win the
West; a bag or two of tiny olive-green plastic marines to storm the beaches of
Iwo Jima.
Alternately, I grabbed my toy six-guns, or simply picked up a suitable stick in
the park, and with friends replayed scenes from the movies of World War II, my
father's war. It was second nature to do so. No instruction was necessary.
After all, a script involving a heady version of American triumphalism was
already firmly in place not just in popular culture, but in the ether, as it
had been long before my grandfather made it to this land in steerage in the
1890s.
My sunny fantasies of war play were intimately connected to the
wars Americans had actually fought by an elaborate mythology of American
goodness and ultimate victory. If my father tended to be silent about the war
he had taken part in, it made no difference. I already knew what he had done. I
had seen it at the movies, in comic books, and sooner or later in shows like Victory
at Sea on that new entertainment medium, television.
And when, in the 1960s, countless demonstrators from my generation went into
opposition to a brutal American war in Vietnam, they did so still garbed in
cast-off "Good War" paraphernalia - secondhand Army jackets and bombardier
coats - or they formed themselves into "tribes" and turned goodness and victory
over to the former enemies in their childhood war stories.
They transformed the V for Victory into a peace sign and made themselves into
beings recognizable from thousands of Westerns. They wore the Pancho Villa
mustache, sombrero and serape, or the Native American headband and moccasins.
They painted their faces and grew long hair in the manner of the formerly
"savage" foe, and smoked the peace (now, pot) pipe.
American mytho-history, even when turned upside down, was deeply embedded in
their lives. How could they have known that they would be its undertakers, that
their six-shooters would become eBay-able relics?
You can bet on one thing today: in those streets, fields, parks, or rooms,
children in significant numbers are not playing GI versus Sunni insurgent, or
Special Op soldier versus Taliban fighter; and if those kids are wielding toy
guns, they're not replicas from the current arsenal, but flashingly neon
weaponry from some fantasy future.
As it happens, GI Joe - then dubbed a "real American hero" - proved to be my
introduction to this new world of child's war play. I had, of course, grown up
years too early for the original GI Joe, but one spring in the mid-1980s,
during his second heyday, I paid a journalistic visit to the Toy Fair, a yearly
industry bash for toy-store buyers held in New York City.
Hasbro, which produced the popular GI Joe action figures, was one of the Big
Two in the toy business. Mattel, the maker of Joe's original inspiration and
big sister, Barbie, was the other. Hasbro had its own building and, on
arriving, I soon found myself being led by a company minder through a
labyrinthine exhibit hall in the deeply gender segregated world of toys.
Featured were blond models dressed in white holding baby dolls and fashion
dolls of every imaginable sort, set against an environment done up in nothing
but pink and robin's egg blue.
Here, the hum of the world seemed to lower to a selling hush, a baby-doll
whisper, but somewhere off in the distance, you could faintly hear the
high-pitched whistle of an incoming mortar round amid brief bursts of
machine-gun fire. And then, suddenly, you stepped across a threshold and out of
a world of pastels into a kingdom of darkness, of netting and camouflage, of
blasting music and a soundtrack of destruction, as well-muscled male models in
camo performed battle routines while displaying the upcoming line of little GI
Joe action figures or their evil Cobra counterparts.
It was energizing. It was electric. If you were a toy buyer you wanted in. You
wanted Joe, then the rage in the boy's world of war play, as well as on
children's TV where an animated series of syndicated half-hour shows was
nothing but a toy commercial. I was as riveted as any buyer and yet the world I
had just been plunged into seemed alien. These figures bore no relation to my
toy soldiers. On first sight, it was hard even to tell the good guys from the
bad guys or to figure out who was fighting whom, where, and for what reason.
And that, it turned out, was just the beginning.
The sequel (August 2009): Nobody's mentioned it, but the most
impressive thing about the new movie, GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra, comes
last - the eight minutes or so of credits that make it clear that, to produce a
21st century shoot-em-up, you need to mobilize a veritable army of experts.
There may be more "compositors" than actors and more movie units (Prague Unit,
Prague Second Unit, Paris Unit) than units of Joes.
As the movie theater empties, those credits still scroll inexorably onward,
like a beachhead in eternity, the very eternity in American cultural life that
GI Joe already seems to inhabit. The credits do, of course, finally end - and
on a note of gratitude that, almost uniquely in the film, evokes an actual
history. "The producers also wish to thank the following," it says, and the
list that follows is headed by the Department of Defense, which has been
"advising" Hollywood on how to make war movies - with generous loans of
equipment, troops, consultants, and weaponry in return for script "supervision"
- since the silent era.
