Man of mystery (3/6/02)
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Collateral Damage. [Andrew Davis, 2002.]
Heroic LA firefighter and devoted nuclear-family man Arnold Schwarzenegger is uncharacteristically late to pick up his gorgeous wife and cute kid from an appointment which, unfortunately, has been scheduled next door to the Colombian embassy; and, in consequence, arrives only just in time to watch in horror as they’re blown to pieces by rebel terrorists intent on whacking some government bigshots associated with an unfortunate South American drug-induced policy which is, we almost immediately discover, rather too enthusiastically endorsed by Evil Manipulative CIA Dude Elias Koteas. Thus the protagonist is transformed into that unshaven unbalanced tormented Deranged Arnold of whom, actually, I’m growing rather fond; and, seizing on the excuse that he’s the only guy who can identify the guerilla kingpin, a mysterious figure known as The Wolf [see The Jackal], spurns the perhaps not entirely wellmeaning advice of the bureaucratic suits and departs posthaste for Central America on a Mission of Revenge. This deposits him, I suppose predictably, in a remake of
Romancing the Stone — complete with busloads of peasants, guncrazy police who shoot people on whim, and buttslides down ravines, though without laughs, Danny De Vito, or planes full of weed and bottles of tequila — and, after one of those patented dives over a waterfall, he washes up, presently, on the streets of some Colombian town or other [they identified all the locations on those too-helpful spynovel sluglines at the bottom of the screen, but as usual I ignored all of them], where promptly and fortuitously he makes the acquaintance of the mirror-wife and mirror-kid belonging to his double and eidolon, Mister Big. Since by now everyone in the country has his picture and knows who he is, there isn’t time to exchange more than one or two pleasantries before he’s captured by the police and tossed into the local version of the Tijuana Jail; where, nonetheless, his luck continues, since he meets John Turturro, who between sessions of sexual depravity fixes the generators of the dopegrowers upriver, among whom Arnold must seek his nemesis. Busting out when the rebels decide to spring a few of their own with a rocketlauncher attack, Arnold sets off toward the heart of darkness, meets John Leguizamo, blows some stuff up, trails the rebels to their lair, and is on the verge of consummating his revenge when he is faced with the neatly-framed Defining Moment when he faces the choice between croaking the Wolf and saving the girl and kid. Showing his moral superiority by choosing the latter, he gets tossed into an even less appetizing clink. And here we hit pause and reflect.
Up to this point we’ve established Arnold, and his Evil Twin. The latter has [accidentally] killed the wife and child of the former, but suffers no bad conscience because he believes the end justifies the means; the former has [purposefully] saved the wife and child of the latter, because, avenging angel or no, he cannot make himself believe this. The root cause of the conflict between them, it has been established by illustrative incident, anecdote, and the coding of the double’s wife and kid as cute and innocent and Koteas and his fellow CIA gonzos as evil and manipulative, is not some inexplicable form of demonic possession which has seized upon the inhabitants of Colombia to do the work of Satan upon the earth, but American policy in Latin America [sow the wind, reap the whirlwind], which has installed in power an unholy alliance of the police, the military, the landowning elite, and the wicked politicos, and induced a wholly justified rebellion against them in which the drug trade is only an epiphenomenal cash cow exploited by both sides.
Everything in the narrative, in other words, has been designed to raise the question whether our boy is on the right side. And at this point, really, there’s nothing else to do: Arnold should kill the terrorist, adopt his wife and kid, install himself as the leader of the guerilla army, and make war against the CIA manipulators who are really responsible for his misery; this is
Bananas, in other words, albeit without so many laughs.
So, naturally, at precisely this point somebody ripped the last act out of the script and ordered a rewrite: the CIA guys arrive in their helicopters and blast the stuffing out of everything and the girl springs Arnold to pursue Mister Big back to — Washington! where, after our hero thwarts another terrorist plot by diving down elevator shafts and throwing bombs out of windows as they’re about to explode he finally dispatches his nemesis, all the momentarily-sympathetic characters mysteriously morph back into soulless monsters, and, a sadder but a wiser man, Arnold absorbs finally the morals that only psychopaths oppose American foreign policy, that any violence committed against Them by Us is justified, that even the assholes of the CIA are only assholes in a higher cause; and, most important [and, frankly, Orwellian] of all, that anyone who thinks otherwise — anyone, for instance, who thought he knew where the plot was going up to the end of the second act — is deluding himself, because Dick Cheney and Big Brother know best.
Nothing could more neatly summarize the co-opting of the war against terror by the forces that, now as ever, relentlessly pursue the opportunity to install the apparatus of repression in the name of a higher good [they too believe the end justifies the means]; and nothing, to be candid, more excites in me the urge to reach for my AK and stand some motherfuckers up against the wall. — First we take Manhattan; then we take Berlin.
____________It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing (1/29/02)
