Analysis of ‘Commando’

I: Introduction

Commando is a 1985 action film directed by Mark L. Lester and written by Steven E. de Souza, after a story by Joseph Loeb III, Matthew Weisman, and de Souza. It stars Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rae Dawn Chong, with Alyssa Milano, Vernon Wells, Bill Duke, Dan Hedaya, James Olson, and David Patrick Kelly.

The music score, noted for its use of steel drums, was by James Horner, and the film ends with a song by The Power Station called “We Fight for Love,” when Michael Des Barres replaced Robert Palmer as lead singer.

Here‘s a link to quotes from the film.

Giving the film a rating of 67% based on reviews from 36 critics, Rotten Tomatoes aptly describes Commando in its consensus as having a “threadbare plot, outsized action, and endless one-liners.” In other words, it’s a crowd-pleaser with all the gratuitous violence, swearing, and cheesy puns that a movie-going philistine could ever want.

So, Dear Reader, you’re probably wondering why I’m wasting my energy with this Hollywood schlock. Well, apart from the fact that the philistine in me finds this mindless entertainment amusing (the nostalgic memories of watching it as a teen in the 1980s being a big part of that amusement), the flash and excitement that Commando delivers is a distraction from the political undertones that I feel should be discussed.

II: A Brief Digression, If You’ll Indulge Me, Please

As should be obvious to anyone watching the film with his or her brain turned on, Commando contributes to the mythology of the US as the great saviour of other countries from tyranny and despotism. I’m not saying this as if it were a great revelation to you, Dear Reader: I bring this up because I want to discuss the social effects of movies like this, and how they brainwash Westerners, Americans especially, into cheering for US/NATO imperialism.

I was trying to do such commentary on another film aptly starring right-leaning Schwarzenegger, Conan the Barbarian. The reader response to that analysis was mixed: while one positive responder understood my intentions, to alert people to the hypnotizing danger of passively accepting Hollywood action films as US imperialist and right-wing libertarian propaganda (an example of the kind of thing Michael Parenti analyzed in his book, Inventing Reality), two others blasted my Conan analysis for seemingly opposing reasons.

The first negative responder was a woman who went out of her way to be as insulting as possible, saying my analysis was ‘so superficial as to be silly,’ and that during the Reagan era, pretty much all movies reflected a right-wing ideology, so apparently there’s no insight to be gained from describing Conan the way I did. First of all, many 1980s movies did obviously reflect a right-wing stance, but many others didn’t–take They Live, for instance, as an anti-Reagan film. Secondly, only someone with a right-wing bias (as I suspect she has) would see no value in critiquing Conan‘s right-wing agenda, since a left-wing sympathy would see that value. I’d say it was her reading of what I wrote that was “superficial” and “silly”: I suspect she read only the first few paragraphs, snorted and called it ‘stupid!’, then jumped to conclusions and made her snarky comments without bothering to read any further.

The second commenter took the opposite view, seeing my discussion of a right-wing libertarian, anti-communist allegory in Conan as “the most half-baked review” of a movie that he’d ever read. Then he ‘corrected’ me by pointing out something I myself stated, however briefly, in my analysis: that the film is about determination in rising up against one’s obstacles (speaking of pointing out the obvious, hence my brevity in stating it). Never mind that I flooded the analysis with links to prove my point about the allegory (i.e., the director’s right-wing leanings as well as those of Schwarzenegger’s, a link stating that Nazi salutes were done on the set, etc.). And what I wrote wasn’t a review (my saying whether or not I liked the film), but an analysis, stated plainly in the title (a discussion of themes, symbolism, allegory, etc.). So, was I stating the absurdly obvious, or was I going off on some “half-baked” tangent? I’m not sure.

My point in bringing up the Conan analysis and its negative responses is to say that this one of Commando is one of many articles in which I’m not just saying what I like or dislike about a film. The film analyses are about relating the content of the films with either political issues (typically from a Marxist-Leninist viewpoint) or with psychoanalytic ones (usually Freudian and post-Freudian, but recently, more and more Jungian).

That kind of analysis is what I do here on this blog; so if that’s not your thing, please read no further (I gave just such a warning at the beginning of my Conan analysis, which as I explained above, went unheeded at least twice). If, however, you do like how I relate film, literature, and music to leftist politics and psychoanalysis, then by all means, read on, Dear Reader.

III: Some Rather Needless Killing

The film begins with three men assassinated, all former members of the unit of US Army Special Forces Colonel John Matrix (Schwarzenegger). The first victim is shot by two men posing as garbagemen; the second of these two killers, Cooke (Duke), then kills a car salesman by running him over right in the dealership with the car he’s supposedly interested in buying; and the third victim, Bennett (Wells), is supposedly blown up in a boat, though we later learn that his death has been faked.

