The Rock

I had an argument with someone over whether this subscribed to the standard right wing/fascist line from action movies in the 80's- that we abandoned our soldiers in Vietnam, ceased to support them, bound their hands, and that's why we lost, or need to go back, or otherwise need to do or support more brutal violence. In the Rock, the main villain is someone we're supposed to agree with: he's a black ops commander, and his men that have been killed no recognition or compensation. He talks about Vietnam- and China, where he and his men killed hundreds of 'enemies'- and one feels the underlying, very fascist argument that these were the warriors who did what needed doing, and we ignore them for that.

I think the most charitable read- and one that does hold up- is that the movie is attacking America's propensity for doing horrible things and refusing to admit what it does, and the hypocrisy of it; it fits, since Connery's character's crime is stealing a log of the (presumably awful) things America has hidden, and in response it buries him. The difference between the two readings is whether all that stuff needed doing, whether burying the secrets is evil because it insults the great men who did the dark deeds, or because hiding evil things stops people from preventing them happening again. And it's not really answered.

The Rock doesn't pit heroic Americans against demonic foreigners who can be mowed down by the dozen, and it has a sense of the moral impact of killing at some points, but it also has a sense of heroism in overcoming that horror, and unbelievable fetishization of the military. I think the queasiest fascist movies are the ones that have the artistic integrity to acknowledge that, to any normal person, a killing is horrible and revolting: it lets the movie push past that, to force you into feeling that the revulsion is something you can and maybe should overcome, that strength lies beyond it. With the Rock, the nerd who has trouble with killing at first is making quips about death by the end, but he's also Nick Cage at his weirdest- I assume one was originally meant to identify with him, but as he comes out, yelling about ZEUS'S BUTTHOLE and playing playing guitar naked, there's a lot of distance. Moreover, his final act of bravery isn't a killing, but stabbing himself in the heart, which is genuinely (or at least uncomplicatedly) heroic. Ed Harris's commander is genuinely unwilling to sacrifice the lives of innocent people for his goal, which also lends an unexpected belief in the sanctity of human life. The marines under his command are portrayed as violent, vicious men who are not at all admirable.

I think what happened here is that a normal script, a fascist one, got altered again and again, with more details about real human behavior slipping in each time, until it became ambiguous enough to be tolerable. It's what happened with the whole movie, really- Bay is as terrible a director as ever, ramming in a dull and unnecessary car chase because he doesn't trust the audience to sit through half an hour of non-action, but the script (due presumably to last minute additions by Aaron Sorkin and Quentin Tarantino) has a sense of how ridiculous it is, Harris invests his character with such genuine humanity that it becomes almost a deconstruction of normal action villains, and Cage has rewritten his own part with so many wonderfully bad ideas that he feels somewhere between an action hero and Crispin Glover. It's a wonderful movie, not in the strictly positive sense, but in that watching it fills one with a sense of wonder about how this thing happened, and why you are enjoying it so.