JonathanRosenbaum.com

During the spring of 1998, not long before the American

release of Small Soldiers, I happened upon “The Toys

of Peace,” a wise and wicked tale by Saki included in

A. S. Byatt’s recent collection, The Oxford Book of

English Short Stories. Set in 1914, it recounts the

noble and doomed efforts of the hero to interest his

two nephews, aged nine and ten, in “peace toys”:

models of a municipal dustbin and the Manchester

branch of the YWCA, lead figurines of John Stuart

Mill, Robert Raikes (the founder of Sunday schools),

a sanitary inspector, and a district councillor. Forty

minutes later, he looks in on the boys and finds

that they’ve converted these objects into war toys:

the municipal dustbin punctured with holes to

accommodate the muzzles of imaginary cannons,

Mill dipped in red ink to approximate an eighteenth-

century French colonel, with a grisly game plan

mapped out to yield a maximum amount of

bloodshed, including the remainder of the red ink

splashed against the side of the YWCA building.

A mordant rejoinder to PC child rearing in 1914

England, Saki’s story testifies to the long-standing

lure of make-believe war to boys. Even more wicked

and wise in some ways is Joe Dante’s Small Soldiers

— a trenchant satire rude enough to suggest that some

of the make-believe wars boys like to play turn out

to be the real ones, including those in Vietnam and

the Persian Gulf. The sentiments and fabrications

underlying such escapades, as this movie sees it,

are not so different from those underlying the

games little boys play. This is especially true for

civilian spectators who watch the battles from afar,

accepting the mise en scène of newscasters and

governments the same way that kids accept the

game plans of toy manufacturers. But it also applies to

some of the participants — the eager enlistees

programmed by movies to see warfare as a glorified

form of kicking butt. Garry Wills’s recent book, John

Wayne’s America, hypothesizes that it was our fantasies

about a movie star that got us into Vietnam in the first

place. And couldn’t one argue that the two most

successful American exports, movies and weapons, are

both aggressive, fantasy-driven toys?

Small Soldiers opened in the United States in early July

1998, only two weeks prior to the release of Saving Private

Ryan — a feature from the same Hollywood studio,

DreamWorks, and directed by the man, Steven Spielberg, who

effectively produced Small Soldiers — adding pertinence to the

satire for anyone who cared to connect it with contemporary

reality. To my way of thinking, Spielberg’s film represented a

sophisticated form of warmongering, motored by clever,

mainstream adaptations of practically every war film he’d ever

seen; yet although his own discourse was every bit as cross-

referenced to other war films as Dante’s, this fact seemed far

from apparent to the American press, which applauded

Spielberg’s film precisely for its freshness and originality.

Spielberg drew on second-degree memories of All Quiet on

the Western Front, Fuller’s war films, Kubrick’s war films,

The Bridge on the River Kwai, third-degree memories of

John Ford’s war films, and many others — complete with little

kernels of wisdom culled from each of these sources — while

Small Soldiers parodied The Dirty Dozen and Apocalypse

Now, among others. But the same critical establishment that

deemed Small Soldiers both old hat and commercially crass,

a remake of either Gremlins or Toy Story (or, in some cases,

improbably both) motivated by simple greed, declared Saving

Private Ryan to be brand-new and morally enlightening. The

impact of the extreme violence of the Normandy Beach landing

near the beginning silenced criticism in the same way that

shouting can sometimes win an argument.

In short, the media profiles accorded these two releases

were so radically different that the relevance of Dante’s film

to Spielberg’s went virtually unnoticed. As far as most of the

public was concerned, Small Soldiers was anything but an

auteur film: the name “Joe Dante,” barely known in the

first place among American filmgoers, was given so little

emphasis in the film’s advance publicity that I failed to

notice it myself and came very close to missing the Chicago

press screening, even though I’ve been a passionate fan

of Dante’s work at least since Gremlins. One way of partially

accounting for this confusion was the deceptive nature of the

ads — which I was later surprised to discover Dante had

approved, perhaps as one way of negotiating and rationalizing

his ambiguous alliance with the movie’s intricate tie-ins with

Burger King and the sale of various war toys. These ads

foregrounded the toy soldiers known as the Commando Elite

as if they were the movie’s unironic heroes rather than its

pathetically programmed comic villains, falsely equating the

movie’s essence with the crassness of Commando Elite’s

manufacturer in the movie, known as Globotech. Until I

noted in the ads’ fine print that Dante was the director,

I came close to skipping the film myself thanks to this

cheesy promo.

