The ghost of Patrick Swayze dirty dances into the red dawn

If you’re a forty-something Reaganite of the type Right Wing media Inquisitor Tim Graham means in this column, the type whose first thought upon hearing that Patrick Swayze died was, “Wow, Red Dawn was a great movie!” the youngest you could have been when the Wolverines first banded together is fifteen.

I’m sorry, but fifteen is too old to have taken that movie to heart.  Twelve is about as grown-up as you should have been without Red Dawn causing you to break out in fits of giggles as often as in rounds of cheers and applause.  If Red Dawn was a formative movie-going experience for you when you were old enough to drive in some states, you might as well admit that your favorite movie back then was Ernest Goes to Camp or The Goonies.

Red Dawn may have been an enjoyable popcorn movie---and the Siren has made the case that it was or at least wasn’t all that bad---but taking it seriously either as a work of art or a political cautionary tale or even as a shoot-em-up on par with the best westerns or war movies is like saying that your favorite Star Wars movie was Return of the Jedi because of the Ewoks.

“That last battle, man, where the Ewoks kicked Stormtrooper butt?  That really shows how innovative, libertarian, creative individualism is vastly superior to a technocratic authoritarian culture.  It was, like, Randian!  With Wickett W. E. Wackett as the Ewok’s John Galt!”

Speaking of Star Wars, here’s a list of some of the action-adventure movies that could have been your favorite film back in high school, if you’re a forty-something anything:  The Empire Strikes Back, Robocop, Blade Runner, Alien and Aliens, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Escape From New York, Tim Burton’s Batman, Warriors, Excalibur, Terminator and Terminator 2, Legend, Tron.

You could even add Ghostbusters and The Princess Bride to that list.

And some movies intended for a specifically grown-up audience as opposed to a more general one:  The Year of Living Dangerously, Platoon, Casualties of War.

Then there are movies that were aimed at a younger crowd, like The Last Starfighter, Short Circuit, The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, and Flight of the Navigator, all of which were more intelligently written and directed, better acted, and more sophisticated about human nature and the way the world works and about matters of good and evil than Red Dawn, which was after all written and directed by John Milius, one of Hollywood’s most arrested of its huge population of arrested adolescents, a bully, and a sadist.

Quentin Tarantino is all those things too, but with Tarantino those are character flaws that he wrestles with in his art, while Milius thinks they’re virtues that add up to an ideal of adult masculinity that he uses his art to champion.  Plus, compared to Tarantino, Milius can’t write dialog worth a lick.  Hasn’t stop him from producing some good work from time to time, although it’s been a while.  Big Wednesday is still a must-see for fans of Jan-Michael Vincent.  And Jeremiah Johnson, although it has to be noted that that one comes close to being a silent movie and was directed by someone else.

At any rate, watch those two and Milius’ Dillinger and then watch Red Dawn and you’ll see him scraping the bottom of his own barrel.

Dillinger’s also worth watching in tandem with Michael Mann’s Public Enemies.

But to get back to Red Dawn as a fortysomething Reaganite’s Citizen Kane.

If Red Dawn mattered to you half as much as any of the movies I listed, nevermind more than any of them, you weren’t a particularly hip, experienced, savvy, sophisticated, or…um…bright fifteen year old.

And, remember, most of you weren’t even that young.  Only those of you who are forty and forty-one can excuse your worse than sophomoric tastes at the time on the grounds that you were actually sophomores.  Most of the rest of you fortysomething Reaganites were old enough to drive and even vote in 1984; you’d have been old enough to drink if your hero President hadn’t blackmailed all the states into raising their legal drinking, and how was that for federalism?  Plenty of you were still old enough to drink.  You were finishing up college, you were in grad school, you were taking your MBAs to Wall Street, and if you saw that movie at the time you should understand now why you were laid off and why nobody has any sympathy for you, but I understand why when you look back on your youthful movie-going you prefer to wax nostalgic about Red Dawn and think of it as the cinematic emblem of the Reagan Era, which by the way it is, but in the same way as Rambo was.

