In Red State, director Kevin Smith deviates from the canon of familiar characters and actors that made previous films like Mallrats, Clerks, and Chasing Amy cult successes. Here, he branches further into political and religious satire. Admittedly, he tested the bounds of biblical interpretation and scripture in Dogma (1999), a film that I happen to enjoy quite a bit, but there were also hyperbolic caricatures of characters and neo-mythological creations (Golgatha, the shit monster) that coated the satire with crude levity. So, while Loki (Matt Damon) and Bartleby (Ben Affleck) are hatching a plan to point out flaws in divine dogma, comic relief resides around the corner to alleviate the gravity of the eschatological commentary brewing under the surface.
However, Red State offers no such relief and is a barrage of political, social, sexual, military, and government castigation. Here, Smith pulls no punches and continuously – and most often, convincingly – weaves tension into the film’s fabric. The focal issue of the film is homosexuality, and this is blatant from the opening scene in which a mother who is bringing her son Jarod to school is impeded by a brood of Five Points Trinity Church zealots protesting the funeral of Jacob Harlow, a homosexual whose body was found wrapped head to foot in cellophane and disposed of behind a dumpster. The leader of this rabble is Pastor Abin Cooper (Michael Parks), a man who believes that “Satan’s instruments on Earth” are “the homosexuals” and who “the Nazis” think is “Nuckin Futs,” according to a local high school teacher. There is no problem with the comparison here other than the teacher’s embellishment seems more pedantically charged than necessary. As the film progresses, Cooper’s extremism becomes rather evident. As does the contradictions between what he preaches and practices, which offer another clear examination at the often wonky interpretation of scripture.
To Smith’s credit, he takes the time to point out a number of other juxtapositions found in society’s views. One most notable looks at our views on sexuality. The aforementioned Jarod and his two buddies Billy and Travis are looking to have an orgy with a thirty-eight year old woman (Melissa Leo) they find on a “Craigslist for people who want to get fucked,” “who wants to fuck all three of [them] at the same time,” and while they seem sympathetic to Harlow’s death and derisive of the protests it draws, Billy still wonders if “three of us balling this woman in the same room is a little faggoty.” Here, Smith skims away the male orgy fantasy and exposes it as homosexuality in the presence of a woman.
There are other such moments like this when Billy and Travis are confined in the basement of the Five Points Trinity Church while Jarod is fastened to a post on the alter. As each one respectively wriggles free, their self-preservation supersedes the desire to aid the other friend, bringing to light that – despite the rather extreme, violent views of the Church – Cooper’s congregation is stronger because it is a collective and will not dissolve amidst strife. Therefore, the perils of individuality and vanity are also explored.
Smith also explores government policies and semantics in the same manner, making us wonder who the “good” and “bad” guys are, and how thin a line differentiates the two. While clever and poignant in its apathy, Red State also suffers in its unnecessarily overt exposition. As a director, Smith vilifies nearly everyone in this film for their duplicity and cowardice, which is fine, but he also seems to assume that his audience is uneducated and needs to have everything spelled out for them. Perhaps he’s correct, and Red State is an intellectual catharsis, but many of the lines and characters are overly pedantic shills meant to offer obvious commentary about Guantanamo Bay, religious extremism, the nefariousness of government administrations, and the Patriot Act. These issues certainly deserved to be questioned, but the conflicts and hypocrisies inherent to each are shown through the various actions within the film and do not need to be summarized again and again.
Perhaps what Smith does the best is exemplified by the film’s title: he exposes the binary world that we live in as rather fraudulent, manipulative, and inaccurate. As if it were the dark charcoal line enveloping the dialectical gray area of the film, the title criticizes the media’s classification of the public. With a simple, sound-bite worthy phrase, “red state” or a “blue state” stigmatizes entire populations without giving thought or considerations to the various subcultures who have been encouraged to participate in a similarly binary voting process that casts a 1 against a 0 with no third-party gray area. This same binary-exposing lens can be seen in the various references to the Constitutional Amendments held so dear: the right to assembly, the right to bear arms, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion. As we have evolved (perhaps that term is used loosely if Red State is a lens), these freedoms have similarly become black or white, categorizing our actions as acceptable or unacceptable, all or none, extremist or tolerant, mob or gathering, and simply right or wrong.
