Freedom Isn't Free

By Cynthia Fuchs, PopMatters. Posted October 15, 2004.

The trouble starts in frame one. "Team America: World Police" opens in "Paris, France, 365 miles east of America," where a marionette is bobbling herky-jerky before a childishly drawn Eiffel Tower. The camera pulls back to reveal that this puppet is being manipulated by another puppet, whose background is a three-dimensional Paris, specifically a sunny park and fountains populated by artists, poodles, and a child in a sailor suit singing "Frere Jacques." So peaceful, so charming. And so soon done.

But the primary source of the trouble isn't who you'd think. To be sure, the first sign of ruckus takes the form of terrorists – men with beards, turbans, and a "Middle Eastern" soundtrack, carrying a briefcase-bomb and giving the evil eye to the sailor suit kid – but they've got nothing on Team America. Arriving in a red-white-and-blue jet plane and chopper, brazenly costumed in matching red-white-and-blue jumpsuits, these self-proclaimed heroes of the free world take charge, as civilians quiver, eyes wide (the puppets' faces are separately controlled and curiously emotive). "You in the robes! Put down the WMD and get on the ground!" The terrorists resist, but haven't planned on the Lisa (voiced by Kristin Miller), blond, vavoomy, and armed to the teeth: "Hey terrorist! Terrorize this!" Within seconds, TA strikes, kicking martial arts ass and blasting every possible hidey hole they see, their insta-launch missiles taking out Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the pretty park and fountains. Parisians stand with mouths agape, shocked at the devastation brought by their saviors.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone's much-ballyhooed parody of Jerry Bruckheimer-style action pictures is aptly violent, delirious, and outsized (in its miniature-puppet way). The scene goes so far as to bring back a dead-seeming terrorist, Terminator-style, to kill off a team member, in order to allow one of those patented action-movie utter woe moments, the camera pulling up and out as Lisa screams out, "Noooo!", her fiancé bloody and limp in her arms.

Feeling all tragic and minus a member, TA must replace him, and fast. Professor X-ish Spottswoode (Daran Norris) attends a Broadway production of "Lease," where the dashing "top young actor" Gary (Trey Parker) leads the cast in a rousing finale: "Everyone has AIDS!! AIDS! AIDS!" A giant red sequined ribbon rises up through the floor, singers wail and dancers writhe. "The Pope has got it! So do you!" Spottswoode, deep in shadow, smiles. He has found his man, in every sense. That is, "Team America"'s version of Bruckheimerian motions (via "Thunderbirds") include making explicit the homoerotic/homophobic tensions that propel all that explosive action. As he says repeatedly and ostensibly in jest, Spottswoode means to have Gary "suck my cock. Ha ha ha."

The other major plan here has to do with Team America's war on terror, now personalized, of course. Spottswoode brings Gary to the Team's secret headquarters, inside Mount Rushmore, where he explains his plan to send Gary undercover into a Chechen terrorists' cell, surgically altered to resemble the standard-issue terrorist – dark-skinned, patchy beard, and, er, blue eyes. No matter that Gary has no military or international espionage training; as Spottswoode reasons, spying is the same as acting (the film takes this logic a step further, such that really good acting is a kind of "force," allowing you to run Jedi mind control tricks on your audience). Gary is initially skeptical, noting that it's not his job to save the world. Spottswoode explains the current us-versus-them breakdown: "There are people out there who want you dead," he asserts. "They're called terrorists, Gary and they hate everything about you." Okay then.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »