G.I. Freud

G.I. JOE - The Rise of Cobra (Stephen Sommer, 2009)

To the unsuspecting, G.I. JOE is being marketed as an action film based on Hasbro's time-honored action figure dolls that takes place in the not too distant future. In fact the film is something like the diary of a madman, written by a deranged Freudian who is falling in love with his Dominatrix.

The whole film can be seen as an allusion to an intoxicating session in a S&M house, perversely encoded as childhood pain and the pleasure of innocent love. The characters wear quite macho leather-type outfits (even the foxy Rachel Nichols whose battle suit shows her snugly encased breasts); the evil doctor (Joseph Gordon Levitt) wears an oxygen mask and sounds like Dennis Hopper in BLUE VELVET; and all the goons wear masks and head-gear that make them look like denizens of some domination dungeon. The "rush" of the action is all about physical thrills and endurance of the beating kind, even the use of armed weaponry is depicted graphically as waves (of pleasure, of pain). This is all brought to a head at the end where the evil doctor, demanding to be called "Commander," puts on a very phallic looking silvery head mask - an image that gives greater dimensionality to the sub-title of the film "The Rise of Cobra". Can you get anymore S&M than that? A movie inspired by Action Figure Dolls? Hardly (or perhaps at some sub-conscious level of Freudian play - very deeply).

There is much more but let me settle on one or two "dreams." In a sustained action set piece, two of the "Joes" (the ostensible white hero, Duke, and black side-kick Ripcord) don special suits which enable them to run faster, jump higher, and shoot endless rounds of high-velocity bullets all in the blink of an eye. Looking like a cross between mini Robocops and Buzz Lightyear, they chase the bad guys all over Paris, speeding through the streets like two crazed spermatoza desperate for survival and trying to save the symbol of French potency, the Eiffel Tower, from being eaten (yes, eaten!) by metal crunching nano-ants. It all seems somewhat reversed to me - two spermatoza looking for the phallus - but then we have seen a number of Hollywood entertainments that seem enamoured of reversing the natural order of things by fiddling around with the space/time continuum from Back to the Future, all the way to Benjamin Button.

There are explosions, phallic play of gun and sword that you normally see in action films but here also are instances which might be called Freudian male fantasies. Proto-lesbian bitch fights where Sienna Miller - a Mother and Whore character - toughs it out with the younger Rachel Nichols who rejects men at first until she finds some sympathy in a black man (every Hollywood film reflects the President in power, and this is the Obama factor).

There are fantasy sequences coded as flashbacks - in particular infantile regression where bad guy Storm Shadow (Lee Byung-hun) flashes back to his childhood when he was a kung fu rival to good guy Snake Eyes (Ray Park). No matter that they seem to be performing a hybrid version of Chinese kung fu in a Japanese temple with a Chinese monk who would seem more at home in Thailand; what's important is that they have watched Sammo Hung and Jet Li movies from the 1980s and are now imitating them badly. Part of this infantile regression is signalled by the old school Hollywood racism of the film - when will studio pictures reject the stereotype of Asian men as faintly gay and dangerous villains, and African American sidekicks as just modern updates of Jack Benny's Rochester, a figure of fun and abuse?

We know from Freud that infantile sexuality in its first phase is characterized by an inability to distinguish between oneself and the external world, and that pleasure is derived largely from sucking which is equated with eating. Thus, the scene of young Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes fighting each other with the violence of adults, is set in a kitchen and centered around hunger and food (Storm Shadow catches Snake Eyes stealing food from the kitchen and fights him). And it is a fight - in patterns and behavior - that the protagonists bring into their current lives. In that sense, the characters are still marked by infantile sexuality and cannot distinguish the past from the present, fantasy from actuality, the Real from the Fake. They have yet to grow up. Precisely like this movie.