My old friend Dave Plotz’s piece on Red Dawn (Kathryn linked below) is close to a parody of the sort of liberal moral equivalence that made so many liberals useless in the late stages of the Cold War. He writes:

But what’s most unsettling about Red Dawn today is not its infatuation with the warrior death cult. It’s that the movie’s historical parallels have been turned upside down. In 1984, the Soviets of Red Dawn represented, well, the Soviets, and the Wolverines represented both the Americans and also the plucky Afghan mujahideen then defeating the Red Army in a guerilla war. But on re-viewing, Red Dawn isn’t a stark reminder of Cold War fears. Rather, it’s a pretty good movie about Iraq, with the United States in the role of the Soviets and the insurgents in the role of the Wolverines.

I’m not going to go point by point through the whole thing. But what’s striking about David’s analysis isn’t merely the out-of-date moral equivalence better suited for The Nation circa 1983, but it’s even more recent dated moral equivalence argument as well. Plotz’s thesis would have made some cultural or political sense — no matter how much I disagreed with it — if he wrote it in 2005 before the surge. Now even as retro-rethink journalism it seems like it’s missed its moment.

Regardless, the comparison of Iraq to America only works if the pre-invasion Iraq was the peace-loving idyll of Michael Moore’s imagination. It wasn’t. The analogy also needs America’s invasion of Iraq to be motivated by base imperialistic designs. It wasn’t.

David covers these sorts of objections as a sort of after thought in the last throwaway, paragraph:

Red Dawn is not an exact parallel to our situation, of course. The Iraq we invaded was no functioning democracy; our Army does not execute civilians; many Iraqis favor the American occupation. But Red Dawn certainly didn’t stir the mad, patriotic fervor I felt when I heard Howell shout, “Wolverines” 24 years ago. MGM is so far tight-lipped about the plot of its Red Dawn remake, but I wonder: Will the new Wolverines be us—or fighting us?

That’s a good question, but not for the reasons Plotz seems to think. You see Hollywood — which shares the author’s worldview, alas — has been for the most part incapable of making war movies about Iraq or Afghanistan with America as the good guys.

As for his critiques of the film as a film. I have several disagreements but I will limit myself to a couple. He says that “Red Dawn is really a fetish movie, an ode to guns and blood” made by the “military zealot” John Milius. Of course, the movie is a “guy movie” and has a lot of macho rah-rah stuff in it. But it is flatly absurd that Plotz credits the Guiness Book of World Records’ claim that it is the most violent movie ever made. David even concedes that Guiness’s finding is “amazing” in the age of movies like Saw. Amazing is one word. Amazingly stupid is more accurate. Red Dawn’s violence is perfectly in keeping with a broad tradition of American cinema going back to the Westerns and war movies. The violence porn of today’s horror movies is something very different — and much, much worse. And whatever Milius’ fondness for blood and gore, I would argue that Oliver Stone’s Platoon and Natural Born Killers are even more fetishistic in that regard. Also, it’s worth noting that Milius’ treatment of war is not nearly so cartoonish (never mind “fascist”) as Plotz claims. Swayze burns out on war and basically commits himself to a suicide mission because he can’t take it anymore. C. Thomas Howell becomes completely twisted by war as well.

I can understand why some people don’t think Red Dawn holds up well. I disagree. But if you don’t think it holds up well, that’s no reason to stand it up artificially so it can be your ideological strawman.