But don’t we all tend to lay critical grids over most films

before we see them? A year or so ago I discovered in

The Realist, Paul Krassner’s humor magazine, that the

Chinese title of Oliver Stone’s Nixon was The Big Liar —

which led me to speculate that if Stone had had the balls

to give his movie that title in English, I probably would have

hated it less. (I also have to admit that the aura of hushed

respect surrounding Saving Private Ryan already made me

approach it with some suspicion; for that matter, I’m wary of

trusting the rhetoric of any director who chooses to begin and

end a picture with the waving of an American flag — even a

somewhat grey and tarnished American flag, as in this

case, still sounds a note of sanctity.)

Perceived almost exclusively as a summer release for

small children with multiple commercial tie-ins, Small

Soldiers was for the most part reviewed as such, and

even though the two multiplex audiences I saw it with

in Chicago — as well as the thousands of spectators at

the outdoor piazza screening of the Locarno International

Film Festival on August 7, 1998, a month after its U.S.

opening, where it showed on a double bill with There’s

Something About Mary — appeared to fully understand

and appreciate it as a satire, the same appreciation in the

U.S. media was at best scattered, perhaps because the ads

spoke louder than the movie itself. (This is often the case

with high-profile studio releases. Austin Powers: The Spy

Who Shagged Me, which had a production budget of

$35 million, was said to have an advertising budget of

between $35 and $40 million.)

By contrast, the same media perceived Saving Private

Ryan almost immediately as a serious art film; like

Schindler’s List and Amistad, it was earmarked, long before

any reviewers saw it, as a prestige item, a highly personal

project, and consequently a brave commercial risk on the

part of both Spielberg and DreamWorks. The fact that

The New Yorker advertised a promotional interview with

Spielberg on its cover by describing Saving Private Ryan

as the film “to end all wars” was emblematic of the

responses to the film elsewhere. Reviewers found it to be both

serious and adult — further evidence of Spielberg’s growing

maturity as a filmmaker, and a far cry from the money-

grubbing cynicism and exploitative nature of something like

Small Soldiers, which many of the most influential American

film critics criticized for its violence, hypocrisy, and capacity

to traumatize small children. No such criticism was waged

against Saving Private Ryan because the much more graphic

violence of the Normandy Beach sequence was taken to be a

healthy jolt of reality, traumatizing only in a favorable sense

by shocking the (supposedly adult) audience into a perception

of the truth.

A characteristic phrase from New York magazine’s capsule

review by David Denby — the film critic who can be counted on

most regularly to express American doublethink with the least

amount of self-consciousness — is the assertion that Saving

Private Ryan “blows every other World War II film out of the

water.” The use of a violent military metaphor to justify

a supposedly pacifist or at least semi-pacifist war film should

be connected ideologically and syntactically with The New

Yorker’s previously cited cover blurb — i.e., “the film to end

all wars that blows every other World War II film out of the

water” — in order to understand more precisely the sort of

hypocrisy that Dante’s film exposes.

But I don’t mean to suggest that the dismissal of Dante’s

work was exclusively the consequence of American

publicity. An appreciation of the ethical force of Small

Soldiers depends not only on a recognition of Joe Dante

as a particular kind of satirist, but also on a sharing of

certain generational attitudes, as well as on the timing of

the release of Saving Private Ryan, which gave Dante’s

film a pointed relevance for me. Put somewhat differently,

Small Soldiers thrives on its contextual references whereas

Saving Private Ryan succeeds with audiences only when its

own contextual references are overlooked. The media was

inattentive to the references to other war movies in both

cases because these went against the critical profiles these

films were supposed to have — crass business motives in the

case of Small Soldiers, heartfelt reflections of real-life

experiences in the case of Saving Private Ryan. The

essential auteur of Small Soldiers was perceived by

many American spectators to be Burger King, a not-

unreasonable assumption given the film’s promotional

tie-in deals, not to mention the fact that, as I eventually

discovered from Dante himself, Burger King had the final

cut. In Locarno, the only hint of a tie-in or promotional

gimmick came with the free hair gel handed out to spectators

as a joke in conjunction with There’s Something About Mary,

so audiences were freer to respond to the movie on its own

terms.