Undead Joe
Think of GI Joe as a modern American zombie. "He" may never have existed, but
he just won't die. More on that later.
As a start, I'm sure you want to know about the new Joe movie which was meant,
like Star Trek earlier in the summer, to reinvigorate a semi-comatose
brand by retelling its ur-story. In the process, the hope is to create a
prequel to endless sequels that, like the Transformers series (also from
a toy that was an 1980s hit), will prove to be Hollywood's Holy Grail of
endless summer, bringing in global mega-profits forever after.
I caught GI Joe, the Rise of Cobra, one sunny afternoon in a multiplex
theater empty of customers except for a few clusters of teenage boys. So where
to start? How about with the Joes' futuristic military base, all flashing
screens, hi-tech weaponry, and next generation surveillance equipment, built
under the Egyptian desert. (How this most postmodern of bases got under
Pharaonic sands or what kind of Status of Forces Agreement the Joes have with
the government of Egypt are not questions this film considers.)
But here's the thing: well-protected as the base is, spectacularly armed and
trained as the Joes are, it turns out to be a snap to break into - if you
happen to be a dame in the black cat suit of a dominatrix and a ninja dressed
in white.
And then there's that even spiffier ultra-evil base under the Arctic (a
location only slightly less busy than Times Square in movies like this). It's
the sort of set-up that would have made Captain Nemo salivate.
Oh, and don't let me forget the introductory scene about a Scottish arms dealer
in 17th-century France condemned to having a molten mask fitted over his face
for selling weapons to all sides - and his great-great-great-something-or-other
who's doing the same thing in our world. Then there are those weaponized
exoskeletons lifted from Iron Man (which also had its own two-faced arms
dealer), the X-wing-fighter-style space battle from Star Wars but
transposed under the ocean (a la James Bond in Thunderball), not to
speak of the Bond-ish scene in which the evildoer, having captured the hero,
introduces him to a fate so much worse than death and so time-consuming it
can't possibly work.
And how can there not be a scene in which a famous landmark (in this case, the
Eiffel Tower) is destroyed by the forces of evil, collapsing on panicked crowds
below - as in Independence Day or just about any disaster film you'd
care to mention? Throw in the sort of car chase introduced a zillion years ago
in Bullitt, but now pumped up beyond all recognition, and, oh yes,
there's someone who wants to control the world and will do anything, including
killing millions, to achieve his purpose (ha-ha-ha!).
Is that clear enough? If not, it doesn't matter in the least. Movies like this
are Hollywood's version of recombinant DNA. They can be written in the dark or,
as in the case of this film, in a terrible hurry because of an impending
writers' strike. All that matters is that they deliver the chases and
explosions, the fake blood and weird experiments, the wild weaponry and
futuristic sets, the madmen and heroes at such a pace and decibel level that
your nervous system is brought fully to life jangling like a fire alarm.
These, today, are the son et lumiere (sound and light) of American
youthful screen life. Their sole raison d'etre is to deliver boys and
young men - and so the franchise - to studios like Paramount (and, in cases
like Joe, to the Department of Defense as well): the Batman franchise,
the Bond franchise, the Terminator franchise, the X-Men franchise,
the Bourne franchise, the Iron Man franchise, the Transformers
franchise. And now - if it works - the GI Joe franchise.
After all, the first word that appears on screen without explanation in this
latest junior epic is, appropriately enough, Hasbro. We're talking about the
toy company that is GI Joe and, in a synergistic fury, is just now releasing an
endless range of toys (GI Joe Rise of Cobra Night Raven with Air-Viper v1),
action figures, video games, board games, Burger King give-aways, and who knows
what else as synergistic accompaniments to this elaborate "advertainment."
Barbie's little brother
Hasbro first brought Joe to market in 1964. He was essentially a Barbie for
boys, a soldier doll you could dress in that "Ike" jacket with the red scarf or
a "beachhead assault fatigue shirt", then undress, and take into that pup tent
with you for the night.
Of course, nobody could say such a thing. Officially, the doll was declared a
"poseable action figure for boys", and that phrase, "action figure", for a new
boy toy, like Joe himself, never went away. He had no "backstory" (a word still
to be invented), and no name. (GI - for "Government Issue" - Joe was a generic
term for an American foot soldier, redolent of the last American war in which
total victory had been possible.) Nor did he have an enemy, in part because
young boys still knew a version of American history, of World War II and the
Cold War. They still knew who the enemy was without a backstory or a guide
book.
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