Reading this review with details of scenes in this movie just made me shake my head with how true it rings.
This is exactly what moderation and third-way means to a lot of people I meet around here, which is basically that liberals do all the compromising. And the stuff they compromise on aren’t positions real liberals actually hold anyway, it’s just the ideas of positions conservatives think liberals hold after listening to Fox News and right-wing radio all the time.
When he’s not calling her a snowflake, judging her mother for immigrating illegally, yelling at her after she lets him move into her apartment on no notice, or getting angry because she got him a dog, whatever Luke does for Cassie offscreen must be extremely charming because it’s enough to get her to commit herself repeatedly to the sham marriage. Eventually, she decides, it’s the realest thing she knows. “My thoughts aren’t mine, now they’re yours,” the newly chastened Cassie sings at one point, her inner shrew now duly tamed. If you’re wondering if he ever apologizes to her for any of his own behavior, or if he ever, for example, asks his friend to be less racist? That would be a no. The only deep change happening here is on Cassie’s side.
What’s perhaps most frustrating about this framework is that it presents people whose values even slightly lean to the left as fundamentally incapable of lending support to Americans serving in the military without some kind of change of heart. The movie also seems to want “support for the military” to stand in for a broad range of conservative beliefs and behavior the movie assumes liberals and progressives just don’t partake in, including a strong love of country, religion, and basic empathy. In one scene, Cassie appears surprised to discover that servicemen have … families that love them. In another, she discovers that she enjoys saying “God bless you” to random people on the street. “I hate the way I say words that I laughed at before,” she sings at one point, apparently processing all this.
But why would Cassie have mocked these ideas before? None of these things are incompatible with feminism or anti-racism or inclusive language. Of course they aren’t. Still, the movie’s truest propaganda, alongside its romanticizing of military life, America’s role in Iraq, and war, is suggesting that they are.
Matt_W
August 18, 2022, 6:54pm
42
That sounds like a movie created specifically to make me explode.
Someday there will be a film with military personnel presented as human beings with a wide range of political beliefs and personal predilections.
