[April 17th marks the 50th anniversary of the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy U.S. invasions and interventions of Latin American nations, leading up to a weekend Guest Post on the Dominican Republic from a colleague, friend, and DR scholar!]
On fictional and
symbolic wars, on and off the big screen.
One of the most interesting and
telling trends in mid-1980s popular culture would have to be the constant
presence of films in which the US (or at least its action hero proxies) fought
and won fictional wars around the world. Some of those wars explicitly pitted
the American forces against the Soviets, whether as guerrillas at home (as in Red Dawn
[1984], when a group of teenagers led by Patrick Swayze manage to emerge
victorious against the Soviet army), as superior military forces abroad (as in
the climactic sequence of
Top Gun [1986], when Tom Cruise
and Val Kilmer take out a group of Russian fighters), or as all-natural boxing
champs on Russian turf (as in Rocky 4 [1985],
when Sly Stallone climbs
some snowy mountains and gains enough strength to beat the Soviets’
drug-enhanced machine). But our filmic victories likewise extended to Central
America (as in Schwarzenegger’s Commando [1985]),
Afghanistan (Rambo 3 [1988]), and
even Vietnam (Rambo 2 [1985] and
Chuck Norris’s Missing in Action
[1984]), the site of the humiliating defeat that certainly contributed to the
need for these kinds of fictional victories. The latter
two films, in which Stallone and Norris combine to kill roughly 32,281
Vietnamese soldiers during peacetime, make for a particularly salient
double-feature, especially when paired and contrasted with the period’s two
most famous films about the actual Vietnam War, Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Platoon
(1988).
But it wasn’t only on the silver
screen that the US was fighting and winning largely fictional but hugely
symbolic wars. The decade’s one actual shooting war, the two-day
1983 invasion of the small Caribbean island of Grenada, was to my mind at
least as fabricated and stage-managed as the Hollywood conflicts of the next
few years. I don’t intend in any way to downplay the experiences of the more
than seven thousand American servicemen and -women who served in the conflict,
and I most especially don’t want to elide the
casualties (50 dead and 115 wounded on the American side, many more among
both Grenadian forces and civilians) and the effects of those losses on
numerous families and lives. At the ground level, to a significant extent and
to the best of my knowledge, war is war, and I can neither speak for what it
means for those who go through it nor argue that the experience of any war is
more or less affecting and meaningful than any other. But from its tactical name
of Operation
Urgent Fury to its ostensible main purpose—to protect a group of American
medical students who were studying at the island’s university—and many other
details and elements, the rhetoric of the war seems comically out of balance
with its realities, as if there was the actual invasion and then the narratives
of the invasion, and the two bear only a casual relationship to one another at
best.
That is of course my interpretation,
and there’s plenty of primary source material (such as that in my hyperlinks)
through which you can and should develop your own (if you’re interested). But
no matter what happened on the ground in Grenada, an American Studies analysis
of the war would have to take into account the legacy of the prior war in which
the United States had been involved, the new kind of Cold War foreign policy
that the Reagan Administration had sought to pursue (or at least the new
tough-guy narratives of such policy that it had worked to create) over its
first two and a half years in office, and the representations of war that would
emerge in our popular culture just after this invasion. Moreover, it would be
important to connect this particular attempt to unseat a revolutionary Latin
American regime to the very different kind that the US government (or at least
certain figures within it) would undertake a few
years later in Nicaragua, where secret funds and support were provided to
the Contras in their violent battle against the Sandinista regime; the two
situations and nations were distinct in many ways, but it’s certainly possible
that the very mixed international reception of the Grenada invasion (a United
Nations resolution condemned it and Margaret Thatcher’s government
privately rebuked Reagan as well) led to the much more secretive and behind the
scenes efforts in Nicaragua. All of which is to say, this highly minor war
reflected, contributed to, and can help us perceive and analyze a great many
broader narratives and trends in the period.
In part I’m
trying here to reverse an existing scholarly argument, one which sees the wars
fought in and after the 1990s (such as the invasion of Panama and the first
Gulf War) as narrated and understood in significant measure through the lenses
of Hollywood films, video games, and other pop culture materials. There’s
certainly some truth to that, but it’s likewise true that many of those pop
culture images of war emerged after the nation’s first truly media-friendly
conflict, a war in which the urgency and fury could be found mostly in the name
and the narratives, far from the small island toward which they were officially
directed. Next InvasionStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other US-Latin America histories you’d highlight?
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