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Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh #92: Racist Commie-Bashing Now Bad For Show Business

Adi Tantimedh writes for Bleeding Cool

Serendipity can be a funny thing when it makes coincidences add up to paint an unexpectedly meaningful picture. Last week began with the release of HOMEFRONT, a First-Person Shooter videogame where you play as an average American Joe fighting against the North Korean Army after they invade and occupy the US. The week ended with the announcement that the remake of writer-director John Milius' preposterous 1980s Cold War fantasia RED DAWN would go through major revision in post-production to erase all mention of the Chinese Red Army in the movie and replace them with North Korea instead.

After I finished laughing my arse off, the coincidences were too tasty to ignore.  The original RED DAWN was about a band of plucky teenagers who form a resistance against a Soviet invasion and occupation of America.  It was anti-Red propaganda in Teen Movie Clothing.  When the current studio announced a remake for 2011 or 2012, they said the invading Communist Army would instead be from China because, well, Russia was no longer a Communist state.  They seemed to be completely clueless about the fact that China is no longer Communist either – hell, back in 2004, at the annual People's Party Congress speech, the rulers of China formally acknowledged that the Chinese economy was based on manufacturing, import-export… and private property ownership.  This was reported on the BBC and everything.  Now, doesn't that sound about as far away from Communism as you can get?  Granted, China is still a totalitarian government, but if you look at the seams, it is no longer Communist.  But hey, Hollywood has never let facts get in the way if they think they can make a buck out of a movie.  Another fun little coincidence is that John Milius is the scriptwriter of HOMEFRONT as well, though he wasn't involved in the remake of RED DAWN.  Probably got a cheque, though.

Then came the announcement that they were tip-exing the Chinese out of the remake because word is they were told that the movie might not get picked up for distribution in China and the rest of Asia, which would kill any potential profit margin the studio hoped for in the box office. They had already shot the whole movie only to be suddenly reminded that they risked pissing off an entire market they could not afford to lose in business. About a month earlier, THQ said that they too originally planned for the invading army to be the Chinese, but had been warned that they would be completely blackballed from doing any business in China if they did, so they changed the baddies to the North Koreans instead, since North Korea is pretty much the insane, demonic commie regime that people have in their nightmares. Not to mention that they don't officially buy American products anyway, so it's not like Hollywood will be losing any revenue in badmouthing them. It can't be as bad as pissing off a potential market of over one billion buyers, and what are the North Koreans going to do if they get mad? Invade?

At least THQ was warned early in the development stage of HOMEFRONT – by their China branch office, no less – so they could rework the script before final coding for the game commenced. With RED DAWN 2011, I can't even begin to imagine how many millions it's going to cost to rewrite, then digitally replace every audio and visual reference to The People's Republic of China in an entire movie.

Not the presence of new Wonder Woman Adrianne Palicki in the cast.

What amazes me is that both the producers of HOMEFRONT and the RED DAWN remake did not realise from the very first minute that it is not a good idea to make China the Enemy in their silly escapist action plot. This strikes me as a hilariously spectacular failure of imagination on the producers' part. It should have been voted off the moment it was brought up from the most practical business point of view. China is now a major consumer of American and Hollywood entertainment and has been for quite a while now. More than one producer and Hollywood development executive has told me as far back as a year ago that making the Mainland Chinese the bad guys in a Hollywood movie is a no-no. I don't make business decisions where millions are at stake and even I know yo

u do not want to insult Mainland China if you want to succeed. You might as well just use your MBA diploma as toilet paper right after you poop your company into the john as that's what you'll have done the moment you commit that act of casual, unthinking racism.

The other thing that amazes me is that so many Americans, even the most liberal Hollywood screenwriter, can still have such knee-jerk phobias about Evil Communism Taking Over America, even those born after 1980. It's obvious to me that SHIN RED DAWN (as I imagine the Japanese might call it. "Shin" means "new") and HOMEFRONT were created primarily for the American market, even if their makers want them to be international successes. This brand of hysteria over Communism is uniquely American, since Europeans have a different perspective. Take KILLZONE 3, for instance, it was produced by a European company for the US and international market, but the fictional baddies are basically Space Nazis rather than communists. The racism of making the Commies a different skin colour could be said to be a visual distinction so you know who to shoot. After all, the cutscenes of HOMEFRONT involving evil North Korean soldiers executing nice white suburban parents and dumping them in mass graves before the eyes of their screeching children are intended to incite the player into such righteous anger so they want to kill as many yellow bastards in a uniform as possible. Who cares if they're Chinese or North Koreans? They all look the same, right? And they're Commies! They' are all Other, and they must be killed. And maybe teabagged, especially in multiplayer.

So now the studio might have a problem promoting SHIN RED DAWN in Asia since it kind of paints yellow-skinned people as The Enemy. That's the problem when you get literal ad specific in your allegorical genre fiction. They could have made an "America Invaded" movie where the opposing army is either an African country, an Arabic country, Mexico after it's been taken over by a drug lord (preferably sweaty, sadistic and with a twirl-able moustache) but then that would lose the entire black and Latino markets at home and abroad. Hey, they could have Canada invade America, with Mounties charging across the border with plates of pancakes soaked in fresh maple syrup as their insidious, irresistible weapons to conquer hearts and minds. It's not impossible. Not more impossible than North Korea invading America. Just, like the prospect of North Korea invading, highly unlikely. This is why it's easier to have the religious fundamentalists intent on exterminating the human race be aliens in the HALO series. Or totally non-specific conquering aliens in BATTLE: LOS ANGELES (ironically shot in Oklahoma) coming for natural resources (though wen I heard that was why they were invading, I wondered "What resources? Plastic surgeons and struggling actors?") providing an excuse for the military heroes to be heroic and caring while fulfilling the same type of persecution fantasy that HOMEFRONT and SHIN RED DAWN are trying to cater for, but without getting accused of racism. That's the beauty of abstraction: it both is and isn't who you think it is.

After next week, the changes in RED DAWN have also rendered HOMEFRONT the unofficial crappy tie-in video game that Hollywood studios insist on making that no one ever asks for, but in this case, THQ has totally accidentally done it for them and they didn't have to pay a cent for it. MGM got a free game out of it. Too bad they won't get royalties. That doesn't help MGM's bankruptcy issues, but then people don't generally buy movie tie-in games anyway.

This is why I tend to see the media business as comedy, because people who are supposed to be smart and in charge of decisions worth tens of millions of dollars can be so epically dumb.

I wonder if THQ have heard the rumours that Kim Jong-Il's son is an avid gamer. For all we know, he could be online playing HOMEFRONT multiplayer with sociopathic American teenage homophobes right now. And then they encounter a group of girls who totally pwn them so they decide they have to track them down in order to ask them out on a date. That's my pitch for the next big teen comedy. I'm going to totally register it and shit.

Not joining a Resistance at lookitmoves@gmail.com

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Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh

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