If Burger King indeed qualifies as the film’s auteur and Dante

is merely its struggling metteur en scène, Small Soldiers can

indeed be read as hypocritical; if the movie exists mainly to sell

war toys and Dante can only work in the margins of this project

by ridiculing selling war toys — and selling, buying, and

consuming wars — then the whole enterprise has to be regarded

as a machine turned against itself. So the question of how

adept some critics were in screening out the ridicule has to be

joined with the question of how defenders such as myself

managed to screen out Burger King’s ad copy. In the final

analysis, the heart of the matter is the question of what a

movie consists of — a viewing experience or the central object

in a marketing campaign. Saving Private Ryan was mainly

treated as the former and Small Soldiers the latter, which

accounts in part not only for the discrepancy between the

two responses but also for the overall failure of the press

to perceive any meaningful relationship between the two

movies.

The following remarks are an attempt to chart that

discrepancy and failure via my own particular reading of

Small Soldiers.

***

Beginning with a TV commercial for Globotech, a huge

conglomerate that boasts converting weaponry into peaceful

uses — “beating swords into plowshares for you and your

family” — Small Soldiers whisks us off to the first meeting of

Globotech’s CEO (Denis Leary) with two toy designer

working for his latest acquisition, Heartland Play Systems.

One of these designers, nerdy Irwin (David Cross) — a rough

equivalent of Saki’s idealist hero — believes in making

educational, non-violent toys and has come up with a

blueprint for benign, noble monsters known as the

Gorgonites, creatures searching peacefully for Gorgon,

their ancestral home. The other designer, hyper Larry

(Jay Mohr), proposes the Commando Elite, a hard-ass

squad of killer soldiers.

Scoffing at Irwin’s qualms about violence and

rationalizing his own preferences in movie-entertainment

terms (“Don’t call it violence — call it action. Kids love

action”), the CEO combines these two projects into a single

line of products by designating the mainly white

Commandos, miniature Schwarzeneggers and Van Dammes,

as good, old-fashioned American destroyers and the

Gorgonites as their multiracialtargets and victims, then

sends both designers off to produce high-tech toys within

six months. Eager to please his new boss, Larry filches

Irwin’s computer password and with it manages to acquire a

microchip from the U.S. Defense Department, thereby

empowering his Commandos with all the “action” they need.

When an early shipment of Commandos and Gorgonites is

getting trucked through a small town in Ohio, a rebellious

teenager named Alan (Gregory Smith), minding his father’s

New Age toy store, the Inner Child, persuades the trucker

(Dick Miller) to turn over one set of the new products on

consignment, despite the fact that his father (Kevin Dunn)

won’t stock war toys. Knowing that he can turn an easy

buck by selling these toys on the sly while his father’s away

at a seminar on small businesses, Alan represents another

version of Larry and the CEO — let’s call it the entrepreneurial

spirit — while his ineffectual father represents Irwin’s bumbling

idealism. But once both Commandos and Gorgonites break

out of their boxes and become engaged in a full-scale war —

the Commandos programmed to search and destroy, the

Gorgonites programmed to hide and eventually lose — the

humans in Alan’s house and the family next door, including

Christy (Kirsten Dunst), the girl Alan is pursuing — become

caught in the crossfire and are forced to take sides. As the

Commandos convert everyday domestic objects and appliances

into weaponry, the grim undersides of consumer culture and

kick-ass ideology come together in riotous, carnivalesque

splendor.

Dante’s satire doesn’t simply target war and warmongering

but the everyday cultural violence that encompasses them,

by which I mean the violence in pop culture as well as the

violence of pop culture. With the possible exception of Inner

Space, just about all of Dante’s best work is concerned with

this cultural violence — cuddly Spielbergian pets in Gremlins;

animated cartoons in “It’s a Good Life,” his segment of

Twilight Zone — The Movie; TV in the finale of The

Explorers and practically all of The Second Civil War

(his prescient and neglected 1997 made-for-cable satire);

xenophobia in The ’Burbs (despite the confusing ending);

war fever in Matinee; corporate merchandising in Gremlins

2: The New Batch — and part of the exciting achievement of

Small Soldiers is to combine all of these concerns into one

streamlined statement.

