Anti-Actor Aktion

Michael Moore suicide bombing Mount Rushmore. A Parisian rue paved with cobblestones shaped like croissants. Kim Jong-il taking a moment from his Skeletor-esque machinations to sing about his loneliness. The Eifel Tower, the Louvre, and the Arc de Triomphe, located only feet apart, destroyed in seconds by an American strike team. A long, graphic puppet sex scene cut over and over by the MPAA. Indeed, all the above with puppets. Puppets exploding into bloody goo. Puppets kissing and sword fighting, vomiting and crying. Puppets performing in a musical called AIDS.

Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s Team America: World Police (2004) just sounds funny. Has anyone else ever even attempted an “adult puppet comedy film”?

Politically, it’s a relic of the Bush years, though not as much as might initially seem. A special-forces unit based out of Mount Rushmore (the titular “Team America”) goes around the world defeating terrorists and raining untold suffering on anyone and everyone who gets in their way. North Korea’s then-leader teams up with a variety of Muslim extremists to set off WMDs around the world. Team America is helpless until they enlist a Broadway actor, whose acting, we’re told, can save the world. Unfortunately, Kim Jong-il has the assistance of a bevy of naïve Hollywood actors and their Film Actors Guild (the acronym, ahem). Jingoistic American hawks, liberal coastal elites, and stale action movie tropes. So much has changed; so much hasn’t.

From its release, Team America has been labeled a politically irresponsible movie. While it takes shots at American Empire (and the then-current notion that Europeans and others hated us for being crass and violent), it also features caricatured Asian accents, makes fun of liberal critics of George W. Bush, and casts advocates of world peace in an unflattering light. Some even called the film anarchistic, nihilistic.

On the contrary, that’s, to my mind, what makes it brilliant. I could do without the parodies of Arabic speech, sure. I don’t think Team America is some triumph of hard-nosed political realism. I do, however, think t’s a wondrous reminder of the carnivalesque power of public comedy; it tears everyone down, taking aim at anyone touched by terminal self-seriousness and megalomania.

Take “acting.” The Film Actors Guild is one of the team’s primary antagonists, filled with big-headed Hollywood types who rarely leave LA, but pontificate on world affairs. Or, as Janeane Garofalo puts it in the film, “As actors, it is our responsibility to read the newspapers, and then say what we read on television like it’s our own opinion.” Similarly, the head of Team America is a Broadway actor who Jedi mind tricks his way past North Korean guards, all with the power of his “acting.”

For Parker and Stone, everyone is pretending, all the people of the world who can’t laugh at themselves or the absurdities we create. These industry and thought leaders enforce seriousness by playing their parts, and demand everyone else does too. But what does this charade produce? It leads to banal action films filled with paper-thin plots, unbelievable romances, limp stunts, and gigantic egos. It undergirds a world in which commandos can bring terror to the innocent, a geopolitical landscape in which the only way US audiences can understand foreign countries is in super-villainous terms. It paves the road for mass media in which people who were at the bottom of every other society’s class system think their mastery of a craft makes them bodhisattvas committed to global harmony. It demands we take all this with a straight face.

What normal person, sitting at home today, can’t laugh at the pretentiousness? At how little has changed? Why not use puppets?

There’s a scene late in the film where the team’s leader’s life has fallen apart; he’s off the squad. Playing on the cliché, Stone and Parker have him head to a bar and get belligerently drunk. Stumbling, strings dangling, out the backdoor, he starts throwing up. Fair enough. But it goes on and on and on. The music swells, as if he’s come up against some personal demon, overcome some obstacle. But he just keeps vomiting more and more violently until he’s slapping against the ground like a punctured garden hose.

Vulgar, over-the-top, clownish—sure. But damn if it ain’t funny.