If you like movies for movies’ sake, as opposed to liking them for how manly and brave and ready to take on battalions of invading Cuban paratroopers and how justified in opposing health care reform in later life they make you feel, Red Dawn won’t rate high on your list of great movies, not even when it comes time to evaluate Patrick Swayze’s career, which is the job Adam Bernstein assigned himself in the obituary he wrote for Swayze in the Washington Post.

But Tim Graham thinks Bernstein has deliberately under-appreciated Red Dawn and its place in Swayze’s career and he suspects a political motive or at least a politically correct one.

The fact that Bernstein doesn’t mention Red Dawn until the twenty-third paragraph “is a sign that the Washington Post is a liberal paper.”  (Clearly, Graham has not read the Post’s editorial page in the last ten years.)  And putting Red Dawn so far down, well below mention of To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar clinches it.  “There are clearly no fortysomething Reaganites working in the Washington Post newsroom.”  (Again, Graham proves he’s unfamiliar with the Post’s editorial page and has never met Fred Hiatt.)

Couple of things.  It doesn’t seem to have crossed Graham’s mind that there might be any number of fortysomething Reaganites at the Post but that they might be women whose first thoughts when they heard Swayze had died were of pottery wheels or along the lines of “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.”

It also doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that there are lots of fortysomething Reaganites, male and female, who have never seen Red Dawn or if they saw it can barely remember it or didn’t like it.  Graham appears to think that for all fortysomething Reaganites Red Dawn is a species of conservative scripture like the writings of Milton Friedman and the speeches of Ronald Reagan.

Graham is a professional grievance-finder.  His job is to identify things that can be used to enrage the Right Wing base at their supposed marginalization by the Liberal Media and to make sure they are so distrustful of what they read in the newspapers and see on network television and in the movie theaters that they are impervious to actual facts as well as to the blandishments of “liberal” bias.  In short, it’s his job to help keep the base angry and stupid.

But maybe he’s sincerely aggrieved himself.  Grievance-mongering is a quality of a type that neither the Right nor the Left has in short supply.  There are people who just cannot stand it that the world is full of other people who do not share their point of view or accept the rightness, and righteousness, of their opinions and beliefs.  They believe that it’s the purpose of all art to validate their vanities and prejudices.  It’s just that the Right has been more insistent on this lately and around their side of the bandwidth there have been assiduous attempts to turn grievance-mongering into a school of film criticism.

Whether Graham is sincere or just a hack or a just a sincere hack, he’s smart enough not to try to claim that Red Dawn should rate up with Ghost and Dirty Dancing, or even Point Break, on the list of Patrick Swayze’s best movies.  He only argues that it should be moved up higher on the list than where he accuses Bernstein of having placed it placed it.  He even knows enough to try to make a non-political case for moving it higher on the list.

He’s apparently unaware though that his non-political argument is politically correct from a Right Wing point of view.

Red Dawn, Graham says, is noteworthy because it “was a completely shocking product coming out of a Hollywood: a movie about American teens fighting a resistance against a Soviet invasion of the United States.”

Ok, I’ll ignore the implicit politically correct notion that Hollywood normally doesn’t make movies in which America’s enemies are presented as enemies. (The more usual version of this is Right Wing movie “critics” wondering why every villain in every movie isn’t a Muslim terrorist and finding something nefarious in the dearth of bad guys named Amahl.)  The most adolescent of all the adolescent ideas you could hold about Red Dawn is that there is anything “shocking” about its plot or themes.  That the bad guys are Commies doesn’t matter.  The story of the kids stepping up to finish the job the grown-ups failed to do is as old as humankind.  Once upon a time the bad guys were Neanderthals, later they were the barbarians at the gate, later still they were Norsemen.  Then they were the Sheriff’s men, then pirates, then Indians (or the White Men, depending), then Nazis, then Martians.  There was even a period when they were Commies.

