Trigger Warning, or: How Jessica Alba stopped worrying and learned to love woke imperialism
I’ll be linking to my politically-inclined film reviews from time to time, and you can view my film blog here: Dumber Than The Crudest Fiction.
I usually don’t dive into new releases, but propaganda films get an exception. It matters little to me if it’s the insane universe of reactionary right-wing drivel like Red Dawn, or some abomination from the Netflix world, which aims to address (and redress) global evil by making sure everyone shows proper respect for gender pronouns.
Trigger Warning makes no bones about fiercely waving a rainbow-colored flag, but it flies without a trace of the radical queerness it used to embody and has become nothing more than a whitewashing of US hegemony and an emblem of conformity to the standards of neoliberal global finance capitalism and forever war.
The template for Trigger Warning is Rambo. It's also Walking Tall, Roadhouse, Billy Jack, or any one of the last dozen or so John Wick films. It’s a flexible template that can take a threadbare plot and use it to bolster and propagate any ideology. It’s the perfect delivery system for messaging either side of America’s two by and large politically illiterate classes: liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans. It’s perfect because it doesn’t deal with fact or history or nuance. It asks no questions. It does what reactionary film always does: it reacts. It responds emotionally to something it doesn’t understand intellectually.
This way, the complexities of race and class, capital and state terror, empire, violence, and wealth inequality – they all get disappeared. In the world of Dirty Harry, the problem is the two-dimensional, bleeding-heart liberals running our institutions. In Trigger Warning, it’s every swinging cock and ball in sight. Bonus points for Caucasians. Both simplistic, both wrongheaded, both 100% American in their inability to even want, or ask for anything else; a refusal to explore complex issues, to reach for anything beyond the dumbness we've been spoon-fed since pre-school.
We meet Jessica’s character on the battlefield. Her name is Parker: non-gender specific, and that matters. After a firefight, she immediately decides to impose justice on a fellow mercenary for not slaughtering brown people in the way that the US military is supposed to slaughter brown people. It’s meant to be done in the name of democracy, and it's something that demands respect for optics. Parker is enraged at a fellow soldier for shooting a captured Iraqi in the head. Which is interesting, as she had just seconds ago murdered a half-dozen of them onscreen, no questions asked. She does so, and continues to do so throughout the film, with a knife. Yes, sister switchblade uses a battle knife, the phallic godhead of patriarchy, to castrate these beasts who don’t understand etiquette when it comes to how we ride roughshod over this planet, inflicting slaughter and despair wherever we go.
“We have a way of doing this, Duh!”
Commando Parker is the Jeanne D’Arc of a morally bankrupt, violent, corrupt, and racist Empire, and she’s gakked-to-the-gills high on the stupidest and shallowest form of identity politics, giddy with glee that she can help demolish the planet as long as she doesn’t have to do it with anyone named Travis or Billy Bob.
Parker returns home after her father dies and goes through the requisite cliches demanded by the genre tropes and plot devices of cookie-cutter dreck like this. Someone killed her Pop. Turns out to be some two-dimensional, evil, racist, white guys. Big surprise. She drags her former partner into the mire. He's African American and the only cis male who doesn’t end up getting castrated by her holy blade of irony and hamfisted symbolism. He’s now a proud employee of that righteous & moral band of justice warriors we call the CIA. The Benneton Empire, proving there is a way to turn everyone into a monster.
Remember: Killing brown people in the name of Empire and military hegemony is fine, just as long as it’s another woman of color killing the other brown people. We saw something similar to this with the ascent of the second wave of American feminism, which decided there’s nothing wrong with exploiting women on the bottom of the economic ladder as long as other women could also have the right to be ruthless CEOs and join in all the exploitative, wealth-hoarding reindeer fun.
In the end, all of these films are either some testosterone-fueled, knuckle-dragging John Milius crap, or low-rent trash like Trigger Warning, using identity politics to sell you on forever war and telling you to trust an institution as evil as the CIA. The film’s title is such low-hanging fruit that I didn’t want to humiliate myself by even addressing it. Some might call it "meta," but "cringe" and "facile" work much better as descriptive qualifiers. Watch it and laugh, then watch it and cry, remembering all the while that Americans like everything in big portions, including their bullshit.