Part of the kick of Dante’s cheerful scorn is that it takes on

not only the more obvious targets like The Dirty Dozen (by

employing members of the original cast to speak the voices

of the Commandos), but also the less obvious ones, like

Apocalypse Now — already perceived by many as an antiwar

film and hence something of a sacred cow, even in the

nineties — while adroitly exposing the innate childishness of

the overblown epic and heroic stances in all of them. The

self-importance of a supposedly “balanced” portrait like

Patton (Richard Nixon’s favorite movie) is made to seem

just as ludicrous as an imperialist adventure like Rambo,

and the consumerist aspect of war films in general is kept

in the foreground. This pointedly includes the hypocrisy of

such flag-waving “history lessons” as the exploded and

severed body parts in Saving Private Ryan, which are

contrived simultaneously to sell tickets and to provide

moral correctives to other war movies — though the movies

being corrected often upped the violence quotient in their

own eras with identical rationalizations and mixed motives.

An ironic syndrome: every time a director decides to make

a war film more graphic in its violence than its predecessors,

the argument seems to be, “This’ll make someone think twice

about wanting to go to war,” but the apparent result is to

make young male spectators even more eager to prove their

mettle by diving into such bloodbaths. It’s another version of

the syndrome described in the Saki story, and one that has

understandably prompted some critics to claim that there’s no

such thing as an antiwar war movie — though Spielberg,

perennial exploitation apologist, has recently claimed the

reverse, that “every war movie, good or bad, is an antiwar

movie” (presumably including Sands of Iwo Jima and

The Green Berets).

It might be argued that self-deception is central to

Spielberg’s achievements, as central to them as deceiving

the public, because the two activities ultimately amount

to the same thing. (Perhaps the apparent national desire

to make Spielberg America’s official guru and poet

laureate is predicated on an implicit understanding that he’s

every bit as innocent about his motives as his audience —

meaning that the audience knows it can safely remain

innocent as long as he’s the grown-up in charge.) Audiences

wouldn’t be nearly so susceptible to accepting the

seriousness of Spielberg’s “grown-up” projects if he weren’t

so adept at doing con jobs on himself. It surely takes a

combination of innocence and show-biz smarts to convince

an audience to contemplate the Holocaust by first getting

them to identify with a Nazi who enjoys going to ritzy

nightclubs. The same mentality led Spielberg to tell Stephen

Schiff in The New Yorker that he received an enormous

amount of pleasure from giving money to charities without

telling anyone — without telling anyone, that is, except

Schiff and his millions of readers. That’s why the same man

capable of claiming that Jaws was “his” Vietnam and that

“every war movie, good or bad, is an antiwar movie” can

convince other people that Saving Private Ryan is something

other than one more recruiting film.

I’ll never forget the experience I had escorting the late

Samuel Fuller, the much-decorated World War II hero

and maverick filmmaker, to a multiplex screening of Full

Metal Jacket, along with fellow critic Bill Krohn, in Santa

Barbara thirteen years ago. Though Fuller courteously

stayed with us to the end, he declared afterward that as far

as he was concerned, it was another goddam recruiting film

— that teenage boys who went to see Kubrick’s picture with

their girlfriends would come out thinking that wartime combat

was neat. Krohn and I were both somewhat flabbergasted by

his response at the time, but in hindsight I think his point was

irrefutable. There are still legitimate reasons for defending

Full Metal Jacket, in my opinion — as a radical statement

about what conditioning does to intelligence and personality,

as a meditation on what the denial of femininity does to

masculine definitions of civilization, as a deeply disturbing

experiment in sprung and unsprung narrative, and no

doubt as other things as well. But as a piece of propaganda

against warfare, it remains specious and dubious, providing

one more link in an endless chain of generic macho self-

deceptions on the subject. And for all its technical flair,

it might be argued that the principal achievement of Saving

Private Ryan is to extend that sort of self-deception into the

nineties.

***

Attempting to tabulate the forty-seven American reviews

of Small Soldiers that I’ve read — a file that omits my own

favorable review in the Chicago Reader, a few portions of

which are recycled here — I note first of all that there’s an

almost even split: twenty-two are unfavorable, eighteen

are favorable, and seven are mixed. But what constitutes

“favorable,” “unfavorable,” and “mixed” is largely a matter

of interpretation and hardly means the same thing to any

two reviewers. For instance, Eric Layton’s review for

Entertainment Today, which I’ve identified as “mixed,”

concludes, “To fully enjoy Small Soldiers, ignore its murky

political messages and just enjoy the exceedingly special

effects — sort of like you did during Armageddon.” Layton

also argues, “Adam Rifkin’s script is ostensibly a meditation

on the dangers of military technology and the senselessness

of war, but Small Soldiers is so immersed in violence, all

moralizing is rendered moot.” Rita Kempley voiced similar

misgivings in the Washington Post, not because of the

violence but because of the audience it addresses: although

the movie’s “message is more sophisticated than it seems

. . . the target audience of 6-, 7- and 8-year-olds aren’t about

to read anything into this rowdy, repetitious war game. And

they certainly aren’t going to notice the hypocrisy inherent

in a movie built around the violent children’s entertainment

it pretends to condemn.” But Steve Murray in the Atlanta

Journal-Constitution based his own mixed reactions on

finding the film too derivative of Toy Story, The Indian in the

Cupboard, the made-for-TV feature Trilogy of Terror, and,

most of all, Gremlins: “That 1984 flick was also directed by Joe

Dante, but he can’t sue himself.”

Perhaps a more meaningful tabulation would be how many

of the reviews perceived the film as satirical, at least in its

intentions, regardless of whether they were favorable or not.

My rough estimate is that about two-thirds did, though

interestingly enough the third that didn’t included most of

the reviews that appeared nationally and reached the

largest number of readers, including, among others, those

of Gene Siskel in the Chicago Tribune, Peter Travers in

Rolling Stone, Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal,

Peter Rainer in New Times, Leonard Klady in Variety, and

David Ansen in Newsweek. And not even this imposing

lineup includes the Chicago Tribune’s Michael Wilmington,

who alluded to the film’s unfulfilled “satiric potential,” but

only in relation to toys; Roger Ebert (both in the Chicago

Sun-Times and syndicated elsewhere), who noted a “satirical

purpose” only in the evisceration of a member of the

Commando Elite by a lawn mower; Dennis Lim in the

Village Voice, who saw the satire directed exclusively

against capitalism; Kenneth Turin in the Los Angeles Times,

who noted only that Dante “does bring sweetness and a

sense of satiric comedy to the human relationships”; and

Janet Maslin in The New York Times, who criticized the film

for directing “well-deserved satire at the toy industry” at the

beginning and then “forgetting” to include any more of it

later. (It’s worth adding that Maslin’s “mixed” notice, in

keeping with many of her reviews, echoes Variety by judging

the film largely as a business venture; it begins, “Nothing

beats a plaything when it comes to comandeering the

attention of children, so Joe Dante’s Small Soldiers should

have had the makings of a sure thing.” Many of the other

reviews, for that matter, underline the degree to which,

even outside trade publications, present-day film reviewing

often conflates business judgments with aesthetic

evaluations.) In short, none of these dozen reviewers

gave the slightest indication that Small Soldiers had

anything to say about war or war films, and because

they set the tone of the film’s overall critical reception,

the possible relevance of Dante’s film to Saving Private

Ryan became a lot easier to miss.

Two recurring references in most of these reviews,

especially the unfavorable ones, are to the late Phil Hartman,

whose last screen performance is in the film, and to Toy

Story, the Disney computer animation hit. Hartman,

murdered by his girlfriend while the film was still in

production, plays the hero’s next-door neighbor, a

compulsive TV buff who at one point utters a

memorable line to his wife — “World War II is my

favorite war” — that one can easily imagine being

attributed to Spielberg. Though the film is dedicated

to Hartman in its closing credits (featuring a brief

outtake of him as a tribute) and his role in the film

is relatively minor, many reviewers were disturbed

by his presence; one considered it an act of bad taste

by DreamWorks to have released the film at all, and

Travers in Rolling Stone structured his entire short

review around the complaint that Small Soldiers was

unworthy of Hartman’s talent.

Toy Story, by virtue of using toys as characters, was

most frequently mentioned as a film that Small Soldiers

either ripped off or tried unsuccessfully to emulate.

The late Gene Siskel complained on the weekly TV show

that he shared with Ebert that he expected something

more “cutting edge” from Small Soldiers, like Toy Story

— apparently thinking of the technology involved in that

cartoon feature, without any reference to its content —

and many other reviewers, including Ebert, decried

Dante’s violence as harmful and disturbing to children,

again in comparison to Toy Story. (On their TV show,

they jointly concluded that the film was too dumb for

adults and too violent for children, making it not worth

seeing for anyone.) But the only cutting edges I can

recall from that earlier movie are the ones used to gouge

out the eyes of toy figures, perhaps because I find it

difficult to isolate technology from what it’s being used

for. I don’t have children of my own, but it’s

hard for me to see how an exercise in good-natured,

across-the-board ridicule of warmongering could

traumatize the same kids who are packed off to enjoy

the squeezed-out eyes and severed limbs of Toy

Story without qualm. One parent has assured me

that the violence of Toy Story wasn’t perceived by

his little boy as violence but rather as a visceral rush

of images. It’s hard to know how to quarrel with this,

but I would argue that just as kids are perfectly able

to distinguish between animation and live action

(which amounts to the usual defense of Toy

Story as a harmless children’s movie), they’re also able

to distinguish between toys and human beings. In any

event, the subsequent wide popularity of Small Soldiers

with small children on home video, which briefly

encouraged DreamWorks to envision a sequel, hasn’t to

the best of my knowledge — based on the experiences of

various parents and babysitters I’ve spoken with —

resulted in any traumas.

The strongest element of censure in the reviews by both

Ebert and Klady is the charge of mean-spiritedness,

which deserves to be examined in greater detail. Here are

the most relevant passages from the two reviews:

EBERT::

Small Soldiers is a family picture on the outside, and a mean, violent

action picture on the inside. Since most of the violence happens to toys,

I guess we’re supposed to give it a pass, but I dunno: The toys are pre-

sented as individuals who can think for themselves, and there are believ-

able heroes and villains among them. For smaller children, this could be

a terrifying experience. . . .

In Small Soldiers, toys have unspeakable things happen to them, and

many of them end up looking like horror props. Chip Hazard [a mem-

ber of the Commando Elite] meets an especially gruesome end. What

bothered me most about Small Soldiers is that it didn’t tell me where to

stand or what attitude to adopt. In movies for adults, I like that quality.

But here is a movie being sold to kids, with a lot of toy tie-ins and ads

on the children’s TV channels. Below a certain age, they like to know

what they can count on. When Barbie clones are being sliced and diced

by a lawn mower, are they going to understand the satirical purpose?

KLADY (opening paragrapoh of review)

The notion of technology running amok fuels Small Soldiers. When

children’s action toys, implanted with faulty military microchips, begin

to move, speak and learn, they turn on their human owners with a lethal

vengeance. It’s an adult’s paranoid dream come to life, so setting it in a

juvenile context may have inadvertently undone the foundation of the

story. And while pic’s sense of a toy store turned upside-down, courtesy

of dazzling f/x, will draw young viewers, ultimately the film’s mean-spirit-

edness and serious underpinnings will turn off its core audience. The

result will be rapid commercial erosion and disappointing theatrical box

office; ancillary movement, particularly on video, could provide the pic

with a more vital afterlife.

In order to counter Ebert’s and Klady’s objections, some

of the facts in their reviews need to be disputed: Klady’s

claim that “the action toys. . . turn on their human owners

with a lethal vengeance” obscures the facts that the targets

of the Commando Elite are actually the Gorgonites, who

are programmed to hide and to lose, and that the human

“owners” of both toys are at risk only when they get in the

way or shelter the Gorgonites. Similarly, Ebert’s

description obscures the fact that many of the Gorgonites

“[look] like horror props” from the outset, and this is what

makes them the heroes of the film. Moreover, the affection

expressed by the film toward these noble underdogs and

the fear and derision expressed toward the Commando

Elite, represented unambiguously as unthinking and

merciless killing machines, provides precisely the moral

positioning that Ebert finds absent — an indication both

of “where to stand” and “what attitude to adopt,” though

this clearly is an indication rather than a set of moral

directives.

Given such faulty descriptions, the charge of mean-

spiritedness becomes comprehensible. The sense of recoil

conveyed by both reviews suggests that a serious grappling

with the issue of enjoying warfare as spectacle is indeed

“mean-spirited” if the viewer’s own impulses in that

direction become the target of the ridicule. And though Ebert

is provocative enough to suggest that allowing the viewer a

certain amount of moral freedom is commendable in a movie

for adults but reprehensible in a movie for children, it might

be argued that the only partially concealed moral directives

and biases of Saving Private Ryan make Spielberg’s film in

Ebert’s terms a film for children, not adults.