Red Dawn is a conventional re-telling of this old, old story.  In fact, it’s very close to being a re-telling of The Cowboys, with Powers Booth as John Wayne and the Rooskies as many clones of Bruce Dern.  The Cowboys is a re-telling itself of countless other versions of the old, old story, but it is better in a dozen ways, and more shocking, not least because the kids taking on the jobs of grown men are in fact kids and because John Wayne dies halfway through.  Bruce Dern---BRUCE DERN!---kills him.  He just casually shoots the Duke in the back as if he was any other human being and not John Wayne!  The Rooskies only manage to get Powers Booth and it takes practically a whole army of them.

But Graham has another, not so overtly politically correct reason for giving Red Dawn more attention in an evaluation of Swayze’s career.

Red Dawn was not a prestigious film, but it was a breakout lead role for Swayze…

I can’t really argue with this, although it’s not how I remember it.  It’s been a long time, but I vaguely recall that Red Dawn was meant to be a C. Thomas Howell film and that Swayze stole the movie from him, although maybe it was the other way around.  Either way, it’s hard to think of Jed Eckert being the role that led to his starring in Dirty Dancing and Ghost.  I’d say it was his role in the trilogy of television mini-series that started with North and South Book One that marked him as a romantic leading man and made him a star.

That could be nostalgia talking though.

One of my fondest memories from my salad days in Fort Wayne is of Nancy Nall coming over every night during the weeks North and South Books One and Two aired to have dinner and then sit down with the blonde and me to watch that night’s episode.  (If you’re ever out drinking with Nance, ask her to do her impression of the second male lead’s Irish wife.  “Oh, Jarge!”)  North and South was every bit as trite, insipid, cliche-ridden, and hackneyed conventional as Red Dawn.  All the characters were stereotypes.  Even Abraham Lincoln was a stereotype of Abraham Lincoln.  And it was way too sympathetic to the South and when it wasn’t doing its best to ignore the fact of slavery---the South happened to be full of poorly dressed black people who were inexplicably devoted to random white strangers---blamed its evil not on its being, well, actually evil, but on the abuses of a handful of slaveholders of bad character.  Actually, looking back on it, I think it was shown as being all David Carradine’s fault.  Also, abolitionists were somehow to blame as well, which is why one of the series’ most despicable characters was an abolitionist played by Kirstie Alley, who might just have been a victim of her own bad acting.  Alley learned an important lesson from doing North and South---never try to actually act again.  That’s why she was so funny on Cheers.  She just played herself and had a ball.   Patrick Swayze played Orry Main, the quintessentially gallant (read cliche) Southern gentleman and Confederate officer who earns the audience’s sympathy and keeps it by generally not noticing that he’s fighting to preserve the peculiar institution and happens to be a slave-holder himself.

But it was sweeping.

And although much of the acting was out and out terrible (Genie Francis was also in the cast and was worse than Kirstie Alley in that she didn’t even know how to try to act),  it also showcased many fine actors who managed to rise above their stock characters’ idiotic dialog.  But North and South succeeded in being watchable and enjoyable on the strength of several strong supporting characters, the female lead, Leslie-Anne Down, and its three male leads, including and especially Swayze.

He had to be both romantic and rugged, dashing and dangerous, soft-hearted and iron-willed (except when it came to resisting the charms of his married love interest), and for the most part he carried it all off and in the process carried much of the series on his back.

It didn’t surprise me, or Nance or the blonde, when he became a movie star.  What was surprising and continues to be surprising to me is that he didn’t stay one.

Not a true movie star, anyway.  Think of the young romantic leads who became stars at about the same time.  Kevin Costner, Tom Hanks, Dennis Quaid, Denzel Washington, Mel Gibson.

Now think of actors who were on the brink of movie stardom but never quite achieved the same level as those guys.  Jeff Daniels, Tim Robbins, Matthew Broderick.

Swayze just never had the wattage as the guys in the first group or the acting talent that allowed the guys in the second group to carve careers early as character actors and oddball leading men in the quirkier sorts of movies.

