Posted on 09/21/2007 10:54:31 AM PDT by Rummyfan
It's been a while since I played with G.I. Joe. At my age, it tends to attract stares from the playground security guard. Nevertheless, I vaguely recall two details about the prototype "action figure": 1) he was something to do with -- if you'll pardon the expression -- the U.S. military; and 2) he had no private parts. Flash forward to 2007 and this news item in Variety about the forthcoming live-action G.I. Joe movie: "While some remember the character from its gung-ho fighting man '60s incarnation, he's evolved. G.I. Joe is now a Brussels-based outfit that stands for Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity, an international coed force of operatives who use hi-tech equipment to battle Cobra, an evil organization headed by a double-crossing Scottish arms dealer. The property is closer in tone to X-Men and James Bond than a war film." Golly. So much for my two childhood memories: 1) he's no longer anything to do with the U.S. military; and 2) the guys with no private parts are the execs at Paramount and Hasbro who concluded that an American serviceman would be too tough a sell in the global marketplace. "G.I. Joe is not just a brand that represents the military," says Brian Goldner, Hasbro's chief operating officer. "It also represents great characters." And who says you can't have great characters based in Belgium?
The "evolution" of G.I. Joe is an instructive one. The term "G.I." stands for "Galvanized Iron" (which so much army stuff was made of that the initials became a routine speed bump in military bookkeeping) and not, as many assume, for "General Infantry." But it was certainly the poor bloody infantry who embraced the abbreviation, initially for the stuff they were on the receiving end of: in the Great War, U.S. troops used to refer to incoming German artillery shells as "G.I. cans." By the next global conflict, it was firmly established as an instantly recognizable shorthand for the regular enlisted man, as in Johnny Mercer's hit song: This is the G. I. Jive Man alive It starts with the bugler blowin' reveille over your bed when you arrive Jack, that's the G. I. Jive Roodley-toot Jump in your suit Make a salute Boot! Who wouldn't love the American G.I.? He was the citizen soldier -- the hapless farmer, the befuddled accountant, the amiable grease monkey, pressed into service to save places like Belgium from the depredations of darker forces. It was the cartoonist David Breger who made him the formal embodiment of the men in uniform. "G.I. Joe" debuted in Yank, The Army Weekly in 1942 and planted a phrase in the language: When the war was over There were jobs galore For the G.I. Josephs Who were in the war ... That's Bing singing Irving Berlin in White Christmas, a big Hollywood smash in 1954, with a score that also included the slyly titled Gee, I Wish I Was Back in the Army. Now here's another movie, from 2006 -- Oliver Stone's World Trade Center -- as discussed in these pages by my colleague Brian D. Johnson: "Karnes comes across as a vigilante G.I. Joe action figure -- a born-again Christian soldier who says things like 'We're going to need some good men out there to avenge this.' " Whoa! That's quite the etymological trip, from shorthand for the little guy to psychotic Christofascist mercenary in a mere half-century. What happened? Well, there was Vietnam, after which Hasbro decided the army was a bummer and relaunched Joe as the head of the "Super Joe Adventure Team." But, when that sputtered and died, he returned as "G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero." Question: Can "A Real American Hero" be based in Belgium? It's often said that what Americans call "globalization" the rest of the world calls "Americanization," and you can see what they mean: if you're French, there doesn't seem anything terribly "globalized" about every airport on the planet offering the same half-dozen American fast-food franchises. The rest of the world knows the routine by now: you're in Hollywood pitching Helen Mirren as the Queen, but the studio exec sees it as a great vehicle for Angelina Jolie, maybe with Ben Affleck as the Duke of Edinburgh. That fellow who wrote The Horse Whisperer was a bloke from Yorkshire or some such but he knew enough to set it in Montana. And, sitting through Saving Private Ryan or Pearl Harbor, I long ago stopped wondering when we'd get an epic tale of derring-do by Canada's storied regiments: you can live to 130 and you won't see Lord Strathcona's Horse Whisperer at the local multiplex.
