[50 years ago this coming weekend, the pilot episode of M*A*S*H aired. So in honor of that ground-breaking sitcom, this week I’ll AmericanStudy wartime comedies in various media, leading up to a special post on M*A*S*H!]
On whether
and how the Hollywood meta-comedy is also a wartime meta-comedy.
I could
write a whole different weekly series about Hollywood
meta-comedies and satires, and to a significant degree director and
co-writer Ben Stiller’s very funny (and quite frequently offensive) Tropic Thunder (2008)
would fit better in that series than it does in this one. The main characters (including
Stiller alongside Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black, Jay Baruchel, and Brandon T.
Jackson) are all actors
making a film that goes terribly wrong; the supporting characters include the film’s director (Steve
Coogan) and its special
effects man (Danny McBride), the author of the book being
adapted into the film (Nick Nolte), the overbearing studio head (Tom Cruise),
and the sleazy agent (Matthew McConaughey) for one of the actors. Add in
the fact that each of those characters is played by a talented comic actor giving
an extremely exaggerated performance—yes, I do mean extremely exaggerated—and
you’ve got all the makings of a very funny Hollywood meta-satire.
As I
imagine you already know, and as each and every one of those hyperlinked clips
reflects, the movie that all those characters are making is a war movie, the
Vietnam War-set Tropic Thunder. That
means without question that the satirical, meta-comic elements are consistently
directed at other war and Vietnam War films—it’s not a coincidence for example that
the film’s
trailer begins with the uber-familiar notes of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s
Worth” (probably the second most consistently used track in Vietnam War-
and 1960s-set films, after “Fortunate
Son”). Many of the film’s other central elements, such as the team’s diverse
collection of personalities who butt heads constantly but have to come together
to achieve their mission, are drawn from the traditions
and stereotypes of war films more generally, making this a comedy that
parodies that longstanding cultural genre on multiple successful levels.
But beyond
those two successful and funny levels of film meta-comedy—a satire of Hollywood
and a parody of war films—is Tropic
Thunder a film about war in any way? I’m not entirely sure that it is, but
I would say that there’s one interesting and easily overlooked layer which
qualifies: the mythologized source material on which the film-within-the-film
is based. It turns out that the wartime memoir written by “Four Leaf” Tayback
(Nick Nolte) was entirely invented—he served in the Coast Guard during the
Vietnam War and never left the U.S., and his hook hands are also fake, an
affectation to amplify his faux-authenticity as a vet. Partly that adds yet
more to the meta-commentary, since it turns out that however far down we dig, Tropic Thunder (the same of Tayback’s
memoir as well as the film-within-the-film and, yes, the actual film) is an
invented, fake story. But I’d say this telling details also reminds us of just
how many of the narratives around war are always similarly invented, revealing
more about our need to believe in them than about the histories they purport to
portray. That ain’t so funny, but it’s a lesson worth learning to be sure.
Special
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other wartime comedies you’d highlight?
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