Here comes Team America

With George Bush’s war in Iraq stuck in some kind of insurgency loop, it is time now for the US to focus on a new "evil empire" threatening the world with WMDs. Enter Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s puzzling leader who is poised either to wheel and deal with the US (where Saddam Hussein failed), or incur Bush’s freewheeling wrath.

Not surprisingly, Bush has taken to referring to Kim Jong Il as the leader of an "axis-of-evil" empire and labeling him a "tyrant." Sticks and stones can surely break bones, but coming from Bush, words like these have also been known to bring on the hurt.

Bush’s consistent badmouthing of Kim has given the green light for America to start hating its latest perceived enemy: North Korea. As the International Herald Tribune reported recently, video games and mindless Hollywood action films are now jumping on the anti-Korea bandwagon. First there was the James Bond flick Die Another Day, then came the Vin Diesel vehicle, The Pacifier, both featuring North Korean baddies.

The Tribune goes on to mention Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Team America: World Police, which features a maniacal marionette version of Kim Jong Il plotting to destroy the world with weapons of mass destruction.

Whoa. Now hold on a damn second. We can readily believe that Hollywood would toe the Bush line on North Korea, serving up a gallery of screen villains with "Kim" in their names — but the South Park guys? Stooges of the Bush administration? No way, dude.

Team America was released during the summer leading up to the November 2004 reelection of George Bush, and it proves that nothing dates so quickly as politically-timed satire. Now that the election fever has died down — Bush won, let’s move on, yada yada yada — it’s easy to see the flaws in this skewering of American aggression that relies on Thunderbirds-style marionettes for laughs. (Oh, plus scenes of puppets having sex and vomiting.) Although Team America is not a "good" movie by any stretch, and died a quick death at the US box office, Bush propaganda it ain’t.

Yes, it is strange to see Parker and Stone laying off their usual targets in the thick of an American military campaign that had sharply divided world opinion — there are no puppets of President Bush or his White House team in sight. Instead, Team America is a shadow government organization that jets out of Abe Lincoln’s mouth from its base inside Mount Rushmore to kick terror’s ass — with predictably mixed results. With a soundtrack of pumpin’ ‘80s-style rock and original lyrics along the lines of "America, f**k yeah/ Comin’ again to save the motherf**king day," this is Satire with a capital "S."

Spoofing the blank-eyed, minimal-emotion marionettes that populated ‘60s TV shows like Thunderbirds, these puppets swear, smoke, drink, puke, have sex, and lay waste to world monuments in their effort to defeat terrorism. Sounds familiar, right? The opening sequence takes place in a Paris park, where Middle Eastern terrorists are toting around a suspicious metal suitcase. Of course, Team America members quickly descend, and their "shoot first, verify later" policy quickly lays waste to the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, and a couple of mimes to boot. Yeah, it’s all good fun at France’s expense, but it also betrays a reactionary, jingoistic tone underlying the South Park guys’ humor ("Yeah, don’t you just hate those Frenchies?").

And then there’s the puppet of Kim Jong Il, shooting down UN inspector Hans Blix in cold blood and then feeding the corpse to his pet sharks. All the while, he hatches his evil plans by passing out WMDs to Middle Eastern terrorists, later to be detonated simultaneously worldwide. At other times, Kim is shown walking around his vast palace complex singing a plaintive ballad called "I’m So Lonely" (or, more accurately, "I’m So Ronery").

This is not sophisticated humor, but let’s get real. You don’t look to Trey Parker and Matt Stone for PC laughs. The two funniest bits in the movie — two scenes that I’m pretty sure were the very reason for making this movie in the first place — involve puppets having sex and puppets puking. Each of these scenes is hilarious, but drawn out way past the point of restraint (if there is such a thing as restraint in puppet sex and puppet vomiting scenes). The sex scene is scored to an ’80s-style power ballad called "I Need a Woman" and features several perversions not included in the Kama Sutra; the puking scene goes on four or five minutes, much longer than the stomach capacity of any marionette, and certainly longer than the audience’s capacity to laugh.

But you can’t slam the South Park guys for picking on easy targets. They even include a Michael Moore puppet whose anti-Team America (read: anti-Bush) agenda gets him blown up for his troubles. You’d think Moore and the South Park dudes would have much in common, ideologically speaking. But here’s the back story: Moore apparently pissed off Parker and Stone by including a South Park-style cartoon segment in his 2002 documentary, Bowling for Columbine, though the duo had nothing to do with it. Moore apparently had the last laugh, though: his anti-Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 made $150 million at the box office, while Team America made zilch.

And leave it to Parker and Stone to lay the ultimate blame for the final Pyongyang WMD showdown on… meddling Hollywood actors. Yes, the outspoken insipidities of Film Actor Guild (or F.A.G.) members Alec Baldwin, Tim Robbins, Janeane Garofalo, Liv Tyler and Susan Sarandon are all given the royal marionette skewering. ("Don’t you just hate those big-mouth, rich actors?")

So in the end, maybe the Herald Tribune has a point. The humor of Parker and Stone is not aimed at a cerebral, analytical audience. It does tend to savage the same targets that reactionary Americans love to hate, even though it lampoons this close-minded tendency at the same time. The film is not strictly about-Kim Jong Il-bashing. Parker and Stone are equal-opportunity trashers — everybody gets hit. But being from Colorado, a conservative "red" state that represents Bush’s America as much as any other, it’s safe to say that the duo are also suspicious of extreme schools of thought. Or maybe suspicious of too much thinking altogether.