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Red Dawn/Dawn Red

Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis

Red Dawn
Released in 1984, the film Red Dawn was the story of a Soviet-backed Cuban invasion of the United States.

     In an early shot, Jed Smith, played by a young Patrick Swayze, appears in the low corner of the frame, alone. He is gauntly handsome, clean-shaven, and bronzed from dirt and sun. He wears a gray sweatshirt, hood pulled tight over his head, a black sweatband wrapped round it, and over the sweatshirt, a heavy green overcoat.
     Behind him is a black-green row of forest, and above him, a pacific sky. A mountain range is just visible in the far upper right corner of the frame. What the forest, the open sky, the mountains signify is dislocation: to avoid capture, Jed and his team (not pictured) have abandoned their homes in Calumet City, Colorado, moving for months through the nether woodlands of the central and eastern U.S.
     They must move constantly.

     Unfreeze the shot: Jed releases into motion. It is an October morning, cold and breezy. The team, now visible behind him, is comprised, one sees, of Jed's younger brother and three of his brother's friends -- one boy, two girls.
     They are in the woods on the outskirts of the small town of Leeland, Pennsylvania. In the glare of the morning they scuttle down a hill and slip into a gas station's convenience mart.
     The two attendants, suspected informers, one older, one middle-aged, Jed and his team strip naked, gag, truss at the ankles, knees, and wrists, then lash to chairs behind the cash register.
     Informers they consider worse than Cubans.
     The camera follows as the team gorges itself on marshmallows and sliced bread and takes turns at a spigot outside, then packs away matches and propane canisters, small jugs of water, canned peaches.
     Jed uses a can of royal blue spray paint to write "Wolverines" across the linoleum floor of the convenience mart, then paints the bound attendants -- informers -- in the same damning, defiant blue. The two men struggle under their bonds until Jed raises the can to their faces. Then they lie still, eyes pinched shut.
     Outside, one of the girls, Toni, paints "Wolverines" on the front windows of the mart.
     The Wolverine was the mascot of their former high school, also the symbol of resistance they've chosen: though small, the animal is ferocious and unrelenting, known to guard its territory against even grizzly bears some 2000 lbs. heavier. The wolverine's attack is the guerilla's attack: swift, fierce, bloody. Wherever Jed and the team go, they leave the word painted as a call-sign for the Cubans to find.
     The final shot of the scene is of the word "Wolverines" painted on the mart windows.

     What the camera does not show is the narrative of Jed's inner life.
     Just beyond the next edge of the woods, waiting? High overhead, above the trees in helicopters? Above the clouds, in planes equipped with cameras, infrared sensors? In the wide expanse of the imagination, the Cubans, moving in his dreams, stepping suddenly through his day-dreams, always moving in the velvet shadows at the edge of his vision. And in his mind's eye he sees a secret crack team tracking him: heavily stubbled, sleep-deprived, truculent, they are Soviets, and though not KGB, once schooled by KGB in the Siberian hinterlands, he thinks. Mercenaries hired by the Cubans. They do not stop as he stops, do not stop as he dreams. They move on, gear bouncing, breath rattling, only stopping to rest when he falls into a dead, dreamless sleep.

     Jed wakes the next day to the faint sounds of movement. He rises frantically and rouses the others from their tents.
     Together they scramble behind a massive rock that borders their encampment. A lichen the color of oatmeal covers the rock's face. They lean back against it, panting.
     "What is it?" Matty -- Jed's brother -- whispers.
     Peering around the rock, Jed reaches his hand back, motioning, and when no one responds to his signal, he hisses "Pass me the rocket launcher."
     Toni passes it with a grunt, then hands Jed two long rockets with the ginger care of a wet nurse.
     He motions again and they all move warily from behind the rock to assume positions, low-crawling to stations describing a wide semi-circle around the suspected activity -- suspected because they cannot yet see the Cuban enemy.
     Hunched in the frozen brown dirt behind the rock, Jed loads the launcher noiselessly.
     He pops around the left side of the rock and fires and it is over very quickly, just a brief jet trail behind the shell. It actually flies to the left of where he aims, and the quake in the air of the shell shuddering free from the pipe causes him to lose his balance. The shell detonates.
     When he sits up, he sees the smoke rising; there is now a hole in the forest and the earth where the shell landed. There are no traces of anything remaining.
     Were foreign commandos there moments ago? Or just a grouping of trees moving in the wind, or deer, or wandering woodsmen, hunters?
     "In the peasant revolt of Kelloselkä," Jed reminds the others, as they pick through the ash, "they buried the bodies of the soldiers they killed in holes as deep as they could dig.
     "Best to vanquish the enemy from sight entirely."
     The others nod but look about a few minutes more, finding nothing. Across the flat plate of the crater Matty paints "Wolverines." Jed paints in red, as if the stakes have risen, "We will no longer tolerate the Cuban occupation of the U.S."

