What could "The Expendables" teach us, besides why you don't want to pick a fight with any of them?

Back at the beginning of Summer we gave a preview of three films that were to come out that have something in common. What these films share is a focus on a tight-knit group of ex-military soldiers who work towards a shared goal of some kind. With The Losers it was about getting revenge, with The A-Team it was about living up to one’s duties as a patriot, and with The Expendables it was about serving the human condition. As you may have noticed, the motivations of the groups got progressively nobler, from serving selfish incentives to fulfilling an intangible obligation to heroic morals; namely the moral that the strong have to protect the weak. The three movies, and by extension the three groups in these movies, may share a similar basic premise, and may interact within their respective contexts in a similar way, but their differing motivations distinguish them from each other more so than we may have anticipated. Likewise, they also shared more in common than we previously thought. What exactly, though, can we learn from comparing them further?

We brought up the idea that these films might be an indication that a trend may be starting that will show favoritism for fighting evil in groups as opposed to fighting it alone. The past decade in particular showed how popular super heroes can be when their stories are told correctly. The Spider-Man, Batman, Iron Man, and Superman franchises, for example, got significant boosts, as did a reboot for the Hulk. The one glaring exception to this trend was the success of the X-Men films, because while they gave attention to individual stories they each affirmed the notion that teamwork is the best option to thwart evil. What is perhaps to be gotten out of the X-Men films’ popularity is that they could have served as a kind of precursor to this year’s slate of team-driven action flicks. Not since 1998’s Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line has a war film shown really well the essentiality of comradery for the purposes of accomplishing a goal and defeating an enemy, and perhaps because of this and the suspicion that most Americans are more aware of (and even maybe more interested in) the lives of soldiers due to the country being at war for almost a decade that that essentiality has gotten more acknowledgment; hence the creation of the three films in question.

Our ingrained fascination with special individuals (including but not limited to all action hero characters), given the makeup of our society and its love of individualism, will not die anytime soon, which is why we can expect to see many more super hero films in the near and distant future (such as Batman 3, The Green Lantern, and Captain America: The First Avenger). But the group dynamic in the super hero realm did not end with the conclusion of the X-Men trilogy. The arduous set-up of the Avengers franchise in the two Iron Man movies (not to also mention the internet buzz and announced intentions of Paramount and Disney) points to another move towards including a bundle of super hero faces in the same franchise, effectively adopting the group vs. evil formula. But what about heroic groups outside of the super hero realm?

Nietzsche might have been impressed with how the three rogue groups handled themselves while in a stateless situation

One way of looking at The Losers, The A-Team, and The Expendables is to consider them as atypical war films. The Losers and The Expendables are both teams consisting of ex-military personnel that no longer have a country to fight for (for the former it’s because they were framed and are now considered enemies of the state, and for the latter it’s because of reasons unknown). In their respective cases they are like souls trapped in limbo, unable to go back to normality but also unable to fulfill the purpose for which they were originally trained to perform. The A-Team must face this state of limbo as well, however because they never recognized themselves as being in that state they continued to try and fulfill their purpose as defenders of and fighters for the U.S. government anyway. Their official status is left somewhat ambiguous at the movie’s end, but it is clear that they intend to fulfill their original purpose regardless of whether the providers of that purpose decide to relieve them of it. One could possibly say the same thing about The Losers, however because their motivation for at least the first half of the film is generally selfish (and I mean that in a non-judgmental way) and they decide to take up their original duties only after an impetus to do so is thrust upon them (when they discover that giant bombs are being sold on the black market) they do not share the same drive to work themselves out of limbo, and so they do not share the same odds of escaping it as The A-Team. Conversely, The Expendables embrace the fact that they are in this limbo. Granted they fight for whoever hires them, and this helps relieve the negative aspects of being abnormal and stateless, but their willingness to in effect die for money gives them only a superficial purpose before they decide they’re willing to die for the people of Vilena.

What could be so bad about being stateless, exactly? Well, according to Friedrich Nietzsche in his writings about the uses and disadvantages of history, a man who is stateless is bound to his history more so than he should be. To Nietzsche, it is imperative that each person, and indeed everyone as a culture, balances correctly what they forget with what they remember. The inability of someone to let go of something negative in their past, such as a tragedy or an offense, is tantamount to letting a bleeding wound go undressed. A stateless man may be so by choice, but regardless of this he would still be more inclined to remember more than he should, and if he is stateless because of ill fate then he would be in peril of dwelling too much on the moments when he transformed. “The stronger the innermost roots of a man’s nature, the more readily he will be able to assimilate and appropriate the things of the past; and the most powerful and tremendous nature would be characterized by the fact that it would know no boundary at all at which the historical sense began to overwhelm” (Untimely Meditations). All three teams are to their credit able to avoid dwelling too much on their respective pasts, and that may be due to their having strong natures (safe for the characters Roque of The Losers and Gunner Jensen of The Expendables, as they both let their pasts negatively affect them). Because of their strong natures – particularly The A-Team’s, since they hardly even seemed to recognize their condition – they are able to (eventually) move beyond the circumstances which left them stateless and focus on realizing their purposes, whatever they may be.

With these three films coming out within only a couple months of each other, can we perhaps say that they are reflective of American audiences in some way? With this question I mean to seek an answer beyond the obvious, as guns, explosions, wise-cracks, and stunts have been proven to appeal to many of us for some time. On the level of considering the three films examples of groups of action-oriented characters threatened by their relationships with their pasts, caught in limbo between what once was and a future that won’t afford them the same fruits of their labors that they’ve been trained to work towards, do we as audience members share anything in common? This is not an easy question to answer. We must first consider the fact that the medium of film is always in a state of transition in some regard, and so then are we as audience members. This alone does not indicate that any of us are in some sort of limbo. What I would suggest, however, due to the three films in question being made and released within such close proximity, is that Hollywood studios are convinced that at least some of the American populous is in limbo between the following: Loving the singular, extra-special heroes that exemplified our culture’s love for the exceptional, and recognizing that teamwork has proven to be the best option for success, with the forum of action films being the easiest and most logical way to address this notion. Because of our society’s obsession with individualism the silver screen super hero story will likely never disappear (at worst it will lose steam and become a subgenre once again), and by contrast because the group dynamic in the action genre is hardly new we can see that at least a portion of the American audience has been torn between the two sides for some time. What The Losers, The A-Team, and The Expendables indicate is that the struggle rages on.

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