Matrix, it seems, is next to be assassinated.

As it turns out, though, he isn’t to be killed, but rather to be forced to assassinate the president of a fictional Latin American country, Val Verde, this man being someone Matrix originally helped put in power there, having ousted Arius (Hedaya), a brutal dictator who wants to be reinstated. If Matrix doesn’t cooperate, Arius will have his men kill Matrix’s pre-teen daughter, Jenny (Milano), whom they’ve kidnapped.

Here’s my point: why were those two men killed at the beginning of the film, with Bennett’s death faked? Apparently, Arius’ men (including Bennett) mean to agitate General Franklin Kirby (Olson) and get him to go to Matrix’s home to warn him personally that he’s probably next to die, and in the process Kirby will unwittingly help the bad guys know where Matrix lives.

This is an absurd way to get to Matrix, whose address (somewhere in upstate California, in the mountains) is presumably private for his and Jenny’s protection. Would Kirby be stupid enough to go there personally, risking leading the assassins right to Matrix? Couldn’t the killers just find another way to find him (e.g., paying someone in the army a handsome sum to disclose the address, etc.)? Wouldn’t it be better to catch Matrix off guard in a surprise attack?

It’s obvious that the killings at the beginning were just an excuse to have excitement for its own sake, to lull the audience in, to make them passive recipients of more pro-US propaganda.

IV: Matrix and Jenny

Of course, Schwarzenegger as tough guy Matrix is supposed to personify how ‘indestructible’ the American empire is (an empire that, incidentally, failed to defeat North Korea, lost against Vietnam, and similarly left Afghanistan with its tail between its legs). The liberals, however, can’t have their big hero be just a cold-hearted killer; we have to see his sensitive side, so during the opening credits and before Jenny’s kidnapping, we see some father/daughter quality time between Matrix and her.

While they’re eating sandwiches at home, he makes a cliché joke about gender-bending Boy George. Then he refers to his life as a boy in East Germany, and how the communists said that rock ‘n’ roll is “subversive.” While communists back in the 1950s and 1960s were probably much more socially conservative (as were, obviously, at least half of Americans back then) than in recent years (a lessening of conservatism that can’t be reasonably be said of those half of all Americans!), we’re meant to deem this old judgement of the communists as an example of how ‘repressive‘ they were and are. Matrix’s later quip that “Maybe they were right” is meant to be flippant, yet it tells us which people still have the repressive attitude…still by the 1980s and since then. Putin may not be sympathetic to LGBT people, but he hasn’t been a communist in decades.

Now, we’ve acknowledged that Matrix is of German background (presumably to rationalize Austrian Schwarzenegger’s undeniable accent), yet his name sounds utterly English, since we don’t want our American hero to seem inordinately Teutonic (shouldn’t his name be more like ‘Johann Meetrichs’?).

Given the film’s obvious agenda to glorify Anglo/American/NATO imperialism as comprising the ‘good guys,’ as against anyone who would dare defy said imperialism (Arius et al), the idea of having a German-American hero fighting those defiant of that imperialism (who, in real life, tend to be left-wing) strongly suggests the enlisting of fascists, at least symbolically. Matrix would have defected from East Germany early on, and the real purpose of the Berlin Wall, or Anti-fascist Protection Wall, as the East Germans called it, was just that: to keep the West German fascists out (i.e., those ex-Nazis who, rather than be punished for their war crimes, were given cushy jobs to fight the ‘commies’), as well as to keep East Germany from losing needed skilled workers.

Matrix’s leaving of the socialist state would have stemmed from an ideological hatred of socialism. Germans who hate socialism have historically leaned towards fascism as a protection against Marxism. The capitalist class has always used fascism to protect themselves against left-wing revolution, as have the petite bourgeoisie. The film’s negative portrayal of Latin Americans reinforces the idea that there’s a Nazi racist undertone here, as there was in Conan, as I argued in my analysis of it (see link above).

So what we see in German-American Matrix is a personification of the continuum between liberalism and fascism. He’s the sensitive father, as I discussed above in his relationship with Jenny at the beginning of the film, but she can be seen as personifying his threatened class interests when she’s kidnapped, making him ruthless in his lawless, bloody, and murderous quest to get her back. The fact that she’s a sweet, helpless, and sympathetic girl shouldn’t deflect us from seeing that cynical reality. Her sweetness, taken from an allegorical perspective, is being used as propaganda to justify all of his killing. More on that later.

