Red Dawn : A backlash to the Jimmy Carter era

A backlash to the Jimmy Carter era

I've noticed a lot of people scratching their heads and wondering how this movie ever got made in the first place - let alone that it was actually successful. Today, it's difficult to even decide what the most ludicrous aspect of the film is. Is it America being invaded as far inland as Colorado by hordes of Soviet paratroopers in broad daylight? (and yes - radar has been around since long before the 1980s). Is it a bunch of high school kids banding together to beat the living snot out of these elite forces? (and it doesn't help that one of the kids is Charlie Sheen). Or maybe just the fact that the movie - far from being a parody or outright comedy - actually took itself completely seriously?


Well, I first saw this movie in 1984 when I was a junior in high school - basically the same age as most of the characters in the film. And while I admit I get a laugh out of the movie today, to understand its success, you basically have to understand the political climate at the time.

As teenagers, we had grown up in the immediate shadow of Vietnam, Watergate, and parents who did more sex, drugs, and rock and roll than any other generation before (or since). By and large our parents - along with 'leaders' such as Jimmy Carter - had taught us to believe that the most important aspect of being American was to acknowledge that the US was an aggressive, overtly capitalist, war-mongering nation; that the Communists may actually be on to something better; and that - above all - we should all be just a little ashamed to be American. Oh, and then there was that whole you-could-wake-up-tomorrow-to-find-the-world-has-been-destroyed nuclear thing to add a bit of paranoid terror and uncertainty to each and every day.

Then sometime in the early-to-mid 80s, things started to change. A new feeling that we had never before experienced in our young lives came about - starting with the landslide election of Ronald Reagen over Jimmy Carter in 1980, and becoming firmly established with the most decisive presidential victory in the history of the US when Reagen obliterated Jimmy's vice president Walter Mondale in 1984.

The feeling we had never before experienced? Patriotism. For the first time ever, the term didn't just apply to mean, out-of-touch middle school teachers who droned on endlessly about their service in WWII and how our generation was worthless. For the first time ever, it was actually COOL to be patriotic. And being teenagers, we did what teenagers do best - and got completely carried away with this latest trend. If it's hard to imagine Red Dawn even getting made at this point - try to imagine a theater full of high school kids cheering every time a Soviet soldier gets shot or blown up - and believing that soon we would be kicking some serious Commie ass ourselves. True, nearly all the kids in the movie get shot or blown up themselves by the end, but we didn't let that bother us too too much.

30 years later, I'm not particularly proud OR ashamed of the way we viewed the movie, or ourselves. Mostly, I'm just kind of amused with how I was back then - and with movies like Red Dawn.

MATADORS!!!! Hmmm... somehow, yelling out my high school mascot never sounded quite as dramatic as yelling out "Wolverines!!"

Re: A backlash to the Jimmy Carter era

That's an interesting point. I wasn't around for Carter, and I can't really relate to the era. I do still see a post-Vietnam war sense of self doubt about the country. Actually, I always saw Reagan's aggressiveness towards communism as a ploy to seek more weapons to the military -the defense industry was huge in his Southern California home turf, and obviously paid a lot of money to his fundraising drives.

I always heard that the red scare was BS. Nobody on either side was stupid enough to push the button.

I really like this movie for the war situations it presents. I think that the beginning is BS, with Soviet Troops raiding the school and shooting random people. I think that the film gets good once the crew returns to town, because it deals with the hard issues of living under occupation. It helps that the invading troops look just as human and just as brave as the defenders. That's the way war always is, fought by people who believe in their country but don't have any say in the decision to fire the first shot.

Re: A backlash to the Jimmy Carter era

" I wasn't around for Carter, and I can't really relate to the era." That there pretty much makes the rest of the paragraph moot as well as your next sentence.

As a Jr. in HS at the time it was a fun movie to watch, and even a little sad for those who were more sensitive to the deaths of the kids.
"Nobody was stupid enough to push the button"?? I see you've had revisionist history 101. While not as bad as in the 50s and 60s there were plenty of WWII types still running around and in charge of things. Look up Soviet history, losing a million or so was seen as acceptable.
Soviet troops raiding the school/shooting random people?? Look up their invasion of Afghanistan.

Re: A backlash to the Jimmy Carter era

Actually, gss2 brings up an interesting point about the fears of nuclear war - and how legitimate it ever was to believe it would actually happen.

What we were most afraid of - the US or the Soviet Union launching an intentional preemptive nuclear strike - was almost certainly never the most likely scenario for the beginning of a nuclear holocaust.

Decades later, there is very little documented evidence that anyone on either side ever came close to ordering a preemptive strike. And for good reason - there would be no world left to claim.

