You may have heard of Red Scorpion, a 1989 anti-Soviet shoot-'em-up written and produced by Jack Abramoff, the now-disgraced Washington lobbyist, that has been studied in Salon, The New Republic, and Entertainment Weekly. But even savvy movie-watchers may have missed Red Scorpion 2.
First, Abramoff's original Red Scorpion movie: machine-gun fire whirs over the Russian defector's head as he speeds through the desert in a military transport, evading capture by the Soviet military while protecting his newfound friends -- an American journalist and an anti-communist African rebel leader -- all while American rock 'n' roll blasts from the transport's loudspeakers. In the sequel, a neo-Nazi catches fire, falls out of a window, and lands in a shed marked “explosives,” a performance that would work well in The Naked Gun. But Red Scorpion 2 isn't supposed to be funny. At least we think. If Red Scorpion is the Hollywood manifestation of the Reagan Revolution, then the straight-to-video Red Scorpion 2 captures some of the intellectual emptiness, opportunism, and crassness of today's Republican Party.
Red Scorpion follows a Soviet soldier named Nikolai (played by Dolph Lungren) who is charged by his superiors with subverting a rebellion against an unnamed African country's communist regime. In the process, Nikolai “goes native,” befriending a rebel and a journalist.
Red Scorpion emerged in 1989, when the conservative movement was arguably at the height of its powers. Reagan was in office during the film's production, and it is clearly the work of a Reaganite true believer. The Soviet threat is framed as simultaneously evil but convertibly human; American strength is divinely destined for greatness; the African warlord and his subjects are exotic “Others,” to be sure, but they are potential converts to American values; and strength and violence are complimentary (rather than contradictory) with American nobility. The film will never earn a spot on the American Film Institute's Top 100 list. But it has something to say.
Red Scorpion 2, on the other hand, is an exercise in banality. The film was released in 1994, the year when 30 years of movement conservatism finally resulted in Republican control of the House of Representatives, and when ideas started playing second fiddle to the pursuit of simple power, as exemplified by Tom DeLay -- who was elected Majority Whip that year. The film follows Nick, an American soldier in charge of an elite squad directed by a covert government agency to undermine a neo-Nazi named Kendrick with plans for world domination. Red Scorpion is a virtually uninterrupted sequence of visual and rhetorical clichés. The only plot line -- aside from watching Kendrick's plan unfold -- is violence. People shoot each other, burn each other, crash cars, and jump out of windows with a numbing constancy.
But more telling than the violence is the politics. In the blogosphere, there is something known as “Godwin's Law,” which states that whenever Hitler is invoked in an online discussion, the argument is over, and whoever invoked Hitler has lost. In other words, if you make your film about neo-Nazis, you probably don't have all that much to say.
Yet taken together, the two films bring into focus the modern Republican Party's struggle -- and failure -- to maintain integrity and intellectual coherence in the years after it seized power in Washington. In the years leading up to 1989, the Republican Party was grounded by the convictions of conservative intellects like Leo Strauss, William F. Buckley, and Irving Kristol. Today, however, party leaders seem to have few convictions. Republicans trot out heavily marketed policy initiatives that could never be called conservative, from the prescription drug benefit to the Federal Marriage Amendment to the No Child Left Behind Act. Meanwhile, neoconservatives in the Bush administration have undertaken a breathtakingly liberal foreign policy of Wilsonian democracy promotion. To put it mildly, party leaders don't seem to know what they believe.
The conservative true-believers and anti-Soviet crusaders of the 1980s may have enjoyed Red Scorpion . But no one could possibly care about its sequel, which lacks any real convictions at all. Notably, while Abramoff personally wrote the first Red Scorpion , he shopped the creative part out and simply handled the financing for the sequel. That, in itself, speaks volumes about the transition of Abramoff's Republican Party.
Michael Signer and Ryan Chiachiere blog at www.DemocracyArsenal.org and TPMCafe, respectively.