But compare him to some of his contemporaries who were briefly stars in the eighties but understandably vanished or smartly adapted to television.  Andrew McCarthy, Charlie Sheen, Kiefer Sutherland.

He might not have been as talented as all the guys in the first two groups but he was at least as good as if not better than the guys in the third.

Towards the end he was managing to work his way into the second and third groups. (Any fans of The Beast want to comment?)  But what happened in between?

Nance’s theory is that he was born at the wrong time.

…he was always the best thing in a bad movie, but couldn’t really make the leap to good ones. He belonged in a dif­fer­ent era, when his Gene Kelly com­bi­na­tion of phys­i­cal grace and unques­tioned mas­culin­ity could have been pack­aged in his own “Sin­gin’ in the Rain.” Either that, or he needed to live a lit­tle longer, until Quentin Taran­tino could have built a script around him, like he did for John Tra­volta and Robert Forster. As it is, he’ll be remem­bered for doing his best work in indi­vid­ual scenes where he could shine — the last few min­utes of “Dirty Danc­ing,” the Chippendale’s sketch from “Sat­ur­day Night Live” — rather than one sin­gle movie.

I think that about sums it up.  But I have to add one last thing.  Graham doesn’t notice or doesn’t care that the story of Swayze’s death is the courage and grace and humor with which he faced the end.  My complaints with Bernstein’s obituary are that it barely touches on that and that he didn’t have time or space to give proper attention to the story of Swayze’s life and the love affair that was at the center of it.

Swayze and his wife Lisa Niemi met when they were teenagers.  They were married for over thirty years.  Besides being an accomplished dancer and choreographer, Niemi’s an amateur pilot and after he got sick she flew them herself from their home to the faraway hospital where went for his treatments.

Now that’s a movie!

Many thanks to Brad at Sadly, No!

Comments

[Janelle]

I only watched "Red Dawn" because Ben Johnson had a small role in it. I can't believe this Graham guy took it seriously....

[Chris G.]

My wife and I went to "To Wong Foo..." on our first date, so that's the role I always associate with Swayze above all others. And that date came about because we were talking on the phone while watching the game where Cal Ripken broke Lou Gehrig's consecutive games played record and an ad for the movie came on. So someday I'm going to tell my daughter that she owes her existence in large part to Cal Ripken and Patrick Swayze.

[actor212]

Milius also wrote "Conan The Barbarian" (screenplay), which contains my favorite all time Sybil Danning line, enunciated in that sort of shrewish whiny voice she practically created, "What? Do you want to live forevah?"

The world's first Norwegian Jewish mother, ladies and gentlemen!

[The Siren]

I really enjoyed this post, and get what you are driving at, definitely. But I have to disagree, at least in part. Some time back, when there was a small blogosphere kerfuffle over Red Dawn, I did a post about it, right here, where I went through Milius's WW II-movie borrowings in detail:

http://selfstyledsiren.blogspot.com/2008/10/red-dawn-1984.html

Sorry to pimp my own post there, but I firmly believe that Red Dawn remains a conservative touchstone for a certain age group because it was the perfect me-too World War II fantasy, a movie that lets some guys get in on all the action they missed on account of not being born at the right time and being stuck with dirty hippies and the post-Vietnam era instead.

It was in some ways the movie that put Swayze on the map; he's the lead and has most of the big emotional scenes and he's better than the rest of the young actors, although that isn't saying too much. But I think you're right that it was North and South that made him a star. And your analysis of THAT work is dead on. Oy. I'd rather watch Raintree County any day.

The most touching comment I received on the Red Dawn post was from Exiled in NJ, who recalled how his daughter, age 12 and apolitical as most girls that age are, loved the movie, and loved it for Swayze and the other beautiful young actors in it. There were undoubtedly a lot of kids in the movie theatres in 1984 for the same reason; hell, it's why I was there although I pretty much hated Red Dawn on sight. Milius's genius, if you want to call it that, was in fusing the trend for teen movies in the 1980s with the widespread yearning for enemy butt to kick, and kick hard.