My point is that liberals, seeming progressive in their goals on the surface, will betray that progressive agenda in a heartbeat if their class interests are at stake, and that’s what’s represented in Matrix’s quick switch from sensitive father to unflinching killer, thief, destroyer of property, kidnapper (however briefly, of Cindy [Chong]), etc.

Stalin once said that “Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism.” (Note that social democracy is the furthest left of liberalism.) His words may, on the surface, seem extreme, but put in their proper historical perspective, they are clearly understood. He said them in 1924, just five years after the social-democratic Weimar Republic had used the right-wing Freikorps to crush the Spartacist Uprising‘s attempt at a communist revolution in Germany, murdering Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. The Weimar Republic’s soft and ineffective rule would lead to great dissatisfaction on both the far left and far right, one thing would lead to another, and by the early 1930s, you-know-who would rise to power in Germany.

If the ‘far left’ of liberalism can lead to fascism, so can more ‘moderately left’ versions of it. We easily backslid from the welfare capitalism of the era of post-WWII economic prosperity to the ‘free market’ capitalism of the Reagan/Thatcher years, and thence to the far-right nightmare of recent decades, all thanks to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which meant that a large welfare state was no longer needed to ward off the danger of proletarian revolution in the West. We’d reached ‘the end of history,’ and the ruling class no longer felt threatened by the working class.

That liberals today are supporting literal fascists in Ukraine and Israel should help you see the truth in Stalin’s words, Dear Reader.

V: Making Matrix Aid Arius’ Revolution

We never learn of Arius’ political ideology; we only know that he’s a brutal dictator, who’s “tortured and killed” those who have resisted him. But is he on the left, or the right?

He’s a Latin American, a former ruler of Val Verde, as I mentioned above. We know that Matrix helped overthrow Arius and put a new president, Velasquez, in power. Here’s the funny thing, though: the US army, CIA, etc. like putting brutal right-wing dictators in power in Latin America.

Indeed, the American government has a history of intervening in other countries’ political affairs, typically replacing democratically-elected heads of state with ones that further the capitalist/imperialist interests of the US/NATO countries. Examples include Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973…and more recently, Ukraine in 2014, and Bolivia in 2019, as well as attempted coups in places like Venezuela. One should look into US support for Operation Condor, too.

Of course, the Western corporate media likes to portray these interventions as ‘triumphs of freedom and democracy,’ when actually they were anything but. So we shouldn’t be surprised to see the ousting of Arius and replacement of him by US-backed Velasquez in Commando as portrayed as a good thing. It’s all just part of the propaganda used to make the US look like the good guys, while men like Arius are vilified.

So the very idea of the American military, as represented by Matrix, as not wanting to help spearhead a coup and install a dictator is ludicrous. Pinochet was the Arius of Chile in the 1970s, responsible for the deaths and disappearances of thousands of dissident Chileans, including dropping some of them from helicopters. The CIA helped put Pinochet in power, a “scumbag” who “tortured and killed” many, yet I doubt that any in the US military would have applied Matrix’s words to Pinochet the way Matrix applied them to Arius.

So Matrix not wanting to overthrow a Latin American government and replacing it with that of a brutal right-wing dictator is sheer denial on the part of the propagandists making this film. Moviegoers who see this film, knowing little if anything about the true political state of affairs in the world, will just eat up this propaganda uncritically, absorbing it and imagining that what the film portrays more or less corresponds with what the US government’s role in world affairs really is: the ‘policemen’ of the world, fighting tyranny and oppression everywhere, rather than the cause of so much of it.

This is a dangerous message to send to Western audiences, reinforcing a myth of our supposed superiority, which in turn is used to justify more and more imperial conquests, killing more and more innocent people. This urge to impose ‘freedom and democracy’ has led to possibly a million Iraqi deaths, and the destruction of Libya, changing it from a prosperous nation that took care of its people to a failed state with a slave trade. The current wish to bring ‘freedom and democracy’ to Russia and China could lead to a very nuclear WWIII, killing everyone on the globe.

Since Commando was made in the mid-1980s, I wonder why the film didn’t portray Arius as a left-wing dictator, but just as a generic one. Surely portraying him as a ‘commie’ would have made for effective Cold War propaganda, wouldn’t it have? Perhaps they didn’t specify his ideology because they knew enough left-wing critics still existed in the 1980s to trash the film for being even more obvious right-wing propaganda than it was and is. Still, for the reasons I’ve given above, it makes more sense for Arius to have a left-wing, rather than right-wing, ideology, so we’ll just go with that, remembering that his vilification, as well as the dehumanizing of his troops, is all part of Commando‘s obvious right-wing agenda.