However, there are a number of recently unclassified documents which confirm that misidentifications, false alarms, and technical glitches brought us to within a whisker of mutual annihilation at least a handful of times.

Ironically, in nearly all of these cases it was human judgement - the same human judgement that we always thought would bring about world destruction - that jumped in at the last minute and pulled our fat out of the fire.

In October 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, one of the most infamous incidents occurred when a US destroyer dropped non-lethal depth charges on a Soviet B-59 submarine as a warning to surface. The captain mistook the charges to be the opening salvo of WW III, and ordered what he thought would be a retaliatory strike. Fortunately, the order required the signatures of the three senior officers on board. Including the captain, two of the three senior officers signed the order; but the third officer - Vasili Arkhipov - refused to give his consent, and was able to calm the captain down and convince him to surface and await orders from Moscow.

In September 1983, a Soviet satellite misinterpreted a glint of sunlight off the Montana clouds to be a nuclear attack. Panic broke out within a Soviet bunker monitoring the satellite, and teams scrambled to prepare a counter strike. Once again, a single man - in this case the commanding officer, Lt. Colonel Stanislav Petrov - was able to calm his comrades down and convince them to wait for human confirmation that there were in fact US missiles heading for Russia before ordering a retaliatory strike.

In both these cases - as well as a handful of others - a single man truly did save the entire world.


Re: A backlash to the Jimmy Carter era

tmitch-1, thanks for your informative post. I had always heard that there were several near-misses that almost led the total destruction of vast parts of our planet, but I had never encountered any specific information. Those two men you mention by name were true heroes--I'm sure no one would have blamed them if they had gone along with their colleagues and allowed the nuclear missiles to launch, so the fact that they were willing to take action to prevent mass destruction is incredible. I wonder how their countrymen treated them afterwards. I hope they were recognized as the brave men they were...but somehow, I doubt it. At least not until MUCH later.

Re: A backlash to the Jimmy Carter era

Interesting post. Red Dawn is definitely a product of its time, I'm sure the political climate influenced it as you said. They could only have made a movie like this in the mid 80s. The zeitgeist or whatever you want to call it.

Acting like you some one-man GPS

Re: A backlash to the Jimmy Carter era

One thing I recall as a major issue in the early 80s was panic over Nicaragua and the Sandinista regime. When I was in high school, I saw a film from the American Conservative Union which predicted a domino theory in Central America, which would then spread to Mexico, then the United States. It was pretty much the same scenario of Red Dawn, which was made even more obvious when Powers Booth's character talked about "the whole Cuban and Nicaraguan armies" invading.

Jimmy Carter's election was a backlash in and of itself, mainly against the Nixon-Ford era. Jimmy Carter was not exactly the hippies' favorite at the time, and the Democrats were still pretty divided. Carter was a compromise, middle-of-the-road candidate, more of an old guard Democrat.

To be sure, Carter inherited a huge mess left by the previous Administration, and he was also facing opposition within his own party. Ted Kennedy opposed him for the nomination in 1980, and that, coupled with Carter's perceived impotence over Nicaragua, Cuba, the Iran hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and a failed hostage rescue mission that made it appear that Carter was mismanaging the military, it seemed like Carter just didn't know what to do. Granted, much of it wasn't entirely his fault, and no one expected him to work miracles. I think most people thought he was a good man, but just not a good president.

I was in high school myself in 1980, and by that time, the Cold War was viewed on a more strategic level, although I could recognize that most of the initial causes of the Cold War were no longer relevant, and that the center of world crisis and instability was shifting to the Middle East. The US and China were seeing more eye to eye and saw the Soviet Union as a common enemy, which kept the USSR somewhat bottled up. The global situation had changed since the 1950s, but Reagan and many of his followers didn't really seem to see that. They kept thinking that the commies were still planning a big global takeover, which seemed rather absurd considering the overall geopolitical situation. They could barely hold on to what they already had, and even that was slipping out of their grasp by the late 70s/early 80s.

I think the scenario outlined in "The Day After" got people's attention since there was a belief that something like that could happen. But the scenario in Red Dawn was a completely different kettle of fish with a lot of variables which seemed a bit too far fetched even for the 1980s. I was already in college by then, and a lot of people laughed it off as Reagan propaganda.

Many people liked Reagan for his economic policies, but he was criticized for ostensibly wanting to provoke and revive tensions with the Soviet Union that didn't really need to be revived. The Cold War was waning and effectively over by 1980, but then Reagan must have been bored and wanted to start it up again. Both sides already should have been aware that the true problems were in the Middle East, and perhaps if we had tried to work out a more amicable truce with Russia instead of trying to drive them into the ground, the world situation might be far better today.



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