Because Swayze appears to have been such a genuinely kind and decent man, I don't want to leave without pointing out his excellent work in Point Break where he stole the movie out from under Keanu Reeves. And I loved Nancy's piece; I think she's right, there was always something very retro about Swayze, which is why the film that will probably live the longest in memory had him playing an old-fashioned hoofer.

[The Siren]

Want to add too that this is dead on:

The most adolescent of all the adolescent ideas you could hold about Red Dawn is that there is anything “shocking” about its plot or themes. That the bad guys are Commies doesn’t matter. The story of the kids stepping up to finish the job the grown-ups failed to do is as old as humankind. Once upon a time the bad guys were Neanderthals, later they were the barbarians at the gate, later still they were Norsemen. Then they were the Sheriff’s men, then pirates, then Indians (or the White Men, depending), then Nazis, then Martians. There was even a period when they were Commies.

[Lance]

Siren, pimping one's own blog is an approved and highly encouraged practice around here, plus I meant to include the link to your post, I just goofed. It's in there now.

I remember Exiled's comment, and I have to note that his daughter was the age I said was just right for taking Red Dawn seriously, 12.

If Graham had written about late thirtysomething Reaganites I probably wouldn't have been inspired to write this post. When I saw Red Dawn I was a certifiable grown-up but I knew even as I was laughing at it that if I'd seen such a movie when I was 10, 11, or 12 it would have been one of my favorite movies for life.

[Ken Houghton]

Being older, I always thought of Red Dawn (1984) as a low-rent remake of Taps (1981) or a variation on Firefox (1982) without the wattage.

In short, I thought you had to be Really Stupid to think Red Dawn was unique in any way as a Hollywood product, let alone something to obsess about unless you were too young to have seen the previous two films, which pretty much means you have to be just about exactly born in 1973.

Ben Domenech was two when Red Dawn was released.

[sfmike]

I never understood why Patrick Swayze kept getting stuck in those stupid all-male movies. There's a long line of them stretching from "Red Dawn" to "Road House" to "Black Dog." His real genius was as a convincing heterosexual man who loves women, and oddly enough that's a rarer skill in most modern male movie stars than is commonly acknowledged. So yes to "North and South" and "Dirty Dancing" and "Ghost," where he made his female co-stars completely shine.

As for why he wasn't a bigger movie star, I read in one of the obits that he spent a number of years in rehab at the end of the 1990s. That may or may not have had something to do with his weird career. On the basis of his peformance in "Donnie Darko," though, I think he would have made the transition into older character actor without a hitch. The camera loved him.

[Lance]

SFMike, good point about making his female co-stars shine. Not to put Swayze in their league, but this is something Grant, Gable, and Errol Flynn did better than anyone in their days, and almost nobody but Swayze has done well since. It has to do with being able to focus all your attention on your co-star. Redford could do it to some extent. But Newman almost never did. Too self-contained. Costner can manage it when he tries (Bull Durham, Tin Cup, but I think Sarandon and Russo forced him to pay attention.) Imagine the possible pairings that never happened. Swayze and Michelle Pfieffer, Swayze and Jessica Lange, Swayze and Debra Winger. Swayze and Kathleen Turner!

[Dutch]

Dude. Srsly.

2800 words. Each more artful than the last. There are Denny Lehane novels that are not as thoughtful or emotionally complex.

What a brilliant tribute to...

Patrick Swayze????

We can debate whether or not Patrick's artistic high water mark was Roadhouse or his cameo in Donnie Darko, sure, but...

Patrick Swayze????

D-List Patrick Swayze????

Dude. Wow. I'm can hardly wait for your ode to Dustin Diamond.

[Lance]

Dutch, lol! You counted? Oh well. It was either 2800 words on Swayze or 3500 on Henry Gibson.

I still might do the Gibson post.

[Sherry Chandler]

I like The Goonies. But probably not as well as I loved To Wong Foo

Great post. You make me wish I'd paid more attention to Swayze.