VI: The Female Factor

Getting Cindy, an off-duty flight attendant, to help Matrix without there being any sexual chemistry between these attractive male and female leads seems as if this film is an example of the emerging kind that is trying to show more respect to female characters (her firing a rocket launcher correctly…on the second try; her flying a seaplane, etc.), especially since she’s a POC. Still, there’s plenty of sexism against women to keep Commando far behind more recent action films, which are sure to include women kicking lots of ass.

Poor Cindy is frequently treated like a whore, even explicitly called one by predatory Sully (Kelly, whom you’ll recall clinking those bottles together at the climax of The Warriors), leaving her in a huff for not letting him have his way with her. Later, without asking for her consent, in Sully’s motel room and waiting for Cooke, Matrix opens her top to make her look easy, that is, having indeed let Sully have his way with her. Even a cop, who’s later helped apprehend Matrix for trying to rob an army surplus store, sees her in a car next the cops’ truck and assumes she’s a “hooker.”

Earlier, Sully–asshole that he is–jokes in the airport about having “a little more time with” kidnapped Jenny. At the end of the film, Matrix carries her on his shoulder as if this damsel-in-distress were a prize he’s won after killing everyone else.

But the crowning piece of sexism in the film is the gratuitous display of a woman’s large, shaking breasts in a motel room next to Sully’s during Matrix’s fight with Cooke. It’s a completely unnecessary moment of titillation mixed with humour, meant as one of many examples of Commando‘s use of visuals to dazzle and distract the viewer as he or she absorbs the pro-US propaganda without thinking.

(By the way, Ava Cadell, who played the woman in the motel scene, has since become a therapist with a doctorate from Newport University, California. She has written a number of books on sexuality, has done lectures, and given counseling to couples on personal issues. Here’s her website. As we can see, she’s risen far above doing mere cheesecake roles in schlocky Hollywood movies.)

VII: Rescuing Jenny

Rescuing a damsel in distress is more acceptable in the modern world, of course, if she’s a child. Our sympathy for her is what makes the wiping out of everyone else on the island where she’s being held hostage seem perfectly justified.

Commando, however, is just a movie. It isn’t reality. As a piece of American propaganda, it causes us to transfer our desensitizing of the brutal killing of all the dehumanized Latin American soldiers to the killing of any other people in the world, be they soldiers or civilians, who in any way stand between the US/NATO empire and the achievement of its goals.

Part of ensuring the audience’s desensitizing to the deaths of the soldiers is a showering of contempt on them and their worth. Bennett tells Arius that his “little pissant soldiers…are nothing.” This sort of devaluing of them makes it all the easier for the audience to watch them all die.

On the other side of the coin, Matrix’s killing of them all comes with nary a scratch on his body, for he personifies the invincibility of the American empire. Indeed, one of the particularly ludicrous aspects of Commando is how Matrix can single-handedly wipe out so many dozens of soldiers, and not even one of them can get a lucky shot and give him a significant wound, let alone kill him.

The tool shed scene, apart from showcasing gratuitous violence for the sheer fun of it, demonstrates that shaving off the top of a man’s head with a small buzzsaw blade thrown like a Frisbee (in the director’s cut, a second buzzsaw blade hits a guy in the neck), the stabbing of an axe into a soldier’s balls, and the hacking off of a man’s arm with a machete are not horrifying sights to see, but exciting ones.

The message given throughout the film is that, since Matrix can break one law after another with impunity to save Jenny, and since he personifies American military might, then the US government, military, and intelligence are free to disregard international law, UN Security Council Resolutions, etc., to achieve their objectives and maintain their global hegemony.

Let’s see how these issues translate into the politics of the real world. Israel, properly seen as an extension of Western imperialism into the Middle East, has been given carte blanche by the US government to kill and maim as many Gazans as they like. The rationalization?…to rescue a number of Israeli hostages taken by Hamas on October 7th of 2023, rather like the kidnapping of Jenny. Where all those killed in Commando are soldiers, most, if not almost all, of the Gazans being killed are innocent civilians, including women and children.

Israel has made incursions into the West Bank, and the detonating of pagers in Lebanon–as well as airstrikes on several buildings in Beirut–has killed and injured many there, too, though there’s a similar rationale…the need to wipe out Hezbollah. The UN has, by the way, acknowledged that the armed resistance of fighters like Hamas is legitimate against an occupying force like Israel, but to the Zionist apologist, Hamas and Hezbollah are ‘terrorists’ whom he or she would surely sneer at as “little pissant soldiers” who “are nothing.”