     Meanwhile the Soviet trackers are moving closer.

     The next day the Wolverines reach hillier, rockier ground. A steep incline, and still they hike at a frantic pace -- to stay outside the Cuban reach, Jed insists.
     The others are just children, scared, confused, half-starving. The saliva sticks to the tongue, and the sweat comes wearily in dots, not beads, they are so dehydrated. They all bear the white sheen of salt from evaporated sweat on their skin, around their mouths, and they urinate only every several days. They have sunken black circles under their eyes, chapped lips, dirt-scrubbed cheeks, matted hair, boneless voices.
     Jed looks back at them, and superimposed over their gangly bodies he sees the stumpy frames of the peasant rebels of Kelloselkä, the same haunted faces of the resistant -- no, not so different.
     Replace the rifles with the tools of the earth, the hoe, the shovel, the long pick, the scythe, even the simple wooden stave, sturdy and balanced; replace the soft-eyed steps with a headier conviction. They become the same. The digging of well-holes for the smashed bodies of soldiers is done in the same spirit as the Wolverines' precision sabotage and constant flight.
     There is a continuum from then until now, he is sure.

Operation Red Dawn
Newsweek reported the following in its December 22, 2003 issue: "In a strike code-named Operation Red Dawn, roughly 600 American troops descended on an Iraqi farm where Saddam Hussein was believed to be hiding. At 8:26 p.m., just outside the farm, U.S. forces swarmed a spider-hole dug six feet in the ground, capturing the bearded and bedraggled former ruler."

Red Dawn 2
April 5, 2004, NAJAF, Iraq -- Following attacks in four Iraqi cities that left eight U.S. troops dead and a dozen others wounded, an anti-American group released this statement to the press: "We will no longer tolerate the American occupation of Iraq."

Red Dawn
Late in the film, there is another slow shot of Jed Smith, alone and pensive. Freeze it and zoom in.
     He remains handsome. His face is even gaunter, its planes longer and flatter. He wears the same hooded sweatshirt and over it the same black sweatband. Also new winter whites and an ammunition belt wrapped diagonally across his chest. He carries an assault rifle.
     Behind him are thick woods, an open sky: flight again.
     What is missing is most significant of all: there are no Cubans or Soviets in the frame. Their absence hums onscreen, the threat of them haunting the shot. The Soviet trackers should be descending on the Wolverines' location at this very second, spiriting into the frame, for they have hurtled across the continent, picking up speed all along, and by all rights they should be colliding with him now in the flat of this clearing. But as Jed recognizes, they are always just outside the frame, perpetually drawing closer.

Dawn Red
Released privately in 2003, the documentary short film Dawn Red circulated slowly in underground channels until it reached European distributors sometime in early 2004, whereupon copying and dissemination accelerated. By late 2004, one could find it easily on the Internet. Presumably because the version most see has been copied and recopied so many times, its resolution and sound quality are very poor.
     The action is set in an unidentified urban locale, though we're given one clue as to the setting: the storefront signs are in Arabic. The two filmmakers, whom we hear and even see at some points, are American and British.
     It seems an ordinary day as the film begins. The camera tracks the hustle-bustle of the marketplace, following several figures of foggy ethnicity -- they are dark-skinned and dark-haired, that much is obvious -- but only for moments at a time, quickly leaving one to follow another. Then the camera pans to the sky, and in the distance, we see what appear to be grainy falling stars, white dots with diffuse white trails. They are missiles. Finally the camera latches on to a single boy, tracking him as the explosions begin. We see him running, others running, the filmmakers running for cover. The camera remains on, so the view is vertiginous, the camera bouncing from ground to sky as they run.
     When finally they reach a shelter of some sort, one of the filmmakers, the Brit, tends to the wounded. The American turns the camera again to the boy, who sits against a wall. All is silent save for crashing outside the frame, at some points a dull hum and at others a muted staccato, and the camera lingers on his face for the remainder of the film -- several minutes, uncomfortably long. Presumably the American asks him questions, but if so, we cannot hear them. There is only the boy's dark, flat, wrenching face. He is bewildered, despairing. Written on his face is the simplest resistance, the soul's response, the agony over senseless death. The shot is ragged and the camera is intrusive, seemingly intrusive with compassion, and what emerges…With no available sound, we must focus only on the boy, so that even if it is achieved by accident, the shot preserves and foregrounds his suffering, forces our acknowledgment of it, defiantly asserts his humanity. Close in on the boy's mouth, his shaking, dusty breath, and one sees his soul's will and right to breathe. . .

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