Film: Southern Comfort

Okay, full disclosure: I fell asleep twenty minutes into this film and I need to finish watching it. But there are a couple of things I already find interesting. First, Powers Boothe AND Keith Carradine? That power duo already makes this required viewing. It's a film about the national guard, the Louisiana national guard at that, so these guys are just out doing a mission for their training. But the way that it is written it sounds like there is combat: one guard tells another that they go out to break up anti-war rallies and throw n*****s in jail. So as they go on their training mission -- which is to hump 38 kilometers out in the Louisiana bayou -- it starts to look an awful lot like Vietnam. When the leader of the unit realizes his map is unusable because the water table has risen, the soldier/guards are stuck.

Then they make the choice to "borrow" a couple of canoes to row across the bayou, leaving one so that the absent occupants of the camp-cum-slaughter house (dead animals are strung up and scattered around the site). When the occupants return to find the soldiers halfway across the bayou in their canoes, they open fire on them. What's surprising is how easily the setting gets transferred to Vietnam: the jungle, the inability to pinpoint their whereabouts and understand the rules governing behavior of the natives. Further, the natives (ostensibly American) should respond with frustration, but not with violence. It's America turning on itself and it's scary.

One bone to pick though. This film, like Deliverance, chooses to make backwoods people the villians. I suppose there is an argument that could somehow make sense of that. But having people who are dirty, uneducated, violent and vile attack the white, educated, urban Americans draw such a nasty line between city and country, as though we should be afraid of the country and flock to the city to be safe. Alternatively, you can look at it as old America attacking new America and forcing the viewer to side with new America and disavowing the roots of America.

That's a lot for twenty minutes, huh?