Something Sigmund Freud never said was, “The Irish are the one race for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.”

Another thing he never said was, “That’s enough cocaine for me, thanks. I have work tomorrow.”

For brevity, we’re going to focus on the first one.

Red Dawn

Trying to see the world through the eyes of a corporation is like trying to mentally catalogue every single way in which it’s possible to die – extremely unhealthy, very little practical application, and only ever granting the illusion that you have any control over what’s going to happen next. You might as well aspire to perceive reality as an empty stomach does. It’s an empty stomach. It wants to eat stuff.

Which is why you should be suspicious of any studio film that claims to be about anything other than getting people to watch that studio film. Any philosophy more complex than I Have a Fever, and the Only Prescription Is More Money requires believing in something, or existing in any kind of sustained reality, which corporations do not do. It’s how they can claim to be genuinely concerned about the threats facing society (World War III – a bad thing!) while also giddily stoking the lucrative emotions that only exist because of those threats (World War III – the new Call of Duty DLC!).

I don’t even think that the weird bastards who run Business, Inc. are duplicitous – their towering indifference is more a requirement for and consequence of the fact that ascending to such an unfathomably high level of social influence requires being dumb enough to not only exist along a narrow greed-fear axis but also to forget, upon occupying one of those two possible conditions, that the other one still exists, has always existed, and that you were, in fact, occupying it not too long ago. Imagine waking up every day, fresh as a newborn baby, all of yesterday’s sins washed clean, ready to do the exact same dumb shit all over again. Lord, grant me the confidence of a moron.

Red Dawn is too dumb to get worked up about in any meaningful capacity. It manages to be bad in multiple directions simultaneously, which I guess is impressive in the same way that Evel Knievel jumping over things on motorcycles was kind of impressive, but the tonal incoherence hurts my brain. The Soviet invasion plot is literally, “fall from sky,” and the American response is so weirdly apathetic that the adults advise their children to flee the collapse of civilization with the same ambivalence as if they were reminding them to bring an extra pair of socks to a sleepover. Red Dawn can’t tell if it wants to be power-fantasy fun or stirring melodrama, so it settles on being boring instead.

The End

Red, white, and blue slop is still slop. Shit, I’d probably be more interested in Red Dawn if it was super jingoist-y – at least then there’d be something to push back against. And that’s the masterstroke of making Very Large Stuff to be consumed at a Very Large Scale – in spite of the superficial bigness of it all the secret sauce is deliberate emptiness, volume without sound. Nothing to get worked up against, just another thing to be consumed. Even patriotism can be rendered meaningless if you make it loud enough.