Is This the Best Right-Wing Film Ever?

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 40
John Milius (writer/director), Red Dawn

You already know the story: Soviet paratroopers descend upon an unsuspecting Colorado town during the local high school’s first period. The invasion is swift and decisive. Six teens, representing six personality types—jocks, rich kids, brains, et cetera—flee into the Rocky Mountain foothills, equipped with rudimentary survival gear and assault rifles. After a brief period of indecision, they begin their insurgency against the invaders. Which tired, combat-hardened kids will survive to see liberated America?

It’s sometimes difficult to appreciate exactly how conservative Hollywood’s 1980s Brat Pack movement was. The trend was spearheaded by screenwriter John Hughes, in movies like Pretty in Pink and The Breakfast Club, pictures that didn’t exactly wear their conservatism externally. These pictures, however, significantly trusted tradition and authority; they only feuded over which traditional authorities deserved teen audiences’ loyalty. This movie remains unique in broadcasting its political motivations, explicitly asserting American greatness is under threat.

The plot almost doesn’t bear recapitulation. The six teens (joined by two girls whose major contribution is being girls) organize a grassroots insurgency against the Soviet invaders and their Latin American allies. The Soviets respond with reprisals against civilian targets. Each teenager endures some traumatic personal loss, usually a dead or turncoat parent, but rather than capitulating, the kids reload and keep firing. The didactic story plays with the inevitability of a medieval morality play.

Writer-director John Milius was a classmate of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. He arose from the same New Hollywood background that informed their earliest work, and even did uncredited script-doctor work on Spielberg’s Jaws. However, while those directors drifted increasingly into broad, downmarket blockbusters, Milius became increasingly enrapt with politics. His career peak was characterized by increasingly militant right-wing pictures. This one probably stands as his personal pinnacle, and conservative Hollywood’s Reagan-era high water mark.

Importantly, Milius doesn’t pretend his story isn’t instructive. From the opening crawl, he establishes that America has grown soft through dependence on NATO. The Soviets are able to track the teenage insurgents, who christen themselves the Wolverines (their high school mascot), through ATF paperwork recovered from the sporting goods store. In his most famous visual, Milius’ camera pans from an NRA “Cold Dead Hands” sticker to its owner, smoking pistol in his cold, dead hand.

This morality isn’t accidental. Since at least Edmund Burke, philosophical conservatism has insisted that society is occupied, all goodness colonized by pervasive sin. Good people, conservative leaders insist, must constantly refine and purge their characters through violence, literal or metaphorical. Burke despised the French Revolution, but considered it necessary, as the ancien regime had grown lenient and squishy. Teddy Roosevelt suggested having wars every generation, to mold young men’s characters. Modern conservatism is inherently warlike.

For Milius, this war isn’t institutional, it’s personal. The Wolverines find an American fighter pilot surviving behind enemy lines, almost certainly a nod to Lord of the Flies. This pilot provides the teens military training; he also narrates the developments of World War III, which unfolds as pure background. The entire war happens to teach these boys, and it’s certainly about the boys, the values they must defend against Bolshevik wickedness. It’s all about individuals.

Surprisingly, for both its genre and its era, this movie doesn’t shy from hurting the characters. Where John Hughes taught teenagers important lessons about society and values by shaming them in school, John Milius wholly tortures his kids. They watch their parents tortured and murdered. One kid, the mayor’s son, discovers his father is a collaborator, proving the failures of conventional politics. Where many action films constantly protect their protagonists, Milius kills his heroes onscreen.

We cannot avoid Milius’ conclusion, which he signposts without stating it outright: we must destroy Cold War America to save it. Milius appears further Right than Ronald Reagan, who at least nominally supported diplomacy and negotiation. Where political leaders talk and make horse trades, Milius (channeling Burke) asserts that society is a bellum omnium contra omnes, and values, including American greatness, must arise from savagery. Moral goodness comes to anyone willing to destroy evil violently.

Certainly, this movie is dated. It makes assumptions about the Soviet Union’s alliances which, we now know, were patently untrue. Its battalion of teenage archetypes represents 1980s ideals that haven’t aged well. A 2012 remake, recasting the enemy as North Korea, died on arrival. We must watch this movie as an artifact of its time; but within that context, it’s a taut, well-paced introduction to conservative philosophy. It concisely forecasts the America we inherit today.