The fact that these reviewers and others didn’t perceive

Dante’s efforts as satire about the consumption of war as

spectacle or art is unfortunate but not entirely

unprecedented. Dante’s major predecessor in American pop

cinema, the late Frank Tashlin, was equally misunderstood

in the United States. Tashlin’s own vision of cultural

violence was grounded in animated cartoons — he began

as a cartoonist and animator — but the objects of his

satirical and parodic scorn were somewhat different, tied

to what was most aggressive about American pop culture

in the fifties: comic books (Arists and Models);

Hollywood (Hollywood or Bust); rock ’n’ roll (The Girl

Can’t Help It); advertising (Will Success Spoil Rock

Hunter?); television (Rock-a-Bye Baby); all kinds of media

excess, sexual hysteria, loud colors, and gadgets (passim).

As a fan and aficionado of

horror and SF movies as

well as cartoons, Dante

has a different spin on

cultural aggression and

what it consists of, but

his fascination with the pop materials that he mocks and

synthesizes rivals Tashlin’s, leading some commentators

to conclude that he’s too invested in these materials to

qualify as a satirist. Just as some critics found Tashlin too

vulgar to qualify as a satirist of vulgarity, some critics today

find Dante’s movies too violent to qualify as satires about

violence.

I would argue in both cases that the extreme stylization

of both directors creates a sense of detachment about

what they’re showing that is the true source of disturbance.

Nothing is ever perceived as real in their comic fantasies,

which means that viewers who want to participate are forced

to reflect on their own reactions to what they’re watching,

examine their own reflexes, and consider how much they’re

the targets of what’s being satirized.

Small Soldiers doesn’t represent the first time that Joe Dante

has been misunderstood, nor, I suspect, will it be the last. His

previous theatrical release in the United States, the 1993

Matinee, was about war fever, and reviewers who saw any

connection between the Cuban missile crisis and the periodic

eviscerations of Bagdad in the early nineties were few and

far between. Though virtually all of Dante’s movies are

about the ethics and ramifications of spectatorship, he

prefers to keep a low profile within the studio system and

works without a personal publicist — the most obvious reason

why a good many reviewers resist treating him like an auteur.

No doubt part of the failure of many American critics to

perceive Small Soldiers as satire can be attributed to the

habit of perceiving satire strictly according to the Swiftian

model — the contempt for humanity in general and the a

audience in particular that infects, for instance, Dr.

Strangelove, Wag the Dog, and The Truman Show, all

relative favorites with critics and other industry “insiders”

who pride themselves on their “media savvy.” The

character played by Ed Harris in The Truman Show

epitomizes this self-regarding image — a deity in the

clouds who understands what the audience needs and

wants with the proper amount of lofty condescension;

the fact that Harris was honored with an Academy Award

nomination for this performance only underlines the

flattery.

From this standpoint, one of the most elucidating as well

as disconcerting aspects of The Second Civil War — the

middle film in Dante’s war trilogy that started with Matinee,

regrettably seen only on cable in the United States (though

shown theatrically in Europe) — is the degree to which Dante

refuses to show contempt for any of his human characters,

no matter how monstrous and misconceived their

behavior might be. The contradiction in The Second Civil

War between the dangerous xenophobia of the policies of

the governor (Beau Bridges) and the affection he expresses

for both his Mexican mistress (Elizabeth Pena) and Mexican

food may be blatantly hypocritical, but rather than heap

scorn on this character, Dante actually appears to like

him; in effect it’s only the xenophobia that gets fully

ridiculed. A similar refusal to treat any characters as

pure villains characterizes the work of Tashlin, and the

generational attitude associated with Dante’s satire is

part of Tashlin’s legacy. It’s a legacy of both skepticism

about and distance from the complex joys and perils of

spectatorship — a legacy suggesting that Tashlin’s origins

as a cartoonist and Dante’s as a film critic may

represent two versions of the same basic impulse.

Small children seemed to have a much easier time picking

up the satiric message of Small Soldiers than many of this

country’s most prestigious film critics, suggesting the

problem that “noise” — represented in this case by

advertising and Burger King tie-ins, both of which

helped to occlude Dante’s creative input — presents in

assessing movies. Or maybe a likelier reason that film

critics missed the point is their desire to assent to

Spielberg’s patriotic warmongering, which Small Soldiers

exposes with cheerful derision.