Jar Jar Binks Goes to War

Lucas crashes Red Tails

By Armond White

George Lucas' sales tactics for Red Tails, his $93 million production about the Tuskegee Airmen, the first African-American pilots in the armed forces, make a bigger bang than the film itself.

On the publicity rounds, Lucas has talked about the dearth of movies with African-American heroes, promising that Red Tails will give black teens the kinds of on-screen heroes and patriotic good feeling they've been denied. Apparently, Lucas has missed all blaxpoitation, post-blaxploitation and post-hip-hop cinema, not to mention the 1995 TV film The Tuskegee Airmen. Lucas' ignorance condemns Red Tails to be irredeemably condescending.

It's also one poor piece of filmmaking. Red Tails' 332nd Fighter Group are a bunch of superficial GI stereotypes, black only in the brown-skinned Obama sense, displaying superficial personal traits. Their captain, Easy (Nate Parker), drinks for courage, and pilot Lightning (David Oyewolo) is a brash daredevil.

Their commanders, Col. A.J. Bullard (Terrence Howard) and Maj. Emmanuel Stone (Cuba Gooding Jr.) are shallow lifers given to speeches about perseverance. All are cartoon figures; visually, the film also resembles a cartoon: postcard colors that make the squadron's base at the Ramitelli Airfield in Italy look like it was shot in Southern California (oops!). Cartoonishness defines Lucas' approach to Hollywood revisionism; he doesn't take World War II any more seriously than he took the Galactic Empire, and the Tuskegee Airmen mean no more to him than the Jedi knights.

The pilots, who due to military segregation were denied the right to fly combat missions but were used as escorts and decoys for white fighter pilots, perform selflessly to unspecific codes of conduct, as if they were uninvolved in history (their war chant: "To the last plane, to the last bullet, to the last man, we fight, we fight, we fight!"). This is goofball heroism, though totally without a sense of humor-less, even, than Snoopy's fantasy dogfights with The Red Baron, which Red Tails frequently evokes.

Why comic strip artist Aaron McGruder (The Boondocks) participated in co-writing the screenplay is mystifying given the film's total lack of his usual sarcasm. McGruder, too, must believe in The Force, which has infantilized American cinema since Star Wars, and so answered Lucas' call to sign up. That meant signing on to the notion that moviegoers wouldn't respond to a serious depiction of young men who fulfilled the intellectual requirements of aviation or comprehend the complexity of young black people who felt duty-bound to fight for the country that denied them basic civil rights.

Director Anthony Hemingway-recruited from TV's overrated The Wire-must only be comfortable with ghetto stereotypes and urban miscreant clichés. His images of principled military men and the 1940s era are unconvincing, and the post-synch dialogue has the same laughable impact as a badly dubbed Japanese monster movie. Nothing in Red Tails shows serious artistic commitment.

By promoting Red Tails (named for the Airmen's customized new P-51 Mustang aircraft) as a correction of Hollywood bigotry, Lucas shows that he knows nothing about how popular culture works. In a New York Times magazine puff piece, Lucas explained his wish for cultural crossover: "...which is what you get with sports. Which is what you get with music. I wanted to do it with just being an American citizen." He ignores how black moviegoers have often identified with white movie heroes and enjoyed cinematic patriotism-and not vicariously. When Red Tails' Airmen fraternize with white officers, they never so much as ask which states they came from. This isn't American culture; it's beer commercial bonhomie.

Red Tails not only insults the experiences of the Tuskegee Airmen, it is disconnected from the figures of black male dignity that audiences embraced when forged by Rex Ingram, Paul Robeson, Juano Hernandez, James Douglas, Canada Lee, Woody Strode, Ivan Dixon and others that George Lucas forgets. He's Jar Jar Binked us again.