Amerika

National Review, Feb 27, 1987 by Terry Teachout

Amerika

THE BARE FACTS are astonishingenough. ABC, the network that brought us Sam Donaldson and The Day After, is staking $35 million and some 15 hours of its choicest prime time during the February ratings sweeps on the mini-series Amerika, which depicts in lascivious detail the horrors of an imaginary Soviet occupation of the United States. One hardly knows what to think. It's as if PBS had followed up The Africans with a ten-part Masterpiece Theatre version of Atlas Shrugged.

Needless to say, the Russians arefoaming at the mouth at the prospect of so relentless an exercise in Commie-bashing. But the irony is that they have only themselves to blame. Their crude attempt last January to blackmail ABC into scrapping Amerika by threatening to shut down the network's Moscow news bureau made it impossible for Brandon Stoddard and ABC Circle Films to weasel out of producing the series. Matters were made considerably worse when the American Friends Service Committee got hold of a copy of the shooting script and leaked it to various left-wing journalists, most of whom have denounced it with extraordinary ferocity. (I sat two rows ahead of a Rolling Stone correspondent at an Amerika screening. You could hear the sneer on his face.) There's even an organization operating out of New York that was apparently started solely to issue irate press releases about Amerika.

What's all the fuss about? Not surprisingly,ABC is playing dumb. "The film in no way is another one of those films like Red Dawn or Rocky IV or anything like that,' says Donald Wrye, the writer-director-producer of Amerika. "It's not intended to be taken literally. It certainly isn't intended to express any kind of Paul Revere alarm that the Russians are coming.' But Mr. Wrye is not very convincing in disclaiming any political intent. Amerika is the single most politicized piece of entertainment, left or right, to make its way onto the small screen since I Led Three Lives.

Nor are we talking your standardsquishy-soft Hollywood-style leftoid politics. The script of Amerika constitutes a veritable wish list of the American Right, with no ideological axes left unground. The fall of America is attributed to a moral malaise the likes of which Jimmy Carter never imagined. ("Half the people just want to be left alone to make it however they can. A quarter of the population is so strung out on drugs and alcohol they wouldn't recognize a change even if they cared.') Teachers in the New America encourage their charges to join a Young Communist-type outfit called the Lincoln Youth Brigade. Behavior modification, analysis, the United Nations, MTV, and the media elite are trashed with shameless glee. ("Some in the media have seen this occupation as an opportunity for social revolution and the establishment of a new order.') And liberal idealists are savaged, with the most egregious of the American collaborators made to explain her treachery as follows:

We--many of us--took the opportunityto create an America we believe in. There were millions of people who never participated in the so-called American Dream. Ten to 15 per cent of the people were an underclass--perpetually on welfare, recidivist criminals, undereducated.

Granting that Donald Wrye, whoseprevious screen credits include such innocuous-sounding productions as Ice Castles, Divorce Wars, It Happened One Christmas, and Death Be Not Proud, may actually be a secret member of the Eagle Forum, it nonetheless strains credulity to suppose that one single Hollywood writer could have come up with all of this juicy stuff by himself. Enter Reed Irvine. Taking his cue from a column by Ben Stein written shortly after ABC broadcast The Day After, Mr. Irvine started pressuring ABC to do a mini-series about American life under a hypothetical Soviet occupation, introduced a resolution at a post-Day After ABC board meeting calling for an investigation into whether the network was being used as a channel for Soviet disinformation, sent Brandon Stoddard a scenario for the fall of America that bears a certain resemblance to the final shooting script for Amerika, and supplied information and advice to Wrye's research team.

But don't jump to the conclusionthat Amerika represents Reed Irvine's ultimate revenge on the television business. Despite a deceptively heavy overlay of conservative iconography, Amerika is strictly commercial from beginning to end. Long shots of the Nebraska prairies alternate with steamily sadomasochistic sex scenes. All the safest patriotic buttons are pushed incessantly. ("I'm happy as hell there was a Washington--a Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, a Martin Luther King --even a John Kennedy.') And the cast of characters embodies every mossy theatrical cliche imaginable: the weatherbeaten man of the people who keeps mumbling into his beard about Lincoln, the "good' Russian whose grandfather was sent to Siberia on Stalin's orders, the brittle and ambitious beauty who sleeps her way to the top. George Orwell, working with a similar story idea, came up with Nineteen Eighty-Four. This version is more like a cross between The Dynasty Archipelago and Little Gulag on the Prairie.