Elsewhere, the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up by the US, with the help of Norway–an act of ecoterrorism practically confessed to by the American government. Seymour Hersh, the acclaimed investigative journalist who exposed the My Lai Massacre back in 1968, found conclusive, detailed evidence of how this crime was committed, yet the mainstream, corporate, imperialist media absurdly blamed the attack on Russia. How predictable. The motive behind this terrorist act, apart from the usual Russophobia/anti-Putin agenda (their ‘unprovoked’ invasion of Ukraine), was to stop Germany from buying cheap Russian oil and forcing the country to buy American oil.

Needless to say, the US government hasn’t been punished, nor will be, for this crime any more than Israel will be for her crimes against humanity. We, the general public, shrug these crimes off, or at least are expected to, just as we do the excesses of Matrix’s violence, all to rescue one little girl, who personifies his threatened class interests as I said above, and who is carried on his shoulder at the film’s end as a kind of trophy.

When Kirby, who has arrived with his army at that time, asks Matrix what he’s left for them, he callously says, “Just bodies.” Matrix then refuses to resume working for Kirby as a soldier, wanting instead to be the nice, sensitive father to Jenny; but as with any liberal, being the nice guy comes only when one’s class interests (symbolic ones in Matrix’s case) aren’t being threatened.

VIII: Confession, Projection, and Denial

In a conversation with Cindy in Sully’s car on the way to the motel to confront Cooke, Matrix explains why he has to rescue Jenny. In the process, he goes into a kind of confession of guilt, not only about how he, constantly on assignment as a Special Forces man somewhere on the other side of the world (Laos, Angola, Lebanon, Pakistan, etc.), has never had time to be with Jenny, but also about how he did “things you don’t want to know about,” and which he wishes he didn’t know he’d done.

Bennett, we learn, was kicked out of Matrix’s unit for being excessively violent (and this is why he, wanting to get revenge on Matrix for his expulsion, is willing to help Arius “for nothing,” to get a chance to get at Matrix). Yet given what we know Matrix has implied in his confession to Cindy, and what we know of his brutal killing of so many in this film…including his killing of Bennett, to get him to “let off some steam,” it’s hard to imagine Bennett being all that much more violent.

It should be obvious that, Matrix representing American militarism and seeing Bennett and Arius as far worse than he, the film’s pro-US propaganda tries to excuse American violence by projecting it out to other countries. Bennett, significantly, is Australian–just listen to his accent. Arius is Latin American. These latter two are so awful, apparently, that Matrix, and therefore the US, can’t be all that bad.

So in giving his brief confession, implying the awful things he’s done, while projecting far worse guilt onto people from other countries, Matrix–in spite of his constant violence and lawlessness, like that of the US, as I’ve explained above–can still be regarded as the liberal ‘good guy,’ as politicians like the Clintons, Obama, Biden, and Harris can be seen. One can safely deny being as bad as the antagonists are, and the protagonists’ guilt will be ignored and forgotten about by moviegoing lovers of action films.

Another thing that will be ignored and forgotten in Commando is the political ideology that Arius must have, as is typical of any Latin American head of state that opposes American imperial hegemony and ends up being ousted in a coup d’état. Such an ideology is glossed over and disregarded: all we know is that Arius believes the people of Val Verde need “an understanding of discipline,” which sounds unsettling coming from a generic ‘dictator,’ whom many in the audience would imagine to be a left-wing one, as I’m assuming Arius is.

Now, Marxism-Leninism does have an understanding of party discipline, but it isn’t anything brutal, as Arius is implying in Commando‘s propagandistic script. It’s about organizing the working class to rise up in revolution and defeat the ruling class, thus liberating the people from oppression, not subjecting them to oppression, the latter of which is what US puppets like Pinochet did to their people. As for how “extremist” a left-wing political ideology is, just read the <<<link. You won’t know the truth of the matter by watching Arius’ caricature of it.

IX: Conclusion

I hope, Dear Reader, that if you’ve read this far, that you understand my intentions in writing this analysis of Commando. I know it’s no Earth-shattering revelation that the film has a right-wing agenda: my purpose is to explore the political ramifications and social effects of said agenda, to warn of its dangers on a public not aware of how consent is manufactured for war and its atrocities.

The ‘tangents’ I went off on in elucidating these political and social implications, far from being “half-baked,” are the whole point of the article. People need to be conscious of the political wool being pulled over their eyes, not to be told, “Oh, come on, it’s just a movie. Lighten up!”