Red Dawn Strikes Back

Red Dawn is a movie of real courage, grit and endurance in the face of the teen’s worst nightmare: the monolithic force of government (parental control) dominating their lives. The movie is a perfect metaphor for every teen’s desire to remain a teen and fight against the perceived unethical superiority of authoritarian figures. It is Peter Pan with actual rebellion instead of delayed maturity. The Lost Boys, and girls, fight to maintain the foundations of their young lives, as they see them, and ultimately lose while fighting the good fight against the sell-out death of the adult, corporate and government regimented life. These brave teens reject all aspects of the soul crushing world of responsibility and strike out at those who would harm their friends, families and idols.

The brothers Eckert bring the few friends and classmates they can rescue into their old hunting grounds to wait out the siege. This is textbook teen isolation. These kids are portraying classic feelings of depression. They retreat into tight groups and identify with the group because they are having trouble, as so many do, with the transition from a child, who receives her/his identity from his/her parents, to an adult who has created their own identity.

The quest for identity leads many of us down strange paths. All of us have periods in our lives that we hope remain buried from public scrutiny because of our embarrassingly slavish devotion to fringe, or not so fringy, groups. Conformity provides comfort by providing us with something we long for so desperately as teens; a sense of perfect identity. The characters in Red Dawn are linked by their struggle, their suffering and their group. The Wolverines or Zezeldany as the god damned commies call our courageous heroes.

Another focus of the movie that may have been obscured for those who chose to laugh at this great, cinematic psychological examination is the actions taken buy the teens. They rebel by escaping the oppressing rule of the oncoming adult life, represented by the Cuban and Russian militaries, but they also aggressively attempt to change the world by fighting back.

In the same as recent political taggers in the District’s metropolitan area, the Wolverines see that something is wrong with the world and are striving to create change. Our heroes are not fatally misguided, as many teens sadly are, because they see that their struggle against the invading militaries is justified because of its unprovoked nature. Most teens can only see problems but can find no solution because they lack experience and perspective. The problems of the world have no easy solution, but teens insist that there must be because they are speaking with voices that have only recently begun to move from a child’s view.



Children have simple problems with wonderfully simple solutions. Teens are fraught with fear and insecurity precisely because they long to be adult, but wish to remain childishly without responsibility. The group in Red Dawn could have hidden away in the mountains for the duration of the war, but they chose to act. Thus, the dilemma of a teen’s struggle for identity is solved through action as well as through group membership.

As the film ends, we see that the two surviving members of the Wolverines have moved fully into adulthood by recognizing that their actions have limited success due to their poor perspective and lack of experience, while the Eckert brothers assault the enemy military stronghold simultaneously convinced of their own mortality and invulnerability. The teen believes that s/he is invulnerable because s/he has no reason to suspect otherwise, but also longs for a release of the few responsibilities already earned. In this final act, we see the self destruction inherent in all those who resist the move into adulthood and the ultimate identity of the self.

How can anyone deny that Red Dawn is a brilliantly subtle teenage identity crisis hidden in a jingoistic guerrilla war movie? For those of you who fail to recognize the brilliance of Red Dawn, I pity you children.