But cultural globalization cuts both ways. If Hollywood is making product for the planet, in what sense is it any longer "American"? When conservatives complain that the movies' dreary biases are not even in the studios' commercial interest, they correctly point out that the U.S. is pretty much a 50/50 red state/blue state split, and there's a huge underserved market waiting for a picture in which Brian D. Johnson's vigilante G.I. Joe born-again Christian crazy kicks Islamobutt from Ramadi to Jalalabad and back. But, back at corporate HQ, the vice-presidents look at the real market, and throw in all the bonus blue states -- Canada, Europe, Asia -- and commission yet another lame-o conspiracy thriller in which the stereotypical young Saudi male everyone thinks is going to blow up the plane turns out to have been framed by one of Dick Cheney's Halliburton subsidiaries to distract attention from global warming. That's not to say there aren't any movies about regular G.I. Joes. Brian De Palma's just made one. It's called Redacted, and it's already won a couple of prestigious prizes in Venice. To be honest, I've never been able to take De Palma seriously since he used that ridiculous body double for Angie Dickinson in the nude shower scenes of Dressed To Kill. But he's certainly come a long way since then. Redacted is based on real events: the brutal rape and murder of an Iraqi girl at the hands of four good ol' G.I.s. Sgt. Paul Cortez was sentenced earlier this year to 100 years in jail for the killing, which suggests that the U.S. military takes these things seriously. Statistically speaking, American soldiers rape and murder at a significantly lower rate than the citizens of America's "liberal" cities. Nonetheless, for De Palma these events represent the larger U.S. adventure in Iraq, and only he has the courage to speak out. "I have done something that just cannot be done," he crowed on the BBC the other day. "You can never say anything critical of the troops."
Oh, come on. You can say what you like about American troops: among U.S. senators alone, Ted Kennedy's compared them to Baathists and Dick Durbin to Nazis. What you can't do is make a movie showing them as a force for good in the world. So the great iconic shorthand for the American fighting man has to be appropriated and "evolved" into an acronym for some multilateral Belgian action team. Talk about suspension of disbelief. Do you know what the chances of basing any kick-ass "joint operating entity" in Brussels are? This is a country that in the spring of 2003 announced it was considering war crimes prosecutions against Rumsfeld, Powell and America's commanders -- at least until Rumsfeld quietly remarked that maybe the new American-funded NATO headquarters didn't need to be in Brussels after all. Any Belgian action team would be constrained by rules of engagement drawn so tight (see the Norwegians et al. in Afghanistan) that they'd be spending most of the movie sending memos to each other. So the planet's moviegoers will be subjected to a fiction more absurd than any comic book: American-style action, yes please! But no American values. Maybe Hollywood directors should get themselves a new bumper sticker: "We Support Our Troops. It's Not Our Fault the Rest of The Planet Doesn't."
So’d I.
“That means he sells rockets to Israel AND Hams...”
Selling hams to Israel, eh? /s
That was 1964-68, a period when genuine heroes were fighting real villains in the jungles and plains of Vietnam, getting the back of the hand from the same public that celebrated Napoleon Solo and Ilya Kuryakin. Even then it was apparent who, from the point of view of Hollywood, was enlightened and who was not.
There was, as well, a fellow named Bond whose business it was to oppose his opposite numbers not in the appropriately multicultural and fictional SPECTRE, but in the very real KGB. That lasted one movie and even then was carefully adjusted to absolve the Soviets of the responsibility for the actions of the movie's principal villains. This was not an attempt to fit the movie to any Soviet audience, but it was a reflection of an "enlightened," i.e. non-bipolar political alignment.
As far as G.I. Joe goes, this sort of globalist fantasy land is merely another manifestation of the preference for sanitized, cartoon villains and mawkish, politically correct heroes over the gritty realities of either. One can pretend to be Luke Skywalker at any age but one has to grow up to be a Marine. Hollywood doesn't deal well with grownups - kids, even superannuated ones, are a much easier sell.
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