Tropic Thunder/Rain Of Madness

Tropic Thunder trailer

Rain Of Madness trailer (requires iTunes)

A lot of interesting stuff going on here. Tropic Thunder is a parody of, among other things, Apocalypse Now. So Rain Of Madness, the non-existent documentary about Tropic Thunder, is a parody of Hearts Of Darkness, the documentary about Apocalypse Now.

It’s an interesting time to make a comedy about the war in Vietnam, given that the US is currently involved in another endless police action. But Tropic Thunder isn’t, on its face, a comedy about war. It’s a satire of the whole idea of making a movie about war.

This extra level of remove insulates the audience from having to think directly about what this movie really is: a sophisticated comedy about the war in Iraq. Not just the war itself, but the perceptions that surround it: the way it’s imagined vs. the way it’s realized, what it’s like to really be in combat vs. what it’s like to feel so immersed in war toys, imagery, and information that you feel you might as well be there, even when you’re not.

If you pay attention to the Tropic Thunder trailer, you’ll see that the heart of it is just the old Seven Samurai formula: A group of misfit performers find themselves having to actually do what they previously only pretended to do. For them, the comedy becomes serious. The audience gets the chance to laugh at a situation that’s both serious and funny, but above all, pathetic. In this context, it means that Americans can laugh at how ridiculous it is that we’re still sending troops to Iraq.

The same trick is being used to make jokes about racial stereotypes. If I’d told you last year that Robert Downey Jr. was going to do a movie in blackface, you might not have believed it. But now, ha ha, he’s doing a movie about an actor doing a movie in blackface, so that’s okay, because it’s not really Robert Downey Jr. doing a movie in blackface. But it is.

Isn’t it?